American Ghosts

By Edward Santella

Can the injustices of the past truly be redeemed? Or will they continue to entangle the future in a web of violence?

Siblings Rik and Jessa Hollie should be happy to be moving to Paradise, Massachusetts. Their stepdad, Gary, that moving to a “nice”—that is, white and middle-class—neighborhood will protect his family from the reality of a country full of paranoia, disasters and internal refugees. But on the first night in their new house, Jessa sees something strange and unsettling. A hallucination? No. Rik, her older brother has his own vision, equally strange and unsettling. The family soon learns that not only their house but their whole neighborhood is haunted by ghosts—the ghosts of black people whose gaping wounds speak of a terrible history.

With the help of their classmate Celisa, Rik and Jessa choose to find out who the ghosts are, why they are here and why now. The answers to those questions will force the family and their neighbors to confront long avoided truths and make a decision they never imagined they would face. Because the ghosts are here for a reason. And there are those in the neighborhood who will go to any length to be rid of them—including the unthinkable.

American Ghosts is a story about growing up in a country that pretends that race doesn’t matter and class doesn’t exist. It’s a story of past violence and present survival, about finding conscience in a post conscience world. To find a way forward, the Hollies will have to listen to long ignored stories, make connections with people unlike themselves and forge identities in a strange new world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Santella
• Release date: Dec 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463598825

Book preview

AMERICAN GHOSTS

by

Edward J. Santella

SMASHWORDS EDITION

© 2018 by Edward J. Santella

ISBN-13: 9781730841903

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Emerson, Marlena, Natalie

and all kids everywhere.

And while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man

are among the heaviest counts in the

indictment against humanity,

color prejudice is not our original fault,

but only one aspect of the atrophy of imagination

that prevents us from seeing ourselves in

every creature that breathes under the sun.

- Doris Lessing

CHAPTER ONE

Monday Night

Rik read: Gregor tried to suppose to himself that something like what had happened to him today might someday happen to the chief clerk; one really could not deny that it was possible.

A tap on the door.

The single, quiet knock was brother-sister code, the opposite of their parents’ barrage of thuds and shouts, which preceded invasions. He checked his phone: it was nearly two. He wasn’t surprised she was awake.

He closed the book.

He stretched.

He called, In!

The door opened six inches. Jessa peeked. I saw your light on. She stepped in edgewise, as if the light leaking from her brother’s room might wake their parents down the hall. She closed the door quietly behind her.

Geez, little sister. Children your age are supposed to be asleep.

She looked down her nose at him from the corners of her eyes, a trick she’d learned as a two-year-old, and, as an afterthought, showed him her middle finger.

Inexpertly taped boxes, rescues from liquor stores, cluttered the room in stacks three or four high. A lamp duct-taped to the post at the head of Rik’s bed cast distorted geometric shadows on the walls. The scent of newly painted walls and freshly waxed floors filled the room. The bed lay bare.

Rik wore jeans and a white t-shirt and had the slender strength of a young man. Jessa thought he could have been mistaken for a future movie star. His eyes gave his character away: they radiated acceptance and curiosity. His summer-dark tan had begun to fade toward a pale almond. Talking to him, others got the sense that he was prepared to step back in a differential, even feminine way, to allow the other person more room. He did allow others room without judgment, though rarely did he do himself the same favor. Some misjudged him as weak. Jessa knew him as her protector, a role that had once gotten him a dislocated jaw.

Two curtainless windows looked out into the night.

He asked, The stuff you’re taking keeping you awake?

No. Not usually. Not tonight. Too much going on in my head.

Too much. Always too much, but more so tonight. This was their first night in the house, and tomorrow they began classes in a new school. Rik had a lot on his mind, too.

Jessa slid between the piles of boxes and stepped to the window beside the foot of Rik’s bed. She wore loose gray jogging pants and a short-sleeved red tee. She was fifteen, almost two years younger than Rik. An air of vigilance hung about her. Her eyes held an intensity that said whatever you give me I’ve already survived.

