THE GHOST HUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER

by Christopher Barzak

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, and most recently The Love We Share Without Knowing. Both books are supernatural fantasies and both are published by Bantam. Christopher’s short stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He teaches fiction writing at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. The heartbreaking implications of the interactions between the living and the supernatural are hauntingly depicted in his first story for Asimov’s.

“Syl-vie! Syl-vie! Syl-vie!” her father calls through the hallways of the house. The ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter sighs, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye, looks out the cobwebbed window of the attic. Sometimes it’s the basement, sometimes the attic. Occasionally a house has a secret crawl space, and if she sensed it, she’d go there and wait with the creepy crawlies and spinning motes of dust. Through the false eyes of the portrait of a lady with her toy poodle sitting on her lap, she’d watch her father negotiate the living room, the swathe of his flashlight cutting through the dark. “Syl-vie! Syl-vie! Syl-vie!” he’ll call—always call—until the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter finally says, “Here, Daddy. I’m in here.”

“Sylvie,” he’ll ask, “my God, how do you do it? Tell me how to find you.”

How does she do it? If only Sylvie knew, she would try to stop it from happening. The whispered calls, the bloody walls, the voice of a house, the way it told you how bad it was hurting. If she could turn it off, she’d gladly do it. She’s had enough of houses, their complaints, their listing, the wreckage of their histories. If only she could be normal!

She peeked her head out the side of the false wall that time, waved, and he gasped. “Clever girl!” he exclaimed a moment later, his shock fading, replaced by a grin. He ambled over to put his arm around her and squeeze her affectionately while he admired the dark passage behind the deteriorating gaze of a two hundred-year-old society woman and her once white poodle.

He calls now, too. His voice comes from the floor below her. Upstairs is where this house’s ghost lives, in the attic. They are so dramatic, ghosts, thinks Sylvie. If only they’d settle down, give up on whatever keeps them lingering, maybe their lives would get a little better. No more moaning in pain, no more throwing things around in frustration. No more struggling to get someone to notice you. Give up, thinks the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter. Why don’t you just give up already!

“Here,” Sylvie whispers. When her father calls again, she speaks louder. “Here, Daddy!” she shouts. “I’m up here. In the attic.”

His feet thud on the pull-down steps until his head rises over the square Sylvie climbed through half an hour ago. The ghost here hadn’t tried to hide from her like some. She hates that, the way some shudder when they see her, wrinkle their noses, furrow their brows—the way they disdain her very presence, as if they are saying, You’re not who I was waiting for. You’re not the one I want. This ghost, though, had few expectations. It had few conditions or requirements. It was an old woman, and old women aren’t as picky as lost children, spurned lovers, old men whose sins were never forgiven, people who cannot bury hatchets, people who cannot bear to leave even after life has left them.

“Sylvie!” her father gasps. “Oh my, Sylvie, what have you found?”

The ghost is barely holding itself together. At first Sylvie wasn’t sure if it was even human. It might have been some strange sort of animal. She’s seen those before, though they’re rarer. Afterward, they don’t always know how to hold the shape they had in life. The old woman is gaseous; she probably doesn’t even know what she’s doing in this attic. Liquids are sorrowful, solids angry, throwing chairs and mirrors and lamps across rooms at their leisure. Gases, often confused, are usually waiting for some sort of answer. What is the question, though, Sylvie wonders. What don’t you understand, old woman?

The ghost hunter nods at his daughter briefly when she doesn’t answer, then goes directly to the old woman’s figure in the corner. The old woman turns to look at him. Her face is misty. Wisps of moisture trail in the air behind her when she turns too quickly. She is like a finely composed hologram until she moves, revealing just how loosely she’s held together. She looks past the ghost hunter, over his shoulder, to meet his daughter’s gaze. Sylvie turns away from her to look back out the cobwebbed window. A long, wide park of a yard rolls out and away, trees growing in copses, with a driveway unspooling down the middle of everything, leading out through the wrought iron fence to the tree-lined road. This was her father’s favorite sort of grounds to hunt—his favorite kinds of ghosts lived in places like this, usually. Sylvie can’t bear to look back at the old woman. She knows what comes next.

There is the click, the sucking sound, the high moan of the old woman’s ghost, and then the silence ringing in the dusty attic. Her father sniffs, coughs, clears his throat, and Sylvie knows it is okay to look now. She turns to find him fiddling with his old Polaroid camera, pulling the film out and waving it in the air until it begins to develop. “That’s a good one,” he says. “Not the best, but not the worst either.” The old woman’s ghost is gone. He looks up and sees Sylvie watching him. Blinks. Sylvie blinks back. “Thank you, sweetie,” he says. Then: “Come on now. The Boardmans will be back shortly. We should get going.”

The road is gray, the tree trunks are gray, the sky is gray above her. There are no discernible clouds, only drops of gray rain pattering down, speckling the windshield of her father’s car as they pull away, and further away, from the haunted mansion. Sylvie remembers visiting the mansion once with her mother. In October. For Halloween. The mansion, one of many, sat in the historic district of one of those small Midwestern cities in one of those states with an Indian name. Each Halloween, members of the community theater hid among the mansions and family cemeteries of the historic district, buried themselves in orangey-red leaves, covered themselves in clothes from the previous century, adopted slightly archaic ways of speaking. They were ghosts for an evening, telling stories to small groups of people—parents and children, gaggles of high school boys and girls who chuckled and made fun of their dramatic renditions—who had come on the Ghost Walk through the park and along the river, where once the people whose ghosts they now played actually had walked, loved, hated, drowned themselves out of unreciprocated affection, hid amongst the tombstones from abusive husbands, hanged themselves before the police came to arrest them. Her mother’s hand holding hers, how large and soft it was, moist, how her mother’s hand quickly squeezed hers whenever a ghost brought his or her story to a climax. “This is it, Sylvie!” said her mother’s hand in that sudden squeeze. “Something wonderful or terrible is going to happen!” the hand told her.

