Well, boys and girls, I have a ghost.
It’s funny. I don’t even believe in ghosts. Maybe that’s why I got one. Or maybe she just came with the house. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s one of those houses that looks like it was designed specifically to be haunted. It was my grandfather’s, who hated me until the end, and who only willed it to me because I’m the only one of us left on his side. See, in addition to my ghost-skepticism I also harbor a pretty strong God-skepticism. My grandfather believed in both, as well as a global cabal of Zionist puppet masters who dominate all 195 sovereign nation-states. Well, he was right about ghosts. Maybe he was even right about God. The Zionist thing, of course, is fruitcake territory. I’m getting sidetracked.
The point is, he despised me. Was utterly convinced my entire life is basically a slow-motion swan-dive into Hell. His will actually stipulated that I wouldn’t inherent a cent until I declared my belief in God in front of some very serious people. A near-foolproof plan to save my soul, with only one tiny flaw–it was highly susceptible to strategic dishonesty. For some reason, I don’t think it ever occurred to him I might just lie, which is of course what I did. I don’t really feel bad about it. If all it took to get a house and a half-million dollars was to disrespect the last will and testament of a batshit anti-semite, wouldn’t you?
And again, I’m getting sidetracked. I don’t think I want to talk about it. I have to talk about it. The house.
I call it a house. You might also call it a cabin. From the outside, a long rectangle with log siding and a wrap-around porch, sitting deep into a few thousand acres of forest. At night, with the lights shining in the windows and the cricket-chorus rising up from the brush and an impenetrable darkness in every direction, it gives you the impression of something which doesn’t belong. Like it was left there by mistake.
Inside, with a few exceptions, it’s furnished in the way of an old woman—my grandmother’s handiwork, though she’s been in the ground much longer than my grandfather. Almost nothing in the house is mine. A guitar, some clothes, my laptop, and a single earring, one of two which Molly used to wear everyday, back before she died. Everything else is strange to me—all fanciful and old, and it’s so empty and quiet that you can hear the clock in the kitchen from the master bedroom down the hall. In short, it’s what professional ghost-hunters refer to as “creepy as fuck.”
You might be wondering why I moved in. I had to move, and quickly. It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you later, if you buy me a drink. For now, just the house, and the ghost.
A lot goes through your mind the first time you see a ghost. Even more if you don’t believe in them to begin with. You don’t just start believing in ghosts the second one shows up in your hallway. There’s a process. For me, it came in four stages, starting the moment I opened the front door and stepped over the threshold. It was maybe ten at night, and I was coming in from a long drive. I saw her before I even got the door closed behind me.
Phase 1, which I will call the Idiot Phase: I thought, oh shit, somehow I have wandered into someone else’s cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere, and now I am face-to-face with a stranger’s terrified child, and any second she’s going to scream, and her redneck father is going to come barrelling in, outwardly angry but inwardly delighted for an opportunity to exercise his second-amendment rights. At this moment, I did a half-turn, and I almost ran. But then, I had opened the door with my own key, hadn’t I? I turned back and checked again. Yep. The old floral-pattern couch, my grandfather’s recliner and claw-footed end table where he kept his spittoon (a big plastic cup from Arby’s), the sign on the wall which informs you that Home is, indeed, Where the Heart Is. The sixty inch TV which engaged my grandfather nightly, baring the closely-guarded secrets of the deep-state globalist lizardmen. Even so, I turned and checked the address on the front door. An act of denial, I think. A ghost’s real power, it so happens, is to temporarily turn you into a total dumbass.
The address was right. I turned back. She was still there.
She stood in the hallway aperture, on the edge of the dark, staring wide-eyed and scared, and me staring back, probably looking much the same. This prompted Phase 2, AKA the There Must Be a Reasonable Explanation Phase. It was simple. A little girl got lost in the woods. Tired and hungry, she saw the house lights through the trees and came on over to perpetrate a perfectly understandable B&E job. If I looked around, I was sure I would find a broken window somewhere.
This theory crumbled almost instantly. I took two steps in, breathing fast and holding my hand out like I was trying to calm down a belligerent drunk guy at a bar. Then she vanished. Rather, she was made to vanish. It’s not that she so much flickered out of view, but that she was pulled out of view. Jerked backward on invisible strings into the pitch hallway black. The front door creaked shut behind me. In retrospect, this is what ultimately shifted me into Phase 3, AKA the I’ve Lost My Fucking Mind Phase. Not that I immediately had this thought. What I immediately did was go get my grandfather’s gun, a revolver which looks old enough to have been the one that killed Wild Bill Hickock. Then I toured the house. Opened every door and cabinet, checked under every bed, even climbed into the crawlspace which my grandfather had generously called an attic. Nothing. And the more nothing I uncovered, the more the idea took hold in my brain. I have lost my fucking mind.
