A. C. Wise
The 2017 Annual Juried Exhibition at Gallery Oban consists of a single winning entry in four parts titled “The Ghost Sequences.” Although they dissolved their artist collective shortly before the opening of the show, two of the members, Georgina Rush and Kathryn Morrow, worked closely with the gallery, providing specific instructions for the exhibition’s layout, and further stipulating that any subsequent showing should replicate the original conditions—four rooms in the order Red, Black & White, Mechanical, and Empty—and that the works never be shown separately.
Red
A haunting is a moment of trauma, infinitely repeated. It extends forward and backward in time. It is the hole grief makes. It is a house built by memory in between your skin and bones.
—Lettie Wells, Artist’s Statement, 2017
• • •
The red room contains a series of abstract paintings by Lettie Wells. The paint is textured, thick, the color somewhere between poppies and oxidized blood. On each canvas, the paint is mixed with a different medium: brick dust, plaster, wood shavings, ground glass.
Upon entering the room and turning left, the first canvas the viewer encounters holds a single drop of black paint against the red. With each subsequent painting, the drop grows—a windshield pebble strike, a spiderweb, a star going supernova. Something coming closer from very far away.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the viewer will turn left through the doorway. As a result, the thing inside the paintings is constantly retreating and approaching, drawing nearer and running away, depending on the sequence in which the works are viewed. The room, however, is a closed circuit; there is no escape. The thing in the paintings must circle endlessly, trapped beneath layers of red, always searching for a way out.
Studio Session #1—Ghost Stories
“Family meeting!” Abby calls, her little joke as she enters the shared studio space where their artists’ collective of four works and lives.
She deposits grocery bags on the counter as the others emerge: Lettie paint-spattered, Georgina smelling faintly of developing chemicals, and Kathryn twisting a spare bit of copper wire around her left hand.
“What are we going to do about this?” Abby slaps a bright yellow flyer on the counter beside the bags.
Lettie picks it up, and Georgina and Kathryn read over her shoulder. The skin around Lettie’s nails is as stained as her clothes, a myriad of different colors.
“Gallery Oban.” Kathryn looks up. “Is that the one on Prince Street?”
“No entry fee for submissions.” Abby grins. “The winner gets a three-month exhibition.”
“I haven’t finished anything new in months.” Lettie’s thumb drifts to her mouth, teeth working a ragged edge of skin. Kathryn gently pushes Lettie’s arm back to her side, but not before she leaves a smear of paint behind.
“And no one wants to buy the crap I’m producing,” Georgina says as she unpacks the grocery bags, laying out packages of instant ramen, and setting water on to boil.
“Then this is the perfect thing to push us out of our ruts,” Abby says. “We could even work on a central theme, each in our own medium.”
“Do you have a theme in mind?” Georgina asks.
“Nope.” Abby grins. “We’ll brainstorm tonight. This should help.”
She retrieves a bottle of cheap wine from the last grocery bag and hunts for a corkscrew. And as soon as it’s ready, Georgina dishes ramen into four bowls. As she hands the over last bowl over, the power flickers and goes out.
“Shit.”
“Think Mr. Nanas ‘forgot’ to pay the electric bill? Or maybe the rain is really to blame?” Abby strikes a pose, doing her best Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“I’ll get candles.” Kathryn leaves her bowl on the counter while Lettie sits with hers cupped between her hands, steam rising around her face.
“We should tell ghost stories,” Kathryn says. The last candle lit, she joins the others around a low coffee table they rescued from the trash. “That’s what my sisters and I used to do when the power would go out.”
“Oh.” Abby sits up straighter. “That’s perfect. Ghost stories. That can be our exhibition theme!”
Lettie, Kathryn, and Georgina exchange a look, and Abby throws up her hands, flopping back against the futon.
“We’re artists! Our whole job is to make the unseen visible.”
“Actually, I might have an idea.” Georgina taps her spoon against her lips. “You know Morgan Paige?”
“The director?” Lettie sets her bowl aside, sitting on her hands to keep from gnawing at her skin. Georgina nods.
“Most people think Cherry Lane was his first movie, but there’s an earlier one that was never released. He made it right out of film school with a couple of friends. It’s practically a student film, but . . .” Georgina shrugs. She looks around and, seeing no wandering attention, continues.
“It’s called The Woods. It’s about a group of high school kids who try to create their own version of the Suicide Forest in Japan by driving one of their classmates to kill themselves. They’re testing the idea that they can create a haunting through a single traumatic event that spreads until it effects the whole school. It’s supposed to be an examination of depression, apathy, and mental illness.” Georgina reaches for the wine and refills their glasses.
