Mrs. Edgar
a dream
S. Johnson
I was traveling somewhere on my bike but then I had to get on a bus with it to get over a bridge or for some other stupid reason. While I was on the bus a fat man stole my bike and got off the bus with it. The bus wouldn’t stop for me to get off and run after him. I ended up way downtown, by the river, in LA. There I met a woman named Lise and we became good friends and started traveling together. First we had to find someplace to stay and regroup and on the advice of a traveler’s advisory we stopped in a local museum. The museum had been bought by a caretaker who wanted someone to stay in there while it was being rehabilitated. An old lady who was the daughter of the nurse of the family who used to live in the house was taking care of it currently but she lived in the back part of the house. The owner, an old cadaverous man, introduced us to the old lady and then had her show us around. There were still some old displays gathering dust and among those materials I saw an old magazine that referred to the house as being haunted. This explained why the rent was so cheap for so much room. I confronted the old lady by saying “Tell me, is there any part of the house we should avoid?” and she admitted that yes, it was haunted, by an old maiden aunt of the family that had lived there, but the ghost kept mainly to a parlor or sitting room off of what had been the children’s room and didn’t cause any trouble if one didn’t go in there at night. Also, the old lady went on, they kept a safety net in the room right next door, which was the one everyone used anyway. So, if the ghost came out of its room, you could just catch it in the safety net and put it back. The safety net, or ghost-catcher, looked just like a small aquarium or pond net, except that it was black. Also, there were several cats that lived in the house.
Lise and I settled in and became friends with the old woman, who often spent time with us during the day. One thing I noticed though was that the ghost was much more active than the old lady had led me to believe. It started being active one time when I was sitting with the old woman in the living room talking about the history of the house and the family who lived there. We touched on the identity of the woman who had become the ghost and I started to feel nervous. I began talking about my own ancestors, my great-grandmother, when and where she lived, and that’s when the ghost came out of the room for the first time.
It came out of its room quite often, even during the day, to be with us as we sat and talked or worked in the main living area. The ghost took the form of a small cloud of steam and in fact that’s exactly what you thought it was when it hovered in its usual place, over the wall radiator in the smaller side-room. But the little steam-cloud liked to travel and would drift out of its room and go hang over people’s heads making them nervous. When that happened one of us would pick up the ghost catcher and scoop up the cloud of steam. That would neutralize the ghost for a while and we could have some peace and quiet. Later on as the ghost came out more and more often, it started to do physical things; the cloud would hang over the old lady’s head; she’d bat at it with one hand and reach for the safety net with the other, and the ghost would tickle me between the shoulder blades so that I could barely move or breath.
Since the ghost seemed to like to be active and spend time with people, it never occurred to me to ask why we needed a safety net.
Then one night I came home and the house was dark. I called out to see where Lise was – maybe in the kitchen in the back talking with the old woman over a cup of tea or glass of wine? But no one answered. I could feel something very evil lurking just off to the side somewhere. I called out again and the old lady finally came down the long passage from the kitchen at the rear of the building. She claimed she hadn’t seen Lise and didn’t know where she was. Then she remarked that the ghost seemed active and maybe we should go back to the kitchen area for the night. I had a bad feeling about it though and I wanted to find Lise before clearing out. Except I found that I could barely remember her name. I struggled and struggled to remember it so I could call out to her. Finally I remembered her name and started going through the house calling out to her. Long story short, I had to go into the haunted room and spend some time there. I took the safety net with me because the ghost was being very powerful and hostile and I was just too scared for words, an awful feeling. But I knew I had to do it because I knew I couldn’t abandon Lise. I kept calling out for Lise and eventually I got the ghost to manifest. It had taken Lise’s body and turned it into the body of its former self, an (angry) old woman named Mrs. Edgar. I was terrified and appalled but I knew this wasn’t right even though the ghost had its own reasons for doing what it did which I am sure followed some ghostly logic of their own and who was I to judge? But it still wasn’t right for the ghost to take away Lise’s body and as Lise’s friend I had to do something about it.
The problem was that I had absolutely no idea what to do. I didn’t know any spells, incantations, secret kung-fu tricks, or anything. Still I had to do something as I wasn’t going to let the ghost get away with this. So I swallowed my fear and grabbed the ghost (who was wearing Lise’s body) in a bear hug and began praying, something like this: Excuse me, God, this is Sue, as you’re probably aware I don’t contact you often, but this is something really really important, if you could restore Lise’s body to her, she was a good friend of mine and I’m asking on her behalf, please please save her, make the ghost give her back . I went on in that vein, reassuring God that it was completely up to him and I was just asking, then started listing all the wonderful things about Lise I could think of, how important she had been to me, what a good friend, the laughs we had together, the good times. As I stood there with my arms wrapped around the ghost to stop it from getting away the body slowly started to decay and dissolve. I shut my eyes, held on and kept praying and thinking about Lise. At one point I opened my eyes and saw that I was clutching a featureless lump of flesh. I quickly closed my eyes again. By now I was praying so hard I was in some kind of spiritual hyper-drive and the words flew by so fast their meaning blurred and only their intention was left. I knew I had to keep holding on until Lise was back, and that if she didn’t come back I could never let go. Because if I let go from holding onto that hideous lump of featureless flesh I would go permanently insane and have to live in an attic in a gothic novel.
