Doug was thirteen hours into his haunting before he caught on to
it. The afternoon's events, while weird, weren't so far out of the ordinary as
to warrant deep analysis at the end of the day, and he didn't put things
together until finally confronted by his ghost. Then things just fell
into place, and the full weirdness of the day made itself apparent.
The first weird thing had happened around 10:30 that morning,
while he had been out looking for work in town. He visited an office
supply store and asked if they were hiring. The guy behind the counter
told him to go to the company's Web site--amusingly, he said "Office Depot
dot com" instead of "OfficeMax"--and apply there. He asked
whether Doug had any computer experience. Doug wasn't sure whether the
guy was talking about IT work or sales, but he had both kinds, although the
sales experience was 20-odd years in the past. The guy found this mildly
amusing, and joked briefly about the perishability of skills like PC sales.
Doug tried to pass it off, pointing out that in his days as a retail guy,
he'd also assembled lots of furniture and display equipment, and so knew almost
as much about computer desks as computer disks.
And this reminded him suddenly of Ashley, about whom he hadn't
thought for most of that 20 years. It was while working for her that he'd
sold those PCs, built those desks, and assembled the displays.
And it was working for her that had put him off retail work and
driven him to seek employment in another field, the field from which he was now
retreating in search of a simpler life with less responsibility.
Doug suddenly lost all interest in continuing small talk, and
broke off as quickly as possible, thanked the guy, and headed for the exit.
As he was passing through the first glass door into the store's
vestibule, he felt a sudden, sharp stab of pain in his chest, from the solar
plexus around the right side of his rib cage to the back. By the time he
was exiting the store, the pain was blinding, hitting him in rapid pulses.
He half-walked, half-staggered back to his car, and then had to lean on
it for a few seconds to catch his breath. He was feeling lightheaded.
By the time he slid into the driver's seat, he was beginning to seriously
worry that this was some kind of cardiac event.
But within a minute, the pain began to fade, and a minute later,
he no longer felt lightheaded.
He turned the key and pulled out of the parking lot. He had
had enough job searching for the day.
It was a half-hour drive from this part of town back to his
trailer outside the city limits. The day was cloudy, threatening rain,
but traffic was light, and he made it out of town before the lunch rush
started. But while he maintained a tense alertness, straining to feel
every sensation passing through his torso, he found himself drifting off in
fugues of a few seconds' duration every few minutes. It was as if the
half-remembered dreams of the previous night, or perhaps of the past few years,
were worming their way into his consciousness, doing their damndest to take his
eyes off the road.
He parked the car sloppily alongside his trailer, trotted to the
dinged-up door, let himself in, and collapsed into a long nap.
Since quitting his previous job, he'd had to rent out his house to
make ends meet. The property was inherited from his parents, and before
that had been in his family for generations, so he was determined not to lose
any of it. But he had had to tow an old trailer onto one corner, string
electric cables out to it, and live a quiet, cramped life, with most of his
belongings stored in the various scattered sheds and outbuildings on the
property, while he tried to get his long-sought writing career going.
Several months of writing, researching writing for a living and
applying at dozens of online writing outfits had availed him very little.
His net income in that time, outside of the two months during which he'd
managed to collect rent from the hermity old fellow--a retired cowhand--who'd
moved in late in the proceedings, had been $300. Not even enough to pay
for groceries and electricity over that interval. His savings, which had
numbered into four figures when he'd quit, were starting to dwindle toward
double digits, so as this week had begun, he forced himself to get up early every
day and drive around town looking for any kind of work he could find.
Writing took a back seat, as his days were occupied with
collecting job applications and presenting himself as an amiable, competent
prospect to potential employers, and his evenings were occupied with filling
out those applications, and with going online to find more. He found
himself questioning his decisions on first a daily, then an hourly basis, as
life became ever more uncertain and tedious. Why leave behind a lucrative
job in the first place? Why had he managed to save so little in all those
years? Why had his desire to simplify his life and reduce his
responsibility load resulted in a more stressful, arguably much more
complicated life?
