The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books) Read online

  Slowly he stood, feeling as if he were waking from a dream; this was Clancyville to be sure, but there were many more buildings. So foreign, yet familiar. And the contraptions, the colorful gaslights, the people in their strange garb.

  Anguish gripped his heart. He knew this place. He knew it to be a lonely place.

  “Nelllllll!” Some of the gathered cocked their heads, as if they’d heard a distant sound.

  He grabbed the chain and lifted the anchor; the metal clanked and the people gasped as one, all eyes turned to him.

  “Hallo there!” He carried his anchor up the pier, dragging the chain, which still wound round his ankle. The people gaped. Had they never seen a chain before? Nor boots? Up the pier he trudged and the people just watched his feet, daft with wonder.

  “Hallo! Can you not hear me?”

  No response. Dread settled over him like a cold mist.

  And he remembered. Again.

  It always took him a while – he would forget during the storm, the way a man forgot himself during a nightmare. He would think only of Nell, but then he would come face to face with the people. This was Clancyville, but 1879 was long past. And these people couldn’t see him, nor hear his voice. By some mystery, they were aware only of the sound of his chain.

  He was dead.

  Not only dead, but a ghost, doomed to be insulted and mocked by the townspeople and their kith and kin. Except for those spells when he was back in the storm, he was trapped in this town. Torment knifed into his heart. His Nell was lost, gone years and years ago. He was alone. Never again would he experience that happy feeling, that belonging, that connection.

  He stared at the crowd, and it was then he saw her – the worst one of them all, the redheaded girl they called Cassie. She stood there, smirking.

  He had to get away. He turned and trudged back to the other end of the pier. But there was only the sea. Then he remembered – when he closed his eyes and thought hard enough of other places in Clancyville, he could travel there. He closed his eyes and thought of the old barn on Garvey’s farm where some kittens had recently been born.

  Cassie Nolan took another sip of her latte and put her finger to her lips, reminding the tourists not to speak until she gave the sign.

  The six of them had gone through what she termed to her friend Belinda as “the stupid look of wonder phase”, where they’d stand at the foot of the pier, hearing the chain drag and clank, wearing stupid expressions. Then, as Old Salt got maybe halfway to them, they would go into the “sharing looks of wonder with their neighbor” phase, to be closely followed by “turn your idiotic look of wonder to the tour guide” phase. Cassie, at this time, would clap a perfectly neutral expression onto her face. These phases would cycle around as Old Salt dragged his chain the other way, back to the sea. Then would come the silence.

  Sometimes she wished she could disappear off the end of the pier, too. She couldn’t believe she was back in Clancyville. God, she’d worked so hard to escape! She wanted to be anywhere else.

  And it was all Old Salt’s fault. Indirectly, OK, but still!

  Every evening as he clanked along the pier, it was all she could do not to yell, Give it up, dude! Your old Nell isn’t here! She will never be here!

  She didn’t know how he came to be called Old Salt, since he was supposedly a strapping young man in the prime of his life when he died, and she doubted he’d looked anything like the Old Salt caricature that seemed to be everywhere in Clancyville – some 1920s commercial artist had seen fit to do him as a kind of piratey Popeye, hook hoisted menacingly. The image was on souvenirs, storefronts, T-shirts, signs, often with the caption “Never give up on love”. If she had made the souvenirs, they’d have a different caption – possibly, “The ultimate stalker”. Or, “Hey Old Salt McHenry, buy a clue!”

  She knew she should be grateful to Old Salt. Half of the economy of Clancyville, North Carolina came from his ghostly visits, and her family had the luck to own the land nearest the haunted pier. Her great-greats had built the Old Salt Tavern there nearly a century ago, once they realized people were interested in the ghost, and it had been their living ever since.

  Right next to the start of the pier, a thick steel pole rose out of the ground, high up into the air. On top of it sat a giant circular sign with lights all around, featuring – of course – the Old Salt image smack in the middle, like a two-story high Old Salt lollipop.