“Anyway, that’s not the weird part. You know the woods over by Muirfield Farm?”
Nods all around, and Lettie shifts in her seat.
“That’s where Paige and his friends shot most of the film. On their last day of shooting, something went wrong with the camera and while Paige was trying to fix it, he saw something on the film that shouldn’t have been there.”
One of Lettie’s hands creeps free, and she chews at the side of her thumb. A faint smear of red marks her lips, not matching any of the paint under her nails.
“He sees a girl standing between the trees, barefoot, wearing strange clothes. She could just be some local kid, but Paige is convinced he’s caught a ghost on film. He freaks out and scraps the movie. Eventually, he takes the frames he has and buries them, and doesn’t make another movie for nearly five years. According to the rumors, the raw footage of The Woods is under the freeway overpass somewhere near Clover Street.”
“No one’s ever found it?” Kathryn asks.
Georgina shrugs.
“Maybe if they ever do those repairs they’ve been promising for years . . .” She finishes her wine and shrugs. “Anyway, maybe I could do something with that for my part of the exhibition.”
Abby stands.
“I have a story, but give me a sec.”
There’s a slyness to her expression as she disappears into her studio. She and Kathryn have spaces on the first floor, while Lettie and Georgina have studios on the half floor overlooking the common room. The whole building used to be industrial storage space, renovated during the city’s renaissance in an attempt to attract artists to the region and create the next big hipster neighborhood. Abby returns with a second bottle of wine.
“You’ve been holding out on us.” Georgina nudges her as Abby opens the bottle and pours. Lettie covers her glass.
“This is something that happened at my grandmother’s school when she was in tenth grade,” Abby says as she settles back down. “There was this group of popular girls. Everyone called them ‘the pack,’ though not to their faces. Even the teachers were afraid of them.
“Anyway, halfway through the school year, a new girl named Libby joins the class. She’s painfully shy. Her clothes are out of style, like maybe her family doesn’t have much money. Basically, she’s that kid that every class has, the one with victim written across their forehead.
“The leader of the pack is a girl named Helen. One night when her parents are out of town, she invites Libby to join the pack for a sleepover. Libby’s never slept away from home before, but Helen won’t take no for an answer. All the other kids in the class know the pack is planning something, but they’re too scared to warn Libby in case Helen turns on them instead.”
Abby takes a slow sip of her wine, reveling in the attention as she unwinds her tale.
“Anyway, Helen finally convinces Libby. The night of the sleepover arrives and Libby pulls an old-fashioned nightgown with long sleeves and a skirt that almost touches the floor out of her overnight bag. As they’re all getting changed, Susannah catches a glimpse of bruises on Libby’s thighs and arms, just a quick flash before the nightgown covers everything. She tells Helen, but not the other girls.
“After they’re all dressed for bed, Helen tells them how the woods behind her house are haunted, then she insists they play truth or dare. When her turn comes, Libby picks truth, and Helen asks, ‘Who do you love more, your mother or your father?’ Libby’s eyes go wide, she looks scared and won’t answer, rubbing at her arms through the sleeves of her nightgown. ‘If you won’t answer, then you have to do a dare,’ Helen says. The other girls start chanting ‘Dare, dare, dare,’ until Libby gives in.
“ ‘I dare you to go into the woods behind the house and play the hanging game,’ Helen says. She grabs a pair of her mother’s silk stockings and drags Libby outside. The other girls stay inside and watch through the window as Helen makes Libby stand under one of the trees and wraps one leg of the stocking around her throat and the other around the lowest branch.
“ ‘Now close your eyes and count to one hundred, then you can come back inside,’ Helen says. Libby closes her eyes and starts counting aloud while Helen walks backward toward the house. When she gets to the door, Helen is planning to lock it behind her, and then she’ll make the rest of the pack hide. But before Helen can get to the house, Libby screams, and Helen freezes. Libby is thrashing, clawing at the stocking. By the time the other girls run out of the house, it’s too late. Libby isn’t breathing. It’s as if something pulled her into the tree and left her there to hang.”
“That’s a horrible story,” Kathryn says.
Abby opens her mouth to protest and at that exact moment, something hits one of the windows. The sound is like a gunshot, and Lettie jumps, knocking over her wine. Georgina scrambles up to get a towel. She hands it to Lettie, but Lettie only twists it into a rope between her hands. Then she speaks, staring straight ahead.
“When I was eleven years old, my big sister and I came home from school and found my mother sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. She’d smashed some of our plates, and she was putting the pieces in her mouth one by one.” Lettie takes a breath, and Abby leans forward slightly. Kathryn and Georgina go still, staring at Lettie, who continues to look straight ahead. “We screamed for her to stop, but it was like she couldn’t hear us. My sister grabbed her wrists, and then hit her to make her stop. When my mother finally looked at us, it was like she didn’t know who we were.”
