Madeleine's Ghost Read Online Free

had expressly forbidden any cigar smoking in the apartment. His bottles of Dixie beer, empty except for that little bit of backwash, piled up in the kitchen at the rate of a case and a half a week. And those women with big hair and gaudy jewelry brought home most Saturday nights from one bar or the next; their giggling and the squeals and groans of lusty play could be heard through the thin pressboard of the wall as I tossed alone on the other side in my narrow bed.
    I suppose the ghost couldn’t stand this noisy, squalid life. Perhaps it hid in the woodwork with the termites and the spiders or slept between the walls with the rats or disappeared into the fabric of the air.
    Then, three months ago, Molesworth picked up and went back toMamou, Louisiana, owing me one month’s rent and six hundred dollars in long-distance phone calls. Of course, I will never see the money. I woke up one morning to find his room empty and what sounded like a prepared statement read into the memo function of the answering machine.
    â€œDear Coonass,” came his thick backcountry drawl through the static of the tape, “circumstances beyond my control conspire to call me home to Louisiana. And if you ask old Molesworth’s opinion, it’s high time you yourself repair to other climes. Your life in New York has reached a dead end. You are drifting, Coonass, you have no agenda! Far be it from me to throw you a lifeline, but you might reconsider your old stomping grounds. I hope you will not take advantage of my departure to masturbate too much. This is Lyle Molesworth signing off.”
    Molesworth had spent the two weeks just prior to his midnight exit from New York on the phone with a lawyer in Shreveport discussing wills and servitudes and liquor licenses. His grandfather Duploux died in January, and Molesworth inherited a bar on stilts in the middle of Bayou Dessaintes.
    From all descriptions, it is a rough sort of place, which has been in his family for generations. There are no toilets, just holes in the floor opening directly into black water infested with alligator and cotton-mouth, though for some reason the bar is patronized by a diverse group of folks that include from time to time Johnny Cash and the governor himself, as well as the usual host of Cajun brawlers and roughnecks from the oil fields. Legend has it that a drunken Hank Williams vomited on the stage there in 1947, and they preserve what passes for the great man’s evacuated dinner—an indistinguishable lump gone green and black with age—in a mason jar on a shelf over the jukebox.
    With Molesworth gone, the ghost started again where it had left off five years before. In the first few days there was nothing I could put my finger on, exactly. Just a renewed pressure in the wake of Molesworth’s departure. A soft scraping no louder than leaves falling from a dead tree or breath leaving the mouth of a child. After a week or so I began to hear a sighing in the moment before I entered a room to click on the lights at dusk, and once I caught an odd reflection in the green at the back of themirror in the bathroom. But now it is already in the nineties every day, we are in for a hot, miserable summer, and the ghost has abandoned such subtleties. It is dropping stones from the ceiling, moving furniture. It has grown bolder with the rising mercury as if it thrives on the heat like a hothouse orchid. Now it blows through this apartment, a sour, vindictive wind.
    What does the ghost want from me? Ghosts always want something. According to what I have read, they are the children of the spirit world, always tugging on the skirts of the living. They want comfort, they want attention, they want us to know how they died. And am I sure that it is a ghost? There are days when I have my doubts. Could it be an unusual sort of electrical phenomenon, a disturbance in the magnetic field of the apartment caused by the proximity of the power plant just across the