The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  My mind simply refused to allow me to witness the rest of what happened.

  37

  What I eventually recall.

  I sleep a lot. I wake up on the couch again, day or night, in a cocoon of soreness, itching and nauseating drug high. I pat my arms and legs and chest, checking for more bleeding. I am dry and the gauze he wrapped me in before is now replaced or supported by an additional layer of cloth athletic bandages. I am constricted.

  What is he waiting for?

  Vague snatches of the conversation, talking about her again as he tends my wounds in the bathroom, kneeling at my feet and bracing me against the wall of the shower stall that is my slop trough. She’s not at her house. But I will find her. And you fuck, you better pray to God she’s not hurt. You better pray she decides not to let me do it. Because I will do it. End this now if it were up to me. Cut your filthy fucking tongue out and mount it to my—

  Time slips.

  Sometimes I am on the floor, sometimes I am on the couch. I bleed freely, at random times, no matter how he tries to patch me up. My back is a nova of pain shining light into every corner of my body. When the drugs wear off, I ascertain that my shoulder is dislocated, my ribs cracked, toes broken, face road-burned, throat swollen like a snake bite victim’s. I cough and it is like being hit on the heart with a mallet. Too weak and in too much pain to get up, I lose control of my bladder several times per day. I itch. He adds blankets beneath me and the couch thickens. My piss nest. Chicken bones. Splinters in my lungs. My tongue fills my whole mouth. The needle. Sleep. Sleep and pray for death.

  Time slips like a morphine drip.

  Hands, the hands on me. Waking in the middle of a delirium in the dark and checking my body, under my shirt, under my pants. My hands. They are only my hands. But someone else’s were here first. The bandages moist. The clothes stiff. My pubic hair shaved and growing back, itching. He can do this, he can do anything.

  Time slips.

  I never know if he will be gone for two minutes or three hours and his boot steps clunk above me at all hours. He paces holding conversations with himself about how much longer to keep me alive. Would be so much easier to dump me in the desert. Do it, fucking kill me you big redheaded cocksucker.

  The side of my face is swollen and burning from the road, my body rejecting particles of asphalt through a yellow and purple glaze.

  When he is upstairs, the activity varies. Often there is only silence, but at other times the sound of power tools shakes the walls and ceiling. He sings songs to himself in the kitchen. He swears and shatters furniture. The water runs for six hours. One night I hear gunshots erupting in the backyard. Hundreds of them. When he comes down after, I can smell the powder on him from thirty feet away and blue smoke is rising from his hands and hair.

  Slip. Slip. Slip.

  He comes crawling across the floor on his hands and knees. Look here, look here. He opens the safe and shows me a nickel-plated .45 and calls it Aaron’s gun. He says it was an accident. He was only trying to show the boy. He was only trying to teach the boy. He was always present. He weeps. How was he to know the boy would watch him, memorize the combination? He lost his temper, that was all. Saw the boy holding the gun, a circuit blew. He screamed and lunged and the boy wouldn’t let go, he wouldn’t let go. It was an accident, you can see that. He tried to explain it to Arthur but Arthur couldn’t be trusted. They showed Arthur the music and said, see, see where he got the idea? It’s a sickness, this music.

  Arthur never liked him. Arthur had an accident, too.

  He puts the .45 in my mouth. He weeps.

  Time slips.

  He misses another dose. Late at night and I am screaming in the dark, begging the warden. He comes down the stairs looking sleepy and sticks another needle in my shoulder. It isn’t working. It might be vitamins. Or air.

  My shoulder swells like a balloon. He pets my hair and says I should stop making those noises, the ones I don’t know I am making. He sits with me through the night and calls me Ghost because James is dead and it has always been this way and that’s the truth. I know what you’re in for. I’m in holding, too. He says we are cell-mates, we will get through this stretch together.

  Time . . .

  He says all of the cuts are shallow. Except for the one that took the lobe of my left ear. I cry and ask about my ear, please, I want my ear back. No one is allowed to have my ear. I pat the ragged edge where it was and he looks for it for almost ten minutes before he finds it in the shuffle-board sand. When he brings it back to me it looks like a miniature ball of pizza dough rolled in flour. He asks me if I want it and when I shake my head he eats it like taking communion.

  . . . slips.

  In the dreams the boy in the black hood is chasing me, always chasing me. He can run forever and forever, his arms stiff at his sides as he runs, the white face floating after me, and no matter how fast I run he can always keep up with me. I run through fields and over hills, through empty streets and empty houses, and I lose him a mile back, three miles, ten. Having run for days I am in another state. I find the empty house and I find the closet and force myself to stop breathing and sink down into the corner silent and just when I think I have finally outrun him and found the perfect hiding spot, the closet door opens.

  His feet are two baby doves on the carpet before me.

