“Who’s a good boy? You are! Yes you are!” I whisper into the lure. It’s a homemade hook, a bit of joy mixed with a bit of glass that looks sort of like a stuffed squirrel at a distance. The joy is pink; the glass is sharper than a silver bullet. I attach it to my tip down and let the rod do its thing. I then repeat this process with a second tip down, though I bait this lure with, “I love you, yes I do! Yes I do!”
I say the words in an exaggerated voice. I’ve never met a dog that didn’t love that voice.
Their ghosts love that voice, too.
The rest is a game of waiting. It’s peaceful waiting though. The aether laps beneath my feet, and the graveyard earth shifts in pleasant ways. It smells like autumn and feels like spider webs. My rods dangle from their bramble puppets, each weighted with just the right amount of exorcise to tip down and snag a biting ghost. It’s more engineering than magic, but it is magic. Anything that does 90% of the work without help is magic, at least in my opinion.
My shack is a haphazard warm. There is beer—of course—and there is a little radio spitting static and the voices that live just beneath the static. It’s a home-made structure, mostly built of grainy wooden planks decorated with knotholes. Nothing special, but it keeps the frost at bay. Bent nails pockmark the walls, acting as cheap hooks for jars and tools that threaten to fall but only threaten. Nothing actually falls in my shack. Spirits drift up, but never down.
Well, some drift down, but I don’t fish for those anymore.
I only have the two tip downs, so for my third grave, I use a bog-standard fishing pole. It’s also homemade, a gift from dear-ol’ dad. May you rest in peace, pops.
“I’ll love you forever, little man,” I whisper into my final lure. A little piece of my heart breaks away and attaches to the glass point. It glistens red like a drop of blood.
The fishing pole is a brackish piece of corpsewood, yellow at the bottom like a femur but bleach-white everywhere else. Well, except the very middle. That bit’s made of stainless steel from when I first broke it some thirty five years ago. Caught me a nasty haunt, one of them drift-down types. “Never again!” I said, but time and beer have a way of making “never again” turn into “eh what the heck?” which is why there are two pieces of stainless steel holding pop’s old fishing pole together.
He’d shake his head and sigh. Goddamn do I miss him.
I cast, and my lure plips through the dirt, and into the aether. The smell of apples cuts through my shack before turning back into old leaves. I smile, because that’s how you know its prime dog season. They like to play in the leaves. Like to chase after squirrels and bark at birds and get in the way when it’s time to set the table. Always a good scrap or two for the dogs during autumn. It’s the best time to grill in the backyard.
Static hisses through the radio. The dead grumble, and Her flute leads them on. It’s a faint sound, the melody so distorted that it’s less a song and more a part of the wind. She’s far, and as long as She’s far, I’m safe.
So I settle back, place my rod within reach, and pop a beer. I close my eyes and let the sounds of the aether do their thing. I’m in no rush. I’m much too alive for that.
*
A tip down jingles with a catch, and I set my rod aside to yank the bramble puppet up. Hooked, line, and sinker is a wriggling dog snout, fluorescent purple and yipping loud enough to wake the rest of the dead. It’s eyeless and more ooze than form, like turned yogurt stuck to the bottom of a quart, but I can make out enough details to know it was a Yorkshire terrier. I smudge its jaws aside to work the lure out of its mouth. Once free, its little barks turn into whines, which are quieter yet more annoying.
“Oh hush you,” I say. It does not hush. They never do.
In my cooler, next to the beer, is a round-bottom flask. Its neck is about an inch in diameter, but it bottoms out to something closer to six inches. It’s clear, heavy, and sound proof. I bring the complaining ghost to the edge, and it sucks the little Yorkie in without a second thought. Perfect fishing silence returns to my shack.
I add more bait to the tip down, set it back up, and return to my spot, my dad’s fishing pole between my legs and a beer to my right. The radio spits more static. Her flute is almost impossible to hear.
*
It takes another beer before my tip downs jingle, one right after the other. I plod over to them, yanking first a well-worn mutt with a blue glow, then a golden retriever with an orange shine. Both are prime catches, the kind of dogs with easy attitudes and wagging tails. Neither fights back as I bring them to my flask. The Yorkie tries to escape, but he’s too small to get out, and with the other two, they form a makeshift pack. Three is always better than one when it comes to dogs.
