Out of the Mist (11 page)

Perhaps the
dangers—real and imagined—were just too much for anyone to
endure.

Clyde had to accept
reality; he couldn't keep the hotel running any longer. The
century-old wooden edifice’s time had expired.

A tingling sensation
coursed through him. He looked up to the rolling clouds, certain
one stopped to hover over him. Campbell MacDonald, his grandfather,
surely peered down on him. The old man, despite being deceased for
several decades, wouldn't be happy with the course the hotel had
taken. Clyde had spent happy summers with his grandparents at the
hotel, never noticing anything out of the ordinary while he stayed
there.

Clyde’s parents, not
wanting to live in the boonies nor run a hotel, hired managers
while they remained in Halifax. Upon his graduation from
university, Clyde’s father convinced him to take over the hotel.
Clyde didn’t want to live at the hotel, so he continued his
parents’ practice of hiring managers to run the place. Every few
weeks he travelled from Halifax to Cape Chignecto to ensure the
hotel ran properly and kept in frequent contact by telephone, but
his efforts were in vain. The business was losing money, and he
couldn’t afford to keep subsidizing it.

He had to close the
hotel. For good. It was time.

An unknown force
propelled him to take the key for room 428 and head up the stairs.
He opened the door, immediately seeing the framed painting of the
horse. He hadn't taken much notice of it previously, but that day
it sneered at him. The mouth came alive, its lips peeled away to
reveal blood-red gums and huge, yellowed teeth. Clyde had to rub
his eyes several times to rid himself of the image that flared
before him. Since when had it hung in the bedroom? It had been
displayed in the lobby when his grandfather was alive. When he
looked again, the picture was back to normal.

Then, Clyde watched
in horror as one by one empty drawers ejected from the dresser and
toppled to the floor. The bed rose, hoisted evenly by the four
bedposts. The flowered comforter drifted up and off the bed. The
pillows floated alongside the comforter before flying across the
room toward him.

Although the sun
streamed through the balcony door, the room darkened. Shadows
seeped from under the floorboards, from inside the closet, from
behind the mirror. A sudden flash of light highlighted dark shadows
rising to the ceiling. Once there, the shapes morphed into a white
cloud. A foggy substance hovered for a few seconds before
disappearing, as if the apparition had fragmented into the air and
its particles absorbed into nothingness. Clyde shivered and held
his breath.

A breeze swirled
around him, and he recoiled at the malodorous odour—warm and
sickly-sweet, foul like rotten horse breath—before the speed of the
air intensified and spun him around. He opened his mouth to scream
and then just as quickly closed it. The wind became stronger, and
he was afraid to breathe, scared he might inhale too much too fast.
He let himself go limp, allowed his body to ascend to the ceiling
in the hope the episode would soon be over.

He heard the silence
before realizing he’d been released from what possessed him. Oddly
exhilarated, he felt he had slept for two solid days. In the far
distance a man and a woman screamed. A gunshot followed. The last
sound he heard was a horse’s neigh. He had never liked animals, had
never been around them much. Why was that the last sound he
heard?

Today

Frank gazes at
several patches of crumbling concrete—all that remains of Ocean’s
End Hotel. The hotel had been in the MacDonald family from its
construction in 1869 until the 1950s. At one time, he thought, it
must have been a bustling, thriving establishment. After its
collapse and demolition, the province of Nova Scotia turned the
land into a provincial park.

Although the hotel
was abandoned when Frank first saw it as a child, he remembers the
building standing like an unconquerable fortress. Although
uncertain why, the building scared him. Frank thinks back to his
teenage years and the papers he and his father found when they were
walking on the fourth floor. Frank tripped over a protruding
floorboard. When his father bent down to help him up, his father
mumbled several incoherent words before he yanked out the rotten
board. The older man pulled out a batch of weathered papers,
glanced at them, and then stuck them under his arm. When Frank
inquired as to the discovery, his father clammed up saying they
were some old bills.

