by Brian Corley
God bless Texas.
I ghosted a version of the shotgun as well as the closet door. I needed something to kick out for the perfect action sequence.
I reentered the bedroom in amazing form as I kicked out the ghosted door and pumped the shotgun.
“Come get some,” I sneered.
The room fell silent. I didn’t see anyone laughing now.
I should have waited to pump the shotgun. Now would have been a better time while everyone was quiet.
My four adversaries regained their composure as they each pulled their own pistols.
Right. I wish I had a bigger gun.
I noticed the dirty, wiry guy’s eyes widen a little as he looked at my gun.
I followed his gaze. It was bigger. My gun was bigger, like I was in a damn cartoon.
Of course, this is just like the clothes.
I quickly blinked a gun belt with grenades attached and two bandoliers of bullets across each shoulder. I thought of Stallone with two huge machine guns, and without looking, I knew that I already had them in my hands. I started shelling, and the room erupted with noise, bullets, and flying casings.
One of the goons managed to get off a shot or two on their way out of the room and hit me. Damn, that stung. I wondered what it felt like to get hit with the big ones I was shooting. Probably bad. I’m guessing they hurt.
I smiled as I pursued my quarry down the hallway and out the front door, guns-a-blazing. Two of them fell in the yard and held up their hands, hoping I would accept their surrender. I’m not exactly sure how we process damage as ghosts, but we can definitely get hurt.
The fat one walked back, hands up, to join his friends.
“Loyal, I guess I can respect that,” I said.
He nodded and collapsed onto the front lawn.
“You want to tell me what you were up to back there?”
The fat one, now flat on his back, spoke between breaths. “Kids can sense us way better than adults. More fun to scare ’em.”
“That is so messed up. I don’t know where to begin. That ends tonight. You’re never doing it again … right?”
They mumbled amongst themselves.
“Right?” I repeated. “You’re never doing it again. Say it,” I repeated, this time aiming an even larger gun at the group.
“We’re never doing it again,” they replied in unison.
“Good. That’s better. Now, you’re going to leave, and you’re not going to come back. Understood?”
They all nodded, but I wasn’t sure I believed them.
“If I catch you here again, I’m going to take you back with me and put you down in a very dark place for a very long time. The kind of place where the only music is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Do we understand each other?”
They all nodded again, but this time I believed them. Good thing they bought into my dark prison bit, although I guess it wasn’t that big of a jump, given what I’d just conjured in front of them.
“Oh, and make sure to pass the message along if you see your bald friend,” I said.
“Don’t worry, we will,” the greasy one said, “but we’ll make him wish for what you just described if we ever see him again.”
“Alright … well, y’all go ahead and get moving,” I said.
“Have a nice night, sir,” the fat one said.
“Real sorry,” said the greasy one, “you’ll never see us again.”
The last one just gave me an awkward wave and avoided eye contact, and I watched them fly off to the north. Once they were sufficiently small enough on the horizon, I walked back inside. No need to phase my way in through Eric’s door this time as it was open, his mother spooning with him on his little bed and stroking his hair. Yep, I was done here.
I floated up and followed Baylor Street until I ran across the public art installation called Hope Outdoor Gallery. It’s a few hundred feet of walls that graffiti artists use as their canvas, but it’s something to behold.
I decided to stop and check it out for the first time up close, examining individual pieces and looking for their tag. I wasn’t there long before I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. My head whipped around, and I thought I saw the girl from the other night on Congress, slightly obscured by a tree.
I squinted (not that it helped—no real eyes) to try to discern if it was her or not, but she walked behind another tree and disappeared. She wasn’t concealed by its trunk; it was too young a tree for that. She was just gone—Cheshire Cat style.
I shook my head and floated above South Lamar, a north-and-south street, and made my way south. It was a scenic route that took me by the edge of downtown and across the river to the south side of town.
Once I arrived back home, I decided to challenge myself to phase down from the roof and directly onto my bed, like I did when I was in junior high at my desk with wads of paper and a trash can. If I could land directly and perfectly flat on my bed, then I was the grand champion of champions.
I missed, but just barely.
Chapter 15
I faded into a familiar smell. Bleh. I hated waking up to smoke. Zoe and her team must be at the house. I ghosted my trusty pen out of my work bag once again and headed straight for the kitchen where I found the welcome space I expected—sandalwood-smelling incense, candles, and eight familiar faces circled around a bowl with a crackling old transistor radio from some sort of ancient time—like the ’80s—set beside it. I didn’t wait on Zoe to summon me and headed straight for the ashes. Sweaters and knitted blankets were tightened (they were prepared for me this time).
What’s up?
Zoe smiled. “Plenty, but try saying it.”
What? What did she mean, “say it”? Oh yeah! Why didn’t I think about this before? The ol’ spirit talking via white noise trick, of course!
Going back to the early days of radio, there have been accounts that detail mysterious voices coming through speakers, accounts that continued on with the advent of television. I used to love to watch “ghost hunting” shows where they walked around old houses yelling into the air and then listening to recordings for phantom replies.