“Lettie.” Kathryn touches her arm. Lettie blinks, and slowly turns her head. The candlelight plays tricks with her eyes, turning them to glass.
Kathryn’s hand slides from Lettie’s arm as though pushed away.
“Honey, you don’t . . . ,” Kathryn starts, but Lettie ignores her. Georgina frowns, and Abby scoots forward so she’s sitting on the edge of her chair, but she doesn’t reach for Lettie or her restless hands.
“As long as I can remember, my mother thought she was haunted. She would go on binges of eating, trying to fill herself up so there was no room for ghosts inside her skin. But other times she refused to eat at all, nearly starving herself and begging the ghosts to take her.”
Lettie looks at each of them in turn, still twisting the towel in her hands.
“On my sixteenth birthday, I came home from school and found my mother and my sister dead. My mother was lying on her bed. There were clothes scattered on the floor, a lamp knocked over, like there’d been a fight. There were empty pill bottles with the labels peeled off. My mother’s hands . . . it looked like someone had bitten her. They were all bloody and there were teeth marks on her skin. I screamed for Ellie, but she didn’t come. Then I found her in my mother’s bathroom. She was lying in the bathtub with her clothes on. It looked like maybe she’d hit her head. There was blood around her mouth. I don’t know if my mother killed her, or . . . I don’t know.”
Lettie wraps her arms around her knees, hugging them to her chest. She rocks slightly, then puts her head down, her voice muffled when she speaks.
“My sister is starving, and she wants to come home.”
Interlude #1—A Room with One Door
There was a game my sister and I used to play when we were little. When our mother was having one of her bad days, we’d go into the crawl space under the basement stairs. It was just big enough for us on our hands and knees, or sitting down, and there was only one way in so it felt safe.
The game was called Brick by Brick. There was a deck of cards, each with a picture of a different room. In the real rules, we were supposed to play against each other, but Ellie and I always changed it so we took turns drawing cards and building the house together. We were born only eleven months apart, so really we were more like twins than sisters.
In the game, there were little plastic figurines that came with the cards: red, yellow, green, and blue for the people, and white for the ghost or the monster. The idea was to move through the house as fast as possible, so the monster wouldn’t catch you. The trick was, if you built a secret passageway, or a hidden staircase to get through the house faster, the monster could use it too.
Sometimes Ellie would make up stories about the house while we played. She’d tell me about all the things in the rooms, and the lives of the little plastic versions of us who lived there. The monster was in her stories too, but there it was nice and it wasn’t trying to hurt us at all.
The little plastic figures got lost at some point, but I still have the cards. On nights when I can’t sleep, I take the deck out and arrange the cards different ways. If I close my eyes just a little bit while I’m doing it, I can almost see Ellie moving around inside the card house. If I manage to get the sequence of cards just right, she’ll be able to find her way out and come home. The trick is, what if the monster finds the way out first?
The second room in the gallery contains a series of black-and-white photographs by Georgina Rush. One grouping is labeled The Tomb, the other, The Woods The Tomb photographs depict a spot beneath a highway overpass—graffiti, empty bottles, a half-finished meal in a Styrofoam container. Even so, there’s something mystical about the images. They suggest a sacred site, an archaeological dig. Something is buried here, and the artist is documenting its unearthing.
The Woods depicts rows of trees on the far side of an empty field. Rather than a wild forest, these trees are planned and planted, and Rush achieves a stunning effect with the light coming between the trunks. Despite the regularity of the rows, there is something uncanny about the trees. The spaces between them are full of waiting. One cannot help feeling the woods, and perhaps the photographs themselves, are haunted.
In the center of the gallery there is a pedestal holding a laptop with files that visitors are encouraged to explore. These are raw, unprocessed images, outtakes from the exhibition. The one incongruity is a video file titled “Overlapping Voices (Abby’s Possession).” The film appears to be shot in the studio shared by the four artists. It’s unclear how it fits with the photographs on the wall, however it’s possible the film is another outtake, a dress rehearsal for the performance piece Abby Farris had planned for the show.
Studio Session #2—The Ghost in the Machine
There’s a tapping sound so soft Kathryn barely hears it. When it finally registers, her first irrational thought is that there’s someone in the walls. Then she realizes the sound is at her studio door and opens it to see Lettie’s face, just a slice between the door and the frame. There’s darkness under her eyes, like she hasn’t been sleeping, and the rest of her skin is paler by comparison.
