Red Leaves – Reactor

The spirit of a recently deceased young boy helps a group of ghosts seek revenge on a corrupt and abusive town minister.

Short Story | 4.540 words

“You just stand there and take that?” the girl said to me. I didn’t see where her voice was coming from. “You let him make your mama bawl like that? You don’t do a thing?”

My mother was leaning on the shape of the thing, crying so hard she didn’t notice when I put my arms around her. I’d never heard her wail that way, not in all my life. And there was the man in his dark suit, his nose so high that his stare slid down his cheeks, slow, like ice breaking up on stone. Staring at my mother, crying. Wretched woman, he’d said. Who are you to question the Almighty?

“I tried to tell her he’s a terrible liar,” I said. “She didn’t listen.”

“None of ’em do,” the girl agreed. Then I saw her, peeking over the top of the man’s head. She had a thin, green look and her legs wrapped around his neck looked too bendy, but her eyes were smart and glittering. She had friends with her, I noticed all at once, a lot of them. More than I might have thought would fit on his two shoulders, and clinging all over his back. He seemed crooked with the weight. So why didn’t he do something about it, like scrape them off against the doorframe? “Why don’t you come with us, then?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have my lessons to do.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, and reached a hand for me. Reached it farther than
I would have thought it might go. Hooked her fingers in my chest, which made me gasp, because I thought it ought to hurt. But it didn’t hurt, not at all. I went slipping up her arm, somehow, like it was a rail through my heart. Landed in the tangle of them up on the man’s dark collar, with its white flakes and stink of old wool.

“Emma’s right, you know,” one of them said to me. I couldn’t tell which. “You’re best off with us.”

I didn’t want to go. But I was fitted in among them, the lap and curl of the crowd of them. We seemed to spill inside one another rather neatly, humped on the man’s spine.

“Just as long as I’m home in time for supper,” I said. “I suppose it’s all right, in that case.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” the girl said. “Is it ever all right.”

I wanted to argue, couldn’t have said what about. But then the man was leaving, our maid Mary cowering back at the door as she let him out and her eyes red and strange.

The man went in at a boarding house I’d passed before. A very respectable place, my mother had said. Run by a very respectable widow, whatever certain backwards-thinking people might have to say about her. Remembering my mother had said that made me less worried, about following the man inside.

At least… “He lives here?” I asked. “It’s his home?”

“Home,” Emma sneered. Her friends took it up, gibbering the word in a hundred voices until the man in the dark suit switched like a cow’s tail after flies. “He might think it’s his. We might say something else, if you catch my meaning.”

I didn’t. We were in a nice front hall, clean and shiny, but the carpet looked worn. To the left were double doors to the parlor, couldn’t say how I knew, and there was soft singing coming from behind them. Not one person, but not twenty either. I could feel how the room was dark. Soft, pliant dark, calling me on. It would feel nice, I thought, like a bath soothing where I ached. I gave a little yearn toward it, but Emma and her friends yanked me back.

“That’s baby stuff,” Emma said. “We’ve got real business. You’ll see.”

The man heard the singing too and his nostrils pinched. “Disgraceful,” he muttered. “Unholy drivel.” A maid was in the hall, bobbing, frightened. “You! Bring up my tea. And mind it’s hot this time, if you would be so good as to do your work decently for once.”

The maid’s eyes rolled like wet marbles and she mumbled and her curtsy was all bounce and flutter. But when the man turned away she stuck her tongue out at his back.

“Bet she spits in his jam!” Emma cackled, and then we were going up the stairs, a wobbling mass of us all around his shoulders. I thought we might go tumbling down the stairs, but we held on.

“Go on,” Emma urged. “Just a nudge, is all. Remember your poor mama, howling like a kicked dog?”

I looked at the tea steaming on the lace tablecloth. It was very hot. The man was leaning in, jotting something in a book with its cover spread like emerald wings. It wouldn’t take much.

“I’ll be whipped,” I said. “If I do a thing like that.” Like a little hooligan would do, I didn’t say.

They all laughed, and their laughter prickled through me like flying sparks. “Not ever again, you won’t,” said three, or five, or a dozen of them, voices all lapping and babbling. “Never again!”

I still didn’t want to. “Why me?” I asked Emma. “If it’s so easy, you can do it yourself.”