“Testing, testing, is this thing on?” My voice crackled through the old radio. “Want to thank everyone for coming out tonight. Show of hands, who here is from out of town?”
Zoe leaned back and shot a sideways look at Max with a victorious smile as he took a twenty out of his pocket and passed it around the circle until it made its way to her. She mouthed “thank you” and graciously bowed her head.
“We were kind of getting frustrated with the ashes thing, buddy,” Max explained into the air, as though he were looking at me. He wasn’t, and it entertained me more than it should have.
He was right. I was already tired of writing everything down. It was getting to be a bit of a mental beating, and I was beginning to wonder how long we could keep that up—kind of like how we could easily call our old friends to catch up, but we didn’t because talking on the phone seemed like such a hassle. Or like texting someone that wouldn’t let the conversation end. Anyway, we had a new solution, and I liked it.
“Jonah,” Zoe said, “we have a business opportunity for you.”
“Cool, I’m listening,” I said. “But I don’t need money, so I’m not really sure what’s in it for me. That came out sounding more selfish than I meant. I just mean that my motivations—”
“OK, I get it. Just let me finish the thought,” Zoe said.
She was looking at me. Maybe she could see me, and maybe it was just the smoke from the incense, but it seemed like more than a good guess. She continued, “OK, I’ll put it this way—I have a proposition to keep you busy.”
Max chimed in, “I went to talk to Zoe today about researching some other ways we could communicate with you. She had to take a call during our meeting, and I figured out they w
ere talking about another haunting. So I had this idea—why don’t we help? We’ve got a ghost … he’s doing this stuff for free right now … why not help people and make a little money?”
Zoe continued, “So I agreed to let y’all in on my business, if you were up for it.”
I floated around the room as I thought it over, the tips of the candles’ flames following me. It was a pretty cool effect. Hmm.
“Sounds a little self-serving though. I mean, right now I’m just doing it because I like to help people.”
“You said it yourself,” Max began. “You can’t use money, so it’s not self-serving at all. You could—say—give your cut to me.”
I guess Max had more of a head for business than I gave him credit for.
“Why would I let you keep the money when I could give it to Mom or Taylor?” I replied.
“Good question. Why would you give your cut to me instead of your family?” Max said, repeating the question aloud but to himself. “Because it’s how you’ll cover your part of the rent here—and I think the loan officer for the mortgage company would like to see another stream of income other than the slightly-above-minimum hourly wage I make at the law firm and the lucrative—but still new and unproven—revenue from Meme in my Coffee.”
“You named your company Meme in my Coffee,” I laughed—not hard, it wasn’t that funny. “OK, if I’m helping you and the fine, upstanding ghosts of Austin move on, I suppose that keeps me firmly in the do-gooder category. Kind of like a police officer or firefighter.”
Zoe added, “Don’t forget our clients. You’re helping
them too.”
“Alright, I’m interested. How do you see this going down?”
Zoe and Max filled me in on ideas from their brainstorming session earlier in the day. The general premise was that they would spend time sitting and talking with the client in the home while I talked to the haunter in residence. They thought it was a good idea to continue with Zoe’s prepared ceremony, including the incense, because it would help the Psy-kicks see spirits through the fog. Also, that whole bit really set a mood, and it would probably make our customers feel like they were getting their money’s worth. I insisted they just use the sandalwood-smelling kind for every room though. I got sick just thinking about the other smell. At some point in the night, the spirit would need to move on, consider moving on, or we would make them leave the house.
“Oh, and we have an all-inclusive package now!” Zoe said. “$3,000—all in—for the exorcism. No need for the per-attempt charge now that we have a guy on the inside.”
“That was my idea,” Max chimed in, scanning the room and making sure everyone knew. “That was my idea.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “That was Max’s idea, and a good one.” Zoe placated Max with a gentle high five.
“Yeah,” cool haircut Quinton added, “maybe now some of us can afford to eat three meals a day.”
“When do we start?” I asked.
“How about now?” Zoe offered.
I agreed, and the group broke to stand, stretch, and extinguish the bundles of incense around the house. Zoe collected the little transistor radio and left it on as we all filed out of the house toward an old but clean, white, fifteen-passenger van.
“Shotgun,” I crackled through the whining old radio, looking at Max as he threw up his hands in frustration. I was always better at getting the drop on calling the passenger seat, and it was good to know I still had the knack—even from the great beyond. Zoe started the van and tuned the radio to static so we could communicate on the way to our first client’s house. I wondered if that made me a Psy-kick now …
I began to sing through the radio.
“Don’t make me turn this off,” Zoe threatened as her hand shot to the volume knob, but it was too late. Max picked up where I left off, and cool-haircut Lin joined him. Before too long, the whole van minus Zoe crooned along to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III while I sang the guitar part. Dun! Dun-dun-dun!
Zoe stopped the van about a block short of the client’s house and asked me to go scout it out. She showed me the address and a picture of the house on her phone, and I floated down the street to find it.
Our client’s house was a split-level built in the ’70s in the Zilker neighborhood—a small community in South Austin. I phased through the front door and started scanning room to room, looking for the source of our client’s problem. I found our client, a young woman in her twenties. She hadn’t fully changed from work, but was wrapped in a well-worn knit sweater. A small, scruffy, black-and-tan, mixed-breed dog sat at her feet, looking up as she made a late dinner over her stove.
I dropped down to the bottom floor of the house and into a wood-paneled and rock-walled multipurpose room. There, on the far side, sat a teenage boy in bell bottoms and a green-and-yellow ringed T-shirt, moping around, trying to tune a busted-up old guitar. He didn’t notice me, so I floated back up and made sure I’d checked every other room to confirm there weren’t any other spirits hanging around. Once satisfied that the kid was my case, I floated back to the van.
“It’s a teenager,” my voice crackled through the speakers. “Looks sad, what have we heard from the client?”
“Our client works in tech,” Zoe said, “and bought the house after she sold an app she’d been working on since college. Strange things have been happening with her electronics—her TV cuts off constantly as well as her music. She’s had people over to look at them both, but no one can figure out why. Her room downstairs gets colder than the rest of the house at night, and she’s been through multiple A/C and insulation guys who can’t solve those problems either. She mentioned that she always gets a little sad when she goes down there, so she stopped using it altogether. Most recently, she thought she heard a voice in the house. Her dog sitter said the same, and recently quit.”
“OK, I’ll go talk to the kid,” I said.
Zoe turned around in the driver’s seat. “Alright, everybody, let’s do this.”
She turned the key and drove the van the rest of the way to the house. The Psy-kicks, which now included Max, piled out of the van and headed toward the front door. So did I, but I didn’t wait with them and just went on through. I heard the doorbell ring as I floated over to the stairs.
To reduce the risk of scaring him, I decided to walk down like a normal person, and my efforts succeeded. He acknowledged my presence with a nod, and I returned the gesture with another. He told me his name was Ozzy, and he died in an electrical accident in the house while trying to wire up a few guitar amps he’d collected to make sure the entire neighborhood could hear him play instead of just the fifty houses within closest proximity.
He felt protective of his little brother Kyle, who was four at the time of the accident, and didn’t feel like he could move on and leave him behind. Kyle grew up and went off to school, and his parents sold the house shortly after that and moved to Florida. Ozzy never figured out how to leave the house and found himself blocked in. He instinctively constructed the guitar he was still tuning but didn’t understand what I meant when I asked him how he did it. Maybe it was such a critical part of his identity, he couldn’t imagine being without it.
He hadn’t figured out how to change clothes either—maybe he wasn’t able to. He just stayed in the same house night after night. Bored. He copped to turning our client’s shows off because he thought they were annoying.
“Just all these plastic-looking phonies talking about how they’re the right one for some stupid guy—so dumb. And why are people orange now?” he asked. I didn’t have a good answer.
He said he turned off her music because it “sucked.”
I shared with him what I’d been doing for other spirits around town, and it didn’t take long before his door appeared. He gave me a wave and a nod of the head as he strolled through, and I noticed his teenage façade break for a moment as
he saw the other side. Whatever he saw moved him.
Feeling good about myself, I floated back upstairs to find the group circled in deep meditation. Zoe felt like she needed to stay in practice, and it was yet another thing that made the customer feel like they got their money’s worth. The group reacted to the change in temperature as I entered the circle and opened their eyes to see the words:
I’m sorry I scared you. Wipe, wipe. I’ll move on.
The client teared up and buried her face in the little scruffy dog. I floated out of the house and back to the van, settling just above the passenger seat to wait for the group. Zoe returned with an envelope overstuffed with cash and opened the driver’s side door as the rest of the Psy-kicks piled in from the side.
“We even got a tip,” she said as she got in and turned the key to start the van. Max opened the door to the passenger side.
“Still shotgun,” I said through the speakers.
Max shook his head, slammed the door shut, and piled in the back with the rest of the group. The van slowly pulled away from the curb and out into the night.
We were waiting at a stoplight, about to head south out of the neighborhood, when I noticed what looked like a fun ghostly gathering at a little strip mall on the west side of Lamar.
“I’ll catch up with y’all later,” I announced through the speakers.
I heard a few “be goods,” “okays,” and one loud “shotgun” from the van as I floated off in the direction of what looked like a fun time.
Chapter 16
I heard voices and laughter and saw groups of ghosts hanging out in the parking lot. Music spilled from an open door. Calling it a strip mall may have been a little generous as it was really just three buildings close together, owned by different people, with a converted gas station beside them that had been turned into a fast-food burrito joint.
The outside of the shops had been recently renovated with a stucco application to bring the disparate looks together. I floated toward the open door and found it propped into place by a box fan that kept the area cool. I guessed it must have been a nice night, temperature-wise.