“Sorry, can I come in?”
Kathryn opens the door wider before Lettie even finishes, and Lettie steps inside, glancing over her shoulder.
“Sorry, I just . . .” She rubs her arms. When Kathryn closes the door, Lettie relaxes visibly, then offers a self-deprecating smile and shrugs. “You know how it is when you get in your own head sometimes.”
“Sure.” Kathryn gestures to her work table.
The frame for her piece is mostly complete. Wires trail across the table’s surface like a mat of tangled hair.
“I was actually just finishing up this part. Wanna see if it works?”
Kathryn clears space around the machine, bits and scraps she ended up not using. Most of the parts were bought at the local hardware store, but the crown jewel she found on eBay—a Ouija board in good condition, but showing signs of use, which is exactly what she wanted. The letters are a bit faded, and the felt pads on the planchette’s feet have worn away. The board sits in the center of a frame, and a thin metal arm runs from the planchette to the frame, hinged to allow a full range of motion. It can reach every letter and number on the board, along with “Yes,” “No,” and “Good-bye.”
“Wait.” Lettie touches Kathryn’s wrist as she reaches for the power switch.
A bandage wraps Lettie’s thumb, the edges dirty and peeling. There’s a dark red stain along one side, fading to brown.
“Can it really talk to ghosts?” The way Lettie says it, almost hopeful, gives Kathryn pause.
She lowers her hand. As a kid, she wanted so badly to see a ghost. All those stories she and her sisters told, gathered around a flashlight under sheets strung over chairs—if she could just see one of those ghosts for real it would make her special. But what she sees in Lettie’s eyes is completely different. Raw need. Loss. The room goes colder, air dropping out and goose bumps rising on Kathryn’s skin.
“We don’t have to.” Kathryn fights the urge to rub at her arms the way Lettie did. This whole thing was a terrible mistake. “It can wait until some other time.”
“No, I want to see.”
The chill goose-prickling her arms crawls up the back of Kathryn’s neck. There’s someone standing in the corner. Someone just behind her. If she turns to look, it won’t be there. The corner will be empty. But if she doesn’t look, the thing will continue to stand there. Not breathing, not moving. Just watching her. Always.
Lettie stands beside her at the table, close enough that their arms almost touch. Yet Kathryn is filled with the sudden, irrational feeling that Lettie is also standing behind her in the corner of the room. A shadow moves in the hallway, just visible through the crack in the door even though Kathryn is certain she closed the door after Lettie entered. Her heart thumps, and she bites down on her lip. A moment later Georgina peers through the gap.
“We heard voices. Is your piece finished? Can we see?”
Kathryn nods, her throat dry. Georgina pushes the door wide, and Abby follows her inside. The studio feels crowded with all of them there. Lettie moves around the table holding the machine like she’s sleepwalking and flicks the switch that turns on Kathryn’s machine.
The EMF detector attached to the frame lights up, lights cycling from green, through yellow, to orange and red before settling back down to a single green pip. The readout on the thermometer beside it shows the room at seventy degrees, slightly higher than normal with their body heat.
Nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to happen and this is stupid and Kathryn wants everyone out of her room now. The lights flicker from green to red again and the mechanical arm holding the planchette jumps.
“Oh shit,” Georgina says, then laughs, a nervous sound. “Is it programmed to do that?”
Kathryn’s throat is tight. She wants to squeeze her eyes closed, but she can’t. For a moment, nothing else happens, then lights on the EMF detector spike and the arm moves again. The planchette scrapes to the left. The unfelted feet on the board shriek, worse than a chalkboard and nails. Then the planchette swoops down to the bottom of the board.
Yes. Good-bye. I-B. No. Good-bye. B-B-B. Kathryn tracks the motion, her mouth open. The machine is working as designed, but it isn’t supposed to do that. There’s no such thing as ghosts; rationally, she knows that to be a fact. EMF detectors can be set off by microwaves, cell-phone towers, or maybe she wired the machine wrong.
Beside her Lettie watches the board, rapt. The planchette moves faster, screeching as it does. Yes. Good-bye. Good-bye. L-B-I-I. No. I-L. No. L-I-B-I. L-I-B-I. The planchette whips through the letters, a blur repeating the last four with sharp insistence.
“Oh shit,” Georgina says again. “It’s spelling Libby. Like the girl in Abby’s story.”
Lettie makes a sound, not quite a breath, not quite a sob.
“What did you do?” Kathryn rounds on Abby. Her fingers clench and unclench at her side.
