The Ghoul Next Door

by Victoria Laurie

  “He’s one of the best, honey,” Gil replied, handing me the shoe box. “Now, get dressed and do something with your hair. You have half an hour.”

  The shoes Gil had picked out were black patent leather at the heel with electric blue suede at the toe to match the dress. I got myself together quickly and was relieved to see the dress fit like a glove. And, as long as I didn’t breathe too deeply, it was even comfortable.

  As for my hair . . . I tried. I tried the curling iron a couple of times and gobs of hair spray, but I have thick chestnut-colored hair that always manages to pull out of the curl. Still, I did manage to at least make it look wavy, and I was happy with the end result.

  I walked out of the bedroom after hastily putting most of the clothes on my bed back in the closet, and as both Gilley and Heath jumped to their feet and whistled appreciatively, I think I passed the litmus test.

  We arrived at the restaurant, which is just a few blocks down from my place, at only a minute or two past seven. Heath held my hand and I knew he could sense how tense I was—my palm was clearly sweating. He squeezed it and offered me an encouraging smile and I had to marvel at how handsome he was in his black dress slacks and emerald green silk shirt.

  On my left Gilley was also smartly dressed in black jeans, matching boots, a charcoal shirt, and snappy vest. On his head he’d even worn his most stylish fedora. He looked like a guy that didn’t have to try very hard to look trendy, and I knew that was partly Michel’s influence and partly just Gilley’s natural taste. It made me feel a little more confident to be buffered by the two men . . . that is, until Steven walked in with a beautiful brunette on his arm.

  My ex was dressed in a light tan suede jacket and a white shirt with faded jeans, but his fiancée had on a simple black cocktail dress, which complemented her olive skin tone and set off her hazel eyes.

  She had a countenance that wasn’t classically beautiful, but lovely all the same, with large doe eyes, a long thin nose, and full lips encased in a heart-shaped face haloed by long curly hair that bounced when she walked. Mostly, she looked kind and approachable, and the minute I saw her and Steven together, I knew they were made for each other. Courtney was tall and lithe, a perfect complement to Steven’s six-foot frame.

  We had little chance to do more than smile nervously at each other when the host, Estevan, approached us with much enthusiasm. “M.J.! Steven! So good to see you two again!”

  I felt my cheeks color. This used to be our favorite hangout, and I didn’t think Estevan knew that Steven and I weren’t together anymore. In fact, I knew he didn’t when he stepped in front of us and glanced at the woman clearly on Steven’s arm and my hand clasped in Heath’s. Estevan’s smile became a little forced and his eyes blinked furiously as I could practically see the wheels turning in his head to put it all together. “Hi, Estevan,” Gil said merrily. “There will be five of us for dinner tonight.”

  Estevan nodded, that forced smile never losing wattage, and turned swiftly to gather menus. “This way, this way,” he sang. We followed him to the table and took our seats. Courtney and Steven sat opposite Heath and me, and Gil landed to my right and Steven’s left. “I love your dress,” Courtney said as I sat in the chair Heath had pulled out for me.

  “Thank you!” I replied, with maybe a little too much enthusiasm. “Yours is supercute!”

  Gil cleared his throat and gave me a look that begged me to chill out. I got busy unrolling my utensils from the napkin. Estevan then rattled off the specials of the day before making haste to hurry off and wipe his now sweaty brow.

  The table fell into a bit of uncomfortable silence and it was Gil who broke the tension by introducing himself. “Hello,” he said, offering Courtney his hand. “I’m Gilley. You must be Courtney.”

  She smiled shyly at him. “Hello,” she said. “I’ve heard all about you, Gilley.”

  Gil turned his head slightly and pretended to blush. “Oh, my. All good, I hope?”

  “All good,” she assured him.

  “It’s good to see you,” Steven said to Gilley, and there was genuine warmth in the statement. “I’ve missed you.”

