About Last Night

by T Paulin

  Eli puzzled over the name for a moment. “But that’s not a pun. It’s not a pun if you didn’t repair hearts.”

  “Sure, we did, probably. My dad could fix anything. Ever hear of a mechanical heart? He could fix one of those. My dad could fix anything.”

  “I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure nobody’s walking around with a mechanical heart in them today, let alone twenty-six years ago.”

  “Are you saying my mother didn’t know what a pun was?”

  “I’m saying nobody repaired mechanical hearts at that shop, or anywhere else.”

  Khan turned away from the road to look directly at Eli. “Nobody knows exactly what my father did, because repairing people’s small appliances didn’t generate enough revenue to keep the lights on in the shop, let alone pay for the nice house I grew up in.”

  Eli took the hints Khan was feeding him, and tried to piece together a picture. Mr. Hart Senior must have been running scams, just like his son.

  “What’s he up to these days?” Eli asked casually. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mr. Hart Senior was now a CEO or a politician or in jail.

  “This and that. My mother passed away a few years ago, so Valentine and I took over the shop, just as the bank accounts were running dry. My sister’s a genius, but we’re still running on fumes.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother. I never had one, so I don’t know what losing one would feel like. I was raised by…” He didn’t want to get into the whole topic of his adoption, or the experiments, or the chip in his head. “The man I called my father,” he finished.

  “Is the old man still around?”

  “In spirit only.”

  Khan grinned. “I thought you said ghosts aren’t real.”

  Eli rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say he was haunting me. And ghosts aren’t—” His throat closed off. “—scientifically proven.”

  “Neither’s gravity.”

  Eli wished physics had interested him in school. He’d love nothing more than to whip out some big, fat, smart-sounding physics talk and win this argument with a knockout punch. He’d love to give someone a concussion from whacking them on the head with knowledge. Where had this passion been when he was in high school? It was too late for him now.

  “Proven or not, I like gravity,” Eli said.

  “And I like stripper bars.” Khan cranked the wheel hard and turned the van onto a gravel driveway leading to a farmhouse. “So let’s do this job, get paid, and support the city’s stripper economy.”

  Eli glanced over at Khan’s backpack of supplies. A tingle of childhood-first-time excitement ran through his veins. What was in the bag? It could be anything. Oh, happy day.

  Khan slammed the van to a halt and jumped out. Through the open window, he instructed Eli to grab the bag of supplies, follow him in, and not speak until he was spoken to.

  Still tingling with excitement, Eli did as he was told.

  The farmhouse had once been a modest rancher-style home, maybe a thousand square feet by the look of the exterior. Now it looked more embarrassed than modest. The exposed wood siding held a few flakes of paint near the window trim, but most of the exterior was as bare and gray as an abandoned barn.

  “Are you sure someone lives here?” Eli asked.

  Khan rapped on the door, ignoring him.

  Eli stepped back off the porch and looked up at the sky, at a single, wispy cloud. There were worse ways to spend a day.

  With a creak, the front door opened slowly to reveal a pale, thin man who looked older than time.

  Chapter Eight

  Eli stared, open-mouthed at the ancient man who’d opened the farmhouse door.

  The white hairs on the man’s head were as wispy as the lone cloud in the sky overhead. Over his thin frame, he wore a button-down shirt, several sizes too large, and a pair of workman’s pants held up by suspenders.

  Was this the ghost they were here for?

  No, he was being silly.

  Eli forced himself to walk back up the stairs to the porch. Khan introduced himself and then Eli.

  Eli noticed the old man’s pants were so loose, he could see the striped inner lining of the waistband. A memory of his father’s final days came back to him, unbidden. Eli’s stomach roiled and his head swam, his blood pressure rapidly dropping. He steadied himself with an elbow on the doorframe as he shook the man’s hand, skin soft like tissue paper.

  The man, referred to as Mr. Quentin by Khan, invited them inside. The home’s interior smelled as bad as Eli expected. There was mildew, spoiled milk, and menthol.

