A Ghost of Me(William Cline) A Ghost of Me

Fire Commissioner Richard Springer stood in the center of the empty truck-bay looking lost, his rheumy, moist eyes taking in the diesel-stained cinderblock walls. Like a dozen old stations I’ve worked in, he thought. The air smelled stale from being closed up for so long. But there was the familiar odor of burnt things; the smells you brought back with you from a long night at a house fire. It brought a smile to his aged face. He closed his eyes; the sounds of a fire station echoed through that empty space; voices from so many years ago.

Springer was there to meet with the general contractor hired by the department’s Board of Fire Commissioners to tear the old station down. The email he had received an hour ago had said that some papers needed to be signed before the contractor could begin demolition. The chairman had asked Springer to take care of it. They would approve the signing at the meeting later that night.

Finally, some movement to get this project back on track, Springer thought.

Under Springer’s leadership he had convinced the rest of the board of the need to move the department in a new direction. That had been nearly a year ago, and began with moving their headquarters into a much larger station a mile up the road. Then they made some changes in the department’s focus and priorities, some changes in leadership, one administrator was let go…

Springer scowled at the thought; he refused to call it a termination, though that is what everyone else called it. He was not terminated; was not fired. Hamilton was no longer a good fit for the department, so we opted not to renew his contract. We were going to help him be successful somewhere else…

Springer had heard that phrase – help him be successful somewhere else - used at a leadership conference for Commissioners; Springer took an immediate liking to it. He used the line in his appeals to the other board members that they needed to let Hamilton go. We will help him be successful somewhere else. Dean Wilkerson, who had been a yes-man for Springer for some time, nodded and smiled; which indicated to Springer that Wilkerson did not grasp what was happening, but wanted to appear as if he did. Al Johnson, the current chair of the board, was unconvinced.

But, in the end, Springer got his way, two votes to one, and Assistant Chief James “Jimmy” Hamilton, after twenty-nine years of service, was told he no longer had a place in the department.

At the next meeting of the board, where they gave Hamilton the news during executive session, Jimmy said very little. Commissioner Springer talked briefly about the new direction for the department: the plan to demote the current Chief, promote the Deputy Chief to Chief - a man brought in by Dale Brontski, Springer’s predecessor. “Things are going to change, but we want to help you be successful somewhere else. We are prepared to write you a letter of recommendation.” Jimmy had just stared at him. Finally, after a feeble, “So, that’s it?” Jimmy left the room.

For a few days after the meeting it seemed that Hamilton had accepted his fate, would come to the commissioners for the letter of recommendation, then they could all get on with things. And then it had gone bad. Jimmy disappeared and his wife was frantic. Two days later Jimmy came home. Three days went by and it seemed as if things would settle down; then Jimmy’s son found his father dead. He had taken a scalpel and opened the arteries of both his wrists.

The department was in chaos. Blame for Hamilton’s suicide was heaped upon the commissioners, especially Springer. They all blamed me, Springer recalled. But they all stood by without saying anything while it was going on. I even asked the Union president how he felt about it; got nothing. The family filed a lawsuit, and the union began the plans for an elaborate funeral.

Word came to Springer not long after the funeral plans began that no commissioner would be allowed to attend.

It did not say we were not invited; it said we would not be allowed to attend. Springer still bristled at the implied threat. I did not kill him; he killed himself. He could have found a position with any department anywhere.

After the funeral, the department began to slowly work its way back to normal operations. The new Chief settled in to his duties; the lawsuit was settled.

Now we are back on track.

Springer heard a noise, a thump coming from the second floor. That must be the contractor. The crew living quarters were right above the truck bay. He turned to the back of the truck bay, toward the stairs to the second floor. Just then he heard a crackle of static from the speakers in the ceiling. It went on for a few seconds, and then was replaced by a sound that Springer could only identify as a voice. There were no words Springer could understand, only a long, drawn out wail, hissing electronically, as if from a distance.

