The Far Hill
“There are
people in the room at night,” he said.
It was
broad daylight, visiting hours, a white, disinfected sunlight streaming in
through the unshaded hospital windows. I
could hear the murmur of three p.m. traffic from the city street below, the
wheezing of air brakes as the buses made their stops and starts. He was sitting up in bed, two tubes jammed up
his nose for oxygen, another one sending a drip into his arm. The full head of hair, steel-gray well into
his seventies, had turned a snowy, otherworldly white.
“What people?” I
asked. “You mean doctors, a nurse coming
in?”
He shook his head and pointed, and my eye traveled
involuntarily across the room.
“They stand
against the wall,” he said. “All I can
see is their shadows. A tall thin man, a
heavy-set woman, and a little boy.
They’re here all night, watching me.”
My mother and
older brother hadn’t arrived yet. He was
telling me this because I was the only one in the family who was likely to
believe him, who wouldn’t assume that he was in the early stages of dementia.
“What do they
want?” I asked him. He stared at me, the
tubes in his nose distorting his features.
“Who are they?” I persisted.
At first, I
thought he wasn’t going to respond, but then he glanced around nervously at the
cream-colored walls blank as movie screens, lowered his voice, and spoke.
“I think they’re
people who died in this room. A tall
thin man,” he repeated, as if he were seeing them, “a heavy-set woman, and a
little boy. This is a goddamn hospital room,” he added. “Do you realize how many people have died in
this place?”
“You’re not going
to die, Dad,” I assured him.
He looked at me
doubtfully. He was eighty-eight, and his
lungs, battered by seventy years or more of cigarette smoke, were beginning to
shut down. The truth is, I believed what
he was telling me. He had one foot in
the other world already.
My mother and
brother swept in, dispelling the shadows and ending abruptly one of the most
interesting conversations I’d ever had with my father. I tried to tell my mother what he’d said, but
she waved me away and wouldn’t hear it.
She busied herself with punching my father’s pillows into shape, and
soon the usual round of family stories, told so often I could’ve recited them
by heart, crowded out every other topic.
Two days later, my father was released from the hospital,
and he lived for another seven months after that. He seemed to recover completely, and then,
very suddenly he was gone. In the
interim, I could never again get him to talk about the shadows on the
wall. That brief exchange in the
hospital room was all we ever got.
My sister arranged a memorial service in the eighth-floor
lobby of the high-rise in Clearwater where he’d lived for the last six years of
his life. She hired a bartender, put out
some hors d’oeuvres, and set up a projector on a table along one wall that
flashed pictures of my father on a screen.
I watched the succession of photographs, his face aging slowly as black
and white gave way to color shots, and wondered which shifting, disappearing incarnation
was most truly him. But then I recalled
the story that had always told me who he was.
It was autumn, 1945. He stepped
off the bus on a corner two blocks from his house, still in uniform, gone three
years in the war. His mother walked past
but stopped when she saw him, though she hardly recognized him at first. Oh,
it’s you, she said. Then, The key’s under the front mat, she told
him and hurried off to her card game, leaving him standing there, the fall
sunlight drifting through the trees, his sea bag at his feet.
An hour into the
service, the elevator doors parted, and a sailor in dress whites marched
solemnly into our gathering. He was
escorted by a Marine in a high-collared blue jacket with brass buttons and a
red stripe running the length of each creased trouser leg. The room went silent at once. They’d brought a CD player, and they stood
saluting as the speakers played Taps. The light froze, and the afternoon itself
seemed to come to attention. Then,
between them, they folded a flag with their white-gloved hands to a neat, crisp
triangle and presented it to my weeping mother, the stars facing up.
I spent the
remainder of that afternoon talking to some of the people who lived in the
building – blue-haired ladies smelling of powder and their gallant, ageing
spouses in bowties and seersucker sport coats.
Their stories, spoken laconically as the honey-colored Florida sun
slanted in and splashed on the rug, gave me a sense of what my father’s time
there had been like. For the last few
months of his life, he’d taken to patrolling the perimeter of the building, an
eighty-nine-year-old man in a wheelchair with a cane laid across his knees, an
oxygen tank hooked to the back of his chair, and the mask he preferred not to
wear hanging by a strap from his grizzled chin.
He wore the Greek fisherman’s cap we’d bought for him on the sponge
docks at Tarpon Springs a few towns over.
I could see him clearly, wheeling his chair under the shadows of palm
fronds, heat rising in waves above the flowering oleander. He reminded me of some intrepid soul
stationed alone on a jungle island to watch the skies for planes, back in the
war again, the enemy closing in.
