Violet’s Premier Ghost Bottling

by Eileen Kelly

You’re sitting at the dining room table when you hear the noise for the first time. At first, it sounds like mice in the wall, tiny scrabbling fingernails against the backside of drywall, but it’s not. Your daughter is asleep in the room at the top of the stairs—she is fifteen, a good girl, always wears her retainers. The clock above the stove in the kitchen is visible through the doorway, black hands behind glass reading eleven thirty-eight. It’s a Wednesday. For all that your mother warned you against moving out to the island, you’ve never felt unsafe here. Jagged rocks and sharp waves are nothing compared to an angry husband with a drinking habit. If you climb the metal stairs up to the top of the lighthouse tower on a clear day, you can see the lake stretching out for what must be miles in every direction. It feels like the real-life version of the games you used to play with your sister as a child: you would sit back to back on your twin bed and pretend that all of the carpet spreading out beneath you was water, every little brother that crossed it was a battleship that risked being shot at with a hair band launched from your fingers. You were telling your daughter this story just the other day, and it made you feel a bit guilty, isolating her out here on this rock with only you and the gulls for company. But still, it’s comforting, knowing that nobody can ever sneak up on you. The noise at the kitchen wall is just some scraggly branches in the wind brushing up against the siding, and you ignore it, shutting off the light above the table and standing at the window above the sink for a minute before going to bed, staring up at the beacon shining out forty feet above the lake’s surface. Ever since moving to the island, you’ve had more time to read than ever before. Twice a month you take the boat across the strait and into the harbor town for groceries, and usually you stop at the library, too. The librarian knows you by name now, and she also knows that, as a rule, you’ll read anything that isn’t a ghost story— they make you nervous.

You’re able to tune out the noise until your daughter asks about it the next day. You try to brush it off, say that the keeper’s quarters are old and the pipes probably make strange noises with the shifting temperatures, but the look on her face gives away the fact that she isn’t buying it. Eventually, by mid-afternoon, the scratching stops, and you give her a triumphant look over the top of your book. She’s doing her schoolwork in the floral living chair across the room. All of the furniture came with the place, and it looks like nothing had been changed or reupholstered since the first people moved out to the island . The flowers and ribbons printed on everything from the curtains to the carpet in the bedroom remind you of your grandmother’s house, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The next day you go into town, to the grocery store and to the library, and then to the animal control building. You tell the man behind the counter that you think you have a mouse problem, and he hands over the scraggliest orange cat you’ve ever seen. It’s none too happy to be shoved inside the cardboard box that comes along with it, and as you’re walking out the door, he calls after you to be careful letting it out of the house if you live near a busy street. You and your daughter are laughing about it when you get back—if the cat has enough sense to stay out of the water, it won’t have anything to worry about once it’s out at the lighthouse. It’s been so long since you last had a cat—your husband was allergic—that you don’t notice it’s acting strangely at first. It keeps sniffing around the doorway to your bedroom, and it won’t go into the hallway that leads to the light tower and the staircase to the lantern room, but the scratching sound hasn’t returned, so you assume that it’s doing its job even though you haven’t found any dead mice lying around. You’re cooking dinner that night when there’s a creak in the floor above your head. You call for your daughter to come down and finish peeling the carrots, but she’s right behind you. There’s a moment where your hand freezes on the wooden handle of the spoon you’re using to stir the pot of soup before you brush it off as the house settling. A voice in the back of your head tells you that there’s not much to settle when the only thing it’s resting on is solid granite under a thin layer of crabgrass, but you ignore it. You tell

