The Secret Chorus of All Hidden Things

Winner of our 2014 "First Line Fiction" short story contest. Learn about the competition, meet the judges, and read the other winning stories here.

Judge: Ronlyn Domingue

Her notes: Told with exacting, evocative details, The Secret Chorus of All Hidden Things is a poignant story of memory and loss. The turn at the center took me by surprise and held me to the end, leading me to reflect on what mysteries were explained and which ones lingered. Congratulations to the author!

When I first read Ronlyn Domingue’s first line, I was struck by the setting, the attic as a place of memories set aside, the better to be forgotten. From there the idea of a ghost story was natural, though I was as surprised as anyone by the ghost I conjured. 

—William Hawkins

—

In the attic’s darkest corner, behind his Russian grandmother’s dowry chest, was a phonograph, its horn humming out the chorus of hidden bees. He asked Gracie why it sang. Gracie told him it was Grandmother Orina, whispering from beyond the gulag grave she’d been kicked into. He told Gracie he didn’t believe her, but she ignored him and wondered aloud what Grandmother Orina’s corpse looked like, if the arctic-bitten soil preserved her flesh. If, say, she were to stumble out of her grave, would tiny shards of frozen flesh crumble off her body? Would they make a tinkling sound like wind chimes at night? 

The wind chime bit was brilliant; even in his fear he could appreciate a master’s work. Their mother, of course, hung wind chimes on the eaves of the veranda, and when a wind blew around the old Victorian house, no matter what room you were in, no matter how tightly you curled yourself into the sheets or how hard you pressed a pillow against your face, you could always hear the faint tinkling of the chimes. Every night after when he heard the wind chimes he thought of his grandmother’s corpse, stumbling up the steps, coming to reclaim what was hers.

He asked his déduka what it meant, this secret humming of the phonograph.

“Nothing, malyutka. It is nothing. It is old. A dead thing twitching.”

It was not, the boy pressed, voices whispering from the other side?

At that point Déd called Gracie into the room and asked her what she had told the boy. She offered the customary denials, after which he scolded her for putting any ideas into her brother’s head.

“Not even ideas. Foolishness!”

“Foolishness” was Déd’s favorite curse, uttered at any bright or shiny thing the Americans had made and his son had bought. He spit after the word, a hard glob of faintly verdant saliva, and pulled the boy close to him.

“Listen, well, malyutka. There are no voices whispering to you from the other side. There is no other side. When you die, there is nothing but nothing, yes? You understand? No heaven, no hell, just black nothing. There’s a good boy. Now run along to your studies.”

He didn’t ask his father or mother what it meant. There was no room with them for any questions. Time with them was clockwork ritual, dinner with parents asking their children how school had been before discussing the next party at the club or who had bought what and when or how wonderfully cook had prepared dinner. Then the children would be sent off for an hour of television in the sitting room before bed. Their father would go to his office, their mother into the parlor, and their déduka, of course, stayed in his room, his supper brought up to him on a tray by the cook and taken away by their mother when he was finished.

It was while they were watching the Andersons teach Kathy how to be a proper young lady that Gracie got the idea for a séance. After she explained what it was, he told her no, he didn’t want to do it, but she ignored him and wondered aloud where they could get a Ouija board.

“Déd says there is no such thing as a spirit world.”

“He only says that because he’s Russian.” Gracie said “Russian” the way Déd said “foolishness,” only she rolled her eyes instead of spitting. “You know we’re not supposed to listen to him when he says Russian things. Mother said so.”

That wasn’t what their mother said, but it was still the truth so he nodded his head.

“We’re going to have a séance.”

He resisted, but his sister never cared. One night a week later, when their parents were at the club and their déduka long asleep, they crept into the attic armed with flashlights. Gracie set the Ouija board on Grandmother Orina’s dowry chest and lit two candles to keep the board company.

“Put your fingers on the pointer. Like this. Good. Now. We can begin.”

The phonograph was quiet, whatever spark of life there had been passed, just as Déd had said. Yet in the dark, its horn leered out at the boy like the open mouth of a brass monster, and it took too little effort to imagine it suddenly lunging over his head and swallowing him whole.