About six weeks later, on a warm day in the middle of
October, I was crossing a parking lot on campus, walking back from the mailroom
to the old brick building that housed English and math, when I stopped suddenly
in mid-stride. Backing up, I waved a
hand awkwardly in front of my face, trying to brush away the black spider that
hung from an invisible thread in front of my right eye, stubborn, moving as I
did. Thinking that the creature must’ve
attached itself to my glasses, I took them off and looked. Nothing. But still a small dark space, no larger than
the point of a dull pencil in the bright October sunlight, blotted out a
fragment of the afternoon, shifting its position continually as my eye glanced
around at the parked cars and distracted students hurrying for class. Minutes later, standing before the mirror
under the fluorescent lights in the nearest restroom, I could see nothing
unusual about the eye, but when I flushed it with cold tap water, my visitor
remained, floating darkly through my field of vision.
The following day
in my office, I kept turning to my right thinking someone was standing next to
me. But each time, the room was
empty. On one occasion, I swung around
and began to speak – “May I help you?”
To my bewilderment, I was confronted only by the books lining my wall,
each worn spine sealing its whispering voices.
I was frightened, but not at the prospect of some otherworldly
visitation. The threat of blindness
terrified me. I saw myself, arms
extended, feeling my way through rooms I couldn’t see, stumbling forward in
absolute darkness like some sightless creature in an underground cave.
Late that afternoon on the drive home, I kept seeing a
blurred shape, man-sized, undefined, moving beyond the right passenger window,
as if a figure was running full out on the shoulder of the road keeping pace
with the car, appearing and disappearing.
The figure slowed when I did, sped up when I hit the gas. I told myself it was only a flash of sunlight
on the window, something my peripheral vision hadn’t processed correctly. When I pulled into the darkened garage, the
figure pursuing me was gone. Only
silence and the dusky space around me, the wall with its rack of brooms and
rakes. Relieved, I turned off the
engine, dismissed my own suspicion and went inside.
But that night, I smelled cigarette smoke in
the house.
“Dad?” I asked
tentatively. “Is that you?”
Silence. Only the faint sound of the refrigerator
humming in the kitchen.
“If that’s you,
make a sound.”
No response. But the
scent thickened, rich and cutting, like blue smoke curling from the end of his
Marlboro. That was the first time I
suspected that my father was in the house.
He’d found the place where I lived though he’d never visited. Now he walked the narrow, dimly lit hall and
low-ceilinged spaces of the three-bedroom rented bungalow waiting for his
moment to speak.
In the weeks that followed, a blank space trailed through my
view of the world, a crack in
the smooth surface of reality where something that was
usually hidden began to break through. At
first, it was merely a game I played, but as time went on, the game became
real. When I was home in the evening, I
was never alone. A pale shape, glimpsed
at the edge of my vision, moved over the walls, absent when I turned to face
it. What
does he want? I wracked my brain for
an answer. The rooms began to feel
crowded, and I took to sitting on the back patio in the cool October evenings,
watching the stars sprinkled like salt above the tops of the eighty-foot pines.
But I wasn’t alone there either. On my far right, when I looked away, a figure
slipped silently between the trees.
In the last few months of his life, my father had started
carrying a worn blue notebook around with him, something none of us had ever
seen before. When family visited, he’d
wheel his chair to the edge of the group, open the notebook and begin reading
silently to himself.
“What have you
got there, Dad?” I asked him.
“My journal from
the war.”
My sister and I
exchanged a surprised look.
“Really?”
We had no idea
he’d kept a record. Clearly, there was
something he wanted to tell us, but when we asked him to read it aloud, the
book contained only dates and the names of the places
he’d been: Guam, the Solomon Islands, shore leave in
Australia, Okinawa. His account
described nothing of what he’d done there or what he’d seen or felt.
After he died, I found some black and white photographs in a
drawer in his office, a
dozen or so, that told me more. They were pictures of dead Japanese soldiers,
the blood black on them, an arm or a leg blown off, their bodies bloated and
swelling nightmarishly in the tropical heat.
Shuffling through those images, I could feel the sun on my neck and hear
the flies’ angry buzzing. In one
sun-faded shot, a head still wearing its helmet had been spiked on the limb of
a blasted tree, rags of flesh hanging from the neck. Small wonder then, that for three years after
my father returned home from the war, he needed a shot of whiskey to get out of
bed in the morning. He’d sit on the edge
of the mattress, arms crossed over his chest, and shake until the liquor warmed
him. Deep in the night, he’d call out in
his sleep and flail around so violently that he’d once broken two of my
mother’s ribs. That was the reason that
they’d always slept in separate beds for the next thirty years or so of their
marriage.
