The Elevator Ghost (7 page)

Muffin whimpered. He nudged Bedelia toward a jimson weed with something caught in its underbranches. It was the small tubelike object Maroo had been carrying. In the daylight, Bedelia could see exactly what it was — a model of a spaceship.

“Does your aunt still have the model?” Benjamin asked, his eyes transfixed.

“No, she doesn't.” Carolina Giddle shook her head. The dragonfly clip in her hair winked at them in the flickering light from the tea candles.

Benjamin sighed. “I bet it was something. Too bad she lost it.”

“She didn't,” Carolina Giddle said. “She gave it to me.” Reaching into her handbag, she pulled out a box.

Emma and Lucy leaned forward.

Benjamin reached out, his fingers shaking as they brushed the lid of the box.

“Go ahead,” Carolina Giddle said. “Open it.”

Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was the model.

It looked a little like a hot dog, with a double row of tiny windows where the wiener would go.

Later, Carolina Giddle ran into Herman Spiegelman as she was getting out of the elevator on the main floor.

He clicked off the vacuum cleaner. “You like to come down here to the sunroom at the end of a day, don't you? If you got any tea left over you can always tip it into the aspidistra pot. That plant thrives on tea.”

It wasn't until the caretaker had finished and headed to his suite that her friends appeared.

“Have you heard any more?” Grace was barely visible this evening. “You know, from the rhyming man?”

“Not heard, but I have a feeling I should —”

“Your mama always said no one had itchier feet than you.” Aunt Beulah shook her head. “Me, I was never one to travel much farther than a frog can spit.”

Carolina Giddle sighed. “If I'd known he stayed right there all these years…” With a finger she stroked the crystal in her left earring. “But let's not talk about that. Tell me, Grace, about that Halloween just after you died.”

“Oh, yes, that Halloween. But you should tell it, Beulah.”

“I'll never forget it.” The old woman took a deep breath. “That night of Ada's party…”

SEVEN

The Elevator Ghost

It was Halloween
night, and Carolina Giddle was giving a party.

“She's having it in the sunroom,” Corrina Bellini said to Hetty Croop as they compared their invitations.

Each invitation was shaped like an eye-mask. Corrina's had a tiny black cat on each corner and was dusted with gold sparkles. Hetty's had a small jack-o'-lantern between the eyes.

“She told me her apartment was too small for everyone,” said Hetty, who was dressed as a ballerina. Red sequins spotted the nylon net of her tutu like a glittery rash of measles.

“Are you guys going to tell a ghost story?” Benjamin Hooper asked. All of the mask-shaped cards invited the guest to tell a ghost story — if they wanted to. “I'm calling mine ‘The Ghost Spaceship.'” Ben was dressed as a UFO. He looked out at the girls through his space goggles.

“I'm telling a story about a vampire dog that loves to drink cat blood,” Corrina said.

“I just want to listen,” Hetty said shyly.

The three joined a parade of children streaming through the sunroom door. Awful-looking spiderwebs drooped from its upper corners. Hubert Croop shuddered and smoothed the cardboard feathers of his owl costume.

The room was decorated with items the children had helped make the day before. Dwayne Fergus's jack-o'-lantern, with its Dracula teeth and slitty eyes, grinned from the snack table.

Dwight had constructed a swamp ­monster out of milk jugs and ice-cream containers taped together with duct tape and painted green. It was covered with drips of snotty slime he'd made by mixing mint toothpaste with engine oil. Eerie lights gleamed through its eyes and mouth.

One of Galina Lubinitsky's drawings of a scaly bat monster was tacked on the wall above the aspidistra. The monster wore a mask over its eyes.

“She puts masks on all her monsters now,” Luba explained.

Luba and Elsa had made funny Mix 'n' Match creatures. One had a head like a fairy-tale princess, a middle like an overweight heavy-metal rock star, and legs like Sasquatch.

The older Lubinitsky sisters wore costumes their dad had helped them create. Elsa was a Picasso painting with two huge eyes on one side of her face and a round striped tummy. Luba wore a costume covered with pictures of clock faces that looked like they were melting.

Galina, to no one's surprise, was dressed like a bat monster. Scales had been carefully sewn on her pajamas. Her bat wings, made out of black garbage bags attached to wire coat hangers, drooped a bit in the back.

Lucy Hooper put on a record of “Danse Macabre.” Emma Hooper and Angelo Bellini twirled and danced beneath a disco ball that caught the light from tea candles artfully arranged between a large wing-backed chair and a stool against the far wall.

