The Ghost in the Casement
by Robert Runté
Marta glanced around at the mostly deserted exhibit, trying to choose something on which to comment. The chairs looked uncomfortable… spindly wooden things, with the backs patterned as a cathedral silhouette, complete with a little cross on top. Bit creepy, actually. But if she could talk about the chairs, her dad would know she’d been. No way she was going to remember anything this baby museum guide was droning on about.
“I’m not boring you, am I?” the young man asked, singling her out. His tone conveyed a mix of annoyance at her inattention and concern that he might be failing her expectations.
“Oh, it’s not you,” Marta assured him quickly. “It’s just…” she took a breath, decided to speak honestly, “… I’m not that interested in Walpole.”
He froze, arm still stretched out inviting their small group to enter the next room of the display.
“It’s a Walpole exhibit,” he said, taken aback. “Why come to a Horace Walpole exhib if you’re not interested in Horace Walpole?”
“My dad. He kind of insisted.”
“Ah.” The young man smiled a frozen little smile and turned to others in the tour. “Why don’t you go on through to the Strawberry Hill room while I have a word with the young lady?” The group of older women drifted through the archway, chatting in whispers, while the guide reached out and grabbed Marta’s arm and steered her out of hearing of the others.
Marta wrested her arm out of his grip, annoyed someone likely her own age thought he had the right to give her a “talking to,” but when he turned and faced her, his grin was conspiratorial.
“Dads,” he said. He gave her an appraising look. “Let me guess. Your dad said, ‘if you’re going to dress goth, you had better know where goth comes from.'”
Marta rolled her eyes. “This one time, I was out of laundry and put on a black dress. That hardly makes me ‘goth.’”
“They never get it,” he sympathized. “With me, it’s my grandfather. He’s on the Board, so he insisted I be a guide for the summer, even though he knew I had a lead on a gig repairing Harleys. And he made me take out my piercings, when come on, old Horace would totally have been okay with a bit of metal.”
Marta examined the guide—his nametag said “Edgar”—more closely, trying to imagine him with piercings and decided that might work. Once she got past the powder-blue guide jacket and tie, he wasn’t half-bad looking. A certain dark attractiveness—though not what one would normally think of as handsome.
He waved dismissively in the direction they’d been headed. “Let’s skip the boring stuff and go straight to the castle tower holo.”
“Castle tower holo?” Marta echoed.
“It’s better than it sounds. Come on.”
“What about the group?” Marta asked.
He grabbed her hand and pulled in the opposite direction. “They’re busy gossiping. The exhibit is just an excuse to get together. They care less about Walpole than you do.”
He led her back past the way they had come to a curtained alcove that opened on a plain grey-metal door signed, “Staff Only.” He pulled her through, and they started up the austere cement stairwell that told her they were out in the museum proper. They climbed up two flights, and then he turned away from the third-floor doorway to a sliding panel on the opposite side of the landing. He put his fingers to his lips for quiet, slid back the panel, and poked at the blackout curtain beyond until he found the opening and stuck his head through. Leaning in, his hand snaked out behind him at bum level to wave Marta forward.
Marta rolled her eyes again—he was overplaying the whole subterfuge angle—as she stepped in behind him.
Once inside with the blackout curtain pulled tightly closed behind them to cut off light from the stairwell, the holographic image steadied. The illusion of standing in the middle of a medieval castle turret was overwhelming. A “whoa” escaped her.
“I know, right?” The guy was positively beaming. “But wait, it gets better.” He went over to the turret wall, stuck his hand through the corner holographic stone.
“Control panel,” he explained.
But she wasn’t watching him. She was staring out the faux window. The illusion through the arched opening was a perfect 3D view of the forested landscape beyond. She’d swear she could even feel a slight breeze coming from outside.
“Ta da!” Edgar announced as the sun winked out, replaced by a moon almost entirely obscured by ominous clouds. The turret was suddenly dark, the breeze replaced by angry gusts, the whole scene transformed into something out of a Dracula movie.
She leaned forward through the casement to stare down at the skeletal remains of dead trees stretching out over barren lands. A dozen headstones stood atop a hillock, the dark silhouette of a broken rail fence marking the household graveyard.
She flinched slightly when he abruptly appeared behind her in the dark.
“Three… two… one,” he counted down into her ear. Lightning blinded her as thunder crashed through the turret.
Even with his warning, she was disoriented for a moment by the light and noise and found his arm encircling her shoulders. She took one step away, forcing his arm to drop.
“Convincing, isn’t it?” he asked smoothly, as if he hadn’t been rebuffed.
