Spooks, Specters and Spirits Event - Corktown By Tabitha Baumander

CORKTOWN             
CHAPTER  2

The orientation interview happened in the first week of August. The school had two classes in every grade beyond kindergarten. One was a uniform grade the other was a split grade with half the class of that grade the other students being the grade below. The more experienced teachers handled the split grades where the students often had complicated issues that needed experience handling. Sometimes the students were behind, sometimes they were far ahead of expected grade level, in both cases they needed extra attention.
As for the newcomers, they would be handling classes with the single grade students. Lorain was to take on grade five, Diane grade three, Mary was being handed grade one. After the meeting with the principal they went down the street to the nearest coffee shop all three could agree on budget wise and had a celebratory treat. Mary picked a small iced chocolate, heavy on the chocolate sprinkles please, the others had lattés.
“Am I the only one wondering why they are taking on three rookies at once in the same school?” Diane asked.
“I’d be willing to bet they use this place as a testing ground. Survive here and you get to upgrade to a neighborhood where the parents of the kids actually have jobs,” Lorain said.
As the only one of the three who was born and grew up in Toronto, Mary found herself wanting to defend her home turf. She’d never done anything more than ride through this spot on a street car but she knew its history reasonably well.
“Actually, at this point you’re probably only half right. Yes, there’s still a lot of public housing and subsidised housing within walking distance. There’re also entire streets full of houses that’ve been renovated to the point where you couldn’t rent an apartment in one without a really nice income. Then there’s the condos, they may have been built with well to do singles and couple in mind but developers in general forget the fact that the one thing you can count on with most couples is, they won’t stay just a couple forever.
After this small victory party, they went their separate ways. Each one of them with the painful realization that they had very little time to prepare for the coming ordeal.
September arrived and the first week of school was both better and worse than Mary pictured. The second week went smoother, the third smoother still. She was Miss Allan the new grade one teacher. As a label it made her head spin just a little but Mary found she liked it a lot.
It was October first before Mary noticed anyone from The Mission breaking the rules. She was on playground duty, standing with her back to the six-foot tall chain link fence marking the boundary between the sidewalk and the yard. A figure standing on the sidewalk stepped into her line of sight causing the nerves on the back of her neck to tingle. A little over dressed for the still comfortably temperate fall weather he stood on the other side of the fence looking into the playground, not moving simply standing arms limp. Eyes on the kids Mary casually strolled over to within his hearing range and spoke.
“I mean no disrespect but there is a rule.”
When she looked in his direction to see if he was listening, he wasn’t there. Before Mary could spot which way the man went the recess bell sounded and it was time to get the kids back inside. This was a process she secretly thought of as similar to herding cats.
He was back two days later. This was before the nine o’clock bell. Mary was only half way through her first tea of the morning and not feeling nearly as charitable as she might have been later in the day. As before, she strolled up to him on her side of the fence primary attention on the yard in front of her in an attempt to talk to him in as non-confrontational a way as possible.
“Listen, I’m trying to be polite here. I realize you might be new and not know it yet but there is a rule. You need to stay on your side of the street during school hours and as early as it is this qualifies,” she said quietly.
Conveniently or inconveniently, Mary wasn’t sure which word applied to the situation, this time he didn’t vanish. He was listless, seemingly unconcerned about losing any meal or shelter privileges. That thought alone was a little bit worrying. It suggested possible interests beyond food or shelter that had the outside potential to be dangerous.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“This is a school yard. On any given day you can spot kids, teachers and the occasional parent volunteer. Can you narrow down which –they- you mean?” Mary asked.
“The one’s in fancy dress,” he said.
Caught completely off guard by this incongruous statement Mary looked from the strangely listless man to face the yard. There was one parent, a Mrs. Mason, who was a constant volunteer and a bit of a hovering annoyance. Beyond that she could see Diane Murphy and a growing selection of children. In a little while, once breakfast club got out, the number of kids would more than double. At this point however while some of the kids were dressed better than the others, no one was in anything close to fancy dress.
“What do you mean fancy dress?” she asked him.