The snack table was covered with Carolina Giddle's specialties. There was a tray of Rumpelstiltskin sandwiches and plates of purple squiggy squares and iced granghoula bars. Peppermint bone rattlers filled a ceramic bowl covered with small ghosts. Another huge bowl, as black as a witch's cat, was filled with green popcorn balls.

“Martian Munchies,” Emma Hooper whispered to Amanita Bellini.

Frozen alien worms lolled in ice cubes floating in a punch bowl of lemonade. An urn was filled with Carolina Giddle's hot Ghost Host brew.

But where was Carolina Giddle?

Herman Spiegelman, wearing his usual work clothes, was keeping an eye on everything. He made sure no one stood too close to the candles or got into a food fight at the snack table.

“He doesn't need a costume.” Dwight nudged his twin.

“He looks like that guy who gets the bodies for Frankenstein,” Dwayne agreed.

Suddenly all the lights in the sunroom went out. Gasps and small shrieks circled the floor like surround sound.

When the lights came on again several ­seconds later, Carolina Giddle was sitting in the wing-backed chair.

Another gasp, like the breath of a ghost, rippled through the room.

Carolina Giddle's hair was white with a couple of white cloth roses tucked into the curls. Her face was the color of chalk, and her eyes were rimmed with black. Blackish-red lipstick outlined her mouth. She wore a long lace-trimmed whitish dress of some thin material that looked like it could have been spun by spiders. It was torn and tattered in places.

She made a beckoning gesture with her hands, and everyone in the room drew closer.

“Y'all make yourselves comfortable,” Carolina Giddle said in a voice that sounded a little crackly, as if she had put it on to go with her ghost dress. There were chairs and floor cushions close to where she sat.

“Now, is everyone ready for our ghost-­story extravaganza?”

There was a chorus of yesses along with some moans and little shrieks.

“Me first!” Angelo Bellini shouted. No one argued. He'd been better since Carolina Giddle had been babysitting the Bellini children, but he could still throw a pretty amazing tantrum.

“This isn't a whole story,” Angelo said as he climbed onto the storytelling stool. “It's a…what?”

“A riddle,” Amanita Bellini prompted.

“Yeah. A widdle.” Angelo inhaled a big breath of air. “Where do baby ghosts go in the daytime?” Before anyone could hazard a guess, he hollered out, “A dayscare center!” and quickly climbed down off the stool, a big smile on his face as everyone laughed.

Benjamin was next.

“There was this spaceship,” he began, “and it was sort of like the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle except it had eight tail blades, not four, and the front cone had a sensor spike sticking out of it sort of like a narwhal horn…”

It took him fifteen minutes to tell the story.

“Wake me when it's over,” Dwayne said halfway through.

Then Lucy Hooper took over the chair and told a story about a spooky hitchhiker who had four thumbs. Hers only took five minutes.

There were six stories in all, followed by a break for snacks. The ice cubes in the punch bowl had melted and a fat worm candy hung out of Angelo Bellini's mouth. The room was filled with the sound of crunching bone rattlers and granghoula bars. Dwight and Dwayne Fergus's tongues turned green as they licked the sparkles off their popcorn balls.

Herman Spiegelman dimmed the lights. The tea candles next to Carolina Giddle flickered excitedly.

It was time for Carolina Giddle to tell her ghost story.

When she was a young girl, my great-aunt Beulah lived here — in Apartment 712 — right across from where I live now. The Blatchford Arms, in those days, was the fanciest apartment building in the city. People would sometimes come just to ride the elevator which, you have to admit, still looks pretty fancy even if it does creak and moan like a banshee on a bad night. Imagine how shiny it all was a hundred years ago when everything was new — the marble tile on the floor, the brass bar for hanging onto, glass frosted with designs that looked like the feathers of exotic birds.

Beulah had only been living in the building for a couple of months when she met Ada, who lived on the fourth floor. They became best friends. When Halloween rolled around that year, Ada's parents let her host a masquerade party.

The girls spent weeks getting ready for it.

Beulah devoted a lot of time to her costume. She was dressing up as Pierrette, a kind of clown figure you might see on the stage back then. She talked her mother into buying her some white silk pajamas, and she attached black pompoms to the buttons of the pajama jacket. With pipe-cleaner wire and starched handkerchiefs, she created a ruffle for the neck, and on her head she wore a black skullcap from Chinatown. She painted her face white with clown makeup and applied perfect pink circles to her cheeks. She darkened her eyebrows and outlined her eyes with black eyeliner. She was something to see!

It took quite a while to get ready, and Beulah knew guests would already be arriving down in Ada's apartment. So she hurried into the hallway to catch the elevator. The arrow above the elevator gate indicated it had to come up from the lobby.

As she waited, Beulah looked out the hall window onto the lawns and gardens below. This was back in the days before a parking lot circled the building.