The goal is thirteen. It’s a prime number, and one that distills down to the perfect mason jar. The kind us backwater moonshiners call our, “special elixir.” We can thank the Morrison Sisters for that. What kind of moonshine depends on the dogs—Happy dogs skew towards rum while bitter little ankle-biters like the Yorki make a good whiskey. Real big dogs ferment into scotch. A mix of anything and everything blends into a kind of flavorless vodka, which I enjoy with orange juice on Sunday mornings. Praise God. One of these days I’ll figure out how to make brandy.
Not today though.
*
Something yanks at my pole with enough force to tear it from my hands.
“Jesus Fuck!”
I manage to catch it before it falls into the aether. The handle is death-cold, and whatever’s got hold tears back and forth like a wolf trying to break a deer’s neck. I pull, and it pulls right back, almost putting me off balance. Dirt flies everywhere. My beer falls to the ground with a thunk and a glub-glub noise. Half my trinkets crash to the ground, and one of my tip downs tips right the hell over. The radio spits static mixed with bad flute.
“Fuckin’ fuck!”
Panic takes hold, because this feels like one of them drift-down type spirits. Somethin’ real bad, like a bear or a mountain lion. Or worse, a human. My skin threatens to crawl off as I reach for a knife. The ground cracks apart. I can hear the aether twisting like a tornado, a violent swirl sucking at all life. Dirt spills in, and the smell is mold. I’ve never fallen into the aether before. Not sure anyone has and lived to tell the tale. It’s cold and black, and the dirt that sits between this world and the next doesn’t like to be disturbed. It wants to close in, wants to become a still grave. It wants me to scream and drown and die, and then it wants Her to find what’s left.
Before I can cut the line, it slackens. Everything stops with it. The fear, the screams, even the hope. My beer dribbles its last while my radio cuts out.
“Easy now,” I whisper. “Easy now.”
My dad’s old fishing pole jerks in my hand.
I slide the knife up, ready to cut the line and whatever bad spirit has hold, and find myself giving the reel a gentle wind instead. Just a few turns. The gears click like rattling teeth. Whatever I’ve caught doesn’t fight back, so I keep going. Up and up, with just a little play here and there. Sometimes the big dogs fight a bit—not the wolves, but the German Shepherds and Rottweiler’s. Once caught a Husky that threw a real howling fit, so bad it almost knocked the shack over. Most dogs are good, worth a pet and a smile, but not all. The bad dogs bite, and the spirits they distill into bite as well.
“Come on,” I say, and already I can tell the ghost is at the edge, ready to spill over. My heart quickens. I mouth a quick prayer.
I yank up not a dog but a crow.
“What in the hell?”
It’s a dark ghost, like if black could glow, and it doesn’t ooze or droop but spirits around with wings that rotate like a windmill. It caws as it flies, loud bleats that dig into my ears, through my skull, and into my forehead. Little headaches explode behind my eyes. I stumble around, one hand on my pole, another flailing with the knife. I can see my lure in the crow’s mouth, not snagged but bitten. The ghost took hold on its own. It can let go at any time.
I cut the line. The magic fades from the string in a burst of silver. Now it’s just fabric and glass.
Instead of dropping the lure and returning to the afterlife, the crow flutters to the tallest corner of my shack. It finds an empty nail and perches. Or rather, it hovers right above it. Ghosts can’t stand, but this one floats and hops like if it were alive. It gives my lure another playful yank, and the line swishes into the wall. It doesn’t even make a sound.
“Caw!” the ghost shrieks. Pain follows.
“No,” I say. I point at the hole. “Go back down there.”
“Caw!”
I stare at the crow. It stares back. Even as a ghost, it holds its form, with piercing green eyes and wings so dark they shimmer. Most ghosts don’t get so lucky. Most fade as soon as they die, turning into clumps of jelly. Dogs lose their tails and eyes first, then their ears and paws. Rodents jumble into puddles so fast it’s almost scary, yet they retain their noses and whiskers for a long, long time. Deer shrink. A deer ghost will look like a Christmas tree ornament for years before it melts into something that’s more antler than form, and even the doe grow a few points in death. Birds tend to look like eggs made of runny yogurt. Taste like it too.
Cats reincarnate like the cheating bastards that they are.
Humans—but I shake that thought away. I don’t fish for drift-down ghosts no more.
The crow makes like its preening its feathers, which is a strange sight as its beak is more thought than shape. Its feathers ooze around it, through it.
“Caw!” it shrieks when I raise my knife. Pain blossoms behind my eyes.
“You’re supposed to be dead!” I say.
“Caw!”
I look into my cooler. There are two beers left, and my flask, which is nowhere near its thirteen ghosts. If the crow won’t go back to hell, maybe it’ll distill into a spirit or two. I don’t like mixing animals—never been a fan of what the kids call a WOP—but I don’t trust this ghost as far as I can throw it. It smells like a drift-down type.