Out of those park-like promenades of oak and maple lined streets they drove, back into the center of their shabby little city. Warren. Named after the man who surveyed the area for the Connecticut Land Company that pioneered the Western Reserve, Sylvie had learned in Ohio History class only a week ago. Before that, when someone said the name of the city, she had always thought of mazes and tunnels instead of a man who measured land. She misses picturing those mazes, those tunnels. Though the city is small, shrinking each year since steel left these valley people decades ago, it is tidy and neat, not maze-like at all. It’s a city you could never get lost in.

Once past the downtown, on the other side of the city, the wrong side of the tracks but better than where they’d been living, her father likes to say, they stop at the Hot Dog Shoppe’s drive-thru window, order fries and chili cheese dogs for both of their lunches, then continue on to the house Sylvie’s father purchased several months ago. “An upgrade, Sylvie,” he had said when he took her to the old brick Tudor with the ivy creeping up one of its walls. Much better than the falling-down house where they’d lived when her mother was alive. Sylvie still passed that house on her bus ride to and from school each day. That house could barely hold itself up when they’d moved out last spring. Now it really was falling down, leaning to one side unsteadily. The windows had all been broken by vandals and thieves now, people looking for leftover valuables. Not jewels or antique furniture. Copper piping, aluminum window frames and siding—anything they could turn in for money. They found nothing in that house, though. Sylvie’s father had already stripped the place before others could get to it.

Inside he sits at the computer desk, as usual, one hand pressing the hot dog to his mouth, the other moving the mouse, clicking, opening e-mail. They’d had a lot of work in the past year, after word spread that her father could truly rid homes of lingering spirits, temper-tantrum poltergeists and troublesome ghosts. He’d built his own website after a while, and bought the new house. He was going to give her a better life, he told her. A better life than the one he’d had. Sylvie wondered why he spoke as if his life was already over. Her mother was dead. Her father was alive despite his deathly self-description. How could he not see the difference?

“Another one!” he shouts while chewing a bite of his chili dog. He grabs the napkins Sylvie has placed beside the mouse pad and wipes away the sauce that dribbled out while he spoke. “Listen to this, Sylvie.”

Dear Mr. Applegate,

My husband and I have recently read in the newspaper about your ability to exorcise spirits. Frankly, my husband thinks it is bullshit (his word) but for my sake he said he is willing to try anything. You see, we have a sort of problem ghost in our home. It was here before we were. It’s the ghost of a child, a baby. It cries and cries, and nothing we do stops it except when I sing it lullabies in what must have been the baby’s room at some point in this home’s history. Sometimes we’ll find little hand prints in something I might spill on the floor—apple sauce, cake batter I might have slopped over while I wasn’t paying attention because I was on the phone with my mother or perhaps a friend. If it were only the hand prints, I don’t think it would matter very much to us. But the crying just goes on and on and it’s begun to drive a wedge between my husband and me. He seems to be—well, I’m not sure how to put it. He seems to be jealous of the baby ghost. Probably because I sing it lullabies quite often. At least four or five times a day. Sometimes I worry about it, too, when I’m out shopping or seeing a movie with a friend or my mother, and I’ll think, How is that baby? I hope the baby is all right without me. I mean, it won’t stop crying for my husband even if he was at home. The baby doesn’t like him. And often he’ll leave and go to the bar down the road when that happens until I come home and sing it back to sleep. We’re not rich people, though, Mr. Applegate. And the prices I read on your website are a bit out of our range. Would we be able to bargain? I know it’s a lot to ask, considering the task, but as of now we could afford to pay you eight hundred dollars. I wish it were more, but there it is. You’re our only hope. Would you help us?

Yours sincerely,

Mary Caldwell

Her father laughs after finishing the e-mail. His smile grows long and wide. “Eight hundred dollars,” he says, leaning over the keyboard. “Eight hundred dollars will be just fine.”

“She sounds upset,” Sylvie says. She sits on the couch in the living room where she can still see her father in the little cubby hole room he calls his office, and eats a French fry.

“She is upset, Sylvie!” her father says, turning around as his sentence comes to a close on her name. “And people who are upset are our bread and butter. Without them, we wouldn’t have this fine new house, now would we?”

Sylvie looks up and around along with her father after he says this, taking in the rooms that they’ve both looked at a hundred times in just this way over the months since they moved in. Each time her father feels she doesn’t understand how much he does for them, for her, for their better life, he’ll talk about the fine new house and look up and around at the ceiling and walls of whatever room they’re in, as if this is necessary to pay your respects dutifully.

“Well, I think it sounds sweet,” says Sylvie.

“What does?” her father says. He turns back to the computer to begin a reply e-mail to Mary Caldwell.

“The baby,” says Sylvie. “Why would they want to get rid of it?”

“It’s not even their baby, honey. And even if it were, people just want to live a peaceful life. Ghosts make that impossible. Don’t judge so harshly.”

Sylvie drops her French fry on the plate. She stands up and excuses herself, and her father asks why she hasn’t eaten all of her lunch. “I’m full,” says Sylvie, and leaves the room, her chili dog half uneaten.

The crazy mumbler, the silly girl in pigtails, the annoying policeman who is always pointing his finger and shaking it, the rich woman in the fur coat and hat with the golden pin of a butterfly on one side, the confused dog who runs in circles after his own tail, the maid who is always offering tea or coffee, the old man dressed in a severe black suit with tails and top hat, his long white mustache drooping over the sides of his mouth and down his chin like spilled milk. Page after page, she turns through them until she comes to the new one, the one her father gave her before sitting down to eat his chili dog and open his e-mail. “Here,” he’d said, holding the photo by one corner as if it were the tail of a dead mouse, and handed it to Sylvie. “For the scrapbook. Keep her safe.”

The old lady looks up and around the frame of the photograph, as if it is a fine new house for her, looks out at Sylvie, furrows her brow, then says, “Child, why have you done this? I thought we were becoming friends.”

“It wasn’t me,” Sylvie tells her.

“She’s telling the truth, my dear lady,” the old man in the suit says from his page directly across. “It’s not our young Sylvie here who has done this. It’s the girl’s father. The ghost hunter.”

