Walk Me Home

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

Brad laughed. “I didn’t. Then my car broke down, my phone died at the same time, and you came out of nowhere about two seconds later. You’re not a ghost, are you?”

She smiled rather than answering, making his heart race in a mix of fear and excitement. Her eyes shone in the glow of the streetlight, impossibly large. Teenage boys fall in love over the most fleeting of things, but those eyes went on forever.

Then she looked away. In a voice he could barely hear, she asked, “If I were a ghost, would you leave me?”

“No,” he said. The word passed his lips so fast that the sound of it startled him.

“I'd hoped you’d say that,” she told him, sounding relieved. She leaned closer and wrapped both her arms around one of his the way girls did with their boyfriends between classes. The sleeves of her tan jacket rustled as she moved. She was small enough to rest her head against his biceps; her touch pressed the inside of his coat against his skin, a startling reminder of the evening chill.

“Cold,” she said into his sleeve.

“Is your place far?”

She shook her head. “But this part of town worries me at night. People don’t know me, and if they don’t know you in the city, then you’re in danger.”

That caused Brad to glance around at the darkened windows. Tenement homes rose along both sides of the street. It was past midnight, but it seemed odd that not one building had a light burning. He thought of his dead car and cell phone. Like an E.M.P. went off and everything electronic is fried.

As if in consent to his fantasy, a street light winked out as they walked under it.

“That always happens to me,” she said with a wistful laugh.

“Me too!” Brad said. “My whole life!”

He laughed again, wishing it didn’t sound nervous.

If they don’t know you in the city, then you’re in danger.

He was a long way from his parent’s home in the suburbs, and he was an hour past curfew. Dad would not be pleased, but Brad might be able to earn some grace if he came home with a story about helping this poor girl home. She was his age and alone after midnight. How could he leave her like this? Unlikely to save him from being grounded for a week, but stranger things had happened. It wasn’t impossible that Dad might listen, give him one of those quietly proud half-smiles that brightened his eyes, and just leave it at that.

They walked together under the next few humming lights, which did not turn off. Brad scanned ahead but still detected no windows illuminated. The only light came from the glare above, which blotted out stars but fell short of banishing the shadows that filled the occasional alley.

“Don’t look,” she said, hurrying him from sidewalk to sidewalk where one building ended and its twin began.

Brad obeyed without question. He focused on the path ahead and how much he did not want her to let go of him. Peripherally, though, he spotted movement in the darkness of the alley. In Driver’s Ed, Mr. Worth had said, “The light you get from your sodium street lamps doubles peripheral vision and helps pedestrians to avoid tripping.” Brad didn’t get a good look, but whatever was in the alley was too tall to be an animal—they didn’t get bears in the city—but not quite right for a big man, either.

Her feet came down on the sidewalk in front of the next tenement just ahead of his own. Then her cheek was against his arm again. He didn’t bother to glance back.

“Thank you again for walking me,” she said.

“No problem,” he said. “I’m not from around here, either. You’re kind of walking me, too.”

“I like that,” she said and squeezed his arm tighter. She still felt cold. Brad’s breath formed clouds when he exhaled. It had been in the low sixties earlier today, but in autumn temperatures plummeted after sundown. He considered offering her his jacket, but she set a brisk pace and showed no interest in slowing. Her tan jacket was worn in places, but it would shelter her till they got where they were going. She would be home soon, and she wouldn’t want to stop to wait for him to take off his coat when she was already wearing one.

The darkened apartments continued to slumber around them. Two streetlights winked out across the road, one just ahead of where they stood, the other just behind. In front of them stretched more identical tenements—they could be the same one repeated over and over—and then darkness, as if the road ambled off into nothing. There were no lots ahead. Brad narrowed his eyes. There were also no stoplights, which meant no major cross streets. Just unlit—but maybe not empty—alleyways between buildings.

Why did she have to get me thinking about ghosts?

“You’re not from around here?” he asked.

She shook her head, rubbing her cheek against his sleeve. She made a muffled sound that might have meant anything.

“Where are you from?”

“Providence,” she said after a moment. Then she giggled. It was a brief, chiding sound that did nothing to put Brad at ease. It was the sound girls made when they got a joke that you didn’t even realize had been made.

“Are you here visiting family?”

She shrugged.

Brad nodded as if he understood. They came to another alley, two brick walls stretching into a darkness the streetlights could not penetrate. She gripped his arm and rushed forward; he kept pace easily enough. The alley might have watched them pass, but he glimpsed nothing within, even with double his usual peripheral vision due to the lights overhead.