  This time Gilley really did blush. He then proceeded to tell Steven all about his new, “devastatingly good-looking” boyfriend and this description and a few of the more humorous tales of Michel and Gilley’s adventures since meeting in Wales lasted well into the ordering of our drinks. At last Gil sat back and winked at me. His tactic had worked. We’d all shared a laugh and the tension at the table had eased.

  I then felt obliged to make an effort to be nice and asked, “So, where did you two meet?”

  “The hospital,” Courtney said, smiling brightly at Steven. She reached for her utensils at the same time and I had a chance to see the enormous rock on her finger. Gilley hadn’t guessed wrong. Steven had gone all out. “We did a consult on a patient who’d suffered a mild heart attack while driving, and he’d had an accident that resulted in a closed head injury.”

  “Ouch,” Heath said. “Did he make it?”

  Courtney nodded. “He did. He’s had a rough time of it, but he’s alive and doing better every day.”

  The waiter came by to take our orders and we all realized we hadn’t looked at the menu. Promising that we’d be ready in just a minute, we all began to skim over the menu. I looked for any vegetarian offerings and found a stuffed ravioli dish with homemade creamy tomato sauce that looked right up my alley. When I placed my order, Steven looked quizzically at me. “You always go for the filet.”

  “I’ve given up meat,” I told him. That was a very recent decision, because lately, every time I ate meat, I swore I could feel a hint of the fear and pain the animal had endured before it died. It was something I hadn’t known would affect me, and I was learning that many, many psychics ultimately became vegetarians for that very reason.

  Next to me Heath ordered the cheese-filled crepes—also meat free—and he nudged me with his shoulder a little. Meanwhile, Steven had rolled his eyes a little at me and ordered the filet for himself and also for his fiancée, and that was more telling to me than anything, I suppose. We really wouldn’t have lasted as a couple, even if Heath hadn’t entered the picture.

  Gilley ordered the salmon and we made small talk until our meal arrived. “So!” Gil said as he tucked into his fish. “When’s the wedding?”

  Courtney and Steven exchanged a look that suggested they’d had more than a few discussions about that. “We’re hoping for sometime in early September,” she said.

  “First we have to deal with the living situation,” Steven said, more to Courtney than to us. I could tell that was also a much talked-about topic between them.

  “You’re welcome to move in with me,” Courtney said, her smile sly.

  Steven sighed and focused his attention back on me. “She won’t leave her brother alone in that house.”

  Heath cut off a small section of his crepe dish and set it on his bread plate, then offered it to me without my asking. I realized I’d been staring hungrily at his meal with more than a little buyer’s remorse because it looked and smelled amazing—far better than my ravioli. “So, what’s going on with your brother exactly?” Heath asked Courtney.

  She stopped cutting into her filet and looked up at him, and I was shocked by the tears that began to fill her eyes. “I wish I knew,” she whispered.

  Steven laid a hand on her back to comfort her. “It’s all right,” he encouraged. “Tell them what’s been going on, bella. They can help.”

  Courtney took a sip of water and shook her head a little, trying to collect herself. “Luke moved in with me about six weeks ago,” she began. “He’d been having a lot of trouble at school, and that’s not like him. He was top in his class going into his senior year at BU, but then he seemed to have some sort of a breakdown. . . .” Courtney’s voice faded away as her eyes misted again.

  “What w
as he studying?” I asked gently, trying to coax the story out of her.

  She cleared her throat and took another sip of water. “Nanotechnology,” she said, smiling gratefully at me. “Luke is so smart. He always excelled in school, even with all the stuff happening at home.”

  “What happened at home?” Gil asked.

  Courtney shrugged. “Our parents were both alcoholics, and for a time we lived in foster care. It was harder on Luke, I think. He was more sensitive to the erratic and unpredictable nature of my mom and dad. I graduated early and went to college on a scholarship, but Luke is eight years younger, so he was home alone with them for a longer, more troubling period. I finally had him come live with me when he was a freshman in high school, and I was the one that kept him off the streets and focused on school. I managed to get him a job briefly at the hospital and then he got a scholarship to BU and I thought he’d escaped all the hard stuff that comes from having such a dysfunctional home life, but maybe it all caught up to him and he invited this . . . whatever this is.”