The first two phases took all of thirty seconds to pass. The third took nearly two days.
On the first day I drove into town to see a doctor. I told her I was hallucinating. I mentioned that my uncle was a schizophrenic, and is that inheritable? It sure the fuck is, she told me (in so many words), which reinforced the I Have Lost My Fucking Mind hypothesis. Then she asked me about my sleep schedule, any drug habits, and (inexplicably) my sex life. I told her my sleep schedule is fine, I have the drinking under control, and that unemployed 30-year-old men who live alone in woodland cabins 90 minutes away from civilization do not have sex lives. She referred me to a psychiatrist, and also to someone who could scan my brain. I made appointments for both before I even left the parking lot.
Then came the night.
I won’t lie. I was scared to be there, alone in that house with my newly broken brain. Alone with the tick-tick-tick of the kitchen clock and the patter of the raccoons on the roof and the long dark of the hallway waiting to catch me looking down it. Alone with a loaded gun tucked into the chair beside me because I no longer felt safe if it wasn’t nearby. Alone, thinking about Molly, as I always do at night, and her lost earring, a little rose-gold treble-clef with an L engraved on the back, the match for the M one I kept in my nightstand. And then, inevitably, my thoughts turned to the cabinet over the fridge, where my grandfather left about half a fifth of Wild Turkey. Why I can’t just pour it down the drain, I don’t know.
Alone.
In the end, I opted for a different drug, and one which is arguably worse. Cable TV. I turned it on, quickly changed away from my grandfather’s favorite channel in order to prevent my brain from further dissolving, and then surfed for a while until I found Die Hard. That’s basically the one good thing about cable TV, is that you can always find Die Hard, which is worth a watch even if it is broken up with ads for reverse home mortgages. Maybe I should get a reverse home mortgage for the ghost house. Hey, look. I’m stalling again.
I heard her breathing, first. I didn’t move and I didn’t make a sound. I wasn’t actually sure what I was hearing, because it didn’t sound quite right. It sounded muted and low, kind of like the way things sound underwater. It was hard to say what direction it was coming from. John McClane on the TV, dragging himself into the bathroom after his feet get shredded by the broken glass. Underneath, the kitchen clock, tick-tick-tick. And beneath that, her breath. Then, a pale shivering blue in my periphery, and I turned my head.
She stood beside me, and a little behind, between the recliner and the couch. As before, she looked terrified. She wore a blue dress, and her body jerked with her breath, the frills on her shoulders twitching. She was staring, not at me, but down the hallway.
Reluctantly—very reluctantly—I followed her gaze with mine. I peered down the hallway dark and tried to discern….what was I trying to discern? Nothing. There was nothing. I looked back at her. I opened my mouth.
“What is it?” I said, in a kind of desert-dry, croaky voice which I have just learned is the voice I use when I’m scared to death.
She turned her head. Still breathing hard, still shivering, still there. She looked at me.
“What is it?” I said again.
And she spoke to me. I don’t know what she said. Muted. Garbled. Underwater.
“What?” I breathed.
Now she took a step back, and repeated herself, to no use. She looked back down the hallway. I looked after her. That’s when I saw it.
Something enormous, down near the end. A black shape, hunched over, head brushing the ceiling. It shifted its great weight, not walking, but sliding, inching forward, coming toward me. Then, distantly, as though from the bottom of a well, a voice. Like the little girl’s voice, it was garbled and strange. But unlike the little girl’s voice, I could understand it.
I thought…we might…try…try…try…that…
For a moment, it was like my brain no longer controlled my body. It told me to run, but I did not run. It told me to turn on the lights, but I didn’t do that either. It told me to shut my eyes and that when I opened them again the thing would be gone and the girl would be gone and everything would be fine.
But I didn’t close my eyes, and the thing crept closer.
I…thought…we…might…
“She heard me say I love you a thousand times,” John McClane said on the TV. “She never heard me say I’m sorry.”
Molly and her treble-clef earrings, looking over at me from the wheel, mouthing something which I couldn’t hear. The whiskey over the fridge. The whiskey that I think about every day. I haven’t lost to it, yet. Maybe that’s why I don’t pour it out. Maybe I need that.
