Haunted Legends (26 page)

In 1968 a local radio station in Newark ran an “old-time radio” program every Friday night that included at least one episode of
Lights Out, Haunted: Stories of the Supernatural, The Price of Fear,
and
Macabre,
to name but a few. One night the program featured Lucille Fletcher’s classic story “The Hitchhiker,” and it scared the eight-year-old me silly, and from that night on, I was a ghost-story junkie. Tales of phantom drivers, phantom passengers, phantom roads and cars, were my particular favorites. The idea of being alone on the road at night, in your car while
something
supernatural and not at all nice followed you or, worse, was in the car
with
you, tantalized my young imagination. When it came time
to write a story for
Haunted Legends
I knew immediately that I was going to write a story about a road ghost, and reshaping the legend of Resurrection Mary was too enticing to pass up. And I’d always wanted to try my hand at writing a ghost story wherein the ghost never makes an appearance. Except through guilt, of course. Guilt is a ghost all its own.

Erzebet YellowBoy is the editor of
Cabinet des Fées,
a journal of fairy-tale fiction, and the founder of Papaveria Press, a private press specializing in handbound limited editions of mythic poetry and prose. Her stories and poems have appeared in
Fantasy Magazine, Jabberwocky, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Electric Velocipede,
and others, and her second novel,
Sleeping Helena,
is being published in 2010. For more information, visit her website at
www.erzebet.com
.

There is a blizzard rolling in. It flattens the sagebrush and sends the last few ragged tumbleweeds hurtling into the fence around the house. In these frigid hours the word on the street is this: there’s a narc among us; Jax went to the hospital throwing up blood; the police are organizing a Meth Task Force and holding their first public meeting tonight. I wonder if she’s bold enough to go.

Em and I are huddled on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the light flicker on the old black-and-white tilting in the corner. We weren’t invited to the meeting. None of us on this side of town ever will be, never mind that every other house on our block stinks of ten thousand cats. Never mind the scarecrows, the broken bones, and the babies crying at night. It isn’t really a problem until it becomes one for them.

Their doctors discuss the root of the problem, their law determines how they deal with the problem, they talk in circles around the problem and they’ll probably be talking still when the problem walks in on them. The fools will never see her coming. I know all about her, though I wish Double-Face Woman had never walked down my block. I told my baby sister Em, if you see her, run, but Em didn’t believe. Em and I used to be close, but Em never did listen to me.

That’s the real problem. Not enough people believe in her these days. It has always been her way to lead us from the path of thoughtful living. There
was
one, once. We used to walk it. My grandmother told me this, before she went home to the stars. She told me all about Double-Face Woman. I
thought she was making it up. Though the path was long overgrown, I should have listened, too.

The path may be gone but Double-Face Woman is right here, right now. We no longer recognize her and so she gets us all. Before, she’d go after the boys, tempt them and tease them with strands of her hair or the doe-look in her eye. Our ancestors knew the stories. They knew not to follow Double-Face Woman. We, on the other hand, open our arms because what they believed, we’ve forgotten.

She was the most beautiful woman alive, so the story goes, and too proud of it. She tried to seduce the sun from the sky and was punished. Her beautiful face was halved, and half made hideous, but that did not stop her. She made her way out of the cottonwood copses and the wide plains. She walks now to and through the small towns, once watering holes for the wagon trains, and from there into cities, barrios, and ghettoes. She seduces us all as she goes. Now she is everyone’s problem. Double-Face Woman has done what we cannot; she has crossed all barriers and boundaries of color, class, and kind. Not too shabby for a legend. I want to laugh, but there’s nothing funny about it.

She got me a long time ago. I was just a girl, skipping school, like Em is now, hanging out with my friends, cousins, and aunties, as carefree as any child. It was a slow and scorching day and we were playing with the old frayed garden hose when she walked by. Maybe if I’d turned back to the game she would have kept on going. I didn’t. I stared at her as she passed. She was everything I was not, dark as the clay with hair the color of a starless night. I couldn’t look away. She turned her head and looked back at me with a sly, sideways eye. I was hooked.

She showed me her beautiful face, dark and dusky, half hidden behind strands of bark-black hair. Her lips were luscious and I wanted to kiss them, but instead she handed me a pipe and I drew in the smoke for her, all for her. I didn’t know any better. We never do, or maybe we do and we just don’t care. I know I couldn’t resist. I followed her.

I watched the ground below my feet change from cracked granite to tar, to puncture-vine streaming across rock and sand as the dry heat of summer formed a wall around me. I wonder now if the very air knew I was heading toward danger and wanted to stop me from reaching it. Every so often I glanced at the back of her as she walked on ahead of me, her gait gliding, each
step placed so delicately before the other, like a deer moving through the world of men. Her hair was wild and free; it poured down into the small of her back and fell below it to where soft buckskin rippled over her thighs. The bright-patterned beadwork on her dress belonged in a museum, not here among the dust and rubble-strewn streets.

