Little Dodd was hardly New York City, where a man could easily find companionship with a woman, even of the temporary sort. On occasion, Palmveist had—another of the reasons that had so offended his brother’s wife. A rented room was no place for a bride, let alone suitable for starting a family, but it allowed him to save his earnings. Sweden was far away and effectively lost to him. Still, he could begin anew if he, too, found a wife. He was certain that then all the ghosts of his past would vanish.

  Not far from Bridgeport Tool and Die was a tailor renowned for his exceptional cut and execution. Before work, Palmveist hurried to the storefront whose windows displayed men’s suits on mannequins without heads, showcased by drawn black velvet drapes. He tried the door but found it locked. He was too early. The exquisite clothes mocked him. Twice he spun in the direction of the factory, only to turn back. After checking his watch, he entered the alley between Choice Tailoring and Haberdashery and the brick building that contained, according to an understated tile, the shop of Madame Cataldo, palmist.

  Palmveist dug in his heels and faced the simple blue door, which lacked windows. The tile, also blue, creaked on its hinges. His intention had been to cut through the alley, see if the tailor lived at the back of his shop as he assumed many tailors did. But thoughts of a new suit and vest, and a button-down with a stiff white collar, vanished.

  The March wind whistled down the alley and rocked the sign. Such an out of the way place—likely set in a remote corner of the downtown to keep it removed from Protestant eyes, the same puritans behind Prohibition’s dry America—was also surely closed at so early an hour. But Palmveist knew that if he reached for the door, the knob would turn, and he would find himself speaking with the mystic, Madame Cataldo, in her sanctum.

  He extended his fingers and then recoiled, as though the tips had been flash-frozen. Shaking his head, he turned, hurried back to the sidewalk and marched to Bridgeport Tool and Die with his hands shoved in his pockets for warmth.

  * * *

  Palmveist studied his reflection. “Are you certain?”

  Rudolpho Choice, the tailor, smoothed out the shoulders of his new jacket. “The wider trouser leg? Absolutely. Oxford bags are in fashion.”

  The jacket was higher waisted, the lapels thinner. Choice called the color midnight-blue.

  “The look suits you.”

  Palmveist agreed. He exhaled and indulged in the rare flicker of happiness.

  “Besides,” Choice continued, “new clothes are an expression of a man’s prosperity.”

  The narrow neckband of the shirt collar was softer than he expected. New trends. New beginnings. Palmveist almost believed in the possibilities.

  He studied the jacket and vest, and a chill gossiped over his skin. He willed his eyes higher, up to his face, but they refused to cooperate, as though knowing he wouldn’t be there. The only reflection would be that of his new suit, not his old flesh, the image like one of the headless mannequins in the display windows.

  “Is something wrong?” the tailor asked.

  Palmveist realized he’d stopped breathing and exhaled a lungful of air. His eyes darted north and recorded the expression that had given Rudolpho Choice such concern. “No, no, I was only thinking.”

  “Thinking?”

  “Yes, regarding your nearest neighbor, Madame Cataldo.”

  “What of her?”

  “Is she…?” Palmveist’s voice trailed to silence.

  Choice completed the sentence. “Is she legitimate? Some would say no, others yes. Are you in need of a glimpse into the mysteries of the future?”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe the past.”

  “Caveat emptor.” Choice sighed and again brushed his bony fingers across Palmveist’s shoulders, smoothing the already smooth material. He then presented him with the bill.

  A restless wind gusted down Main Street. The long walk to his rented room loomed, and whatever lightness of spirit he’d gained from his new clothes scattered with it. His new Oxford wingtip shoes felt like cement hardening around his feet. Palmveist reached the mouth of the alley. He turned right. The tile rocked on its hinges. The doorknob turned. He entered Madame Cataldo’s shop.

