by Gilmour, SJB
Sally’s method of keeping her outward demeanour so cheerful involved keeping whatever it was that was bugging her buried deep down so she could think of only good things. I knew not to dredge into her mind too much because that brought those subjects bubbling to the surface. Besides, I didn’t really need to. I knew what she was worried about. I tried to raise happy thoughts in her mind during the brief moments she was in me, but the mass of dark fears and misery in her mind was so heavy, so strong that it was almost impossible to break through.
What was the doctor going to say? Had the IUD damaged her organs? Would she be able to bear children? Oddly enough, she also felt incredibly guilty because this problem also switched off her libido and that meant Mitch was missing out.
Deary me, girlie. Of all the silly worries to have, that’s a doozy.
Mitch knew it too. His ability to read his wife was amazing. There were times I wondered if he was psychic. Of course, I’ve never met, before or since my death, any living soul with the ability to read another living person’s mind. There are plenty of ghosts and possessed rooms like me who can do it, and of course there are quite a few living humans who can communicate with us. But, it’s always dead to living or living to dead, never living to living.
He gave her lots of hugs, made sure there was only boppy, cheerful music playing, and even sat through episodes of Big Bang Theory, which he found banal and repetitive. What the hell, I caught him thinking while he was in me to spoon ice-cream into bowls for them both to eat in front of the television. She likes it. All I have to do is keep her happy and calm. She’ll see. The medic will tell her she’s alright… But what then?
Yes, Mitch. What then?
Will she turn around and tell me she wants to get pregnant? The pill’s probably out. What’ll we use for contraception? Condoms? I fucking hate condoms.
Despite the positive vibe they both tried to project, they were both sad. They moved more slowly; their thoughts, once optimistic and at times incredibly erotic, were now dark. Where there was heat in their smiles and passion in their cooking, their meals seemed as dull and grey as the autumn clouds in the sky outside and they ate at my bench with flat robotic economy of movement.
By the Thursday, the morning of Sally’s appointment, she could barely talk to Mitch. She’d not eaten any breakfast. She only consumed a few small glasses of water because memories of her mother’s voice came to her, insisting she keep her fluids up. They gathered their things and left without saying a word to each other.
He must have been waiting for them to leave, because the moment the ute disappeared from my vision, a young male ghost walked through my front wall and window and stood beside my bench. He looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. Why he bothered to wait for them to leave made me curious. It’s not like they could have been able to see him.
‘Hello?’ he called out. He seemed very nervous.
Who was this young ghost? Then I remembered Mason telling me about him.
‘Hello. Young Mr Riley, isn’t it?’
The boy nodded. ‘Alec.’ He looked around. ‘So where are you? I’ve only met one other haunted room, and that’s at the hospital and he won’t speak to me.’
I chuckled. ‘I can be anywhere in this room, but if you like, I’ll stay in one spot while you’re here. Look up. See that light? That’s where I am now.’
‘‘Kay. You’re Eugenie?’
‘And it’s possessed, not haunted.’
‘Huh?’ He seemed very puzzled.
‘A haunt is just that. It’s where a ghost likes to hang out. Say you decided you liked a place so much that you never wanted to leave it, and never really did, then that place would be haunted, because you haunt it.’
He thought this over for a while. ‘‘Kay,’ he said again. ‘That makes sense.’
At least he was an intelligent lad. There’s little more depressing that a slow-witted spook. Then it dawned on me. While his spectral body had not aged, his mind had. I was not talking to an eleven year-old. I was talking to a fifteen year-old.
‘Now what can I do for you, Alec?’
‘Can I sit down?’
What is it with ghosts and their desire to do as they once did as humans? He had no mass. No muscles or joints to rest. What possible comfort could he gain from adopting a seated posture on a chair through which he could just as easily drift?
‘Help yourself,’ I told him trying to keep the laughter from my voice.
Seated, he leaned back and gazed up at the light fitting where he thought I was.
‘I’ve been—’ He thought about it for a moment, ‘—haunting the police station.’
‘Oh?’
‘That writer guy who lives here? It’s all they’re talking about. They’ve re-opened all these big cases.’
‘Really?’ I was surprised.
He nodded. ‘All the deaths, and I mean every one of them going back years. All the rapes. My case.’
‘Your disappearance,’ I said gently.
His face clouded over and he nodded. ‘Yeah.’ His eyes flashed with pain at what must have been awful memories.
‘Go on,’ I encouraged him, hoping to steer him away from the painful past and back to the reason he’d drifted fourteen kilometres from Gembrook to seek me out here in Shiprock Falls.
‘You know that old ghost? The dude who died in the quarry?’
‘Wears old fashioned clothes? Everyone just calls him Mason.’
‘That’s him. He said you can read the minds of the living.’ There was a hint of desperation in his eyes.
