About Last Night

by T Paulin

  As the memory expanded, Eli longed for the touch of a horse’s velvet fur under his hands, over those grass-fed muscles, shining in the dappled sun. There was no form of sun more beautiful than the kind that streamed through leaves, onto a horse’s flanks.

  Khan was still talking, but no longer asking questions—just mumbling to himself about the case.

  Trees whipped by along the sides of the road. As they drew nearer the city outskirts, the van seemed to be more responsive to the gas pedal, like the lazy horses who only wanted to trot when pointed back to the barn. Eli tapped on the steering wheel to distract himself from his longing—his longing to wrap his arms around the strong neck of a horse, to inhale the earthy scent of its dried sweat.

  “You’re quiet,” Khan said.

  “Just thinking about horses.”

  Khan ignored the potential for a topic change. “We’re missing something. I could hear most of what he said from where I was down the hall, and it sounded like Mr. Quentin wanted to go live with his daughter and grandkids. He painted a nice picture of moving in with them, yet here he is, holed up in that old house, like he’s waiting for something.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting to die, and doesn’t want to be a bother. Everyone should respect his wishes.”

  Khan pulled off his mirrored sunglasses to give Eli a withering glare. “Dark, Eli. Real dark.”

  “You saw the guy. He’s like a scarecrow. He probably doesn’t have long.”

  “Aside from the blindness, he’s in good health,” Khan scolded, a silent ‘you idiot’ at the end of his sentence. “There’s something else.”

  Eli bristled at Khan’s tone and responded with sarcasm. “Excuse me. I didn’t realize you were a doctor and gave him a full physical examination. I guess when you electrocuted me with your contraption, it must have wiped my memory.”

  “I told you not to touch it.” You idiot.

  “Well, whatever. The old man doesn’t want to move, and everyone should respect his decisions. All his decisions. And his dignity.”

  “Nope.” Khan put the sunglasses back on and crossed his arms. “His daughter probably worries about him constantly. Every night when she goes to bed, she closes her eyes and imagines her elderly father slipping in the tub and breaking a hip, with no one around for miles to hear him call for help.” He rolled the window down, then up again, then down. “He’s a selfish old bastard, making her worry like that.”

  An idea lit up Eli’s brain. “I’ve got it,” he cried excitedly. “The housekeeper is in cahoots with the daughter. She made up the haunting stuff to try to force him out. I wish I’d figured it out back there. I could have warned him. I’ll tell him tomorrow when I bring out the new microwave.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You can’t stop me. Tomorrow’s my day off work, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “I’ll come with you. Valentine’s been working on a new Booster—that’s the thing you stuck your grubby hand on when I told you not to.”

  “Would Valentine come with us?”

  “You wish.”

  Eli clamped his teeth together and focused on the highway.

  That settled it. If Valentine wasn’t coming, Khan wasn’t either. Eli would drive the new microwave out himself tomorrow, and have another chat with Mr. Quentin. He’d share his thoughts about the old man moving to be with his family, and he’d leave it at that. If a person had an idea for how they wanted to die, that was something Eli respected. Something he had to respect.

  When they reached the city, they got caught in traffic. The counter-flow lanes were switched to direct cars away from the city, and the van lurched impatiently from red light to red light, like a lazy horse in want of its oats. Eli hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and his mouth perversely salivated at the idea of a bucket of oats.

  Eli pulled over in front of the Ghost Hackers storefront. The drive had been long, yet it had been too fast. Despite their differences, he didn’t want to say goodbye to Khan.

  “Wait,” he said right after Khan stepped out.

  Khan turned to face him, and in his mirrored sunglasses, Eli saw his own face. His pathetic face.

  Eli wanted to lay his cards on the table and offer what little he had. Growing up, he’d been a loner, and it wasn’t by choice. Everyone knew he was a tattletale, and except for one long summer that started off idyllic and ended in horror, he’d never been part of anything.