“Spooky,” she agreed.
“Oh, the ghost shows up later,” he said. “I have to go through the whole nonsense of the castle being haunted, the long history of “murders and unexplained deaths in this very tower,” to set the mood. By the time I’m finished with the spiel, people have half-forgotten this is a holo, and you hear them saying things like, ‘Oh, and to think all that happened right here!’ It’s hilarious.”
She smirked appreciatively at the gullibility of others but was nevertheless impressed. He was not wrong: the tower holo was all kinds of wonderful.
“The Board invested a surprising amount of time and money getting it right,” Edgar said.
“Supposed to be Walpole’s ghost or something?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. It doesn’t talk to you or anything. It’s just this blob that floats off in the distance, over the graveyard. It never comes close enough for you to get a good look at it. Why it works.”
She raised a pierced eyebrow in question: a distant blur didn’t sound very convincing.
He wrinkled his forehead as if trying to think of how to explain it. “You know how in horror movies they build up all this tension hinting about some hideous monster locked in the attic or whatever? The big reveal is always a letdown because it’s just some guy in bad makeup with a limp and you think, ‘Hell no, I could totally punch out that thing.’ So that never happens with this one. It just floats off in the distance.” He hesitated. “But….”
“But what?”
He ran his hand through his hair, down the back of his neck. “It’s just… I see it nine times a day, must be almost 300 times since I started in June. Still gives me the creeps.”
Marta felt a little thrill run up her back. If only it could actually be scary.
Edgar let out a long breath. “I think some of it is the way Mr. Warren is so obsessed.”
“Who’s that?”
“Board Chair,” Edgar explained. “Victor Warren.” He paused as if waiting to see if she recognized the name. “Super-rich dude, donates to galleries and stuff?”
She shrugged.
“Anyway, he donated the money for the tower and the ghost. Like a lot. So the museum left him to it. Ryan, the guy who worked the exhibit before me, figures Mr. Warren must be trying to develop tech he could market to other museums. Why Mr. Warren is adamant nobody else touch the equipment. The whole Walpole exhibition was delayed a month while he tinkered with the ghost, but he donated more than they could have made from admissions, and he’s Chair, so what could anybody say?”
Marta nodded absently as she stared out at the cemetery. She shivered as another blast from the AC blew across her in time with the wind bending the dead trees outside the tower. She pulled up the zipper on her leather jacket and crossed her arms against the chill.
“Another five minutes yet,” Edgar told her, seeing her shiver. “The spiel is kinda long. To build suspense, make people forget they’re in a display.”
Marta found herself focused on the stone markers in the cemetery. There was an old-fashioned stone cross, slightly taller than the curved tops of the gravestones surrounding it, each leaning at a slightly different angle, and off center again from the small stone mausoleum in the background. She admired how the scene was purposefully unbalanced to create that sense of wrongness, of an underlining evil.
“You can’t have the ghost pop up too soon,” Edgar continued, “because people half expect something like that. But if you wait long enough, they’ve settled into the scene and figure if something were going to jump out at them, it would have done so by now. Like the lightning.”
“And the young women faint into your arms, do they?”
“Hardly. And it’s mostly old ladies who come to the exhibit. Though if you’d care to try a traditional faint…”
She turned and took a step away, as if to examine the chains hanging from the tower walls.
He followed and reached past her to handle one of the iron rings affixed to the faux stone. “Dungeon paraphernalia,” he said. “I mean, I guess it fits with the whole murder and ghost theme, but it’s always struck me as a bit off. Not really Walpole.”
“Maybe he has other markets in mind besides museums,” Marta said.
“Yeah, I can definitely picture Mr. Warren with his own dungeon.”
“Creepy, is your Mr. Warren?”
Edgar bit his lip, then shook his head. “I didn’t mean to say that. It’s nothing”
Marta leaned back and tilted her head to change the angle at which she regarded Edgar. “The way you say, ‘it’s nothing,’ means it’s something.”
She watched Edgar sag. His arms crossed defensively, hugging against his stomach as his shoulders hunched in. “No. It’s stupid.”
Without thinking, she reached out and squeezed Edgar’s arm. “Tell me.”
“It’s just that he’s always up here. I used to think he was checking up on me, making sure I wasn’t screwing up too badly, you know? Like the teacher who comes and watches over your shoulder as you write the test.”
“I hate that,” Marta agreed. She squeezed his arm again encouragingly.
Edgar looked around, ensuring there was no one to overhear, bent in closer. “But then I realized that he was coming up on his own, too. Every time the ghost is scheduled, whether there’s a tour up here or not.”
