Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails

by John G. Hartness

  “Well, slide that thing along those windows up there and let’s find an open one. Or at least one that’s not bulletproof and big enough for me to get my big ass out through.” Sam indicated the windows at the top of the bleachers. Jess aimed her light up along the top row all along the visitor’s side with no luck. Those windows were too high and locked up tight anyway. The bleachers went higher on the home side, in hopes that the home team would draw more fans, so the windows were easily within reach, if all locked up tight.

  “Okay, let’s go do this the hard way,” Sam said, starting up the bleachers and motioning for Jess to follow.

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “You’ve got a gun. We’ve got glass that needs to get out of the way. I think this will work just fine,” Sam said, reaching the top of the bleachers and putting her hand on the closed window. “Hey wait.”

  “Wait, what?” Jess asked.

  “This window moved.”

  “What do you mean, moved?”

  “I mean moved like might be open,” Sam replied. She put both hands on the window and pushed. Sure enough, the old, counterweighted glass creaked and protested, but swung up and out of the way.

  “I can totally climb out of here,” Sam said.

  “But what’s the drop look like?” Jess asked. She looked back at the gym floor better than ten feet below her.

  Sam stuck her head out the window and looked down. “It looks like about—”

  “Sam, don’t do that—”

  Simultaneous with Jess’s worried shout, the heavy glass slid back down in place with authority, slamming into the back of Sam’s neck and sending a sickening crack echoing across the gym. Jessica screamed and ran to her friend’s side, but it was too late. Samantha’s neck was broken, and her throat crushed for good measure. The falling metal window frame snapped her neck like a twig and left her lifeless body dancing.

  Jessica clutched the other woman’s legs, twisting herself around into a sitting position on the top bleacher. She sat there, her arms around Sam’s legs, her face buried in the other woman’s pants leg sobbing for several minutes.

  After pulling herself somewhat together and checking Sam’s pulse to ensure that the other woman was, in fact, dead, Jess squared her shoulders and stood up.

  “Ready to finish it now, Jessica?” The voice was thin, breathy, like it didn’t come from a body.

  Jessica whirled around, looking for the source of the words. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

  “Oh good, you can hear me. I thought you might.” The voice came again, this time seemingly from right behind her. Jess wheeled around and lost her balance, flailing her arms wildly as she started to tumble backward down the bleachers. She felt hands come out of nowhere and grab her wrists, her shirt, her shoulders to help hold her upright. It felt like there were dozens of them.

  “Be careful, Jessica. We aren’t done with you yet.” The voice came again, and Jessica turned, looking for it. This time she caught sight of something shimmering down on the court.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded. Jess stomped down the bleachers, careful to put her feet only on the steps, not on the seats, for better footing.

  “We’re all here, Jessie. We can’t leave.” The voice came again, and Jessica saw the shimmer start to take shape. Out of the glimmer of light materialized the misty form of a skinny teenage boy in a gray JHS sweat suit. His hair stuck out at odd angles, and he looked more like a scarecrow than a ghost. But Jessica recognized him in an instant.

  “Reggie? Reggie Coventry? You’re the one doing all this shit? You’re the one that killed all my friends? You motherfucker, I’ll send you to Hell!” Jessica charged down the last few steps onto the gym floor and raised her shotgun. She pulled the trigger and racked another shell, continuing her march forward as she sent five shells of rock salt through the shimmering image in quick succession.

  “That won’t work here, Jessie. That only works on summoned spirits. This is my house, bitch, and I’m in charge!” The ghost stretched out a hand of light and wrenched the barrel of the shotgun aside. Jessica felt the resistance as if a human hand grabbed the gun, a hand attached to an NFL lineman maybe, or a pro wrestler. She gasped and dropped the gun. It floated for a second, then clattered to the floor.

  “Now that we’ve gotten that unpleasantness out of the way, and there’s nobody around to disturb us, let’s chat, shall we?” The ghost crossed his legs and sat, Indian-style, floating in mid-air. A plastic-bottomed chair slid out from the scorekeeper’s table and scooted all the way across the gym floor to rest behind Jessica’s legs. She put a hand back to steady the chair and sat, as if she didn’t trust it not to slide away at the last second.

