An Offshore Wind
Hello Friends,
I wrapped up Season 2 of In Solitude, For Company in August and am prepping for Season 3. In the meantime, since it’s October and everyone is feeling a bit spooky, I asked my friend G.T. Gordan—a prolific and reclusive writer of short stories—if I could post one of his stories. He snail-mailed me this ghost story set in Charleston, South Carolina. You don’t want to read it at night!
An Offshore Wind
by G.T. Gordan
Father Saul ran a finger under his clerical collar. In Charleston’s humidity, his black clergy shirt clung to his flesh like a sausage’s casing. The weight he had gained during the pandemic didn’t help; although, he couldn’t use that as an excuse anymore since the lockdown had been over for a couple of years. Now it was just weight that he carried as part of himself. He had planned to go for a run when he got home this evening from the empty church offices, but fiddling with his keys in the heat, all he could entertain was sipping a gin and tonic in front of the air conditioner.
The rectory, which St. Luke’s provided for him and Wilbur the Pug, was a two-floor townhouse with clapboard-siding the color of sea-foam. Half the upper floor was a balcony that ran the length of the house, overlooking a small side yard. Across that yard and a short fence, an identical townhouse faced his own. The woman who lived and ran her business there rarely emerged during the day. A tiny person, maybe four and a half feet tall, she perpetually wore a hemp dress and a wedding veil. Saul gathered from fliers around the neighborhood that she called herself Madame Annabel. She offered to contact the dead. To himself, he referred to her as the Witch of Endor.
Her late night business irritated him, partly for theological reasons, but also because he rented out his back room to travelers through Airbnb. The latest tenant, a balding fellow who nevertheless maintained a ponytail, left a one-star review and claimed that ghosts kept him up all night, forcing him to cut short his vacation. He had left the room smelling of marijuana.
As Saul unlocked his front door, wind chimes clanged from the witch’s door. The scent of burning sage cloaked him. He felt her standing at his elbow and shivered, despite the heat. She had moved noiselessly across the dirty sidewalk between their houses.
She didn’t speak. Sage smoke wisped from a twisted bundle below her face. Behind the veil, her dim eyes flitted between his face and his front door, which stood ajar. Her lips worked as she gnawed their insides.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“Let me in your house,” she said.
He put his foot in the doorway, grasping for the knob, but it had drifted open.
“I don’t feel comfortable...”
“Let me in your house, priest.” Her bloodshot eyes lodged in the back of his hallway. While his head was turned, she thrusted to pass him. Her teeth were black around the gums. Even through the sage he smelled ammonia. He blocked her with his arm and caught her face in his sweaty armpit.
“No, Miss…”
“It’s Madame. Let me in.” She shook the smoking sage.
He filled the doorframe. “Get out of my door, witch.”
A growl grew from her tiny body like a cat preparing to swipe a dog. Her eyes narrowed, and seeing that she could not get by him, she left, cursing his household.
Saul trembled with adrenaline. He stood for a moment to gather his breath. He decided to skip his run, and instead, pour the tonic and gin.
About sunset, a wind rose from the ocean. Saul moved outdoors, hoping to enjoy some cool air, but it remained stifling. He lounged in a chair on the balcony, sipping his third drink. He reasoned that once a bottle of tonic water is opened he must finish it that night, or else it would go flat and be ruined. Quinine and juniper refreshed his tongue; the bubbles and ice cubes fortified him against the heat. On the side table, an unopened mystery novel he’d brought out to read had become a coaster. The illustrated protagonist on the book’s cover was chasing a silhouetted figure down a dark city block. Occasionally, he glanced up from his phone at the condensation ring his drink left on the book. The protagonist was bleeding ink onto the sidewalk now, and the silhouetted figure had turned to chase him.
When he was younger, he enjoyed mystery novels and westerns, detectives and thrillers. The fictional high stakes of cliffhanger endings to each chapter, urging the reader on, racing toward a resolution seemed a novelty against life that trudged on and on. His daily conversations that were interrupted and tasks unfinished or procrastinated never begged resolution like a story. Downstairs, he heard the door to the rented room rattle. Wilbur the Pug opened his eyes. Panic sprang on Saul as if he realized he was fifteen minutes late for an appointment. Had he forgotten a guest? He checked Airbnb. The calendar was empty until the following weekend. The rattling stopped and Wilbur’s eyes rolled back under his eyelids. The house was quiet, so he eased back into his buzz.
Twice the witch appeared on her porch, pacing, staring, then retreating back into her house. He mused while chewing a wheel of lime that he did not believe in ghosts, the wandering souls of dead people. He thought back through his catechisms and seminary textbooks. He surmised the spirits Annabel contacted were more nefarious. Demons, perhaps? They needed bodies to possess like the Gerasene demoniac. Anyway, he wasn’t worried. Waving his hand dismissively, he recited the catechism: “He delivered me from all the power of the devil.”
A city darkness cloaked the street corners, occasionally moving between garish streetlights. He sucked the remaining gin from an ice cube. The door rattled again.
“This wind,” he said. He stood, drunk and off balance. He would retrieve more ice cubes while he checked the doors.
Across the yard, the witch Annabel materialized again.
“Don’t go inside,” she squealed.
He raised his empty tumbler and shook the ice cube remains. “I’m thirsty, Madame.” He stumbled around a patio table, laughing at his clumsiness.
The palm trees on the street bent under the powerful wind. His patio door began to shake on its hinges. Wilbur barked wildly at the noise and the balcony door burst open. Saul fell this time over the table and shattered his glass against the railing. Blood spurted from his hand. The offshore wind gust onto the porch with an ammoniac stench. He felt it claw at his nostrils and mouth before blowing away from him towards the barking dog.
He pulled himself up with his good hand and leaned on the rail to catch his breath. A shard of glass protruded from the heel of his palm. Blood gushed with his pulse. He was woozy. He stood too fast and stars appeared in his vision. Wilbur growled at his feet. He peered at his dog. “What’s wrong, buddy?”
The dog lunged and bit his ankle. Saul yelled and kicked his leg. His other foot slipped in the broken glass, and he and the dog twisted over the railing, falling the full story onto his neck.
From her porch, the witch hissed. Wilbur the Pug bounced clear of Saul’s body, and when he regained his breath, he stood and limped, wheezing to the Cooper River and was drowned in the sea as the tide washed out past Fort Sumter.
Thanks for the company. Stay tuned for Season 3 of In Solitude, For Company!