The old man peered up from the hospital bed at the young woman. She thought he looked and spoke with astonishing alacrity for a moribund man. He had lost weight and his hands shook, but his eyes still sparkled with the vivacity she remembered from her childhood.
The old man peered up from the hospital bed at the young woman. She thought he looked and spoke with astonishing alacrity for a moribund man. He had lost weight and his hands shook, but his eyes still sparkled with the vivacity she remembered from her childhood.
He coughed. “You’re really going to Ipswich?”
“Yeah Grandpa, I’m really going. I start in two weeks.” He was her great-grandfather, but she always knew him as Grandpa, the same address her mother had always used.
“Ipswich College is my alma mater you know? I have memories of that school, the brisk New Hampshire autumns painted by God’s own hand, and the white-washed hills of winter.” He coughed again, catching the phlegm in his handkerchief. He never took a fashion to disposable tissues.
She smiled. “I know Grandpa; you’ve told me all about it.” She loved the man, and felt morose about his eminent departure from the world. She wished he could hold onto life for another year.
He nodded, as if remembering he should have remembered. He reached a knotted hand, well ravaged by time, to her wrist and clasped it. His skin was like the desert: hot, arid, and gritty.
She winced, but turned her head so he would not notice.
“I haven’t told you everything about it,” he said.
She was confused. The dying man’s face was grave, and she sensed he was about to reveal a story never told to her before. It would be a painful story.
“You know Ipswich College was already a hundred years old when I attended? I was barely eighteen, all of seventy years ago.”
She was disappointed. A fresh story, however dreadful, was preferable to any story she had listened to during her entire nineteen years of life. Her great-grandfather would not survive the semester, and she had prepared to tolerate anything when she set her mind to visit him. A hole near the hearth grew cold even now, his hole haunted for decades gone by. It would be abandoned entirely by Christmas; but as long as he still drew breath, his place was not entirely empty.
“The school has changed these seven decades, and so it’s hard to direct you properly. In my day there was only one dormitory. It was such a small school, and only provided to the minds of us young men. No women were allowed beyond its pompous gates. Not even to cook our food. Sexism was a divine right, even in the swelling of the Second World War.”
“Try your best, grandpa.”
“Oh, I was getting to the bench. I had a roommate; a squirrely nervous boy by the name of Chester Pickering. Chester was a second year, and I was green as the ornamental lawn that escorts the main drive to the campus proper. He told me, that first week, the school often suffered bouts of the swamp fog. On nights like that it was best not to wander the campus. I should take special caution of the bench between the history building and the chemistry building, when the fog came with the night. I paid him no heed. How dangerous could a bench be?
“Of course, I sought out these benches. A cobblestone path led through the narrows between the two buildings. Then they were called Rupert Hall and the Boyle Building. Not sure how they’re named today.” He shifted his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t even know if they are still there, although I haven’t heard they’ve been demolished.
“I thought nothing of his comments for some days, busying myself with the frantic school schedule and the weight of work emphasized by the bulk of our books. We didn’t have computers you know?” He looked up toward her and flashed a smile. He still possessed most of his teeth.
“I know Grandpa.” She decided to sit for this one. His stories tended to last awhile.
“Yes, well into my second week of classes, I was up late studying for my first exam of the semester. A dreadful man by the name of Dr. McClintock brutalized us with Shakespeare’s Othello from the first day, and now we prepared to hurl it out on paper for him. The thees and thous spun on the page in the dim candlelight. We had to use candles because the college was skimping on electricity due to the war effort. As the words in my book refused to be still, I decided to go for a walk.
“The night wrapped around me like a warm damp blanket, and the fog was so thick I thought I might never see my way to the dorm again. The candle lamps flickered like glowing phantoms in the mist. I was so weary from my studies I forgot Chester’s warning; it seemed he was so frail a mouse might scare the soul from him. I delighted in the strange soft echo of my hard soles against those cobblestones. That’s when I saw him sitting on the bench.
“I didn’t anticipate anyone but myself foolish enough to brave the mist, and in my start I hopped with such ferocity my flat cap flopped from my head. I retrieved the cap and set it back upon my wavy brown hair. I had hair then,” he laughed. “The man, I took for a professor, smiled at me and simply sat. He nervously clutched his satchel.”
She leaned in close. This was a story she never heard him tell before.
*
“Hello,” he said. I returned the favor. He smiled again, and asked my name. I told him and he gave me his. “Dr. Herbert Wallace.” I asked what he taught, and he said “Law.” I didn’t know we had law classes at Ipswich, so his confession confused me.
“What classes are you taking?” he asked.
I said, “I’m struggling with my literature regimen.”
He laughed and said, “That old Dr. Clifford is a rusty tough nail.”
I corrected him. “My professor’s Dr. McClintock.”
He furrowed his face, and said he didn’t know of such a man. It was strange that in a small school like Ipswich there would be two professors alien to one another. All students studied the same subject with the same man. I was unnerved.