  “Why are you here, Reggie? Why haven’t you moved on? And why did you hurt my friends?” Jessica asked, trying to bring her emotions and breathing back under control. Her chest felt tight, and she could see the beginnings of black spots moving in on her vision. She was seconds away from a full-blown panic attack, and she knew if that happened, she was going to die just like the rest of her crew.

  “I get to ask the questions here, Jessie.”

  “Jessica. Or Jess. Nobody’s called me Jessie since—”

  “Since high school? But you’re back home now, Jessie, where everybody knows your business, and everybody calls you Jessie.”

  “You never called me Jessie. You knew I hated it. Why now?”

  “Maybe in twenty years I decided I didn’t give a shit what you like, you ever think of that?” Reggie’s form flickered as his voice rose. “Now, I said I’m asking the questions. You answer them all correctly and I’ll let you live.”

  “Did you make that offer to my friends?”

  “No. They were dead the second they stepped foot in this place. I knew I’d never be able to have this conversation with you if they were alive. You wouldn’t be able to be honest unless I broke you down a little, took away your crutches.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Reggie? You were always a weird little dude, but you were never mean. You were kinda sweet, actually.”

  “Yeah, I was sweet. I brought you flowers on Valentine’s Day. Remember? Daisies, because I heard you tell Angela Childers they were your favorites. Then you threw them in the trash as soon as Patrick Miller walked up with a box of chocolates. I saw that. I saw everything. I saw you laughing at me when I would drop water bottles bringing them out for the team. I saw you point and makes sure everybody saw it when Allan Clark pantsed me at center court. I saw you tell Crystal Purdue to gather up the cheerleaders’ dirty underwear and put them in my locker, so they’d all spill out into the hall when I went to my locker after homeroom. I got suspended for three days for being a pervert!” The louder the ghost yelled, the more his image flickered, as if his corporeality was directly tied to emotion.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with the underwear,” Jessica protested. “I mean, I gave Crystal a pair, but they were clean, thank you. And I’m sorry that we picked on you, but what does that have to do with killing my friends? What does any of that have to do with haunting this place for twenty years? You died in the explosion, just like the rest of the team, just like all the cheerleaders, just like the coaches…”

  “Just like everybody but you. Everybody but the princess, who never had anything bad happen to her.”

  “It wasn’t like that, and you know it, Reggie! I wasn’t on the stage because I flunked trig! I’m alive because I was too dumb to be a cheerleader, what kind of cliché is that?”

  “And you’re a medium because of it. We all died, and you got to see the Other Side.”

  “Yeah, that’s such a fucking blessing. I get to see all the ghosts and all their pain, wherever I go. I go to the bank, I see the old man who had a heart attack waiting to cash his Social Security check. I go to the grocery store, I see the bag boy that got shot in a holdup. And God forbid I drive through a dangerous intersection. For fuck’s sake, Reggie, I haven’t been able to drive in a city in ten
years!”

  “Is that why you never told your team? They had no idea that your string of debunkings were really exorcisms, did they?”

  “No. Most of them never believed in what we were doing anyway, they were just in it for the money. Mike believed, and I think he knew something was up, but as long as the ratings were good, he didn’t care.”

  “But you cared. You were all about laying the spirits to rest, weren’t you?” The ghost’s voice took on a mocking lilt.

  Jess felt her face flush. “Yeah, I was. I helped a lot of people move on. What’s your deal? You hang around the high school waiting for the cheerleader you had a crush on to come back after two decades so you can show me what a big bad mojo you are now, Reggie? Well, I know a thing or two about ghosts, and I know you’ve only got a couple of hours before sunrise, and you’ve used up a lot of energy tonight. So how you gonna kill me, Reggie? How you gonna get your revenge on me?”

  The image of Reggie shimmered, then flickered out before popping back into view. “You think that’s what this is about? This isn’t about revenge, Jessie. This is about atonement. I’m not trying to get even; I’m trying to make things right.”

