Smith's Monthly #27 Page 7

  Set in the primitive area of Idaho, “Growing Pains of the Dead” tells a gentle ghost story of a young boy named Mathew who finally gets a chance to grow up one hundred years after he died.

  GROWING PAINS OF THE DEAD

  ONE

  In the towering mountains of central Idaho, storms sweep in almost without notice, sometimes dumping snow measured in feet in a matter of hours. In the summer, the heat can kill a human without water within days, and the steep slopes can trap even the most experienced hiker in a confusing mix of valleys filled with giant trees, thick brush, and fields of fallen rock. The area is now designated “primitive area” mostly because it is just too rugged to bother doing anything else with.

  There are no towns.

  There aren’t even roads.

  We live in a valley called Monumental Valley in this primitive area, off a creek called Mule Creek. From mid-September to late May, there is no way for humans in or out of the valley through the deep snow. Even in the summer, only a small trail leads over the summit and to the small human settlements in valleys beyond the steep ridges. I understand there are huge human cities beyond those valleys, but I cannot imagine them.

  Going downstream in the Monumental Valley, the trail follows Mule Creek until it blends into a river called “The River of No Return.” The trail ends there.

  We have a very simple existence here, in our steep-walled valley. Once in a while a few humans visit, usually carrying too much weight in fancy-colored backpacks.

  I like it when the humans come into the valley. They are always fun to watch, even though they never know I am there. A thousand years before my time, the first humans had come into the valley and stayed for a time. Then just over a hundred years ago my family settled here, to mine for gold, my father said.

  A huge flood wiped out where we were living and the town we lived in, and the remaining humans just eventually all left the valley, leaving us to ourselves, wandering through the trees, waiting for something. Something none of us knew or talked about or even worried about. We do not worry about anything.

  And we feel almost nothing as well.

  I remember when my dad tried to show himself to a living human once, two men who had camped in a tent on the lakeshore above our old home. He tried to communicate, show them he was there, even tossed small rocks he could move into the water. It scared them and they stayed up most of the night acting real strange. In the morning they left at first light.

  Dad just laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny. I want to understand why we walk these woods, why I never grow older, why I don’t leave the valley, even on the warm summer days when the trail is open and nothing blocks my way.

  When I mention such things to my mother, who sits all day in the trees next to an old gravestone with the writing worn off by the weather, or my father, who wanders the main street of the old town under the water, they both just tell me that is the way of things.

  When I asked them why we look like humans, but yet are not human, they told me we were human, once, but we died and can no longer be human. When I asked what death was, they simply told me it is the moment between being human and not being human.

  I did not understand, and when I told them that, they smiled and said I was too young to understand. But on other times, they told me I will never grow older. Only humans grow older.

  I want to grow older.

  I want to understand.

  There are fifty of us in this valley, from the summit to the raging waters of The River of No Return. We talk only rarely, and we do not often laugh. We simply sit or walk the deer trails.

  The oldest of us is a mother with a baby, dressed in animal skins with colored beads made from clay. My father told me she has been in the valley for a thousand years, and she does not speak our language. I have never spoken to her, and in the one hundred years I have been in the valley, the baby has not grown, just as I have not grown. The mother has been carrying the baby on her back for over a thousand years. I cannot imagine that or understand it either, but there seemed no point in talking with my parents about it.

  TWO

  Everything changed for me one warm spring day. I had decided to walk up the trail toward the summit, going to visit the three who lived in the ghostly image of an old hotel that used to stand at the crest of the trail. One girl there is my age, and I enjoy her company on warm days, even though she seldom talks. My parents told me I did not know her when I was a human. She died before we came to the valley.

  I still like her, like her plain blue dress, her scuffed black shoes, her smile, when she does smile.

  I am halfway up the trail, at a point where it crosses a rockslide, when a human hiker with a large blue backpack stops just ahead of me and stares.

  On my left the slope goes almost straight down for a thousand feet into the trees around the stream below. On my left, the rock slope climbs very steeply, too steep to hike up, for almost two thousand feet. There is still snow on the top ridgeline, snow that feeds the streams below.

  “You can’t be here, too,” she says.

  I am used to humans talking even when no other human was around. This young human, a woman who was younger than my mother, is dressed in very short shorts and a soft shirt of some kind that was loose at her waist. My mother would have called her clothing indecent, but I have grown used to the way the few modern humans dressed who came to the valley in the summers.

  My parents never understood why I even paid attention to the humans, but decided I was just being a normal, curious boy and after twenty or so years, they didn’t bother to even comment on my habits.

  I step up the slope, just off the narrow trail, and stop to wait for her to pass. I have never liked having a human walk through me, and decided that if I could help it, I would not let that happen. It felt like walking through a fire, from what I could remember of the heat of a fire. We did not often feel much of anything. Feeling seemed to be a human experience that ended with death.

  She does not continue forward, but instead stares at me, seeming to talk to me.

