Audrey Summers

Ghosts from the Old Road

Excerpt

I can’t splice out the timing of when I saw each ghost. Memories of a child don’t work that way. They don’t lay flat, linear. They stay stacked on top of each other, bleeding in-between planes of dreamscapes.

I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have been afraid of them. They never did me any harm.

The first in my memory appeared at the end of my parents’ bed. I sat crisscross applesauce gazing into the inky darkness. Each parental body slumbered in their neat row, while I sat in my nest between their feet. He came slowly around the corner of the bed. He was tall, a skeleton made of almost iridescent bones. His steps were long and loping, hips rotating, arms swinging. Almost imperceptibly, he turned his head to the left. If there were eyes left, we would have made eye contact. Instead, I swore it felt like he was smiling at me. But all skulls look like they’re smiling without the presence of lips.

When he finally made it around the bed he walked right up to the nightstand, with the plastic phone receiver and an answering machine punctuated with holes to let out the sound of “Hi, you’ve reached the Summers. Please leave a message.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Not necessarily because I was scared, but because I was looking at something that I wasn’t supposed to see. Like the time I had opened the bathroom door on one of my grandma’s friends—nothing but a little wrinkled cotton puff sitting on the toilet.

When I opened my eyes, he was, of course, gone.

More incidents followed as I moved through kindergarten, first, and second grade. I rarely slept. Every night, my body locked and stiffened itself in fear of what it might see. Almost every night, I walked with my eyes closed, hands out in front of me, up two flights of stairs to my parents’ bedroom. I was not sleepwalking. Just absolutely terrified that if I even looked for a second, I’d see something again.

One night, as I rounded the corner of the hallway to go downstairs, my mother followed behind me. Since she had not yet turned the corner, she didn’t have the same line of vision to the foot of the stairs in the basement that I had.

My feet skidded on the nubby, diamond-patterned carpet of the first step. Someone waited for me at the bottom, underneath the single light that I was allowed to keep on to assuage my fears.

He wore maroon corduroy slacks that bunched at his ankles, and a pair of black punched-leather lace-up shoes. They weren’t black dress shoes per se, that a banker or an account would wear to work. They looked older. Reminiscent of a modern oxford shoe, but just looking at the minuscule creases in the leather or the thickness of the lace would let you know that shoes like that existed years ago and ceased to be made in the same way anymore.

But I couldn’t see the rest of him. There was something thrown over his head and torso. A sheet? A blanket? A shirt? The light, somehow glaringly bright, obscured it, almost like trying to focus on a distant point while looking into the sun.

Several months later, when I tried to describe it to the psychiatrist, she pressed her lips together to suppress a grin. “Like a ghost costume on Halloween?” she asked. In her mind, I was describing a sheet thrown over a kid trick-or-treating, with eye holes cut out in the face.

“No,” I snapped. “You’re not understanding me. I couldn’t see him like I could see other things.”

I whirled around and slammed myself into my mother’s body, who still hadn’t rounded the corner that would allow her to see the horrors that I did. I wailed, screeching about how someone was down there. Because I didn’t sleep any more in those years, neither did my mother. I woke her up almost every night. She could have ripped my arms away in exasperation and ordered me back to bed, as she sometimes did when I reported my paranormal sightings to her. But instead she held my quivering body while I sobbed. She could feel the fear throbbing on the surface of my skin, the most basic animal stress radiating off of my tiny body.

More strange visitors followed. A burst of shimmery smoke in front of my bedroom door right before I crossed the threshold. Doors slamming that only I could hear. Hands on my shoulder that moved up to my brow to brush a strand of hair away from my flushed face.

One of the walls of my basement is completely made up of glass windows. From the vantage point of my bed, I could see the living room reflected back to me from the large window next to my door (which I always left open so I could make a quick break).

I kept the hallway light on, and two different lamps. Even if you were deep within the trees ringing my house, the soft light from the basement would reach you. This, however, presented a problem. Since the whole room was glowing, I couldn’t help but study it intensely. It was a catch-22 of sorts. I had to keep the lights on to provide myself with the guise of safety, but my ability to see my surroundings would surely conjure another unwelcome guest.

It was sort of like picking at a scab. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the Junie B. Jones chapter book in front of me, but I couldn’t help letting my eyes flick over to the reflection. Brown corduroy couch, plaid ottoman, canoe paddle hanging over the window. All good. I flicked my eyes back to the text. Junie was hiding in the storage cabinet at her school. Flick back. Couch. Flick. Junie. Flick—

There she was. Seated on the sofa with her hands properly laced together. The nun was wearing an older habit. The full-length one with the wimple. Not the short veils that they wear now. The only reference point I had at that time was the scary Mother Superior from the Sound of Music.

After the nun incident, my mother tried one more thing. One day while I was at school and my father at work, she invited our parish priest over. He flicked holy water in the air, opened the windows, and recited a small prayer, asking God to watch over his child Audrey as she slept. 

The next night I swore that someone was standing over the bed looking at me, so I slept on the bedroom floor of my parents’ room for the rest of the week.

About the Author

Audrey Summers is a nonfiction writer from northern Minnesota.