Because of his
father’s changed and secretive attitude, Frank knew otherwise. When
his parents left for the store, Frank withdrew the papers from the
desk where he had seen his father stash them. Frank’s first thought
was that they were pages from a diary, obviously important ones
since they’d been stored there for a reason. But why? And who had
put them there?

Frank scanned the
papers, not understanding much of what was written, not at the
time, but years later when he overheard his father and grandfather
rehashing the goings on in the hotel, the words held more meaning.
That was when he figured Alice, the wife of Freeman MacDonald, had
written them, since they appeared to be written by a woman pining
for someone other than her husband. Over the years, he had heard of
Alice and how the family in later generations blamed every
catastrophe befalling Ocean’s End Hotel on her.

The several pages
from Alice’s diary, the edges of the paper lightly charred, were
stuffed between other sheets, written by another individual, more
or less updating happenings later—how Alice had disappeared leaving
her diary behind in the lit fireplace. Whoever wrote the other
pages had entered the room, found the dying fire and, puzzled as to
why and who had started a fire on a hot summer’s day, discovered
the slightly charred book.

Alice’s words spoke
of her untold grief after her stepson, Mason, with whom she had
carried on an inappropriate relationship, had died. Later, she
became more unhinged when Duncan, her biological son from a
previous marriage, had been killed. Sightings of a
woman—Alice—lingering about the hotel were rampant in future
years.

Frank heard other
explanations of ghostly tales. One was that Reginald, hoping he
could change the past, continually returned to room 428 to re-enact
the night he had discovered his unfaithful wife. Unable to bring
her back, he caused mayhem in the room. Another stated the spectral
bodies occasionally found in bed with guests were the ghosts of
Duncan and Elizabeth. Yet another snippet offered the opinion that
because Alice’s and Mason’s souls could not rest, they continually
searched for a bed where they could sleep peacefully. They always
ended up in room 428 because Alice wanted to be close to where
Duncan died.

None of the yellowed
papers dealt with Clyde’s generation. Clyde, the great-grandfather
Frank never met, vanished just before he was to close the hotel for
good in 1950. The mystery of Clyde’s disappearance had never been
solved.

“
Who knows for
certain what the truth is. If there is any truth at all.” Frank
sighs for all that has been lost—the hotel, his ancestors, but
mainly the truth.

He stares into the
distance. The well-known Bay of Fundy fog will soon settle and
camouflage everything in sight. Mist has already dampened Frank’s
face. He rolls his tongue across his salted lips. Several seagulls
flap over the vast ocean, their squawking the only sound marring
the calm of the wilderness. The birds’ black markings blend in with
the darkening sky. Perhaps a storm is brewing.

Frank shrugs and
heads back to his car. He stops at the sound of a harsh wail,
reminding him of a horse’s whinny. But where would a horse be in
that wilderness? Did he imagine the sound of a horse, since he just
rehashed past events? The noise brings back remembrances of a
picture of a horse from his childhood. He doesn’t remember seeing
it in the hotel when he last traipsed the building when he was a
teenager, not that he was actively searching for it. The painting
was the ugliest picture of a horse he’d ever seen. And who would
ever paint a portrait of a horse?