  “Is there not any place on this planet you ghosts do not roam?”

  My father had used the term ‘ghosts’ a few times to describe us, and every time my mother had hushed him, telling him we were not ghosts, we were simply waiting for the next stage of life.

  “I do not know,” I say to the young woman. “I live in this valley with my parents and others.”

  “I had so hoped,” she says, pulling off her heavy pack, dropping it on the narrow trail, and sitting down on a large rock. Then she breaks into tears, something I have seldom seen humans do over the hundred years. I remember I used to cry when I was alive at times, but had never cried since I had left being a human.

  “Hope what?” I ask, moving closer to her, but stopping within ten feet.

  She looks up at me. “Hoped to find a place where there are no ghosts.”

  “Then you can see us?” I ask. It is an obvious question, but one that I needed to ask because in my experience humans could not see any of us.

  She nods and the tears keep coming, even though now she seems to be looking out over the narrow but beautiful valley at the steep hillside beyond. “I started seeing you after an accident last spring. There are far more ghosts than there are humans in some places, did you know that? Even here.”

  “I can show you where there are none of my kind,” I say, wanting to ask her more questions, but deciding not to at the moment.

  She looks directly at me. “You can? Where?”

  I point back toward where my parents are. “There is an old town named Roosevelt under a lake down the hill. A stream comes in near the lake. If you follow the stream up the hill, in about a half-day’s hike, you will find an old gold mine. There are none of my people there and we have no reason to leave this valley and go there.”

  She jumps to her feet, clearly excited. “Will you show me the way?”

  “I will,” I say.

  She bends over, gr
abs the strap of her clearly heavy backpack and swings it up on her shoulder. The weight makes her stagger, her foot slips on the loose rock of the trail, and she goes over the edge of the trail with a scream, pulled by the heavy weight of her pack.

  I watch as she tumbles down the rock slope, gaining speed until a thousand feet below she crashes into the trees, followed by a small avalanche of stones following her. Her screams had stopped long before she reached the bottom.

  THREE

  I move back down the trail about a half-mile, then take a deer trail off toward the stream, moving up the valley through the brush. I find her sitting on a rock about ten feet from the remains of her twisted, bloody human body.

  She sees me coming and smiles. “That wasn’t very smart on my part, was it?”

  “Did dying hurt?”

  She frowns at her mangled human body. “No, actually. And I have a hunch I should be angry, but I don’t feel much of anything at the moment, to be honest. That’s kind of nice.”

  “That’s normal,” I say. “I can still show you the way.”

  She points to a meadow through the trees, a small place where two deer are grazing in the sun. “I think I will stay here. It is so beautiful.”

  “May I come visit you?” I ask. “I would like to learn what the world outside this valley is like.”

  She glances back up the slope she had tumbled down when human. “Can you leave the valley?”

  “Nothing seems to stop me,” I say, feeling slightly worried about her question.

  She nods. “Give me time to get used to this and I will tell you about the world beyond that ridge. What is your name?”

  I am about to turn away, to give her time, but her question startles me and I stop. I think for a moment. “I was called Mathew when I was human.”

  I remembered my parents calling me that before, when I was human, and my mother continued using that name the first few years of us not being human. Now I was never called anything at all.

  She smiles again. “Mathew, I am Connie. Thank you for offering to help me.”

  It is my turn to smile. “Connie, it is very nice meeting you. I am sorry you are no longer human.”

  She glances at her battered human body a short distance away. “I don’t think I miss it.”

  With that, I turn and leave, going down the valley to where I can follow the deer trail up the path to the ridge, then on up to the old lodge on the ridge, continuing my original journey. I am now curious as to the young girl’s name.

  And how she became non-human.

  I remember how I became non-human. I fell asleep one night, very sick, and at some point in the middle of the night, while the snow fell outside our small cabin, I was no longer human. They buried my human body in the small cemetery where my mother sits most of the time. My mother said I was only fourteen years old at the time, far too young to die.

  My mother joined me as non-human one night that same winter when she sat beside my grave through a snow storm. My father was shot in a fight in a saloon in the now underwater town of Roosevelt while drunk a very short time later.

  My friend in the scuffed black shoes who lives on the ridge tells me she is named Lareina, after her grandmother. She is surprised I ask her name and then she is surprised I tell her mine. It seems to please her, as it does me. She also died at age 14 she tells me, also from a sickness.

  “Walk with me?” I ask her, and we start down the narrow mountain road that leads from the ridge toward the human settlements beyond. I am surprised there is no feeling that I should turn back, and she doesn’t complain.

  “A full day’s walk down this road,” Lareina tells me, “there is an old mining town called Stibnite. There are many of us living there.”

  “And beyond that?”

  She shakes her head. “I have never gone beyond that, toward the next town where humans live.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “I have never had a reason to do so,” she says.

  We walk in silence until I decide to tell her about the hiker who went from being human to one of us right before my eyes earlier.