  A scent of citrus infused the air. Delightful, but hardly the exotic spice he expected. Missing from the mental décor he’d laid out in his imagination was the crystal ball; the gnarled gypsy with the wart on her nose, a dark yarn shawl around her hunched shoulders; the stuffed black cat frozen in taxidermy, its spine arched, its eyes bugged out and its mouth open in a permanent silent scream. No mummy’s sarcophagus. No jars of dead things floating in solutions, or potions, or smoking cauldron.

  He entered a sitting room, quite charming and ordinary, with a camelback sofa, upholstered in a claret-colored velvet, and two Queen Anne chairs, those in the same summer blue as the outer door. A candle flickered on a table set between the sofa and chairs, more for effect, he thought, given the electric wall sconces. A mirror with a gold frame sent back the room’s reflection, creating an illusion that it was twice as large.

  Another door connected the room to wherever. Palmveist wondered if this were an anteroom of sorts, a parlor. The gypsy with the crystal ball surely saw her clients beyond the other door. He opened his mouth, intending to call out, only he couldn’t conjure his voice.

  The mirror drew him over to the wall. The same room. Of course it was. He hadn’t noticed the simple landscape on the opposite wall—a painting of the ocean of all things, with white-capped waves crashing beyond a spare anchor of beach.

  Palmveist turned around, and no such painting hung on the wall. He again faced the mirror. The painting was gone, a hallucination that had jumped out of his mind for a second and had returned to the territory of the imagination.

  A woman now stood in the mirror’s reflection. He spun around, stirring the scent of citrus, and found that she was real. Blonde, not unattractive, she wore the kinds of clothes women of the decade had embraced with brashness—shorter, tighter, showing off what the catalogues scandalously referred to as ‘boys’ bodies.

  Hers was trim and boyish. Where the woman showed her age was in the eyes.

  “May I help you?” she asked in a voice that lacked accent, so far as Palmveist could tell.

  He cleared his throat. “Yes, thank you. I seek Madame Cataldo.”

  “I am she.”

  “You?” he asked, and then felt foolish for the question.

  “How may I help you, Mister…?”

  “Palmveist. Edgard. I seek the truth.”

  She waved the slender fingers of one hand toward the Queen Anne chairs. “Have a seat.”

  Palmveist shuffled to the nearest of the chairs. As he passed the section of wall where the imaginary seascape had hung, the temperature in the room plummeted. Madame Cataldo shivered.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked.

  Though it was clear in the language of her body that she had, she took the other seat without formalizing her answer. Madame Cataldo extended both hands. “This is my left hand, in which you’ll place a coin for my services.”

  He reached into his pocket. “How much?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  He fished out a Walking Liberty half-dollar and placed it in her hand.

  “Generous,” she said, though the statement lacked enthusiasm. She closed the left, opened the right. “And this is my right hand, upon which you’ll lay yours, palm side up.”

  The connection unleashed a numbing rush of cold up Palmveist’s wrist. His instinct was to pull away, like the time in Yonkers at his brother’s home when, reaching to turn on an electric torchiere, he’d received a shock. But Madame Cataldo’s open palm, far smaller than the back of his hand, held him frozen.

  “The water,” she said in a voice that sounded half-submerged. “Stay away.”

  Palmveist gasped an expletive in his native tongue. “Tell me…the Spöke—?”

  She coughed.

  “The ghost,” he said. “Is it real? Following me?”

  Madame Cataldo attempted to mouth an answer. Instead, a gout of brackish water flew from between her quivering lips. Palmveist jumped out of his seat, breaking their connection. The vomited liquid splashed across the floor. He no longer smelled citrus; the brine of the ocean poisoned his next breath.

  “Yes,” she spat. Thick tears clotted her eyes. “The Spöke—for an instant, I almost saw his face!”

  “Him? Not a young girl with a shawl?”

  She shook her head. The clotted tears spilled down her cheeks. “He’s angry, so angry—”

  Movement at the periphery drew Palmveist’s gaze away from the mystic, to the wall. No painting of waves crashing beyond a thin strip of shore materialized. It was, a rational man would see, merely the light of the candle, distorted by their sudden movements and projected onto that stretch of horsehair plaster. Still, the way the reflection flickered, rolling in waves, painted the same study in strokes of fire instead of oil pigment. Palmveist shook.

  “I must go,” he said, and turned toward the door to the alley, praying it would still be there. It was.

  Madame Cataldo called after him. “Stay away from the water! The next time you go in the water, you will drown.”

  * * *

  The midnight-blue suit haunted him in the growing shadows. Palmveist studied the cut of the vest and the Oxford bag trousers, dangling from the bottom center of the clothes hanger. New clothes for old skin. He again remembered the mannequins without heads. Here he was, a suit on a hanger suspended from the hook on the back of the door to his rented room, a being without form. There were times when he no longer felt solid, a man made of memories.

  Any second, he expected the clothes on the hanger to come alive, the shoes to scuttle across the floor independent of feet.

  Dusk deepened and night rolled in, casting dark waves over everything in the room, including the suit. Palmveist resisted the urge to light the candle. He struggled to breathe; he felt like drowning.

  * * *

  On March the twenty-seventh, he donned his new suit and headed out of his rented room, down Main Street. He stopped at the barber’s for a shave. Johansson was a Swede and what conversation they shared was made in the language of their mother tongue.

  “Moving?” Johansson asked.

  “Yes. I’m seriously considering a change of place,” Palmveist said. “Somewhere new. The mountains, perhaps.”

  “It would be a shame to lose a friend from home, and you have everything a man needs here in Little Dodd.”

  Palmveist chuckled. “Everything? I have no family, no wife.”

  Johansson’s eyes glinted with mischief. “I have a solution to that. My wife’s sister Annika, a Swedish beauty who is in need of a husband…”

  * * *

  He planned to dine at the best restaurant in Little Dodd, with or without Annika Christoffer as his guest. The leisurely stroll to the Johansson house in the remote countryside dragged out before him. His feet complained, and the new wingtips absorbed as much spring mud on the outside as sweat inside. He considered turning back, which would label him a cad and destroy any chance at courting the woman described to him as “a fine beauty, sadly alone and far from home.”

  The road wound through a dense stand of fir trees growing so close together that their linked branches formed a living wall. The afternoon sun floated behind the clouds, a platinum disk offering little warmth. Patches of the last of winter’s snow prevailed at roadside and beneath the hemlocks.

  Handsome, Johansson had said, and the image of his potential new bride was one of hard expressions and wide hips, not of the flapper girls dressed in short, flowing frocks that sang and clanged from hems of beads and bangles.

  The company would more than compensate for actual passion. Another body to heat the bed, to keep away ghosts. A fresh start, with him walking toward it dressed in his sharp, new clothes. At the Johansson place, out past the stone quarry. Maybe.

  A scuffle of footsteps sounded behind him. Palmveist spun. No one was there. They came again, this time from the direction ahead. He turned back around in time to catch a darting ripple of color, midnight-blue, as it dipped into the nearby trees. His next breath clotted in his throat. He looked down to make sure his new clothes were still on his body, that they hadn’t jumped off him in search of the hanger.

  Someone in a similar suit moved at the tree line, just out of sight behind the branches.

  “Who are you?” Palmveist demanded. His voice rose to a shout. “What game is this?”

  The only response was a man’s laughter.

  Turn around, his consciousness urged. Run back to your room, fall deep beneath the covers where it’s warm and dry.

  Palmveist shook his head. Spöke.

  He pursued.

  The figure zigzagged, staying always ahead, always barely there, a flicker behind the gray-green branches.

  “Who—”

  Hemlocks pawed at his face. His new suit wouldn’t be so crisp once he emerged from the woods, and he was past caring.

  “I demand to know, who are you?”

  Palmveist broke through the trees and found himself standing on the precipice of a hollowed-out hillside. The stone quarry. A damp, stale smell assaulted his nostrils as he gazed down the scored, exposed walls to the pond that had formed in the vast bowl far beneath. The water was as black as the ocean on that night. He froze.

