August Evelyn Nevernight

My Ghost

Dear ______,

I never know how to say this other than to be up front about it, but I have a ghost. Below is the story of how this spirit became attached to me. This happened many years ago now, and this spirit has been with me ever since. Here is the story:

I like to collect weird things that no one else wants around. Dead stuff, parts of dead stuff, bird nests, rocks, and a plethora of other lost, deceased, or otherwise curious things. One thing I picked up had tenant living inside it.

August Evelyn Nevernight was born somewhere in England. He won’t speak of the place, afraid its horrible name will lodge in his throat and he’ll drown in astral dampness. August arrived, a wailing, healthy boy in September of 1841. His mother died in childbirth so he was raised by a seemingly endless succession of nannies. He had two sisters who sucked endlessly at society’s spurious teats and had no time for him. He saw his father only rarely. Usually on holidays when the short, heavy-browed man was not working or carousing.

Little August spent his early years avoiding his sisters and longing for his mother. He was jumbled up inside and he took it out on his nannies. The last nanny was Eunice. Eunice wore mourning clothes, “black satin and velvet draperies with lace frothing at the sleeves and black bone corset at the neck,” as August described them. She always carried a black lace handkerchief to dab her tears away. One day August heard his sisters gossiping about Eunice, alleging that she used to be well off but then her husband had drowned and she was forced to take work to live. August took to making paper coffins and writing the name of her poor dead husband inside each one. He’d then leave them propped up all over the house. When Eunice refused to let him have an extra piece of cake or stay up past his bedtime, August would pretend to drown himself in his nightly bath. He almost actually drowned twice.

The day Eunice quit she bent down and looked at little August right in the eyes, “one day you will find love, but it will not last,” she said. And then she turned and left. August was sent to boarding school.

Upon graduation in 1866 August could not wait to get out of “dank old England” and took a job working for Albert Albertsson, the mayor of Deadwater, California. The mayor was convinced that a creature called the nokken lived in the swamp at the center of town and he hired August to handle the campaign to drain the swamp. August was prepared to stamp out damp wherever it could be found.

A nokken, incidentally, is a shapeshifting water spirit that can appear as almost anything it wants. In Deadwater it was a handsome man leaning against a rock, playing haunting tunes on a violin. If it lured in an audience, it would drown them all. Times were bad in Deadwater when August lived there, anyone who didn’t move away longed to be lucky enough to hear the nokken play. Albertsson eventually went mad and ran into the swamp himself, but that was long after August was already dead. August himself heard the music many times, but said that a liverwurst sandwich always cured him of the desire to follow it. He always carried one in his satchel.

While August was in Deadwater he fell in love with Albertsson’s daughter, also named Evelyn. Albertsson welcomed him into the family with open arms and the two married after a short courtship. Evelyn Albertsson was small and lithe with dusty blond hair and an adventurous spirit. It was she who discovered that liverwurst would reverse the hypnotic effects of the nokken's music after she had been lured to the water’s edge and beat the spirit in a game of wits.

She and August were married atop one of Deadwater’s towering ocean cliffs. The ceremony was lovely, but the guests were buffeted by high winds and bothered by the smell of decay drifting off of Deadwater’s beaches (that’s a story too, but it’s long and better left for another day). August and Evelyn were nevertheless enchanted with the spot and returned often to watch whales through August’s grandfather’s old spyglass.

One sunny morning August and Evelyn were whale spotting. Evelyn had brought her parasol because the sun so easily scorched her delicate skin, but found she couldn’t hold it and the spyglass at the same time. Being a gentleman, and her husband, August took the parasol. He was twirling it like a dandy and making Evelyn laugh when a gust of wind took the parasol, and August, off the cliff. He fell 800 feet to his death.

The parasol washed ashore a few days later and Evelyn kept it until her death, perched in an umbrella stand despite it being stained and ruined by seawater. She never opened it, but she lovingly caressed the handle every time she passed it. When Evelyn died the parasol and its story were sold at an estate sale. The memento bounced around California for awhile and ended up in the home of one Maria Martinez, a collector of love stories. When she died I bought the parasol at her estate sale. It was water stained and crusty. Everyone before me had left the parasol closed, for fear the skeletal supports would crack if they tried to open it. But I tried it anyway. That’s when August escaped.

It’s unfortunate that Evelyn never opened it. August could have haunted her instead, or found solace and moved on. But she didn’t. I did. And now I have his surly, strange ghost for a companion. I threw the parasol out by the way, it smelled horrible and I thought August might go with it. He didn’t. I'm not sure how to get rid of him, but I’d like to. August loves the occult and I read his future every day. He’s an absolute monster if I don’t. I’ve used his tarot readings as a journal to chronicle our life together.

I should warn you, this is a strange and harrowing tale. There are no happy endings here.¹

Read the first entry here.

1. This letter to an unnamed recipient was found among Rebecca March’s papers after her death. Had she planned on publishing the chronicle of her life with August? We’ll likely never know, but we’ve decided publish them here, as part of Deadwater’s larger story.