  I am tissue paper delicate as butterfly wings. Please don’t do it again. All it will take is the slightest tear and I will leak everywhere. His eyes are missing. His jaw is white and his hands come out of the pouch with the scalpel and it all starts again.

  I can’t stop screaming, even when I am awake.

  He gave me cigarettes. He clipped my toenails. He let us watch The Blue Lagoon and said it was the story of Rick and Annette.

  Someone laughed.

  Their father was still in the prison in Gainesville for preying on children, their friends. Their mother died of a cerebral aneurism when they were still in elementary school. When Annette was fourteen he watched her body change. He followed her home from school and her friends laughed at him. He protected her from her boyfriends, making up for not protecting her from their father. They found the campground along the Kern River, where they could be together for days where no one would know, a place to rendezvous throughout high school, get away for a night or a weekend when times were hard. He had never been with any other woman, and never would.

  Who’s that man standing in the corner? He looks like Aaron except bigger. He looks familiar. I used to look like him.

  Come closer . . .

  I’m getting bigger and stronger every day.

  It’s finally morning, the light is coming in. He has opened the curtains to let the light shine in. I wake up in a pleasant fog feeling nothing but the warmth on my skin, the sunlight pushing me up to the surface. There is no pain. I am flat on my back and naked and I lift my chin to see the red letters G-H-O-S-T freshly cut into the skin of my abdomen. The policeman is swabbing the cuts with clear fluid and cotton pads, admiring his work like a tattoo artist. I start screaming and he stops and looks up at me as if he has forgotten I am here.

  James slips.

  He brings me platters of food. When I can’t swallow the food, he forces ice into my mouth. He recites lyrics from the CD booklets. He sits on the floor beside the couch and reads them to me in a monotone. When I forget the words he slaps me. When I forget why I wrote the song he slaps me. When I forget what the words mean he slaps me. When I sing it wrong he punches me and I gag on a tooth and swallow it and throw up on the floor and if he slaps me again I just might disappear.

  Stacey? Are you in here?

  The policeman comes home in a panic. He has had a scare. He has a measure of rope on his person. He uses it to make a necktie for me, loops it over a beam in the ceiling, and drags the long end until I jerk from the couch and swing suspended. My toes are four inches from the carpet. He is crying, yelling no, no, no. I fight and claw at it and it burns in my lungs. I can’t see. I
can’t see.

  It becomes beautiful in here.

  In the blackness, James was alone. Everything that was him - every idea and thought and memory and image of himself and the world, and every sense of physical and emotional self that belonged to James Hastings - swirled down a black drain into an infinite spiral of nothingness.

  Sixteen days after watching himself die on television, James Hastings died.

  And I stepped forward.

  In the vacuum of his death, I expanded, filled out his sleeves, took new breath into his lungs, opened his eyes, and tasted the salt of his blood.

  I am not James. I am not a ghost. I am the Ghost.

  Valium drinks and other drinks, and pills, injections and alcohol straight from the bottles. I accept them all without hesitation, gobble them down and roar my rebel yell. Dumbass has no idea I am Popeye and drugs are my spinach. I consume them and they taste good and they make me feel like a motherfucking god.

  It’s coming.

  The warden takes the pills, too, and punches holes in the walls screaming where is she where is she where is she, and I laugh. I scream in his face and he doesn’t know what else to do, gives in, laughs with me.

  He shows me the Luger he used to gun down the A-rab crawler last winter. One shot from seventy yards. With a Luger. A god damn antique. How do you like that, Ghost?

  I laugh.

  This piece of smokin’ white trash is going to feel God’s wrath. Soon.

  38

  Ghost’s stomach growled. Ghost woke up hungry. When was the last time he had eaten anything? Days ago, maybe even a week ago. Ghost looked around the room. There was the bar. The shuffle-board table. The dart board. The stereo cabinet. The large TV on the wall. His media case full of videos and magazines. There had to be a weapon in here somewhere. Ghost would find something. Ghost would rise.

  The bar. A corkscrew. Maybe he had left some glass mugs behind. Break one over his head. Slit his throat. Drink his blood. Fuck his corpse and burn the house down.

  I tried to sit up. The pain came like a shock wave and rippled from my waist, up and down. I fell back and breathed deeply until the pain faded.

  You are a killer.

  I counted to three and sat up again, faster this time and pulling myself through it. It wasn’t so bad sitting up or lying down. It was the in-between that hurt.

  The bar was only ten or fifteen feet away. My left leg did not respond properly. I put the extra weight on my right leg, leaning into it, hamstrings spasming. The back of my left knee went loose as I crossed the basement like a man on short stilts, hobbling on locked legs and falling forward as the bar floated toward me. I caught the thick edge of the top, swiveled onto the first stool, sweating, panting, and now the stinging was widening in lines along my back, the wounds were reopening.