She didn’t answer.

“Can’t you?” I demanded.

“You’re the new one,” Emma snapped at last. “You think we brought you along to be our precious pet? Show us what you’re good for, rich boy.”

I didn’t think a girl should talk to me this way—a girl my mother wouldn’t have let me play with, besides. But Emma wasn’t nothing. She was the kind of something that made you do what she said. Carefully I reached down, and gave the cup a tap.

It jumped an inch and the tiny spoon clinked on the saucer.

The man in the dark suit looked down at it—supercilious, there was the word—all scowl and piss. He looked around and I thought he’d grab me by the ear and pull me out from the mess of us and beat me black and blue with his walking stick. But he looked, looked twice, and pursed his lips, and picked up his pen again. I felt proud that I’d hidden myself so well from him.

“Now!” Emma squealed. “Again! You give it what for this time! Again!”

They were all babbling it with her. Again, again! Something in my head was shaking, shimmering, buzzing with the squeal of them all till I could hardly stand it. This time I gave the cup and saucer a proper smack and it all went sailing, off the table and onto his lap.

The man in the dark suit jumped up and screamed, and the cup and saucer smashed to bits. His trouser leg was soaked and steaming, up all the way to his privates even. He screamed and screamed, and Emma shrieked with laughter.

“Tell my mama I’m unclean, will you now? Tell her I’m not fit to be among the blessed? You’re the one with hellfire on your boiled old prick! I hope it blisters right off, you worm!”

“Emma!” I said. “Talking like that to a minister!” Because I remembered now, the man was one. I felt a flinch that I’d scalded him. But it was only little, the flinch, and it soared up on wide wings—because he’d said to my mama too, he’d said—

There was a stamping and thumping on the stairs. “Reverend, are you all right?” I didn’t know why the voices were starting to sound strange, foggy. Only because of the door, or—

“You got him!” Emma said to me, and she sounded fine. “That’s our boy!” Her friends took it up, yammer and chatter of boy, our boy. I found myself wishing they had more their own voices, or their own faces. I found myself wishing they didn’t blur and bubble, with a head popping from the tangle here or there and then shrinking again, like the air was leaking out of it.

It seemed hard to make friends properly if I couldn’t tell them apart. And then, the fact that they were like that, so terribly confused—

But then I smiled. “I did,” I said. “I showed him.”

And I’d gotten clean away with it, too. He hadn’t even seen me!

“Call Dr. Harriot,” he was screaming. “My God, my God.”

Emma laughed and laughed.

It was after the doctor had bandaged him up and dosed him with laudanum that I noticed something. Everyone sounded too far and too foggy, but at the same time everyone—in the house, anyway—sounded much too close. It didn’t seem to matter what walls were in the way, what doors. Everything sifted through the same, right into my hearing. I gave a little stretch, and all at once the whole house fit me like a new-sewn shirt.

So I felt the landlady downstairs in her striped silk dress, as if she was sitting in my ribs. I knew when she said, “I almost think he spilled the tea on himself deliberately, simply as an excuse to interrupt our sitting! Of course the spirits wouldn’t linger after all that dreadful carrying on!”

But when I tried to sneak home to my mama, I found the house stuck to me. I couldn’t get it off.

I knew Emma was there too, stretched all over the same rooms as me, fitted into their corners and chimneys just as well as I was.

I knew she was watching to see if I’d cry.

There was a lot to know in the house. There were half a dozen boarders—slotted in me when I stretched, all stuck in my lungs and neck and shins, and dropped on their chairs when I didn’t—and three servants always throwing dust where I thought my nose should be. I kept waiting to sneeze. And then there was the pretty landlady, who seemed rather grand for how many holes were in her roof, how many cold drips tingled their silvery lines inside my back. When creditors banged on her door, she shooed them away all bright and fancy and How ridiculous! Of course, of course—

Besides all that, there were the people who came most evenings to sit and sing in the dark. Once I had the trick of filling out the rooms, Emma couldn’t keep me away from them, no matter how she mocked.

“You won’t be new forever, rich boy,” she sneered. “You’d better get busy, instead of hanging around those sticky stickers.”

“Those what?” I said. “What do you mean? It’s only—I feel so cold all the time, and it’s nice and warm in there. The singing is warm.”

