A Tale of the Other Side
by Walter Agnew Moore II
16 February 2002, Amiens, France

There is a corner of this bar I have never sat in before, even though I come here far too often. We are at a table in a little nook near the door, me, (Hasdrubal), and (HorseGirl). It was the only table open. The bar is packed, but this little corner is a world of its own.

(Hasdrubal) says "There could be ghosts here."

I nod. "Ghosts are everywhere. Back at our house in Alabama, people have seen at least two ghosts, and I have seen... things... in the woods nearby."

(HorseGirl): "Ghosts? Like, spirits?"

"Yes. My old girlfriend said she was sensitive to things like that. She stayed in the guest-room once and saw an old woman there, in there with her one night. She told me about it the next day, and later, I described the woman to my mother. My mother said: that sounds like Mama B."

(Hasdrubal): "Mama what?"

"Mama B., as in Bradford. My mother's mother's mother. So I said to my mother, did Mama B. ever live in that room? 'No.' Where did the furniture all come from? 'Mostly pretty recent, after the war, except for the bed.' The bed? I asked her...'Yes, that was the bed Mama B. died in.'"

(Hasdrubal) jerks back from the table: "Ah ah aha AHH! The bed she DIED in!"

I smile. (HorseGirl) is just sitting there with smoke coming off her cigarette.

I continue: "Then of course, my grandfather came back one night right after he died, sat on the bed next to my grandmother. She saw the mattress depress, felt him leaning on her hip. She just snapped at him, 'What do you WANT?', and he eased back up and left. But that is how she is."

They shake their heads. (Hasdrubal) asks, "What did you say you saw in the woods?"

"It's not really what I saw—ah, it's a long story, you really want to hear it?"

(yeah yeah, tell us, yeah)

"OK, you have to understand our house— it's not tall, but it stretches out long. My room was far away from everybody else's, on the corner of an enclosed porch— it had once been open, but they walled it up. Still, it was all windows.

"I used to stay up all night and read in my bed. In springtime, I'd leave the windows open to let the breeze in.

"So I'm up one night, maybe 2 am, I think in May from the way it feels, fresh air, you can smell honey-suckle and other green things. Completely quiet out on the road, no cars.

"Suddenly, in the distance, I hear this noise, very strange. Halfway like an animal croaking, but almost like metal dragging, scraping. But it wasn't like that either."

(Hasdrubal) says, "What do you mean, it wasn't like metal or an animal?"

"I can't explain. But something about it made me stop everything and listen. I had—(I can't think of the word in French for goosebumps, I point to my forearm while twitching my fingers like a spider)..."

(HorseGirl): "Chair de poule"

Chicken skin. Exactly. Crawling skin.

"So I'm sitting there in bed, motionless, 'chicken-skinned', hearing this sound, and watching the road to see what comes around the bend. I quickly turn out the light, so I can see it before it sees me. The noise sounds like it's out by the road and getting closer. But I see nothing. Then the sound seems to be farther away."

"The yard is empty. I sit there, in the dark, air barely moving through the windows, listening.

"A minute later I hear it again. It is right underneath the windows across the room from me, and slowly moving around to the left, to the corner where my bed is.

"Now, next to my bed was this box of stuff, junk from when I was a kid, broken boomerangs, funny-looking rocks, that sort of thing. And also in that box was an old machete that I used to take with me on hikes in the woods to chop vines away from the path or whatever.

"The sound is moving around the house. It is almost to the corner. It is about two long steps from the window by my head. So slowly, I reach toward the handle of the machete. I get my hand on its grip that I had reinforced with copper wire. I carefully start to pull the steel blade out from the box as I watch the empty window by my head.

"The blade clinks on some other piece of metal in the box. The sound stops, just like that."

They look at me. "And what happened then?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. I never heard anything leave, but I knew it wasn't there anymore."

I take a sip of my beer. "But that is just part of the story. The rest happens a few months, actually maybe a year later."

They both stare at me, in our dark little corner of the bar.

"I guess I'm 18 or 19. I've been off at the University, and I have come home for vacation. I brought back boxes of my stuff, but I got home late. I just parked my car out under the roof of the garage, put some of the boxes in the house, but I left several others just sitting on the car.

"I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel wind through the windows, and I hear the rattle of the first few drops of a storm coming in.

"You have to understand that the building out back, the garage, it was open on the sides where my car was. Rain could blow inside and soak the boxes sitting on my car. I pull on some pants, and trot out the back door to see about moving the boxes to an unexposed place.