your daughter to turn up the record player in the living room. You’ve been on the island for three months before it finally starts to cement in your head that there might be something strange going on. Doors left wide open when you’re sure you closed them, little things going missing and then turning up days later in places they had no business being. Christmastime is coming, and you chalk it up to just the usual holiday scatterbrained state of things inside your head as you scramble to make sure that you’ll be ready to visit your mother for the holidays. Back when you lived downstate, everything always seemed to fall apart in the weeks leading up to the 25 th . You recall it being the source of more than a few fights that would end in dented drywall, and once, most memorably, a smashed Sunday lamp that you’d been given by your grandmother. While the misplaced—that’s what you tell yourself— towels and jewelry are frustrating, it’s better than digging shards of stained glass out of your heel sitting on the edge of the bathtub. You’re just becoming a bit forgetful, you say, although your daughter is more than a little annoyed when her favorite sweater disappears for a week. It’s a few weeks before Christmas before the feeling that something could truly be wrong sets in for good, and it isn’t the missing trinkets or the strange noises that do it. You’re getting a box of tinsel and garland down from the linen closet upstairs even though you’ll be gone for the day itself, the house feels cold without any decorations—when you notice a wooden box shoved up behind the stacks of sheets and washcloths. Inside is a leather-bound notebook, the keeper’s log from the lighthouse, you realize, after flipping it open. A page at the front of the book lists all of the appointed keepers stationed on the island since the lighthouse was built, leading all the way up until the light was automated in the 80s. Every row lists the start and end dates of their positions, and every box in the table is filled except the one in the bottom right corner—there’s no end date for the last keeper. That night, you can’t sleep, and you swear that you hear footsteps on the metal stairs that lead to the lantern room. You know it’s silly, but you still get up six times to check the latch on the door. The next day isn’t Friday, but you suddenly can’t stand being on the island, and under the guise of last-minute holiday

shopping, you manage to drag your daughter around to eleven different stores (which she complains about all evening) before heading back just as it starts to get dark. You eat lunch at a café, and she swipes a newspaper of a deserted table as you’re leaving, spending the rest of the afternoon reading it while you poke around the dollar store and spend a half-hour waiting in line at the post office to send cards. It’s the second night of no sleep and you’re wandering around the house, because getting up every half hour to check the lock on the front door and the one on the door to the tower, and then, eventually, the latch on every single window, makes the mattress creak and scares the cat, who’s taken to sleeping at the foot of your bed, which in turn scares you, as on edge as you are. After a while, you sit at the kitchen table, where you can see both doors, and pick up the newspaper. It’s mostly full of exactly what you’d expect from a small-town newspaper—local politics, a writeup on the church Christmas pageant. The insert page displays ads for a dairy farm, a special on turkeys at the grocery store. You’re about to fold the paper up again when a tiny box in the top corner catches your eye. You’re not superstitious, not really. You’ve walked under ladders and stepped on your fair share of sidewalk cracks. You don’t know your star sign; you don’t trust fortune tellers or fortune cookies—you’re not even sure if you believe in God. To be fair, the advertisement would draw anyone’s attention, if only for a moment, for a good laugh, but you aren’t just anyone. Violet’s Premier Ghost Bottling, it reads, text wrapping around a drawing of a small spirit in a purple jar, Distilling and Purifying Since 1804. There’s a number listed below, a nine-oh-six area code that matches your own. You leave the page open on the tabletop, and every once in a while, as you pace the house waiting for morning, you stop to look at it again. As you could have predicted, your daughter finds the whole thing ridiculous, but funny, as well, and she outright encourages you to call the number. She’s probably hoping that it will be the cell of some teenagers playing a prank, but it’s an older woman that picks up, and a few moments later you find yourself penciling distilling appointment into your calendar for the following Thursday