  My brow furrowed. “Whatever what is?” I asked.

  Courtney took a deep breath and I could tell that whatever was going on with Luke, it was affecting her deeply. “Something changed,” she whispered, almost as if she was afraid that confessing it would bring something bad into the atmosphere. “Luke was living alone in a house he was renting. It was a dump of a house, and I hadn’t heard from him in a week or two, so I went over to check on him. I found him alone in the dark, all the blinds closed, the house a complete mess—we’re talking garbage on the floor, clothes and bedding tossed everywhere, and my brother sitting on the floor, wrapped in a blanket with a set of headphones on, rocking back and forth maniacally.

  “At first I thought Luke had had some sort of psychotic break—I mean, the scene in that house was just so antithetical to his usual neat and highly organized character. But when I bent down to him, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Make him go away, sis. Make him go away!’”

  I put my elbow on the table and leaned forward. “Make who go away, Courtney?”

  She shook her head against the memory, making those long curls bounce. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “But I looked into the eyes of my brother and I knew . . . I knew he hadn’t had a psychotic break. He was lucid. His eyes were clear. I’m a neurologist—we’re trained to recognize abnormalities of the brain, and this wasn’t an abnormality.”

  “What’d you do?” Gilley asked.

  Courtney looked down at the table, still struggling with the memory of that day in the house with her brother. “I wrapped him in my arms and hugged him tightly, promising him that I’d do whatever I could to help him, but he just kept asking me to make ‘him’ go away. Finally, I sat back and asked him who he meant, and Luke pointed behind me. . . .”

  Again Courtney’s voice faded away and she struggled to speak. “I . . . ,” she said, her voice wavering. “I turned and on the wall of the living room there was this shadow. . . .”

  “A shadow,” I repeated, trying to help. “Was it in the shape of a person?”

  Her eyes lifted to mine. “Yes!”

  “A man,” I added.

  She nodded.

  “And the shadow wasn’t flat, right? It had dimension, as if the shadow were in three-D.”

  Courtney put a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide and misty as she nodded.

  “Did you hear anything?” Heath asked her.

  Her gaze shifted to him. “Yes,” she repeated. “I heard . . . I heard . . . laughter, only it wasn’t laughter. It was more evil. It was the evilest noise I’ve ever heard. And it surrounded us in a way that . . .” Courtney seemed to struggle with a way to explain what she’d heard.

  “You felt it in your bones, didn’t you?” I said.

  She gasped. “Yes! That’s exactly how it felt.”

  Gilley set his fork and knife down. I could see the fear and worry on his face. I think when we’d explained to him that Steven had come to us saying that his fiancée had a ghost she needed help with, he’d thought it’d be more like the old days when we dealt with local spooks who just made small bumps in the night. This was already looking to be a much bigger deal. “What’d you do then?” he asked her.

  She leaned over a little and hugged Steven’s arm. “I grabbed Luke and we bolted out of the house. I took him home to my place and we haven’t been back to that house since.”

  Gilley seemed to relax. “Oh, phew!” he said. “So, you just want us to talk to Luke and let him know that what he encountered is a perfectly natural phenomenon, and that he’s not crazy, right?”

  “No,” Steven said to him. “There’s a little more to the story, Gilley.” Turning to Courtney, he added, “Tell them the rest, bella.”

  She took another deep breath and continued. “At first, things went back to normal. Well, sort of normal. I put Luke to bed, because he seemed to be exhausted, and the next morning I had an early surgery, so I let him sleep. When I got home, he was still asleep and I became concerned, so I woke him. He told me that before I’d gotten to the house he was renting, he hadn’t slept more than an hour or two a night in about a week and a half. I could also tell that he’d lost about ten pounds since the last time I’d seen him.