There was one
additional photo, different from the others, at the very bottom of the
drawer. An island
girl with straight black hair and dark eyes smiled at the camera. She was bare breasted, maybe seventeen, a
length of flowered batik wrapped in a sarong around her hips. She reminded me of a Gauguin I’d seen at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art on a school trip when I was a kid. On the back of the photo were two words in
faded ink written in my father’s hand: The
Philippines.
It was nearly the end of October, two weeks into the shadowy
game of hide and seek I was playing with my father, the days mellow, the nights
cool, with that brief, startling clarity in the air that comes when the harvest
is in. The quiet Southern town with its
steeples and dilapidated courthouse was turning slowly toward winter.
On one of those
clear nights, I had a dream. I was
crouching in the corner of a steel box on the sea, the smell of gasoline thick
in the air, a motor chugging noisily somewhere behind me. The box lifted and fell with the tide as we
approached land. Then the front of the
box fell forward into the sea with a crash I could hear over the racket of the
engine, and I saw an island, a line of white sand in the distance bordered by
tall wind-bent palms. I was in the sea
then, the taste of salt in my mouth, holding a rifle above my head with both
hands, the sun burning down behind me as I struggled toward shore. My shadow wavered in front of me on the
water, and I saw that I had a helmet on – then I felt its weight on my head,
the strap tight under my chin. Glancing
around, I saw hundreds of us wading through the tide, struggling like crabs,
pincers raised, to reach land. I stumbled up on the beach and began digging in,
frantically throwing sand up in front of me for cover. I knew I didn’t have much time. Face-down on the beach, I kept an eye on the
jungle. I watched as a figure flitted
through the shadows, moving as my eye did.
Suddenly, the figure ran out into the light – a sailor in
white pants, a tee shirt, his Dixie
Cup hat worn four-blocked, a dark, sweat-stained scarf tied
around his neck. He fell on his knees in
the sand beside me and glanced back nervously into the brush. The sun flared
behind him; it turned his face into a featureless silhouette. Planes of light flashed out around his head
like the spokes of a wheel. He bent
lower to speak, and then I found myself looking into the face of my father,
forty years younger than I am now.
Astonished, I studied his profile as he turned to
stare off into the brush.
He touched me
lightly on one shoulder.
Stay down, he said. They’re
coming over the far hill. Keep your head
down!
He glanced at me once, holding my gaze
for an instant to make certain that I understood. When I awoke, I remembered the dream down to
the smallest detail, the sand in my mouth and the heat on my neck.
A norther blew into town the next day. The temperature
dropped by forty degrees and gave us our first taste of the coming winter. All over the gray, deserted neighborhoods
only the wind traveled the streets, stripping trees, scattering the
flame-colored, hand-shaped leaves, and throwing itself against the cold glass
windows. The weather held us captive in
our houses; up and down the block, a thin line of smoke rose from the chimney
of each brick ranch.
Late one afternoon, as the columns of blue pine shadows
lengthened across the lawn, I was walking down the hallway that ran the length
of the house. The furnace fired on,
bringing a rumble of flame and the promise of welcome heat. I was distracted, thinking about something
that had happened at work that day, a meeting that had gone unexpectedly right,
when my
attention was diverted by motion at the end of the
hall.
I froze. A shape, low
to the ground, shifted over the wall and disappeared into the
bedroom.
“Who’s there?’ I called out.
Silence. The
atmosphere in the hall and cluster of surrounding rooms had gone
heavy. I forced
myself down to the open bedroom doorway and stepped inside. A cold, clear
light flooded the space.
The room was empty.
As I stood there, confused, looking for some explanation, a
truck rumbled past on the road outside.
Sunlight flashed on its windows and traveled briefly across one
wall. That’s it, I
told myself. I’d seen
the reflection of a passing car. It had not been, as I’d thought at first, the
shadow of small boy.
A wave of relief washed over me.
But then I began
to see that same form in the corner of my eye whenever I was in the
house. Something new
was watching me, circling, probing for weakness, for some point of
access, and with each pass coming nearer, revealing more of
what it was. My father’s words in the
hospital room came back to me with a new force – a tall thin man, a heavy-set woman and a little boy. I understood at last; this was what he’d come
to warn me about. They were coming over
the far hill.
One evening, an
hour after the light had gone down, I was putting away some dishes in the
kitchen, listening to the rain tap the windows, when I heard footsteps running
down the hall –bare feet, close, the sound distinctive,
unmistakable. Heart racing, I stepped
around the corner and looked down the hall.
Empty. I knew there was no one in the house but me,
and yet I also knew what I’d heard.
Taking a breath to steady myself, then another, I moved slowly down the
shotgun hall toward the bedroom, the last door on the right. I could hear sleet ticking at the windows of
the rooms I passed like the second hands of dozens of clocks and pocket
watches. Reaching the bedroom, I pushed
open the door, took a step inside, and stopped.