Tense dreams interrupted his nap, and he awoke hungry, disoriented
and regretful that he had abandoned today's effort so early. It was
already late afternoon, and there was little point to getting back on the road
now. He decided to call it a sick day and get started on some kind of
dinner.
In the kitchen, after putting a pot pie into the microwave, he
stopped to wash his hands and heard a muffled thumping noise coming from the
wall, as if someone outside were banging on it with a fist wrapped in a
T-shirt. Whump. Whump. Whump.
He felt an immediate flight-or-fight response, a raising of the
hairs on the back of his neck. For a second he didn't move, then he
rushed to the nearest window. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, nobody
there, so then he rushed to the door.
Nobody. Nothing.
No more noise, either. There was a fairly strong breeze
blowing, as usual, bending the tall grass outside the fenced-in lot, but there
were no trees close enough to bang into the trailer.
Weirdness.
While prying the lid off the pot pie, he felt a familiar heaviness
in his head, as if it were filling with blood the way it used to when he'd hang
upside down from a horizontal tree limb. The kind of fullness that would
sometimes accompany the smoking of too much weed. The vasodilatory precursor
to a migraine headache. He paused, just breathing, trying to relax.
After half a minute, the feeling passed. Probing with his spoon, he
scooped all the vegetables out of the pie and set them atop the inverted lid of
crust, letting them cool while the pie steamed its way toward a somewhat
lower-energy state. Another minute or so of contemplation followed; then,
after he deemed the diced carrots and peas cool enough to eat, he gulped them
down in a single bite, getting the gross part of the meal out of the way so he
could treat the remainder as dessert. Not for the first time, he found
himself wishing Swanson would make a crust-flavored pot pie, accented with
chunks of poultry instead of veggies.
His mouth burns were minimal, for once, when he finished up.
He considered washing down dinner with a beer, but there were only three
left in the fridge, and that was his allowance for the month.
He closed the fridge on the beer, threw away his pot pie tin and
paper plate, washed his hands, and returned to the table to work on the Sunday Times crossword puzzle he'd been whittling
away at for the past week. Then he returned to the fridge, grabbed a beer
before he could talk himself out of it, and sat back down.
Twenty minutes later, he had downed the beer, and made no progress
on the puzzle, when he realized he was still hungry. It was darkening
outside as he returned to the kitchen. Not quite willing yet to sacrifice
another pot pie to the cause, he scrounged through the meager pantry looking
for something snackable. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement
outside, and whipped his head toward the window.
There was an amorphous blue blob pulsating and shifting on the
ground just outside.
His head hurt from the sudden turn, and in addition to his raised
hackles he could feel the blood-swellingness returning behind his eyes.
Frozen, watching the blob, he struggled to make sense of what he was
seeing. Then his eyes registered the scene for what it was: the
blue tarp he used to cover the water hose, to protect the cheap black rubber
from the sun, had blown free of the brick he used to weight it down, and it was
billowing in the dying breeze.
He felt like laughing, if only to convince his empty trailer that
he wasn't as scared as his adrenaline level indicated. But he could raise
no sound other than a good thorough throat clearing, and he found himself
reaching with shaking hands for the fridge handle. With a second beer in
hand, he rooted around in the freezer for more pot pies.
The crossword puzzle was a mess of sloppy erasures and tentative
overwriting an hour later when he gave up on it. The third and final beer
was not quite finished yet, and each swallow reproached him with its warmth for
his not having downed it sooner. On one paper plate next to him was a
half-eaten pot pie pot pie, into which he'd managed to stuff the crusts of two
other pot pies; on another paper plate was the sacrificial filling, mostly
vegetables and gravy, but with a few neglected nuggets of turkey and chicken
rapidly assuming room temperature.
As he sat, considering whether to finish the pot pie pot pie,
which would give him heartburn on top of the beer, or waste perfectly good food
he couldn’t afford to waste, a plastic coathanger, left on the edge of the
table after this morning’s hasty ironing, fell and clattered to the floor.