“We call upon the spirit of Grandmother Orina. Grandmother Orina!” Gracie glanced at him with a troubled expression. “What was her last name?”

“Volkmann.”

“No,” Gracie murmured, frowning, “that wasn’t it. Déd changed his name to Volkmann. The name he had before was too Russian. What was it?”

He couldn’t remember and neither could she, so she shrugged her thin shoulders and went on with it.

“Grandmother Orina! Speak to us!”

Then Gracie pushed the pointer so it made the letters IAMHERE. He pretended he hadn’t noticed. As long as he knew it was just Gracie he wasn’t afraid.

“She’s here,” Gracie whispered in theatrical whisper. “Grandmother Orina! Tell me. Will I find love?”

Gracie pushed the pointer to YES.

“Will my husband be brave and handsome and very, very rich?”

Gracie pushed our fingers away then back to YES.

“Will I be the most beautiful bride?”

Another YES. Gracie looked satisfied. Then she grinned, the gap between her two incisors darker in the candlelight. He knew what it meant. He tried to pull his fingers away, but she wouldn’t let him.

“And John? Will John find love?”

There was a brief and quiet struggle, neither of them willing to use the force necessary to betray how obviously they were pushing the pointer themselves. Gracie won, Gracie always won, and the pointer landed on NO.

“Oh, goodness. No? Grandmother Orina! When will John die?”

“I don’t want to play anymore.”

This time he did take his fingers away, but Gracie went on, pushing the pointer into the numbers section and spelling out 32.

“Oh, thirty-two, that’s not bad.” Her voice was sweet; the twin flames of the candles reflected in her eyes as burning pits. “That’s practically ancient. You have plenty of time.”

He told her to shut up. She told him to make her.

Then the chorus of hidden bees returned, rushing out of the phonograph, buzzing into their ears. At that sharp snap of static they both leapt into the air, upending the Ouija board and the candles. Frantically, they stomped, trying to make sure nothing caught fire, but they only managed enough noise to wake Déd before they scrambled out of the attic, fighting over one another, back to their bedrooms.

There John waited in bed, sweating beneath the covers, breath wet and unsteady. He listened as Déd walked down the hallway, listened to him creak the door open and stand within it for a minute, looking inside to the boy’s cotton down shape. The boy nearly cried out in guilt, but Déd turned at the breaking moment and continued walking down the hall to Gracie’s room. Déd never turned any light on; he claimed to see better in the dark. 

John knew she would not cry out. He fell asleep, and the next morning the house had not burned, they had not been discovered. Gracie had waited until Déd went back to bed and snuck back up to clean everything up. Wax had spilled from the candles and ruined the top of our grandmother’s dowry chest. Gracie covered it with old bedding and made John swear he would never tell what they did. He swore.

It hardly mattered. Gracie disappeared a week later. She was last seen riding her bike two blocks off by Mr. Holtz. Later, Mr. Holtz told John’s mother and father she had waved at him, and he had waved back. If he had only known.

The whole neighborhood had the facts whittled into their brains. Grace ‘Gracie’ Volkmann, age eleven, thin, pale, almost strawberry blonde hair, pale skin, freckles, a gap in her teeth, last seen wearing a pair of jeans and a pink long-sleeved shirt, riding a pink bicycle with rainbow streamers. If sighted, kids were to tell the nearest adults, adults were to call the police, everyone was to be on the lookout. Any clue, any information someone might have, they were encouraged to bring forward.

The bicycle was found in the local creek a month after she disappeared. Two boys were playing cowboys by the creek and heard it first, a metallic click click, then spotted the rear wheel sticking up straight out of the water, slowly spinning in a small breeze. They did the right thing and told the nearest adult immediately. They became something of local celebrities, and for months afterward John would see them playing coppers.

The bicycle gave the boy’s mother hope for a few more months, but as the years filled up behind them his parents gave up on Gracie, his father first, then his mother. Déd never had hope to begin with. When the boy asked him what had happened, Déd told him a stranger had taken Gracie away, and such men do not let what they take slip through their fingers. He told the boy the most he could do was pray Gracie had joined Grandmother Orina in the eternal nothing where she would be spared any more pain and agony. The boy did not ask what pain and agony he meant.

