The Ghost Orchid (9 page)

“Won’t she notice the feel of paint on my hands?”

“You can say you’ve just used some hand cream to ease your chapped skin. In fact I’ll make a show of loaning you some. At the worst, she’d be afraid of using her hands and then the séance will be ‘a blank’ and Aurora will think she’s unable to contact the children. But if she does use her hands, the evidence of her touch will be all over the room. When we turn on the lights, we’ll unmask her duplicity and Aurora will ask her to leave in the morning. What do you say, Mr. Campbell? Shall we do it for the sake of Aurora and Bosco?”

Corinth follows Aurora up the west stairs, trying to regain her equilibrium. It’s been years since she had a spell like the one she just had in the breakfast room. As a child she had them quite frequently. In fact, it was her spells that led her to her life as a medium.

The first time it happened she was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her mother and two other women from the Vly, Mary Two Tree and Wanda White Cloud, played cards and smoked their pipes, which meant it was a night her father was out, because he objected to the sight of women smoking. A dirty Indian habit, he called it. Corinth loved the smell of the women’s pipes, though, an altogether different smell from what the men smoked. The women used an herb that her mother gathered from the edges of the cranberry bogs when they traveled in the summer to visit her people at Barktown, the settlement on the Big Vly, the marshy lands west of the Sacandaga River. The smell reminded her of the way the grass smelled when the men from Barktown burnt the fields for autumn hunting, the smoke mingling with the fogs that rose over the marshes and bogs.

Her mother had been the daughter of an Iroquois chief. She left Barktown to marry the white logger named Mike Blackwell. They came to this mill town just before Corinth was born, after Mike had broken his leg on a log drive on the Sacandaga. A curse, some of the other rivermen said, for marrying an Indian. But in the stories the Barktown women told, it was the Indian women who were cursed for the lovers they chose.

Mary Two Tree told a story about the daughter of a chief who was planning to marry a white man. When the chief found out, he poled himself and his daughter out into the bogs on a spruce log raft and then, after binding himself to his daughter with leather thongs, toppled them both into the bog. People said that when you heard a loon calling across Cranberry Bog on a foggy night, it was really the voice of the drowned girl.

“At least she died with her father and so her spirit was not alone on its journey to the Sky World,” Wanda White Cloud said. “Better than the girl who lay with a French missionary. When he learned she was pregnant, he ran away. She was so ashamed she ran to Indian Point and threw herself over the cliff. My cousin, Sam Pine, said he was hunting for deer in the woods by Indian Point two winters ago when a fog suddenly arose out of the ground and out of nowhere stepped the prettiest and saddest-looking girl he’d ever seen. He called to her, but she walked away. He followed her right up to the edge of the cliff and nearly fell over. They say she prowls the woods looking for young men to lead to their deaths and that if you ever see a fog rising by the Point, you’d best head the other way.”

There seemed to be a fog in the kitchen, so heavy was the smoke from the women’s pipes. The smoke and the talk of spirits made Corinth light-headed, so that the edges of things began to blur. She watched as the blue of her mother’s gingham dress began to bleed out onto her white apron, like blueberries staining white milk, and then Corinth was suddenly rising up, looking down on her own body and the bodies of the three women sitting around the table, her spirit carried upward on a plume of the sweet smoke. The smoke from up there was like a light frost lying on top of everything—clear enough for her to see through but making everything seem separate and faraway and close all at the same time. She could see the bald spot on the top of Mary Two Tree’s scalp, where a hank of hair had gotten pulled out by a threader at the glove factory where she worked before coming to the lumber mill. She could see the cards in Wanda White Cloud’s hands—a two and a six of spades, an eight and a three of clubs, and a jack of hearts—and she watched while Wanda raised the bid and Mary folded her cards down on the table.

Just like Wanda White Cloud to bluff,
Corinth thought. Her mother always said that Wanda White Cloud would tell a lie when the truth would do.
I’ve got to tell Mama,
she thought, and the thought, as if it were a lead sinker, dragged her right back down into her bones—so fast and hard she gasped as if the wind had been knocked right out of her.

“Have you been into the molasses again, Cory, and choked yourself?” her mother asked.

She shook her head and then, climbing into the warmth of her mother’s lap because her whole body felt cold, like a coal stove that’s been left unlit all summer long, whispered into her mother’s ear, “Wanda doesn’t have any cards that match, Mama, you can beat her easy.”

She felt her mother stiffen and was afraid she’d made her angry, but when she looked up, she saw her mother studying her the way she did when she thought she was sick. She touched a hand to Corinth’s brow and Corinth leaned into it, hungry for its warmth.

“You feel cold, child. Go sit by the fire.”