The window was a
gray square against the deeper darkness of the room, and to my
alarm, a shape was outlined against the gray. A chair had been moved in front of the
window. As I watched, that shape grew
more defined, until a boy sat there, gaunt and motionless, his back to me, the
white-blond hair cropped close to his skull.
A little light leaked in from the open doorway, and I saw, briefly, two
shadows moving across the wall in front of him.
For an instant I made out a heavy face, the flesh hanging, dark eyes
staring back at me. Then the face drew
back into shadow, into smoke.
My eyes swung
back to the child. Had he seen what I’d
seen? Something in the slant of his
back, a sense of alert expectation, told me that he had. I did not
want that boy to turn around. And
then he did. He turned glaring at me
over one shoulder, his eyes black and empty in the
darkened room.
“They’re coming,”
he lisped, and a terrible joy broke out across his face. “The others –
they’re already here!”
Keeping my eyes
on that lurid grin, terrified that the boy would climb out of the chair and
come at me with that wild hilarity on his face, I backed slowly out of the room
and closed the door. I grabbed a chair
from the dining room table and wedged it against the door. Then I leaned a hand against the wall to steady
myself, to make the long hallway stop spinning, careening away. As soon as I was certain I could stay on my
feet, I moved quickly around the darkened house, turning on lights.
I didn’t sleep
that night. I positioned a chair at the
far end of the hall and kept my eyes fixed on the closed bedroom door. At one point, deep in the night, I saw the
door swing out and the boy come rushing toward me down the length of the hall,
his arms extended, hands reaching for me.
I jumped to my feet, the chair clattered to the floor, and then I saw
the hall empty and
the door at the far end tightly closed, the extra chair
still angled securely in place.
In the morning, I left for Houston to keep the eye
appointment I’d made a few weeks earlier.
The lonely two-lane stretches of Highway 59, snaking through
half-deserted towns, past
weathered barns standing in the empty fields, seemed devoid
of life on that six-hour journey. No
shadowy, half-glimpsed figures accompanied me on that drive,
but I couldn’t shake the notion
that I was being watched, my movements tracked from a
distance, as if the line of trees at the far
edge of every pasture concealed a hostile presence. I was suffering from the night I’d endured,
having trouble keeping my eyes open on the rolling, monotonous stretches of
east Texas prairie.
At one point, I woke with a start to find myself on a grassy
decline on the side of the road, the
motor idling.
Miraculously unhurt, I got out of the car and walked around to wake
myself up.
The shadow of a cloud flowed swiftly toward me across the
field, changing shape as it came. I
climbed behind the wheel, backed out onto the blacktop
highway, and drove quickly on.
And I was lucky in another way. The doctors in Houston were able to fix what
was
wrong with my eye.
The crack in the world was sealed.
After a few days recovering in a Galleria hotel, I made my way back to
my dark house in the pines.
I entered
tentatively, leaving my suitcase at the door, and slowly walked through the
rooms. The house was empty: I could feel
it as soon as I’d stepped in. But I
needed to make sure. At last, I came to
the bedroom, to the door that had remained closed in my absence. I paused, gathering myself, then set the
chair aside, pulled the door open, and walked in.
Winter sunlight
lay in bright stripes on the floor. The
chair the boy had occupied was back in its usual position to the right of the
bed, the seat piled high with books. For
three days I saw nothing further in the house, no unexplained shadows, no
figures at the borders of my vision who, when I turned were not there. The smell of cigarette smoke that had drifted
through the rooms for weeks was gone as well, and I understood that my father,
having delivered his warning, had moved on.
But I knew I couldn’t stay in that place. Those dying Southern towns are too quiet, and
it’s too easy for the dead to find us there among the deserted brick
storefronts, the decaying graveyards, the trees trailing their dusty rags of
Spanish moss. On the morning of the
fourth day, as I stepped into the bedroom, coffee mug in hand, thinking only of
the day’s appointments, the light darkened suddenly, as if someone had thrown a
switch. It may have only been the sun
dropping behind a cloud, but at the time I didn’t think so. I backed out of the room and closed
the door behind me.
That same day, I resigned my position, packed the car, and
left town for good.
about the author
James Ulmer is the author of two previous collections of
ghost stories, The Secret Life and The Fire Doll (winner of the 2017 George
Garrett Fiction Prize). He is a graduate
of the University of Houston Writing Program, a former Hoyns Fellow in Creative
Writing at the University of Virginia, and the former Writer-in-Residence at
Houston Baptist University. Ulmer’s
fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of journals including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Saturday Evening
Post, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, and elsewhere. Ulmer is currently Professor of English at
Southern Arkansas University. He and his
wife, writer Robin Kozak, live in haunted St. Augustine, Florida.