  “He said that it all started a few weeks before winter finals. Walking across campus to his car after one of his night classes, he had the feeling that he was being followed, but he swore that every time he looked over his shoulder, nothing was there. He told me that once he got home, weird stuff began happening. He’d open up the cabinet where he kept his glassware, and instead he’d find plates and bowls. He’d put his clothes in the hamper and find them hanging up in his closet the next morning. Or he’d set something down for a minute only to return and find it in another room. And, he says, the feeling of being followed persisted and got worse.

  “Luke swears that every time he left the house, it was like someone was right behind him—he could even hear the footsteps—but nobody was there. He started to wonder if he was going crazy. But then he says that his friends stopped wanting to hang out with him. This happened abruptly. One minute he had a group of buddies to hang out with or study with, and all of a sudden they don’t want anything to do with him.

  “Finally he couldn’t take that feeling of being followed anymore, so he skipped class and stayed home, and that day almost nothing unusual happened. The next day he went out for groceries and the minute he stepped out of the house, he felt that presence again. It was like whatever was following him wanted him to stay put.

  “He didn’t know what was happening, and he was terrified that he was becoming schizophrenic. He didn’t know what to do and he didn’t call me because he was afraid I’d tell him that’s exactly what was happening. Meanwhile, Luke said that every time he tried to catch some sleep, he would have terrible nightmares of being physically attacked by a shadowy figure wielding a hunting knife. He said he couldn’t get away from the shadow person in his dreams and he started to fear going to sleep. At last he started to see the figure of a man out of the corner of his eye, always darting out of sight whenever Luke tried to look. Eventually, he was so sleep deprived he became delirious and he could barely think. That’s about the time I found him.”

  The waiter came by to clear away our plates and offer us dessert. I think he was a little thrown by the somber mood at the table, but we all ordered coffee and Courtney got back to her story. “For the next several days Luke rested, ate, and got better. He’d left all of his belongings back at the other house, but neither of us wanted to think about ever going back there, so I replaced his textbooks, his computer, and his clothes, and took him on walks down by the water to help him try to feel normal again. Luke loves the smell of the bay and I thought that walking along the shore was helping him more than anything, but then one afternoon just a few days into this new routine, as Luke and I were walking, I felt Luke sort of stif
fen. When I looked over at him, I could see how pale he’d suddenly become—he looked terrified. I asked him what was wrong and he said that we were being followed. I looked behind us, but there was no one there.”

  “Could it have been his imagination?” Gilley asked (hopefully, I thought).

  Courtney shook her head. “At first, that’s what I thought, but then we started walking again and I swear I felt this sort of weird presence behind us too. Luke got so freaked-out that he took off running and it was a minute before I realized what’d happened. I started chasing after him when I saw this black shadow appear out of thin air and keep right on his heels. I think that scared me even more than the encounter at the house. I mean, whatever it was, it was literally chasing my brother all the way down the street. It matched Luke step for step. . . .” Courtney’s voice trailed off as she gave in to a shudder and seemed to lose herself in the awful memory. “They were both faster than me, but I did manage to catch up to Luke when he ducked inside a grocery store. When I found him huddled near the produce, I think we both realized that the shadow was gone. Luke said the minute he got into a crowd, the shadow had vanished. It’s like it can’t pick him out of a crowd or something, but out on the streets and alone in the house, he’s fair game.”

  I glanced sideways at Heath and found him looking at me in return. This sounded bad, and I could tell he thought so too.

  “After that,” Courtney continued, leaning back so the waiter could set down her coffee, “he begged me not to leave him alone, and so I didn’t. I called the hospital and rearranged my shifts, and managed to spend two more days with him. Steven came over and we had a few friends in for a visit, and while the house was full of people during those few days, nothing happened, and I started to hope that maybe we had lost whatever that thing was that had attached itself to my brother. Steven knew something was wrong, however, and after our guests left, he got me to confess what’d been going on, and I was so relieved when he not only believed me, but he told me he might be able to help. Luke and I felt so much better for his company, but then Luke started having those nightmares again.”