For the first time in a few months, the day had brought a serious rainstorm. All she could make out through the window were the large blurred shapes of nearby houses; moving lights in the sky, probably planes and security drones; and a few streetlights on the far side of the block. She heard the fractured wails of sirens, distorted by distance and the thickness of the windows. She heard other sounds, too. With her finger, she traced the erratic path of a raindrop down the glass. You been listening?

To what?

She tossed him an impatient glance. Out there.

Rik cocked his head. He heard the rain and the background sound of engines. But he did hear something else. Birds?

Yeah.

Jessa noticed things: a caterpillar crossing the walk, a hand-printed note caught in bushes, a change in an adult’s mood. That was part of who she was, one of those traits that both amazed and irritated Rik.

So?

It’s almost two.

Maybe a cat climbed… He listened again. You’re right. Sounds like midday in a jungle.

Weird, whatever they’re doing. Jessa sat on the bed. She set her head on her hands.

Rik asked, So what’s going on?

Nothing. Nothing new. She lifted her head and looked at her brother. I wish we hadn’t moved.

They’d talked this through a million times to its inevitable rational inconclusion. Probably right.

The harder he works the unhappier he becomes.

He meant their stepfather, and now adoptive father, Gary, their mother’s husband of nearly two years, though he’d been in their lives for three. I hate it when he says he’s doing it for us. He makes me feel so ungrateful. I don’t even think the new school will be any different from our old one.

We’ll find out in, um, six hours, give or take.

Jessa said, I liked our apartment. Why do we need this big house?

The manosaurus makes all the decisions, including the decision that the manosaurus makes all the decisions.

She glanced at Rik, turned away, frowned. Do you ever feel that you’re not really, I mean, I know he’s not our birth father, but do you ever feel like you aren’t really their child, maybe not anyone’s child?

Rik closed his eyes. Jessa could be a deep river. God, we’re their children, Mom and Dad, though we can’t even remember him, then Meph, and now Gary. Our personalities are the sum of all the ways we defend ourselves from their craziness. Whoever else we might have been got lost. He stopped, thinking of their first father, who’d been killed in one of the African Wars when they were six and four. Were they like him? What had he been like? No, that’s not right. You didn’t learn your art from them. You found that yourself. That’s yours. They didn’t teach me to love words. That’s mine. We have something that’s ours. At least our own ways of escaping from them.

That’s what I mean. The person that’s really me is lost inside my everyday self.

You could do a sketch of you caught inside yourself.

I could. Jessa pressed her tongue between her teeth. She harbored something she didn’t want to tell him yet. Change the subject, she thought. What are you reading?

Kafka. This poor guy, some sort of traveling salesman who lives with his parents and sister, wakes up one morning transformed into a giant bug. The family’s terrorized. I think the guy who turned into the bug dies in the end.

Ah, still into happy endings.

I’m sure his sister had a lot to do with it.

Really? Get me the magic spell.

Jessa leaned back, her arms braced on her brother’s mattress. She had the profile and breasts of a young woman. Her skin was the palest copper, the result of having spent most of the summer inside. Rik thought her inquisitive and willing to meet others midway. At times, though, her eyes could harden like ice, and she would jut her chin forward as a man might. He envied her confidence…no. That was wrong. She didn’t have confidence at all. What she had was the courage, or drive, or perhaps it was compulsion, to go forward despite the lack. She also had problems.

Jessa said, You haven’t begun unpacking.

I will when I’m ready. Mom.

And that will be?

Rik paused for a second before speaking. When I feel at home.

Hah! I knew it. You feel as freaked out by this move as I do.

I know it’s worse for you than me.

You’re lucky the way things bounce off you. But, look at me! Jessa stood on the bed and threw her arms out toward the bare walls. I got up this morning! I’ve gotten up every morning for three weeks! I’m me!

A miracle of pharmaceutical science.

She dropped back onto the bed. Able to confront the shit of modern life with a single… Her voice drifted away. Not a single, she thought. Multiple. Multiple pills.

Rik sat up. His face was barely a foot from hers. You’ll do alright. We’ll do alright. We’re survivors. You’ve had a bad summer but you’re better now. You’ve got me.

Jessa smiled, though her eyes grew damp. And there’s no cure for you.