And then her mother met Wanda’s bet and raised her two bits. When she put down her cards, Wanda turned around in her chair and looked at Corinth long and hard with her black eyes, and Corinth, even though she was crouched right next to the fire, felt a cold breeze blow right through her . . . as if she were still outside her body and Wanda White Cloud had sent a wind to scatter her spirit to the four corners of the earth.

Later when she was in bed her mother came into her room and, sitting on the edge of Corinth’s mattress, asked her how she’d known what Wanda’s hand was. Had she sneaked under the table and peeked? Corinth explained how she’d risen above the table with the smoke. She didn’t think her mother would believe her, but she did.

“Women of our people have been able to do this before,” she said, smoothing the woolen blankets across Corinth’s chest. “I had an aunt once who the people called Find-Anything because whenever anyone lost something, she could rise up out of her body and go find it. At first, she used her gift for important things like finding where the deer were grazing in the hunting season or where the best berries were growing in the spring, but then people would ask her to find a lost sewing needle or a child’s toy and then there were those who wanted her to spy on a straying husband or a wife when she went to the village to trade. Her spirit left its body so often that one day it couldn’t find its way back to her body. Find-Anything became Can’t-Find-Her-Way-Home. She was like an old tree that’s rotted inside—and smelled bad, too.” Her mother wrinkled her nose. Then she lowered her head so that Corinth could hear her whisper. “And that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Sometimes, when your spirit is outside of your body, another spirit may try to enter your body and steal it from you. That’s why I named you after the place on the earth where you were born. So your spirit would always know where to come back to. Still, you must use this gift for important things—not for games or tricking people.”

“But how can I stop it?” Corinth asked, terrified at the thought of ending up like Find-Anything, a piece of rotting wood or, worse, losing her body to an evil spirit.

Her mother took out a soft leather pouch stitched with blue beads in the shape of a turtle from her pocket and opened it to show Corinth the sharp-smelling herbs inside and the bone needle punched through the leather flap.

“When you start to see the edges of things blurring, prick your finger with this needle and rub some of this rosemary under your nose. It will keep your spirit tied to your body”—she tapped the beaded turtle on the pouch’s flap—“just as the mud stuck to Turtle’s back to make the land.”

The needle and the rosemary had worked—at least most of the time—until her father had found out about her “gift” and thought of ways he could make money with it.

Now, as Corinth climbs the last flight of stairs to the attic nursery, she draws from her pocket a shard of blue china from the broken teacup. The color of the china where the blue has bled into the white is the color of ghosts. At least it’s the color of that poor wisp of a thing haunting Indian Point, whom she saw later, many years after hearing Wanda White Cloud’s story. She slips the shard into her glove until its sharp point presses into the palm of her hand. The last thing she wants at the séance tonight is to encounter any real spirits.

Chapter Seven

“I can show them to you, if you want.” He pushes aside the pile of blueprints that lie between us and moves closer to me.

“Show what to me?” I ask, rising from the bed. The springs make a sound like a small animal’s cry when I get up. I rest my hand on one of the bedposts to steady myself and notice what look like claw marks in the soft birch wood.

“The tunnels. The passage goes straight down from this room into the basement and from there into the entrance to the underground tunnels.” He’s already moving toward the bookcase and feeling along the side for the hidden hinge.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not much for tunnels and mazes, and I can’t imagine they’d be very safe after all these years.”

“I’ve already been down in them,” David says, swinging the bookcase open into the dark passage, “and I can give you my word as an architect that they’re structurally sound.”

I wonder if a
landscape
architect is really qualified to make that kind of judgment. Isn’t it a bit like having a PhD in literature give you a medical checkup? I’m thinking of a polite but firm way of saying no when David Fox dangles the final enticement.

“Think of how important this could be for your book. It’s the key to the mystery of what happened that summer, I’m sure of it. And no one else knows about it—not even Beth Graham.”

The basement at Bosco, more like a cave than part of a house, is hewn out of the living rock. The walls gleam damply where David points his flashlight.

“I thought the springs were all dried up,” I say. “Are you sure these tunnels won’t flood while we’re in them?”

“Here,” David says, ignoring my question, “hold the flashlight for a minute. I think this is the entrance.”

“I thought you said you’d gone down in them already?”

“I did. It’s just that Aurora went out of her way to keep the tunnels a secret.” David is running his fingers up and down the surface of the dark, slimy rock. I can’t imagine how he can bear touching it, but then, he must be used to getting his hands dirty. His fingers pause on a ridge in the rock, dig into a shallow crevice, and a piece of the wall suddenly swings open. The flashlight reveals a narrow passage behind it.

