by Aly Noble
“Make sure you’re out of here by the time I’m back,” I muttered as I zipped up my coat and picked up my purse.
“Sure,” he said flippantly, not moving an inch.
I rolled my eyes. “At least replace the windows.”
“Sure.”
We stared at one another for a brief moment before I finally left the room and headed downstairs. I wasn’t going to allow myself a glance back at the house if only for not wanting to give my resident phantom the pleasure of seeing me think one more time on him or “his” house. Yet I still found myself glancing toward my bedroom window and saw the now-familiar sallow face beyond the glass.
Before I knew what it meant, the sight would have terrified me. Now I just felt a mild stab of irritation. Still, I couldn’t help but think with some relief that I was pretty much out of the woods as I fired up the engine and pulled out of the driveway. If anything, the problem ghost was gone and what remained was this pissant of a spirit who was a nuisance, but didn’t seem intent on harming me at least. It was an improvement.
You know what acts like that?
My own words were resurfacing in my mind as I tucked a hank of purple hair behind my ear and took the turn at the end of Red Heather Road, speeding off toward Willow Press.
Predators.
Chapter 12
Willow Press had seen better days. Not since I’d started freelancing there, but I was sure that—at some point—it hadn’t looked as prepared to fall apart as I had felt over the past few weeks. There were older buildings that had a historic feel to them and that added to their charm, which I supposed applied loosely to Willow Press as I approached the door, but it was toeing the line between being able to blame its age and defaulting to blaming the maintenance. The paper could barely afford to keep running, so it couldn’t ultimately be helped that its base needed a bit of a facelift.
My shoulder felt uncomfortably light without my laptop bag, but there was really no point in bringing it when my laptop looked like it had vomited molten licorice straight out of the hell-mouth that was probably its motherboard now. I grimaced at the memory and wondered when I’d feel ready—or willing—to face it again. The ghost was—by Jonah’s word—“passed on,” but the mess dissuaded me from trying to save the computer itself. I’d likely have to get a new laptop and pray that an IT guy at a local tech store could salvage the hard drive.
Back up your shit, James. Lesson learned, I thought caustically when I shouldered the door open. I held my notebook, sketchbook, and the file on my house in the crook of my arm, maneuvering the door wide with my weight before heading inside. I peeked inside Catherine’s office to see that she wasn’t there before replacing the file in her cabinet, less the one page I’d ripped out to sketch Jonah’s ghostly face. When I exited the office, I turned the corner and immediately ran into Estelle.
“Hey,” Estelle said, amusement coloring her tone as she peered at me across the rims of her turquoise reading glasses. “Do yourself a favor and never try for spy, ninja, or any career path that requires covertness.”
“I’m so overt, I’m covert,” I replied, but with little conviction. “Noted. What’s up?”
“What were you doing in Catherine’s office?” Estelle asked instead, but conversationally to her credit. She’d decided sometime between now and my car accident weeks prior that she didn’t hate me and I felt we might be well on our way to actually becoming friends. All because she had written what I’d thought to be an undue slam at the time on my humble haunted abode and I’d strutted in, metaphorical guns ablaze, and landed myself a design job instead of wreaking good old-fashioned vengeance. It was just as well though. She was pretty cool and probably the only one aside from my petite neighbor, Bethaline, who believed that I was dealing with something more than just squeaky floorboards at 1 Red Heather Road.
“Putting back the Heather file,” I whispered conspiratorially as Carla walked up the hall to step outside for a smoke.
Estelle took the hint and waited until Carla was outside to ask, “Any developments with that?”
I briefly deliberated explaining the horrific series of incidents since our last discussion of the house right then, but figured maybe it should wait for a more private setting. “Short answer is yes. But we should grab lunch today or something and discuss it privately… Preferably very privately so we’re not institutionalized.”
This caused her eyes to light up. “Definitely today. It has to be today now. Ugh, are you sure it has to wait until lunchtime?” she asked, her words quick with her enthusiasm.
“You’re too excited about this,” I observed as she hung on my every word and then looked disappointed when none of them were ghost-related. “I probably almost died.”
“But you clearly didn’t,” she pointed out.
“My laptop suffered a tragic fate.”
That threw her a bit. “Your laptop?” Estelle repeated blankly.
“Long story. Looking over the camcorder footage. Speaking of which, I’ll grab those from my car,” I said quickly, taking a break from our conversation to put my stuff on my desk and then heading out to the parking lot. It had begun to drizzle some, and I shielded the camcorder bags with my body, sacrificing my previously acceptable hair to keep the technology from fizzling in the light rain. When I returned to the door, Estelle took one of the bags and we placed them back into storage.
As I was tying my damp hair back, I saw her glance at my hands before she asked, “Where’s the fourth one?”
I blinked, thinking back. “Oh, shit. I forgot there were four. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“No worries,” Estelle said with a shrug. “With all this junk in here, no one will notice. Especially for one more day.”
“Thanks again for covering me on borrowing those,” I said, winding an elastic around my hair and just hoping I didn’t have any wayward spikes poking out. “Is my hair neat?”
“What do you care? It’s fucking purple.”