A chill coursed through his body, a sudden surge of fear through his chest and out to his skin that ended in his scalp, making him itch. The static voice called out again from the speakers. It was a man’s voice, Springer thought, the voice of someone in pain, someone in despair. The sound sent another chill through his gut. There was something about the voice that hinted of recognition. Then came the sound of footsteps above. He watched the ceiling as if he could see through it, following the footsteps toward the staircase.

"Okay, you upstairs, you have some explaining to do. I am a member of the board and you better have some answers. To begin with, explaining why you turned the power back on to the radio."

Then a whispering voice in the back of his head reminded Springer that all the electrical equipment had been removed months ago. He stopped at the base of the stairs, looked up at the first landing, which was dark, even though there was a window framed into the wall. The window had been removed just after the crews moved out. Plywood covered the opening, as it did every other window in the station.

This has to be some kind of joke, Springer thought as he lifted his foot up to the tread of the first step. Somebody set me up, and they are up there having a good laugh.

At the top of the stairs he yelled out: “I hope you guys are having fun.” He looked around, looked into the small TV room just to his right; nobody in there. Then he looked a little further on into the training room where the Commissioner’s had held all their meetings until the move. Overhead the speakers crackled, and he heard footsteps in the dorm. “Enough is enough. Let’s get this over with.”

The dorm was empty, just as the rest of the building had been. The air in the dorm was cold, and smelled of moldy carpet and dust. The windows were boarded up, but the skylight gave enough light to see, though that too was dimming. Outside it was moving on toward evening. Springer moved slowly through the dorm toward the door to the locker room.

Last place left to hide. He knew there was no other way out. Whoever was up here had to be in the locker-room.

Springer pushed open the door. The smell of the locker room struck him full in the face, making him step backward. It brought to mind memories of public toilets where the stench was so thick that it seemed to make the cinderblock walls slick and the air difficult to walk through. He was about to step back out when he saw the mirror above the sinks.

Just beyond the privacy wall up between the toilet and urinals was one long mirror. From the doorway Springer could see that something had been written on it; two stanzas of what must be a poem, the letters formed by some darkening material smeared by hand. The words stood out against the dusty glass, and were twinned by the silvery reflective surface of the mirror. What drew Springer’s attention first was that two of the stanza contained one word written larger and bolder than the rest. It was as if in the writing of this word, the emotion of the writer was flooding through, creating heavy, misshapen words.

It was one word:

THEY

Springer moved through the bathroom, suffering through the smell, expecting some pornographic graffiti on the mirror. Instead he read:

Where do you go
when THEY don’t want you
at the only place
you want to be?

What do you do
when THEY won’t let you do
the only thing you love to do?

Springer moved past the mirror, but as he did he could not help but watch his reflection move past. Just before he came to the end of the mirror, his reflection seemed to twist, like in a mirror at a carnival. His image changed, stretched and, for a brief moment while his image first became twisted taller, then compressed, Springer saw another figure standing behind him, unaffected by the mirror’s sudden changes. The figure was there only long enough to recognize as being a person, then it was gone. The radio crackled.

Just past the mirror were the old metal lockers the crews used for their personal gear. They were tan, six feet high, and they ran from the edge of the sink to the far wall that bordered the two showers. Each locker door had a small strip just below the upper vent – nametags; most of them faded or peeling, or both. He scanned down the row of lockers, reading the names that could still be read. Half way down the row Springer found the one he expected to find.

HAMILTON, J

The door hung open about a quarter of an inch; the handle appeared to be jammed to the side as if something weighty had struck it at an angle. Springer moved to wedge his fingers into the dark crack between the door and the locker wall when the radio burst again to life.

There was no words, no voice, but the sound no longer evoked fear or dread in him; it was just a static burst.

He reached out again, but grabbed the broken handle of the locker rather than expose his fingers to the darkness within, and pulled. He half expected something monstrous to appear in the sudden light; to be twisting on a rope from one of the coat hooks; expected that it would turn at the sudden light, its eyes flat and lifeless, a skeletal grin on its face, to look out of the locker at him. Instead he found the coat hooks empty. Springer laughed nervously.