“Checking up on the equipment,” she hazarded.
Edgar dropped his voice, leaned in until he was speaking directly into her ear, barely audible.
“I followed him up. He talks to it.”
“What?
“He talks to the ghost. He calls out for it to come to him, then talks to it the whole time; begs it to ‘tarry’ when it starts to fade out. It’s weird.”
“Trying out an alternate spiel for the customers,” Marta suggested.
“He wouldn’t have to keep doing it over and over. It’s always the same. He calls out to Catherine, saying how sorry he is. It’s the same every time.”
“Who’s Catherine?”
Edgar sighed. “I googled, of course. His daughter. She went missing when she was about your age. The news played it as ‘little rich girl runs away.’ But….”
He looked up over her shoulder and jerked erect, staring at the faux tapestries framing the tower window behind her as they wafted in the gusts from the AC. He stalked over to them and yanked the tapestries aside to reveal the blank wall behind. He let out a breath and sagged again, as if immensely relieved that no one had been there.
“We should go,” he muttered.
“Edgar, tell me.”
“No.” Then in a whisper, “What if he hears?”
“There’s no one here but us.” She pointed at the spiral staircase that led up the tower from below. “We’ll hear anyone coming up.”
Edgar hesitated, then went to the section of tower wall that was projected over the blackout curtain. He pushed the curtain aside far enough to reach for a mop propped against the inner wall. He rotated it in its pail so the handle balanced precariously against the sliding panel they had used to enter the tower from the museum stairs.
“We’ll hear it fall if anyone comes that way,” he said.
The castle wall wavered for a moment as he let the blackout curtain fall back in place. Marta fought the queasy sensation while the illusion steadied into stone once more.
“There were always rumors, social media speculation about Catherine’s disappearance,” Edgar said, almost too quiet to hear. “But you know how those sites are: the next story is how the Royal Family are shape-shifting alien lizards.” His shrug meant most of what was posted was nonsense. “But the more I hear him talking to the ghost, the more it creeps me out. I don’t get the sense like he’d said something that pissed her off, and she’d ran away. It’s more like…”
“Like he murdered her and buried her in the basement,” Marta finished for him.
His head bobbed a little dance, not quite a shake, but not a nod either. “I don’t know. Maybe. That doesn’t feel quite right. But whatever happened, he’s convinced she’s dead, and he feels guilty about it.”
“Because he talks to the holo like it’s Catherine,” Marta guessed.
“Because he tells the ghost he’s waiting for the right body, and then he’ll bring her back.”
“What!”
“‘I’ll find her,’ he says. Until about a week ago, when he changed to, ‘I’ve found her! Your twin! Your age, your height, your figure, your hair—Catherine, she wears your face.’
Then he cries out, ‘You shall live again!’ Like he’s sold his soul to find this perfect victim and to get power over her somehow.”
Marta realized Edgar was waiting to see if she believed in the devil and the possibilities of deals. Marta tugged on the zipper of her jacket, but it was already up all the way.
He continued more tentatively, gauging her reaction as he laid out the evidence. “The way he obsessed over setting it up. And the projector has these weirdly shaped aerials all over it. Why does a projector, even a holographic one, need aerials? It’s supposed to project images, not receive signals. What if—what if it’s not just a projector but opens a channel to the other side, somehow?”
He blew into his hands as if they were cold, or like when people blow into a paper bag to keep from fainting. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “The rubbed-out chalk marks on the floor.” He nodded to indicate the hall beyond the faux wall. “The red stains under the bucket where we came in. The dead pigeons in the dumpster.”
“Pigeons?”
“All-white pigeons. One a day, every day for the last week.”
“Doves,” she guessed. She’d read her share of occult sites. “Have you told anybody?”
“Are you crazy?” He glanced around them again. “Who would I tell? My boss? The police? That the city’s biggest philanthropist intends to kidnap some random girl so he can possess her body for the soul of his dead daughter? That’s lizard-people level. They wouldn’t just fire me; they’d send me for a psych evaluation.”
She nodded.
“I mean, it’s all just ravings, right? But then, I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, what if it’s true? At 3AM you believe stuff you know in the day can’t possibly be real. What if some girl is on her way here, and I let it happen because I dismissed it all as nonsense? What if it’s real and I don’t stop it because I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone? Too scared of Mr. Warren?”
Marta squeezed his arm tighter. “Maybe you should quit. This isn’t healthy.”
“And tell my grandfather what? That I couldn’t keep a job for two months? I can’t tell him what I told you. He’d think I was using again.”