“Aesthetic is not cowlick inclusive. Am I good or not?”
She snorted. “Fair. And you’re good.”
“Thanks,” I said, dropping my hands to my sides.
“So, do we really have to wait until lunch? You’re killing me here.”
“We’ll go to lunch early. But yeah, it’s… It’s something else.”
“I feel like that’s an understatement,” she noticed as we walked back to our desks. I could hear Steven typing from down the hall.
“You would be right,” I murmured, scratching the back of my neck. “Hey, Steven.” Steven glanced up briefly and nodded, looking back at his screen with a harried look. I took the hint and left him alone, sitting down at my desk and looking down at my books with a frown. “Why did I even come in?” I wondered bleakly in Estelle’s general direction. “It’s not like I can do anything digital without my laptop.”
Without looking up, Estelle mumbled around the pen between her teeth, “You can use the desktop over there.”
I turned around to see where she indicated only to find what might have been the first small-scale IBM to grace a casual setting. “That might be a fossil.”
“Made you look.” I rolled my eyes hard enough to make my brow tense and sat back in my chair. “Who cares, you’re caught up,” Estelle reasoned, feeling my tension from her desk space beside mine. “Work on your quilt drawings.”
“It’s not about a quilt just because it’s called Pilot Patch.”
“You’re really easy to bug today,” she noticed with a plum-colored smirk.
“Be careful who you bug or you might not get the lowdown on the showdown if you know what I’m sayin’.”
“Mm, no. You’re not allowed to hold ghost stories over my head for tormenting you. You don’t understand my level of need for the weird and creepy.”
“I’m not sure I want to understand it.”
Estelle chuckled and tried to delve into the article she was working on, but continued to harass me over the next few hours abou
t “ghost story spoilers,” which only encouraged me to create more mystique around what actually happened. Not that it could possibly disappoint, but she was dying for me to fill her in and I couldn’t help myself. I finally caved and went to Jill’s with her for a burger after she took to singing “Purple Rain” at my hair and probably made Steven hate us within twenty minutes.
“I would’ve never guessed you’d be so annoying when I first met you,” I remarked as we walked into the bar, making Estelle laugh as we shook the rain off our sleeves. “At least not this kind of annoying.”
“I’m persuasive,” she corrected me as we picked out a booth.
“No, that’s just called annoying,” I retorted as I sat down across from her.
“Okay, so seriously, start talking.”
“For fuck’s sake, can I get a beer first?”
From the bar, Jeff had overheard and laughingly replied, “Coming up!”
A few weeks back, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine that the small town life would grow on me, but it already was. Aside from the weirdness in the house, I really liked my new start in Grendling. Unfortunately, the weirdness in the house was a huge part of my new start.
Two steins were set down before us and, once we had ordered a rather large lunch spread, Estelle turned eager eyes to me. She didn’t have to say anything and she knew it. In fact, it was evident that she was trying very hard not to ask (again) what was going on and what had happened. Still, before I could start, she asked a different question. “Did anything show up on the cameras?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Please tell me you saved it.”
“Hell no!”
She was appalled until I told her why. I started from the setup of the camcorders around the house, explaining where I’d chosen to place them and describing the power outage that had followed. I told her about going into the basement and feeling something grab me and the burn from the encounter that had been gone by the next morning. I told her about my flashlight beam finding who I only knew at the time as Mirror Man in the hallway. And I told her about reviewing the footage, the grotesque tar-like substance that had bubbled and seeped out of my laptop keyboard, and Jonah the Ghost (I liked referring to him this way as it made him sound cartoonish and fed my lingering denial) helping me get rid of it. I explained that—based on Jonah’s explanation afterward—it had been a ghost of someone who'd lived there before and, despite seeing Jonah often in the house before then, it hadn’t been him doing all the damage. At least, I couldn’t be sure it was.
“Is he the one in my photograph?” she asked after a moment of silence I hadn’t known she was capable of, especially with ghosts involved.
“Yeah, he is,” I replied, nodding. “He just kind of lurks.”
“Why did he scare you though if he wasn’t bad?” she wondered, sipping her beer and waiting until Jeff had set our appetizer sampler down between us before elaborating. “Why ‘lurk’ when he could’ve just been like, ‘Hey, I know this is weird, but I live here, too, and also you have a ghost screwing with you. Just a head’s up’?”
“That’s why I still don’t like him,” I said, nodding in agreement. “Well, one of the reasons why. He’s kind of a dick.”
“So he’s been sticking around now?”
“Yeah. For a while, he kept lurking—just not as creepily—but now that he knows I want him out of my house, he annoys the living hell out of me. I can’t get away from him unless I actually leave the house.”
“Maybe he likes you,” she pointed out, swirling a mozzarella stick in a pot of marinara.
“Don’t be gross,” I scolded her.
“It’s not gross, it’s complete novel fodder. Write something and sell the bejeezus out of it, and then move out of the goddamn house. It’s a golden plan, frankly.”
“Should I get a throwing wheel, too?” I asked wryly.
“Probably,” she smirked. “You are an artist, maybe that’s the way to go. Your business quirk could be that your shit’s haunted. ‘Spun from unadulterated ghost lust’.”
