Winston Ipswitch lived alone in Morgenthau University’s abandoned library on a bed of clothes laid out on a frame of old encyclopedias. Next to The Professor and Grover, Winston had the longest tenure of any of the residents on campus. His accommodations at the library were always a subject of controversy and jealousy, mainly because he was the building’s only tenant and paid the same amount of rent as everyone else. He certainly did not see himself as the rightful owner of the building, and whenever he was accused of hogging the library all to himself, he invited any resentful individuals to come spend a night with him in the library. Anyone who took him up on the offer never went back again.The bodies of our departed brothers and sisters may have been buried on the west side of campus in the forgotten splendor of The Gardens, but their spirits unquestionably lived in the library. According to Winston, who had majored in Art History at Morgenthau back in its heyday, there had always been some kind of spirit in building, even before the campus was abandoned and people started dying.
The library more adequately resembled a medieval castle than it did anything else. It had once been a lavish mansion on the outskirts of the city in the late nineteenth century. An artist’s colony developed around it, and some of those buildings were eventually incorporated into the Morgenthau Academy and later by the University of the same name.
So, when asked about the ghosts that haunted the library, Winston said that most of them had been around for a good hundred years.
“It’s just like any old house,” he told me one afternoon when I was helping him and Alistair board up a window that had cracked during a summer hailstorm. “The people who lived there before me still feel like they own the place. They’ve been dead a hundred years and they still feel like they own the place!” Winston’s favorite remark was always saved for when new people asked him about living with the ghosts.
“Doesn’t it bother you living with ghosts?” asked Eva the first time she met him.
“They annoy me less than you people do,” he said, always with a smirk.
Winston ended up living at Morgenthau after a modest career painting murals in New York City began to unravel due to a debilitating nerve disease that affected his ability to hold his brushes steadily. He refused to call it Parkinson’s, and usually said some other name when asked what his disease was called. When the condition was still in its earliest stages, Winston tried to ignore the disease and compensated for the jittering and shaking by painting with smaller brushes or even with his opposite hand. As a result, his work slowed to a crawl and he missed deadlines, fell behind in his work, and spent his advance before he finished the job and received the rest of his commission.
As a result, he was kicked out of the artists collective where he was living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and decided to try to get a teaching fellowship at Morgenthau, only to travel back to his alma mater to find that it had been boarded up and closed down. While roaming the deserted thoroughfares on that November morning, he saw The Professor as he was walking back from the Admin building, the only descent place to take a shit in the entire complex before record snowfall collapsed its roof that winter.
The Professor told him to get lost if he knew what was good for him, but Winston lingered around the campus until night fell and the temperatures began to dip below freezing. Unlike years later when the campus was overrun with addicts and other squatters, the campus only had a handful of residents at the time. The quadrangle had yet to become a jungle of weeds and overrun by snakes, the Fieldhouse was still standing, but locked. The Main Residence Hall was open, but the stench drove Winston away immediately.
The only building that Winston found unlocked was the Library, which The Professor had been looting whenever he began to lose his mind with boredom. A solid, stone building, the library was a quick stroll from the dorms, connected to the quadrangle by a two story arch that led to thick oak doors, adorned with a series of wood carvings. Inside the doors, a reception desk sat at the foot of a double staircase that led up to the nonfiction sections. By sidestepping the reference desk and the stairs, a Morgenthau student would then walk into a well-lit, high ceiling chamber that housed fiction, microfilm, computer stations, typewriter stations and dozens of comfy couches and chairs for reading and studying. The upstairs nonfiction section served as a mezzanine that looked down on the grand room of the library.
By the time Winston came back to the library, he found very little of the building he remembered from his days studying about the Impressionist movement. The lobby was cluttered with debris, dirt and random trash. The grand room of the library swirled with a perpetual fog of dust and smoke. Several bookcases had toppled over like dominoes, their contents were scattered across the ground like leaves beneath a tall tree in autumn. The couches, ones so comfy that Winston remembered falling asleep while cramming for a bio final, had been ripped to shreds or had their cushions stolen by the campus’ first few residents looking for decent bedding.
It broke Winston’s heart to see his college in the shape that it was in. He had no idea what happened to this place that he had called home. This time of year, a place like the Library would be filled to capacity with students prepping for midterms and thesis projects. Instead, the life had been sucked out of this once lively place. It felt like he was living in a cemetery long before he ever encountered the ghosts.
He rarely spoke about his spectral landlords, but when he did, he would criticize them for being so repetitive. Things like tapping his shoulder when he was walking through a dark room were terrifying at first, but after a while he had come to expect it from them, the same way he stopped getting fooled by his uncle who always told him his shoes were untied before flicking his nose. Every now and then he would talk about the ghostly figures that spent eternity re-arranging the scattered books back into their proper Dewey-Decimal order. If pressed, he would talk about the sounds of footsteps in the dark, or the squeaky wheels of the book cart as it rolled along the mezzanine, or the old typewriter that would start up in the middle of the night and type exactly 2,000 words. They bothered Winston, but as he always said, they didn’t bother him half as much as we did.
Winston got through the first few weeks in the library without sleeping at all. He took a few naps during the day when the spirits were on break. The library’s old, solid structure allowed for the heat to be held throughout the winter and for a cool, cellar-like feeling to maintain throughout the summer. Even as the other residents braved the elements in the dorms, no one who had spent five minutes in the library would dare of trading their hypothermia for a warm night with the ghosts.