“Ghost hunter?” the old lady says. “Is that who flashed that camera at me?”

Sylvie nods.

“Well, I never. What sort of man goes around scaring the living daylights out of you like that? What did I ever do to him?”

“It’s not you,” Sylvie tells the old woman. “It was your son and his family. They moved into your place after you died two years ago. Remember?”

The old lady’s face grows more pinched, more confused, her wrinkles deepening. “Why no, I don’t remember that at all!” she says. Then: “Wait. Oh, yes. You’re right. They did move in, didn’t they? I am dead, aren’t I?”

Sylvie nods again, trying to look sympathetic. She hates when ghosts realize they’re ghosts.

“Give her some time, Sylvie,” the old man with his milk-flow mustache says. “It would be better if you just let me talk to her.”

Sylvie knows the old man is right, and turns the pages back and back and back again until she comes to the first one, the very first ghost her father captured. The very first entry in Sylvie’s album. “Hi,” she says, her voice almost a whisper, smiling as soon as she sees her mother’s smiling face.

“Hello, my big girl,” says her mother.

There are, perhaps, a few things that should be mentioned about Sylvie’s mother before we go any further. Her name was Anna Applegate, but she was born to the Warners, one of Warren’s well to do families that had kept their ties to the city, even after the manufacturing industry fled to poorer nations. Most of the wealthy had gone with their corporations, or had never settled in the communities who worked for them to begin with, but the Warners had a particular flaw, a flaw that only revealed itself in the receding tide of money: the Warners sometimes showed that they had what some people called “heart” or “feelings”—both enemies of profit, and because they had kept their modest wealth invested in the city, and lived among the people who worked for them, over a period of several decades they eventually “came a cropper,” as Anna’s father liked to tell friends and colleagues at the university in the neighboring city of Youngstown. He was an art historian —a dreamer and a good for nothing, his own father had called him as they had begun to feel the burden of becoming people who were required to think about money in relationship to need for the first time in several generations. He was fond of sayings, phrases, and aphorisms from the past. He had a difficult time caring about anything that distracted his gaze from beauty. His family had lost their wealth, but he had not lost the sorts of desires wealth had once afforded them.

Sylvie’s mother had inherited the Warner flaw of heart, and because of this she married Sylvie’s father, a young man whose careers had ranged from convenience store clerk to selling cemetery plots to working in a cabinet factory by the time he’d turned twenty. She had married for love, and love led her into a falling-down house with her new husband, already carrying a child. And though the Warner family had come down the ladder, they had not come down so far that they would approve of Anna marrying such a man. “What kind of life can he give you?” her father had asked in the front room of their family mansion that was always cold, even in summer.

Anna had said, “Why does it matter what he can give me? What can I give him? What can we give each other?”

Her father had pursed his lips, closed his eyes and sighed, knowing sense would not reach her. He turned, lifting his hands in resignation, and left Anna standing under the candelabra with the wide staircase curling up on either side of the room to the second floor. She shivered for a while in the cold draft that came through the hallways. Then she made a decision. A decision that would take her to Sylvie’s father’s family home, into the ramshackle section of unemployed laborers and their raucous families, where Sylvie would be born eight months later.

“Hello, my big girl,” says Anna. Sylvie wishes she could hug her mother instead of just see her and talk to her in the photo. It’s been so long since she felt her mother’s arms around her. Her father’s hugs are tight and hot, but her mother’s felt like spring mornings, light coming under the window shade, the smell of growing things pushing their way up and out of the earth.

“Hi, Mom,” says Sylvie, though she’s not sure what else to say. How many times has she opened this book of dead people just to look at her mother? Just to say hello? It’s hard to have a conversation now that her mother’s dead. Sylvie keeps on changing, but her mother will always be who she was when that picture was taken. She will be like that forever.

“What did you do today?” Anna asks. “I thought I’d see you this morning, but it’s already afternoon.”

“Dad had a job. At the Boardman mansion. She’s at the back of the book with Mr. Marlowe. He’s explaining everything to her now.”

Anna sighs and shakes her head, leaning against the border of the photograph. “Your father is doing well then?”

Sylvie nods. “He got another e-mail today, too. A baby ghost. Guess it’s crying too much for the woman’s husband.”

“I wish he would stop,” says Anna.

“I wish he would too,” says Sylvie.

“I wish he’d never found out what you can do,” says Anna.

“I don’t mind, I guess,” says Sylvie. “I mean, I just wish he would stop. That’s all.”

“Did you do your homework?” her mother asks, trying not to appear too obvious in her switching of the subject. Sylvie nods, then shrugs and says no. “You better do that, honey,” says her mother. “I know it’s hard right now, but you have to keep studying.”

“What good is it anyway?” says Sylvie. “You’re smart. Where did it get you?”

“Don’t say things like that, Sylvie.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sylvie says. “I just wish you were here. I mean, really.”

“So do I,” says Anna. “But you need to be strong, okay? I need you to be my big, strong girl.”

Sylvie nods, even though she is neither big nor strong. She kisses her mother’s picture before closing the album and putting it aside to do her algebra homework. She’s fourteen, neither big nor strong, but she can at least do algebra for her mother.

While Sylvie does her homework, while she watches a movie about rich warlocks taking over a town their great-grandfathers founded long, long ago, while Sylvie showers and walks around with her hair wrapped up in a towel like a beehive, while she puts herself to bed and falls asleep, while she dreams she is trapped in one of those police department rooms where people can see in but you can’t see out, the ghosts in the photograph album gossip, debate, inform the new ghost—the old woman, whose name is Mrs. Clara Boardman, formerly of the Boardmans of Warren, Ohio—about the general condition of her recently transformed existence. Mrs. Boardman is outraged to discover that Sylvie’s father believes he has freed her from ghosthood, that she’s now resting at peace in some place people imagine to be heaven. “Only Sylvie can see and hear us then?” she asks.

The other ghosts murmur or mumble their confirmations, but Mr. Marlowe adds, “Well, the people we were haunting, too. They could see and hear us, of course.”

