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I dug them all out and took them down to the furnace in the basement. It took me half a day to get it going again, with four trips to a hardware store for supplies, but you need a high temperature to reduce bone to ash. You can’t just throw gas on it and stand back. I had the last bit in my hands, a piece of broken yellow bone, when the Lady blew on my face. The house had gone very quiet since I started the burning and I could feel the tension, the way air feels before a storm.
I’d grown to trust the Lady and I put that old bone in my little box and took it away with me. Maybe she talked to him. Maybe she told him about the exciting life on the road and he went along. Hell, maybe a ghost in an abandoned house gets lonely, I don’t know. I didn’t really need him, or so I thought at the time. The Lady was my finder and I was getting a name for myself. I’d even had TV companies sniffing around me, but I don’t want my face shown around the country. There are a few people who would be very pleased to see it, and I don’t want to meet them again, not ever.
I did say there were four of us, when I started this record. The last to join my little family was about as muscular as Geronimo. He could throw things around like you wouldn’t believe. It was an old place in Georgia where I found him, overgrown with so much green crap that it looked like it was about to sink into the marshy ground. I nearly fell through the floor more than once. There was graffiti on the walls and beer cans all over the ground floor, even some marks from fires, where kids had tried to light the old place. It was too damp to burn, I think.
I’d gone looking for his relic and he’d come at me in a dust devil, blowing the filth of a century of neglect into my face. I was blind for a while, and only the Lady guiding me got me out into the sunshine. However, I’m a professional and it wasn’t so hard to buy goggles and overalls for the second trip. As it happens, I didn’t need them. I reached the old kitchen and as the wind started up, I opened my little box.
“Meet the kids,” I said. Well, that wind just died on the spot. I imagined them all sniffing each other like dogs.
“I can take you to places you’d never see otherwise,” I said aloud. That was how I added an old gold locket with a lover’s lock to my box. I never could hear him, but Geronimo told me his name was Thomas, so I always called him that.
Together, we toured the country for maybe three years. I never found another like Tom or Geronimo and if I had the slightest trouble, I’d just open the box and the air would get real heavy while they slugged it out. I don’t know exactly how they could give a ghost a beating, but those boys seemed to love it when we had the chance. I might have gone on like that forever, until the fall of ’04, when I finally met Erwin Trommler. He’s sort of the reason I started this record, so if you’ve been drifting while I gave you my valuable wisdom, it might be time to sit up and gulp the cold coffee.
I’d worked the East Coast for a few years and I’d been thinking of heading farther west, maybe to Memphis. I’d gotten the idea that someone with my talents should visit Graceland, you know? If you don’t understand right away, you never will, so don’t worry about it.
Before I went, I had a live one call me to Long Branch, New Jersey, right on the coast. Ms. Gorski, she called herself, so I knew she was going to be an ugly one. Not that I did that anymore. Taking out the ghost trash doesn’t seem to get them hanging off you the way speaking to the dead does. I worked out the distances and thought, yes, I could do that job and then swing west to reach Graceland in the fall.
She was standing on the step waiting for me when I swung into her road. In fact, she wasn’t too bad looking. She was dark-haired and sort of formal in her manners, maybe a little plumper than I like to see in a woman, but not too far gone. I spotted her and pulled up, taking my box from the front seat. I know they could travel in the trunk, but it seemed disrespectful somehow.
When we were all inside, I took a look around, pleased to see the signs of serious money. I have a pretty good eye for antiques and there were some nice pieces in there. Good neighborhood too. It’s not that I won’t help poor people, it’s more like I have to make a living too and poor people don’t pay so well. So I was relaxing a bit as I sat there on a sofa that must have cost more than my car.
“Tell me about your father,” I said. I had a routine by then, mainly to give them a sense of value for money. I could feel the Lady breathing on my neck, so I knew it was a real one. Talking to the clients didn’t help me find relics any faster, but if I didn’t, I think I’d have been the loneliest man alive.
Now you have to understand that her father, Erwin, had died just a few days before. If it had been a different kind of call and if she’d been more to look at, it could have been a fun afternoon for me. Like I said, I don’t do that anymore, but I didn’t see any grief in her. She just sat there and talked, but all the time I had the feeling she was giving me nothing. Hell, maybe I am psychic. She told me his name and that he’d come through Ellis Island a long time ago. He’d been about ninety when he died. I could see she didn’t like talking about him at all. So I pushed for more details, with my bump of curiosity itching away like crazy.
“I feel his spirit in the house,” she said. “Things move and there are noises, not just bad dreams. If you come back tonight, you’ll feel it too. No one can live here until he’s gone. That’s all you need to know.”
“Ma’am, you shouldn’t tell me my business,” I said. “If I tell you I need to know more, it’s because I do. Now I can just leave and maybe you’ll find some other fool, I don’t know. But I’m telling you, there’s no one else who can do what I can. If you truly want him gone, you’ll be honest with me.”
She looked at me for a long time and I felt a kind of thrill, like I was on the edge of something.
“I was born here, Mr. Garner. But my father was originally from Germany.”
“Well, folks have to come from someplace,” I said. My own grandmother came through Ellis, bringing her little daughter with her. I wondered for a moment if they would have stood in line with the young Erwin Gorski.
“He arrived in 1944. His real name was Erwin Trommler, before. He claimed to be Polish and he spoke the language fluently. He hid himself in America.” She hesitated again and I had a sort of premonition, not so much a psychic thing as a sick feeling in my stomach.
“Tell it all then,” I said softly, reaching out to touch her arm. “I need to know.” There were tears in her eyes, just a glimmer, like I was seeing her heart torn out.
“He worked in Bergen-Belsen for three years, Mr. Garner. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but he earned enough money to get false papers and get out before the end.”
Belsen. I knew more about that than she did. The British found thousands of dead bodies in that place, left to rot on the ground. The ones they found alive made some of the most harrowing pictures you’ll ever see. Walking skeletons, with dead eyes, the ones who lived. Babies, women, piles of children. If there’s one thing that God will hold up to humanity, one thing to shame us on the day of judgment, it will be the Belsen concentration camp.
“My father was a cold man, Mr. Garner. He never talked about his past. It was only after his death that I went through his papers.” She shuddered and I thought to myself that I didn’t want to see what she had found. Not then, not ever. Some things burn themselves so deeply into your mind that you can’t ever tear them out.
“Will you come back tonight, Mr. Garner? I haven’t slept in here since he died, but I can still feel him. I want him gone. I want him properly dead.”
I nodded, thinking I w
as going to have to make some plans for this one.
“You stay out of the house,” I said. “I’ll come back when it’s dark.” To her credit, she didn’t flinch at the idea of giving me a key to a house full of antiques. I guess she’d seen something in my eyes as I’d listened. She trusted me, and I’d almost forgotten how good that could feel.
I stood before that old place as the sun went down and I felt a little bit like an exterminator come to kill roaches. I had my tools, a pair of goggles, and some overalls. I suppose I looked like an exterminator as well. I also had my little brass box, with the Lady, Geronimo, and Tom. The Lady was pushing me in, with that breath on the back of my neck that wouldn’t let up, so I knew she was as keen as I was.
I opened the door and closed it softly behind me. I’d been in enough homes over the years to know this one was real angry. Well, that was just fine with me. I was pretty damn angry myself.
I stood inside that entrance hall in the moonlight and smiled to myself as I felt the air move and grow solid. I know the Lady’s touch, and that wasn’t it. Maybe I should have been freaked out by the feeling of cold fingers touching my face, but I wasn’t. I really wanted him to be in there. I wanted him to fight me.
