“My usual fee is six hundred dollars for this kind of work,” I said. He looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon when I said that, but I just stared him down.
“You should know I don’t believe any of this,” he said, like he was scoring a point. I waited for him to think of his wife and how angry she’d be if he said he’d sent me away. Thing was, though, I’d have done it for free at that moment, just to see how it should work. Still, I waited until he nodded.
“Cash,” I added. He almost sneered at me.
“Of course,” he said.
I left him alone. Time was I’d have taken pains to annoy a man like that, maybe even broken him up a little, but I was eager to get on and I could feel the Lady pressing me farther into the room.
It took about five minutes, maybe less. I’ve learned since not to do it so quickly. The Lady guided me to the right place, and I used a handsaw to cut a floorboard and a claw hammer to yank up the right part. I found a piece of bone lying in the dust there, black with soot.
“Have you ever had a fire here?” I called over my shoulder. He was looking kind of horrified at the damage I’d done, but he nodded.
“My grandfather’s time, yes,” he said. It would have been a good hit, just the sort of thing they don’t expect you to know, even though it would have been in all the local papers at the time.
“And someone died in that fire, in this room,” I said. It wasn’t even a question, and he just gaped at me as I brought the bone out into the air. It was only a piece and I couldn’t tell which part it had come from. Maybe an ankle, I don’t know. It was enough to keep the spirit in the same place, though. I could feel the temperature dropping, though there was nothing special, like frost patterns on the window. This wasn’t a powerful spirit. I’d meet those later.
I took the bone out of his house and he paid me in cash, with all his sneers and fine attitudes neatly cut out of his manner. He had a look of awe in his eyes when he went up to check the room and found it warm. I had the bone in my pocket and it felt like there was winter all round me. I saw the man flinch as he took my hand and pumped it.
“I’ll destroy it,” I promised. I did too. I wasn’t ready then to take in another boarder, and a spirit who just made you cold was no use to me.
I don’t know what he said to his wife, but that girl had connections and there are a lot of old houses in Massachusetts. I stayed there for another six months and work came flooding in. There were the usual blanks, of course, but the Lady helped me with two real ones and I was off and running. I put my rates up for the big houses and for the first time in my life, I made some real money, enough to change out the transmission on the car. I even thought of renting a house for a time, but I’m happier moving on, always have been. Of course in the past, there’s always been bad memories to run from. I passed my fiftieth birthday in a motel and I even bought myself a goddamn cake and a candle. The Lady blew it out and I drank a fifth of good whiskey.
I found Geronimo halfway through my second year. Now I know what you’re going to say and I agree with you. Why would that old Apache medicine man haunt an abandoned mansion in North Carolina? My honest guess is that whoever he really was, he just likes to call himself something different. I don’t know whether he was a New York broker who leaped out of a window, or just some cattle driver from the thirties. I do know he’s powerful, and that’s what matters. That’s what dragged me two hundred miles south when I heard about that old house, falling down with neglect and no one daring to live in it for half a century.
He has enough strength to speak to me. Maybe working with the Lady made me sensitive, I don’t know, but I can hear the old man as a whisper and understand maybe about a quarter of it. The Lady and I found his relic in the usual way, but that was all that was usual. I’d grown accustomed to thinking of spirits as weak things—a slightly chilly room isn’t The Shining, if you know what I mean. Geronimo could call up a storm, and we found his relics while there were books and dust swirling around us. I had to use an old door from the basement to cover my head while we dug out his bones. I guess he was probably murdered, as they don’t let you bury your loved ones in the garden, even in North Carolina.
I dug them all out and took them down to the furnace in the basement. It took me half a day to get it going again, with four trips to a hardware store for supplies, but you need a high temperature to reduce bone to ash. You can’t just throw gas on it and stand back. I had the last bit in my hands, a piece of broken yellow bone, when the Lady blew on my face. The house had gone very quiet since I started the burning and I could feel the tension, the way air feels before a storm.
I’d grown to trust the Lady and I put that old bone in my little box and took it away with me. Maybe she talked to him. Maybe she told him about the exciting life on the road and he went along. Hell, maybe a ghost in an abandoned house gets lonely, I don’t know. I didn’t really need him, or so I thought at the time. The Lady was my finder and I was getting a name for myself. I’d even had TV companies sniffing around me, but I don’t want my face shown around the country. There are a few people who would be very pleased to see it, and I don’t want to meet them again, not ever.
I did say there were four of us, when I started this record. The last to join my little family was about as muscular as Geronimo. He could throw things around like you wouldn’t believe. It was an old place in Georgia where I found him, overgrown with so much green crap that it looked like it was about to sink into the marshy ground. I nearly fell through the floor more than once. There was graffiti on the walls and beer cans all over the ground floor, even some marks from fires, where kids had tried to light the old place. It was too damp to burn, I think.
I’d gone looking for his relic and he’d come at me in a dust devil, blowing the filth of a century of neglect into my face. I was blind for a while, and only the Lady guiding me got me out into the sunshine. However, I’m a professional and it wasn’t so hard to buy goggles and overalls for the second trip. As it happens, I didn’t need them. I reached the old kitchen and as the wind started up, I opened my little box.
“Meet the kids,” I said. Well, that wind just died on the spot. I imagined them all sniffing each other like dogs.
“I can take you to places you’d never see otherwise,” I said aloud. That was how I added an old gold locket with a lover’s lock to my box. I never could hear him, but Geronimo told me his name was Thomas, so I always called him that.
Together, we toured the country for maybe three years. I never found another like Tom or Geronimo and if I had the slightest trouble, I’d just open the box and the air would get real heavy while they slugged it out. I don’t know exactly how they could give a ghost a beating, but those boys seemed to love it when we had the chance. I might have gone on like that forever, until the fall of ’04, when I finally met Erwin Trommler. He’s sort of the reason I started this record, so if you’ve been drifting while I gave you my valuable wisdom, it might be time to sit up and gulp the cold coffee.
I’d worked the East Coast for a few years and I’d been thinking of heading farther west, maybe to Memphis. I’d gotten the idea that someone with my talents should visit Graceland, you know? If you don’t understand right away, you never will, so don’t worry about it.
Before I went, I had a live one call me to Long Branch, New Jersey, right on the coast. Ms. Gorski, she called herself, so I knew she was going to be an ugly one. Not that I did that anymore. Taking out the ghost trash doesn’t seem to get them hanging off you the way speaking to the dead does. I worked out the distances and thought, yes, I could do that job and then swing west to reach Graceland in the fall.