  “The microwave is the main problem,” Mr. Quentin explained in a croaking voice as he lead them to the kitchen. “I’m not the superstitious type, but my housekeeper, she’s Catholic. It’s hard for me to get help to come out this way, and she’s a good woman, so I’d rather keep her.”

  They entered the kitchen, which was yellowed but orderly. The appliance sat in the corner. Khan reached out and swept his fingertips over the button panel on what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary, twenty-year-old microwave.

  “I’m familiar with this particular model,” Khan said, his deep voice deep and reassuring. “Mr. Quentin, I’m not surprised you’re having problems.”

  Eli felt like a hot air balloon deflating. They weren’t there to catch a ghost after all. They were on a microwave service call. The disappointment was too much to bear standing up. He dropped the heavy camouflage-print bag to the floor, then pulled out a kitchen chair and sat with a sigh.

  “What has the microwave been saying?” Khan asked.

  Eli sighed again.

  Khan gave Eli a dirty look, then squatted down to open the bag.

  The man answered, “I should have had her write it down, sorry.” His cloudy eyes were still trained on the space where Khan’s head had been a moment earlier. He was either blind or nearly blind. “Something about needing to talk. Always asking to talk, to have a conversation. I never paid it much attention, but like I said, I don’t want to lose the housekeeper. She brings my groceries.”

  “Most people would get a new microwave,” Khan said.

  The man scoffed. “Nothing wrong with that one.”

  Something about the man’s tone sent a shiver up Eli’s back. His voice had doubled in strength, as though he was overcompensating for something. He was lying.

  Khan pulled from the bag a tool the size of a TV remote control. He waved it over the front of the microwave. He pressed some of the buttons, ran the microwave on defrost for thirty seconds, then opened the door and waved the device inside.

  “I’m detecting a mild surge,” Khan said. “Where’s the main electrical panel for the house?”

  The man reached out one bony arm and pointed to a hallway off the kitchen. “Down that hall, in the back of the linen closet. It’s behind some shelves, and I know that’s not up to code.”

  Khan chuckled. “That’s fine, Mr. Quentin. We’re not the building code enforcers. We’re the good guys, the knights without armor. There’s no need to hide anything from us.”

  The old man’s body jerked, and he began to cough.

  Eli jumped to his feet and quickly poured him a glass of water. He gently pressed the glass into the man’s hands, trying not to shudder at the webs of blue veins visible beneath the man’s translucent skin.

  Hidden things are meant to be hidden, Eli thought. Close your eyes, close your eyes and don’t look.

  Khan dug around in the pack again and pulled out what looked like a car battery, as well as some cables.

  “You stay here and read out exactly what the microwave says,” Khan instructed Eli.

  Eli replied, “I don’t think I can do this.” He tried to communicate with his facial expression that enough was enough, and he didn’t want to scam the elderly Mr. Quentin. If the man had been wealthy or mean, he wouldn’t have minded, but this wasn’t right. All he wanted to do was help.

  “Yes, you can,” Khan said.

  Glaring bo
ldly into Khan’s eyes, Eli said, “Mr. Quentin, I’m going to buy you a new microwave. I’ve got a delivery van, and I’m going to deliver it out here tomorrow.”

  Khan’s eyes seemed to glow with an internal green fire.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Quentin said firmly. “Nothing wrong with this one. I know what all the buttons do.”

  “But a new microwave would probably be cheaper than whatever we’re charging.”

  Grumpily, the old man replied, “I won’t have it.”

  Eli shrugged at Khan to show he’d given up. “You heard the man. Time to do an exorcism on the microwave.”

  Khan’s dark eyebrows were as flat and still as painted lines. “Eli, You have one simple task. One simple task. Don’t mess it up.” He turned away and marched down the hallway with the cables and box.

  Eli followed, saying in a hushed voice, “But I don’t even have a script. Even if I could do it, and I can’t, I wouldn’t know what to say. What’s the scam?”