Abby’s mouth drops open, and she holds up her hands. If her shock is an act, it’s convincing. An ache makes itself known between Kathryn’s eyes, and she shakes her head once to dislodge it. What makes her think Abby had anything to do with this? Just because she told a ghost story about a girl named Libby? Besides, Georgina is the one who pointed it out so quickly, couldn’t it have been her? Or none of them, because no one has touched the machine except for her. It’s just a weird coincidence, and Kathryn is being paranoid.
“It’s something wrong with the wires,” Kathryn speaks quickly. Instead of turning off the switch, she yanks out the whole bundle of wires in one go, and the arm and the planchette fall still.
Lettie continues staring at the machine, willing it to move again, to speak. Her face is bloodless, except for one spot of color high on her cheek as though someone slapped her.
“It isn’t Ellie.” Lettie shakes her head. She turns to Kathryn, stricken. “It’s the wrong ghost.”
Kathryn pulls Lettie into a hug, but it’s too late. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s ruined everything. Something terrible is in the room with them, and she’s the one who let it in.
Interlude #2—A Room with No Windows
Georgina let me help her with her photographs. I don’t want to be in my studio alone. The red light in her darkroom is peaceful, and there are no windows. It reminds me of the crawl space where Ellie and I used to play. Safe, except when the ghosts would tell my mother where to look and helped her make herself small enough to crawl into the darkness after us.
I watched Georgina make images out of light, then she showed me how to bathe the photo paper in the chemical wash. It’s like a magic trick, watching the picture fade into place. While I was watching her trees, they suddenly weren’t trees anymore. They were the wooden frame of a house still being built. A skeleton without windows, or walls, or doors. Then the chemicals finished their work and it was just woods, but there was someone standing between the trees.
I was so startled I knocked the whole tray over. It ruined Georgina’s picture. She told me not to worry, she could make another one, and she did, but there was nothing between the trees the second time. No house. No figure. Just shadows and light.
I think Georgina was afraid of upsetting me. Everyone walks on eggshells around me since the night the power went out. Except for Abby. The other day I walked into the kitchen and they were all there. I’d been in my studio with my earphones on, so I didn’t hear them until I opened my door, then Kathryn said, “So who moved it? A ghost?” But they all stopped talking the second they saw me. Kathryn and Georgina exchanged a look like they wanted to say something, but they didn’t know who should go first. Abby smiled, but in the end no one said anything. They just watched me get a glass of water and go back into my studio. Am I so fragile they all have to tiptoe around me? Or are they scared of something else? Do they know about the house I’m building with the cards? Or how badly I want to open the door?
Is it possible to build a machine to capture a ghost? That is the question at the heart of “Séance Table.” Ghost hunters have used a variety of equipment to detect paranormal activity for years—electromagnetic field detectors, voice recorders, infrared cameras. “Séance Table” makes use of some of those tools of the trade, specifically an EMF machine and an extremely sensitive thermometer. The goal of the piece is to mechanically facilitate communication with the paranormal world. A spike in EMF readings, or a drop in temperature, will trigger the arm attached to the piece’s frame, causing the planchette to move. Even though the motion is mechanically aided, the prime mover, the trigger if you will, is the ghost.
Is it possible for the random motion of the arm to spell a word, or impart a message with specific meaning to the visitor? If my machine does capture a ghost, is it because the ghost was always there, or do the conditions of the machine itself—an open phone line, an invitation to speak—cause the haunting? I am certain you have questions of your own as well, and I invite you to write them on the provided note cards and drop them in the box affixed to the base of the machine. Perhaps a ghost will answer. I also invite you to take your time in the gallery, and keep an open mind. Let’s explore the questions of the afterlife together.
—Kathryn Morrow, Artist’s Statement, 2017
Studio Session #3—Overlapping Voices (Abby’s Possession)
Georgina wakes to Kathryn leaning over her, gesturing for silence.
“What—”
“Shh. Here.” She presses Georgina’s phone into her hands. “Something’s wrong.”
“Come on.” Kathryn tugs her, and Georgina stumbles after her.
“What’s going on?” Lettie joins them, her eyes wide in the dark. They look like they’ve been wide for a long time. Sleepless.
The door to Abby’s studio stands ajar, the murmur of voices emerging from within.
“Turn your camera on.” Kathryn indicates Georgina’s phone.
Confused, Georgina obeys. Her mind is sleep-numb, dazed. She lifts the phone regardless, watching the screen as Kathryn pushes open Abby’s door.
The room is a mess. The sheets on the empty bed are rumpled; Abby’s clothes are scattered on the floor. It looks like someone tossed a deck of playing cards in the air and left them wherever they fell. As Georgina’s eyes adjust, she sees they’re not regular playing cards. There are pictures of rooms on them, stairs, hallways, broken pieces of a house in random order.
