The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  This game is traditionally played outdoors, however your sitting room is more than large enough to serve. (Perhaps it was once a ballroom?)

  Draw the curtains against the lightning. Madame Edamame will wear the blindfold. Have your guests stand around her in a circle and spin her until she is dizzy and nearly falling down. (The alcohol will help in this regard.) As she reaches to steady herself, your guests will scatter and hide themselves away—beneath the grand piano, behind the tight-drawn curtains, inside the curio cabinet where the good china and glass figurines used to be displayed, the one with the shelves taken out long ago.

  Madame Edamame will stumble. She will call a name, possibly the name of one of your guests, but not the name they have been given for the game.

  Inside the curio cabinet, where shelves used to be, there will be one heartbeat and two sets of breath. Behind the curtains, a stifled laugh. Beneath the piano, two sets of eyes peer out at the game, even though the guest hiding there hid alone.

  Madame Edamame will pretend not to be afraid. She will feel someone touch her hand. By the time your other guests think to help her, it will be too late. She will already have left bloody gouges on her cheeks tearing the blindfold away.

  Entertainment (Variant #3)—Exploration

  This is the most popular variant. It always comes down to exploration and isolation in the end. A ghost for every guest, and each to their own.

  Divide the party into pairs and send them out in different directions. Your guests may be reluctant, there is safety in numbers, after all. Remind them that none of them will be alone. If this isn’t exactly comforting, remind them that they came here of their own free will. What happens from here on out is out of your hands.

  First Exploration Team: The Library

  Miss Foster and Young Mister Cleeves will proceed to the library. Young Mister Cleeves will grope his way toward the light, or where he believes the light ought to be. He will trip over a pile of books, cursing softly. He will lose track of Miss Foster right away. He will be terrified simultaneously that he is alone and no longer alone.

  Something will break. Don’t worry. Material things can always be replaced.

  When Young Mister Cleeves finds the light, it will illuminate Miss Foster standing in front of one of the floor to ceiling bookshelves. In all her un-rooted childhood, books were her constant. Her sole anchor in the dark. Her lips will move, but Young Mister Cleeves won’t be able to make out the words. He will be profoundly grateful for this fact. Blood, a single drop, will fall from Miss Foster’s palm.

  She will not turn when Young Mister Cleeves calls her name. He will be profoundly grateful for this as well. The idea of seeing her face fills him with blank dread. He has begun to suspect she is not so young as she seems. At the same time, the fear that she is unable to move, will never move again, haunts him. He cannot leave her here, but he cannot bring himself to touch her shoulder either, as if a haunting could be passed along like a disease.

  He will be forced to admit to himself that he was hoping for something more, exploring a dimly-lit house with a lovely and fragile young woman (girl). He will feel small, seeing his impulse to chivalry for the base thing it is. His pulse will slow. It will slow continually, each beat more distant from the next. Paradoxically, his breath will speed with the waiting, which will seem interminable, waiting to see whether the distance between one beat and the next becomes too vast and they stop.

  Second Exploration Team: The Basement

  Mr. James and Captain Frank will make their way to the basement. They will reach the bottom of the steps before they find the light. The basement smells of dust and the memory of rain, something sweet and sharp and long buried underlying both.

  The woodpile and the glowering pot-bellied stove will greet them. Mr. James will be reminded inexplicably of his father.

  He will pick up the ax, even though the blade is sunk deep into one of the logs, abandoned mid-chop, and it will require a great amount of effort to pull it free. He will not understand why he does these things, but he will be compelled.

  The blade is rusty; the handle fits his grip like an old friend. Mr. James will swing the ax, just once (in his mind) to test the heft, but his arms will ache as though he swung it again and again.

  Captain Frank, Jane, as she prefers to be called, will think, fuck, no, I am not dying this way. I did not survive two wars to buy it in a moldy basement. She will see, again, buildings torn apart, hear the screams following an IED explosion, every IED explosion. She will taste plaster and cement blown to dust as her mind struggles to rearrange a puzzle of scattered limbs. She will think, yes, this is familiar. This I know. And she will do what needs to be done.

  Captain Frank will limp when she climbs the stairs back into the light. She will be alone. Her hair will be disheveled, and one of her medals missing. Behind her, the basement will be dark. Even if she did look back, she wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

  Third Exploration Team: The Garden

  Father Crispin and Mr. Evans will take the brick path to the shed at the end of yard, a straight line from the house’s back door. There is no light in the shed, which is scarcely bigger than a tomb, and why should there be? Most people don’t garden in the dark.

  Father Crispin will prop the door open with a brick. It will take a moment for his eyes to adjust, and a moment longer to realize he is alone. Mr. Evans vanished somewhere between the shed and the back door.

  Or perhaps he has always been alone.

  Father Crispin will breathe in the scent of turned earth and old clay. Trowels, rakes, and clawed instruments hang from the walls. Bottles of fertilizers and weed killer and rat poison line the shelves. Everything in the shed can be used to kill.