The thing lurched, and slid closer.
I…I…thooought…
“Kill him,” the little girl said, in her underwater voice, and I didn’t even realize I had understood her until it was all over. My body woke up.
I pulled the gun from the chair, pointed it down the hallway, and pulled the trigger. The kick, the muzzle flash, an explosion of shattering glass, and a soft splattering sound. It quickly turned into a dribble, and then a drip. I waited for that drip to slow into silence, staring down the hallway the whole time, gun still raised, the barrel trembling.
Sergeant Powell telling John McClane he was gonna make it out. The clock tick-tick-ticking away. No monster in the hall. No girl in a blue dress. Just me in an empty house. Slowly, still shaking, I got up and turned on the hallway light. Shards of glass littered a shelf down at the end where my grandmother had kept her snow globes. More shards on the floor, a wet chaos mosaic scattered out in an arc like a glittering solar flare. Water everywhere. I tucked the gun into my jacket and went to the door to pull my boots on. Then I traversed the hall to stop before the shelf, glass crunching under my soles.
My grandmother loved snow globes. She kept them out all year. I’d gotten one with a little fawn looking up at a snowman. I’d taken the snowman’s head off, and now a crack was running down its body. A strange melancholy came over me as I considered the murdered snowman and the fawn staring up at where its head used to be.
And I thought of Molly, and the lost L earring, and the whiskey. And I went to bed, leaving the hallway’s end shining with water and broken glass.
I had insomnia even before I had a ghost, which is lucky for me, as scientists have developed a number of wonderful chemicals meant to treat sleeplessness, and these chemicals do not care where your sleeplessness comes from. Last week it was life-anxiety, this week it is ghost-anxiety—Ambien works for both. I took two (not recommended) and a melatonin cap. I lay there with the light on, staring up at the ceiling and breathing as slow as I could. The chemical warmth washed in after fifteen minutes or so, and I got up and picked out a Zane Grey novel from my grandfather’s bookshelf. I opened it, but I couldn’t follow the words.
Next thing, I was waking up. At some point I had apparently turned out the light, because it was pitch dark. I checked my phone and saw it was after three. My head was still fuzzy, my mouth was dry and I needed to pee. I dragged myself out of bed, opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. Instantly, a bolt of pain like an electric shock shot through the sole of my foot.
“Fuck.”
I said it in a whisper, as though my grandparents might hear me somehow. I grabbed the door frame and staggered back and sat on the bed, where I turned on the lamp and pulled my foot up for examination. A large shard of glass now protruded from my heel, beads of blood dripping down its sharp edge.
“Fuck,” I said again, now just feeling resigned, and a little embarrassed. Not sure what I thought was going to happen, leaving the shattered snow globe scattered across the floor like that. In my defense, I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. After a short spell watching the blood slowly leak out onto the glass, I did a (stylish) one-legged hop over to the dresser and pulled out a fresh shirt. Then I returned (stylishly) to the bed, sat down, and pulled the glass free. A surge of blood followed, but I managed to tie the shirt around my foot without getting too much on the floor. I tied it tight enough to make my toes feel prickly and waited until I thought it was safe to put some weight on it.
The shirt got soaked, anyway, on my lopsided walk to the bathroom. Even keeping my heel off the ground, I could feel a fresh seepage of blood every time I took a step. Sitting on the edge of the tub, I pulled the shirt even tighter, and waited even longer. It was five minutes or so before I risked untying it. I saw the bleeding by then was minimal, so I washed the wound with soap and water, which hurt like hell. Then I hobbled over to the medicine cabinet and pulled out the rubbing alcohol, and that hurt a lot worse. There weren’t any bandages, though I knew there was more first-aid gear in the other bathroom.
Back in the bedroom, I rifled through the closet until I found a puffy camouflage coat. My grandfather had bought that coat before I was born, and he wore it every winter, and now it smelled like tobacco and wet leaves. It had made him look about twice as wide as he really was, a sort of redneck Michelin man, an image which 5-year-old me thought was hilarious. He’d laugh, too, the way I remember it. He could laugh, back then.
I threw the coat over the glass in the hallway—a stepping stone for my wobbly sojourn to the bathroom across the house. I kept my hand against the wood-panel hallway wall and half-walked, half-slid toward my objective. That great dark shape appeared in my brain, and I pushed it back out again. I was meeting the psychiatrist in the morning, and they’d give me a pill, and then I wouldn’t be crazy anymore. Surely there were pills to treat this kind of thing? Isn’t that what antipsychotics were for? I reminded myself to look it up when I got back in reach of my phone, and then I tried to remember if it was cloudy outside, earlier. The only internet you could get this far out was satellite, which was slow as hell and useless when the sky was overcast.