I was feeling an ill pill settling on my stomach and retired for the evening. We said our goodbyes, and I returned to my bed. It was nearly another month before I saw Dr. Wallace again. On this particular evening the autumnal colors were gone, and the trees were bare. It was a cold night, and the fog ate through my clothes like a dunking in the lake. I was buried in books for midterm exams, and needed to stretch my legs and wake myself from a studious stupor.
I clacked over the stones, and found Dr. Wallace sitting as he had before, still clutching that satchel. It seemed time worn, and so did he. Wrinkles besmirched his clean skin, and his hair reflected the stress in his eyes.
“Hello,” I said and he returned the greeting.
“How did you do on the test?” he asked. I asked which test he meant, as I was in the bad habit of taking tests this far along into the season. He reminded me the last time we spoke I was edgy about an essay of my Shakespearian acumen.
I replied, “I received marks in the upper eighties on the Othello exam. We are moving on to Hamlet in the meanwhile, and the midterm will track my progress there.”
He understood and I studied his features. I was not mistaken about it; he had aged years in the simple weeks since our last encounter. The effect of this aging, and the swirling fog shifting between us, caused me disconcertion. I called it quits. I pledged to discover this man’s private office to pay him a visit in more human conditions.
I forgot about that though as midterms swept me away in their rapids. The grueling regimen taxed me to the point I had no room in my mind for frivolities or wild goose chases. Before long snow coated the cobblestones and cluttered among the branches of the trees. Christmas break was rapidly approaching and final exams were nigh upon us. I needed to study all to be had of King Lear, seven sonnets, and brush up on the first two plays of the former half of the semester. With aching eyes and throbbing temples, I sought respite in the chill of the ebbing autumn air, with all the crisp flavor of wintry weather laced with wood fire cheer. The fog glittered in the dancing light of the lanterns, and the sky hanging over the cloud glowed with the reflection of the city lights far below.
I strolled through that fog, my long coat snuggled tight against my frame and my ears burned cold. My flat cap wasn’t up to the task of warming them. Dr. Wallace sat there, clutching the satchel, now fissured and sun bleached. His hair was stricken with white, and at first glimpse I took it to be buried in the snow! I was off. His hair, in the space of a mere four months, lost all of its color. His face was weather-beaten like the satchel, and his eyes tired and sagging. A single semester transformed him into an old man! I was nonplussed.
He looked at me and a tear dripped from the left of those faded eyes. I asked him what was the matter, cautious to keep my feet and did not sit. He gazed at me perilously and informed me his wife died from typhus and he was retiring. I expressed my condolences and he accepted. He then looked upon me with his head cocked, and said that Dr. Clifford retired last term and he was astonished that the replacement was a young man named Dr. McClintock. I thought this odd, as a full term had not commenced since our first meeting, not by half. This information should have been known to him on that first encounter where we took equal surprise at our incongruence. He said then he didn’t know a Dr. McClintock.
It struck me then, beyond the shadows in my mind suspecting it. At that moment I knew a thing I wish I had never known. A horrible thing. It was as though I sorted through the pieces of a jig-sawed nightmare until I could fit each one into the ghastly form of a picture I didn’t want to confess, even to myself.
*
He reached out to the young woman and took her hand. “I tell you this, dear, to stay away from that bench in the fog. And do not speak with Dr. Wallace. It is not fit for us mere mortals to stretch across the reach. In all my years teaching English I never mentioned this story, nor wrote of it. I suppose you think me a silly old fool, afraid of ghosts? I am that, but I tell you now, for it is the sort of story that lays on the soul like a blister that never heals.”
“Who was he, grandpa?”
“Who was he? He was a professor who died about twelve years before I set foot on campus. The studies on law retired with him, some years before his death. I was quite shocked when I visited the classroom where he taught for the whole of his professional life, and saw his painting on the wall behind the professor’s chair. I examined it, and saw the name with the dates he taught in the room he forever presided over. My dear, do stay away. I received a douse of goose pimples that never entirely disappeared.”
“What is so hard about seeing a ghost? “she asked. “I hear people tell me they have seen ghosts and nothing horrible happened to them.”
“I have heard other stories too, and they are either the case of mistaking the things of this world for that other place. If you look into the eyes of a dead man, you see the light gone from him. The spark that animates his spirit has been doused. If you stare into that spark without the proper body attached, it troubles your sleep for the rest of your life. I look to my death, which I go to gladly, for the sleep denied me in this life. I suspect old Chester Pickering wished the same thing. He died eight years ago, may he rest in peace. That saying takes on a new meaning, honey, after you have seen those not at rest, but in a state of perpetual disquiet. Chester was a nervous man when I met him, and I became a nervous man myself. Wallace a nervous man, you should have seen him clutch and tug at his satchel like his soul were contained within it! I suspect before Wallace died, he saw someone who had stepped across the morbid gulf himself. I fear the cause of his manifestation was making that connection, perhaps in the fog on a bench somewhere. I fear it because the same fate might befall me. Me and Chester.”
“Oh Grandpa,” she said, feeling his hand grow cold and limp.
He closed his eyes, and she rubbed his hand. He breathed deeply and exhaled. He never breathed again. The young woman wept, and pledged to never seek out that bench when the fog fell upon the campus, despite her disbelief in his story.
She almost kept her word.
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