The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  Annette says something. Stacey doesn’t respond. Annette keeps speaking, her lips moving soundlessly. Stacey is tensing, her shoulders bunching up the way they do. She crosses her arms defensively. Annette keeps speaking, her head now Oprah-thrusting, berating Stacey. She points at the house, stabbing with her finger, then at Stacey.

  Stacey looks back over her shoulder for help, shakes her head. She steps forward, giving it back now, speaking forcefully. Annette slaps the sunglasses off the top of Stacey’s head. Stacey recoils, putting a hand to her face. She disappears into the garage for a moment and reappears with her cellphone. Stacey shakes the phone at Annette in a threatening manner. Annette stabs her finger at Stacey twice more, then turns on her heels and marches back to the car.

  Stacey begins typing something into her phone. She is theatric, looking at Annette’s car, for a split second at me (and for a split-split second her eyes meeting mine are skewers through my guilty heart), then back down at the phone. She’s getting the license plate, typing it into her phone.

  Annette makes it back to the car. I hear but do not see her yank the driver’s side door open, and imagine Rick toppling out.

  ‘Move over!’

  ‘Whuh? What happened? What’s wrong?’ Rick says, waking up.

  ‘Get out of the way. I’m driving.’

  There is a shuffling sound as Rick gets out of the way. The engine starts.

  Up ahead, Stacey has put the phone to her ear and turned back to the garage.

  ‘That fucking bitch is writing down the license plate,’ Annette says.

  ‘Who?’ There is a pause during which I assume Rick notices Stacey. ‘Jesus. Who the hell is that?’

  ‘She says she doesn’t know him, but she’s lying,’ Annette snaps. ‘She’s hiding him. He’s not getting away with this.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Rick moans.

  ‘Make sure you get this in case he assaults me. I want it on record.’

  ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Rick says, quietly.

  ‘Do it!’

  Rick picks up the camera.

  Stacey steps back into the alley. She has the phone to her ear, possibly giving a description of the car. Or calling me. Maybe this is the 9.12 message. She paces, disappears back into the garage.

  Rick says, ‘You said only if he was alone. I’m not with you on this. Not with her.’

  ‘All right, all right, screw it,’ Annette says. ‘We’ll come back later.’

  The car revs, pops into gear and speeds forward.

  It’s fifty feet from the garage. Then twenty.

  Ten.

  Stacey steps out and jerks back, her body going rigid as they clip her with the right front fender. She spins out of view and Annette brakes. The sound of the impact is dull, the sound of an apple thrown at a barn.

  ‘Fuck!’ Annette screams. ‘No!’

  Stacey is nowhere in sight. No one moves or reacts.

  ‘Where did she go?’ Rick says very quietly.

  Annette doesn’t answer.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, back up! She could be under the car!’

  ‘Don’t yell at me!’ Annette shouts.

  Their car surges forward, then back, reversing with a whine. They stop a little more than half the distance to where they started. One of them is breathing hard. Stacey is not in the alley.

  ‘Relax,’ Annette says. ‘We barely grazed her.’

  Stacey staggers out of the garage. She is holding her hip and limping. I can’t see any blood. She’s looking back at them in disbelief and shock and, yes, I know that look, boiling anger. She’s fucking steamed now, ready to throw down.

  ‘You fucking bitch!’ Stacey screams. Her voice is dim, far away, but still clearly audible from inside this car. ‘You’re dead! My husband’s going to kill you!’

  Rick babbles on. ‘Too many people involved, can’t clean this up, not in this—’

  ‘You’re already guilty,’ Annette says. ‘I’ll give them your name, too.’

  ‘Turn off the car and give me the keys.’

  ‘Just let me think,’ Annette says. She is no longer in a rage. She is calm.

  Stacey’s hand is shaking. She can’t dial. She holds the phone with both hands, concentrating, then staggers and covers her mouth. Wailing, she points the phone at them, then looks back to the garage. She’s talking to someone. Help is coming.

  Someone else is in the garage.

  Rick yells, ‘It’s over! We have to leave!’

  The white shade slides out of the garage, he’s suddenly there.

  Holding Stacey. A man.

  ‘I knew it! That lying cunt!’ Annette’s voice goes guttural. ‘He’s dead, fucking dead.’

  Ghost. Ghost in his red track pants and his bare feet, rushing to her side, holding Stacey up, and his hair is cowlicked, a bedhead mess, but blond, white-blond, and his arms and bared abdominals are painted with tattoos. She falls to his shoulder and he holds her. She’s safe, she will be safe now. He reaches into his waistband and his right arm comes up with a gun in hand. It’s his favorite gun, black and square-nosed, a Glock 27. He’s turning, pushing Stacey back toward the garage but he can’t stop looking back at the psycho people in the alley.

  ‘C’mon!’ he yells. ‘Get out of the car! I dare you!’