I stopped.
In the middle of the living room floor there lay a small gleaming object amidst a spatter of black viscous fluid. I reached out, heart in my throat, to turn on the lamp, and in the light the black fluid turned red. Blood. But then, I hadn’t passed through here already, had I?
Had I?
I limped closer. I clambered down onto my knees and picked up the earring. The bottom half of the treble-clef was stained scarlet.
Breathing from the hallway.
“No,” I said, and shook my head, and felt tears sting my eyes. I lurched up and stumbled away, not bothering to look back, and locked myself in the bathroom. I stayed in there a long time, clutching the earring hard enough to hurt and repeating the same stupid mantras.
See the shrink, get the pill, get sane. Easy.
Everything is going to be fine.
By the time I emerged, foot wrapped up tight in gauze and a beige bandage, the breathing from the hallway had stopped. There was still blood on the living room floor, but then, there was blood all across the house, now. I followed that blood-track back through the living room, back down the hallway, across the puffy camo coat and into the bedroom. From the nightstand, I retrieved the little box where I kept Molly’s earring, meaning to put it back. It wasn’t meant for an earring—it was the one I had used to propose—but I didn’t have the engagement ring, anymore, so I used it for this.
I opened it, and that’s when I cried. I mean, I really cried. I sat on the edge of the bed, sobbing and looking at the other earring, still in the box where I had left it, a perfect match for the one which was now in my hand. The one I’d just retrieved from my bloody living room floor. I turned it over with a shaking hand to see the little loopy L engraved on the back. I picked up the other and set them side by side. M. L. Molly Lively. It wasn’t possible. Here, the earring I’d spent hours searching for in the pouring rain on the side of the backwoods highway where Molly died. The one which had been ripped from her ear and lost in the tangled metal and the pine straw and the scorched plastic and the grass and the glass and the briars and the brush.
It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t.
I cried myself out in about five minutes, and then I felt numb. I put the earrings side-by-side in the box and closed it. I laid down and held the box against my chest.
See the shrink, get the pill, get sane, I thought, and thought again, even though it was getting harder to believe it. But then, I had to think something, and I could not think again of the monster in the hall, or the girl in the blue dress, or the whisky over the fridge, or Molly. Not then. Not that night.
In the morning I saw the shrink. She was a slender sixty-something woman with curly grey hair, wearing glasses which were too large for her head and a don’t-fuck-with-me sort of expression.
“You’re Samuel Foster,” she said, as though I might need reminding. Her voice was low and flat, with a trace of some kind of Eastern European accent.
“Sam,” I said.
“You have been hallucinating.” Again, as though I didn’t know.
I hesitated, but eventually said that I was.
“Visual or auditory?”
“Both.”
“And when did it start?”
I took a breath. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the little rose-gold treble-clefs.
“Can you see these?” I said, holding them out in my palm.
I thought she’d react, but she remained placid. If anything, she looked a little disappointed. She glanced down at my hand.
“Yes, Mr. Foster.”
“Both of them?”
Her eyes narrowed, and it looked as though she might be on the verge of breaking into a lecture, but she simply said again: “Yes, Mr. Foster.”
And that’s what did it. That’s what brought me around. It wasn’t possible. And if she was also seeing the impossible, then that meant the impossible had happened, and if the impossible had happened, then why not? Why not ghosts? Fuck it, why not God? The Zionist thing is still fruitcake territory.
I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said. My mouth had gone dry. I sounded strange. I probably looked strange, too. “I’m wasting your time. I didn’t…uh…I didn’t mean to.”
She said something at my back as I left her office, but I didn’t hear what. I was thinking of Molly again, and that whiskey over the fridge, and the earrings in my pocket. I exited the building and felt the sun on my face and stared out across the parking lot, where two women were emerging from another doctor’s office. The younger woman had an arm out and the older one was clinging to it for dear life. I let out a breath which it felt like I’d been holding in for days, and then I smiled. Not a happy kind of smile, but still.
This was it. Stage 4. Acceptance. I haven’t lost my fucking mind, which in a way is unfortunate. It complicates things. They don’t make pills for getting rid of ghosts.
And as it happens, I have a ghost.