They shared a thumbs-up. Mutual bolstering of spirits. Hope was something hoped for.

Go to bed.

She stood and returned to the door.

Rik said, Out, art demon!

Jessa began closing the door, then said, I think for your birthday I’ll do a sketch of a man waking to discover he’s a bug.

You’ll get the exact look of horror on his face, I’m sure. Up at six. Sweet dreams, sister.

Jessa closed the door.

She screamed loud enough to topple an empire. Rik had never heard anything as frightened. Or as frightening.

***

The ghost hated the girl and feared her.

They’d told him—they, the moon-faced ones—that hell lay below the earth. They’d lied. His mother’d told him that as a girl she’d had a home close to heaven. She said hell lay across the water from that home, days and days, horribly thirsty, hungry, can’t-escape-the-smell-of-shit-and-piss-and-vomit-and-death-and-decay-and-fear days in steerage. Hell on an island where the weather blew so hot and dry it stole your sweat and filled your nose and mouth with sand. And that was just the first hell. Another hell, the hell he’d been born into, this hell, lay across more water, not so many days, but farther still from home. Rain fell in this hell and so did snow, even up beyond a man’s waist, and the cold so cold his mother could not, before they brought her here, have imagined it. The weather differed from hell to hell, but the whips, the foul, twisted men screaming orders, the ghost-whites with their snarly smiles and their pants down visiting your mother, your wife, your little sister, your own God-damned daughter, and the never knowing whether you or those like you would survive the day: those remained the same.

They’d learned him—not taught, learned him: that was the best their language could describe it—they’d learned him to work the bellows, to stoke the fire, to brew the inferno that softened metal that he would bend into the shape of a hinge or a tool or to fit a horse’s foot. He spent unforgiving hours upon days upon years crafting metal shoes for animals while he himself did with what tossed-off boots the mistress might find him or he might scavenge. His only decent clothes he wore on Sunday to listen to the minister read from his holy book. They refused to teach him to read, or let him learn on his own. The moon-faced ones claimed he was unable to learn, then made rules to prevent him from learning. In their bones, they feared him. He tasted their terror, like rotten meat, on his tongue.

He’d come here, to where his mother’s gods refused to go, to this strange house with his fire burning and restless horses and to this young white woman who must have been a queen—for, though she wore the clothes of a man, she was soft, soft as if she’d never carried water or beaten clothes or been beaten herself or turned a churn, and she was half out of her wits seeing him.

I see your eyes, woman. I smell your terror. Scream, Queen, scream, for you have taken my life and I have nothing left to lose.

Look at me, Lily Queen! Look into my eyes and see me!

She did.

He looked into her depths. I know who you are, Lily Queen. I know you better than you know yourself. I must, in order to survive.

The words hurt her. She covered her ears with her hands. Still, she saw him.

He probed her soul and recognized her wound.

The ghost recoiled from the horror.

They do this to each other!

Light exploded, as if the sun had broken through the roof, freeing him.

***

Rik was at the door in a second, opened it in two, had the hallway light on by three.

Jessa stood facing down the hall, hands over her ears, her eyes frozen open, shaking and crying.

He placed his hands tentatively on her shoulders, wanting to comfort her, but afraid to do more, for she shook with a wild agony. What happened?

He heard their mother and Gary rushing from their bedroom down the hall, Gary shouting, What’s wrong?

Jessa panted, Oh, my God; oh, my God; oh, my God! This wasn’t like the other times when she couldn’t scream, when Meph wouldn’t let her. Now she could scream and she’d put her whole soul and all her grief into it.

She held herself.

Rik put his arms around her arms. He tightened his hold to calm her shaking. It’s okay. Breathe slowly.

Jessa, what’s wrong? Is there someone in the house? Gary’s demand filled the hallway. He rushed past them, stumbling in his half-on slippers, to the top of the stairs.

I’m sorry. No. I don’t know. I saw… Oh, God…—she caught her breath—I mean, I thought I saw a man, a big man, almost naked, a black man, he had a hammer, a huge hammer, and there was fire. He looked me right in my eyes.