  He wanted to push past his fear of rejection, but it was a real and physical thing—an actual lump in his throat. A fence his weak words couldn’t climb.

  Khan mercifully threw him a rope. “You hungry?” he asked, the invitation to have dinner together implicit.

  Eli breathed a sigh of relief. “Starving.”

  “There’s a diner up the street. Come on. It’s not pretty on the outside, or on the inside. The staff’s rude and the food’s terrible.”

  Eli nodded to show he was listening, and wondered if this was a test. Rude staff and terrible food? This diner sounded an awful like his other alternative of going home to eat with Brenda.

  Khan offered no details about any benefits of the diner that might offset its many flaws. He simply finished with, “I’m going there now. You can come if you want.”

  “Sounds perfect.” Eli turned off the van’s engine, jumped out, and jogged to catch up with Khan.

  Chapter Ten

  The diner had classic red vinyl booths and heavy tables that were bolted to the floors. Even the artwork was bolted down, with four visible screw heads dotting the corners of every painting. The paintings were of bullfighters, sketched in bright flourishes on a black velvet background. Eli had never seen a restaurant decor so… boldly original.

  He had checked the time on the van’s dash, so he knew it was the beginning of the dinner rush. Most restaurants in the neighborhood would be at least half full by now, and the good ones would have a lineup and waiting list. This diner was two-thirds empty.

  Nobody greeted them at the door, but a standing sign invited them to sit anywhere they wanted.

  Khan led the way to a corner booth, where a brunette with a ponytail hunched over a table full of papers.

  “I get it,” Eli said. “You eat here because your sister likes it.”

  “We both eat here because there’s never a wait, and by the time we realize we’re hungry, it’s almost too late.”

  Khan slid into the booth across from his sister, then patted the seat next to him. He pushed his sunglasses up to nestle in his spiky white hair and gave Eli a look. Don’t even think about parking your butt next to my sister’s, his look said.

  Valentine glanced up and stared right through both of them, as if they weren’t even there, then returned to poring over her papers.

  A waitress walked by and dumped three menus on the table without ceremony. Eli turned to ask her about the daily specials, but she was already gone.

  Valentine smoothed out what looked like a map of the city, then covered it with a layer of tracing paper and began marking the paper with circles and dashes.

  “Thanks for asking about today’s service call,” Khan said to his sister wryly. “As it happens, the disturbance was a no-show.” He turned to Eli and explained, “In the business, we refer to para-electrical elements as disturbances.”

  “You mean the ghosts.”

  Khan winced. “Not all ghosts are para-electrical elements.”

  Valentine chuckled without looking up. “We should have an orientation booklet for the new hires.”

  “I’m not a new hire,” Eli said. “I have a job already, delivering packages. It’s not much of a career, but my options are limited by…”

  Valentine looked up again, her pretty, pale green eyes silencing Eli with their beauty.

  “Limited by what?” she asked.

  He didn’t want to say. Not in front of Valentine, or Khan, for that matter.

  Eli couldn’t lie, except for sarcasm, but he could change the topic. He picked up a menu. “Wh
at’s good here?”

  The other two answered in unison: “Nothing.”

  Valentine took his menu away and waved to get the waitress’s attention. “Three cheeseburgers and three Cokes,” she called across the two-thirds-empty diner.

  The woman acknowledged with a wave, shouted the order into the kitchen, and wearily began getting the sodas. Eli looked away for a second, and suddenly the waitress was at their table, slamming down the drinks on the margin of table not covered by Valentine’s papers. He rubbed his eyes and wrote off the time glitch as a byproduct of the previous night’s oxygen deprivation.

  Once they were alone again, Eli casually asked, “So, besides the para-electrical elements, what other kinds of ghosts are there?”

  Khan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We only deal with the wires.” Something thumped under the table and he jolted in his seat. “Valentine! What the hell?”

  “Don’t lie to our new friend,” she admonished.

