by Noel Hynd
George had also been, Mrs. Osaro related, a pretty good athlete for a boy of small stature.
“Did he play basketball?” Brooks asked.
She laughed indulgently. “Georgie love basketball,” she said with enthusiasm. “And he play very well against the bigger and stronger ones.”
“I’m sure of that,” Brooks said.
She led him across the room and showed Brooks a trophy George had won in the eighth grade. Most valuable player on his junior high team.
She put the trophy down and walked back toward where they had sat.
“Funny thing is,” she said, “that I always use to worry about him. Somehow knew George would do something crazy like that. Kill himself. And know what he’d say to me? He’d say that he had seen the other side. Said he loved his Maker and there was another beautiful world out there and that he was going to travel between it. And he said he’d have his way of communicating back to me. Sending messages. Have people come by and tell me he’s fine. Just to let me know that his spirit was out there.”
“Uh huh,” Brooks said.
“So your visit today doesn’t come as shock. Doesn’t upset me. Just reassures, I guess you say. Know what I mean?” Brooks knew. “Sit back down,” she said very routinely. “Have some more tea.”
Brooks sat. “Well, he is fine,” Brooks said.
“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Osaro said very casually. “I sense him all the time, too.”
Chapter Sixty-six
As more days passed, as a cold October arrived, and as the dark shadow of all preceding events withdrew, the more Timothy Brooks puzzled over what had happened. And the more he puzzled, the more he was beset by the many contradictions he had witnessed.
He at first tried to see events within traditional Christian terms. But this eventually struck him as too sparse, too narrow, and he tried to add spiritualist shadings with maybe even a little Eastern touch sprinkled in, as George would have wanted.
He tried to do the same as George Osaro might have done. Or at least, the same as George’s spirit might have put forth.
Contradictions. And of course questions. Including the largest question of all. Where did life end? What were the levels of reality?
He could hear his friend again. “How many levels are there, Tim? One. Two. Six million. And what are the levels of each?” And, “Once you’ve accepted that the paranormal exists, you can accept anything that follows.”
Did angels exist? Did a benevolent God sometimes intervene and send an emissary, an angel, to guide one on a righteous and faithful path?
For some reason, a poem, a parable, a story that Brooks had heard as a kid came back to him. One from Sunday school. One he had snickered over at the time.
It concerned the man walking along the beach with the Lord. Scenes from his life flashed across the sky. In each scene he saw footprints in the sand, sometimes. Two sets of footprints, other times one only. This had disturbed him because during the low periods of his life, he could see only one set of footprints.
So he had grown angry with God. “You promised me, Lord,” he had said, “that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?” But God replied. “My dear child. The times when you have seen only one set of footprints, that is when I carried you.”
And so on.
Brooks could even hear the ghost of Henry Flaherty, reduced to a harmless echo now: George Osaro is a dead man!
Well, yes. Flaherty had been all along. Or at least Osaro had passed through the rusting swinging gate in the churchyard, a path that sometimes seemed to travel both ways.
Another clever mingling of lies and truth. And yet to another degree, none of the answers that took shape for Tim Brooks would ever approach the answers he had held a few weeks earlier. He would never walk past a cemetery in the same way. He would never attend a church service, act as a pall bearer, or enter a dark, creaking house in the same way, either.
Life. Resurrection. Hope. Salvation. All the abstracts took on new meaning. Yet in some ways they weren’t abstracts at all. Some of this, some of his suspicions, some of what he most fervently held, came to fruition on the evening of October sixth that same year.
Tim Brooks was on the high school basketball court and a sense of loneliness was upon him.
He stood by himself, a solitary figure in the twilight. He had just passed another birthday and, he reasoned, had marked a point in his life midway between birth and death.
He hit a jump shot from the top of the key. He sank two from beyond the three point line.
Then he moved to the foul line, that small patch of the world where he had always reigned.
He shot and missed.
He retrieved the ball, shot and missed again.
Then he missed a third time. Extraordinary.
He returned to the foul line and missed four more consecutive shots. He watched each one, its arc perfectly true until the end when each shot found some way to land awkwardly on the rim of the basket and fall free, as if cleared by an invisible hand.
