Ghostlove. Dennis Mahoney

      1. MY HAUNTED MOTHER

      “Every room we enter is immediately haunted,” my mother once said.

      She was a librarian with an effervescent love of the occult, but I never knew if she truly believed in otherworldly forces prior to the winter of 1998, when she entered a mysterious brownstone and only part of her came back out.

      Her name was Charlotte. She had auburn hair, starburst freckles on her shoulders and cheeks, and a captivating gangliness that reminded me more of my second-grade classmates than any of their mothers. She laughed whenever she sneezed. She hugged a lot. She daydreamed in a wonderstruck, concentrated way that made me want to know whatever she was thinking.

      Her favorite library patron was a man named Leonard Stick. He was remarkably active at the age of ninety, and he credited his vigor to meaningful work and a lifelong diet of root vegetables. Mr. Stick shared my mother’s love of the occult and was, according to her, a man of direct experience.

      She delighted in helping him locate obscure texts through interlibrary loan. They were peculiar books on ultraspecific subjects: children’s teeth, winding shrouds, the effects of gravity on ethereal bodies. Many of the books existed as single copies in remote libraries, and although my mother always succeeded in filling his requests, the books would often vanish from the Dewey Decimal System, and sometimes even from my mother’s memory, as soon as he returned them.

      In early January of‘98, Mr. Stick abruptly stopped visiting the library. My mother grew concerned and visited his brownstone, where she discovered he was ill and couldn’t leave the house. From that day on, she visited Mr. Stick every day after work, and often on the weekends, and sometimes late at night. I’d grown up watching my mother knitting hats for charity drives, holding hands with lost children, and wafting hornets out of the house instead of whacking them with magazines, and so her devotion to a lonely old man was unsurprising.

      I was seven that year, the only child of a happy marriage, and thought of death as a fascinating misfortune other people suffered. Over dinner one night, I asked my parents if Mr. Stick was dying.

      “Of course,” my father said. “He’s ninety years old. Unless he has a lightning rod that animates bodies. Has he got one of those?”

      “Nope,” my mother said.

      “Odds are grim, then. He ought to be in a nursing home,” he added, not unkindly.

      “He only needs some company,” my mother said.

      My father raised his fork, pretending to be stern. “Don’t get into his will. We’ll end up with a house full of shrunken heads and potions. And don’t let him haunt you.”

      “What if I like being haunted?” she asked.

      My father turned to me and said, “When I was your age, I learned that when a person very special to us dies, they float around in heaven, watching us forever. I think of that now whenever I’m on the toilet.”

      “Not to worry,” my mother said. “Even ghosts get afraid.”

      I liked the way my parents talked. There seemed to be a signal underneath their words, a secret language they alone understood.

      “Only you can haunt me. No one else,” my father said.

      My mother sipped her wine. “I’ll haunt you both. I promise.”

      Most nights, my mother put me to bed and told me about her visits to Mr. Stick’s house. She said that his brownstone was special—that either its brick and iron were conducive to supernatural forces, or the space itself had something of an otherworldly porousness. The building was a ghostly doubleimage of itself, like a picture painted brightly over an older, stranger picture. The house’s deepest secrets were subliminal. Infused. It was an equinox place, Mr. Stick had told her, where light and dark things were equally in power.

      The brownstone was built in 1817 by a mason who never lived there, but who was later murdered and entombed in one of the house’s walls. Its first longtime inhabitant was a spiritualist named Eleanor Cranch who was known for levitation, mothered twin daughters who spoke each other’s thoughts, and eventually died of bone poisoning.

      The house had

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