"I step outside, and there is not a drop of rain. The moon is full and bright, making the sky more blue than black, and casting sharp shadows everywhere. What I heard as raindrops are the leaves of the giant oak above me, rattling in the wind.

"Well, I'm out here anyway, so I may as well move the boxes. I go over to the car and start putting them behind a wall farther inside the garage.

"We had lots of cats. The oldest one, Miss Priss, she comes up. A faded little calico. She loves me, whenever I am home she comes to my window to visit me. She jumps up on the car next to me and purrs, I pet her.

"I see a little harmonica in one of the boxes, I get it out, blow a few notes. The wind kicks up.

"It is strange the way it goes next. Like a dream. Miss Priss jumps down and starts dodging around, chasing leaves in the wind. I go after her, blowing on the harmonica. We are dancing together, the little cat and I. We end up in the back yard, surrounded by big black trees, wind roaring, I am hopping from one bare-foot to another, playing on the harmonica, and she is running in circles around and around me.

"I squat down on my heels, and then I see my shadow in the moonlight.

"My legs, the way I am squatting, look like goat legs. The wind is blowing my hair up, up on each side"—I gesture—

(HorseGirl): "Like horns."

"Yes. And I think to myself, 'Lucky I don't have Pan Pipes, or I'd lose it.' And then I stare down at the harmonica in my hands.

"I stand up slowly, breathing deep. And that, that is when I hear it.

"From the black shadows over to the right, where you can see the pond in the day-time, I hear that noise, that same scraping machine-animal sound that I heard months before outside my window.

"I start to walk towards it. Even as I get closer to the shadows, it doesn't get easier to see. I am almost at the first low branches of the trees when I realize somebody could be inches away in the shadows and I couldn't see them.

"I stop. Quite clearly I say: 'I am going inside now, and you are staying out here.' I back up a little, then I walk across the clover to the back door, and go in.

"I check to make sure the machete is still there before I go to sleep."

(Hasdrubal) says, "Did you ever find out what it was?"

"I have no idea. The closest thing I ever heard to the sound was a deer snort, but it wasn't the same. And besides... Anyway, I started having these strange dreams sometimes, always involving that particular corner of the back yard. Especially that first tree that I almost walked under. I have never liked it. In the dream, there is an old woman buried under it. She is not hostile, but she wants to show me something. Something to do with that part of the yard.

"Before my grandfather bought the land and built the house, it was old cotton fields. A family of black share-croppers still lived next door in an old cabin when they first started turning the area into a post-war suburb that ended up all built-up and forested today.

"That family had to have been the last of many. And where did they bury poor share-croppers in the old days? What records did they keep? An old woman could be under that tree. Graves could be under our house."

(Hasdrubal) shakes his head. "I don't know, Walter, that would freak me out..."

"Oh, that seemed like a big deal at the time, but I have felt stranger things since. The woods in Alabama, they are full of things. The land used to be covered with little farms and tiny towns, but so much of it has been put into timber production, or just deserted. Little farms disappear and all you will find is a chimney back in some trees. Little towns are empty. Everybody lives in the big towns, and the woods are deserted.

"Wild animals are spreading out again. Bears. Mountain lions that scream like women. You can see their eyes sometimes at night, way off reflected in your head-lights. Then they are gone.

"I have hiked through the woods alone. Sometimes, you get to a place that feels evil, your neck crawls. You go a quarter-mile, and the bad feeling, it suddenly stops. Then right around the trail you come out on a road and see a little white-washed church.

"Once, in a place I will never camp in again, halfway between Selma and Tuscaloosa on an old backroad from the wagon-days, something started pulling my blanket off of me in the night. I leapt up yelling, and all that was there was echoes, and something vanishing like a puff of smoke.

(Hasdrubal) keeps shaking his head. He says, "My friend, a very cartesian guy, very logical, he was driving on a road in Morocco one night. He saw this woman, an old woman by the road. You don't stop down there at night. It was in the desert.

"Then, 20 kilometers on, he sees her again. He keeps driving.

"Then the THIRD time he sees her, the same woman, he is about to lose it. He whips the car around, and she is gone.

"He keeps going, watching the road for her. Then he sees her. In the rear-view mirror. In the back of his car. He slams on the brakes, and she gets out, and says: 'Thank you for taking me with you my son.'

(Hasdrubal) is shuddering. (HorseGirl) says, "It is like the White Lady."