  “No scam.” Khan opened the door to the linen closet, pushed aside stacks of towels, and removed a shelf.

  “Fine. So, I’ll go stand in the kitchen and read out whatever Mr. Microwave wants to say to Mr. Quentin.”

  “One simple task.”

  With a frustrated sigh, Eli turned and started back to the kitchen.

  Khan banged around in the linen closet. The overhead lights in the whole house flickered. The house had small windows, so despite the bright spring day outside, it was uncomfortably dark inside when the lights went off. The lights flashed again just as he entered the kitchen and brushed against a silk houseplant resting in an alcove. The soft leaves brushed his cheek in a terrifying way.

  Eli let out a surprised yelp. Mr. Quentin seemed startled by the yelp, but not the lights flashing. The man was completely, utterly blind.

  Eli stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around the kitchen for more threats. There was just the one silk houseplant, and now he had his eye on it. He paced around, cautiously snooping without touching. The refrigerator was covered in family photographs spanning a few decades.

  The lights flickered again, but this time he didn’t yelp.

  From down the hall, Khan called out, “Anything yet?”

  Eli glanced over at the microwave and called back, “Nothing at the moment, except the time. It’s ten o’clock on the dot. That’s a one, a zero, a colon, then a zero and another zero.”

  Mr. Quentin chuckled from his seat at the kitchen table. He took another slow sip of water and stared straight ahead, his eyes unfocused but still open. Eli wondered why it was blind people kept their eyes open, and decided it must have something to do with the muscles. He thought of that saying, about how it takes more muscles to frown than to smile.

  He stood and looked over the family photos on the fridge, testing his muscles by alternating between smiling and frowning. According to the photos, Mr. Quentin had been a rugged man years ago. He looked so proud standing with his beautiful wife and two children.

  As the years progressed and the son and daughter grew to match him in height, he looked less rugged, and less proud.

  The lights flickered again, and something at the edge of Eli’s vision moved. He whipped his head and found nothing. The shape had been to his lower left. He took a deep breath and tried to consciously calm his sympathetic nervous system. Back in college, he’d seen those same dark shapes at the edges of his vision during final assignments. Intense anxiety caused those things, the way lack of sleep gave him deja vu. The brain was a computer, and sometimes it just glitched. A good night’s sleep was the equivalent of turning it off and on.

  “How about now?” Khan called out.

  Eli looked over at the microwave. “It says one, zero, colon, zero, two.”

  “Is that all?” Khan asked.

  Eli opened the door of the microwave. The light came on inside. He closed the door. The digital display still showed the time. Mr. Microwave was not asking for a blood sacrifice or even initiating small talk.

  He refilled Mr. Quentin’s water glass and returned to looking over the candid photos on the fridge. Something at the back of his mind tickled him, but it was like that sensation you get when you can’t remember someone’s name, even though you’ve said it a hundred times.

  That little something stayed at the back of Eli’s head for the next thirty minutes. He was aware of the thought, but it was like a chocolate hidden behind the cardboard door of a Christmas advent calendar.

  If he’d gotten just a little more sleep the night before, Eli might have noticed that the microwave kept displaying the time, even though the power disruptions had caused the clocks on the stove and coffee maker to lose memory and begin flashing 12:00.

  And if he hadn’t been staring out the kitchen window at the fields in the distance, he might have noticed when the microwave displayed a new digital message: WE NEED TO TALK.

  After an hour, Mr. Quentin had drifted off to sleep, his head resting on his forearm on the table.

  Eli carefully washed the used water glass and returned it to the cupboard, exactly where he’d found it. He checked the microwave and walked down the hall to give Khan a report.

  “It’s flashing twelve now,” he said. “So’s the coffee maker and the stove.”

  Khan looked sweaty and frustrated. He had electrical cables and wires strung everywhere.

  “It should have worked.”

  Eli reached out to touch what looked like a modified vehicle battery.