morning. Violet doesn’t look how you expect her to, all things considered. In fact, she reminds you a bit of your third-grade teacher, with an angular bob and a blazer. She explains her business model to you on the ride back across the lake, raising her voice to be heard over the boat’s engine, but you still lose most of it to the wind. You catch that her name isn’t really Violet, but Janet—it’s a pseudonym that she inherited, along with the business itself, from her mother-in- law. She carries with her a gray suitcase that she keeps referencing to as her “equipment”. To be honest, you’re not totally sure what she’s talking about at any point in the conversation, as you tell your daughter later. Reaching the island, you realize, belatedly, that Violet— Janet—is your first houseguest. You scramble to offer her tea, a sandwich, your hostess tendencies rushing back from the years of parties you held for your husband’s colleagues, but she’s all bus ness, swinging the suitcase up onto the table and clicking open the latches as you and your daughter stand to the side. Inside the case sit three rows of glass bottles, separated by pieces of cardboard. She wastes no time in removing them, one by one, from their compartments, peering at them, holding each up close to her eye and then far away. They’re all different shapes— round, rectangular, long and thin like test tubes—but all roughly the same size, smaller than a beer bottle, maybe three times the volume of a shot glass. She goes through maybe half of them before she’s satisfied with one that looks quite ordinary to you: it’s oval in shape, with a neck about half an inch long. There’s a cork in the top. She removes it and tucks it into her pocket. Janet walks through the house, which doesn’t take long, and you and your daughter trail behind her. All three of you end up back in the kitchen, and she looks disappointed, asks if there’s anywhere else. Reluctantly, you lead her to the door to the tower, lift up the latch that’s been firmly in place for weeks. You used to go up once a day, stare out at the water and collect your thoughts, but lately even just the idea of opening the door gives you the creeps. The air is warmer in the tower, you think, warmer than you remember it being in the kitchen just a moment ago, warmer than can reasonably be attributed to the insulation of the brick

walls. Janet takes the stairs one at a time, methodically pausing every few seconds with her right hand on the bannister, the bottle in her left. You glance back at your daughter, who looks amused, but you feel nervous, which only intensifies as you move upward and closer to the lantern room. Once there, you barely even glance out at the lake, too fixated on Janet and her bottle. There’s a noise to your left, a footstep, perhaps, and you turn, but there’s nobody there. You freeze, Janet inhales sharply, her penciled-in eyebrows raised in excitement. She holds out the bottle as if she’s handing it to someone standing in the empty space, and in an instant the lantern room is freezing. Janet plugs the bottle with the cork, and you and your daughter edge closer, eyes wide— hers with surprise, yours with what can only be described as vindicated alarm. You think you see a wisp or something behind the glass, pale and fibrous like a torn piece of quilt batting, but you blink and the bottle looks empty again, nothing there to explain the unsettled feeling that only grows stronger as you lean in to examine it more closely.

Janet explains that she’ll take the jar with her, put the ghost in her library with the rest, and you ask what you owe her as she follows you back down the metal staircase. She brushes it off, says that it’s really you who’s doing her a favor. You ask what she does with the ghosts—a library implies some sort of lending system, does it not? She laughs, agrees, explains, under the incandescent lighting of your dining room, that she’s the only ghost bottler still in business in North America. Every haunted house, every amusement park dark ride, has to go through her to source their haunts. You smile, uneasily, say that you’ve never really thought about it before.

Your daughter is hanging on every word that comes out of Janet’s mouth, but probably by that evening she’ll be laughing about the whole thing on the phone with her school friends from back home. Most likely she’ll do the same with her cousins over Christmas dinner, after the two of you spend the next days packing up your things for the trip—clothes, foil-wrapped gifts, your toothbrushes. It’s a good thing that, unlike you, I don’t have

very many possessions. After all, a bottle is a rather small place to be living.

Writer Spotlight: Eileen Kelly

“I wrote this for a class, but it was very open-ended. I knew I wanted to try writing a shorter story, and when I originally outlined it, I was thinking it would be shorter than it is. But, I ended up expanding on the original idea. I have a family friend who owns a lighthouse in the UP - I’ve never been there and I don’t know them personally very well, but I remember as a kid thinking that was super cool. I knew that that would be the setting, and it was around Halloween, so I was like, well, it’ll be a ghost story. It just made sense.”

“Something I’ve tried doing recently – and I’m sure it’s not my original idea, I just don’t remember where I heard it from – not outlining a whole lot.I’ve had times where I’ve written something and I’ve gotten to the end and realized that I have no idea where it’s going. With this story, I actually did know how it was going to end. I knew how it started, and I wrote the ending right away because then I had something to head towards. It really helped, and I’ll probably do that in the future, too.”

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