Brooks stared at what had happened right before his eyes.
“Goaltending!” he said aloud.
He went back to the line and shot again. Nothing would fall.
Thirteen misses in a row. Then sixteen. Never in his life…
He thought. He smiled.
“Come on, you!” he said aloud. “Come on, George. Make yourself apparent.”
He turned. In the few rays that remained of daylight, he saw, he thought he saw – no, afterward he was sure that he had seen – the figure of a small man watching him from the grove of trees that bordered the parking lot.
He took a step toward it and the vision proved misty. But at the same time, he was aware that a car was coming.
He glanced at the car. A rental. At least one diehard tourist left over from the summer, he reasoned.
Then he glanced back at the man in the shadows. The figure did not recede. In fact, it moved slightly. Brooks felt a strange sense of comfort. A sense of well-being.
He took a step closer and thought he recognized the figure as the car pulled up near the court. Its horn gave a honk. Brooks ignored it, stepping to the edge of the court. He then looked back to the grove of trees.
He called out. “George…? I see you, George!”
This time no one was there. Yet he had this sense these days, this sense that he had picked up from a dear friend. Why, he could often go into a disturbed place or a paranormal situation and…
The car pulled as close to him as it could. The window rolled down on the passenger side.
“Hey, you big hunky dumb cop!” called out a familiar female voice. “Did you forget what I look like?”
The recognition was upon him. He stared.
“Annie?”
“Get in the car, you jerk! I’m on my way to Paris! How much time do you think I have?”
He tossed the basketball one-hop toward the car window. This shot went straight through. Perfect. Swish.
She laughed, then knocked the ball into the back seat so that she could hug him long and hard when he jumped in. He had no idea how much time she had. But it turned out to be five days, a Thursday through a Monday, en route to Europe for her cable movie assignment. Five days since Massachusetts lay on the path between Los Angeles and Italy… sort of… if you bent the airline routes and left a little early.
They drove back to 17 Cort Street.
They re-opened the house and put logs in the fireplace. They braced themselves against the chill of a Massachusetts autumn, huddled together before the crackling fire as the house warmed. They found new charm to Annie’s home and new bonds to their relationship.
17 Cort Street was a warm, inviting place now, filled with happiness, good times and cheer. And as the many years subsequently passed, as Annie and Timothy grew older together and remained in love, it was
difficult to imagine that 17 Cort Street, and their lives, hadn’t been that way forever.
END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noel Hynd is the author of twenty-two published books and three produced screenplays. His work has been translated into ten languages in all parts of the world. His novels have been in the espionage and suspense genre. Flowers From Berlin, his top seller in the latter category, has sold more than one million units and remains an espionage best seller on Amazon Kindle. His nonfiction work has concentrated on baseball. Mr. Hynd lives in the Los Angeles area. He can be reached by readers at: [email protected] or on Facebook.
If you enjoyed Ghosts you will most certainly enjoy Mr. Hynd’s other ventures into the supernatural. Currently available is A Room For The Dead, a novel with a somewhat darker edge than Ghosts. “The chills come fast and hard in Hynd’s latest, a riveting blend of ghost story and police procedural,” wrote the Publishers’ Weekly reviewer. Booklist agreed. “Fans of Stephen King, John Saul, Dean Koontz, and the like will give Hynd a thumbs up for his latest shivery ghost story,” wrote their reviewer.
Here’s the jacket art:
Does that look creepy enough?
Peering into the not-so-distant future, always a dangerous activity, the summer of 2014 will also bring the first edition of a mischievous tome tentatively titled, Fifty Shades of Baudelaire, an illustrated ghost story. Target date is July 2014. The story is inspired by the work of the nineteenth century poet, Charles Baudelaire, with artwork by the brilliant young French artist, Karine Stader.
More of Karine’s work can be found at http://karine-ds.blogspot.com. Karine Stader Artworks is also on Facebook.
Table of Contents
Author’s Note to the 2014 Edition:
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Part Two
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Part Three
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Chapter Sixty-three
Part Four
Chapter Sixty-four
Chapter Sixty-five
Chapter Sixty-six
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
