Fading Away

by Tom Upton

  “Jerry, you’re full of shit,” I said.

  “What? Jules, this is not big deal for you. I’m just asking you a small favor.”

  “Yeah, but what aren’t you telling me?”

  He sighed. “Look, it’s simple,” he said. “All you have to do is be nearby when Sarge dies. You make contact with his spirit, you protect him, and you bring him back here. That’s all.”

  “Ah-hah!” I jumped all over that one. “You want me to bring him back here.”

  “Yeah, what did you think? I want you to grab his spirit and drop it over at Animal Control?”

  “So he’ll be here, in the house, with you?”

  “Yeah, that’s the idea,” he said, as though this was perfectly reasonable.

  It took me a moment to realize that, really, there wasn’t anything wrong with this. Sure, there would be another spirit in the house, but it would only be a dog.

  “Well, I guess that would be okay,” I said, grudgingly, still feeling that somehow I was being tricked. “It’s a ghost dog, right? There’s no chance he’ll poop and pee all over the place.”

  “He won’t actually haunt you, either,” Jerry added. “He’s very well behaved. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even know he’s here.”

  “I suppose I could live with that. What’s a little more weirdness in my life?”

  “Then you’ll do it?” he asked.

  But he seemed too eager. I noticed the way he was leaning forward in his seat, like a businessman about to seal a deal that would net him a load of cash. Again, I wondered if I was missing something. I ran through everything in my head, and finally it hit me.

  “Wait a second. Wait just a second,” I said. “Protect him from what?”

  “What?” Jerry said, playing dumb.

  “You said you said you needed me to contact his spirit, and protect him. Protect him against what?”

  Jerry stared at me for a moment, and then he seemed to sag in his chair.

  “Well…” he murmured, but didn’t go on.

  “Against what?” I demanded, starting to lose my temper again. I hated the idea of a deceptive spirit—if you can’t trust a spirit, especially a spirit who in life had been a cop, who can you trust? “Jerry?”

  “Okay, there might be a tiny problem,” he confessed, holding up his hand, with thumb and index finger almost touching. I would have believed the problem might indeed be tiny, if it weren’t for the grimace on his face.

  “Jerry, I have my own problems.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” he said. “And I really wouldn’t want to pile my problem on yours. But Sarge means a lot to me, and you’re the only… uhm…” He struggled for the right word.

  “Freak?” I suggested.

  “I wouldn’t have said freak. I meant, you’re the only—special person I know. You’re the only one I know who can do what needs to be done—”

  “Lucky me. So protect him from what?” I asked.

  But Jerry was going on. “You see the future. You can read peoples’ thoughts—”

  “Protect him from what, Jerry?” I squeezed in, though he wasn’t listening a bit.

  “—You move things around with your mind—”

  “Jerry.”

  “—You can control the weather, for crying out loud,” he finally finished, having run out of steam. He looked at me with baleful eyes for a moment, and then mumbled, “This won’t be something you can’t do.”

  I was baffled. I’d first encountered Jerry when we moved into the house, seven years ago, when I was ten years old. He’d never been troublesome. For the most part, he kept to himself. He never made the walls creak, or caused things to fall off shelves, or rattled windows. He never actually haunted the house, but I sensed that might change.

  I studied him closely. He seemed unsettled, lost in a cloud of desperation.

  “If I can’t do this,” I asked, “you’re going to be miserable, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be miserable, but yeah, I’d be pretty miserable,” he said.

  Which meant he would make my life even more miserable than it already was. As much as I hated the idea, I guessed I would have to become—on top of everything else—a dogcatcher, a dead dogcatcher.