Weird.
It was too early for bedtime, but it was too late for anything
useful, and he still felt out of sorts and unpleasantly quenched, with an odd
combination of hypervigilance and alcohol-induced depression. He decided
he could risk a kilowatt-hour or two of TV watching before bedtime.
As he stood up, the room briefly swirled around him. He
couldn't possibly be that drunk after two and three-quarter 16-ouncers, but
there he was, holding on to the chair, waiting for the walls to stop moving.
Something was definitely wrong with him.
He flashed back on the earlier bout of chest pain, and wondered
whether he might in fact have suffered a cardiac episode. Or a stroke.
For a moment he even contemplated the possibility that he was already
dead, or dying, and hallucinating this entire evening in the final few seconds of
his brain’s fading physiologique.
Then he had to pee, and figured this meant he was probably both
alive and conscious.
He headed toward the trailer’s tiny closet of bathroom-like
apparatus, half-noticing the way the lights dimmed as he passed through the
trailer’s almost hall-like connecting passage.
He managed to mostly hit the target, although he was swaying in an
unpleasant and unaccustomed manner. He
hadn’t gotten seriously drunk since he was in college, and although he’d had a
beer or two most nights during his adult years, and thought he had an adult’s
tolerance for alcohol, he was evidently somewhat behind the curve on this
particular night.
Stopping to wash his hands, he looked in the mirror and saw Ashley
standing behind him. She said, “Well, that was interesting.” Then she kinda smiled and waved, but Doug was
already whirling around to look behind him.
Nobody was there.
His central nervous system was a bit slow at the moment for the
standard fight-or-flight response, but he was capable of feeling an adrenaline
surge, and this he did now. He whirled
back toward the mirror.
There she was. “Hi,” she
said, waving again.
He heard her voice clearly, although the image in the mirror was
quite blurry. Already knowing it was a
futile gesture, he turned again, seeing only the quasi-bathroom environs.
He turned back toward the door, trying to see neither the window
nor the space behind him, and kept his head down for a few seconds while his
pulse pounded in his head. After a half
minute of letting the adrenaline rush fade, he heard her voice again, only much
quieter and more distant-sounding. “Look
in the mirror, Doug.” It was a plea and
a command.
He obeyed. There she
was. “I need you to see me in order for
us to communicate,” she said. “I have to
register on your subconscious or something.”
He turned his head back downward.
“I don’t want to communicate,” he said.
He managed to stagger into bed, and although the room spun around
him most queasily, and he was still terrified of the mirror’s visions, he did
eventually fall asleep. His dreams were
tumultuous and loud, but vanished upon waking.
The headache he felt when he opened his eyes was mild, and he didn’t
feel hungover per se, but was fatigued and sore, as if he’d been physically
fighting, in his sleep, whatever it was he’d been dreaming about. He hadn’t set the clock alarm the previous
night, and had slept in til nearly 9:30, still in yesterday’s clothes.
He was almost in front of the mirror before he remembered not to
look into it, but by then it was too late.
His momentum carried him the rest of the way, and there she was, saying “Good
morning,” with that same casual half-wave and half-smile. Not so blurry this time. For the first time, he noticed what she was wearing: the same ecru pant suit she’d worn the last
time he’d seen her, the day he stormed out of the retail establishment where
they’d both worked.
“What are you doing here?” he finally asked.
“Good question. I’m not
sure, but I think I was drawn to you.
For some reason.”
“You’re not all in my head?”
“I am. I mean, I’m here,
but I’m just in your head, so to speak.
It’s like a possession. That’s
evidently how this works.”
“So you’re dead?”
“Yeah. You were thinking of
me when I died, I guess, and that’s all it takes, for someone to get locked on
to.”
“What happened?”
She cast her own face downward, thinking. “It’s funny.
