The Old Boy

An all new ghost story, just in time for the holiday season...

The Veil’s ink-stained wretches have been working overtime to complete two long essays in time for the new year. In the meantime, we offer this amuse bouche, an autumnal ghost story in the old style.

The Old Boy

They called their annual weekend piss-up the “Old Boys Weekend,” an ironic tribute to the middling, small-town university where they’d all met. John hosted the event at his cottage, a riverside bungalow his immigrant father built in the sixties with the help of his construction worker buddies, all dead now like John Senior. Pete brought the food and did most of the cooking, Craig was in charge of the booze, and Chris supplied a bag of dope and cooked the breakfasts. They didn’t let John spend a dime. It was his cottage, his boat, his river—no John, no Old Boys Weekend.

The Weekend came late that year, bumped forward into mid-October by the kind of mid-life scheduling conflicts too dreary to even complain about, so that Friday evening found the boys dressed in fall jackets and sweaters and ball caps. The fire was lit, the barbeque cooling after a steak dinner, and twelve empties were already piled next to the beer cooler as the boys settled into the lawn chairs John had set up by the fire pit. Across the river, the setting sun compressed the light it into a radiant orange dome, and the joint Chris was rolling would put a few more bright dabs on the magical scene.

The joint went around, leaving a trail of pungent smoke and sighs, and they started in on the old stories, razzing each other about crazy girlfriends and piss-ups and university affectations—Pete’s dalliance with electronic dance music, Chris’s lover who ran off with her sessional instructor, Craig’s insufferable Marxist phase and John’s equally cringeworthy dalliance with Ayn Rand—and they laughed about the enthusiasms and vows since shuffled off. Chris really got them going with “Pukey Pepperoni” story, when Craig, after eight beers, many bottle tokes and half a Big Jerry’s pizza, started gagging and coughing.

“And I’m like, dude, are you all right? So Craig looks at me, opens his mouth to say something—and he pukes in my face!”

Craig was laughing the hardest, taking his licks like an Old Boy.

“I was picking pepperoni out of my hair for a week!”

“If only I could remember what I wanted to say. It seemed important at the time.”

It was a good story, but better were to come. With the mosquitos gone for the season, the evening was about as perfect as it got on that narrow bend in the river where John’s dad had built his dream cottage. The joint went around again and the boys nuzzled down into a collective buzz to watch the sun set over the black tree line.

The stories would come.

John was staring into the hot coals, his hands dug into his jacket pockets. No one had said it, but his mood was somber. Chris shot Pete a look.

Pete took the hint. “Hey buddy, did the wife keep you up last night?”

“I was here last night.”

“So your right hand kept you up?”

Chris displayed his watch. “First masturbation joke at: four hours, seventeen minutes! Do better, guys, do better.”

John smiled and he stood up and walked over to the wood pile. He was quick and athletic for a guy in his late forties, and he played rec hockey and drums in a weekend jam band, but to look at his stiff movements tonight he could have been ten years older. He wedged the log into the fire’s blazing orange and blue core and when he sat down he let out a sigh, his attention fixed on the tree line across the river, his eyes and mouth tightened to slits—he could have been a helmsman tacking his boat to safer waters.

“I dreamt about Dennis again last night,” he finally said.

“One of those dreams?” Craig sounded pissed off.

“Oh yeah.”

“You said they ended, like years ago. You said it.”

“Guess I was wrong.”

“Dennis Fucking Porter,” Pete said. For reasons no one understood, he’d taken Dennis’ suicide harder than any of the Old Boys. Chris called it a case of hero worship gone bad; he said that for Pete, Dennis’ suicide killed the last faint hope of future glory for all of them.