It wasn’t only that, though I wouldn’t have told Emma for anything. The people cried sometimes and their tears washed channels through my hurt and they said kind things about children and others who’d—slipped a bit. I could pretend it was my mama saying those things about me, calling and calling me to come to her.

“I bet you could still pick up a knife,” Emma said, sulkily enough. “I bet you could slide it in his neck. Or you could put something on the stairs, just ahead of him going down! That would be a good one!”

I thought I could. “And will you leave me be, if I do that?”

Emma was quiet a moment. Her crowd of hangers-on bubbled their eyes at me, but they seemed tired and out of sorts. “Depends, I suppose. Worth a try, though, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t as easy as Emma seemed to think. The rolling pin kept dropping through my fingers. It teetered and spilled where it ought to have been a sure thing.

But in the end I got the pin where I wanted it, just as the man in the suit—I remembered his name, now, but I didn’t care to use it—came mincing down to breakfast. He was moving carefully on account of his burns, but nowhere near carefully enough. Emma’s friends started up to shriek and crow as he went thumping down the stairs, the whole swarm of us tangled around his face and neck like crickets in a spider web.

The man was screaming plenty loudly—it was a good, long fall. But in the end all we had to show for it was another visit from the doctor, and an ankle swollen like a gourd, and two broken ribs. I thought Emma would cry.

“Such sharp, slippery stairs!” Emma mourned. “Why couldn’t he have snapped his spine, at the very least? Why didn’t the edge of one catch his skull enough to whack a crack in it, and let the brains creep out? Why didn’t one of those ribs poke a hole in his lung, I’d like to know? You won’t be up to the job much longer, and how will I get him after that?”

After that, babbled her friends. After that. But there was a sinking to their voices, a weakening. I didn’t try to tell them apart anymore.

I understood that night how Emma had tricked me. I could leave the house only by sticking to the man; I’d stuck as hard as I could whenever he’d stepped out, in case he paid another call on my mama. And now the man was in bed with his leg up on a stack of pillows.

“How about the old knife-in-his-throat?” Emma prodded. “While he’s lying there like a lump of dough? You can do it, all right! Attaboy!”

“No,” I said. “I need him alive, or I’ll never see my mother again.”

Emma was silent a bit. Then: “Roger’s gone. He’s only been with us since the scarlet fever went around, but he never had much juice. I knew he didn’t have it in him to stay long.”

The man bellowed at the landlady, saying the maid should be turned away for her carelessness. And the landlady smiled sly and said she didn’t believe it was the maid.

It was one of their evenings, when the people came stepping in at the front door, and I filled the house to feel their steps shudder under my heart.

“Don’t pay them any mind,” Emma said. “The old worm is snoring up a fit! Just drop the crust of his bread in his wallowing mouth, that’s our boy, and I bet he’ll choke to death!”

There was a step under my heart that shook me all the way down, but somehow I couldn’t make out the lady above her foot. But that foot, that boot, the way it pulsed—

“I’m sorry I called you rich boy, and all that,” Emma wheedled. “You’re a brave, sporting boy. A good friend, and a loyal son! One thing you won’t ever forgive is somebody acting cruel to your mama!”

It was her, only her body was held so stiff and her head so straight I hardly recognized her. I couldn’t see her face very well, but I could feel the times she’d pulled me close and stroked my hair. Memories all clinging to her arms like grapes on the vine.

“Don’t be concerned, Mrs. Harnish,” crooned the landlady. “The reverend is laid up, you won’t be seeing him. He’s been troubled by accidents of late.” She said the last almost like it was a joke.

“It’s her,” I said—to Emma, or to the whole crowd of us, I couldn’t tell. “She’s found out that I’m here, and she’s come to take me home!”

“Well, then,” Emma said. “You’ve seen her again, just like you wanted! You don’t need wormy-in-the-bed anymore! There’s the crust still on his plate, right by the bed, and half an egg. A quick pluck, and quick drop, and maybe just a touch of shoving it in!”

“I would have come sooner,” my mother said. “Only I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing that man again. The things he dared to say to me, with my darling boy not even—”

“I trust tonight will persuade you of how very wrong he was,” said the landlady, silky-bright. “The Calvinists have much sorrow to answer for, and all of it unfounded.”