On the shelf above the coat hooks was a sheaf of paper, about an inch thick, with the edges worn and curling up. Springer reached up and grabbed it. The paper was held together with a large binder clip at the left corner. He looked at the top page. On it were several entries into what must have been a journal. At the top of each entry was a date, a time, and a short sentence. Springer read through the first few entries, then cursed under his breath.

Quickly he flipped through the first few pages, scanning the entries. Every entry Springer read described something that one or more members of the board had done. Damn! Jimmy was documenting everything the board was doing. Looking further into the document Springer found copies of emails, some to the chief, but most of them between members of the board. Springer read through a few them. How did he get these? He kept flipping through pages until he was nearly three quarters of the way through.

Half way down a page the journal entries ended. Springer looked at the date of the last entry. It was made a month before the board decided not to renew Jimmy’s contract. The entry read:

I think it is time I ended this. It is doing me no good. Don’t know what I had in mind for it anyway. Talked with Anne and she agrees that I should just go wherever they put me, watch my back, and get out as soon as I can. She is right, but it is hard to let go…

That is where it ended. Springer reread the last entry. Go wherever they put me? It was almost as if Jimmy were expecting to be moved; demoted, maybe. It was as if he saw it coming, but did not realize to what extent they would go to move him.

Springer walked over to the sinks, put the document on the countertop, looked up at the writing on the mirror.

To his surprise, Springer saw Jimmy Hamilton standing behind him, his image reflected in the mirror. Springer whirled around, but Hamilton was not there. 'This place has me spooked. The smell is horrible, and somebody has planted this…' he reached over to the document and knocked it onto the floor. The binder clip came loose and pages slid across the floor.

Springer reached down and picked up some of the pages that had slid up against his feet. They were not journal entries. These pages were filled with poetry; long, narrow columns of stanzas, broken occasionally by spaces and titles. Springer sifted through the mess on the floor and found other pages of poetry. Coming up with a hand full of pages, he read the poem on top.

A Ghost of Me

There is a ghost of me
hanging languid in the air.

Seeing, watching.
In my vacuous eyes
the answer to the universe.

A portrait of nether,
lost, yet fulfilled.
No emotion clouds
the cloudy skin, or twitches
the silent muscles,
or fills the empty smile.

We are alone with
each other,
my ghost and me.
Neither of us afraid.

It was signed at the bottom: J.W. Hamilton.

Springer let the pages fall to the floor. He looked up at the writing on the mirror and knew the letters were written in blood. And he knew that they had been written by J. W. Hamilton. James William Hamilton. It was beginning to dawn on him what he had found.

The speaker in the ceiling came to life, only this time it was not a painful electronic scream that might have been a voice. This was a voice, though still tinged with a feedback distortion that must have been caused by the speaker.

Springer grew weak, his head felt light. He reached out and put both hands on the countertop. He read through the lines on the mirror.

Where do you go
when THEY don’t want you
at the only place
you want to be?

What do you do
when THEY won’t let you do
the only thing you love to do?

Speaking from his reflection in the mirror, his voice coming through the speaker in the ceiling, Jimmy said, “What do you do?”

“No, no,” Springer said, leaning against the countertop, closing his eyes. “You’re dead. You killed yourself. This is all some kind of joke.” Fear rose up inside him and he felt emptiness where his heart should have been. “No, no,” he said, but this time it was his fear of dying.

“Joke?”

Springer felt the floor shake; the sink began to vibrate and the mirror flexed. Springer backed away, one hand on his chest, sure that he was dying of heart failure. As he moved, the mirror twisted, coalescing toward its center until a recognizable shape showed itself.

Jimmy Hamilton’s face glared at Springer from the center of the mirror. “Was it all a joke to you?” Springer moved sideways toward the exit into the dorm, unable to take his eyes from the twisted glass of the mirror; the face in the mirror followed him. Springer turned away, pushed his way into the dorm.