I prayed so hard I fell asleep and when I woke up again I opened my eyes without looking first. Luckily, the body that was slumped in my arms was that of Lise. She woke up too.
The old lady came out from the kitchen and waved her arms and clucked her tongue and made us cups of tea and generally acted as if something remarkable had happened that needed smoothing over as quickly as possible. I was glad to have Lise back but now that I had met the ghost I knew her a little better, too. Mrs. Edgar was an opinionated, cantankerous old woman who was also smart, independent-minded and, in her own selfish way, kind. She didn’t like being a ghost because you couldn’t get much done that way, and she wanted to write and be a famous author. In fact she had made all this happen so that I would write about it and become famous and go on TV and be talked about. In fact if I walked over to the bookshelf I could see all the books she and I were going to write. They were paperbacks with smooth glossy fresh gleaming colorful covers, all of them adventure and crime and action stories full of plausible details and important names. In fact she had already written these books, otherwise I couldn’t be looking at them. Because I had only her eyes to look through . . .
The old lady shook my shoulder and I awoke. I had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room. How I had gotten there was a mystery to me, as last I remembered I was talking with Lise and the old woman in the kitchen. They told me that I had just got up and left and they had assumed I was going to the bathroom or to get a sweater. I told them what I had found out about Mrs. Edgar, that she had wanted to be a writer. Lise remarked that that must be why Mrs. Edgar had gone for her first, because she had been an English Major in college. I had to admit I have always admired books with shiny covers, which must have drawn Mrs. Edgar to me when her attempt on Lise had failed. The old lady remarked that in all the years she had been looking after the house no one had found out so much about the ghost but, based on what she knew about the family who used to live there, none of it surprised her.
We sat talking further about Mrs. Edgar and Mrs. Edgar slowly became a part of the family. We discovered that her spirit resided in a cloudy mirror in the room she haunted, and that was part of the problem. She was bored. No one ever came into the dark little room (because it was haunted, but you couldn’t tell HER that) so that the only social life she had was when she could slip out and scare people elsewhere. Since the only thing she could seem to do was scare people she accepted scaring people as her raison d’etre. It was either scare people or have no social life at all, and if she didn’t have a social life she’d might as well be dead. Over the years she came to think of herself as something evil and terrifying, at least when she was around other people. Left to her own devices, she brooded about writing.
To make matters worse, the room her mirror stood in hadn’t been much changed since the days she was alive, and its décor held few happy memories for her. Standing between her room and the children’s, it had been served partly as her parlour, partly as a storage room for childish things and mostly as an annex to the nursery. She had not been the type of person who enjoyed the company of children and the children in question had not been the type of people who enjoyed the company of anyone who was not bent on serving, pleasing or amusing them. Between the children’s nurse, an unlettered woman from the village, and Mrs. Edgar there was no common ground; they refrained from bothering one another. (This habit must have held over into ghostly life, since the ghost refrained from ever bothering the old woman caretaker, who in her turn hardly troubled about the ghost.)
So there was Mrs. Edgar, stuck in a mirror looking out over a room full of junk from a previous lifetime, most of it not even her own junk (that had been disposed of directly she died), indeed the most carefully labeled, preserved and prominently placed junk being those foul toys the children had so often annoyed her with when she was alive. “If I had know that being a ghost was this boring. . .” Mrs. Edgar would think to herself. “Distasteful, yes. I would expect, even demand, that. But truly I had been hoping for just a bit of a change in pace . . .”
So the first job was to get the mirror out of that room. We removed it from its frame, polished it up, and stood it in the main part of the house. This gave Mrs. Edgar a great deal more to look at when she was inactive and allowed her to often slip out for visits. A couple of times we even took the mirror on outings with us so that Mrs. Edgar could see more of the world. However, Mrs. Edgar wasn’t so much interested in the world as in us, and she preferred to spend her time in the bosom of her new family. In fact she got to be a kind of pain in the ass. Things around the house had to be just the way she liked them or she’d cause a fuss. Once I stacked some clean dishes too precariously for her taste. Well, even I knew that I had done the job carelessly, but Mrs. Edgar wasn’t going to let me get away with it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something on the floor a few feet away from me which upon closer, but not too close since the object had simply appeared and that fact dissuaded me from approaching it, examination proved to be a white glassine bowl full of half-kneaded bread dough.