Georgina lifts the camera higher, going cold as her eyes and her screen make sense of the image at the same time. Abby stands in the corner, facing away from them. She’s wearing a nightgown with a long skirt and long sleeves. Her hair is loose, and she’s rocking back and forth on her bare feet, muttering words Georgina can’t quite hear.
“Abby?” Kathryn speaks softly behind her. Lettie makes a distressed sound, so small it’s almost lost as Georgina and Kathryn move closer.
Georgina finds herself speaking, like a narrator in a documentary film, before she’s fully registered what she’s doing. Kathryn told her to film this, so she’ll do it right.
“Abby is standing in the corner. She’s barefoot and facing the wall. She’s wearing a nightgown none of us have ever seen before.”
“I don’t like this,” Lettie says.
Georgina inches closer, and Abby’s words either grow clearer, or she’s speaking louder, pitching her voice so her audience will hear.
“In the trees. In the woods. Buried under the road.”
Even if it is a performance, and Georgina really isn’t sure, the skin on her arms tightens, puckering around each hair, and some primal instinct tells her to flee. This is wrong. The voice doesn’t sound like Abby, but there’s no one else it could be.
“There’s something wrong with her spine. The way she’s standing looks wrong,” Georgina says.
If she keeps narrating, it’ll keep what’s happening at a distance. It’s just a movie. She plants her feet, refusing to run, and forces herself to breathe.
“Abby, can you hear me?” Kathryn stops just short of touching Abby’s shoulder. On Georgina’s screen it look like her hand actually bounces away.
“In the woods. In the woods. In the . . .” Abby’s voice grows louder.
“Make her stop.” Lettie’s voice cuts in over Abby’s.
“Abby.” Kathryn finally succeeds in touching her and Abby jerks around to face them, her lips pulled back in a snarl. It’s definitely Abby, but at the same time it looks nothing like her.
“In the woods in the trees in the woods.” It’s almost a chant, and Georgina has the odd sensation Abby’s lips don’t move.
Abby pushes Kathryn, and Lettie catches her. Georgina jumps out of the way, and the image on her screen jumps with her.
“Bury me. Bury me.” Abby’s voice gets louder, closer. Georgina’s head snaps up, looking away from her phone, and somehow Abby is beside her.
Abby grins with her peeled-back lips, a nasty smile. Her gums look wrong, bloody, and Georgina looks away. It’s a moment before she can force herself to follow Abby into the hall.
“Bury me.” The words trail after Abby, but the voice sounds like Lettie’s.
“She’s going to the kitchen,” Georgina whispers to her phone.
A crash reverberates, and Georgina flinches, jerking the screen again. Kathryn pushes past her, and Georgina hurries after her, their footsteps almost, but not quite, covering Lettie’s sob.
There’s just enough light to see Abby standing in the center of the kitchen. Shards from a broken plate radiate around her like the scattered cards in her room. Her eyes are closed now, head tilted at an angle that looks almost painful. Her neck is broken, Georgina thinks, and immediately pushes the thought away. One of Abby’s feet is bleeding; she must have stepped on a piece of the plate.
“It’s my fault.” Lettie speaks so close to Georgina’s shoulder that she nearly drops her phone. “I used the cards to try to build Ellie a path through the house, but the bad thing came through first.”
“Abby, stop it. Now.” Kathryn grabs Abby’s arm, shaking her. Abby lets out a whimper, but doesn’t open her eyes.
“Bury me! Bury me!” she shrieks.
Then her eyes do snap open and she drops to the ground. Kathryn jumps back, kicking a shard of plate that spins away from her. Abby crouches, her feet arched so she balances on the balls of her toes and the points of her fingers. Her mouth opens, and one hand creeps forward, a spider-walk across the kitchen floor, reaching for a broken piece of plate. Georgina’s pulse thumps, her throat too thick to speak.
“No!” Lettie throws herself forward as Abby’s fingers brush the broken plate, and she slaps Abby’s hand away.
Abby snarls, swaying, and Lettie hits her, knocking her back. There’s a painful thump as she hits the ground, but Georgina can’t tell if it’s Abby’s back or her head striking the floor. Lettie scrambles on top of Abby, pinning her down and hitting her again. Abby’s hands come up to defend herself, and Georgina and her camera catch sight of Abby’s face in profile; she looks scared.
Fascination holds her in place. It’s Kathryn who finally grabs Lettie’s wrists and pulls her away. Abby and Lettie are both breathing hard, Abby’s breath hitching on the edge of hyperventilation.
“Turn it off,” Kathryn snaps, and its only then that Georgina fully realizes she’s still filming.