  The bottles of alcohol were behind the bar, against the large Budweiser mirror. I stared, dreaming of broken whiskey bottle necks, jagging the points into his neck, raking open his jugular as the pig’s blood fountained onto the carpet and he fell like timber.

  Something was dripping. I looked at the floor. A pool of dark fluid on the carpet next to my bar stool. While I was staring at it, another drop fell with a wet plap, and then another, and another, regular as my heartbeat.

  Ghost was bleeding.

  A surge of panic propelled me to my feet. I grabbed the bar for support and looked into the Budweiser mirror. My face was swollen, eyes hollow, lips dark and crusted. I averted my gaze down and to the right. The boy in the black hood was staring back at me from the corner of the mirror. He was standing behind me, the half-moon of his pale face gleaming in the darkness.

  The door to the basement was still closed. He had been down there with me since I woke up. Or longer.

  I limped around the end of the bar, trying to put a barrier between us. When I looked back toward the bathroom, Aaron was not there. I had heard no movement while my back was turned. The basement was almost too dark to see from one end to the other. I scanned the room from the wall and shuffle board on the left, going slowly to the right, trying to focus on the load-bearing pillars, the shelves against the wall, next to the cabinet containing the audio equipment . . .

  He was standing behind the couch, in front of the middle of the three large antique safes, unmoving. His pose had not changed. His chin was still slightly tucked, his shoulders tight, hands hidden inside the pouch over his belly. The white block letters of his sweatshirt were crisp in the darkness.

  GHOST

  That’s me, little man.

  The letters blurred at the edges. The white faded out and the blackness of his sweatshirt deepened, almost as if disappearing, or he himself was becoming insubstantial. I blinked, focusing on the letters, and they changed, fading out, then focusing again. The whole process took me back to my third-grade classroom, memories of my teacher fiddling with the archaic film projector, the kind with the needle pointer that appeared on the white screen as images of Dutch farmers in their wooden clogs blurred in and out.

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  The boy’s head snapped up and his hood fell back. Half of his face was alabaster-white except for the area around his left eye, which was bulging in alarm, the green pupil radiant in the dark room. The other half, from the top of his cheek to the top of his forehead and bleached white hairline, was a ragged wound. The flaps of skin were blackened with old blood and stubbled with yellowed chips of bone. At the center, in the space where the right frontal lobe of his brain should have been, there was only a blackness deeper than the room, deeper than his sweatshirt, absolute and yet somehow glossy, lacquer-wet. His mouth opened all the way and his small flat teeth were very white inside black gums.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can fix it.’

  The letters of his sweatshirt flashed like a camera, winked out, the flash’s echo lingering over the safe’s door, my name printed on the metal, and then all traces of him were gone.

  The safe. The safe where the video had been. And the .45. He had stood in front of the safe to draw my attention to it. The cop’s storage lockers, like the one on La Brea, with all of Stacey’s things.

  Storage locker. Locker. Lock. Combination. Locker combination . . .

  The numbers in Aaron’s desk drawer. What had the little scrap of paper said? Middle combination? Yes. Middle. I was staring at the three safes. Aaron had stood in front of the middle of the three.

  I let go of the bar and the pain shot up my sciatic nerve, cramping my legs. Each step was a cattle prod applied to my feet. I bit my cheek. I made it.

  What were the numbers he had written down?

  My song. ‘From My Cold Dead Hands’.

  The 22 is for you

  Cause I love my guns

  The 38 is for hate

  Treat ’em like my sons

  The 44 is for whores

  Cause I love my guns

  The aught-six is for the pigs

  Who sent my brother to the pen . . .

  22 38 44 06

  But I could barely make out the numbers on the dial.

  Heavy footsteps clunked above me, toward the stairs. I stopped, waiting, listening.

  I couldn’t wait any longer.

  As I began to turn the dial, something thumped against the floor. The thump hit once, twice . . . then a long pause . . . and then several times, more urgently, an impatient old man tapping his cane on the kitchen floor. It stopped abruptly and then there was a horrendous crash of glass or crockery that made the ceiling shake.

  Hurry, Jack. The Giant awakes.

  I leaned over, trying to read the tiny numerals and grooved lines. They went from 00 to 99. When I turned the handle, the tumblers made no sound. No clicking came from within. The knob turned without a hint of friction. I focused, turned the arms clockwise first, all the way around three times, just in case it needed to be reset.

  22 right, 38 left, 44 right, 06 left. Stop. I pulled on the door. It did not budge.

  I ran everything again, sl
ower this time. The door did not budge.

  I tried the reverse, going counter-clockwise first. I pulled the arms. My back became molten steel, burning, screaming. My face broke out in sweat.

  The door did not open.

  I bent over, panting. I stood upright again, looking at the safe.

  ‘Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me.’

  I was standing in front of the third safe, the one on the right.

  I shuffled to the left. Take your time and do it right the first time.