  “Can I meet her?” Lareina asks. “I also would like to learn about the world of humans.”

  “I do not think she will mind,” I say. “We must just give her time to adjust to not being human.”

  Lareina smiles at me. “My mother says that time is something we have a great deal of.”

  I think I understand that.

  We walk to the old town of Stibnite, walk around the town, then start back. It takes us two days. We walk both during the beautiful clear days and during the night under the stars.

  There are more of us in Stibnite than in the valley I live in, but most seem to be miners who ignore us. There are only a few children our age and Lareina and I stop and talk with them, learning their names and telling them our names as well.

  When we leave, they want us to come back.

  For the first time, it seems important to me that someone knows my name.

  Lareina and I stop to greet her mother, then Lareina decides to walk with me the length of the trail all the way to the waters of The River of No Return. It takes us four days. On the return we decide to stop and talk with Connie, the hiker.

  Connie’s human body has begun to decay and been torn apart by animals, but there is no sign of the non-human Connie.

  I feel disappointment, and I tell Lareina. She says she feels it also. It is unusual for us to feel anything.

  We start up the trail to the lodge. Connie is sitting on the same rock on the rockslide where she sat before she fell, staring down the slope where her human form died.

  “It is very strange not being alive,” she says as we sit down next to her.

  “I do not remember very well being alive,” I say.

  “Neither do I,” Lareina says.

  “How long have you been dead?” Connie asks.

  “I died of the flu in 1906,” Lareina says.

  I thought quickly, figuring I got sick in 1912 and I tell them that.

  “Wow the year is 2012, a hundred years,” Connie says. “Both of you, frozen in time. That is a very long time.”

  We sit on the trail in silence, then Connie asks, “So there is nothing after this for us ghosts, us non-humans as you call us?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “No one I’ve talked to seems to know. So we wait. But I would like to grow up.”

  Lareina agrees.

  Connie stares at us, then back down at the valley below. We sit there like that for a long time, until finally Connie talks again.

  “As much as it seems right for me to sit here and let time pass, waiting for the next life after this stage, I think I need to go back to the city, Back to New York, to where humans live, to where I lived before I attempted to escape from people like I am now.”

  “And what would you do there?” Lareina asks.

  “Explore, learn, keep living, keep moving,” Connie says. “Maybe find the answer to what comes next. Someone, somewhere should know.”

  “I would like to see the world beyond this valley,” I say. “Can I walk with you?”

  “I would like to see it as well,” Lareina says.

  For some reason, that pleases me.

  “The more the merrier,” Connie says, smiling and standing. “Shall we get going?”

  I glance back down the valley in the direction of the lake and the cemetery and think about telling my parents. But I doubt that they would even notice I was not walking my trail as normal. Sometimes it had been a full year between times we spoke. There had just been no reason to speak after all the decades.

  “I am ready,” I say, standing.

  “So am I,” Lareina says.

  I can feel faint excitement, faint fear, faint feelings of happiness. I like all three feelings and I smile. I remember feelings like that when I was alive.

  “Is this an adventure?” I ask.

  “I would say it is,” Connie says. “Having adventures and
experiences are part of growing up.”

  “I want to grow up,” I say.

  “So do I,” Lareina says.

  Connie reaches out and takes my hand, and for the first time in a long time, I can feel another person’s hand in my own.

  “Then let’s go have some adventures,” Connie says.

  I take Lareina’s hand in turn and she beams, staring at my hand in hers.

  I like the feel of Lareina’s hand, I like the idea of having an adventure in the human cities.

  And most of all, I like the idea of finally growing up.

  Private Detective Pilgrim Hugh loves solving strange cases. Very little stumps him for very long.

  But a woman by the name of Deep Blue, dead in her empty apartment and dyed blue, seemed like an impossible case.

  And more than Hugh knows depends on his quick solution.

  Pilgrim Hugh once again rides to the rescue in his stretch limo driven by his brilliant assistant. If you love puzzle crime stories, grab “The Case of the Dead Lady Blues.”

  THE CASE OF THE DEAD LADY BLUES

  A Pilgrim Hugh Incident

  ONE

  Pilgrim Hugh stared at the body of the woman even though he had no desire to stare or look or even glance. Blue was just not an attractive color on a redhead, and this woman had clearly been very attractive in her pink-skinned time.

  Dead was not attractive either. And she was most certainly dead, stretched out in the middle of the polished oak floor.

  Her skin was deep blue, clashing with her long red hair. Her white slinky dress also seemed a pale blue from the shade of her skin showing through. The dress left little to the imagination, allowing Pilgrim to see clearly more than she likely wanted him to see in her own death.

  Chances are she no longer cared, however.

  The apartment where she lay had been scrubbed clean. The oak hardwood floors had been polished, the off-white walls all wiped down to a gloss, and not a stick of furniture or window blinds or anything else but a blue body remained.