  “Don’t touch that,” Khan warned.

  Annoyed at being bossed around, Eli touched the box anyway. The electrical shock traveled up his finger and clenched all his muscles. He convulsed, unable to let go of the contact. His teeth began to grind together with a squeaking sound. Khan very calmly used a pair of silicon-tipped barbecue tongs to pry Eli’s hand off the box and then shove him back.

  Eli collapsed on the hallway floor, gasping for breath.

  Khan had been looking dejected, but this seemed to make him feel better. “I told you not to touch it.”

  “This is total bull.” Eli stood up on shaking legs. “I’m going back into the city to get Mr. Quentin a new microwave. You can stay here trying to burn his house down if you want.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t see any message on the digital readout? The ion-boosts should have summoned the trapped spirit.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Were you watching the microwave the whole time?”

  Eli’s guts convulsed with what felt like an aftershock from the box. He hadn’t been watching the whole time, but he had checked repeatedly. Was that not good enough?

  Just then, Mr. Quentin, who must have woken up, called out, “Hello? Are you still here?”

  “We’re just about done,” Eli called back. “No charge for today’s visit, because we didn’t do anything except rearrange all your linens.”

  Looking resigned, Khan began rolling up wires and unhooking his contraption from the home’s wiring. The linen closet smelled like smoke and sardines.

  “Go to the kitchen and run through the questionnaire,” he instructed Eli. “There’s a laminated card in the backpack. Just fill in the boxes with the red felt pen as you go.”

  “A questionnaire? Don’t you think we should have started with that?”

  Khan grinned, showing off his dimple and boyish charm. Eli’s annoyance over having his time wasted and his body violently electrocuted started to fade. There were worse ways to spend his day off, such as going to IKEA with Brenda.

  Chapter Nine

  Khan tossed the keys to Eli as they left the dilapidated farmhouse. “You can drive, my man.”

  Eli climbed into the driver’s side slowly. He was puzzling over the questionnaire and the answers Mr. Quentin gave him. Something wasn’t adding up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Maybe the problem was that they came out to deal with a ghost, and ghosts weren’t… scientifically proven to be real.
<
br />   They began the drive back into the city.

  Khan reclined the passenger seat and donned a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. He pulled out the laminated card and reviewed the notes Eli had taken back at the house.

  “I hate closing a case like this,” Khan said gravely. “Let’s see… you checked off that the client swears nobody died inside the house or on the grounds. That includes no accidents with farm equipment, not even involving a non-family member. Seems odd to me that a house that old, on a farm that big, wouldn’t have one death associated with it.”

  “I asked the questions verbatim. All of them.”

  “Could have been something from before the house was built. Early settlers, or an ancient burial ground. Old souls, shaken out of resting. They can be very angry, and confused.”

  Eli got a chill that ran up the back of his spine. “Ooh, scary,” he half-joked.

  “Except there hasn’t been any disturbance of the grounds, not beyond a few inches to plow the fields.”

  “If you ask me,” Eli offered cautiously, “sounds like the housekeeper is the source of the problem. She might be a little nuts, or trying to shake him down for more money.” He didn’t say it, but he silently accused Khan of trying to do the same.

  Khan kept looking over the completed questionnaire and confirming the answers Eli had jotted down. The house was no longer connected to the farmland around it, which had been sold off years ago. The man lived a peaceful life, and there’d been no recent changes to explain a haunting.

  They turned onto the next road, where Eli noticed a familiar sign on the left. It was a horse ranch he’d visited a few times in his youth, where city kids rode rented horses through wooded paths. Many of his classmates only rode the horses past the ridge, where they jumped off, tied the reins to fallen tree branches, and let the horses graze while they enjoyed their contraband.

  Eli, being a known tattletale, wasn’t ever invited to partake. He didn’t care, though. He enjoyed riding, and didn’t mind that his legs would be sore the next day. Muscle soreness meant he was becoming stronger, and he enjoyed the horse ride for the ride itself.