Mama, I wanted to say. I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go walking together, hand in hand, while the leaves are still red on the trees.

But then how would I explain that the house fit me now, like a shirt I couldn’t take off? If I stood up and stretched, quick and sharp enough, what would the house do? Could I get free of it then? Having my mother here, wanting so much to walk with her—I wondered if it would give me the strength to shuck the damned thing, even if I had to split the roof to do it.

No. I supposed that might frighten her.

Mama, I tried. My voice sounded clear enough, right enough, whenever I talked to Emma. But it came out different now, misty and thin. She didn’t look around. Mama!

The landlady brought her into the room with the chairs around the table. The singing room, the dark room. She showed my mother to a chair.

My mother was inside me, inside my face. I billowed my cheeks all over her to feel her heartbeat and the drumming of her sweetness and her warmth. I didn’t know how to make her know it was me, right there with her.

Everyone sat and linked pinkie fingers and sang, all in the dark, and my mother was crying so hard the song choked in her mouth and the words quavered.

Emma billowed herself right into my shape, pushing and crowding, and shook herself to shake me.

“See how she’s weeping? See what he did to her? Come on, it’ll only take a moment, and who knows when we’ll get a chance like this again?”

“Leave me alone,” I told her. “Why is it always me, who has to do these things? Choke him yourself, if you’re so keen on it.”

Emma hesitated. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Drop the egg down his throat, like you said. Push it in.”

I wanted Emma gone so I could feel my mother singing. Feel her tears, washing me off balance. I felt myself getting slipperier, like a dream. Soft and bending.

“I don’t have it in me anymore. Moving things. If I’d known how quick I’d lose it I wouldn’t have wasted time scattering his papers and suchlike. Or dropping his coat in the embers. Or spilling his chamber pot. I should’ve—”

But then I stopped attending to Emma, because the table started bumping. The very big man who always sat by the landlady intoned, “Spirit! We are eager to speak with you! Will you grace us with your name?”

He said that sort of thing every evening, when they sat. The landlady’s eyes rolled back and her head lolled like her neck was breaking. I knew she’d speak, and I knew she wouldn’t sound right.

“It’s me,” she squeaked. “It’s Arthur!”

My mother gasped.

“Now wait a moment,” I said. Emma burst out laughing so hard she made the curtains twitch. People looked around and squeezed their linked fingers tighter.

“Have you a surname, Arthur? Can you recall—”

“Arthur Harnish,” the landlady squeaked on. All the air was charged with me. Oh, I wasn’t soft and bending now! Every unbound hair lifted up and seethed at the darkness. The people sitting began to make noises like a flock wanting to scatter. And my mother—she was weeping, trembling. The landlady had made my mama cry!

“Maintain the circle!” bellowed the big man. “Arthur Harnish, do you bear any ill will toward the company gathered here?”

I felt the landlady peeking below her lashes. I felt her heart pick up its pace. She was getting nervous, I thought. As well she should be! I’d stretch, and set cracks racing through her walls. I’d smash her lamps and tear down her pictures, and throw the kettle through a window! I’d—

All the furniture was creaking like a ship in a storm. The beams in the ceiling groaned.

“Of course not,” the landlady chirped. How could my mama mistake that voice for mine? But she shook, she shook with every word, like it was wind bellying and gusting inside her skin. “I only wished to tell my dearest mother how I love her, and how closely I watch over her. I wished her to know how happy I am, and that she mustn’t grieve so. But”—and here her voice turned sharper, slyer, like she’d had an idea—“other spirits present are not so kind.”

There was a big brass bell on the table. I picked it up and it clacked and clanged. I felt stronger than I had with the rolling pin. Much stronger. I felt my fingers singing anger in lightning lines, and I held the bell firm and high. Why was my mama listening to the landlady, when she hadn’t listened to me?

I threw the bell, just as hard as I could. Right at the landlady’s face.

The big man yanked her aside so it only clipped her ear. But there was a lot of screaming, and the bang of the bell on the wall, and the dent it made. I was glad that the landlady shut up, anyway, and put her hand to her ear. Her fingers came away all over blood.

Emma stopped nagging and cheered, and her friends cheered with her. It made an awful din. “Whoa! You’re a strong one! Don’t get carried away, though. Don’t waste it!”