  “What the actual fuck are you talking about, Reggie? You died in a gas main explosion. What is there to set right?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ you did not just spout that shit to me. You know as well as I do that there was no fucking gas main explosion. Think back. Did you smell gas? Did you smell anything before the explosion? Was there a flame? A spark? Anything that could have lit a gas main? Jessie, there wasn’t even a gas line under the gym.”

  “Then what happened to you? To the team?”

  “I happened.” Reggie’s form flickered in and out several times before he went on. “I built a bomb out of some acetylene torches my dad had in the garage with some other shit and planted it under the stage. I set the timer and was going to blow everybody that had ever tortured me straight to Hell.”

  Jess sat stock-still, her hands clapped over her face, reliving the worst day of her life. She saw it all, the team sitting on the stage, the cheerleaders and equipment managers lined up in front of them. Coaches and administration sitting on the other side of the stage, Principal Davis at the podium going on about something lame while Jessica glared daggers alternately at Mrs. Holmes, her trig teacher, and Miss Scoggins, the cheerleading advisor who kicked her off the team with only two games to go in the season. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Reggie Coventry, lead equipment manager, start to stand up, then topple over on stage, his feet tied to his chair. She saw Allan Clark and Carl Winstead start to howl with laughter, then the world went red and yellow as fire ripped through the gym. A huge ball of flame exploded through the stage, engulfing everyone sitting there in an instant, then a shockwave rolled through the gym, knocking people down and sending bodies flying. Jessica stood, then somebody hit her in the back and knocked her down the bleachers to fall in a tangle of writhing arms and legs and screams.

  Jessica snapped back to the present, staring at Reggie’s flickering form. “You killed them. You killed everybody.”

  “Yeah.” His simple admission struck her as somehow sad, as if he had found regret in the decades since.

  “Why?”

  “I could explain it until the sun came up and you’d never understand. I was supposed to live. I was going to get up and get off the stage right before the explosion, to get a drink of water, or pee, or something. So I’d be the sole survivor. I’d be a hero. Everybody that made my life hell would be dead, and I’d be the famous one. Everybody would know the boy that survived.”

  “You thought you’d be some kind of hillbilly Harry Potter? The Boy Who Lived? And be famous because of it?”

  “Yeah. You see it all the time. People who live through tragedies get interviewed all over the place and get famous. How many network news shows wanted to interview you after it happened?”

  Jess remembered. All of them was the answer. There had been news vans camped outside her house for days after. She didn’t go outside, of course, but saw them through the curtains. “But you died. You fucked it up somehow.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Reggie screamed, and his image flickered again. “Allan and Carl tied my shoelaces to my chair, so I fell over when I tried to stand up. I couldn’t get free in time, so I went up in flames with all the rest of them.”

  “And you’ve been trapped here ever since.”

  “We all have.” Reggie waved an arm, and Jessica saw a crowd appear behind him. Suddenly the empty gym was full of ghosts.

  Jessica stood up and wandered through the incorporeal crowd, passing her fingers through the light-formed figures from her memories. “Allan, Carl, Mr. Davis, Coach Howe…” she murmured as she walked through them. She stopped in front of one girl’s form. “Crystal,” she said, holding up her hand to her best friend’s ghostly face. The ghost held up a hand to hers, and Jess felt a tingle through her arm as they touched.

  “So this is why you wanted me here,” Jessica said, turning back to Reggie.

  “We can’t leave without you.”

  “Wait, what?” Jessica asked.

  “He’s right,” Crystal said from beside her. Her best friend’s voice was softer than Reggie’s, and her form was less distinct, but she was still manifested more strongly than most ghosts Jess had encountered.

  “You’re holding on to us, Jessie,” Crystal continued. “We’re gone, but your guilt is holding us here. You’ve got to let go, so we can move on.”

  “So all I need to do is—” As she was saying it, Jess realized what she had to do. She reached out to Crystal and brushed the image of her cheek. “Goodbye, Crys. I’ll see you again soon. I love you, bestie.”