“It’s why the ghost hunter’s business is doing so well,” adds the annoying policeman, who only the crazy mumbler can see is angrily pointing and wagging his finger as he speaks.

The rich woman in the fur coat and hat with the golden pin of the butterfly on the side of it says, “They’re no longer crazy once Sylvie sees the ghosts, too. When she’s nearby, she makes us visible.”

“Hence the photos,” says Mr. Marlowe.

“Hence this album,” says Sylvie’s mother. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m the one who started all this.”

“Not at all,” says Mr. Marlowe.

“It’s not your fault,” the mumbler says.

“You didn’t make him capture you, or any of us,” says the police officer.

The little girl with pigtails jumping rope smiles across the page from Anna. The dog chasing his tail barks twice. Anna sighs despite their effort to buoy her spirits. “I don’t know,” she says. “If I’d never haunted Sylvie, she might never have been able to see the rest of you. That could be enough reason to lay blame.”

“Pish posh,” says the rich woman, tugging at the collar of her fur coat. “Don’t be silly, dear girl. You could never be blamed for this. It’s not as if you’re a magician who’s given away trade secrets. Ghosts have a right to haunt, now don’t we?”

“Well said,” says Mr. Marlowe, and the dog chasing his tail barks once again.

Their voices seep out of the album while the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter sleeps. All night long she hears their voices without comprehending them; they are like songs teenagers hear in the buds of their turned-down-low iPod earphones while they dream. They make sense to Sylvie while she is sleeping, but in the morning, when she wakes, they fall away from her memory like sand through spread fingers.

At school Sylvie enjoys a sort of fame that she had never felt before her mother died. Since the journalist from the Warren Tribune interviewed her father, everyone knows he can get rid of ghosts. Sylvie had read the article like anyone else ten months ago, in the Sunday edition. At first she’d been confused. Why had her father allowed a reporter to interview him? But quickly she came to understand that it was money. Money was almost always the reason for anything her father did, probably because he had so little of it.

In the article, he is quoted as saying, “After seeing how much it upset my daughter, after all my family and friends told me I was delusional, I decided to buy the equipment necessary to help my wife on her way to the afterlife.”

This is the part of the interview Sylvie hates most. How he lied about her being upset. And the end of the article announcing that he could do this for others, that it was a service he could provide.

When she arrived at school the next day, everyone was waiting with sad eyes and invitations to parties or sleepovers. They believed she’d been through hell and, though many of them had never been haunted, enough had and now they were talking, sharing secrets, surrounding Sylvie with their stories of grief and torment. She’d understand, they thought. She knew the horror.

But Sylvie hadn’t been horrified. She had loved seeing her mother walk around the same rooms she’d walked in when she’d been living. It was almost as if she wasn’t dead. True, she could no longer touch her mother, but she could see and hear her, and sometimes she thought she could smell her perfume, Eternity, but she realized that was just a lingering memory after she started to see other ghosts. Ghosts don’t have a scent, she now knows. Not unless you can remember what they smelled like when they were living.

So it had only been Sylvie that saw her mother at first. Her father didn’t tell the reporter that. And then one day he had come home from working at the cabinet factory early with a stomach ache, and found his beautiful daughter in her bedroom of their slanted, narrow house, talking to his dead wife.

Sylvie had kept it secret until that day, which was also the day she realized others could see her mother if she didn’t take precautions: arrange for times when she and Anna could sit and chat like nothing had ever happened. When her father saw, though, he told everyone, and everyone had patted his back and consoled him while disbelieving. For months afterward he complained to friends and relatives that his wife was haunting him and his daughter, and for months friends and relatives made sympathetic faces, nodded politely, placing a hand on his forearm or putting an arm around his shoulders as they walked through the park, saying things like, “My mother thought my father was haunting her for a while after he died. Don’t worry. It’s just a phase.”

He had been outraged by their belief that he was just another ordinary mourner. He had seen his wife standing right in front of him, talking to his daughter. It was no intimation, no product of his imagination. He could see her, speak to her, when Sylvie was in the room. But his friends and family would only bat their lashes while they pondered polite responses, trying to consider how to help him through his grief. How must Sylvie be handling this, they wondered, if this is how Richard grieves?

And then, as he said in the article, he found his father’s old Polaroid camera and took a picture of Anna. He’d prove what he saw. He hadn’t realized that, when he snapped her picture, she would disappear. He received his proof in the photo that she had been there, but when he looked at it, she was still as stone and no longer talking. Sylvie had cried and cried, curled her fists into balls and beat his chest until he grabbed her wrists and stopped her. “You killed her!” Sylvie screamed.

“No, Sylvie,” her father said, “the cancer did that.”

Later, her father gave her the picture to keep, after having passed it around to friends and family to prove his sanity.

It wasn’t until he gave the picture to Sylvie, after he was through with it, that Anna spoke again. “We can’t let him know about me this time,” said Anna. And Sylvie, who had been crying, nodded and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be careful this time. I won’t let him know you’re still with us.”

In the newspaper interview, her father had done something that Sylvie’s mother said was noble. He had lied about how it was Sylvie who made his wife visible. He didn’t admit that he’d never been able to see her without Sylvie nearby. He said nothing about the camera. He had told the reporter he’d bought the usual ghost hunting equipment for the job: infra-red temperature gauges, negative ion detectors, Geiger counters, electromagnetic field sensors. He owned a few of those things now, for props. He had protected Sylvie.

“Dislike what your father’s done,” Anna told Sylvie, “but don’t hate him. His intentions were good.”

Now Sylvie is popular. Previously she’d been just another poor white girl who hadn’t learned how to fight, avoiding everyone, head down, watching her feet pull her through the hallways of Western Reserve Middle School. When she gets off the bus now, there is always someone waiting to walk and talk with her in the hallways.

“Did your father catch any ghosts this weekend?” Ariel Hyland asks during lunch on Monday. Ariel is probably the darkest-skinned black girl in Warren Western Reserve Middle School. For years she and Sylvie have shared a bus seat, talked in a minimal way about each other’s families, but other than that, the girls barely know each other.