“Where did you say you were going?” he asked.

“Up there,” she said. Then she looked up again, big eyes full of emotion. “Thank you again for walking me.”

“Sure,” he said, thinking that there was more than a joke here that he wasn’t getting.

She leaned closer, looping her arm around his waist in the overly familiar way of some girls; girls that never paid much attention to kids like Brad. She shivered against him. His arm was around her, protective, before the realization of what he was doing could make him stop. The top of her dark hair, scents of perfume and shampoo mingled, brushed his chin. He breathed deep.

“I wish my car hadn’t broken down,” he said. “We could be there by now.”

“You never would have seen me.”

Brad laughed nervously again. They were coming up on another alley, which meant another block lay behind them. The streetlight on the far side was asleep, throwing the space between into deeper shadow. Something about the broader swath of darkness struck him as menacing. She hesitated, feeling the same. 

“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Constance,” she said.

Brad introduced himself in turn, and she giggled again without looking up. What might have come across as shy from another girl instead left him uneasy. Was she laughing at him? It’s not like she could have known his name already. They’d only met three blocks back.

“What brought you here from Providence?”

“Hurry!” she exclaimed. She dropped her hands to his own, sandwiching his between both of hers and pulling him along at a run. Brad let out a surprised cry, both at the shocking strength with which she tugged him and the realization of just how cold she was. Her touch burned the flesh on both the front and back of his hand. They raced past the alley and beneath the sleeping sodium light, she just a flash of tan jacket in the darkness, not stopping until they stood beneath the next burning lamp.

The light pooled around them in a tight circle. It felt safe to Brad, but Constance peered about, still afraid.

He followed her gaze and thought he understood. Many lights flickered and snapped out. The next cone of light pierced the darkness half a block away. The gulf between seemed impenetrable. Even the tenement walls and windows appeared indistinct beyond the veil of darkness.

“What—” he started to ask, but the light overhead flickered, and she again took him by the hand. They ran. This time he worked to keep up.

She must run track, he thought and realized that she was still gaining speed. In the Olympics.

“Don’t look!” she shouted, fear bold in her voice. Faster now, threatening to pull away if Brad didn’t manage to put on more speed than ever before. He wanted to call out, to ask what was wrong, but it took all he had just to keep up. The sidewalk sped beneath him. If a foot came down wrong at this speed he would roll an ankle and tumble like a kid hitting a pothole going downhill on a bicycle.

He brought his eyes up from the ground, focusing on the flickering light ahead. He could see just one more streetlight beyond it, small but steady in the distance. The more he trained his eyes on it, though, the more he began to notice things moving at the edges of his vision. Things that had begun to take notice of the two people running down their street. Things that rose, but not like men. They loomed. Half-seen, they gave the impression of distorted limbs, disproportionate hands, eyes like craters and mouths like chasms, all darker than the night in which they dwelled. Worst of all, they looked familiar.

Don’t look!

Constance reached the light post and stumbled to a halt. The light held steady, providing a constricted but well-lighted space.

“What is going on?” Brad asked. His breath came out in a puff of vapor, but his lungs were not burning. He tried to meet Constance’s eyes, but she stared ahead, toward the last small light in the distance.

“She’s there!” Constance gasped. She grabbed his hand again, and in the instant before her icy fingers closed over his palm, Brad saw that his flesh where she had touched him was black.

They ran together for the last time, pell-mell across the yards spanning the exhausted lights whose glare no longer put the stars into retreat. Past the spaces between tenements where no creature of morning stirred. Brad did not look directly into the dark gaps—he sensed that Constance’s warning might be key to his survival--but he knew that the denizens of this place were no longer just taking notice. They closed in on their flanks.

He sensed what Constance was hoping. The light could keep them at bay. He prayed she was right.

She’s there, Brad thought. A figure stood in the cone of light ahead of them. A woman in a coarse yellow coat, hood drawn up. She held an umbrella of the same hue as her coat. It seemed impossible that he might have missed her before, but there she was. Brad focused on her, a muted sun shining beneath the streetlamp. He made her his destination. If the woman was drawing Constance, then she could draw him, too.

As before, his effort to focus on the woman ahead of them resulted in the bizarre effect of making the half-seen things around them stand out clearer. The more he tried not to see them, the more prominent they became. They stood close enough to stretch out a grotesquely long, thin arm and grab either Constance or him. Brad began to cry out, a long, ululating utterance that was the slow, horrible birth of a scream.