Of course there is nothing inherently threatening about a bowl full of half-kneaded bread dough, but believe me when one suddenly appears on a hitherto empty floor it gives one pause. Not only because it wasn’t, but because it shouldn’t be there. Mrs. Edgar knew that as well as I did, perhaps even better since she had more experience as a ghost. Just to make things clear, though – or perhaps being especially irritated? – she added in a ghostly voice “Stack those dishes properly!” Suffice it to say that I became vigorously motivated to re-stack the dishes in a more careful fashion. When again I glanced at the floor, the dough bowl had vanished. Across the room, the rocker that stood between the hot water heater and the old stove no one used any more except the cats gave a contented rock.
Mrs. Edgar got after the others, as well. The old lady, who hitherto hadn’t paid much attention to the ghost, went through all of the old books in the place, dusting them off, repairing tattered covers, and arranging them decoratively on bookshelves in every room. The result was very attractive; one didn’t need Mrs. Edgar to see that it was an improvement over the way things had been. Mrs. Edgar became like any member of the family, occasionally benign, occasionally annoying, often simply convivial. The only thing that really set her apart, besides not having a body and living in a mirror, was the way she could make fear grip one’s heart by causing unexpected manifestations. To some extent we all had to become accustomed to things appearing where they shouldn’t. The bowl of bread dough was a warning, but other times Mrs. Edgar helped out, for example, by setting the silverware ready for dinner on the table. At least, none of the three of us living ones could recall having done it, so we assumed it was Mrs. Edgar.
Then she started inviting other ghosts over. Apparently she wanted to show off her new family. At any rate, one time she brought her parents to visit. They were a quiet, old, vaporous couple who hung politely against a wall as Mrs. Edgar showed us off. She also got to know some of the local spirits, and even invited a couple of them to move in with us. They wanted something done in the physical realm and Mrs. Edgar had apparently offered them our services and hinted that they could apply pressure more directly if they took up residence. These spirits were much rawer than Mrs. Edgar herself and, in fact, terrified all of us so badly that finally we gave them a couple of empty rooms on the top floor and asked Mrs. Edgar to serve as an intermediary. This worked well for a while; our guests enjoyed terrified the bejesus out of their empty rooms and generally got used to living in a house (apparently it takes them awhile to acclimate to interacting with the human world). Mrs. Edgar divided her time between them and us, occasionally manifesting in some way as we all sat talking in the kitchen to let us know how the guests were doing. They wanted us to do something for them, but they hadn’t been able to formulate their requests yet. Mrs. Edgar was trying to help them translate into humanese, but it was slow going, she reported. After a few weeks of this the spirits apparently got tired of frightening their four walls and, noting Mrs. Edgar’s disappearances from their company, asked her where she was spending her time. For her part, Mrs. Edgar suggested to us that spending more time around humans might help the spirits adjust even more. This is how it came about that the spirits moved into the kitchen where the rest of us already spent much of our time.
The spirits apparently thought that hanging out with people in the kitchen was great fun, but they still didn’t know how to behave properly around people and kept terrifying the socks off of us. They also picked fights with the cats, or at least the cats thought so. The whole state of affairs was a mess; the spirits just would not leave, but they couldn’t behave; we didn’t want to drive them out, as we were happy to have them as guests so long as they behaved (ghosts don’t take up much space, after all) and they were companions for Mrs. Edgar, a ghost who appreciated an active social life. Besides there were these tasks the spirits wanted us to perform, which we were quite happy to do for them, once they were able to express what it was. So far they had gotten as far as telling us they wanted us to rebury their bones, but as Mrs. Edgar explained that’s a stock ghost phrase for wanting to get something done on the physical plane. The spirits themselves were trying to remember what exactly their bones were and where they needed them reburied. Details were slowly emerging, Mrs. Edgar reassured us. The only problem from our point of view was that the way details emerged was usually with a horrendous groaning, rattling of unseen chains and appearance of messy stains on the walls or tablecloth. Finally we marked off two areas in the spacious kitchen, one for each spirit, which they could have to themselves and save the rest of us the trouble of having to clean up after them. The spirits were making some progress; one had identified its totem and was now trying to figure out what it was that it wanted us to do with the totem, and the second was working through some issues in what appeared to be fingerpaints on a large sheet of butcher’s paper we had hung on the wall for it.
Then Mrs. Edgar left. It happened so quickly that I can only imagine that it was nothing she had been planning. I mentioned that there were cats in the house; there always had been and always would be, by the looks of things. A couple cats lived inside with us, while others kept to themselves and lived on the grounds. Every so often new cats would appear; some would stay while others would move on. On this one particular day a very young cat, almost a kitten, jumped up onto the windowsill from outside. Another of our cats was curled up on the sill. He looked up, annoyed, but he didn’t bother moving. The young cat looked directly at me and flicked its tail three times. The other cat looked at him, gave a grudging, surprised mewl of recognition, and shifted to make room for the new one. Did I know this cat? I had never seen it before. Yet . . . the cat looked at me archly, verily as if it had swallowed a canary. It flicked its tail again. “O my god . . .” I gasped. “It’s . . . Mrs. Edgar!” Mrs. Edgar bounded back out of the window and into the life of a cat.
Meanwhile, the spirits in the kitchen have developed an interest in decoupage.