Sylvie nods. Tells Ariel about the Boardman mansion. The girls and boys that line up on the benches of her table lean in to listen closer. They are always waiting to hear about another ghost, another capture. Sylvie’s father is famous. He’s been the lead story for Ghost Hunter Monthly. He’s been invited to Pittsburgh to rid a hotel of a spirit that’s stalked the place for four decades. What he’s waiting for is a call from Hollywood, asking him to do a show. Sylvie tells the other students enough to satisfy their curiosity. But it’s never enough. Even after she finishes telling them about Mrs. Boardman, how she had offered Sylvie tea when she came upon her in the attic, how nice she had seemed about being found, even after it is clear Sylvie will tell no more and changes the subject to the Ghost Walk that’s coming up next weekend and would anyone like to go, they eye her greedily. They have no interest in community theater actors who just pretend to be dead. Only real ghosts matter.

Having made plans to attend the Ghost Walk on Saturday night with Ariel and a few of the other lunch table crowd, Sylvie starts to worry. For months she’s tried to pretend her new fame will disappear, that at some point she can go back to being nobody. She doesn’t know how to tell who really wants to be her friend and who wants to hang around her because of her father’s escapades. She likes knowing where she stands. There are girls who leave letters in her locker now, telling her about their own ghosts. There are boys who come up to her at her lunch table and offer her trinkets of misplaced affection: photographs of glowing lights in their back yards they’ve taken, DVDs of Ghostbusters or Casper, once a silver charm bracelet with tiny, ghostly faces dangling from it. Before, when her mother was still alive but sick and losing her hair and refusing to take money from her family for a better doctor, for better treatment—and even before that, when Anna refused to take money for a college education from her father the art historian, because he’d offered it like she was just another charity organization after marrying Richard, and she would rather live and die working at Wal-Mart, as her mother once said—Sylvie had had few friends. Ariel Hyland hadn’t been what she considers a real friend. Ariel had talked to Sylvie, but had never befriended her in a way that made Sylvie feel known, the way a true friend knows you, the way Sylvie’s mother knows her. But still, out of everyone at Western Reserve Middle School, Ariel is the closest thing she has. She’ll stick close to Ariel on the night of the Ghost Walk, she decides.

“That’s a good idea,” Anna says when Sylvie confides in her. Sylvie tries not to burden her mother with her own problems, but sometimes she can’t help herself. She tries to be big, to be strong, but sometimes she just wants her mother. “It’s good that you have friends, Sylvie,” says Anna. “You can’t hide from the world forever.”

“It isn’t hiding,” says Sylvie.

“What is it then?” Anna asks from the front page of the photo album. In the background Sylvie’s dresser is pressed up against the wall of her bedroom in their old falling-down house, her old mattress thrown down on box springs that have been thrown down on the scratched-up hardwood floor. It’s where Richard took her picture with the Polaroid months ago. Haunting Sylvie’s bedroom, as usual.

“It’s refusing,” Sylvie says. “I’m not hiding from the world. I’m refusing it.”

“But why, honey?” her mother asks. It’s times like this that Sylvie finds herself annoyed with Anna, like most girls at school act annoyed with their mothers. Whenever Sylvie admits that she doesn’t love the world or life as much as her mother loved it, Anna begins to nag like any mother. “There’s so much out there for you, Sylvie,” says Anna. “Don’t refuse the world. Embrace it.”

“Mom,” Sylvie says, “whatever’s out there isn’t you. I love you, but can we drop it?”

The church where Sylvie and Ariel meet the others from their lunch table is on a corner of courthouse square, all lit up on this October evening, leaves tumbling end over end across lawns, scraping across the sidewalks like the severed hands of zombies. Sylvie has always been a fan of Halloween—her favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas, her favorite candies are those little sugary pumpkins, her favorite colors: purple, orange, and black—and now it all seems a little ironic to her as she stands in the front room of the First Presbyterian Church sipping cocoa with Ariel and five of their cafeteria friends whose parents have dropped them off or sent them on their bikes with enough money to buy a ticket to the realm of the dead for the evening, making them promise to be back by ten o’clock.

An older woman comes over to ask if they’re all part of a group or willing to mix with other travelers along the River Styx this night. Everyone laughs or smiles; she’s obviously excited to call the Mahoning River the River Styx and to use grammatical constructions like “this night” to her heart’s content. No one answers her immediately, so Sylvie speaks up. “We’re going together if possible.”

“All righty,” says the old woman, who smells exactly like the church smells, Sylvie notices, a little musty and a little like Avon perfume. “Then go ahead and wait outside on the front steps. Your guide for the evening will meet you shortly.”

Ariel says she’s getting a refill of cocoa—”The damn ticket for this cost so much,” she says, “might as well get my money’s worth.”—and everyone agrees. Their Styrofoam cups steaming with cocoa again, they wander out to the steps, which are wide and steep and face the tree-lined road of mansions their guide will take them down. They wait, sipping, discussing the potential the Ghost Walk has for being incredibly cheesy. “Too bad your dad’s not here, Sylvie,” a boy named Aaron says. “I bet he could tell better stories.”

“Ghosts are ghosts,” says Sylvie, shrugging.

The clatter of hooves on pavement distracts them. A horse-drawn hearse lit up with lanterns on each of its corners is coming down the street. The driver is headless, they see, when he pulls the hearse to a stop. Ariel asks how he manages to drive the horse if his head is really stuck down in his shirt. “Probably see-through,” says Aaron.

“Or maybe there are little holes they cut in the shirt,” says another boy, Patrick.

“Or maybe,” says Sylvie, “he’s dead but able to see without a head.” No one says anything at first. They all look at Sylvie as if she could be the anti-Christ. Sylvie laughs. Then they all laugh. She’s surprised them by being funny. Now she seems a little more like them. She’s not just the ghost hunter’s beautiful daughter.

The headless horseman turns to them and waves his gloved hand to follow. He tells the two horses to walk along, and Ariel says, “I heard his voice down in the middle of his shirt. He’s got a head in there all right.”