“Nice and easy,” I say. I pocket the knife and hold my hands out. The crow jerks its head in a way that could pass as a nod. I, meanwhile, stand there like a scarecrow. I look like one too, with faded jeans and a torn sweatshirt over an old button-up. I smell a bit better though. Fishing clothes last longer than farm decorations, but only a little.
“Nice. And. Easy.”
The crow lets me reach into the cooler without screaming more headaches at me. It’s wary though, alert and thinking in ways ghosts aren’t. I snag the flask, and because I’ve earned it, I reach for another beer too.
“Not sure if I should drink you,” I say to the crow. “Not supposed to catch your types, whatever you are.”
“Caw,” the crow says, but it isn’t a shriek. The headache it sends my way is light. The ghost hops from one nail to another. One of its eyes changes colors from green to blue. “Caw.”
“Shut up.”
I pop my beer. It hisses, and the crow darts towards it. I offer my own headache-inducing yelp. The ghost flaps around my hand with its windmill feathers, a freezing ball of jelly and claws sharp as needles. I bat at it while I try to run and hide. Every tap with its beak, every brush of its wings, causes my shirt to freeze and crack. Beer spills down my sleeve, and what doesn’t turn into blonde ice drips onto my pants.
“Fuck!”
“Caw!”
I drop the beer to put my hands over my ears. The crow flaps a circle around the shack, kicking up dirt and knocking my second tip down over. The lights turn off, on, off, on. And then the ghost heads for my beer. It pecks at it. When that doesn’t work, it tries to stand on it, though it can’t because it’s a ghost.
“Caw!” It screams. It looks at me, all huddled on the ground and feeling like I just lost a fight. My arms hurt. My head pounds. I’m bleeding, though I’m not sure from where. “Caw?”
I’ll be goddamned. It sounds like a question.
“What?”
The crow rubs its head against the beer bottle. Instead of moving the glass, it drifts through it, turning it to ice.
“Caw?”
“You can’t be serious.”
It takes a bit of will, but I stand and brush myself off. The crow watches me with eyes that keep changing color. Blue and green then blue and orange then red and white then teal and purple. One minute it looks like a living bird, the next a ghost orb, the kind you’d see at a cemetery. I check myself for cuts and bruises and find half a dozen, but nothing I can’t fix. Ain’t the first time a ghost bit me.
The crow waits patiently for me to regain my senses, and when it sees that I am ready, it offers another chirp. This one doesn’t hurt.
“You can’t have any,” I say. I shake my head. “Sorry. Ghosts don’t eat or drink. That’s for the living. You should know that.”
“Caw?”
The crow oozes at the bottle. When that doesn’t work, it floats around it, approaching the glass from every direction. The glass doesn’t budge though. An angry ghost can knock things over and make stuff move, but a confused one can’t do nothin’ more than be confused. Or sad. Or dead. The crow blinks. It is crying.
“You gotta go back,” I say. My voice trembles. I’ve been fishin’ for ghosts for decades. Learned it from my father who learned it from his. You can do a lot with a ghost, though we always just drank ‘em. Kick back, relax, and as long as you mind Her, what more could anyone want on a Sunday morning? Then once you’re done, head to church to purify. God forgives the sorry. Then wink and do it again next week.
But seeing this crow sulk around my beer bottle makes me feel worse than dirt. Worse than the aether, which churns beneath the dirt, smelling like autumn leaves and feeling like spider webs.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I tell it. It flutters to my chair. If I sat down, it would be at my shoulder. I bet it used to sit on its owners shoulder when it was alive, and they’d share a beer and a story. I bet someone loved it once. I bet someone loved it forev—
“I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, LITTLE MAN.”
The voice is flutes and death and infinity all rolled in one. I am trapped in the aether, and it is trapped around me. Everything is cold. Everything is tornadoes and drowning. I scream a soundless sound, and I blink a lightless blink. Up and down merge together while the crow caws headaches into my skull. Some part of me curses for not fixing the radio, for not listening for Her, but the rest turns into panic. The rest falls.
The rest dies.
“THAT WAS YOUR TRAP. THAT WAS YOUR LIE.”
She appears in front of me. Her face is a patchwork of skin sewn together with pink thread. There is no light in her eyes. Her hair flows around her face like weeds, and her nose threatens to fall off. Only her lips are complete, contorted into the most gorgeous frown I have ever seen. She could kiss the life from an angel. The rest of her shimmers in and out of existence as flutes play terrible sounds around us.