As a result, Winston tried his best to work through the night painting. His hand had gotten progressively worse when he was not painting, but there was something about working in the dark in the middle of a ghostly study group that had found a way to calm his nerves. His canvases, old tarps from the basement stretched around the frames of the empty bookcases, were painted with a variety of old paint buckets he had found in the utility closets of the academic buildings. Most of his paint was white, but there were a few buckets of Morgenthau’s school colors, red and black, and the occasional light blue or cream.
He painted by candlelight, in a setting that looked more like a séance than an artist’s studio. When he held his palette in his good hand, his bad hand trembled as it dipped his brush into the paint. But Winston had learned to absorb the energies of the spirits around him. As he moved the brush towards the canvas, his wild jerks swirled into a high-speed, controlled vibration. He went from being as erratic as a weed whacker to being as precise as a tattoo needle in a matter of seconds. Occasionally, he could let loose the reigns and his uncontrolled strokes turned into stylized etchings, using his cursed hand’s spasms as a unique approach to his work.
In a past life, Winston had painted portraits, landscapes and murals. In the darkness with the ghosts of the library, he had harnessed his true talents, and the result was dark, primal, furious artistry that still maintained delicate form and intricate arrangements.
The prime example of Winston’s distinctive artistic style was the 10-foot by 6-foot portrait of Kendra that he painted in the days following her death. The piece a cathartic expression as much as it was a lesson in self-torture. In a fit of anger, Winston tore a nearly completed painting off his makeshift easel and covered the tarp with black paint, using up every drop, scraping out the final streaks with his own bare hands and filling in every white space on the cloth. He began screaming at the ghosts in the library to leave him alone so that he could concentrate. He threw books in their directions and spit whiskey through his candles, forming fireballs so bright and crisp that he swore he could see demonic faces in them. He challenged the specters to give him all that they had.
He told me a few months later that the experience was the scariest night of his life. Before then, he had kept an impersonal relationship with the ghosts, but after that night he had crossed the line into their world, and they were about as tired of him as he was tired of them.
The completed painting hung up in the mezzanine, in front of the library’s cathedral-like stained glass windows from the time he finished it until the day we wrapped The Professor’s body in the canvas and buried him. I was amazed that Winston was willing to part with the canvas. He had painted a dead-on perfect portrait of Kendra’s face and shoulders in clean strokes of white and off-white paint. The rest of the painting was a series of erratic strokes that pictured—among other things—the scene of her murder; the dark, menacing forest where she was found; the evil, guiltless fiends who had committed this act; and, according to Winston, the ghosts that tortured his psyche while his bad hand unconsciously composed his finest masterwork. It could have been in any art museum in the world, but instead it’s buried with the corpse of our departed friend and teacher.
I visited Winston one afternoon not too long after The Professor’s death and talked to him as he sketched out a new painting on a brand new canvas. The day suddenly turned into night and I began to realize that we were not alone in the room.
“I think I should leave,” I told Winston. “I don’t want to get really freaked out by your roommates,” I told him.
Winston continued painting and spoke in his typical monotone, “If it makes you feel any better, they’ve been here for about an hour already,” said the painter. I gulped. “Just keep looking at the painting,” he said calmly.
It was hard not to look around the room where I imagined that a dozen apparitions were standing in audience, watching Winston sketch out his next masterpiece.
“What do they want?” I asked, sheepishly.
“Well,” he said with a long, exhaling sigh, “They’re probably not very happy that you’re here, but then again, there is little that makes them happy.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Just keep focusing on the painting,” he repeated. “If you want to leave, you don’t have to make a big scene about it, you can just get up and leave. They’re not going to try to scare you if you act like you’re not afraid and that you don’t want to be bothered.”
“But you’re not afraid of them, and they still bother you,” I countered.
“Well, the big secret about me, kid, is that I’ve kind of become dependent on them. And they’ve kind of become dependent on me. It’s funny how life works like that sometimes. My parents were the same way. Fucking hated each other. But once they were separated for more than a few days they’d start crying uncontrollably. My mom only outlived my dad by two weeks. Fact of the matter is, they steady my hand, and I keep people afraid of them.”
“What happens if we’re no longer afraid of them?” I asked.
Winston turned around from his painting, with his eyes subtly glancing over my shoulder. “Well,” said the painter, “if you’re truly not afraid of them, turn around and see for yourself.” And with that, he picked up his palette and began laying down some smooth black lines and giving off the distinct impression that our conversation was over.
I slowly got my feet, clenched my fists, gathered a head of courage and turned around to find the dark room empty. No sounds of footsteps, no apparitions, nothing. I began thinking that perhaps it was all a point that Winston was making. Did the ghosts really exist or had Winston simply perpetuated the myth so long that people believed it? Were those footsteps really ghosts or just the sounds of an old, rickety building, or perhaps the unwelcome intrusion of one of the addicts from the woods? Had Winston invented this myth so that he could maintain the library’s cozy comforts all for himself? He was crazy enough to do it.
On my way out the door I thought Winston tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I’d forgotten something. I turned back and saw nobody standing there. I screamed like a girl and ran like hell.
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