Their father marched back toward his bedroom. I’m calling the police. Some thug broke in here and I want him arrested!

Jessa laid panic on panic. Pulling free of her brother, she said, No! Don’t! It wasn’t! Gary, don’t! It wasn’t…! She wiped tears from her eyes.

Don’t? What do you mean ‘Don’t’? It wasn’t what?

It wasn’t real.

Gary stood like a boxer waiting for the bell beginning the round, eyes wide, hands clenched. It wasn’t real? He took a step to the side, so as to face her more directly. You screamed damn scared enough.

Jessa shook her head. I saw horses behind him. There couldn’t have been horses in the hall. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

Horses, he said almost calmly. A step toward her, and he shouted, You mean you’re seeing things? His voice ballooned. You scared the living daylights out of your mother about something that wasn’t there, that you didn’t even see!

Gary, quiet. Calm down. Evelyn, hands clenched and shaking, approached Jessa. Tell us the truth, Jessa. She reached out a hand, then drew it back, afraid to touch her daughter. She folded fingers and hands together as if in prayer. We won’t judge you if you saw something that wasn’t there. We’ll do everything to help you. Have you been taking drugs again?

Rik rolled his eyes. Oh, Mom.

Evelyn shot her son an angry look. I’m worried about her!

It’s probably the pills you have her taking, Gary said. I warned you!

Evelyn snapped, Well, that’s what I’m asking. If she isn’t taking drugs, it must be her meds. That’s what I want to know.

I don’t use drugs. Not anymore. Maybe it is my meds, but I’ve been on them for weeks and I haven’t seen…things.

Rik said, Plus the stress of moving and going to a new school in the morning.

What stress? She should be happy and all excited to have a new house and a new school!

Evelyn placed a hand on her husband’s arm. Change upsets people, Gary.

How can something better upset her?

Rik asked, Jessa, do you want to go to your room now? I’ll go with you to make sure everything’s alright.

Damn, Rik, who put you in charge? I’m her father. I’ll go with her. I’ll calm her down!

Gary grabbed Jessa’s arm and marched her into her room.

Evelyn faced Rik and curled her lower lip into her mouth, as if she were biting it. Rik, she said, you have to learn to have a little concern for your sister. Get your head out of those books and pay attention to what’s going on around you! She stomped back to their bedroom.

Rik stood in the hall for a few seconds. His throat constricted, as if he were choking on himself. His teeth clenched. His eyes watered. His hands began to form fists, but stopped halfway, in claws. He couldn’t make out all Gary’s words but their tone came through Jessa’s door clearly. He took a short breath. He hated himself because of his helplessness.

He walked back to his room and closed the door.

He turned, became like stone. His pupils grew large in the dark, large in amazement.

An ancient, breathless chill ran through this body.

A row of hedges stood where his wall had been, and a woman knelt, her back turned toward him, digging earth with her hands.

***

Tears clouded the ghost’s eyes. The sun had long set and she could barely see her hands as she dug a hole in the earth large enough for the bundle next to her. She felt his eyes on her back as surely as she’d felt the master’s whip, as surely as Nan would have felt the whip if the master had learned what the child had done. She’d had to lie, and lie expertly, to protect Nan.

Though her back was turned toward him, the woman spoke to the young man behind her.

"Did what I had to. No other way. I just buried the baby girl, just like this, digging in the earth with my hands. Was Nan’s child. I told the master when he caught me…I told him she’d lost the poor thing…I told him she was only six months. Told him the child had come out like it had to escape. Told him I didn’t know the father. That was the truth. No one cared which master used her. My Nan, she wouldn’t say. No matter. No matter. The child an angel now. She paused. Naw. It wrong. It matter. It matter.’"

She stood and faced the boy. Her facial features were African. She pointed with her left hand to two bound sticks on the ground beside the hole. I have a cross for her. See, Master, there. A cross for the little one.

She squinted as if to gauge the boy’s reaction.

I said—I told him, ‘Yes, Master, Nan was big for six months. Womens knows these things.’ I afraid he suspected.

Again, she paused and cocked her head, as if listening.

"I told him, ‘No, Master, you not hear a baby crying. That was Nan. She only twelve, you know. We not steal from the master.’