He looks back. More
inquisitive gulls appear from nowhere. Their grace in flight
captivates him as their large wings whip through the air. While
Frank watches, the descending fog shrouds the cliff’s edge. Is that
a puff of smoke circling above the edge of the cliff? A small
animal scurries and disappears into the bush. The seagulls fade
into the murkiness. The haze spreads toward him like smoke from an
untamed wildfire.

~~~***~~~

The Ghosts’ Night Out,
or

Bats in the
Belfry

Maida Follini

“
The thing I hate
about being dead,” said Frank, “is not being able to speak to my
grandson.”

“
If I spoke to my
granddaughter, I’d scare her out of her wits,” William replied,
from his plot next to Frank’s in the Union Church Cemetery. William
and Frank had been neighbours in life for over 20 years, William’s
white clapboard Colonial next to Frank’s brick Federal home on Elm
Street in the little town of Sparrow Falls, Eden County, Nova
Scotia. Now they had neighbouring plots in the churchyard, although
Frank had occupied his plot several years before William moved into
his.

Frank had a yard-high
pink granite gravestone at the head of his plot, with “In Loving
Memory” over his name, “Francis Bigelow Cranston”. Below was the
name of his wife, “Amelia” with her date of birth and a blank space
left for her death date. Amelia had not yet joined him. She was in
a retirement home at the edge of town. William, on the other hand,
had a simple marble marker, provided by the government, as he was a
veteran. On it was his name, “William Barrington Scott”, his rank
in the Navy, “Seaman First Class”, birth and death dates, and place
of service, “Korea”. William’s wife, Janet, had gone to live with
their son in Florida. But she sent flowers every year for William’s
grave.

“
I wouldn’t want to
scare little Jack,” Frank went on. “I’d speak to him softly. I’d
give him advice about playing marbles, and coach him when he had a
test in school.”

“
I don’t think I’d
scare my grandson, Marty,” said William. “He’s a skeptical
teenager. If he saw me, he’d just say, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.
You’re just a hologram!’”

“
Well, he couldn’t
see you, any more than Jackie can hear me,” said Frank. “If only we
could make them hear! It’s such a hindrance not to have any power!
No substance! Just floating ectoplasm, wafting around, slipping
through doors like light through a window, and not being able to
leave our mark anywhere!”

“
We can hear each
other, but they can’t.” William spoke of the living people they
watched and visited whenever they left the retirement of their
grave plots. “And we can’t even touch them! The other night I
wanted to push my son-in-law out of the Lodge meeting where they
were all wasting time arguing about whether to paint the Lodge
building white or green!”

Frank shook his airy
head in disgust. “Why don’t they live a little, instead of
argel-bargeling? We’re just useless vapours. Floating around,
watching them make mistakes.” At his hardware store, Frank had been
used to handing out advice and fixing everyone’s
problems.

“
If only we could
find a way to influence them!” William had been the editor of the
town paper, where he had considered it his duty to write
influential editorials.

The sun had set,
darkness had fallen. William began edging his way out of his narrow
grave. “Coming?” he enquired.

“
Just as soon as I
can get around this humungous stone my lovely wife placed on top of
me,” Frank replied. “Not that I don’t appreciate it. She meant it
for the best, and I suppose it made her feel better.”

“
Oh, go on! You’d be
insulted if you had a little flat plaque on the ground that no one
could see, like old Crowley, there!” Crowley was their neighbour in
the cemetery, as unpopular in death as in life.

Frank and William
floated up from the ends of their plots, resting a minute on
Frank’s large headstone to check the weather. A calm night meant
moving deliberately and slowly where they intended to go. Rain had
a tendency to wash them to the ground, while wind—well, once Frank
had been blown in a gale nearly to the next county and it had taken
him three nights to get back.

Tonight there was
only a moderate breeze, making the tree-branches tremble and the
traffic-light in the centre of town sway on its cable. Helped by
the breeze, the two ghosts were soon in the town square, pausing on
the bell-tower of the town hall and surveying the scene. The town
of Sparrow Falls was built along a river where a disused mill
recalled a previous busy age. In the centre of town, a few stores,
the library and a few churches clustered around the Common. From
here, some business blocks spread along Main Street, and
residential streets ran off on each side. Among the houses with
green lawns and shrubbery in front, vegetable gardens and tool
sheds in back, were the former homes of Frank Cranston and William
Scott—now the homes of their grown children.

Frank swooped down to
a lighted window of his son’s house. “Working late on bills, looks
like.” Frank watched as his son suddenly threw down an envelope on
a pile of a dozen others, pushed back his chair, and groaned. The
room door opened and his wife appeared.