They follow the headless horseman’s hearse, and at the street corner they find a woman wearing a black cloak. The headless horseman turns the horses down the street to come back around to the church and lead another group to this same spot. The woman in the cloak tells them that she’s their guide now. She’s tall and willowy with red hair curling out from her hood. She smiles, looking at each of them for a moment. “Everyone ready?” she asks. Everyone nods. “Well then, let me warn you before we begin our journey, there are some pretty scary ghosts out tonight, so stay together.” The boys laugh, the girls smile. The woman wearing the cloak rolls her eyes at them and grins. Then she turns and they begin following her down the tree and mansion-lined sidewalk.

Sylvie has already been in several of these mansions, has already found several ghosts in them for the families that own them. The families that still live in the historic district of Warren are some of her father’s best customers. They’re gone for the evening, so the Ghost Walk can be held without the living passing by windows to go to the bathroom or sitting down at the table to eat dinner while townspeople gather outside. Sylvie has heard some of the stories already. The mad doctor who built his mansion with a pit in the basement and a trap door on the front porch. One pull of a switch and you fell into his dungeon where he’d perform experiments on you and you’d never be heard from again. The wife whose husband beat her, so she ran away to live in a nearby cemetery because her husband feared the dead and wouldn’t go there to get her. The lawyer who hangd himself from his porch because he’d killed a man who came to collect a debt. The actors’ faces are powdered white. Moonlight glows on their cheeks and foreheads. But their cloaks and old fashioned dresses and suits don’t seem nearly old enough to look authentic. It’s better than real ghosts, thinks Sylvie. Better than watching them disappear when her father takes their pictures.

At the Jacobs House, Ariel leans close to Sylvie and whispers, “Who’s that guy?”

Sylvie looks at Ariel, who nods at a middle-aged man in an old black suit standing next to their circle, listening to the Jacobs ghost tell her story. Sylvie shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “Another actor?”

The man turns and looks at Sylvie as the Jacobs ghost finishes her story of eternal love for a boy who died before he could marry her, of how she drowned herself in the Mahoning River to join him. The man in the black suit nods at Sylvie. He has a strange beard, like Mr. Marlowe in her album, pointy and black with two lines of gray down the center. Skunk stripes. Sylvie nods back. Then their guide ushers them on to the next house. Sylvie hangs back until everyone is slightly ahead, and the man in the black suit falls in step beside her.

“Lovely night,” he says. Sylvie nods again. “Are you enjoying the Ghost Walk?” he asks her.

“It’s fun,” she says, noncommittal, looking ahead at the others.

“But you’ve seen ghosts before. Other ghosts. Real ghosts. This is nothing for you.”

Sylvie stops and looks at the man, hard. “Who are you?” she asks.

“You don’t know me, but I know you,” the man says. His voice sounds gravelly and vaguely British. His face is lined with acne crevices, but she can tell he’s not as old as his scarred skin and pointy beard make him look. “Your father is the ghost hunter, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” says Sylvie. “What about it?”

“I want you to give him a message,” the man in the black suit says. “Tell him he’s being watched. Tell him perhaps he should put that camera down before someone gets hurt. Perhaps himself. Or perhaps his daughter, for example. Tell him some of us can do more than haunt. And we would hate to see such a bright young girl like yourself fall down a staircase in one of these old mansions. I hear some of these places aren’t as safe on the inside as they appear.”

Sylvie narrows her eyes. The man smiles and performs something like a little bow, holding one hand against his chest. “You’re lying,” she says. “Ghosts can’t touch.” She knows this because if they could, she and her mother would have always been hugging.

He takes her hand in his and bends to kiss it. It’s cold to the touch, and solid. Sylvie flinches and takes a step back toward the edge of the street.

“Sylvie!” Aaron calls from nearly a block away. “What’s the hold up?”

“Nothing!” she shouts over her shoulder. “Coming!”

She’s already decided she will ask the man in the black suit how he did it, how he touched her, if it’s because, as she sometimes worries, she spends more time with ghosts than living people, if it’s because her father keeps asking her to find them, to see them, to talk to them. But when she turns back to question him, he’s gone. Nothing is there but the wind pushing leaves across the sidewalk.

At home her father asks if she had a good time. “Good enough,” says Sylvie. “But there was a man there. I think he was a ghost.”

“What sort of man?” asks her father, spinning away from his computer on his desk chair to face her. “What sort of ghost?”

“It was weird. He could touch me. He took my hand and tried to kiss it.”

“Sylvie,” her father says, red flags waving in his voice, “did he hurt you in any way?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I pulled away from him and this kid Aaron yelled to ask why I was lagging behind. I turned to tell him I was coming, and when I turned back, the man was gone. He said he was a ghost, and that you’d better stop hunting them.”

“Ghosts can’t touch people, Sylvie. You know that.”

“But he did,” says Sylvie. “I can still feel the cold on my hand where he held it.”

Her father stands and comes to inspect her hand, holding it in his own like something broken that needs to be fixed. When he touches her, Sylvie begins to feel warmth in her hand again, but her father says, “It’s like ice.”

“You should stop, Dad,” says Sylvie. “He said something else. He said he’d hate to see your daughter fall down a staircase in one of those mansions.”

“Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie,” her father whispers, pulling her into a hug, holding her, his arms wrapped all the way around. “You’re tired, that’s all. Whoever this man is, he’s not dead. The dead can’t touch us. He’s probably some wacko. We have to keep an eye out for people like that.”

“You can do something else,” she says into his fuzzy wool sweater. “You can get a different job and then they’ll leave us alone.”

“Honey!” her father says, pushing her out at arm’s length to look at her. “This is the best we’ve ever been able to do. The best we’ve ever lived. There’s no reason to be afraid of a ghost. Besides, if he comes around, we’ll take his picture. See how he likes that.”

“You shouldn’t be doing this. Mom—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t bring your mother into this, Sylvie. It’s been over a year now. I think it’s time to move on, don’t you?”