  ‘Kill her, fucking shoot the bitch!’ I scream in the basement. My back is grinding bones of broken glass agony and I am ass-hopping on his couch, screaming at the plasma window to the world.

  ‘I told you he’d have a gun,’ Rick says, and the camera jostles. ‘Back up!’

  Annette does not back up.

  The engine revs and everything lurches into gear.

  Ghost is turning Stacey around with one arm and holding the gun at them with the other as the distance closes. The Glock goes off - POP-POP! - and Stacey shrinks into a ball, falling from his embrace. The windshield is cracked and two holes appear in it and Ghost screams and a third shot POPS and Annette screams and the collision is astounding. Stacey is just a dull sound and Ghost jumps forward, leaping head-first as if he is going to fly over the car like Superman, but he isn’t, his head bounces off the top of the windshield and he crumples in midair, then folds over the hood before flying off it and disappearing under the front of the car. Annette slams the car into a telephone pole, smashing Stacey my love and the camera flies free and ricochets off the spider-webbed windshield and falls to the floor.

  A man is moaning. The engine revs and the car reverses again. As it does, the camera view - of the seat or the carpet, I can’t tell which - flips with a double bounce that makes someone scream grotesquely. They have just gone over a very large bump on one side.

  Rick is moaning harder now.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Annette says, ‘Or I’ll fucking kill you too!’

  The idle of their engine.

  The screen goes black.

  Steady on the ground, the weedy alley gravel and oil-stained dirt. Everything is quiet. Pan slowly. Ghost is lying on his back. He is bleeding from his ears and mouth and nose. His chest is not rising or falling. His eyes are blank, unblinking, looking up toward the sky, and one of them is filled with red, a pool of blood in and around the eyeball. A large black ant crawls over his chin and down his neck.

  ‘Do you see that?’ Annette says. Her voice is dull, heavy, sexual. No one answers her. ‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’

  The camera slowly pans to the right. Stacey is arranged next to him. She is worse than he is. She is the Stacey of my nightmares. Stacey as I found her. They are shoulder to shoulder. They could be lying on a bed together.

  ‘That’s just a shame,’ Annette says. ‘That’s what he gets for cheating on his wife.’

  There is a sound of scraping somewhere. The sound of something heavy dragging across dirt. A roll of carpet flops over Stacey and Ghost and the weeds next to the orange couch. Rick’s hairy hands withdraw.

  ‘Ding dong, the Ghost is dead,’ she says.

  They stand in silence.

  ‘W
e have to go now,’ Rick says. ‘This is a neighborhood. ’

  Annette makes a disgusting throat sound. A ball of white spit flies onto the carpet and skips twice dryly before smearing in the soot and dirt.

  ‘That’s for Aaron, you demon fucker.’

  For a while there is only the faint humming of wind on the mic, a lament that rises and fades. Time elapses. The television goes black.

  Everything goes black.

  36

  I sat in the darkness, feeling something irreversible leach out of me as I coughed on the choking bile of my tears. Stacey was gone and I didn’t understand. Stacey was dead and I did not understand. There had to be more. Something was missing. I could not have seen what I had just seen. But I knew that I had finally been granted all, seen the thing, the missing support beam that had buckled under us, that was it, the end, my beautiful friend. Gone.

  Everything gone.

  Stacey is dead. Ghost is dead.

  Except . . . and this was everything . . . Ghost didn’t drive Stacey’s car. Ghost didn’t stay at the house with Stacey. Ghost got away.

  James did his job. James Hastings took the fall.

  James Hastings died with her in that alley.

  That was me. That was me up there on the wall, on the TV screen. That was me in the alley, the star. That was me with blood running from my nose, my ears, my mouth. I am laid to rest.

  I’m no longer here. I’m here no longer. I’m—

  A series of heavy thudding noises came from somewhere above the basement and then down. Something moved in the basement, off in the corner. A bright light flashed, yanking me back from the abyss, blinking, squinting.

  Something moved in front of me. A man in black pants. I squeezed my eyes shut, the echoes of her screams and the moaning and gunshots overlapping in my ears. I was floating, going to be sick.

  ‘Do you see?’ he was saying. ‘Do you see?’

  I opened my eyes. The man was standing in front of me in the bright room.I worked my mouth around and ground my teeth.

  ‘The Hastings couple. Do you see what you have done?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They died for your sins. Like the boy. You are the pale demon.’

  He was dressed in all black, his face flushed, black paint around his eyes.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘And now we have you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There were two of you but now there is only one. This is the inescapable truth.’

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘You got caught.’

  ‘I was supposed to help her—’

  His arm went back and when his hand came from behind him a slim tab of metal gleamed briefly in the light. His arm waved past like he was chasing a mosquito. He stepped back and waited.

  I didn’t understand what he was waiting for. I stared at him, my vision blurry.

  ‘The pale demon bleeds,’ he said.

