Illustration by Andy Paciorek
WINNER, Summer 2019
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY A.C. KOCH
1. Silver Aeroplane
The woman who knocked at the front door wanted me to hide a camera for her. She held it out to me, partially wrapped in a silk handkerchief: an old-school Nikon with a stubby lens, silver and black. “I think you must have the wrong house,” I told her.
Dark-haired, mid-twenties, more than pretty—I’d been intrigued when I’d spied her through the peephole standing on the porch in a red leather motorcycle jacket. “No, this is the place,” she said. “Where’s Gustavo?”
“He’s traveling. I’m housesitting for him, all summer.”
“Okay.” She went on holding the camera out to me. “I still need you to take this.” She looked over her shoulder. A motorcycle was parked at the curb. In the park on the other side of the street, someone was walking across the grass.
“Um, I don’t think I should do that. Gustavo didn’t say anything about expecting a camera—”
“Please. Nothing bad will happen, I promise.”
Am I just a sucker? I held out my hands and she placed the camera in its handkerchief on my open palms. Then she slid a brand new hundred dollar bill alongside it. She showed me a big smile. “He’s got a milk box in the closet, with a pair of boots inside? Hide it there. You won’t have to worry about it again.”
The word ‘hide’ was a little alarming—although I did remember Gustavo telling me to put any deliveries into the closet. I held the bundle back out to her. “Look, I really don’t—”
But she had already turned away. She jumped down the porch’s three steps in one leap and jogged over to the motorcycle. She kicked it alive and roared off. Whoever had been walking in the park was out of sight now.
“Shit,” I said.
I looked in the coat closet and found a tin box like people used to keep on their front porches for milk deliveries. Sure enough, there was a pair of black cowboy boots inside. I slipped the camera in its cloth inside one of the boots and closed the closet. My heart was racing. And as messed up as the situation was, I was also wondering when the motorcycle lady might come back.
I wrote Gustavo an e-mail and mentioned that a friend of his had stopped by with an “item,” but received no reply. Part of me couldn’t believe I’d let a total stranger talk me into hiding what was surely stolen merchandise, but here’s the really strange thing: when I checked the closet later that evening, the boot in the milk box was empty. Various trinkets were piled on the closet shelf behind all the jackets and coats—a die-cast metal jet on a swooping stand, a ship in a bottle, a porcelain shoe—but no camera, no silk handkerchief. Not a trace of it. “Shit,” I said for the second time. How was I supposed to explain this when the woman came back? Did she secretly have a key? Had I dreamt the whole thing?
A week went by and she knocked again, looking over her shoulder as she paced on the porch.
“You again,” I said as I opened up.
She was holding a red bandanna, and peeled back a corner to show me a black revolver, old and dusty. She held it out to me. I didn’t reach for it.
“Um, well, let’s see. That camera you gave me last week? It’s not—”
“I know. It’s gone. Put this where you put the other thing and forget about it.” She grabbed my hand and set the heavy bundle in it. Then she stuffed a hundred dollar bill alongside it. “See ya.” She ran off.
“Who are you?” I called, but she was already revving up the bike and riding away.
I looked at the revolver. I didn’t want to open up the cylinder to see if it was loaded. And then—because what else was I going to do?—I set it in the boot inside the milk box in the closet.
Later that evening, the gun was gone.
“I’m going to need some explanations,” I said when she returned a week later. “Why don’t you come inside?”
She stood there holding out a thick manilla envelope. There was no address on it but someone had written PHOTOS—DO NOT BEND across the front in Sharpie.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m not hiding your contraband.”
Glance over the shoulder. “Exactly—you’re not hiding anything. You’re sending it away. Just take it.”
“Sending it away? No.”
She flashed her eyes at me. “This is serious business, my friend. You know how this works. Just do your part.”
“What’s in the envelope?” She’d managed to put it in my hand along with another hundred.
She shrugged, already leaving. “No idea. Open it and look if you want. See ya!”
I watched her drive off and then undid the clasp on the envelope and slid a stack of eight-by-tens out. Black and white photos of men getting into and out of cars, taken from a distance. Some shots partially obscured by potted plants. A shot of a woman in a smart suit standing on a balcony, phone to her ear. The same woman in a bath robe seen through a window, with a shirtless man sitting up in the bed.
I chewed my cheek. Despite not having any idea what was going on, I knew what I had to do. Later that evening, the envelope with the photos was gone.
The next time the woman showed up—I was thinking of her by now as the Red Rider—she wasn’t holding anything. Instead, she stood with a distraught-looking, long-haired woman.
“Okay,” Red Rider said, eyeing both of us a little nervously. “I know this is different, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work the same as usual.”
“Her?”
The woman’s eyes were red and swollen and she wore a gauzy evening gown that looked like it had been torn at the shoulder. She was holding a pair of silver high-heeled shoes.
“You want me to put her in the milk box?” I couldn’t believe I was even saying it.
“Do we have to do this same song and dance every time? Come on, man. It always works, no one ever gets hurt.”
“How do you know that? How do you know no one gets hurt?”
“It always works the same. Whatever you put in there gets sent away and everybody forgets about it. Do your part and everything will be fine.” She shot a look over her shoulder. Three men in coveralls were standing in the middle of the park. One of them started walking this way.
She pressed the money into my hand. There were two hundred-dollar bills this time. I sighed and jerked my head to invite the lady inside. Red Rider split and I closed the door.
“Do you know what’s happening here?” I asked the lady. “Are you in danger?”
“Please, I no English.”
I threw up my hands.
She added, “I disappear, yes?”
I opened the closet and directed her to stand in the boots inside the milk box. I wondered if this was going to be the moment I regretted later as I pushed the door closed. The woman met my eyes from where she peeked out between the hanging coats. There was a relieved smile on her face.
I went into the next room and paced. Was I a freak magnet? Why did I always seem to get wrapped up in people’s hare-brained schemes? Nothing quite like this before, but still—
The closet was quiet. It had been quiet before, but now it seemed like a new kind of quiet. I opened the door and found it empty. Just the coats, milk box, and boots, but no lady.
That evening I did something pretty stupid. I got in the milk box myself. Put on the boots (too big), stood in the milk box, and pulled the door closed. I stood there between the coats, waiting. I must have waited an hour, long enough to try and convict myself as a goddamn lunatic. When I finally pushed the door open, I half-suspected it to reveal a soundless white void, or a sparkling expanse of deep space. But no—it was just Gustavo’s foyer. Whatever formula was making this work, it looked like it included more than just the contents of this closet.
That week, I developed a plan. I’d already identified Red Rider’s motorcycle as a Ducati, and it was an unusual custom paint job—aquamarine with gold pinstripes. I cruised the web for biker forums and community pages. A bar called the Lamplighter kept popping up as a hang-out for fancy street racer bikers, and I spotted a splash of aquamarine on one of the bikes parked out front in their profile picture. I went in on a night off and drank Manhattans at the bar, chatting up the bartender. I tipped big and played it cool but friendly. After the bartender joined some other bikers in a round of tequila shots, I waved him over. “Hey man. If I needed to make something disappear–do you know anybody who could make that happen?”
He gave me a hard, sober look. “Disappear.”
“Yeah. I heard there was a person who could take something off your hands. Send it away, you know? For a price.”
He watched me. I could tell he was considering throwing me the hell out. I would.
“Look,” I went on, “don’t say anything. If you know anyone, let them know I’ll be here again tomorrow evening. Just pass the word.”
“Why don’t you just take off, dude? That last one’s on the house.” Which is exactly how I would’ve handled it.
The next day, I had a beer on the patio at the Lamplighter to stay out of sight of the bartender, my backpack stowed under the table. Twilight sky above. Red Rider came up the sidewalk and spotted me before she even went inside. She looked like she was considering just turning right back around but I spread my arms and gave her a smile. “So nice to see you!”
“You’ve gotta be shitting me. What are you doing here?”
“Just hoping we could talk a little.”
She came up to my table and leaned over it to hiss at me. “There’s nothing to talk about. You play your part, I play mine. That’s it.”
“Can’t I just get a few answers?”
She looked about to spit venom. And then, for reasons I don’t know, her look softened. She sighed and sank into a chair. “Listen. I literally don’t know more than you. When I turned twenty-one, my grandpa brought me here to the Lamplighter to meet a guy. He gave us a cigar box and an envelope full of cash. Then we went to the little bungalow across the street from the park, and a guy opened the door. We gave him the box and a hundred bucks, and that was that. After my grandpa died, I just kept doing it.”
We watched each other across the table.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“If I play my part and you play yours, the thing works. It always works. One hundred percent reliable. The stuff Gustavo puts in that closet—I mean you—it never comes back. It gets forgotten. There are people who have a need for this service, and are willing to pay for it. We always do it right.”
“Do you want a drink or something? My name’s Nathan, by the way.”
She pushed her chair back and stood.
“Wait,” I said. I reached into my backpack and withdrew the object I’d brought: the metallic model of a 1950’s-era jet, mounted on a swooping stand that bore the logo of Aeroplane Tequila. Commandeered from the upper shelf of Gustavo’s closet. Red Rider watched me as I slid it across the table. “I’d like to contract your services,” I said.
She scoffed. “That’s not how it works.”
“From my perspective, that’s exactly how it works. You bring me something—or someone, as the case may be—and then I play my part. And it always works, according to you. So I just want to see where it ends up. Will it end up back on the shelf?” I gave a meaningful shrug.
She watched me while an internal debate took place behind those dark eyes. Finally she stepped forward and grabbed the silver jet. “What an unbelievable pain in the ass you are.”
“How much do I owe you?”
She waved her hand. “This one’s on the house. One free ride. Got it?”
I grinned. “Got it.” When she was at the sidewalk I called after her, “My price has gone up. It’s two hundred now, every time.”
She snorted and shook her head. “My name’s Beatrice. My friends call me Betty. But you don’t call me anything.”
That Sunday evening, she brought the silver plane. I realized as I took it in my hands that we probably had a back-log now of whatever disappearance was supposed to happen this week, and that I’d surely thrown quite a monkey wrench into things with my scheme. Still, here she was, humoring me. She even pressed the money into my hand with the plane: two hundred dollars.
“Oh no, I didn’t mean you had to pay for this one. This one is just for me.”
“You play your part, I play mine.”
I noticed that she didn’t do the nervous glance over the shoulder; she knew no one was after her this time. There was a guy walking across the grass in the park, but there were people over there all the time.
I did the thing, and a short while later, the plane was gone.
I never saw that plane again except in my dream that night. I piloted a sleek silver jet across a cloudscape that spanned the world. Anywhere I wanted to go, I was in complete control of the machinery to take me there. It was one of the most beautiful dreams I’d ever had, and I woke up feeling reborn.
The strangest part of the story hadn’t happened yet. It’s this: Gustavo never came back. His monthly stipend of a thousand dollars arrived automatically in my bank account without fail, but I never saw or heard from him again. Essentially, his house is mine now.
Of course, I never saw the silver aeroplane again either, but here’s the weird thing with that. When I mentioned it to Beatrice later that week, she had no idea what I was talking about. “What airplane?” she said in genuine bafflement. Like it had never existed.
I almost asked her about the other stuff—the revolver, the photos. The woman; I knew I’d never forget the look on that woman’s face as long as I lived. But I held my tongue. Beatrice was right—it always works, and it never comes back. It gets forgotten, by everyone but me. I can live with that. It’s nice knowing I have a part to play.
2. Two Dreams and the Lightning Stone
My name is Two Dreams, but only one dream matters to me now. But before I tell you about that, you need to know about the fantastic legacy of my family.
Listen: my grandpa and I have been stewards of Deep Cavern for as long as I can remember. My father was a part of it until he was killed in the mastodon hunt last winter. Now it’s up to grandpa and me to collect and arrange the offerings that come through. Everything changed with the Lightning Stone.
It lay on the flat rock when I looked into the nook one morning at the usual time. Black and shiny, though coated with a layer of dust, heavier than its size would suggest. I turned it over and over in my hands, marveling at its straight lines and perfect curves and fine textures. Normally I would have taken a torch back into the deeper part of the cavern to leave the offering in the spot I’d cleared for it in the long zig-zagging line of countless other offerings. Many of these were mysterious things as well, with unnatural colors and shapes and textures, fantastic objects extruded from the Universe every seven suns for our consideration. But today’s offering intrigued me in a way the others hadn’t. Something about its weight and its shape seemed to make it designed to fit into my hand. I took it directly to Grandpa.
“We have a special one,” I told him when I found him cleaning his teeth with a green twig at the mouth of the cave. The treetops of the valley spread below where wisps of smoke rose from the tribe’s breakfast fires.
He held out a hand and I put the object there. It seemed to spark his attention as much as it had mine. He set aside his twig and turned the thing over in his hands, fingering the bumps and small protuberances along its contours.
There was a shocking CRACK! as if two stones had been smacked together. The object jumped in Grandpa’s hand, smoke spilled out from it, and—at that exact same instant—a spot on the cave wall burst in a plume of smoke and pebbles as if an invisible lightning bolt had struck it.
“Fuck!” he said and dropped the thing. We stared at it. An inspection of Grandpa’s hand revealed no injury, but a fine black powder stained his skin. It smelled like a lightning strike.
Grandpa narrowed his eye. “Tell no one about this. This one is different.”
The custom was to assemble the tribe in the mouth of Deep Cavern when the moon was full and let them look at and touch the new offerings. There were usually three or four new objects every time. These tended to be raucous affairs. We sang and danced and drank strong molko and celebrated the good fortune that only we among all tribes possessed. As Grandpa’s apprentice at fifteen summers, it was my responsibility to keep track of the objects to ensure no one walked off with one of them.
But the Lightning Stone—he was right about keeping it away from everyone. There was danger and power to it like nothing else we’d seen.
That was why I waited until he slept to look more closely at it. I inspected its every surface with my fingertips in the firelight. I discovered that pieces of it unfolded like a flower. A round stone-within-the-stone slid out, revealing six small holes. Five of these were filled with shining rocks; a sixth hole was empty. It was possible to return the Lightning Stone to its original shape and then unfold it again. I felt that I was learning something deeper than just stewardship of Deep Cavern’s offerings. I was learning how power can reside in the fist.
Grandpa and I were both wondering if the next offering was going to provide some clues about the Lightning Stone but it was puzzlingly banal: a small bundle of shining leaves with straight edges. They seemed to bear images of people in strange skins. There was a sort of moonlight beauty to the glossy leaves, but none of the awesome mystery of the Lightning Stone. I arranged the square leaves in the proper spot, knowing that people would find them intriguing but, like everything else in the zig-zagging line of offerings extending miles and miles into Deep Cavern, ultimately useless.
Seven suns later, the woman took me by surprise. She sat trembling on the flat rock when I peeked into the nook at the usual time. Her eyes widened when she saw me and she cried out in terror. I held up my hands and took a step back. “Easy there, friend,” I said. “How did you get in here?”
I suspected I knew the answer, but it had never happened this way before. She unleashed a string of words I couldn’t understand and we both fell silent, staring at one another. She was draped in what looked like finely-spun spider’s webs and she carried a pair of pronged objects which were silvery like moonlight on the river.
I touched my hand to my chest and said, “Two Dreams.” After doing this several times, she gave me a tired smile, touched her own chest, and said something like, “Marina.”
“Welcome, Marina,” I said. “It’s an honor to receive your visit.”
She looked around the nook and the cavern beyond, the zig-zagging line of offerings extending back into darkness, and she gave a laugh.
I spoke in a whisper so Grandpa wouldn’t overhear. “Marina, can you tell me where you come from?”
She watched me. Waves of emotion seemed to be going through her. Finally she put her arms around my neck and hugged me. The most amazing thing was when she put her feet into the silvery objects she carried and rose up on them, two heads taller than me. Then she laughed, stroked the side of my face, and walked delicately across the gravel towards the spill of light at the mouth of the cave.
“Grandpa,” I called, “you’ve not going to believe this.”
Our initial plan was to keep her in the cavern with us and to introduce her to the tribe at the full moon, but she had a mind of her own. Halfway through that first day, she started clambering down the rock fall beyond the cave mouth as I was stoking the fire. I went after her but others had already seen her. Soon everyone was gathered around in a clearing at the edge of the trees, ogling her as she walked around speaking to us and touching our deerskin robes and our painted faces.
“She’s a god from another world!”
“She could be a demon—look at her feet!”
“She smells amazing. Holy shit, what is that smell?”
Preparations got underway to have a special welcoming celebration at the next full moon. The women got to work sewing her a leopard-pelt cloak, and the men set off to hunt fresh boar for a feast. Me, I was wondering how the next offering might possibly follow up on this.
It’s tempting to imagine how things would have been different if Grandpa hadn’t tried to fuck her. I’d let her sleep on my furs while I stretched out near the fire, but in the middle of the night I awoke to her shouts. Grandpa stood over her, his robe open and his dick sticking out. He was trying to mount her. She howled and kicked at him. The Lightning Stone fell from where he’d hidden it in his robe, and her eyes snapped to it as it clattered to the ground. In the next instant she took it in her hand and held it out towards him. CRACK!
The cavern flashed with light, and Grandpa fell onto the gravel with a howl. Bitter smoke stung my nostrils. When I got to him, a deep wound pulsed in his chest. Blood sputtered from his lips. A moment later his eyes went flat and he was dead.
I looked at Marina. She held the Lightning Stone at her side as if it belonged to her. She was breathing heavily, eyes wide, but she gave me a defiant look and flexed her hand on the Stone. I knew how she felt; I’d held that thing too.
I often dreamed about the offerings that I collected and arranged, and these dreams were baffling and strange, but I was used to them by now. After all, Deep Cavern had been in my family for many generations. I certainly dreamed of Marina—mounting her, pumping her full of sons and daughters—but I didn’t make the same mistake as grandpa.
Nothing compared, however, to the astounding dream I had about the offering that followed that night. It was a silvery bird, frozen in mid-flight and attached to a heavy block of wood carved with intricate markings. It was much larger and smoother than the precious silver pebbles we sometimes found in the river, as shiny as Marina’s strange foot coverings. It gleamed as if with a secret light when I discovered it on the flat rock in the nook at the usual time. I returned several times that night to caress its cool smoothness in the fire light.
I dreamt that night that I was the silver bird soaring far above the forest. I sliced through the cloudscape as if I were a lightning bolt, accompanied by an unending shriek of sound. I passed over the high waterfalls of the Great Tooth Mountains, flashed over the deep forests beyond, and continued on over endless stretches of plains where clusters of lights burned near and far–many more tribes than I’d ever heard of. I awakened wide-eyed and shaking. I felt I’d glimpsed a fearsome truth about the world.
I suppose my expanding horizons fed my curiosity and boldness. When Marina slept, I inspected the Lightning Stone, which she kept at her side. When I unfolded its moving pieces, I discovered that only four shining rocks remained in the six round holes. Would the Lightning Stone retain its power when those four rocks were spent?
I refolded it and set it next to Marina’s sleeping head. Grandpa’s death was a blow to the tribe, and there might be some who would cast blame on Marina the god-demon. But Deep Cavern was now all mine, and I had a feeling she and I would be able to bring the tribe around to seeing things our way.
With a bone needle and rawhide thread, I set to work in the fire light to fashion myself a robe from the glossy moonlight leaves, to match Marina’s new leopard cloak. Perhaps I would also make myself pronged foot coverings to rise nearer to her stature. The world was vast, much bigger and more complex than I’d ever imagined, but we possessed the power to make it ours and bend it to our will. I nuzzled her hair as she slept and she sighed in her sleep. We had much to do tomorrow.
____________________________________________________________
A.C. Koch’s work has been published in the Columbia Journal, Mississippi Review, and Exquisite Corpse, and two of his short stories have been awarded first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award (2003, 2007). This year, he was the runner-up in the Tennessee Williams Short Fiction Award. He lives in Denver where he teaches linguistics at the University of Colorado and plays guitar in a bossanova trio, Firstimers.