He didn’t whip me, God answered my prayers this time.

She slumped once again. I thanked him. I told him, ‘Yes, Master, I’ll be up in the morning. I know you like my cooking.’

As the woman faded, Rik mumbled, I’m sorry.

***

What Rik saw was not a woman, but the ghost of what may once have been a woman, for parts of her were missing, as if holes had been carved into her with an ax and the spaces filled with ill-fitting stones. When she was digging the grave, he saw the curve of her back crossed by another curve, that of her shoulders, and her hands raking the earth, but soon he saw that she had but one hand, that her hair covered a gaping head wound, and part of her left side was gone, replaced with an oozing blackness. She spoke, but she had no mouth. It seemed covered by a hazy weave of cloth, though he heard her words clearly.

The vision held power. With the woman gone, he felt abandoned. He’d been shaken, a child shaken awake to a strange and darker world, only to have that new world stolen away. The transition made his head dizzy and his stomach unsettled.

He steadied himself, placing a hand against the wall.

Gary’s voice still overflowed from Jessa’s room, a rushing tide of the usual certainty and righteousness, but now, also, to Rik’s ear, hollow, the words of a man who failed to grasp the complexity of his own home.

Rik fought to focus his mind. Too many horrors. Giving birth at twelve. A child. A rape. Jessa. The dead baby. The need to defend…

Stop it, he told himself. It wasn’t a command but a plea.

What had he witnessed?

What had Jessa seen?

What was happening?

If he walked into Jessa’s room and announced what he’d seen, Gary wouldn’t believe him just on general principles. Jessa might think he was trying to protect her by deflecting Gary’s attention. He had to wait to tell her when they were alone.

Who were they seeing? People who’d lived here before? Ghosts—good Lord, ghosts!—ghosts of…whom? Was their house haunted?

The wind had picked up, flinging rain into the windows. The birds continued their chatter punctuated with shrieks, as if arguing over what Rik had just seen. He felt cold. He put on his Sox jacket—an early present from Gary—and curled up beneath the burning bed lamp. The world contained multitudes he had not suspected. Ghosts, of all things. He thought, we have a house with ghosts, ghosts of children who give birth at twelve, children who die or are killed at birth and women with pieces missing who bury the dead while fearing the living.

Too many thoughts. Too much sound from Gary’s voice in the next room.

Ghosts. Rik had read stories about them. They haunted castles in England and, closer by, the old Victorians in New England. Years ago he’d memorized Poe’s Haunted Palace, and now a stanza came back to him.

And travellers now, within that valley,

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms, that move fantastically

To a discordant melody,

While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out forever

And laugh—but smile no more.

A hideous throng… Jessa had seen something hideous. And the ghost woman had been hideous. Worse, her story, her life was hideous.

Poe’s words played through Rik’s mind like an old song that refused to be forgotten. He lay down, eyes staring at the ceiling. Hell, he thought, this was…hell, where the first commandment was Fear.

***

After Gary left—after more than an hour—Jessa, still shaking, tried to comfort herself with her drawings. She took her journal from its hiding place. She hadn’t trusted the movers with it. The book held five hundred nine-by-twelve-inch pages, just over two hundred of them filled with her drawings. She needed to sketch as she needed to breathe. Her grandfather, her mother’s father, had understood that when he’d given her the journal. The covers were mahogany faux leather. The contents were honest. She opened it and studied what she’d last sketched.

Jessa had drawn a cavern with stalactites and stalagmites like giant teeth in the foreground. A young girl, a bit younger than herself, in the middle ground, sat on the cave floor, hunched, with her back turned to the viewer. A dark, watery expanse stretched before her to the bleak horizon. The sketch conveyed the young girl’s need to cross that water, her inability to do so, and her lonely abandonment. Beneath, Jess had printed, The Sea of Sorrow. The date written next to it was the day after she’d begun her meds.

If she could have, she would have redrawn the picture in her book differently tonight. The girl would have hallucinations. Cruel and unforgiving faces would appear in the stalactites and stalagmites; narrow, judgmental eyes would loom from the shadows; and a fearsome face full of anger would be rising from the water.