‘Some of them,’ I replied carefully. ‘And it’s not really mind-reading.’ It was, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘It’s more like I can hear their thoughts as if they’d been spoken out loud.’ Well that bit was true, especially for the Forbes girl.
He sat back, his lungs heaving with air he couldn’t possibly be breathing.
‘Brilliant! Can you do it with all of them… You know, the living?’
‘Just a few. Can’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘Only one, and she doesn’t think about much at all except how she hates her parents.’
‘I take it she’s a teenager?’
He nodded, looking miserable. ‘Kelly Forbes. She hated me at school. I couldn’t talk to her then, and I can’t talk to her now.’
I thought about this for a bit. I had no doubt he’d discover what I had come to figure out over the past few months. By dredging up particular thoughts in a living person’s memories, one would actually bring those thoughts to the top of their mind, thus making the person think about them again. It’s our way of communicating with the living. I guess it’s kind of like being a muse — only we can’t put new ideas into their heads, just make old ones appear new.
‘You can, you know,’ I replied quietly. Then I told him all about it.
‘Are you insane, woman?’ Mason thundered, storming into me as I finished explaining our talents to Alec. Mason sped around me, completely ignoring Alec. ‘Telling a mere child the secrets of communing with the living could be catastrophic! Have you no sense of responsibility at all?’
‘Oh calm down, you crazy old spook,’ I told him.
Alec echoed this sentiment, only with the rebellious vehemence and profanity only a teenager could summon.
‘We’re all very sorry about what happened to you, dear boy.’ Mason peered down his nose at the young ghost. ‘But what good will it do you now? Leave the living alone. You’re free to travel anywhere you choose, to do as you will. There’s no need to meddle in these affairs.’
Alec shook his head and stood up off the stool.
‘Four years!’ he yelled at Mason. ‘Four fucking years I’ve been dead!’ He lashed out at the stool, which was the nearest thing to him.
It went over as if it’d been kicked by a horse. The silence that followed was eerie. The stool rested there on the section of floor where the tiles ended and the hall began.
Mason flew back into one of the cupboards in
fright. Only the top of his face — his eyes, nose and forehead — poked out.
Alec too recoiled, only he didn’t seem so surprised as he did disappointed and confused.
‘How did you do that?’ I asked him, awed.
‘Dunno,’ he mumbled. ‘It just happens sometimes when I get mad.’ Then, iridescent tears beginning to well in his eyes, he gave a yell and hurtled out through my window and off into the bush.
‘Great,’ I muttered. This was bad. Mitch and Sally would be home soon and they’d find that stool on the floor. ‘Mason! Can you move objects like that?’
Mason didn’t reply. He just sank back into the cupboard. I moved my consciousness into the cupboard to join him. ‘Mason!’ I yelled.
The old ghost gasped in fright and shot out to hover above my bench.
‘Calm yourself—’
I couldn’t help it. This was not the kind of thing I’d ever expected to happen. I guess I was just getting panicky. I told him quite loudly and with far more foul language than I’d ever used while I’d been alive that I wouldn’t calm myself and that his insultingly superior attitude towards the boy had now caused all kinds of trouble.
‘It is no matter,’ he tried to placate me.
‘Okay then mister know-it-all. Pick that chair up and put it back.’
Mason studied his buckled shoes. ‘I cannot.’
‘Alec moved it. Why can’t you? Are you saying he’s stronger than you?’
Now Mason looked up, stung. ‘Of course not! It’s just—’ He didn’t finish the sentence because at that moment, Mitch and Sally’s Hilux roared up the driveway, crunching the gravel loudly. When I looked back to where Mason had been, he was gone.
I heard the door open. Sally was explaining something to Mitch.
‘It’s from Professor Martin.’ She must have had a text message from her university professor. ‘Those graduates he wants to send up here? They’re—’ She’d seen the chair.
Mitch must have been close behind her. Neither spoke for a few seconds. I could actually hear their breathing and heartbeats from the open entrance to me. I angled myself as far into the corner nearest the hall facing the doorway in an attempt to see them. It wasn’t close enough. Dammit! Their footsteps retreated back out the front door and the door closed.
I shifted to the window. A few moments later, I saw them race to the ute. They got in and locked the doors. Mitch was on the phone in a flash while Sally just sat in there looking horrified. When Mitch hung up the phone, he started the engine and backed the ute down the driveway a bit then stopped, keeping it running. I could just make out that he was holding up his phone in the direction of the front door.
Clever, clever boy. Filming the house in case whoever they thought might still be in there came out. They sat there filming for some fifteen minutes until the police Landcruiser came hurtling up the driveway, lights blazing and siren blaring.
James and Nayani raced up to the front porch while a third officer I didn’t recognise stayed with Mitch and Sally. James called out a few times, as did Nayani but of course they got no answer. Judging by the sound of their footsteps and feel of the changing pressures on my joins and hinges, they charged into and searched each room. Only at the last did they come into me. James checked my larder while Nayani took several photographs with a big fancy Canon digital camera. Then she picked up the fallen stool and set it back in its place at the bench.