  Eli smiled, filling with sunshine and sparkly butterflies. He was their new friend.

  Valentine’s lovely hands flew over the paperwork and tidied the table by rolling everything into a tube, fastened expertly by the red elastic band she pulled from her ponytail. She shook out her medium-brown hair, and Eli had to look away guiltily.

  “What’s your experience level?” she asked him. “Have you been haunted?”

  Eli held his tongue and prepared his words carefully. “I know someone who reported something like a black cat, sitting on her chest. She was terrified. Do you know what something like that might be? Assuming it’s not a hallucination?”

  “Interesting.” Valentine shook her head, her brown hair framing and reframing her face in ever more breathtaking compositions. The waves of hair also seemed to accentuate her curves below the neck—not that they needed any help. Eli clutched his jaw with one hand, pretending to be itching his chin, and manually averted his gaze.

  “Sounds like a kitty wraith,” she said.

  “Feline wraith,” Khan corrected. “Or cat wraith.”

  “Kitty wraith.” She giggled. “They’re bad kitties, Eli. I don’t have much experience with them, but I know they fall halfway between helpful and malevolent.”

  “Do they—” Eli’s voice cracked “—suffocate people to death?”

  Valentine sipped her Coke through a straw, then licked away the bead on her lower lip. Eli was staring, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “Not to death,” she answered. “They usually follow lonely people home, where they do stuff to liven things up in the household.”

  Suddenly, the waitress was at the table again, dropping huge platters of burgers and fries in front of them.

  “What kind of stuff?” Eli asked. “And why?”

  She rolled her pretty green eyes. “I told you why. To liven things up for lonely people. The kitties think they’re helping.”

  Khan cleared his throat. Around a mouthful of cheeseburger, he said, “We can’t attribute human motivations to the unhuman. What we can do is re-home them, into a steel cage.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, which only smeared the oil around. “Does your friend want us to make a service call? I’ll give him a cut rate, for friends of friends.”

  Eli eyed Khan warily. Because he didn’t yet believe ghosts were scientifically proven, he was almost certain this was part of a con. The Hart siblings were planting ideas into his subconscious. That was all. And even if the so-called cat wraith was real, it supposedly wasn’t fatal.

  The edge of Khan’s mouth curled up, as though he couldn’t keep a straight face any longer and was on the verge of admitting he gave Eli a business card laced with hallucinogenic powder.

  “Well?” Khan prompted. “Does your friend want a service call?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Eli said.

  Khan shrugged and continued cramming greasy burger into his mouth.

  “Your friend could put out some catnip,” Valentine offered. “And a saucer of milk.”

  Eli’s stomach growled. He looked down at the food in front of him. It glistened with oil-based calories.

  He began to eat, thinking over Valentine’s suggestion.

  Catnip.

  A saucer of milk.

  Well, he had been thinking about getting a pet.

  Chapter Eleven

  After leaving the diner, Eli drove to the department store where he and Brenda shopped regularly for containers. Their apartment was too small, and full of too much stuff, but Brenda truly believed they were just a few more plastic boxes away from achieving balance.

  Eli skirted the container department, treating it like a miniature Crashdown Zone. The metaphor was apt, because every time Brenda dragged him to the container department, he did seem to lose a nugget of sanity. Just looking up at the sign marking the aisle made him feel like grabbing onto passing shopping carts, to feel the sweet tug at his limbs.

  He shook his head to clear the weirdly suicidal daydreams, and proceeded to the small appliances department.

  The store had two dozen models of microwaves, but fourteen of them were designed for mounting over a stove. That left ten options. Eli closed his eyes and began fondling the control panels.

  A youthful voice of indeterminate gender asked flatly, “Can I help you with anything, sir?”

  Eli’s eyes flew open. The staff member in the blue bib was male, and in his teens. He had dyed black hair, wore black eyeliner, and a studded dog collar around his neck. Eli’s eyes traveled down and stopped on the boy’s name tag—a name tag which led Eli to believe this young man might be sympathetic to Eli’s plight.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Eli asked.