As an explanation, it made sense. Dennis had been the brightest of the Old Boys, the most talented, the most likely to write his name on the lips of all the bright boys and girls dreaming their dreams in mid-sized universities and colleges across the continent. He introduced them to bands and books and movies they’d have been too timid or conventional to discover on their own, and not because he wanted to be cool or avant garde. They all hated the word, but Dennis was authentic. He was the quiet one, the deep one, his chronic shyness preventing from chatting up the arty girls he fell in love with every semester —“hot nerds in black,” in Pete’s words. All through the undergraduate years Dennis was their in-house mascot and cultural guru, a role they expected him to play until they were old men arguing over the best brands of pipe tobacco and slippers.

“You remember the dreams, right.” John met eyes with each of them. “After he died.”

Of course they remembered—no matter how busy their lives got, John always phoned them the day after one of the dreams. The boys, with the exception of Craig, even began to look forward to the calls; they were like distant signals from a more mysterious world.

In the dreams John would be sitting alone in a public place, a bar or an arena or a park, when Dennis would just walk up and start a conversation. John could never remember what they talked about but he was sure that Dennis didn’t ask him about his job or his family or about the other Old Boys. It was all small talk of a sort that you’d share with a friend of a friend, awkward and general but drawing on just enough shared experience to compel participation. John kept up his end. He nodded when he was supposed to nod and he asked polite questions to fill in the awkward silences, aware that Dennis, like a mentally ill man whose attention is turned entirely inwards, was either unable to return the favour. Soon awkwardness turned to discomfort and discomfort to fear, and then it would hit John with a jolt: he was talking to a dead man.

He was talking to his best friend’s ghost.

Even when the shock didn’t wake John, the dream ended soon after. He would tell Dennis that they shouldn’t be talking, that it wasn’t right, and Dennis would agree, he’d say he understood, of course he did, and he was sorry to have bothered him. All the while Dennis looked so sad and stricken, like a loser kid learning that he wasn’t invited to the sleepover party. Then the dream ended.

“What I never told you guys,” John continued, “is why the dreams ended.”

“Because you finally got over Dennis’ death?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Craig.”

“We’re not doing this again, are we?” Craig hated this conversation. He wanted to be telling war stories or playing darts in the rec room with the cheesy topless calendar from the 1970s.

“Look.” John held up his hand. “You don’t have to believe that I actually met Dennis’ ghost in those dreams. I don’t know if I did. But the dreams weren’t like any I’ve ever and they weren’t about me, they were about Dennis, about him not accepting his death. He was confused, he was uncomfortable. In the first dream, I remember thinking, He’s more weirded about by this than I am.”

“Sounds like a ghost to me.”

“Not necessarily,” Pete said. “If I put on a song while you were asleep, the dream would change to include the song you were hearing. The song came from outside, but your mind made it part of the dream.”

“It doesn’t matter.” John’s voice had an edge. “The dreams ended because I finally told Dennis to leave me the fuck alone. I told him he was dead!”

“Harsh.”

John turned on Craig, saw his expression and started to laugh. They all did.

“I gave him some tough love. Shit, Jane was pregnant with Liam, and Brendan was teething, and I couldn’t have my sleep interrupted by the dead.”

“How did Dennis react?” Pete asked. “When you told him.”

“Not surprised, exactly, but hurt, deeply hurt. I felt guilty for months.” John drained the beer and took another from the cooler and cracked it open. “That was, what, seven years ago? I’d been having those dreams for almost ten years, but not a single one since. Until last night.”

Craig leaned forward to say something but thought better of it.

“It was…terrible. You know how in the original dreams Dennis always meets me in a neutral place, like a bar or a park bench? And he always walked into my dream from offstage, like an uninvited actor in a play.” He paused to make sure they understood the import. “Last night? He was here.”

There were loud exhalations and mutters, but only Chris said it out loud: “I’m getting a motel!”

“Don’t worry, he won’t be back.”

“How do you know?”

“Just listen...”

John stared into the fire. “All right, this is the creepy part. When Dennis moved to Toronto, he crashed at my place for a few months. Shit, we must have been twenty-two?”