Sylvie shakes her head and sniffs, realizing she’s about to start crying. She pulls away from her father and folds her hands under her arms, nods, and walks upstairs to her bedroom where the ghosts in the photo album are mumbling, conversing, skipping rope and barking, gossiping and reasoning. Sylvie opens it to talk to her mother, but when she pulls the cover back she sees her mother is asleep on the mattress on the floor of her old bedroom, her breathing even, her chest rising and falling. She looks so peaceful. Sylvie could wake her, but she decides to get through this on her own. “Good night, Mom,” she whispers. Then gently shuts the book.

“You’ll have to excuse me. I didn’t expect you all this early,” says Mary Caldwell when Sylvie and her father arrive at the Caldwells’ the next morning. It’s ten am and Mary Caldwell is in the side yard burning trash in a barrel when they pull up her long, gravel drive. Smoke rises into the air in long dark tendrils beside her. The Caldwells aren’t usual customers. They live in an old farmhouse on land where there’s no longer an actual farm, in a township called Mecca. Years ago it was sold off, piece by piece, Mary Caldwell tells them as she invites them in to sit in the living room for coffee, leaving the barrel burning behind them. So now the land that was once the farm has other houses on it. Mary Caldwell’s husband has gone to a bar down the road, a place Sylvie noticed when they drove around the town circle. The Hole in the Wall. Mary Caldwell’s husband is often there, she tells them. He’s a friend of the owner, but mostly he’s always down there because he can’t stand being inside the house with the baby. “I mean the ghost,” says Mary, blushing. “We don’t have any children of our own.”

“I understand,” says Sylvie’s father. “We’ll take care of everything, rest assured. In fact, you should probably join your husband. It’s better if we’re left alone to take care of the matter.”

So you can’t see how we do it, thinks Sylvie. But she holds her tongue. Mary Caldwell sits up straight in her chair, puts her hands on her thighs and breathes a long sigh, as if she’s entered a yoga position. “Thank you,” she says. “But please, it won’t be painful for the poor thing, will it?”

“Of course not,” says the ghost hunter. “Think of it as releasing a lost soul. I’m sure it’s simply confused about the state of its being.”

“Yeah, probably,” says Mary Caldwell. Sylvie likes Mary Caldwell. She likes the man’s flannel shirt she’s wearing, the way she hasn’t done much with her hair but it still looks real nice, wavy, and that she doesn’t wear any makeup but somehow still looks soft and pretty. That was how her mother used to be. Mary Caldwell catches Sylvie staring and smiles. “Would you like to come with me, honey? We could drive on out to the mall. I’m sure the whole thing must terrify a young girl like yourself, doesn’t it?”

“Actually, Sylvie is my assistant,” says the ghost hunter. He turns to Sylvie and smiles. “And it’s not so terrifying an experience, really. Sylvie has seen other ghosts, obviously. Does it scare you, Sylvie?”

“No,” says Sylvie. “It’s not scary. Just sad.”

“What do you mean?” says Mary Caldwell, her brows furrowing in alarm now.

The ghost hunter takes over. “She means simply that it’s sad to see ghosts stuck here, instead of where they should be.”

“Oh,” says Mary Caldwell. “Well, yes, I can see that’s certainly a sad thing. I’m always thinking that way about the baby. Wanting to help it somehow. I hope this is the right thing.”

The ghost hunter assures her it is. He asks Sylvie to show her the photo album. Sylvie takes it out of her backpack and shows Mary Caldwell pictures of ghosts, flipping from page to page while Mary Caldwell nods and mmm-hmms. Her father says, “These are all ghosts we’ve been able to help on their way.” Sylvie doesn’t show Mary Caldwell her mother. She shows her Mr. Marlowe, who plays with his mustache and snickers, though only Sylvie sees and hears him. She shows her the little girl skipping rope and the dog chasing his tail.

“Well, then,” says Mary Caldwell. “All of these folks seem happy, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” says the ghost hunter. He inquires about the form of payment, and Mary Caldwell pulls a folded envelope from the back pocket of her jeans and hands it to Sylvie’s father. The ghost hunter accepts it appreciatively and leads Mary Caldwell out her door to the porch, down the steps to her car, where he shuts the door for her and waits in the drive until she’s backed out onto the road and is on her way to the Hole in the Wall to meet her husband. After she’s gone, he returns to the living room and says, “Okay, Sylvie. Where can we find this baby?”

Sylvie begins walking through the house, looking around, picking up snow globes, which apparently Mary Caldwell collects. They are everywhere Sylvie looks, on shelves and tables, on the hutch in the dining room. She picks up one with the Statue of Liberty inside it and shakes the globe, stirring the snow. She wanders up the wooden steps of the farmhouse to the second floor, leaving her father in the living room below. She peeks in doorways as she passes by them, the master bedroom with the unmade bed, the guest bedroom where everything is neat and tidy, the sewing room, where everything is a bit disorderly, pieces of fabric, spools and thimbles and pincushions tossed on a worktable and in baskets littered on the floor. When Sylvie is about to leave the sewing room to check out the bathroom, she hears the first cry.

Angry but tiny, it comes from behind her. She turns around, and the cry comes again, then again. The voice does not seem to come from any one place in the room, but from the room itself, as if from every nook and cranny. “Hello?” Sylvie says. “I know you’re here. Why don’t you come out? Let me see you.”

The baby’s cries grow louder and faster, as if it’s throwing a tantrum or suffering from colic. Sylvie coos to it several times, coaxing, and finally, suddenly, it appears on the worktable next to the sewing machine. It’s so tiny! It wears a cloth diaper that’s actually pinned. Its face is red and squinched up, as if it’s in pain, and she goes to it, picks it up and says, “Hey now, hey now. No need to cry, baby.” The baby’s cries stretch out like taffy, but a silence grows between them, longer and longer, until it gives up and looks up into her eyes and quiets for good. Sylvie smiles, then realizes she’s actually holding it. “Oh my God,” she says. “You’re like him. The man in the black suit.”

The baby blinks twice, then fades away, leaving Sylvie holding nothing but empty air.

It reappears on the worktable a minute later, crying again. She goes to it, picks it up and tries to sing it a lullaby. Slowly, surely, it quiets again. “You’re playing with me,” says Sylvie, and the baby giggles and makes a handful of sounds like vowels.

