An appropriate story for this time of the year, Halloween Eve—a story of a ghostly haunting in northern New Mexico, was published earlier this month in Grande Dame Literary Journal.
A spiteful poltergeist, the family matriarch as it happens, is troubling the chapel she loved to retreat to in life—the now ruinous chapel next to the magical Tower of the Riddles, an adobe observatory and place of riddling the skies, initially intended as a belltower for the religious structure just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by one of the daughters had been lost in transit and never replaced.
When a frequent visitor to the Las Trampas ranch "asked Reuben [once her science teacher] to explain about the riddles in the tower's name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he'd looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he'd been taken with. (Neruda's love of the natural world matching his own).
'the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.'"
image: New Mexico, photographer unknown
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