I followed her all the way to the abandoned lot at the end of the block, where Indian paint and sage grows side by side among the husked-out remains of cars and trucks, left to rust and decay. She sat down on a rock and I sat beside her. She raised that pipe to my lips and held the match over it for me, all for me. She never once looked me in the face, and now I know why. She was hiding half of her own, saving the truth for later. I inhaled. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.

Here, little girl,
she may as well have said,
have a treat.
And I did, and it was good, and I forgot for a while that I was a speck of dirt on clean, white linen and I knew the feeling that comes with being singled out for something good. She loved me.

Now, however many years later, Em looks to me for guidance, but I haven’t got any to give her. I’m always out chasing that pipe. It is too late for me, I tell her. You’ve got to find the path on your own. I don’t even know where to look for it.

Maybe I could have found my way, but I’ve been too busy looking for Double-Face Woman. That’s the way it works. She shows us the side that photographs well, the side that calls us with the curve of cheek and lash. We look around—will anyone see us? We look back and there she is, still smiling, still waiting just for us. Maybe it’s her scent or the steps she weaves on the crumbling sidewalk. I don’t know. All I know is how good she makes me feel.

After she’d gone and I was done running in circles, back and forth, thoughts racing and then finally coming to rest on a single point—her face—I went looking for her again. Again and again until finally, she was all there was. I could see her on every step and in every window. I could knock on any door and she’d be there, pipe in hand, waiting just for me.

I go home sometimes and there Em is, waiting just for me. Em does not have such a beautiful face. Em tries to talk to me, but I have no time. Sleep, and find her again. That’s my life. Sometimes Em wants to go with me when I search for Double-Face Woman and I say, no Em, you stay here. I’ll be right back. If she grabs on to my sleeve I push her away, maybe a little too
hard, and I turn my face so I don’t see the tears she bravely tries to hide from me. From me, her big sister. I never came right back.

One day as I was sitting on the sofa, feebly looking for a half-full bottle of whatever was lying around, my old friend Seal walked in. We called him Seal because he was slippery, he never got caught for his crimes. I could tell he’d seen her, too.

“Gotta smoke?” he said, and he didn’t mean her kind.

“Yeah.” I tossed him my bag of tobacco and watched him work it into a brittle paper with fingers bone-thin. He pulled a pack of matches out of his pocket and the flame threw shadows under his eyes. I could see the wall through his skin.

“How ya been?” he asked, and I told him. “You?” I asked when I was done.

“Just passing through,” he said. “I wanted to show you something.”

I watched as he took that lit cigarette and passed it through his hand—through it—and back again. I was too dried out to cry, but I would have if I could. My good friend had followed Double-Face Woman. He followed her all the way home.

He left me then, and not by way of the door. As if to make his point, he slowly faded in front of me, his particles winking out like stars in the night sky. I got up and went looking for her.

That’s when I began to notice the other ghosts. One in every crowd, every gathering. Their clothes were more ragged than most and their eyes glowed. They smoked and drank whatever they were offered, just like anyone else, and maybe everyone else was too drunk or high to notice they were ghosts. Even at my highest, I saw them. They smiled at me, co-conspirators, as though they knew something I knew but wouldn’t admit.

They made me think about things I hadn’t before considered. I wondered if they, on the other side of town, saw the ghosts, if the ghosts went to those meetings and whispered things into those cold, pale ears. I wondered if the ghosts might be heard, the way we were not. Every time I saw Double-Face Woman, I checked her skin. She was always beautiful, always ripe and as solid as any tree. I grew to ignore the ghosts, to avoid their smiles. I forgot about them after a while. After a little more time with her pipe.

Until that last time. All was well; all was as it always was. She held out the pipe, I took it, put the flame to it, inhaled. She was watching; she always watched, she reveled with us, though her own lips never touched the stem.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the rush. When I opened them, Double-Face Woman had turned her ugly face toward me.

Let me tell you about her ugly face. She only shows it when we are so far gone there is no longer any way back. Then she turns, and so much for the photograph. By the time she shows her other face, it is too late to run. In that face I saw what I’d become.

I went home and slept for three days. When I came to my senses, it was my turn to wait. I sat in the cold house for days, shaking, laughing, pulling at my hair and picking at my face. Every time a floorboard creaked I was sure it was Em, come home at last. Every time a car drove by, I went to the window to watch it. Finally, I gave up. My little sister wasn’t coming back and I could wait no longer. Double-Face Woman was out there waiting for me.

I looked everywhere and couldn’t find her, but I saw Em the other day, out walking the streets with her friends. I saw one of the girls reach into her pocket and pull something out, something she showed to the others in the half-concealed cup of her palm. Oh, Em. I didn’t have to see it. I knew it was her pipe. I watched the girls turn down an alley and would have cried if I could, but there were no tears left in me.

The television flickers, the wind howls by a window held together with tape. Em is curled up in my arms. She is so small, so fragile. I look at my own skin and hair; no one will ever follow me. What beauty I ever had is long gone. I look down at Em and catch her watching me, just like I once watched Double-Face Woman, before she turned her head. I want to say to Em, no, older sisters are not to be followed. But of course what really happens is this: you and Double-Face Woman look at each other and when you turn away, there she is.

Afterword