by Brian Corley
When I woke up earlier than normal the next morning with a sharp pain in my neck, my right hand shot up to find the source of my discomfort. I pawed, pulled, and removed the source of irritation.
I realized, too late, I was holding on to the handle of Max’s missing butcher knife.
A warm pool of blood formed around my head and neck, and I sat up quickly.
Chapter 9
Immediately I felt light-headed and lay back down. I was getting cold, sleepy. The peach sword to my left offered me no help as I gasped for air, getting colder by the second.
Dammit, why did I stay here? Why didn’t I book a hotel room? I should have taken Zoe up on her offer, or Quinton, or Max. Why do I always stand up to confrontation? Why couldn’t I have just let this place go?
It just cost me my life.
I pulled the knife from my neck but didn’t feel pain—probably because of the endorphins kicking in. I knew I was in a dire situation. My mind raced. What can I do? I couldn’t think of anything. I was bleeding everywhere and couldn’t find my voice. I needed to try something.
I fought to get up, to move.
I had no strength left but continued to struggle.
Acquiescence.
Peace.
Finally, I closed my eyes to rest.
A bright light roused me, and I opened my eyes to a brilliant white light emanating from a door that didn’t belong in my room. I instinctively knew that I was supposed to walk through it.
I sat up in bed and faced it.
I thought back on my life, my friends, and my family. I was a good son, a good brother, and a good friend. I made a lot of mistakes, but I felt as though the scale weighing my deeds leaned toward good overall. Time to rest.
The door began to pull on me like it had a magnified gravity of its own. I didn’t like being pulled like that and struggled against it.
The pull intensified. The power of the light was overwhelming, and my ears filled with a sound like someone opening the door to a plane at 30,000 feet.
Even through all this, the promise of the door remained: peace, rest, reunion with family and old friends gone too soon.
No.
I’m not ready.
The door pulled, and the light began to overcome me. It was all I could see.
I pushed forward and reached out for something to hold onto, but there was nothing to grab.
I can’t go yet, I have unfinished business here.
The pull immediately released.
I shot across the room and slammed into the wall. The light died down, and I began to get my bearings. The new door in my room pulsed with a soothing light as the deafening din calmed to a steady thrum.
I stood up—no, I hovered and looked down on my bed. A horror show. My body was splayed out, a knife in one hand, a ceremonial sword just out of reach of the other.
I looked to my right.
There he was—Willard Hensch, with a smug, satisfied smirk across his narrow face. I instinctively reached for the peach sword on my bed. As I clutched it, Willard’s expression changed. Confusion? Terror? Why is he looking at me like that? If I’m a ghost, how can I hold this sword? More light—too much light—the room began to fade—no, I began to fade as the sun came up.
As night fell, I rematerialized. The doorway with the bright light was still there; however, everything else looked very different. My body was gone, blankets and linens were gone, the knife was gone, the sword was gone.
I wasn’t floating anymore.
Someone had found my body. My heart sank as I wondered who discovered it. Was it Max? Zoe? I hoped it was Zoe. I didn’t want to think about my best friend discovering my body the way it was.
Willard.
I’m going to make him pay for this.
I bolted toward the door to my room, but my hand couldn’t grip the knob. It took me a moment, but finally the thought occurred to me that I no longer needed to concern myself with doors.
Testing my hypothesis, I reached my arm out to the other side. Satisfied with my experiment, I stepped through with my whole body into the tiny hallway, looked toward the living room, and immediately made eye contact with my murderer. Willard Hensch. He looked just like the picture from Max’s memes: young, skinny, with hair plastered down around his head. The same smug look on his face as he sat in a tufted leather wingback chair that did not belong in my living room. The rest of my furniture was there, however. Interesting.
“I see you no longer have your sword,” he said.
“Not that I need it,” I replied.
My anger took over, and without thinking, I flew forward and, with the fiercest right uppercut I could muster, sent him and his chair over backward.
Willard floated slowly upward, a sneer on his face, and flew toward me, fists raised. His punch connected and knocked me back—hard—through a wall and into Max’s old room. I bounced off the back wall that faced the outside of the house and onto the floor next to Max’s softball bat. Like the sword, I instinctively reached for it.
However, unlike the sword, I grabbed a ghostly facsimile of it while the original stayed in place. Hmm, interesting, but now it’s payback time.
I floated back through Max’s wall into the living room where I found Willard floating comfortably. He was waiting for me, arms crossed and smirking. His expression contorted when he saw the bat in my hand.
“How are you doing that?!” he exclaimed.
He bolted toward me, arms outstretched, and tried to grab it from me.
I swung wildly and connected with a crack reminiscent of a juiced major leaguer taking one out of the park. Willard flew backward and bounced off the outside wall of the living room and onto the floor. My mind started clicking a few things into place.
One: we both bounced off outside walls to the house, but could move freely inside it. There must be some sort of boundary there. Two: Willard seemed to have the advantage in hand-to-hand combat, but I could do something he couldn’t—grab things around the house, at least facsimiles of them. Advantage—me.
Never in my life would I have imagined hitting someone with a baseball bat—I could really hurt them. I certainly wouldn’t have swung at their head—I could kill them.
That said, I was dead now and so was Willard, and neither one of us was getting any deader. I promised him a miserable afterlife, and it was time to deliver.
I made my way toward Willard as though I had all the confidence in the world. I knew he couldn’t figure out how I had this bat in my hand, and that scared him. I wondered if he had any of his own tricks hidden up his sleeve.
“You should have taken the door, Jonah,” he seethed through gritted teeth and lunged at me again.
I took another swing, and he went down.
“Why? We’re just getting started. I warned you, Willard, remember?”
I took another swing as he lunged for me again. It felt good—I was good at this.
Should I be doing this? It feels so easy that I almost feel bad. He did murder me this morning though …
This went on for a couple hours until he got tired of fighting back. He lay down against the outside wall, exhausted, and frankly, I was ready to stop.
Now what?
I know I said I threatened to do this for an eternity, but I was already bored. Then an idea struck me, and I floated over to the utility room where I ghosted a facsimile of a roll of duct tape. I set the leather tufted wingback chair back up right and dragged Willard over to it, set him down, and taped him up without a fight.
Time for some answers.
I couldn’t even touch the doorknob in my room, so how was he able to break the window that first day? How was he able to break the glass in the frames, and how the hell was he able to use Max’s butcher knife?
So, I asked him.
He smiled as he looked up a
t me, punch-drunk and exhausted. Then he dropped his head again as though he was going to take a nap. Dammit.
I thought back to the Patrick Swayze movie Ghost that Max and I just watched, where he played a ghost that hadn’t moved on. I also thought back to how my dad found it while flipping channels one afternoon, and we watched it as a lark. It was a lot different watching it again with my mom and sister after he died.
What would Swayze do? Let’s see, he learned to move stuff and communicated through a medium. Check and check, Willard had done both of those, although we brought the medium to him.
I wondered if he’d watched the same movie. I remembered the ghost that taught Swayze on the subway just got pissed in order to move stuff, so I decided to try it.
I looked around and decided to focus on the TV remote sitting on the coffee table. I thought of my mom, my friends, missed opportunities—Laura from marketing—my entire life cut short. I balled all those feelings together and reached out hard.
I spun the remote.
I couldn’t believe it worked.
I walked around the house looking for small objects to practice on. I made my way to the kitchen, and something on the counter caught my attention. Salt shaker—boom, knocked over. Shot glass! Nudge. Nudge. Nudge, aaand onto the floor. Smash.
I was like an Internet cat, knocking things over left and right. I was making a mess and should probably stop. One more shot glass though. It bounced. Dangit, what a way to end my streak.
Not even a full night into being a ghost and I was already bored. Is this my life now? I floated back into the living room. Willard wouldn’t look at me but seemed to be resting somewhat comfortably in his chair.
I crashed onto the couch just like I would in life. I wished I could watch TV, then thought maybe I could. I got good and pissed and punched my finger toward the power button on the remote. Success. I did the same thing three more times to punch in the cartoon channel. It was probably one of the few channels at this hour that still was still broadcasting original programming instead of paid advertisements. One of my favorites was on: a slapsticky, fast-cut show about teenage superheroes.
Willard bolted up as straight as he could while the ghost duct tape held true to his chair. His eyes widened.
“No,” he whined. “Please, no. Why?” He slumped back down in the chair. “Why couldn’t you have just passed through the door?” he said.
I muted the TV.
“Better?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Tell you what, I’ll keep this on mute if you give me some answers.”
“Fine,” he said, “what do you want to know?”
“When I … woke up, as I am now, all I saw was the door. It offered me peace, quiet, and tranquility, which seems to be all you want. Why wouldn’t you take it?”
He looked away and said, “It doesn’t appear for me anymore. It stopped after a few days, weeks—months maybe—I’m not sure. Time doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. I don’t have anywhere to be, nothing to see. I just appear here, night after night.”
“Yeah, but I had to tear myself away from the door, Willard. I had unfinished business—with you.” I pushed the issue. “Why didn’t you go through?”
“I don’t know. I was scared, I think. I wasn’t religious growing up, and I didn’t expect there to be an ‘after.’ I don’t know what lays on the other side of that door for me. I had a hard life,” he said.
“Life isn’t easy for most people, Willard. What makes you think you had a tougher road than anyone else?” I replied.
He went on to explain that he’d never really fit in at home or at school. He was an accident—they actually called him that—and they resented him. He was picked on in school and ran home most days to avoid getting beat up. He’d go straight to his room to study, making sure he was quiet when he got home, so as not to disturb his mother.
He excelled in school, won a scholarship to Austin U, and stayed in town after graduation as a programmer at the local branch of a large accounting firm. He bought this house shortly after. Unfortunately, things at the firm were much like they were for him in high school, only this time the bullies were his bosses. They took credit for most of his work and mercilessly taunted him. One day, he stood up for himself, but they fired him. He went home to the only place he ever found peace and decided to end it all there … here.
“Then you arrived with your friend,” he said, “all bluster and bravado, walking around my house like you owned the place.”
“I did,” I softly interjected. “I did own the place, but you took that from me too.”
He nodded.
“One thing though,” I added, “I thought you were an accountant.”
“No, just worked for that dreadful firm.” he replied. “Why?”
“Nothing. It’s just what it said in your obituary.”
His face dropped, and his shoulders hung limp.
“I guess there was no one there to correct them.”
We sat in silence for a while, then began to fade as morning arrived.
Chapter 10
I felt refreshed and had a newfound empathy toward Willard as I faded in the next night. However, the look in Willard’s eyes returned no such understanding. Apparently, he awoke renewed and refreshed with a seething bitterness toward me. Luckily, he was still bound to his chair.
“Untie me,” he raged.
I decided that may not be a good idea and thought it best to ignore him—which just upset him more. I wandered around the house and looked in on my old room. The bright-white-light door was there again, but for how much longer? I thought about going through and leaving Willard tied to that chair for eternity ... or however long ghost duct tape lasts.
I wondered if Willard could see my door and if he could go through it even though it was meant for me, so I floated back into the living room and asked him. I guess the question ended up sounding more like a threat because he went on a tirade, telling me I was just like all the others, but I would get mine—typical mustache-twirling villain stuff.
Hell, I’d already gotten mine—I was dead. Still though, I had a choice to make: I could wallow in my own rage or deal with my new situation. I’d worked out a lot of aggression last night, and it just seemed pointless to continue on that path. Staying mad at Willard wasn’t going to change my situation; in fact, I kind of felt sorry for him. It didn’t change what he did, but being on the other side gave me a new perspective.
Also, I had to admit that being able to float around was kind of cool. I started testing what I could do, seeing if I could ghost-grab a ghostly facsimile of the remote and watch ghost TV.
Turns out I could ghost the remote alright, but there wasn’t ghost TV. Disappointing. I set it back down and started testing the outside walls, but couldn’t get through.
“Can we leave?” I asked.
“Why would you want to?” Willard replied.
I understood why he didn’t want to leave, but I felt differently. I floated to the front door, put my hand against it, and discovered that I could push through.
Once outside, I found that although it was dark, I could see fine—as well as I could in the day in my first life, like somewhere between an overcast day and a well-lit outdoor space at night. Other than the chirping of crickets, all was quiet in the neighborhood. There usually wasn’t much going on this time of night, and most people would have fallen asleep a while ago—which made it all the more noticeable when I saw a guy standing out in front of the house on the corner, staring at me. I looked behind me just in case there was something going on there—nope. I looked between him and me to see if maybe his dog was out taking a leak. No to that too.
He waved me over then walked behind the house, so I floated ahead to follow him. When I made it to the house and around the corner, I didn’t see him anywhere. I checked to see if he’d ducked
into the backyard, but I saw only a chain-link fence and one of those old clothesline carousels.
I heard something, though, something faint, a consistent noise—crying. It was coming from inside the house.
Now is the time in the movie where you should leave. Just go. Why investigate a noise? Especially crying.
I knew it might not end well, but I was already a ghost and wasn’t getting any deader. I floated up the back steps and through the door to investigate.
There, in the ghostly outline of a chair that I could tell wasn’t there physically, sat an old woman, her head in her hands, softly weeping. Her hair was up in an unintentionally messy way, and she wore a conservative flower-print dress with a lace collar from another era. She looked up with hope in her eyes as tears rolled down her kind face.
“Can you see me?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“Yes,” I said as compassionately as I could muster, which wasn’t hard, given how frail and feeble she looked sitting there.
“Oh my word,” she said and smiled, “I haven’t been able to talk to someone in years—maybe thirty or forty. What year is it? No, don’t tell me.”
She motioned for me to join her.
“Come have a seat, young man, and visit with me for a while.”
The room was not well furnished and had clearly seen better days. I would hazard to guess that the current occupants rented this place, and on the cheap. That’s not to say that renters don’t take care of a place or that homeowners can’t be slobs, but this place had a very disposable feel to it: torn-up carpet, walls that hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in years, etc.
I sank down in a ratty chair across from the old woman.
“I’m Jonah,” I said gently. “I used to live a couple houses down from you. I’m still there, just not living obviously.”