They were familiar with this chapter from the Book of Dennis. John might have been the first Old Boy bold enough to make the post-graduation trek to Toronto, but it was shy, earnest Dennis who lived out the vaguely bohemian fantasies they’d all cultivated in that provincial, mid-sized university town. After landing a gig bussing tables at a cool Tex Mex dive bar, Dennis was invited to move into a shared house in the west end, a loose commune of wanabee poets and artists and rock stars that hosted legendary parties. Within a year Dennis was writing about the city’s music scene for an alternative weekly and selling longer pieces to magazines. Soon all of the Old Boys were staking their claim in the big city, but they could only observe, with equal parts envy and admiration, Dennis’s transformation into a scenester and working writer, one who was chased after by the hot nerds of his undergraduate dreams.

He was dead by his own hand a week before his thirtieth birthday.

“So last night,” John continued, “I’m here, asleep, when something wakes me up. Suddenly I’m wide awake. It’s pitch black. Dead quiet. I figure I’m at home in bed but then I remember helping Lisa put the kids to sleep before I drove up here. I’m thinking, Where am I? I look at the alarm clock: three a.m. But something doesn’t add up: I’m at the cottage but I can feel Lisa lying next to me. Her or someone. And then I knew—it was Dennis.”

Craig told him to fuck off.

“No, listen. When Dennis moved to the city, he used to crash with me on my futon. He always slept on his back. And last night, I could tell that whoever was lying there was lying on their back. It was Dennis. Even the time lined up: three a.m. I always woke up from those dreams at three a.m.” John shifted forward to adjust the burning logs with his stick, giving the men permission to grab another beer. “Then he spoke.”

“What did he say?” Chris said.

“I can’t remember. It was just conversation, kind of disconnected, like we were exchanging memorized phrases. Then the bedroom light came on—I didn’t do it—and I could hear a party in the living room, muffled music, voices, laughter. And here’s the thing: in the dreams I used to have about Dennis, he was just confused about his situation. Like he knew he was dead but couldn’t process the information. Understandably. Last night was different. Dennis was scared. He was afraid to get out of bed. Then he touched my hand, and the dream changed. We were standing in the living room. The music was blaring a Beatles song but the lyrics were all wrong. There were people all around us, talking, laughing—they were so loud but they sounded far away. And I couldn’t quite see them. They were only visible by the atmosphere they displaced, if that makes sense. Dennis saw them clearly, though. He kept looking around, searching for a face in the crowd, and I have never seen anyone so terrified.”

“That’s awful.” Pete was shaking his head.

“It was. Dennis was still holding my hand and it...” John seemed to wrestle down a shudder. “His skin had no temperature. Or texture. It was just…displacement. His other hand held something just big enough for him to close his fingers around. I knew, like how you know things in a dream, that he didn’t want me see what he was holding, and a second later I knew what it was. I knew why he was hiding it and I knew who was hiding it from. I knew everything.”

Chris was passing another joint, and the darkness was rising up from the river and down from the trees. The breeze picked up and the flames bent and shed sparks like autumn trees in a storm.

“This is the important part,” John told them. “You know about Karina.”

“The less I hear about that bitch the better,” Craig said.

“I’m afraid you’re about to hear a lot more. Dennis changed when he met Karina—I could never figure out if she brought out his true self, whatever that means, or some sub-personality that might otherwise have remained dormant. How do I put this? If Dennis could have painted his ideal woman, it would have been Karina: high forehead and black hair, milk-white skin, full lips and those giant blue eyes. She looked a bit like a doll, but one whose seen too much, if that makes sense. She was the Queen of the Scene, man. She was dating the original guitarist of Hardwar when she was sixteen, he even wrote a song about her, and there were the stories connecting her to his suicide. Dennis saw her walk into the bar in her red dress and black leather jacket. She looked so cool and so bored, but on the inside—oh, the inside, what fires burned for any man bold enough to stoke them.”

“That is some fine fucking dope!” Chris shouted.

“Dennis had a major thing for the Vampira type,” Pete said.