Her thumbs shakes as she taps the stop button. Kathryn puts her arm around Lettie’s shoulder, leading her away. Lying on her back, Abby turns her head toward Georgina. She’s still holding her phone, and she has the sick urge to take a picture of the scene. Abby’s nose is bloodied where Lettie hit her, and red smears her lips and chin, looking black in the dark. Abby’s eyes meet Georgina’s, shiny and wet. Her lips move, mouthing words which might be “I’m sorry” or “Help me,” Georgina can’t tell.
Interlude #3—A Narrow House
There’s another game Ellie and I used to play. We would lie perfectly still in the dark, our bodies straight, our feet together, our arms pressed at our sides, like we were lying in invisible coffins. If we were good enough at pretending, the ghosts would think we were one of them. We called it The Dead Game.
Last night, I came into my studio and found all my paintings for the show rearranged. At first I thought maybe one of the others had been in my room, but I know Georgina and Kathryn wouldn’t do that. I don’t know if I don’t think Abby would either. I realized it had to be a message from Ellie. The deck for Brick by Brick isn’t in my room anymore. I don’t know where it went, but I haven’t seen it in almost a week, and I’ve looked everywhere. Without it, Ellie had no other way to reach me. She had to use the paintings. The canvases are walls in a house that is always being built. It still isn’t finished.
I looked at the paintings for almost an hour, but I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. Then I thought if I played The Dead Game, she might talk to me directly. I lay on the floor and put my arms at my sides, keeping as still as possible. The room was quiet and dark, but I kept smelling paint, and something like sandalwood. Maybe Abby was burning incense in her room. The smell comes under her door sometimes. It’s so strong some days the scent stays on her clothes and in her hair and trails behind her so we can always tell where she’s been.
I tried to hold my breath. Ellie was always better at that part of the game. One time when we were in the crawl space playing, I got really scared thinking she wasn’t breathing at all. I kept shaking her until she finally opened her eyes and smiled at me. There was someone else inside her looking out at me. I broke the rules then, the ones we’d made up for Brick by Brick, that we’d always help each other and stick together so the monster wouldn’t catch us alone. I ran, and I left Ellie in the crawl space behind me.
Lying in my studio, I listened for Ellie as hard as I could. I kept holding my breath until my head pounded. Until my lungs hurt. Then I let it all out at once, and the sound was like a train thundering over the tracks. Black smoke hung over my head, like I’d breathed myself out entirely. Then there was something else in the smoke. It turned and looked at me and I was so surprised, I gasped. I didn’t mean to, but I breathed it in. The dark thing is inside of me, and now I don’t know how to let it out again.
Studio Session #4—In the Trees
Lettie starts, gasping in a breath. Someone is in her room. Someone is leaning over her. She’s playing The Dead Game, and she is a door and something is stepping through.
“Are you awake?” Abby’s voice jolts her.
Lettie crashes back into herself, but her body feels like a collection of loose bones—an unfinished construction—only barely joined by skin. Her studio resolves around her, the canvases lined against the wall smelling of paint and turpentine, even though she opened all the windows. Abby’s scent is there too, sandalwood threaded through and beneath everything.
“What’s wrong?” Lettie sits up; it’s a struggle.
“The others are asleep,” Abby says. “I want to show you something.”
Abby goes to the door, looking back over her shoulder and beckoning. Lettie follows. She shouldn’t. She doesn’t trust Abby, but there’s no reason not to trust her either. Only there’s something different about her tonight. It’s not like when she spoke in strange voices and Lettie hit her, that night they still haven’t talked about. Now, Abby almost seems to glow. There are hollow spaces inside her, places for ghosts to fill.
“Oh,” Lettie says, and hurries to follow Abby into the dark.
Once they’re outside, she asks, “Where are we going?”
Her feet are bare, but it’s too late to go back for shoes. She picks her way carefully over the warped asphalt, following Abby down the narrow alleyway between buildings.
“I borrowed my brother’s car,” Abby says. “I need to get some things for my performance.”
“At night?”
“They accepted our proposal. Didn’t you hear? We made it into the show. We are the show.”
Lettie stops. As far as she knows, Abby hasn’t even started working on her piece. Any time any of them ask her about it, she changes the subject. And she certainly doesn’t remember assembling images of her own paintings to submit to the jury. Surely she would remember that. Unless Georgina did it, with her camera, got everything ready. Of course that’s what happened. How could she forget?
At the mouth of the alley, Abby turns back to look at her. There’s something disdainful in her expression, but something pitying as well, as if she’s sad that Lettie doesn’t understand. That’s when Lettie sees it, a faint ribbon the color that moonlight would be if it could be made solid. It twists away from Abby, a path, a thread, beckoning Lettie to follow.