  “There he goes,” she told the tourists. “Back to the sea. But mark my words; he’ll return just after the town clock chimes eight tomorrow, rain or shine. We’ll hear his call on the wind, and his chain on the dock. He’ll defy the elements, he’ll defy time, he’ll defy the very laws of physics to seek out his lady love.”

  She watched them contemplate this last bit, waiting for the “asshole verification” phase to start up. And indeed, it did, courtesy of a dad and his teenaged daughter, who decided Old Salt was a ruse, and asked to inspect the pier. Cassie smiled and waved them on, reminding them that there were seven affidavits posted on the wall of the Old Salt Tavern from various scientific institutions, including one from a group of scientists from UNC, stating that after thorough inspection above and below the waterline, it had been determined that no known mechanical device could be producing those sounds and vibrations, and its source was “deemed inconclusive”.

  Old Salt, forever searching for his Nell.

  If he was corporeal, she’d walk right up to him and grab his sailor-suit collar and shake the bejesus out of him. “If you’ve done something twenty thousand times over with a poor result, it means it’s not working, dude!”

  She sighed. If he were a real man, she could only imagine how much it would suck to sleep with him. Obviously his Nell had the right idea.

  A few minutes later the father and daughter gave up on their inspection, having found nothing but wooden planking, boat bumpers and lifesaving rings.

  Now the “walk back to the bar excitedly baffled and wondering mildly about the meaning of life” phase could begin, to be followed by the “stuff yourself with burgers and French fries and a beer served by your waitress Cassie” phase.

  Two hours later she pulled off her apron and collapsed on a bar stool. The rush at Old Salt Tavern was finally over. Cassie’s dad put a napkin in front of her.

  Like everything, the napkin had Old Salt’s picture. As a child, she’d deface his image every chance she got – monocle, Martian antennae, pimples – much to the chagrin of her parents.

  “Yup,” she said, meaning, the usual. The usual was a shot of tequila and a black and tan. Not like she had to be chipper in the morning.

  Just over a year ago, Cassie was out in LA, screenwriting degree in hand, working on a fun comedy entitled Blue Sorbet with her writing partner, Alice. She’d gotten a sitcom staff-writer job offer she was planning to accept, too. In other words, she was on her way. Going places. If there was one thing she was good at, it was going places.

  And then her mother had broken her hip. At first, her worries focused on her mother’s health; hip breaks were serious business. Once she got back out to Clancyville, however, it became clear that her parents were on the brink of losing the tavern. Thanks to the economy, they couldn’t hire help, and they couldn’t sell or retire. She called her rebellious older brother, Kenny, and begged him to come help out. Kenny moved from city to city, waiting tables and carving tiny wooden birds – he could just as easily do that in Clancyville. But Kenny hadn’t spoken to their parents for seven years and he wasn’t about to start. Kenny’s rift with her parents had begun with his refusal to go to college and his wild partying ways, and gotten worse with her parents’ insane ultimatums, and then it went completely downhill with both sides saying hurtful, damaging things. She visited Kenny now and then, but his absence made a big hole in their family.

  Reluctantly, she turned down the sitcom job to help her folks out for the tourist season. There’d be other offers, she told herself, and she could work with Alice by Skype for no
w.

  But there was so much to do at the tavern. Leaks in the tall peaked roof, staffing nightmares, refrigeration problems, and general decay that her parents wouldn’t have tolerated even five years ago. Just another month or two, she kept thinking. Tourist season bled into the winter. Spring. And another tourist season was ending.

  Stupid Old Salt. She’d actually tried to pitch the idea to a TV show on paranormal phenomena – she’d thought if the place got more popular, there’d be more tourist business year round, and her folks could sell. But no, as she’d feared, Old Salt’s method of haunting wasn’t visual enough. And certainly not very exciting.

  Yeah, thanks to Old Salt McHenry’s shitty haunting ways, the ghost wharf of Clancyville, North Carolina was just a rung above the nearby llama show and below the pirate museum. If it wasn’t for Old Salt’s feeble hauntings, the town would’ve died a natural death decades ago and her parents would have carved out a different living – an alternate life that might have allowed them to retire.