Where Gracie had been, silence took her place, and his mother and father were separated by it and divorced shortly afterward, nearly four years after her disappearance. Perhaps it was the Russian in him, but John’s father was able to step over the hole Gracie’s loss had made in his heart. He was never the same, but he did not stop living. So John stayed with his father and his Déd, while his mother went back to live with her parents before moving into a mental institution they called by a nicer name before moving across the country with a series of lovers whose names John only ever had to remember for a dinner’s worth of time.

Soon John had lived more of his life without Gracie than with her, and she became nothing but a vague impression of color and childhood half-remembered every time the anniversary of her disappearance surprised him.

Déd died in 1992. The old Russian had lived to see the collapse of the country that killed his wife and took enough joy in it to justify having lived. Or so he told John. There was a short memorial service, mostly filled with friends of John and his father, Déd having kept to himself for nearly three decades. He had asked to be cremated and in his will instructed John to travel to Norifulk to spread his ashes, so his remains might at last find his wife’s. John and his father agreed to ignore these last wishes, figuring the old man wouldn’t mind, because he couldn’t mind, swallowed up by that black nothing he’d told John of all those years ago.

The old house was too big for John’s father to live in alone, and so they agreed to sell it all: the house, the furniture, the knick-knacks collected over a lifetime. His father had no more use for them, and John never had a use for them. The estate sale was scheduled. The house itself was bought at a fair price by two of John’s friends, a couple who relished the opportunity to live in a house with a history. It was all done neatly, efficiently, John and his father hoping for no chances to look back.

But eventually the question of the attic could no longer be ignored, and so the weekend before the estate sale John climbed up the old steps and inventoried what there was, what could be sold, and what needed to be given to Goodwill. He took his time, saving his grandmother’s things for last.

The dowry chest was larger in his memory. The years had reduced, diminished it. It was no longer a thing of the Old World, filled with the secrets of vanished days, but instead a tattered, ratty chest with wax stains on its lid. Inside there were no more secrets, only costume jewelry and a moth-eaten wedding dress. Gracie was meant to have worn it. He closed the chest before he could imagine her in it.

The phonograph was largely silent, but if he bent over, if he dipped his ear into the horn, he could just make out the buzzing, the chorus of hidden bees his sister tried to convince him belonged to the voices of the dead. It was as diminished as the rest of his memories, but it was still there. He squeezed his eyes shut and listened for Gracie’s voice, letting him know she was okay, letting him know what had happened to her. Then he realized he wouldn’t recognize her voice if he heard it; he’d forgotten it long ago. All he could hear was the murmur of electrons passing.

He kept the dowry chest, putting it in his own attic. The phonograph he took to an antique shop his friends had suggested. The owner there, a tinkerer of things left behind, was more than willing to buy.

“It’s a Russian Victor Monarch. Very rare, especially around these parts. But it’s in poor condition. I’ll have to work on it quite a bit before I can resell. Still, considering, how does five hundred grab at you?”

“That’s fine.”

John watched the horn do nothing as the owner opened the cash register.

“Say. I’ve been meaning to ask. When you listen to the horn, I mean, really lean in, do you hear a buzzing sound? Or am I just crazy?”

The owner leaned into the horn and nodded.

“No. You’re not crazy. They tend to do that as they age.”

“My sister, when we were little, tried to convince me it was voices whispering to us from the other side.”

The owner chuckled with the appropriate amount of humor while his hands flashed with instruments hidden from behind the counter. He opened the back of the box in a way John hadn’t know he could and fiddled with whatever metal organs lay inside. There was a squelch and a small screech, then silence.

“Listen, now.”

John leaned in and listened into the horn and heard nothing. A seashell was a symphony compared to what lay inside that phonograph black.

“Huh.”

He took the five hundred and left his grandmother’s phonograph behind to join the shelves of antiques collecting dust in silent chorus. The bell above the store’s front door rang out as he left. It would have been easy for him to imagine it sounded like a wind chime at night. He didn’t.

William Hawkins is writing in Baton Rouge until it’s time for him to attend the University of California at Irvine next fall in the creative writing graduate program.