Fuck me, James thought. First a murder weapon. Now a break-in. Nobody’s here. They trying to set up an alibi? He’s a bloody writer. Knows how to set up a story. Still, it could have been Aidan Brown... That little weasel could hardly resist a new house to break and enter.
Murder? What?
‘Did you find anyone?’ Sally stormed into the house. Now that her initial fright had worn off, anger had taken over. She glared at James. I knew that look. It was the same look that could have destroyed lesser beings at high school; terrified any who stood in the way of little Sally Morgan before she became the uber-cool Sally Taylor.
Standing near my bench, James shook his head.
‘Your house is clear Mrs Taylor. There’s nobody but us here.’ Get mad at me all you like, girlie. You weigh, what, forty-five kilos dripping wet? Still, I’m glad I’m not married to you.
‘Just double-checking,’ James went on, patiently and deadpan. ‘Could anyone else have been in your house? Does anyone else have a key?’
Sally nodded. ‘Kelly Forbes does. She does some gardening every other weekend. Earns some pocket money. But she wouldn’t have been in here. She’s at school—’ She paused, her motherly instincts showing themselves. ‘Well she should be anyway.’
‘We’ll check on her. She’s a good kid. I’m sure that’s where she is.’
Nayani put on her best calming smile. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to come with you to see if anything is missing?’
Sally pursed her lips. She was angry and confused, though a little relieved that what she’d seen of the house so far seemed okay. She nodded at Nayani.
‘Thanks Officer Preeta. I’d like that.’ My microscope, my ‘puter… The spiders! They all better fucking well be there…
Mitch was thinking similar worries about his work. I can’t believe I might have to write all that again. When did I do that last hard backup? Two weeks ago? Shit on a fucking brick.
Mitch and Sally then took Nayani out of me, leaving James at my bench. He made a couple of quick calls to report his status then he began to make a few more notes in a log book. What he wrote didn’t concern me at all. I had to know what he meant by “murder weapon”. Even though I knew it would bring those thoughts to the top of his mind and make him even more suspicious than he already was, I had to know.
House was empty. Only sign of anything out of the ordinary was one chair on its side in the hall, not in the kitchen where it should have been. No damage.
I sank into his mind, scattering his concentration until I found his thoughts about the step.
Dunno how those geeks at Melton figure that kind of stuff out, but they’re convinced from the layers of tissue or some shit, that the bit of wood hit Owen’s head before it was caved in. Someone picked up that thing, all five and half kilos of it, and bashed his fucking skull in. That stain they found on the step below was just where his head, already mushed up and leaking brain, hit. Ugh. Must’ve been like a zombie-fucking-apocalypse.
Huh? Someone hit Ashleigh on the head with the step? How? Who? There’d been nobody in the house that I’d seen! I was about to search for more in James’ mind, but Mitch and Sally returned.
Shit. Here they come. Don’t tell them about the step just yet. If they ask, just tell them we’re still testing it for fingerprints. That bit’s true. He looked around the kitchen and then thought of his lunch sitting in his desk drawer back at the station. Should I be good and eat that or swing by the cafe on the way back? This shit is making me feel like junk food.
‘So do you know of anyone who would break into our house and not take anything?’ Sally was asking Nayani as they came back into me. At least she’s a discreet puttanta. I can’t believe she suggested I check my undies drawer. Dunno what’s better, that nothing was taken, or that she stood outside and didn’t look at my junk-huggers.
I could forgive Sally for being so cranky. I doubt I’d have been anywhere near as calm were I she. Still, she was still mightily affronted that someone had been in her house uninvited. Had I not been so stricken but what I’d gleaned from James’ mind, I’d have found this a little funny. Uninvited? Huh. I was here before them. Mason came and went as he pleased, and at least three other ghosts from Shiprock Falls alone had drifted by at some time or another over the past few years. Heck, once they even had some sort of committee meeting in the dining room with a bunch of spooks from Gembrook and Yarra Junction.
But I was in no mood to dwell on that. My husband had been murdered. Doubt hit me like the hoof of a branded horse. Had I been murdered too? Think, Eugenie. Think! You were puttin
g in that light fitting. Did you go outside to the junction box on the porch? Did you?
I’d been out there so many times during that period. I’d put in other light fittings and power plugs. I’d even had to re-install a junction set box because the idiot who installed it first time didn’t do it right. Okay, forget about all the times you turned the mains off before that morning. Think of what you did do that morning.
I was wearing jeans, a purple tank-top and my house runners. I loved those runners. They were old navy Converse Chuck Taylor All Star Hi-cuts, so faded the were more grey than blue. They were great for climbing ladders because the smooth rubber soles gripped well on the steps.
I’d set up a big battery-powered work lantern on the floor. It was angled up so I’d be able to see what I was doing at the ceiling.