“Okay,” David says, “this time you hold the flashlight to light the way and I’ll walk ahead—just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“The tunnels pitch forward sometimes, and if you aren’t careful, you can slip.” He turns to me and smiles, trying, no doubt, to look reassuring. The flashlight shining up onto his face creates a very different effect; he looks more like a demon about to descend into the maw of Hades. He must guess from my expression how he looks, because as I follow him into the tunnel, I hear him intoning in Italian,
“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

“Very funny,” I say, recognizing the warning on the gates of Dante’s hell: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

The tunnels aren’t so bad, though. They’re wider than I would have thought and neatly lined on both sides with slate. Copper pipes run above our heads. David tells me at several junctures what part of the fountain he thinks a specific pipe is attached to. Only when we have made half a dozen turns does it occur to me to worry about getting lost.

“It’s the same as the box-hedge maze,” he tells me. “All roads lead to Rome. As long as you keep going downhill, you’ll get out.”

“You mean there’s an exit,” I say, relieved that we won’t have to go back up through the tunnels.

“I thought you would have figured that out by now. Here—” he says, pointing up at a hole in the ceiling through which I can see a tiny chink of light, “this is the pipe we uncovered that day I met you in the garden. One of the
giochi d’acqua.
”

“So that means we’re right near—right below—the Pegasus fountain.”

“Exactly. This large pipe here must be right under its foot. It would have sent up a jet that reached twenty feet into the air.”

I look up, imagining the enormous marble statue directly above our heads, the winged horse’s heavy hoof stamping the ground, and feel suddenly dizzy. I can hear the rush of my own blood in my ears and then a voice.

“The ghostly spring still murmurs; water moves,” I hear, “with atom-knowledge old as heat and light.”

“It’s Zalman,” I whisper, feeling a little better when I identify the poet’s voice. “He must be working on a new sonnet.” David and I stand in silence listening to the poem. It feels as if we’re standing in church listening to a service.

“The ghostly spring still murmurs; water moves

with atom-knowledge old as heat and light

along the grotto’s ancient limestone grooves,

its soft caress of stone concealed from sight

but rapturous as any human love,

a soothing blood for ancient bones of Earth

that never ceases flowing. Listen, now:

a sudden bubbling whirl, as if the birth

of yet another passageway in stone,

quick-spins and spills directly overhead,

arousing dread as timbers whine and moan.

Yet somehow reassuring; time has wed

this water, rock, and dark moist soil of Earth

in silver-tumbling merge, ceaseless rebirth.”

Although the poem is lovely, the idea of an ancient spring eroding the rock above us is hardly reassuring. I shine the flashlight ahead, looking for a way out, but the beam hits a solid wall that curves into an apse. It looks exactly like the bulbous dead ends I remember from those diner place-mat mazes.

“I thought you said there was a way out down here.”

“There is—but first I want to show you something.” He climbs up on a narrow ledge that is carved into the wall and waves for me to join him. There’s a small window—way too small for us to get through—covered by a metal grate. David presses his eye to it and then moves so I can look. “It would be better if there were more light in there, but you can still make it out.”

I press my face up to the grate. At first I can’t see anything, but as my eyes adjust I can just make out a dark circular space beyond the grate illuminated by tiny spots of light. Then a breeze blows through the grotto and the lights waver and swell, sparkling on the enamel tiles that cover the walls and ceiling of the dome-shaped room. The light of a dozen candles are reflected in a pool of water.

“It’s the grotto,” David says. “Aurora had Lantini add this little window so she could see inside. Doesn’t it make you wonder what went on in there that she wanted to see so badly?”

I nod, speechless at the glowing spectacle. It’s like looking into one of those sugar Easter eggs (the kind my mother would never let me get because white sugar was “poison”). The more I stare, the brighter the scene grows, the lights dancing off the water and sending ripples onto the walls, so that the room seems to be moving, the enameled sea creatures and mermaids on the walls writhing as if alive, the whole room pulsing, keeping beat with the lapping of the water against the stone. It feels as if something is trapped inside, some creature trying to escape. I can hear it, something scraping at the stone just below the grate as if it is crawling up the wall, its fingers prying deep into the rock—

I pull away from the grate, stepping into air. David catches me before I can fall to the ground. “There’s something . . . someone in there,” I say. “I saw a hand . . .”

“Really? I don’t know how you can see anything in the dark. Let me see.”

He looks through the grate and then looks back at me. “I don’t see anything. It must have been a shadow.”

“No,” I say. “I saw it in the candlelight.”

“Candlelight?” David asks, his face blank. “What candles?” He looks through the grate and then pulls me toward it so I can look, too. I hold back, but he moves me as firmly and gently as if I were a tree he was replanting. When I look this time, all I see is a bare stone room, dim and dry and still.

“What did you see?” David asks.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “It was just a trick of the light. I thought for a moment there were candles—” And water, and enamel sea creatures, and a hand grasping the stone ledge below the grate. “Can we get out of here now?” I feel, suddenly, as though if I don’t get into the air, I might start scratching at the stone walls.