  Her dad set down her drinks. “One of these days you oughta write a movie about the legend of Old Salt!” This was the third time that year he’d suggested it. And he wasn’t the only one; lots of people liked to tell her she should write a movie about Old Salt William McHenry.

  She drained the tequila shot. “The only problem with that is, if I started writing a screenplay about Old Salt, I’d have to gnaw off my own hands to keep myself from scratching out my eyes.”

  “Oh, Cassie.” Her father laughed and walked off to the other end of the bar.

  “Hey babe.” Daryl slid in next to her. His blues band, the C-sides, played the Old Salt Tavern on weekends; Daryl was the drummer and the singer. He called for a tap beer. The band got taps and soda free.

  He turned to her. “Wanna blow on my stick for good luck?”

  “Hell no.” He’d been a jerk in high school, and he was a jerk now. In fact, she was 98 per cent sure he’d swiped a tip off one of her tables, but she hadn’t directly seen it, so she couldn’t do anything. Other waitresses suspected it too, but he’d expertly eluded being seen. Swiping tips was a sin against waitpersons of the world, and they all watched Daryl covertly now. Operation Jackass, they called it.

  This was what her life had come to. She stared up at the beams, criss-crossing all the way up to the peaked ceiling, with old shipping implements hanging down like Christmas tree ornaments. She was as trapped as Old Salt, with the tavern as her personal wrecked ship.

  She got up and walked outside and into the adjoining house – extended in a hodgepodge way over the years – that hugged the tavern like a bulky crust of barnacles.

  In some ways, growing up in a house built around a bar had been great. Her parents were never far, and there was always the sense of being at the center of activity, a feeling she still prized.

  There were downsides, though. Cassie and Kenny and their friends had to be quiet in the rooms abutting the bar, because the sounds of children playing made the daytime drinkers self-conscious. And the toilet in the far bathroom was off limits during bar hours unless the music was loud, because the throaty sound of the flush would reverberate through the whole place. And there was always the faint smell of fry grease, even in her princess bedroom. Still, she was lucky. It was a happy home, especially back when Kenny was part of the family. Pig-headed as they were, her parents were good parents, and she considered them to be two of her best friends these days. She wouldn’t dream of leaving them high and dry.

  Still, she couldn’t shake the sense that real life was being lived elsewhere, and she was missing out. She stretched out on the couch, fired up her laptop and played Jungle Jewel, her favorite game, to the thumping beat of the C-Sides next door. Later she Skyped Alice to tell her about an idea she had for a scene they’d been fighting over. But Alice didn’t want to talk about the scene. She had news. The writing-partners-over-Skype wasn’t working out for her.

  “Alice, no!” Cassie pleaded. “We’re the best team ever!”

  It turned out Alice had somebody new. They had a new project. Cassie could have Blue Sorbet. But Cassie wasn’t sure she wanted it without Alice.

  She shut her laptop and stared at the wall, devastated. She needed Alice. The project needed Alice. Her friend, her creative partner. She had to get out of Clancyville!

  Just then, the C-Sides started up with their most popular tune, “Rooster Bay”, a funky song that she hated, but it always got people up and dancing. At the pinnacle moment, there would be a ten-beat silence where people would freeze in vogue poses. After that, Daryl would tap his sticks together, once, twice, and then he’d launch into a drum solo. If there was one thing you could say about “Rooster Bay”, it certainly showcased Daryl’s drumming talents.

  She sighed. She wasn’t thrilled about going back over while the C-Sides were playing, but she didn’t want to be alone. She headed back to help close.

  She got there just as vogue pose silence had begun. She slipped onto a bar stool and smiled when her dad saw her. He got her another black and tan and a tequila. She set it on an Old Salt napkin so that it bisected Old Salt’s face in a way that made him look like he was frowning, and chatted with her dad about nothing. He was always so happy to see her; it sometimes made her feel bad that she wanted to be anywhere but Clancyville.

  She had another shot of tequila and, when the C-sides started their next set, she went into the kitchen to help Corky, the hippie dishwasher, rack up the last of the beer mugs and ketchup-smeared plates.