  Something on my chest began to itch. I looked down. The red tracksuit jacket was halved. A thin red line stretching from my left shoulder to my right nipple opened and a rake-shaped comb of blood began to flow. I scrambled away from him, up and to the side, my body clumsy, numb all over as I leaped over the end of the couch. I was halfway to the door at the bottom of the stairs when something small and quick sliced across my back, harder and deeper, down to my waist. The taut skin between my shoulders went slack. I grabbed the doorknob and it slipped in my clammy grip, unyielding. He roared and I turned around.

  The man. The bad policeman was standing behind me holding something small and sharp. Oh, dear God, is that - it’s a scalpel. He cut me with a scalpel. He cut me with a scalpel. He cut me—

  His nostrils flared.

  I feinted left, then bolted right, running past him, toward the far end of the basement, where there were no exits. His arm lashed out and my bicep opened like a fish’s mouth. I screamed, wetness warm and sliding down to my wrist.

  He walked after me, his voice slow. ‘You can’t get out that way, sport model.’

  There was a bathroom at the end of the basement. I had used it the day we got drunk together. If I could get inside and shut the door, I could hide. The long shiny top of the shuffle-board table was beside me. I dragged my left hand through the powder as I ran until I got to the end and scooped up one of the steel pucks and I turned and threw it and it hit him in the chest and he laughed and the little metal blade cut sideways at my nose, just missing as I ducked and spun away. The sting bit into my ear and sliced across the nape of my neck. I hit the bathroom door and slammed it behind me. The door was light in my hands, too light, but it latched. I fumbled with the knob but my arms and hands were sheeted with blood sticky and slipping. I thumbed the brass tab to the vertical position and staggered back into the plastic shower stall.

  A splintering hole blew inward and his fist followed, then his other fist, and then the door was tearing, the hinges squealing as he ripped the entire door from its frame as if it were made of Styrofoam. He turned and stamped on the bottom of the door, pulled his fists back through the hole, and flung the door into the two empty beer kegs leaning against the wall.

  ‘Cool it down now,’ he said. ‘Before I cut your fucking eyeballs out.’

  I did not understand why this was happening, who these people were, or what I was supposed to do. They killed Stacey. Was he punishing me for letting her die? Had he loved her, too? Is this where she had gone all those days? To this evil side of the world? I stood in the shower, shivering, and my blood pooled around the drain and bubbled, threading in.

  ‘You’re going to bleed to death,’ he said. ‘Come out and I’ll give you a bandage.’

  He stepped aside and invited me to pass. I couldn’t make my body do anything other than shiver.

  ‘I’m sorry, okay?’ he said. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen yet. Annette told me to take care of you until she got back and I got excited. Because . . . because where is she! Right? Okay, okay. I won’t. Just come out.’

  Everything was cold and I was bleeding and I turned and reached for something, a weapon, the towel rack, and my hand seemed to float out in front of me, someone else’s hand, red up to the elbow. That’s my arm. The shower was empty. There was nothing in here. I pawed at the rubber curtain.

  ‘You can’t stay in there,’ he said. ‘You’re bleeding in at least seven places.’

  He was enormous, his head filling the entire doorway. The scalpel he had used was not in his hands. He was holding his hands out, opening and closing them. He looked very worried.

  ‘You have to come out, Ghost. You’re dying. I promise.’

  Ghost. Was I playing Ghost? Was this an act? I must be acting. I must be involved in something. This was planned, set up, another skit. Trembling, holding my ear, I walked out of the shower. My feet were slippery and cold.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘Please don’t hurt her, okay? Promise you won’t hurt her again?’

  ‘I promise. Let’s go, let’s go. We have to get you out, Ghost. The show’s about to start.’

  My feet didn’t work right. I glanced to the side, then back at his face, the yellow moon hovering in front of me. I moved between him and the doorway, our faces less than a foot apart. I took another step and he winked and bit his tongue and three or four quick stings climbed my ribs and I looked down to see his fingers with the scalpel jutting from them prodding as if he were entering purchases into a cash register.

  Noises came out of me as I ran making a trail of blood back to the bar where I tried to lift a barstool bolted to the floor. The scalpel went in behind my left knee and swirled around, raking bone. My leg buckled and I fell and the warden hauled me up by the arm and spun me around.

  ‘Not her boyfriend now, are you, motherfucker! You’re not anybody’s boyfriend, you’re mine, motherfucker mother fucker mother fuck fuck fuck—’

  The scalpel made silver trails in the air around me as his face took on pointillist dabs of wet maroon and I lost the ability
to scream or fight back or raise my arms to defend myself. I collapsed on my side, a wet, shivering hump. He screamed as he punctured my body again and again. The pain belonged to someone else and the house quaked around us and I knew she would be there to meet me soon. My senses misfired, strobed, shut down. The human body performs miracles and this was one: