Inkling

9.7 The Sinister Influence of Ira Rose - The Father

New York City 1881

Once, when Max was eleven, he told Ira about his father. The father who was ill all the time, who did not play or laugh or talk.

Once, late at night when the entire world seemed asleep, Ira snuck into the tenement house that was home to the Wayde's. He climbed a wall with just his fingers, slid straight through the window shutters. He moved so silently his feet might as well have not touched the ground at all. Maybe they didn't.

He found the parent's bed, the one with the mother sleeping on the edge of the bed, a foot between her back and her husband's shoulder. Compression sickness. At least, that is what it had been. For a moment, Ira was not sure what he was seeing. This was not a ghost which knew it was dead, this was a ghost which thought it was still alive. The body was long gone but the spirit remained. Maybe that was why Mrs. Wayde was sleeping on the edge of her bed, like she could feel his presence. Maybe she knew.

"Oh, Max," Ira whispered, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. "What did you do."

Could an eleven year old boy who could hardly levitate a feather, who refused to try to control a rat, could he have done something like this? Ira did not even know what had been done, exactly.

Somewhere in another room a baby began to cry. Mrs. Wayde groaned and Ira's eyes widened in panic.

Oh no oh no oh no oh shit. He rose to the ceiling like a feather in the wind and hoped as hard as he could that she would not see him. But, he realized, he could have stayed on the ground and she would not have seen him, she was like a ghost herself. She floated out of the room, her feet shuffling along. Ira wondered if she even acknowledged her children, or if she was going to the other room to tell her baby to be quiet or else.

Ira did not stick around to find out.