When he didn’t explain Mary turned back to the fence but again, he was gone. This time she had a chance to look for him. He couldn’t be seen walking off into the distance in any direction, he was simply gone. Mary refocused her attention on the kids and took a deep drink of her tea. There was one explanation for this odd ability to simply be gone. Confirming this notion wouldn’t solve the whole puzzle but it would be a start.
Telling herself to keep her eyes on the yard for the duration of her preschool hour Mary grumbled, “That’s all I need, ancient history coming back to haunt me; as if I wasn’t stressed enough.”
That night Mary went on line and did a little research. It didn’t take long to find pictures of deceased homeless. One of the agencies organizing outreach in the city had set up a memorial page. Slowly she scrolled through pictures and brief, sometimes painfully brief, life histories. With each death she went farther and farther back in time, wondering vaguely how far back the list went.
He was there on the tenth page. There was nothing about his life in general and it was entirely possible they knew nothing. What was there was all about his death and it told Mary a great deal.
“Timothy Durham, sometimes called tiny Tim because of his stature, left this life October tenth nineteen fifty-nine at the age of thirty. A lifelong heavy drinker with possible mental health problems; he’d been seen earlier that night sitting on the church steps talking to no one. The discussion was an energetic one so witnesses left him alone to argue with his demons. The next morning, he was dead. Hypothermia was suggested as a cause of death but rejected due to the relatively warm October temperatures. At the inquest it was pointed out that the nearby shelter was operating at under capacity due to the temperate night so Tim could have slept indoors. Eventually heart failure due to long term alcoholism was declared.”
The picture that sat above this short blurb was clearly a mug shot, probably taken one of the times he’d been arrested for vagrancy. Her rule breaker was defiantly dead. That solved one puzzle but left a couple more. Who were the people in fancy dress he mentioned and why did it bother him?
In bed that night waiting for sleep to come she thought through the situation. Her talent had come back for the first time in years. It was a waste of effort to wonder if she was glad or not. This was a fact of life for her. Unfortunately, it was a fact most people didn’t want to believe even existed.
As much as she wanted to ignore this Tim, there was no getting away from the fact that he wasn’t a recently dead lost soul who hadn’t figured out what was happening. He was clearly tied to this location for some reason. On top of that, something was bothering him. There was only one thing to do, face the elephant standing at the edge of her playground and ask Tim what was wrong.
When on yard duty Mary generally kept her phone in her jacket pocket. Now she picked up a small cheap Bluetooth earpiece. She used it two days later as she took her position for early morning post. This time she didn’t bother to walk close to where the shade stood. She simply took the earpiece out of her pocket and slipped it into her right ear to mask the fact that she was about to appear to be talking to herself.
     “Do you know you’re dead Tim?” she said softly, knowing he would hear her.
     When he answered she heard and almost felt his deep sadness.
     “Yeah. I been looking around. I can’t believe how long ago it happened. Everything’s so different. It’s like I’ve been asleep. I forgot about everything. I forgot about them.”
     “It did happen a while ago. Why are you still here?” she asked.
     There was a long, embarrassed silence. Mary tried to be patient but eventually the school day would start. If the bell rang, she’d have to leave this shadow behind for the classroom. There was no telling if he’d ever be in the mood to talk again.
     “I don’t want to go to hell,” he said quietly.
     Mary gave a deep sigh. Religion in general had good parts and bad parts. This was a symptom of the bad.
     “Tim, I’m not sure any faith has that part completely right. What I am sure of is you probably never hurt anyone in life but yourself. If you did hurt anyone, I think you were the one you hurt the most. I don’t think that gets you an elevator ride to the cosmic basement,” Mary said.
     “What about talking to the dead? My Nan, good Catholic woman my Nan, she raised me. She said it was a sin,” he asked.
     This was another thing religion did that bothered Mary on a personal level. Supernatural talents were all well and good for prophets and people in the bible that lived a long time ago. That was fine. Tell your priest you can see his recently dead grandmother sitting in her usual place in the front pew, looking completely at peace and you can get yourself in trouble.
     “I’m talking to you, aren’t I? Do I seem bad enough to go to hell? I won’t call it a gift Tim. It’s too damned annoying to be a gift. I will call it a not very well understood natural talent,” Mary said reasonably.