  Even though he isn’t a man of the cloth, not outside of this evening and the role you have assigned him, Father Crispin will whisper a prayer. As he does, he will suddenly remember the monastery where he took his vows, a place he has surely never been. Yet he will know how his days there smelled of earth, and how he spent long hours in the garden, weeding rows of tomato and cucumber plants by hand.

  Water will drip from the hem of Father Crispin’s cassock. A voice at the back of his head will suggest he kneel. Not to pray, but to see better into the corners of the shed.

  He will find a bundle wrapped in burlap and tied with twine. He will not want to open it. He will dread opening it with all his soul. And he will open it all the same.

  The bones inside are too small, too light to be human, yet too perfect to be anything else.

  He will know, he has always known, this was waiting for him here. Father Crispin will cradle the bones close against his chest, murmuring the words of a long-forgotten lullaby, weeping softly the whole while.

  Evaluating Your Party’s Success

  There are more rooms and more pairings. There is no need to enumerate them all. Some things are better left unseen, as Father Crispin well knows. Besides, it would take all the fun out of your party to know every detail in advance.

  As the evening unwinds, there are several ways it might go. You could find yourself with a house full of final girls, or a house full of final boys. You could find yourself with a mix of both, or neither. You might find yourself all alone.

  It has happened many times before.

  Ideally, this is the part of the evening when you gather your guests to reveal how and where and who and why. However, it seems there is no one left to gather. You aren’t even certain anyone has been murdered, or whether there is any crime to reveal. There are human remains in your house, to be sure, but it is highly like those have been there all along.

  All that remains is your own exploration, a foray through the empty rooms of your house to take stock of the evening’s game. You may delay, hesitate, hem and haw, but sooner or later you’ll have to climb the attic stairs and throw open the steamer trunk that is large enough to fit a body inside. You will have to descend to the basement, return the ax to its place, and use your fingernails to
pry up the floorboards. You will have to go to the library, and the garden shed, the kitchen and the conservatory. You will have to stand on your tiptoes in the bathroom door and hope that just this once you’ll be able to see inside the claw-foot tub without entering the room.

  As the host, it is your duty to search every last nook and cranny to be sure. But to be sure of what? That you are alone? That you have never been alone?

  Sooner or later, you’ll have to go into the room you swore you’d never enter again. The door stands an inch ajar, waiting for you. You will stand in the hallway for as long as you can, then you’ll grope for the light and there will be a moment of panic before you remember—all the switches are far away from all the doors. You must step into the dark.

  This darkness is physical, like dropping into a pool. It closes over your head, and maybe this time, just this once, you really will drown. Maybe it’s better not to reach for the light. If you do, you’ll know the faceless thing in the corner isn’t just a shadow. You’ll know that in the closet, there’s a hanged girl. Someone is waiting in the corner, by the crib, by the old hobby horse, by the rocking chair where no one has sat for years. They were in the room a moment before you. They just left. They must have passed you in the hall, close enough to touch.

  If you reach for the light now, a hand will reach back for you. Fingers will brush across your skin. But if you wait long enough, if you refuse to act, the decision will be made for you. Your eyes will adjust; the shadows in the corner, in the closet, under the bed, by the chair, will coalesce. You will see, even if your eyes are closed.

  There are so many ways to host a haunted house murder mystery party, but there is only one way this can end.

  This room, this house, your life, have all the hallmarks of a haunting. You should know by now—you cannot be forgiven. By now, you should no longer need a ghost to make your pain real. But standing paralyzed in the door, counting the space between one heartbeat and the next, you can’t help but ask yourself over and over again—what did you do to deserve this?

  In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same

  Five children have gone missing since the school year began. The youngest, only six; the oldest, no more than ten. They all went to school together, but all in different grades. The only thing they have in common is that they all rode the school bus together every day.

  Richard McGinty reported the first child missing. And the second. And the third. He’s the bus driver, it makes sense he would notice, but even so, the police chief can’t help but wonder. There’s just something about him, the police chief has always thought so. Sunnydale is a nice town, a safe one, but there are some people, like Richard McGinty, who just don’t seem to belong. It isn’t anything the police chief can put his finger on, but he’s learned over the years that if someone looks suspicious it’s most likely because they are. So the police chief writes McGinty’s name at the top of his suspect list, then he does what he always does. He gives the Super Teen Detective Squad a call.

  *

  Helen is the pretty one. Everyone says so. Her hair is long and red and flips over her shoulders just so. She isn’t quite rich, but she isn’t poor either. She always has money for new clothes when she wants them, but she tends to wear the same ones day after day. Pretty is something she is, not something she does.

  She’s been a Teen Detective as long as she can remember. Along with Greg, Tricia, and Rooster, she’s solved more mysteries than she can remember. They blend together in her mind—the Old Mill, the Haunted Cemetery, the creature in the pond, or the river, or the swamp. There’s always a ghost, or a demon, or a monster, one that always turns out to be someone in disguise. Helen has never met a real monster. She’s almost eighteen, but she still hopes she will grow up to be a monster someday.