  An hour later her dad sent her out to turn off Old Salt’s face. She nearly fell over one of the chairs on the bar’s empty porch, and had to hold tight to the rail on the rickety steps to the beach. Shit! She shouldn’t have had that last tequila.

  Old Salt McHenry lorded over her from on high like an evil, grinning doofus of a seafarer. She picked up a rock, wanting to hurl it right into his face as she’d done so often in her youth, but she might break the tiny light bulbs that surrounded it. And Corky would have to go up on a ladder and replace them. She turned her attention to the sea, choppy tonight. It was getting on storm season, just a month off the anniversary of the sinking of the Gertie Gail.

  “Old Salt, you dumbfuck!” she yelled into the wind. She leaped onto the pier, got a running start, and hurled the stone out to sea. You could hardly see its splash among the waves. “Take a hint!” She backed up, tripping on a coiled rope. She cried out, flailing to avoid a collision with a post. A blinding pain seared through her head.

  The next thing she knew, people were crowded around the beach, down the shore, and the wharf was awash in flashing red lights.

  She wandered over and caught sight of her friend Belinda. “Hey! What’s going on?”

  Belinda just sobbed.

  Cassie grabbed at Belinda’s sleeve, but missed. Yow, was she that drunk? “Belinda! What’s wrong?” She grabbed at her sleeve again, but it was like she couldn’t grasp it.

  Corky was there, black hair in a long ponytail. Police. People in wetsuits. Then she spotted her parents.

  “Dad! Mom!” Cassie rushed over. Her mother was crying. “Mom!” Cassie tried and failed to touch her.

  “What the hell!” she yelled. “Hello!” Was she dreaming? There was something dreamlike about the whole scene.

  That’s when she spotted the body washed up on shore. A woman face down, wearing the same shoes as her – black patent leather with a strap over the top, and thick black soles. The red tights and black skirt and apron were the same as hers, too . . . and the grey hoodie jacket over a white blouse. The girl lying on shore wore her exact same outfit! She might even have the same hair, weirdly, except it was wet . . . but it was long like hers, and it did look reddish, and it covered the side of her face. Did they think it was her?

  “You guys! I’m right here!” She ran from one person to the other, trying to shake them, push them. “Hello! This isn’t funny!” She knew what she was supposed to think here – she’d seen this sort of scene in movies enough,
where a character dies, but doesn’t know they’re dead.

  Was this a lucid dream? Probably. She’d heard about those, dreams where you are aware you are dreaming, but you can’t wake up. The whole thing felt so weird, like she was a cut-out figure, laid over a photograph, so that she was in the photograph, but not of it. Like she was on a different layer of reality. Even her feet sank deeper into the sand than normal. Like she wasn’t really walking on it. She wasn’t even making tracks! “Fuck!” She looked around wildly. “Hello!”

  A lone figure sat on the side of the pier, just a few yards away, big boots dangling over the water, arm draped on something next to him; he seemed to be watching her. At least somebody saw her!

  “Hey!” She ran over. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, well, well.” He adjusted his brown seaman’s cap over dark curly hair, which was half in and half out of a little ponytail. Several days’ growth of dark whiskers covered his tanned, weathered face, just below his cheekbones. And what the hell was he wearing? A long tattered coat with lots of buttons. A white shirt, open at the neck, with a scarf hanging around it. “If it ain’t Miss Filthy Mouth herself.”

  “You can hear me.”

  He tilted his head and scrutinized her face. “Always have, though I can’t rightly say it’s been my pleasure.”

  Had he been on one of her tours? She’d remember a guy this hot. He had an arm draped over . . . an anchor, of all things. A lacy shirt cuff covered his hand.

  Beep-beep-beep. Over on shore, an ambulance backed toward the crowd.

  “See all those people over there? Can you get their attention or, I don’t know . . .” If this was a dream, what good would that even do? It was all very confusing.

  “Folks never see me neither.”

  “Well, can you try?”

  The guy gave her a look, then put a hand to the side of his mouth and, in a loud, deep voice, he shouted, “Ahoy there! Hey scalawags! Look at us here!”