"The White Lady?"

"Yes. You meet her on the side of the road here in France. She is not bad, but she is there to tell you things, to warn you of something that may happen."

(HorseGirl) wanders away. (Hasdrubal) says, "Well, Walter, one thing you must like about leaving Alabama is getting away from all those ghosts and places and things."

"Oh no. I didn't get away from them."

"OK Walter, you are scaring me now..."

"No reason to be scared. I am just never alone. I always have someone around me. Family types, mostly. A couple of them I know. Some I don't. Maybe they are older."

Yeah. Like the one who yelled at me to suck it up and not pass out once when I really banged my head and was going to fall and get hurt worse. He yelled at me in an archaic dialect of Spanish, and I understood every word.

"Doesn't that bother you, I mean, like somebody's always watching you?"

"No. It's never like that. None of them care if I go to the bathroom or pick my nose. They are beyond it. But they are there, like back-up. I never feel alone anymore. I have allies."

"Damn, Walter..."

"And allies like that are useful in a town like this. There are other ghosts in the room I rent."

"Stop it, please, Walter..."

"About every third time I come home at night, there is somebody there. I am pretty sure it is a woman. She likes to sit in there. She kind of hides up in the bunk-bed when I come in, but I know right away she's there. I simply say: 'You need to go. This is my room now. You go now.'"

"And what happens?"

"She goes. Sometimes I have to say it twice, but she goes. Like a puff of smoke blowing away."

"God, you SAW that?"

"No, it's clear when she's gone though. I only saw one thing, and that was a different one."

"Walter, stop it, stop it now..."

"This one was a man, clear as day, I was up in the top bunk reading, and he came in, he was walking, pacing back and forth in the room. Very tall, more than 2 meters, what, seven feet tall, long scraggly brown hair and beard, red runny eyes staring in front of him, pale. Long white smock going all the way down. Couldn't see his feet, but he wasn't nearly that tall when he was alive. I surprised him when I said for him to leave, and he just walked through the wall and left. I don't think he was really attached to my room, I think he was just passing through."

"STOP IT! God, I will not be able to sleep tonight! How can you stay in this room of yours?"

"Where am I going to go? The street? They are everywhere. And I told you, I've got friends on my side."

We get up and walk around the bar. They are closing up soon, it is almost 3 am. Where did the time go. (Hasdrubal) and (HorseGirl) are having some muttered argument, but they leave together. I see friends I haven't seen for weeks as the crowd thins out, and we chat. After a while, I leave.

I walk up the Route de Rouen. We are in wedge formation, one to each side of me and one watching my back. I am the Captain tonight, and they are willing to follow me. To anyone who looks out, I would seem to be alone. I am not. I have a feeling there will be a real reception waiting for me at the room. They didn't like being talked about, the local spirits.

Too bad for them. I've got some tough ones on my side.

We enter the common hallway of the house, and it is like muscling into a packed party that has been going on for hours. I don't know these ones, and they don't care about me one way or another. Me and mine, we shoulder our way up the circular stairway. If I were them, I'd be waiting on the landing, but they are holed up in my room proper. Waiting.

I turn the key in the door. I open it, and reach into the darkness and turn on the light.

"Alright, dammit, this is getting OLD. I told you this was my room now. You need to leave. You, and you, and yes you up there in the bed. I have been polite, but you know I pay the rent here now."

It is quiet, and almost empty. Almost, but not quite.

I light some candles on my desk. As I do so, the temperature in the room quickly drops about 10 degrees.

That is curious. I go over to the radiator and turn it up a notch. I am careful not to push loose the strand of tinsel Christmas decorations that I left strung across the room. Kind of livens the place up.

I go to the sink to brush my teeth. I look in the tiny mirror that I have propped up against the wall at eye level and think, "this is too predictable, this is when the creature looms up reflected over my shoulder."

There is no face. Instead, what I see reflected in the mirror is the strand of gold tinsel. It is dancing, bobbing up and down, up and down.

Now I really do turn around very, very slowly. It is still bobbing, and not less. This isn't because I bumped it. I walk towards it, and figure it out: hot air rising off the radiator, the radiator that I turned up because it got so cold all of a sudden...

Cold.

"I said GET OUT."

What do they think, that I'm just gonna run? Not likely. We clear the last of them out, the McKenzies and Howells and whoever's on guard duty this night spread outside the room to stand watch, and I lie down in my empty bed to get a little sleep.