     She glanced in his direction and saw a pronounced change. Instead of looking as solid as any living man suddenly he now looked vaguely translucent. He was accepting his life, all of it the good and the bad. This was one of the few moments that let her believe having this ability was a good thing. He was comfortable with things now, almost happy.
     “I think I’m ready to go now but I need to tell you something. There’s one here that’s dangerous. Don’t talk to him. The bad ones can get inside you if you talk to them. That’s what happened to me,” he said.
Realizing there was one thing left she needed to ask, Mary sputtered knowing for a fact she had left the subject to far to late.  
“Tim, wait what?”
He vanished.
“What did you mean by fancy dress?”
Resisting the urge to give a loud exasperated groan Mary took a deep drink from her tea and dropped her earpiece into a handy pocket. Pacing her side of the school yard she thought about the situation she found herself in.
She might have accepted her talent from an early age but that didn’t eliminate the fact that there were long periods of time when she hated it. During one of those periods in her early teens she went on a years’ long reading binge; absorbing everything she could on the subject. That convenient bit of academic ranting against fate put her more than a few steps up on the poor long dead Tim. Mary knew that negative forces were like bratty demanding children. As Tim said it really was best to leave them alone. If you wanted to be a bit more proactive you needed to pay them just enough attention to prevent disaster, then leave them to their own devices.
The kids in fancy dress might reference the difference in dress from his time to this one or it could mean something completely different. There was no way of telling at this point and frankly it didn’t really matter. She was a rookie teacher on her first posting. The last thing she planned on doing was turn ghost buster.
​
* * *
     Standing in an open and empty second floor classroom, cell phone in hand, father O’Dell watched Mary drop the blue tooth ear piece into her coat pocket. She’d defiantly been talking and not on the phone. What he had here was a hint of something he’d been praying for but was almost impossible to find. He looked at his phone, tapped a number next to the name John Walker and listened to the ring.
     “While I am prepared to forgive you for calling at this hour your penance is likely to be energetic if the call is not for a very good reason,” said the sleepy voice at the other end.
     “Mea Culpa,” O’Dell said.
     Father John Walker, answered this in a voice that said its owner was rapidly struggling toward wakefulness.
     “Robert, what’s up?”
     “Mary Allan, we talked about her this summer. Incidentally you didn’t exaggerate nearly as much as you usually do, she’s got the makings of a very good teacher. I now want to press you on the stuff you didn’t want to say, or to be more exact only half said,” O’Dell explained.
     “Been drawing conclusions again I see, you were always good at that. She did talk to herself as a young child but that petered off and died eventually. If you’re wondering if she might have schizophrenic tendencies, symptoms like that should be reversed. I have to admit by the time she hit middle school she was a different person and not in a completely good way,” Father John said.
     “I don’t think she’s schizophrenic John. I think she really did see your predecessor’s dead mother,” O’Dell said.
     This clear statement bought a long silence. O’Dell waited, knowing he had painted a mental picture that required deep thought.
     “You really think she can see spirits? I suppose that would be an explanation. Most kids give up the invisible friend game long before they get to school. She did tone it down gradually as I remember. Dropping it completely defiantly took her much longer,” father John said eventually.
     “I want you to keep this between us but yes I think she could see spirits and more importantly I think she still can and that’s exactly the person I need right now,” said O’Dell
     The unmistakeable sound of a piece of chalk hitting the ground and braking into several bits caused O’Dell to turn around. The room was still empty but on the formerly blank chalk board across from the windows there was now a large and decidedly pornographic picture of a naked man and woman. Sighing deeply O’Dell crossed the room and began erasing the picture.
     “I’ve been having problems John. Things have been happening here, increasingly disturbing things. Involving the diocese could cost me my job but I need help,” he said.
     “Robert you are the most grounded person I know. If you say you are dealing with the supernatural, I believe you. You have my promise of confidence and you have my girl,” said Father John. “If you need anything else let me know.”

I am a novelist screenwriter and playwright. At this point in my life I am divorced with adult twins. I live in my home town of Toronto Canada which I am currently populating with aliens, monsters and fairies. Because, well, why not. I've actually learned recently that most of what I write is called Urban Fantasy. The things you learn when you aren't trying.
Be sure to check out my animations on my you tube page. Go to You Tube and search @RealityInk Look for a circle with a worried worm.