  The young man glanced around, his dark-rimmed eyes flitting nervously. “Why? What do you know? If you’re from head office, you have to tell me. Those are the rules, or else it’s that bad thing. Entrapment.”

  “I’m not from head office, I swear. I’m just a civilian customer, trying to buy a microwave, and wondering if other people believe in ghosts.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Eli.”

  The boy shook his hand. “I’m Nateas.” He pronounced it Nate-az. He nodded to his name tag, which really did list his name at NATEAS, though the final two letters had been drawn in with felt pen. “Read it backwards,” he said, smirking.

  “Two steps ahead of you, Nateas. That’s why I asked if you believe in ghosts. So, do you?”

  “All warlocks believe in ghosts.”

  “You’re a warlock?”

  Nateas took a step back and looked around again. “Are you sure you’re not from head office?”

  “Would someone from head office wear polyester short pants?”

  Nateas looked down at Eli’s knees and chuckled. He checked around furtively for the third time, then pulled a card from his blue smock.

  Eli hesitated before accepting the card, doing a visual check for powder and noting that Nateas was touching the sides with bare fingers. Finally, he took the card, which contained nothing more than an email address that began with necromancer69 and finished with a free email provider.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Eli said.

  “Their numbers are growing,” Nateas said, his voice quivering. “The ghosts are converging on the city from all over the world. Soon we’ll be outnumbered.”

  “What do they want?”

  “A front row seat for the big show.” The kid paused dramatically, his eyebrows raising to their limit. In a hoarse near-whisper, he finished, “The end of the world.”

  “Oh.” Eli turned away and twisted the dial on a microwave. “Sounds legit.”

  The kid snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a Mothershipper.”

  “Pardon me?” Eli didn’t know the term, but it sounded disturbingly similar to another epithet.

  “One of those alien abduction weirdos,” Nateas explained. “Mothershippers.”

  “I think I’d know if I was.” He turned back to the microwaves, deeply regretting his choice to strike u
p a conversation with a stranger. He knew there was a reason he didn’t usually do such a thing.

  The kid slipped back into work mode. “If you buy one of these microwaves, tell them Nate helped you, so I get the commission.”

  “Are you going to help me pick one out?”

  The boy pointed one black-lacquered fingernail at the most basic model. “That one’s on sale.”

  “Is it a good microwave? I hate to be cheap, but I’m buying it for an old guy who’s blind, so this model with the two dials might be better than the digital ones.”

  “He’s blind?” Nateas blinked rapidly, his eyes becoming dewy. Eli got the terrible feeling he’d just ruined someone’s day by mentioning the existence of disabilities.

  “Just in the eyes,” Eli said. He’d meant to say something reassuring—something else entirely, but sometimes the chip diverted him like this. “Just in the eyes,” he repeated in a gentle tone, hoping his voice was soothing.

  “Phew,” Nateas said. He grabbed a cardboard box from the shelf below the display models. “I’ll take this to the checkout for you, unless you need anything else.”

  “What if I did? Would you follow me around like my personal shopping sherpa?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Okay, Nateas. I need catnip. I don’t have a cat, but I’d like to buy a lot of catnip, for personal reasons.”

  The boy hoisted the microwave box to the top of his head and led the way, sherpa-like, to the pet supplies aisle.

  Chapter Twelve

  Brenda was preparing to head out when Eli arrived home.

  He didn’t have to ask where she was going, because it was Friday night, and she usually went dancing with her friends on Friday nights.

  Eli stood at the door to the bathroom, holding a one-pound bag of catnip, and watched as Brenda applied a layer of glitter over top of her thick black mascara.

  “Is that catnip?” she asked.

  “It’s not oregano.”

  Her lips twitched. She leaned in toward the mirror and used her fingertip to remove a black chunk of makeup that had fallen into her eye.