“Excellent, Sylvie,” her father says behind her. She turns quickly, still holding the baby in her arms. “You weren’t lying. I can’t believe it. You can touch it.”

“I told you,” says Sylvie. “I told you what the man said. You’ve got to stop, Dad. I have to stop.”

Her father lifts the Polaroid to his eye and Sylvie spins around as it flashes behind her.

“Sylvie!” her father says. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You can’t, Dad. It’s just a baby. And they’re not gone. You know that.”

“This is nonsense, Sylvie,” her father says, his camera arm going limp beside him in exasperation. But Sylvie won’t turn around. She curls herself over the baby as if any bit of it is exposed, the Polaroid might snatch it from her. “Sylvie, show me that baby,” her father demands.

“Hide,” she whispers to the baby. “And don’t come back. You’ve got to hide, okay?”

The baby begins to disappear just as Sylvie’s father places a hand on her shoulder and spins her around. “Stop this,” he says, and then, when he sees Sylvie isn’t holding anything at all, says, “What did you do, Sylvie? Why are you being so stubborn?”

Just then the baby begins crying again. Sylvie looks over her shoulder at the worktable. There it is, plopped down next to the sewing machine. Her father lifts the camera and snaps the baby while its mouth is wide open, screaming. The scream is cut short, replaced by a hissing sound, air leaking out of a balloon. The ghost hunter retrieves the picture, waves it in the air, and with each flick of his wrist the baby wavers, fading on the worktable, until it disappears. When her father hands the photo to her after it’s developed, the baby’s in the picture. Still screaming. “Dad,” she says. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Sylvie, it’s not a question of want. It’s a question of need. You need to do this. I need you to do this. Just settle down and let’s talk about it.”

But even though he’s saying let’s talk about it, Sylvie can see that her father the ghost hunter really means, let’s get over it, let’s you listen to what I have to say and do as you’re told, let’s just follow my lead, okay? Sylvie wonders if this is how Anna’s father the art historian made her feel about the choices she made. She shakes her head and steps past him, leaving the sewing room and him behind saying, “Sylvie? Hey. Where are you going?”

She trots down the steps and picks the photo album up from the coffee table in the living room on her way out the front door. Her father appears on the landing of the second floor. “Honey?” he says. “Sylvie, stop. Where are you going? What are you doing?”

Sylvie doesn’t look up at him, doesn’t say anything. She runs down the porch steps into the side yard to the burn barrel. The fire is lower now but still going, the smoke not as thick but still smoking. She opens the album and places the baby’s photo beside her mother’s. Her mother says, “Sylvie, what’s going on? What’s happening?”

“I’m going to help you, Mom,” says Sylvie. “I love you.”

She closes the book before her mother can get another word in and holds it to her chest, closes her arms around it, hugging it as tight as she can. The ghost hunter appears on the steps of the farmhouse. “Sylvie!” he shouts. “What are you doing?”

She holds the book out, dangling it over the fire, as if it’s suddenly too hot, too dangerous. Smoke poofs up in a cloud from the burn barrel, and Sylvie imagines the album landing in the flames, catching a moment later, the plastic sizzling on the pages, the cover slowly browning, crisping to a dark charcoal. She imagines a hissing sound escaping from the fire, slowly, slowly like it does when her father’s camera captures a soul and out comes the picture, developing in mere minutes. She imagines the smoke pouring forth in dark tendrils, streaking the air above. A popping, then snapping, as the fire grows. Then from the flames they will come, riding the smoke up and into the pale October sky like kites that have been let go. The dog barking, the baby crying, the little girl skipping her rope up and up and up, the mumbler mumbling, the rich old woman and Mr. Marlowe and Mrs. Boardman all quite startled, the cop wagging his finger at her as he floats up behind them. Her mother, too, looking down at her, smiling. “I love you, Sylvie,” she’ll say, blowing a kiss with one hand as she holds out the other as if she’s trying to reach her, to touch her one last time, and is gone the next instant. All of them. Gone, gone, gone.

“Stop!” The ghost hunter shouts as he runs down the porch steps, coming toward Sylvie where she’s holding the photo album over the flames in the barrel. “You don’t know what will happen if you burn those!”

Is he right? Will what she hopes for not be the thing that happens? Will she have done the stupidest thing in the world if she drops the photos in the flames? The pictures burn, the end, finished. No smoky ghosts riding the wind to heaven. She’ll never see her mother again. And for what?

Sylvie’s crying. She realizes this only after her father puts his hand on her shoulder when he reaches her, his face turned up to the sky where a moment ago Sylvie had been looking, imagining them soaring off and away into nothing. “Sylvie,” he says, his voice low and serious.

She shakes her head, though. “I won’t help anymore,” she tells him. “I don’t want to be a ghost hunter’s daughter.”

“Don’t be like that, Sylvie,” he tells her. “Remember your mother—”

“This isn’t about Mom,” says Sylvie. “Or at least it’s not just about her.” Sylvie puts her hand out and takes hold of his, squeezing tightly. They’re warm to the touch, both of them. She thinks she can feel his pulse beating just there, where her thumb presses against his wrist. The baby’s cries still ring in her ears. Somewhere Mary Caldwell is sitting on a bar stool, crying into a beer she’s ordered before the bar even opens, even though she usually doesn’t drink, while her husband watches a football game on the TV in the corner over the cash register. Somewhere someone is reading a magazine article about her father, about her father’s ability to rid people and places of ghosts. Somewhere a pointy-bearded man wearing a black suit is stalking the leaf-strewn sidewalks of Warren, Ohio. Sylvie hopes he won’t hurt her father, now that she’s made a decision for both of them. If she stops finding ghosts, he won’t be able to capture them. She laughs and cries, happy and mad all at once. She’s not sure which to feel, or if it’s all right to feel both. But she takes the album away from the fire and holds it to her chest. “This is about us,” she says, before squeezing her father’s hand so tight no wind could ever take him from her.

Table of Contents

Start