Marta winced. She might have heard similar accusations from her dad a few times.
Edgar jerked, then patted his jacket and pulled out his phone. He swiped through to the messenger screen. “They’re asking me where I am. We’re taking too long.” He slid his finger rapidly across the screen to spell out a reply. “I’m telling them you asked to see the ghost again, so play along if anyone says anything.”
Marta nodded. Then thought to ask, “Where is the ghost?”
Edgar finished texting, glanced at the time. “Any second now.”
They turned to stare out the casement as a barely perceptible greyish smudge appeared above the graveyard. The smudge grew as if coming towards them, weaving slightly as if riding the gusts towards the tower. As it grew, Marta imagined she could discern the top of a head, shoulders, the silhouette of toes dangling down from beneath a woman’s simple white shift that flowed behind her as the ghost came towards them.
The ghost kept her head tilted down, the chin tucked tightly against her chest as the body slowly swung into a standing position in front of the casement.
“That’s wrong,” Edgar whispered. “It’s never done that before.”
“What?” In spite of herself, Marta clutched Edgar’s arm.
Footsteps were coming up the spiral stairs inside the tower.
“It doesn’t come to the window,” Edgar explained, frantic. “It just floats by in the distance. It’s a good illusion, but it’s not supposed to be good enough to get this close. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
A voice from the stairs called, “Edgar? Can you come away, please? I’ll manage things from here, thank you.”
“Mr. Warren?”
The ghost jerked its head up, its eyes boring into Marta’s.
Marta stared back into her own visage, complete with eyebrow ring. The ghost’s mouth took on a slight smirk.
“Oh my god!” Edgar whispered. “It’s your face!”
Marta screamed.
Mr. Warren climbed through the tower entrance and came at her.
Edgar whispered, “Run!”
Marta let go of Edgar and bolted for the stairs.
Mr. Warren moved as if to block her, but she shoved him hard into the tower wall and pushed past. She took the stairs two at a time, almost falling on the uneven faux stone.
She pounded through the Walpole exhibits below and out into the museum proper. A scattering of visitors turned to stare as Marta flew through the main exhibits and out the nearest emergency exit, which set off the door’s alarm. She didn’t care. She didn’t stop until she was several blocks away, the bright sunlight and the crowds of shoppers coming and going restoring her sense of normalcy.
She bent over and grabbed her knees as she regained her breath. What the fuck was that?
Marta was waiting for Edgar when his shift ended. When he spotted her, he looked relieved and ran over to her.
“What. The. Fuck?” she demanded.
He turned a little pale, no doubt recognizing how pissed she was. “Well, you were bored. So, I made things less boring.”
“You scared the shit out me!”
He gave her a tight, nervous little smile. “You’re welcome?”
Marta stood glaring at him. “It had my face,” she said at last.
“There’s a hidden camera takes photos of whoever sticks their head through the casement and leans into the scene—because they’re always the folks most into it, right? Then Mr. Warren’s setup processes the image onto the ghost.” He smiled tentatively, and added, “Even if it’s not your face, it’s someone from your party.”
Marta blinked, disbelieving. “You terrorize everyone who comes through?”
“Uh, no.” Another pause. “The regular spiel is toothless, all ‘ooh, isn’t this spooky’ nudge-nudge. It’s just filler to give the AI time to process the image. People always laugh when the ghost pops up with their face.”
Marta considered this. “Okay. But what about Mr. Warren coming in at exactly the right moment? He was reaching out to grab me, I swear.”
Edgar forced a laugh. “You watched me text him! I, uh, told him there was a girl being weird and making me do the ghost over and over and could he please come up and deal with her.”
“You texted the Chair?”
Edgar shook his head. “Victor Warren’s head of Guest Experiences. He’s just Guides and Equipment. I made all that stuff up about a rich philanthropist. I thought it made a better story.”
“And what did you tell him after I ran out screaming? How did you explain me freaking out like that?”
“I told him, ‘She must be on drugs or something.’ He apologized to me for having to put up with people like you.”
Marta closed her eyes, took a deep breath, counted to ten.
“But why call him to come up?” she demanded. “Why involve him at all?”
He ran his hand over his hair and down his neck again. “It worked, didn’t it? Added to the scare, I mean.”
Marta starred at him, trying to figure out why he was tensing up again. He should be gloating. He’d totally pranked her. So why… and then she saw it.
“That was where you screwed up, though. Your boss saw how freaked I was. Otherwise, it would have been just my word against yours.” She stepped off the curb and started crossing back towards the museum.
He grabbed her arm. “No! What are you doing?”