It was a perfect Halloween night. A full moon bathed the scene below her with a silvery glow. At the edge of the garden, children had built a bonfire. She could hear their faint laughs and shouts as they tossed dead branches and bits of broken furniture into it.

But then she became aware of another sound. A closer sound.

Someone coughing. It seemed to be coming from behind the door of Apartment 713.

That was very odd, because that apartment belonged to the Van Rickenhoffs, the family that owned the building, and they were never there. It had been closed up, Ada told Beulah, ever since the Van Rickenhoff daughter, Grace, had died from consumption the year before.

Could the family have returned without anyone realizing it?

Cough. Cough.

Maybe it was just the radiator in the hall.

Cough. Cough.

No, it was definitely coming from someone just behind the door of Apartment 713.

Beulah looked at the arrow above the elevator gate again. It had moved up to the number 4 on the dial. Likely people getting off for Ada's party.

Cough. Aargh. Cough.

The hacking cough made Beulah twirl around, and she was amazed to see the door to 713 slowly open.

A young girl stood in the doorway. It looked like she was dressed as a ghost for Halloween. Her face was almost as white as Beulah's clown-face makeup. There was a feverish glow to her blue eyes, made all the brighter in contrast to the gray hollows beneath them. A couple of silk flowers were woven into her pale hair. She was wearing a white dress trimmed with lace.

“I'm wondering if you could help me?” she said to Beulah in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

“Of course,” Beulah said. “Are you going to Ada's party?”

“A Halloween party?” the girl said. Then she smiled. “I love your costume.” She brushed her fingertips over the neck ruffle. “Can you help me fasten this corsage to my shoulder? The pin keeps slipping for me.”

She handed a cluster of white silk flowers to Beulah. It looked like some of the petals were beginning to come loose. Beulah tried to tuck them back in and bind everything together with a faded pink ribbon that dangled from the corsage.

When she took the pin, she was startled by how cold the girl's fingers were. And when she pinned the corsage to the dress, she felt the same icy cold on the girl's shoulder.

“There,” Beulah said. “If you're going to Ada's, we can go down together. What's your name?”

The girl smiled. “The elevator is almost here,” she said. She closed the door to the apartment behind her and stood beside Beulah.

The elevator stopped, making a funny wobbly noise like it always did, as if it couldn't decide exactly how to match its compartment floor with that of the apartment hallway.

It finally eased to a full stop.

“At last!” Beulah laughed nervously. She unlatched the wrought-iron gate.

And that's when something very strange and unexpected happened.

The girl gave Beulah a violent push that sent her sprawling to the floor. Then she hurried into the elevator and pulled the gate closed.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Beulah hollered. She could see the girl through the glass.

Before the elevator started to move, it looked like the girl opened her mouth in a kind of a cry. You know how it is when you've really hurt yourself and you're starting to cry but no sound comes out for a couple of seconds? That's what the girl looked like.

The elevator began to move.

Suddenly there was a horrible wrenching noise, and the sound of metal grinding. Beulah realized the elevator was plunging downward with nothing holding it back.

It only took a few seconds before there was a crash that reverberated throughout the building.

Beulah raced down the stairs. Doors were opening in the hallways, and people hurried along with her. At the fourth floor, Ada, dressed as a Spanish dancer, was in the midst of costumed people from the party.

She grabbed Beulah by the sleeve. “What happened?”

“The elevator fell!” Beulah began to cry, tears streaking through her white makeup. “And there was a girl in it. I…I was almost in it myself but she pushed me back!”

It only took a couple of minutes for them to make their way down to the basement. Sure enough, there was the wreckage of the compartment in a tangle of twisted cable and bent brass, with splinters of wood and shattered glass thrown about.

Beulah turned away. She felt she wouldn't be able to stand seeing what had happened to the girl in the white dress. There was no possible way anyone could have lived through such a ghastly accident.

But then she heard one of the men in the crowd say, “Lucky there was no one in it.”

Could she have heard him correctly?

Beulah went over to the wreckage. The man was right. It did not contain the broken body of the girl. All she found as she bent closer to the floor was one small white silk rose.

“My great-aunt Beulah picked it up and kept it in a box with her jewelry all her life, and when she passed away, she left everything in that box to me.”

Carolina Giddle reached up and plucked a white rose from her hair.

“I have it to this day,” she sighed. “Aunt Beulah always said there must be such a thing as good ghosts, although that was the only ghost she ever met. She and her friend Ada were certain that somehow Grace Van Rickenhoff, who had died from consumption — TB as we know it — sensed that the elevator was about to make its last trip. She was determined that Beulah would not be in it when that happened.”