“It’s a bit of a scramble. The tunnel is partly collapsed.”

“Another tunnel? Aren’t we already in a tunnel?” I try to keep my voice from shaking, but the word
collapsed
has completely unnerved me.

“I guess you can say it’s a tunnel within a tunnel. Someone went to a lot of trouble to conceal it; I wouldn’t have found it at all if I didn’t have Lantini’s plan.” David steps off the ledge and kneels on the stone floor, shining his flashlight along the bottom edge of the wall. When he rests the flashlight on the ledge and starts pulling out bricks, I kneel beside him and help pile the bricks to one side. If necessary, I will dig my way out of here.

“Did you put all these back after you went through before?” I ask when we’ve dislodged a few dozen bricks. The bottom ones, I notice, are damp.

“Uh, I haven’t exactly been through. I wanted to recheck Lantini’s plans first, and it’s quite clear that the underground passage was intended to reach the grotto.”

“Intended? But you said before that Lantini left a lot of the garden unfinished. What if he never completed the tunnel?”

“Don’t worry; I’ll go first,” David says. “If I get through, you’ll know it’s wide enough for you. You’re awfully slim for a tall girl.”

I can feel David’s eyes traveling along the length of my body as if his gaze were a warm current. The sensation is distracting enough that I fail to object fast enough to David’s plan to stop him. He’s down on the ground, wriggling through the narrow opening below the ledge before I can point out the flaw. What if he gets trapped in the tunnel? I’ll never find my way back to the house through the winding maze to get help. I’ll be alone underground . . . alone but for whatever
thing
was trying to scratch its way out of the grotto.

I take a deep breath, willing myself to forget that image. Like the candles, it was only a mirage, I tell myself. I pick up the flashlight and aim it under the ledge just in time to see the soles of David’s feet disappear into the black hole. “David?” I call. “Are you through?” When there’s no answer, I call again, my voice echoing shrilly in the tight space, the light from the flashlight trembling along the dirt walls like a firefly trapped in a jar. And then David’s face appears at the end of the passage, graven as stone in the flashlight’s beam.

“It’s a bit of a squeeze, but I’ll help you through,” he says. “Hand me the flashlight first.”

I do what he says and then, closing my eyes, flatten myself on the ground and crawl through the tunnel, willing myself not to think about the weight of stone and dirt above my head. The ground is damp and covered with some kind of slime. With my ear practically pressed to the ground I imagine I can hear beneath me the sound of running water. The ghost of the old spring Zalman wrote about in his poem whispering with its last breath in a voice so seductive that for a moment I pause to listen. But then I feel something crawling down the back of my neck and push forward as fast as I can, not waiting for David’s hands to pull me out or pausing when something sharp digs into my thigh.

“Okay, okay, easy now,” David says, half lifting me onto the stone bench. “You’re through.”

I know he means
through the tunnel,
but for a moment I understand him to mean,
You’re finished, you’re done,
and I realize that the panic I felt in the tunnel came less from the touch of the spider than from the sudden conviction that the hand scrabbling on the stone wall and the voice speaking to me from beneath the ground belonged to someone who’d been buried alive.

“You really
are
afraid of the dark,” David says. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought you down here.”

“No,” I say, “it’s okay. I wanted to see it.” I look around the grotto. It’s not really all that dark. A wedge of light comes in from a narrow opening to the right of the bench. I can see traces of enamel on the ceiling and patches of white that might be paint or salt deposits. The basin that once held water from the fountain is covered in soft green moss. “And I’m trying to get over being afraid of the dark.”

“Did something happen?” he asks.

“It’s because of the séance,” I tell him.

“Séance?”

“You see, my mother was—still is, I guess—a medium.”

“Really? You mean, like, for a living?”

“Well, she claims not to charge for ‘spiritual services,’ but ‘contributions are always welcome’ and she lets it be understood that the spirits are always more willing in an atmosphere of open-mindedness and generosity. She also makes some money selling herbal salves and lotions and honey from the bees she keeps.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” I ask, allowing myself to look as miserable as I feel. I’ve always dreaded this moment with any new friend, but especially with men. I remember that when I told Richard Scully what my mother did, he was fascinated at first.
Good material,
he called it. But after my story won the contest and the agent asked me to write a novel about a medium, he said that I was in danger of losing control of my objectivity.
People will think you believe in all that crap.
I decided after that not to tell anyone about Mira’s “profession” or the peculiar way I grew up. Today, it seems, I’ve gone far underground to avoid admitting to this particular man why I dread the dark and yet it hasn’t been far enough. When he doesn’t answer, I take a deep breath and, staring up at the rounded dome ceiling, tell him the story.