“I’m going to have a little chat with your boss. What did you think would happen?”
“No! You can’t go back there!” He yanked her back onto the sidewalk.
She shook off his hand. “If you touch me again, I swear I’ll push your face through the nearest wall.”
“No, wait!” He reached out both hands in appeal to her, drew them back again when she stared at them meaningfully. “You don’t understand.”
“I get it,” she said. “You might be fired. But you fucking deserve to be.”
“No! That’s not it.” He reached for her again, stopped himself, danced uncertainly in frustration. “You don’t understand.”
“What, then?”
“Mr. Warrant isn’t just my boss, he’s my… grandfather.”
She paused. Okay, telling his grandfather could be worse… like all the times when school had involved her dad.
“I’m begging you.”
He looked terrified. How bad was his grandfather? She almost relented… but then she realized he was manipulating her again. Damn it!
“You should have thought of that before.” She gathered her resolve and turned to face the Museum.
“Wait!” When she glanced back towards him, he was bent forward, his hands squeezing his head like he was about to pull out his hair in frustration. “You don’t get it!”
“Explain it to me then.” She’d never seen anyone so scared of their grandfather.
“It’s all a lie. I was lying. He made me do it.”
“Your grandfather made you prank me?”
“No! The other part, the other way around.” He looked up at her, his eyes pleading. “You have to believe me! I didn’t want to, but he made me.”
“What other part?”
“I was trying to warn you in the museum. Catherine was my cousin. Grandfather is obsessed with getting her back. He replaced Ryan with me so he could use me to trap the first girl who was a decent match for Catherine. I had to stall you until he could arrive. If I didn’t go along with it, if I hadn’t texted him, he wouldn’t have just punished me for disloyalty. He threatened to take it out on my mom! I had no choice but to play along. All I could do was try to warn you, scare you away.”
“Why all that bunk about philanthropy then?”
“I thought that way, if you told anyone, you’d have your facts wrong, right? There’s no Mr. Warren on the Board, so you’d have screwed up your story. And I could tell grandfather I was stringing you along to stall you, not to warn you.”
For a half a second the fear was back. She’d almost marched right back in there, straight into that maniac’s arms. And she saw the ghost in her mind’s eye again. Terrifying. She’d already pulled out her brow ring waiting for Edgar to get off work.
And then… she slapped her hand to her forehead. “My god, you’ve done it again.” She shook her head. “You’re amazing. No truly,” she said as he started to protest. “That was a masterful performance. Two, no three, in a row. I totally believed you for a second.”
Edgar paled. “Please, you have to—”
“Not again, boyo,” Marta said. “Fool me once. You’d say anything to keep me from going in there to complain about you. If that’s what you wanted, you should have just apologized. I would have seen the humour. It makes for a great story even. But you overplayed your hand.” She shook her head. “Bastard.” She said it with a grudging respect.
Edgar licked his lips. “Don’t go back. You can phone.”
“What?”
“If I’m lying this time, fine. Phone it in. Get me fired. You don’t need to go in person. I know it sounds crazy, and logically, it’s all merely a mean-spirited prank. But if you’re wrong, it’s your life, maybe your soul. I’m begging you. Phone it in.”
Marta reached into her hoodie for her phone.
“I’ll have to figure some other way to protect my mom.”
Marta rolled not just her eyes, but her whole head.
“You never give up, do you? Jesus!”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that out loud. I’m sorry.” He was bouncing on his heels, anxious “I gotta go. I have to get home first. Please don’t go back in there. Walk away or phone, but don’t go back.”
He turned and fled.
Marta looked at her phone. She’d ask for the manager. The receptionist would ask what the call was about. She’d say she had a complaint. The receptionist would ask for details. Marta would demand to speak to the manager—like some Karen.
Or she could ask to speak to Mr. Warren, the guy in charge of Guides and Equipment. To apologize for pushing him into the wall like that. If that was his name. God, could she believe anything she’d been told?
What if Mr. Warren called her dad to say she’d been high at the museum?
She should start with her dad, get to him first. Get him to make the complaint, even.
But confessing she’d been that gullible would be worse. She’d never hear the end of it. And Dad would probably still think she must have been high.
She should let it go.
No. No way she was letting Edgar get in her head like this.
She could write an anonymous letter. It wouldn’t have the same weight as in-person, but it would maybe alert the manager to monitor Edgar more. That Edgar abandoned the tour group to hit on a teen.
But Edgar would know he had won. That he’d spooked her so much that she couldn’t face going back herself.
She stared across the street at the museum for a long moment… made her decision.