  “I love you, too, Jessie.” Crystal’s image shimmered, brightened, and blinked out. Jessica felt around her with her Other Sight, but her friend’s ghost was gone. She looked around. “Allan Clark, it’s time to go.” The team’s center, almost seven feet of gangly freckled redhead, flickered twice and vanished. “Miss Scoggins, you saved my life by kicking me off the team. It’s time to go.” The cheerleading sponsor nodded her head full of dark curls and vanished.

  One by one, Jessica spoke to the ghosts of her childhood, sending them to their rest. Even the few she could no longer call by name vanished at a touch. After over an hour of reliving memories and setting free the ghosts of her youth, a shimmering dark-haired woman walked up, brimming confidence and sarcasm with every ethereal step.

  “Sam,” Jess whispered. “You too?”

  “Yeah, girly. Me too. You either send me on or leave me stuck here. And trust me, chica; I hated high school the first time. I got zero interest in spending eternity in one.”

  “I’m sorry I got you killed.”

  “You didn’t get me killed, sweetie. Your dipshit high school uber-nerd over there got me killed. This ain’t on you.”

  “I’ll miss you, but it’s time to go.”

  “Be well, chica.” Samantha’s image leaned in, brushed ghostly lips across her friend’s cheek, and vanished.

  “Billy,” Jessica said, turning to the cameraman.

  “Don’t hold me up, baby girl, I want to see what high def looks like in Heaven!”

  Jessica held up a hand, Billy touched it lightly, and was gone.

  “I’ll stay with you if you want,” came Mike’s voice from her side.

  “If it worked that way, I’d say yes in a heartbeat. But you’d be stuck here.”

  “I got a deal worked with the guy upstairs. You keep doing this work, and I get to keep helping you.”

  “Really?” Jessica turned to look at Mike. He looked better in death than he did even in life, more at peace with the world, and still dead sexy with his brown curls and olive skin. “You can stay with me, not with the place.”

  “Yeah, apparently if enough people ask nicely, sometimes rules can be bent a little.”

  “But who asked…oh.” Realization dawned as Jess looked around the r
oom, once crowded with several dozen spirits but now home only to Jessica, Mike, and Reggie.

  “Yeah, you have a little juice with the folks upstairs right now. But they have short memories, so I’d take advantage of it now if I were you.”

  Jessica looked down for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, if you can stay with me, then I can keep doing this kind of thing.”

  “Good. Nobody on this side wants you to retreat from your gift like you did last time,” Mike said. He held up a glimmering hand. “High-five?”

  Jessica laughed and flipped him the bird. “Jackass.”

  Then she turned to Reggie and her face stilled. “Now I guess it’s your turn, isn’t it?”

  “Yep, time to send me home. I got people to see, things to do, harps to play, whatever we do after we die, I’m ready to get to doing it.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of going to Hell?”

  “Is there anything that could be worse than being trapped in high school forever?” Reggie’s image flickered as he laughed.

  “Nope, can’t think of anything. Mike, let’s go,” Jessica said, then turned and walked to the gym doors.

  “Wait a minute, you can’t leave. You haven’t sent me on my way yet,” Reggie said.

  “You’re right. I haven’t.” Jessica reached the door and pushed the crash bar. The door opened easily, and she stepped out into the hallway.

  Reggie flickered into the hall ahead of her. “I’m not letting you leave until you pass me on, bitch!” He held out a hand to Jess, but nothing happened.

  “Good call, babe,” Mike’s ghost whispered from beside her.

  Reggie blinked into being in front of her again. “There’s no way you’re leaving here. You saw what I did to your friends.”

  “Yeah, I did, you little fuck.” Jess stopped in the hall and glared at the shimmering form in front of her. “Two decades ago, you killed every one of my friends and put holes in me that just started healing a few minutes ago. Then tonight you murdered my boyfriend, my cameraman, and my best friend, and now you think I’m going to just send you to wherever? Well, fuck you, Reggie. You were a loser in high school, now you’re a loser ghost trapped in an abandoned high school. Seems fitting to me.”