Despite my disconcerting situation, I laughed. “How about, ‘Passing on this great deal will haunt you forever’.”
“Oh, good, it’s a barely disguised threat with a pun,” she observed, putting a small plate of appetizer snacks together. “But really, what’s his deal?”
I shook my head. “I don’t really know. I’ve been too mad at him lately to ask.”
“Maybe you should,” she suggested. “Might give you some insight. Or a way to get him to leave.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “He acts like a cliche brooding ghost boy. I don’t think he lived there before because I looked into the past residents when I was trying to figure out who the ghost was.”
“Maybe ESP is strong there,” Estelle pointed out, tearing apart a potato skin.
“What’s ESP?”
“Wait, not ESP… EMF,” Estelle corrected herself, shaking her head. “Still need to know what ESP is or just EMF?”
“Yes.”
She smirked. “ESP is extrasensory perception, which is person-specific. That’s what mediums have. Lucky bastards. And EMF causes ES, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, but I doubt that’s what’s going on with you since all of this is so vivid. Plus I’ve technically seen Jonah the Ghost, myself, so maybe you just have high ESP.”
I wasn’t buying any of that. Not that I didn’t think it could exist, but I found it hard to believe that these would be the reasons why Jonah was lurking around my house. “Bethaline has seen him, too.”
“Rose’s kid?” Estelle asked, brows raised.
“Yeah,” I said. “She said something about him and then on Halloween, she waved at something past me in the hallway.”
“Creepy.”
“Very. And when I showed her the sketch I did of Jonah when I first saw him—like really saw him—in the mirror, she knew immediately who he was.”
“Do you still have the sketch?” I nodded and took it out of the pocket of my purse, unfolding it and holding it up for her to view. Estelle glanced it over before visibly shuddering. “I just got chills.”
“Welcome to my world,” I noted as she took the page to look at the drawing more closely. She turned the page over before handing it back and gave me a mildly withering look when she saw what I’d sketched on. “What? I was desperate.”
“Not like it really matters. That’s all old research. And I’ve never been able to figure out how they arrived at aliens for one of the accounts. Or what that blue line means on the map.”
I was glad I wasn’t the only one who drew blanks at the sight of the blue highlighter trail. “Maybe it’s the river?”
“I thought of that,” she said, shaking her head, “but I—being me—went out to find it one day and it didn’t match up. Part of it fell on the river, but then it diverged to cut back through the house.”
“Weird,” I mumbled, glancing up when our mini bacon cheeseburger sliders were set down on the table. “Why did we order so much food?”
“Because gossiping is hard work,” Estelle shot back and Jeff stifled a laugh in his retreat. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re full.”
“I’m not, but still. I’m going to have to start running regularly again.”
“Ew, why?”
I just snorted softly and added a slider to my plate.
We ate in silence for a few moments until Estelle spoke again with a new question. “Where was the camcorder you forgot to bring back?”
I thought about that until the answer came like a cold stone dropping into my gut amongst the junk food. “The basement stairs.”
• • •
At the end of the workday, I went home, glancing across the twilit yard as I worked my way to the porch. I locked my car as I took the steps and stuck my key in the old lock, relishing the strangely satisfying shunk of the latch sliding free. Arguably, that sound and the fact that all the doors made it was my favorite thing about the place.
As I was locking back up, I grimaced at the draft cycling through the house and the periodic punch of the wind against the plastic tarps spanning the window panes, hating that I jolted at the sharp sounds. I also didn’t like the idea of going back into the basement, even if it was just opening the door to grab the camcorder and slamming it shut again. I set my books and purse on the dining table next to my Patch manuscript, leaving my jacket on to combat the chill of the impending evening. There was no sign of Jonah so far—I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, but for the time being, I just kept my eyes open.
I contemplated the basement door for longer than I figured was necessary, but finally kicked myself into gear and wrenched the door open, crouched down, snatched the camcorder hard enough that the charger helplessly popped out of the wall socket, and then shut the door immediately after. I took a few moments to stand in the hall and heavy-breathe like the paranoid homeowner I was before taking it to the kitchen and setting it with the rest of my stuff. I found the bag on the kitchen counter, wedged next to the breadbox I had yet to get rid of.
Frowning at the breadbox—which was frankly useless and ugly—I recalled getting it from Dave’s great-aunt long before the wedding date. It wasn’t on our registry, which we hadn’t even created at the time, and it wasn’t a family heirloom or something deeply personal. It was either something she liked and would have bought for herself, or it was something collecting dust in her garage that she just wanted to dump on someone else. Regardless, it was ugly and I hadn’t a clue of why I had picked that particular thing to shove in a box when I was packing up to leave.
I gave it a particularly venomous glare when I had to approach it to snatch up the camcorder bag.
I simultaneously found myself wishing that I had a working laptop to view the remaining footage and feeling glad that I didn’t, considering what had happened last time. If the camera had caught anything, I wasn’t ready to sit down and watch it. Uninterested in watching the video unfold in real time on the camcorder’s tiny side panel screen, I placed the camcorder in the bag and set it aside to take back to the office the next day.