She climbs into the passenger seat as Abby unlocks the door of an ancient Dodge Pinto, the car she borrowed from her brother. The rubber floor mat is gritty under her soles. Light slides over them as Abby pulls away from the curb. Everything is sodium orange and bruise-colored, bloodied at the stoplights, drowned green for go. Abby looks at Lettie sidelong, like she’s testing Lettie, like she’s asking a question.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Lettie says.
The vents in the dashboard rattle, exhaling air smelling of burnt toast. Abby started this whole thing, but Lettie still doesn’t know if she believes. The story she told, Lettie suspects Abby made it up on the spot. Why would Abby’s grandmother admit to such a thing, because how else would she know about it unless she was one of the girls involved? And why would she tell her granddaughter about it if she did?
Depending on how Abby answers, Lettie will know whether Abby knows about the moon-colored glow surrounding her, whether she knows about the ghosts, or whether they’re just using her as a vessel to send a message.
“I’m building a suicide tree,” Abby says instead of answering her. “For the show.”
She turns off the main road where there are fewer streetlights, and shadows stick to her skin.
“During my performances, I’ll stand under the suicide tree with a noose around my neck and invite ghosts to prove themselves by making me into one of them, if they can.”
Abby’s eyes cut right, looking for a reaction. Lettie watches the lights instead, the pattern of shadows. She has the strange impression that the car is moving backward in time. She’s heard everything Abby has to say somewhere else before. She watches through the windshield for the place where the glowing ribbon ends, the place it’s leading them.
“We’re here.” Lettie says it so suddenly Abby hits the brakes without engaging the clutch and the car stalls.
The Dodge’s headlights wash over browned grass, showing the expanse of a field. Beyond the field, trees stand like sentinels in eerily perfect rows. Abby’s mouth opens; Lettie smiles to herself. Her suspicion is confirmed; Abby doesn’t know where they are. She isn’t the one in control.
Abby recovers quickly, scrambling with her seat belt, but Lettie is out of the car first, walking toward the trees. She looks over her shoulder. Abby is very small in the darkness, dwindling. Her mouth is a perfect circle, her eyes smudges of black. It’s time.
Abby is a house, waiting for a ghost, so Lettie slips inside, looking out through Abby’s eyes and watching herself walk across the field. Brown grass crackles under her bare feet.
Abby blinks, feeling like she’s waking up from a long dream, disoriented and unsure where she is. She doesn’t remember leaving the studio, but she’s outside and the trees ahead of her are unsettlingly familiar. Georgina’s photographs. And Lettie. Lettie is with her. Panic beats a tattoo against Abby’s skin.
She blinks again, and there’s something between the trees. Someone. There and then gone. Afterimages of Lettie trail behind her leaving luminescent footprints on the grass, except Abby can’t tell which direction they’re going. She has to catch up before it’s too late. She breaks into a run, tripping, and Lettie is even farther away by the time she gets her feet under her again.
This was a mistake. She came here to . . . Why did she come? She wanted . . . She honestly doesn’t know.
Something is terribly wrong. Something she can’t quite remember. Like a story someone told her a long time ago.
Lettie is almost at the trees. At the edge of the field, Lettie stops. Relief crashes through Abby. She bends over, hands on her knees, gulping deep breaths. She straightens just in time to see Lettie open her mouth, but before either of them can get out a word or a name, something dark surges from between the trees. It’s there and then it’s not, and Lettie isn’t there either. She’s gone. Pulled into the trees. Vanished.
Abby screams. She plunges forward. Trips again, biting her lip and tasting blood. She calls Lettie’s name and her voice echoes back to her, overlapping, a cacophony. There’s no answer but she keeps shouting, on her hands and knees at the edge of the field, calling Lettie’s name until her throat is raw.
Empty
The last room in the gallery is empty. The walls are freshly painted. The special lighting installed to cast shadows from an assemblage in the shape of a tree remains switched off. The room was originally intended to host a performance piece by Abby Farris, but now it is a space defined by absence.
Mostly. A week after the opening of “The Ghost Sequences,” a visitor brought something to the gallery owner’s attention. Along the baseboard near the door, there are words written in blue ballpoint pen, in lettering so small it is almost illegible. The words were not there on the day the exhibition opened. There are two sentences, which almost overlap, possibly written in two different hands, but it’s hard to tell. Rather than retouching the paint to cover the words, the gallery owner let them stand as though they were always meant to be part of the exhibition after all.
I’m sorry Lettie. Ellie I’m still building the house come home.