  Footfalls scurried behind him. Palmveist turned. A moan escaped his lips.

  The face of the ghost haunting him was his own. His reflection pushed.

  And then he was falling again from the deck of the sinking Titanic, spiraling toward the ocean.

  Before reaching the water in the quarry pond, he remembered the stateroom door and that other set of hands. In the rapid flash of the memory window inching open for a brief view, less than a second’s worth of time, he saw the hands were his own, the image recorded out-of-body. The ghost was his. He hadn’t fully survived that night. Part of him had died, drowned.

  Palmveist struck the water.

  * * *

  On April the fifteenth, 1925, Edgard Palmveist’s body was discovered floating face down in the Little Dodd granite quarry. The undertaker who examined the remains concluded the cause of death was drowning.

  Gregory L. Norris writes full time from his home at the outer limits of New Hampshire.

  Norris grew up on a healthy dose of creature double-features, and his work can be found in numerous national magazines and fiction anthologies. He has written for television, including Star Trek: Voyager. He is presently working with the Canadian production company, Space Opera Society, on various TV and film projects.

  Two of Norris’ short stories are featured in volumes from Grey Matter Press. His grisly tale of life in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, “Violence for Fun and Profit,” is included in Splatterlands: Reawakening the Splatterpunk Revolution, and his dark and prescient take on a future where advertising has run amok, “Third Offense,” appears in Ominous Realities: The Anthology of Dark Speculative Horrors.

  There was no precipitating event, no fall or car accident or lifting of too much weight. It started a few days ago, this dangerous feeling in my back, like my spine was being tugged very slowly apart. It quickly became alarming enough to bring me here to endure a series of what are supposed to be quick, routine X-rays. The orthopedist wants to blame it on age, but I'm not that old.

  The tiles are cool on my feet. This is all I can take in of the room, cool tiles and everything brightly white around me. Standing still, I’m flushed with adrenaline, like smoldering coals in my gut pushing heat outwards where it’s trapped and sizzles on my skin. My feet on the cold floor assure me that I won’t dissolve into steam.

  The X-rays, of course, require several unnatural positions, and with each comes a new pain. I’ve learned to expect it. Moving in unusual ways invites a new intensity and flavor. But expecting the pain doesn’t make it any better.

  The cool on my feet isn’t enough anymore. I’m unstable and unsupported, and I ache and burn along the length of me.

  “Just pull on this bar. Hold…and relax.” Jeff, the X-ray tech, is professionally amiable. It doesn’t help, but to his credit he doesn’t make anything worse.

  Another shot, another position, another knife slicing from shoulder to hip. Tears chase each other down my cheeks and I concentrate on not sobbing.

  And then the last, with me facing a detached metal wall, its arms extended over my head like a Halloween ghost. Stupid wall, you don’t scare me. I’m counting breaths until I can sit down again. I may soon not remember how to count. Or how to breathe.

  “Okay, stretch your neck back a little, Leigh. Last one. Deeeeeep breath. Hold… Hold… Hold it… And…”

  Click-hum-click.

  I feel a sudden sharp crack and clutch the metal in front of me for support. It feels like something is swinging from my spine, stretching it out of shape left and right. My gorge rises, then blackness surrounds my vision.

  I hold my breath, waiting for him to say, “Relax,” but he doesn’t say it.

  Looking across my shoulder I see his pale face, eerily lit by the monitor. His brows are knitted in confusion, as if trying to untangle something monstrous with his mind. He’s looking, I know, at the image of my spine.

  “That can't be right,” he mumbles to no one in particular. Then to me, “Leigh, we’re going to repeat this one.” He steps out to reposition me again, then jogs back behind the partition. “Just take a deep breath and don’t move.”

  I grit my teeth.

  Click-hum—

  All at once the weight of my body is too much to carry. I hear what sounds like a truckload of candy canes being crushed by a wrecking ball. This is followed by screaming that I think might be me, and I feel—