“Never Open The Door”

I always thought I was psychically blind. Now I know.

Nearest (as in “Nearest and Dearest;” unspecified husband/wife/spouse/significant other) and I were living in the Navy town of Bremerton, Washington.

Bremerton Walks. Not like Edinburgh, but things stroll around the dark neighborhoods at night that shouldn’t be outside the wooded graveyards. They’re quiet, but they’re there. There are bodies in unexpected places; a street away from our house was the world’s smallest aboriginal reservation, a 1/2-block of big trees, with a few graves lined up in the tiny flower gardens between the house trailers.

Standing in the middle of the intersection by our house, in broad daylight, I heard a horse whinny behind me. A horse? What was a horse doing in a town street ten miles from the nearest pasture?

Not much else sounds like a neigh. I’ve heard enough horse voices; my first back injury came when I hurled myself off my sister’s ancient mare, who fell asleep and collapsed on her head while cantering. The voice on the street wasn’t a kid screaming because she’d fallen off her bike. It was a horse, calling to its ilk.

That night, Nearest and I heard hoofbeats on the asphalt. And a carriage. Four horses, at least, and a carriage. What else sounds like that? I jumped up to open the door, and Nearest — who is Scots, Irish and Wyandotte (not Winnabago, like I tease him sometimes), all Walking People — warned me back from the threshold.

“Don’t open it! “

“Why not?” I said. Then — “OH.”

I remembered why; you don’t want to open a door into yourself when THAT coach goes by. The horses don’t have any heads, and they’re the last horses you’re ever going to see.

Walt Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” portrayed the coachman as the headless one, but in the Irish legend it’s the horses that gallop without their skulls, and personally, I just don’t want to see that. Perhaps they’re the left-overs of the old horse-sacrifices of ancient Hibernia, and they’ll snatch any opportunity to take humans with them into The West.

After we’d settled back down on the couch, we started doubting what we’d heard. Could it just have been the wind, whipping dried leaves and sand along the sidewalk gutters? The limbs of the trees knocking together in unusual ways? A kid on one of those metal scooters? A really big dog?

Then the sirens started up at the hospital, and the medics came to the house at the end of the street, where one of our neighbors died that night.

No, never open the door when that carriage goes by.