At that same moment the mirror exploded, sending shards of glass throughout the locker room. Several shards of the mirror flew through the open door, following Springer. One piece of the mirror’s glass caught Springer in the forearm, scratching him enough to draw a line of blood.

“I came here to die.” Hamilton’s voice returned to the speakers in the ceiling, still made painful with the scream of feedback. “Brought that journal with me so that when they came and found my body they would know why I killed myself. But I just couldn’t do it.”

Springer opened his eyes, lifted his hand from his chest, and took in a deep gulp of air. He did not think he would die; he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. “I knew it,” he said. Springer paused for a moment to catch his breath, let the emptiness in his chest fade away. “Everyone said you were on a drunk someplace and would come back as soon as you were sober.”

Hamilton’s voice, choked with feedback, burst through the speaker. “No one cared!” The building began to shake, as if the pain in Hamilton’s voice were echoing throughout the structure. “Even after word got out, nobody gave a damn. They treated me as if I was already gone.”

This is a nightmare! A nightmare! But the voice was real, hammering at him through the speaker system that was supposed to be dead. And he could find no explanation for the face in the mirror, or the shard of glass that had cut his arm. Springer examined the cut. Blood was already beginning to darken. If this were some sick joke, it already included hallucinations and injuries.

“I did so many things for them; stood up for them when nobody else would. For that they treated me like dog shit on the bottom of a shoe, and just scraped me off.”

The shaking grew worse, more intense. Springer slowly moved toward the door that opened into the hall. “So you went home and killed yourself?” Springer said as he neared the door.

“It was the look on my son’s face. He used to be so proud his dad was a firefighter. He bragged about me. My wife couldn’t stop crying.”

Springer stopped by the door to the hall, turned and looked into the dorm. “You could have gone anywhere,” he said.

“I didn’t want to go anywhere else,” Hamilton’s voice screamed. “I wanted to work here. I started here, grew up with this department. I met my wife while I worked here. Our families are here. She hated the idea of leaving as much as I did.” His voice was losing volume. “There was nowhere else to go. Where do you go when they don’t want you at the only place you want to be?”

Springer pushed through the door and made for the stairs. Hurrying, he tried to keep his balance on the stairs by holding on to the handrail. His legs felt unstable, shaking with tingling sensations in the muscles and sharp pops of pain in his knees. He was breathing much too fast.

Springer stumbled down the last few steps and emerged off balance into the huge space of the truck-bay. He stopped near the back of the bays, where the doors to the hose tower and tool room had been. They were gone, as was the entryway to a short hall that lead back to the public restrooms and a small storage room. It had all changed. Now it was a solid wall of gray cinderblock.

Springer turned slowly, staring with growing horror at the rest of the space. The truck-bay doors were gone, replaced by the same gray cinderblock. The framed wall that separated the front offices from the bay was a shattered ruin, with the splintered ends of two-by-fours jutting up out of piles of sheetrock and broken glass. And as he stared, Springer watched a transformation take place; the building was absorbing those broken materials back into itself and replacing it with a viscous material that appeared to be coming up out of the concrete floor. A new wall was being formed; a wall without any doors or windows.

The place was being sealed around him.

“Welcome,” a voice said.

Springer turned away from the nearly-completed wall being accreted from the floor. From the back wall, now solid cinderblock, a face was beginning to form. It pushed its way through the cinderblock as if it were someone pushing up against a thin, elastic barrier.

“There is no way out,” Hamilton said. The cinderblock eyes focused on Springer; the mouth opened into a huge oval, revealing darkness that plunged backward into the wall.

Springer stepped backward, his hand again reaching up to his chest where the emptiness had returned. He began to feel light-headed, as if he were going to faint. “There has to be. This is not real.”

“Real? Yes, it is very real. This station is real, and I like it here. I think I can be successful here.” Silence, then:

“And I can help you be successful here, too.”

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