I cannot see her army of the dead, but I can feel it. I know it is there, and I know I am doomed to become part of it.
“YOU PREY, AND NOW YOU ARE PREY.”
“I’m sorry.”
“YOU ARE NOT.”
“I—”
“YOU ARE NOT!” Her voice is a rage so thick it could end the universe.
“Caw!”
A headache rips through my head. For a split second, I can see the inside of my shack. It’s hazy and dark, and the ghost of a crow rests near my head, staring into my face with eyes that burn bright with red fever.
“YOU DID NOT LOVE HIM FOREVER, AND YOU ARE NOT LOVED FOREVER.”
I’m crying. I have no form, and I have no voice, but I am crying. She’s lying to me. Her song is lying to me. I did love him, and I am sorry. Everything else is gone, but those two things are not.
“YOU WILL NOT FIND HIM HERE! YOU WILL NEVER SEE HIM EVER AGAIN!”
“Please.”
“Caw!”
The world returns. The ghost is screaming at me. My mouth tastes like copper. I try to raise my hand, but it’s heavy with sleep. My shack reeks of autumn. I can hear flutes outside.
“I—”
“THE DEAD MARCH, BUT YOU WILL CRAWL. THE BETRAYERS CRAWL.”
“No,” I plead. I am a ball of sobs and excuses, and my voice is a whisper. “I did love him. I still do.”
“LIAR!”
“Caw!”
I’m sitting with a knife in one hand and a trowel in the other. They’re both bad blades, one made of bone and coffin wood, the other glass and empty words. They’re strong magic though, the kinds of things that let me go searching for ghosts. Because there’s one ghost I want to find, one I’d do anything to see again, even if just for a moment.
“HE SCREAMS AT WHAT YOU DID TO HIM. YOU WERE THERE, AND HE REMEMBERS. EVEN NOW HE REMEMBERS. HE DOES NOT LOVE YOU, NOT ANYMORE.”
“He was sick,” I say. And he was sick. His kidneys were so busted he could hardly control himself, and he growled if you touched his belly. We had to keep him outside that last month. We had to do a lot of things we didn’t want to. But I miss him. It’s why I use that spell when I go fishing. Because maybe he’ll bite hold, and maybe I can tell him I’m sorry.
“YOU GREW SICK OF HIM.”
“No!”
“Caw!”
I’m standing in my shack, one foot on the ground, the other in the aether. Pain explodes through my head. I’m bleeding from my ears. The crow hovers at my shoulder, flapping and cawing and sending waves of cold death through my body. Everything hurts. My fingers are white with frostbite. I’m holding my knife in one hand and pressing its blade into my wrist. All I need is a little more pressure, and I can go back. I can tell Her she’s wrong. I can—
“Caw!”
“Stop.” The word is a whisper.
“Caw!”
I look at the crow. It has three eyes now, each as red as blood. Its form shifts. Its beak melts into a mouth, one filled with fangs.
“Help me,” I say.
“Say it,” the crow says. Its voice is feminine and far away, and I understand what I’ve caught and what I’ve done. “Say the spell.”
“You’re a witch’s familiar.”
“Caw!” The crow shrieks a headache at me, and I press my knife into my wrist. Blood spills. “Say her words! Make her come here! Tell me you love me because I miss her like you miss your dog.”
Through tears I do as the ghost asks: “I love you forever, little man.” My voice cracks, and I fall to the ground.
I look into the aether, and for the first time, I see my own reflection in it. I’m tired and hurt, with sixty years of wrinkles swimming through my face. I was thirty when I put Bailey down. He was eight. Only eight. The good died young, and I stayed living and searching, fishing and drinking. I am dirt, and the best I can manage is sorry.
The crow caws a headache. I grip my knife. It’s a different color in the aether, black instead of silver. The dirt shifts beneath me. It wants to close up, it wants to cover bodies.
“Goodbye,” the ghost says. It hops from my shoulder to the ground. It shakes its head and raises its wings. “When you said her words, you looked like her.”
I let the knife go. It hits the dirt, sinks, and is no more.
“I didn’t mean to,” I say.
“And when you said you were sorry, I believed you.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“If I see your companion, I will let him know. I think he will believe you, too.”
“His name was Bailey.”
The crow nods. “I will find him.”
The crow’s mouth disappears, replaced with a black beak. It blinks its third eye away. It’s a ghost, and it’s dead, and I watch it fly back to Her. The graveyard earth shifts and pours until the hole to hell is no more.
My radio spits static.
Nonsense 