But since she’d finished that sketch, she’d been unable to draw. She felt no connection with her pencils or paper, no ability to convey feeling. That was what she hadn’t told Rik. Her concentration tore itself to pieces running in circles. Her tears couldn’t decide whether to fall or seep back behind her eyes.

Out of desperation, she took a pencil and piece of scrap paper. She attempted a sunflower. It was stillborn. Not a line showed life.

She was denied the single act by which she could calm her mind, concentrate and feel human.

What was real? she asked herself.

Something in her answered, Everything.

She hadn’t told her family the worst of what she’d seen, and nothing of what she’d heard. She kept these things to herself. She could find no way to share such horrors.

Am I crazy? Am I so crazy I have hallucinations? Hallucinations that claim to know me better than I know myself? Am I so crazy I can’t draw?

She wanted to hurt herself. Even on her meds she wanted to hurt herself, punish and reshape herself into a better person, a better daughter, someone she didn’t hate, someone worth something.

She clenched her fists, snapping her pencil.

CHAPTER TWO

Tuesday

Rik turned to make sure no one could see them from their new house.

He and Jessa each wore a backpack. Rik’s contained his flex, his copy of The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka with its split binding, and a thin notebook. Jessa’s held her flex and her sketchpad along with a pen and a half dozen pencils.

Patches of mist rose from puddles that had begun to evaporate as the heat of the day grew. Felt like the mid-80s, perhaps, and promised to grow hotter. Not a breath of wind. The neighborhood was quiet. The only indications that people might be home were cars parked in driveways. The birds, so raucous the night before, had gone silent.

Jessa, you’re not crazy.

With a bit of sarcasm, Jessa said, I never thought I’d hear you say that. She added, Just leave me alone. I didn’t sleep much last night and nothing is going to make me feel better.

Rik held her arm. I’m not kidding. I mean, unless we’re both crazy.

She kept walking but said sharply, What are you talking about?

After Gary took you to your room, I went back to mine.

Yeah?

I saw something like you did.

She stopped in her tracks. What? Like, you mean…?

Yeah.

When Rik had finished describing what he’d seen and heard, she looked away. Twelve? She was raped. Her voice caught. For a moment she couldn’t talk. She was having a kid at twelve? And it died?

Died. Or someone killed it so it wouldn’t have a life of misery. I couldn’t tell. The woman said the girl, Nan, miscarried at six months. She was trying to convince someone. But then she said something about they wouldn’t steal. I didn’t understand.

You’re not making this up to make me feel better? Because it’s not. Poor kid. She looked into Rik’s eyes. She trusted him. He’d been the only one to protect her. I didn’t tell you everything. Like you said about the woman, the guy I saw had pieces missing. And he said something to me. She looked away.

Rik asked, What? Unless you don’t want to say.

She shook her head. He said something like, ‘I know who you are, Lily Queen. I know you better than you know yourself. I have to.’ As if New England still had winters, icy cold blew through Jessa’s body. She shivered. As soon as he said it, I knew he was right. I don’t know why. I just knew he was right.

Rik sighed. His eyes caught a drone half a block down coming their way. Let’s keep walking. He kicked himself for not having realized that Nan would bring up Jessa’s issues. We can’t be late the first day.

Why did you apologize to her?

Rik had felt sorry, still did, but he couldn’t figure out what he was sorry for. That Nan had been raped? That she had miscarried, or…? That she wouldn’t say who the father was? That we live on a planet where such things are allowed to happen? That the woman had conveyed to him such news? That they—his family—had moved into their—the ghosts’—house? All of the above? I don’t know.

Jessa felt her blood flowing. As confusing as it all was, she’d been suddenly and unexpectedly liberated, even though it was at someone else’s terrible expense. At least, in a way. She shouted in a whisper. Our friggin’ house is haunted? I’m not crazy! Our friggin’ house is haunted! Our new house that Gary almost killed himself working for has ghosts! Wait…why didn’t you tell me last night?

Gary was in your room. I figured he’d never believe me. What was he haranguing you about anyway?

Her expression rolled