“Never understood that,” Craig said.

“There’s no accounting for taste, brother. Look, I’m the only one of us who knew Dennis in High School.” They were used to Pete bringing up this point. “We weren’t really friends, because he didn’t have any friends. He was a loner. The ignorant shit kickers at our school didn’t like his weird music, and they let him know it. Even if a girl had liked him, she wouldn’t have admitted it.”

John pondered Pete’s words, adding them to whatever troubling conclusion his story was building to. “Well, Dennis finally got his dream girl. They went out one night, and within three months they’d moved in together. He had his bartending and writing gigs, and she was working as a waitress and even danced the odd night in a peeler bar.”

“Did Dennis know that?” Craig said.

“Oh, he liked the idea of all those men drooling over her—straight types, with money—and at the end of the night she goes home with him. He’d pick her up and they’d hit the booze cans and late-night parties, always at the best table like a knight and his lady. Doing drugs to stay up, booze to go to sleep.”

“What did she see in him?” Craig asked. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, but it sounds like she could have had any guy she wanted.”

“What did she see in him?” John said. “The same thing we did: brains, talent, vision. She saw that light inside him, and she reflected his light out to the world and back to him, and that made her brighter. He was going to dedicate a great novel to her.”

“Until she sucked the life out of him.”

“She didn’t need to. She had more vitality or life force than anybody I’ve ever met. She was a dynamo—he said she never slept more than five hours a night and only ate twice a day. And for all of her pale beauty, she was as physically strong as Dennis and she never got sick. But there was something dark about her—like, if I believed in auras, hers would have been blood red and black. Nothing you could put your finger on. It’s more like she had no inner life, you know? She wasn’t alive until someone saw her living, and that made her unstable, dangerous. Dennis spent so much time keeping up with her and her wild, beautiful friends that he had no time to write. I mean, why write tales of beauty and ecstasy when you’re living one? Without his writing, Dennis was just another party boy with no money and no future. And he lacked Karina’s vitality. He got worn down while she gathered reserves of power. He knew he was losing her. He got this desperate idea to winter down with her in a mountain cabin while he wrote his great novel. But she was tired of playing the Muse to a dud. She finally left him, and you know the ending.”

They’d gotten the details at the wake: Dennis’ long heroin binge, the pawning of his treasured book and record collection, his last night in a rooming house alone with a picture of Karina and a razor blade.

“I saw Dennis a week before he killed himself, at a donut shop near my place. He was in rough shape, manic but half-catatonic at the same time. He kept telling me that Karina was still in love with him, she just needed some time alone to realize they were meant to be together. He said she had a deep wound and she felt things too deeply.” John waved his hand before anyone could speak. “Listen, I know how naive that sounds but Dennis believed that she was a great soul elevated by sensitivity and tragedy. And he was going to get her back—he was convinced of it. He had something of hers, he said, something so precious she couldn’t live without it. He called it a piece of her soul. A talisman.”

“You’re losing me,” Craig said.

“He wasn’t being metaphorical. He had it with him, right there in the donut shop: Karina’s talisman. It was a round basket with a lid, a little bigger than a ring box, woven out of hemp I think. The weaving was exquisite, you could see it was worth a bit of money and it was really old. He shoved it under my nose. What does it smell like, John? I said it smelt like cloves. What else? There was another smell, pungent, fungal—I couldn’t place it. He barked out the name of a spice I’d never heard of and can’t remember now, then he put the basket on the table and opened the lid. There was a guitar pick in there. A slip of paper. Maybe a bone? And a marble, a very old one. He shut the lid and shoved it back into his hoodie pocket. Before I could he ask he said that the basket had belonged to Billy Dee, from Hardwar, and it had been handed down to him from a great uncle, a Dutch sailor who got it from his grandfather. That’s why it smelt like cloves: the great great grandfather worked on the spice ships sailing out of Indonesia. Billy her told that his ancestor, the original owner, kept his glass eye in the basket when he slept.”