  In her time as a Teen Detective, Helen has learned that most people only think they know what monsters look like. They walk past real monsters every day and never see them at all, which is why the monsters she meets go around in disguise. It’s the only way anyone will ever recognize them, and they are all so desperate to be seen.

  Helen thinks a lot about disguises. She thinks about putting on a hundred pounds, or losing fifty, and paying someone to beat her up so badly it will utterly transform her face. She’ll get a crummy apartment, one with a roach problem, and a door that doesn’t properly lock. It will be the kind of place a girl like her would never live. She’ll spend her days walking right up to people who know her, or think they do, and laughing behind her hands when they don’t recognize her. And it will be absolutely glorious.

  This future, alternate, unrecognizable version of her will get a dog. A big one who slobbers. One who growls at everyone who isn’t her. The dog will know her and love her unconditionally; it won’t have any idea she’s supposed to be the pretty one. It will know her by her smell, and the fact that she feeds it, and it won’t care a thing about her face, her shape, or the color of her hair.

  By unofficial consensus, Greg is the Super Teen Detective Squad’s leader. Helen thinks she might have slept with him once, because they are both pretty and that’s the way it’s supposed to go. Though it’s also possible that they got drunk together once and he told her that he’s gay.

  Lately she’s been having recurring dreams about murdering Greg. In fact, she’s dreamt about murdering every single member of the Teen Detective Squad. More than once, she’s woken with blood on her hands. She has no idea where the blood comes from. The only thing she knows for certain is that it isn’t hers. Sometimes she wonders if she’s spent so much time thinking about becoming a monster that she’s turned into one after all.

  *

  He didn’t start driving the school bus until after he retired. Maybe that’s why all the kids on the bus call him old. “Better behave, or Old Man McGinty will get you.” “I heard Old Man McGinty’s face is just a rubber mask.” “I dare you to pull it off and see what he looks like for real.” “I heard he crashed a bus on purpose once.” “I heard he locks bad kids inside the bus and hurts them.”

  There are so many rumors, none of them true. He doesn’t even really mind; it’s just the way kids are. It comes with the job, it comes with being “old”, with being a little too quiet, a little lonely, a little odd.

  The kids are right about one thing at least. He does look like someone in his disguise, his face and clothing all wrong. The clothes are hand-me-downs from his father. Never throw a good piece of cloth away, his mother always said. They don’t fit him right. They smell of mothballs and smoke, though he’s never touched a cigarette in his life. His father died when he was eight-years-old, but his mother kept the clothes in a trunk in the attic, waiting for him to grow.

  He doesn’t remember the growing part. As far as he knows, he’s always been old. What he does remember is the day his mother pulled his father’s old clothes out of the chest and presented them to him. He remembers climbing into them, all shades of umber and brown, sienna and burnt orange. It was like wearing his father’s ghost. He looked in the mirror and saw a man with hound dog eyes, with shadows in the seams of his skin, and hair fading to the color of a mouse’s fur. He was only eighteen at the time.

  *

  Tricia is the smart one, but no one ever tells her so. They simply take it for granted. She is the reliable one, dependable, boring. She is so predictable that even she catches words coming out of her mouth before she’s had time to think of them sometimes. It’s like someone else living inside her, speaking through her skin.

  Every morning when she gets dressed, Tricia finds dog hairs on her clothes. She finds them even though she hasn’t been anywhere near a dog, ever, as far as she knows. Her parents have always told her she’s deathly allergic, even though the dog hairs on her sweaters don’t even so much as make her itch. It’s the greatest mystery she’s ever encountered. Even with the ghosts, the pirate treasure, the naiad inhabiting the old pond. This is the thing that will haunt her, the unsolved puzzle that will follow her to her grave.
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br />   There are times Tricia wishes she could be the pretty one. Even better, she wishes she could be both pretty and smart, even though everyone knows that’s impossible. There are other times she knows it’s that she wants to be with the pretty one. She dreams of kissing Helen, running her fingers through her fiery hair. She imagines trying on Helen’s clothes, and she imagines them shopping together. They take turns in the dressing room, like a movie montage, holding up dresses and jeans and sweaters, saying “What do you think about this one and this one and this one?” Tricia knows it will never happen. She and Helen don’t spend time together unless they’re solving a mystery. She doesn’t even think they’re friends.

  Sometimes Tricia wonders whether she would rather be with Greg, or be like him. So smooth, so confident, always ready with a quip and a smile. Always up for anything. Other times she knows with absolutely certainty she doesn’t want to be with or like any of them at all. In fact, she hates them. They terrify her, and she wants to run as far away as she can and never see any of them again.

  *

  Every day, after he picks up the last child at the last stop, before he turns onto the road leading to the school, Old Man McGinty counts the children’s faces. He counts them once in the rearview mirror, and once again when he turns around. There is always one more or less than there should be, but he can never be sure which way around. His school bus is haunted; he knows this with certainty, but he has never told anyone. The school itself is haunted, but he’s the only one who knows.