It happened so fast I didn’t even realize it. It was only right afterward, when this whole
infinite perspective kind of opened up, that I figured out that I’d just
crashed. I was able to, like, review the
incident, draw it out in minute detail, although the whole thing took just two
or three seconds. Some asshole ran a
stop sign, just in front of me, and I swerved.
Right into an oncoming semi.”
“This was in Waco?”
“No, just north of town. I
was heading to Dallas for a district meeting.
I’d pulled off the freeway to get some breakfast, and the accident
happened right after I left the restaurant.”
“I think I felt it. When it
happened, I mean.”
“I didn’t. Not really. I can kind of feel it now, if I try real hard
to. But I was crushed very quickly. Impaled on the steering wheel, too. I died before I could feel much.”
“I felt something punching through my chest, mostly on the right
side.”
“That would seem to be it.
At least, that’s what it looked like afterward. Not a very pretty sight, though. I was already feeling very disconnected from
my physical form, though, so although it was really gross, it didn’t bother me
so much.”
He wasn’t looking directly at her reflection any more, just
keeping her in his peripheral vision while he directed his gaze generally
downward. “So what happens now?”
She shrugged. “I guess we’re
stuck with each other. I don’t know what
will happen in the long run. Maybe I
jump off at some point. Maybe we fuse
into some kind of new being. Maybe you
get an exorcism and kick me out.”
Given their history, this last option seemed fairly reasonable,
but mentioning this to someone who had just died a violent death struck him as a
bit callous.
“Don’t worry about it just yet,” she said. “Take some time to figure out what you want
to do.” He realized that he couldn’t
hide any thoughts from her; she had, presumably, full access to his brain.
“Yeah, I do,” she confirmed.
“It’s surprisingly roomy in here.
I can stay in one of these back corners.
You’ll hardly notice me.”
He didn’t bother to speak from that point onward; he formulated
thoughts, and she responded to them. You seem to be forgetting that we hate each
other.
“Oh, come off it. I don’t
hate you. You probably hated me for a
good while, but I’m pretty sure you don’t now.
Otherwise I don’t think I could have climbed aboard so easily.” He was still hearing her voice in precisely
the same way, but no longer looking at the mirror, so he couldn’t know whether
she was in fact speaking or merely thinking back at him. It couldn’t really matter either way, as she
had no corporeal voice; she’d obviously been doing nothing more than “thinking
to him” this entire time. But it did
seem that now, with two-way communication established, he didn’t need the
mirror as an intermediary any more. That
was at least as disconcerting a thought as her initial appearance had been, in
that it suggested there was no way to avoid her now.
“Worried I’ll whisper embarrassing things in your ear when you’re
ogling some babe?”
Yes.
“Aw, how cute. Well, you
never know. But I don’t even want to
know how the whole wet dream thing is going to go down. I hope we’re both asleep for that.”
This was the end of his life.
He’d never be able to look at another woman again, or think about
one. This was her revenge. No matter what he did, or where he went, she
would be there, looking over his shoulder, through his own eyes.
“Oh, hell, it’s not that
bad, is it?”
It was. He realized
belatedly that although he’d walked away from her 20 years ago, he’d never been
free of her. And now that she was dead,
this was doubly true.
“You’ll get used to me, I promise.
I’m already getting used to you.”
You had the chance to get used to me a
long time ago, and you turned it down.
“Well, that was before I knew you like I know you now. This is the most intimate I’ve ever been with
anybody, I’ll have you know.”
Fat lot of good that does me now. I can’t touch you, I can’t feel you, I can’t
even really see you. What good is having
you if I can’t actually have you?
He looked back up at the mirror, and saw that she was leaning
forward, putting her hands on his shoulders, then wrapping one arm across his
chest. “You do have me,” she said.
No, I don’t. You have no body, nothing to hold. You’re not even really there. She
leaned in closer, as if to speak into his ear.
“Life sucks,” he finally said, directly to the mirror, making firm eye
contact with her for the first time.
“Oh, baby,” she whispered. “Death
sucks worse.”