The creak and crash and trembling of the house had set everyone in the other rooms running. I felt it, but I didn’t have thoughts to spare for them. Not even when the man in the suit dragged himself from his bed and came half-thump, half-hop, out of his room. He stopped at the top of the stairs, clinging hard to the banister, with his eyes jumping down the steps and his wispy hair straight up in the storm of me.

He was afraid of those stairs, now. It made me grin through my rage.

But he braced himself and started down, hop and hobble, his left leg bent so only his toes tapped each step.

It was all his fault, I thought. If he hadn’t, hadn’t—well, then I never would have left my mama, and then she never would have come here looking for me, and finding something else that wasn’t me, only pretending to be me, even though I was right here. Oh, how could she not know me, when I was wrapped all around her?

He was halfway down, his lips pinched and grim.

I lifted, twisted myself. The stair he was about to step on tore right up, its nails yanked out and jabbing like thorns, its wood all whine and splinter.

He reeled back a little, eyes boggling. Then he gave a nasty laugh and kept on coming.

In the singing room, a lady lit a lamp with her hands shaking. “That should weaken their activity—that should make them disperse!”

“No!” My mother grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t! Arthur was here. He is here! I beg of you, do nothing that will send his spirit away from me!”

A lamp, really? They weren’t getting rid of me as easily as all that.

He reached the bottom of the stairs. Hobbled forward and threw open the parlor door, sweeping his eyes across the people scattered among toppled chairs and the landlady streaked in blood.

He pointed a long finger at the landlady, which meant he jabbed it smartly in my jaw. “You!” he thundered. “You have called unclean forces to this house!”

I wasn’t unclean! My mama had washed me with her own hands, after—

I wouldn’t speak for Emma and her friends, though. For how clean they might be. Emma’d given up badgering me, but she made a sound like held breath.

And anyway, he was the one who’d brought us here, every one of us!

But then my mama was in front of him. I saw her clearly now. Her face dead white, her eyes full of running light, like spilled oil burning on flagstones. Her legs shook so hard it made her heels stutter on the floor.

“Reverend Crosby,” she said. “You informed me that my dearest Arthur was in hell. The boy is most probably damned, I believe were your exact words? I fear I must correct you. Arthur spoke to me this evening, and he is at peace.”

In hell? What kind of silly idea was that? That would mean I was—

I stood up, sharp and quick. I hadn’t known how wadded up I was. But I stood, and there was a scream of wood and stone. The house was still stuck to me, all right. It just wasn’t stuck to the ground. It was all torn and tipped, a sky-filled grin stretched where the floor and wall didn’t meet anymore, and there was a great tumbling. I knew the people were falling, pinwheeling down, and a lot of furniture with them. Bookshelves sliding, and below me—certain sounds. A crunch, for example, where a table crashed on Reverend Crosby’s skull. I felt Emma and her friends go out in a gust, wobbling away like candle flames.

I knew the sight at my feet wasn’t suitable for children. I knew my mother wouldn’t want me to look at such things. I thought I ought to be good, to show her I was her good boy still. So she wouldn’t get so confused again. Her darling Arthur, very close now.

All at once I felt awfully tired, and I had to let the house fall.

She was there. She was smiling down at me. She held out her hand.

“Mama,” I said. My voice sounded right and strong. All around us were the red leaves, so many leaves, in a stirring wind.

“Arthur,” she said. “My dearest, dearest boy.” She lifted me to my feet, because I must have fallen.

“You thought I was dead,” I said, remembering. “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

The red leaves, the gray path. That was all. It was everything. I couldn’t even see the trees or the sky, for all the wild and scarlet weave of leaves blowing. We were walking, hand in hand. I bent my cheek to her wrist and kissed her. The wind was in me, and the kiss flew in the wind.

“I know, darling.” So why did she still look sad behind her smile? “No parent should have to outlive their own dear child. The Lord is too good to allow such a thing.” She hesitated. “I should have known that He is too good.”

“And that man—he told you I was damned. But I’m not damned, Mama.”

“No, darling,” my mother agreed. “Of course you aren’t. No just God would ever damn an innocent child.”

“Red Leaves” copyright © 2025 by S. E. Porter
Art copyright © 2025 by Jana Heidersdorf

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