“And great-grandpa was a sorcerer, right?” Craig asked.

“A notorious occultist, but you were close. I mean, Billy might have made the whole thing up, or whoever passed on the basket to him did, but Karina believed it enough to break into Billy’s apartment after he killed himself and steal the basket. Dennis said she kept her dope in it. She would take out the basket, wave her finger over the lid in this zigzagging motion, like a snake charmer’s flute, and she’d pop off the lid and say, We’re going on a magic carpet ride tonight… Then they’d get high. She kept the basket on her bedside table and sometimes he’d catch her staring at it while they had sex. She even spoke to it like it was a pet or a doll when she was coming down from a high or at the end of a binge. It drove Dennis a little crazy, that she valued this basket more than the chapbook of poems he’d dedicated to her.”

“So he stole it to spite her,” Pete said. “He must have been desperate.”

“No, he stole it so that she’d be forced to find him. And when she did, he would—I don’t know, win her back somehow? By that point he half-believed that the basket was charged with occult power. He clearly loathed the thing. He said the smell reminded him of rotting flowers.” John gave them a few moments. “I don’t know if she tracked Dennis down before he died, but if she did, he didn’t give her back the basket. I know because in the dream last night, he had the basket—that’s what he was holding in his other hand. Karina’s talisman. And as soon as I realized that, everything and everyone in the room became clearer. I could see the partygoers.” He shook his head. “Their faces were hideous. Their features were distorted, or simplified. You know how these celebrities get so botoxed and nipped and tucked you can only really focus on their dead eyes and cheek bones and puffy mouths—the partygoers were like that, only so much worse. Their features had calcified somehow. Then the crowd all turned toward the living room door at the same time, like a school of fish alerted to a shark’s arrival. The women started primping their hair, the men all squared their shoulders. Someone was coming, you could feel their presence before they arrived. Dennis tried to squeeze my hand. He was terrified, and he nodded before I could ask him. It’s her, he said. She wants it back. He showed me the basket. His face: I’ve never seen anyone led to the gallows before but that’s what they would look like. The room felt oppressive. There was a pressure in the air, a heavy weight that sucked the air out of my lungs. The crowd parted. I caught a glimpse of Karina’s leather jacket, her red dress, but a kind of gelatinous shadow cloaked her like a caul. She held her hands out before her as she walked—I don’t think she could see very well. She was still adjusting to the place.”

Chris asked what he meant.

“Let me finish. As Karina made her way across the room, I could feel myself leaving the dream. My body couldn’t stand the pressure. But before I left I pulled Dennis toward me and told him to give her the basket. You don’t need it, I said. Throw it away! He nodded at me. He was saying, yes, I was right, he had to let it go, and he would, in time, when he was ready. Maybe. I don’t know. Then I was back in bed, alone, in the dark. The house was quiet. I fucking leapt out of bed and put all the lights on. I had a hunch, so I googled Karina’s name. It took a while. She’d taken her husband’s name. He was a record producer, in big demand before the recording business went belly up. She’d filed for divorce a few weeks ago—I guess he didn’t have the chops to keep up with her anymore. Well, Mr. Producer wasn’t going to let anybody else have her, so he shot her five times and put the last bullet in his own head. That was three days ago. She’s dead.”

John opened another beer. They could hear the faint flow of water past the dock moorings below, but to look at it, the river might be a solid band of volcanic black rock or one of those prehistoric tar pits, entombing unsuspecting mastodons and sabertooth tigers. No one spoke for at least five minutes.

“I’m going to roll a three-paper joint,” Chris finally said. “And Pete, you’re going to back that pathetic mini van down to this fucking lawn and put on some real tunes.”

John looked better already.

“And then,” Chris said, “we shall puzzle over this and other mysteries.”

“And we’ll say a prayer for him,” John said.

Even Craig nodded.

“A prayer for the best of the Old Boys. It can only help.”