In his efforts not to peek left or right, he began to notice movement above and below. The sidewalk writhed beneath his feet. He refused to look down, which left him with the haunting impression that the concrete flowed beneath him like a river full of water snakes. The sky above danced with lights. Some desperate, rational part of his mind, grasping at sanity, linked these lights to an airplane coming down to land. He glanced up as they crossed into the cone of light, just enough time to see eyes staring back, bloodshot, weeping viscous tears.

The glare of the lamp overhead obliterated his view of sky and street. Sound remained, the splashing of large raindrops hitting the pavement.

Teardrops. He shuddered.

Brad opened his mouth again but found no words. He realized that, despite having run the length of a football field since the last circle of light, and also several blocks before that, his breath came easily. He moved to look back the way they had come, but Constance placed a hand on his shoulder. Cold penetrated his body. He no longer attributed it to the autumn evening.

The woman in the yellow coat, Brad thought. Why was she so hard to remember?

She stood before them, but he didn’t recall seeing her when they had arrived just a few seconds earlier. He had the wild idea that she had flickered the way the streetlights had done. Only the lamp above them now remained steady. He thought of Constance’s expression earlier when he asked her where she was going, as if she had known the direction but not how far.

“I brought him,” Constance said.

The woman inclined her head, obscured by the hood of her coat. Brad saw her chin, which curved to an angle, lips pressed into a fine line that showed neither favor nor displeasure, the hint of an aquiline nose. She extended the hand that held the umbrella. There were animals printed on it. Ravens. Owls. Sparrows.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Take it,” Constance told him. “It wasn’t your fault. When I found out, I asked to come back for you.”

Abrupt disorientation stirred memories. Brad recalled the moments before his car broke down. Lost and driving through a part of the city he did not recognize. People everywhere, but all of them were distorted, as if seen through funhouse glass. They warped and changed as he watched. Terrified, he had reached for his phone, but it writhed in his hand. It had hissed. That was when one particular figure in a tan coat ran in front of the car. He tried to brake, but the car went faster. Veered into metal and glass.

He looked at Constance. She watched him, her bottomless eyes welling with pity.

“My car didn’t break down.”

She shook her head.

“It was you.”

The corners of her mouth ticked upward a little. “When you get there, you learn so much. I found out about your friends, and that you only had one drink. It wasn’t even alcoholic. You didn’t know they put something in it.”

“When you get there?” he asked.

She did not respond.

“Oh.”

She gestured to the umbrella. “Please take it. This isn’t the right place for you. They said I could bring you home.”

“That means I—” Brad’s voice faltered. “I must have—”

She reached out again, as if to caress his cheek, stopped short. She said, more urgently now, “It’s all right. I forgive you. If you could have, you would have stopped. It would have been you taking me home.”

“I’m…”

Brad reeled. He could feel his scalp beneath his hair. Memories danced, spider-like; they hovered just out of reach. The realization of what he had done to this poor young woman, because he was hurrying home so Dad wouldn’t be pissed about curfew—because of a Coke and whatever had been added to it—all of it was too much. Something in his expression frightened Constance.

“Wait,” she said. “Brad, stop!”

He looked at the umbrella, still held with the curved handle towards him. The handle was of some white stone (Pearl) that he should not have recognized. Engraved in the stone was a name, PROVIDENCE. Memories began to form in his head that weren’t his. They crowded the ones that should have been there. When you get there, you learn so much. But his new memories could not drive out the understanding that the last thing he had done in his seventeen years of life was take away the future from what had to be the sweetest young woman on the planet.

He backed away from the umbrella. The woman holding it would soon flicker away. He sensed that if he waited that long, then he would have waited too long. She would not return.

“Brad, please,” Constance said, but he could not hear over the roar of his guilt. He had been a good son, had hoped to be a good man. He was the sort of person who would pick up a hitchhiker and take her home, even if curfew was already behind him.

She was pleading now. He heard something about their fates being connected by her choice. More that he didn’t understand. He glanced at her tear-streaked face, and he could not bear to look upon her. He did not deserve to go where she had been. He could not bear to be forgiven.

Shaking his head, Brad turned his back on the proffered umbrella. The woman in the yellow coat vanished, but he was no longer looking to see it. Constance screamed as he ran into the darkened city streets, beneath the weeping eyes and into the warped, grasping hands. He ran into his self-ordained punishment, leaving her to collapse and sob in the last circle of light in a benighted landscape.