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Giving Up on the Ghost
Nov. 1st, 2018 05:02 pm“We don’t go into that room.”
“Why?”
“Water damage. Need to get someone to repair it.” That’s all he would say, no matter how many times we asked, like the real joke was being breathtakingly consistent in his non-answers. I never really got Dad’s humor.
Still, Dad wasn’t wrong. The exterior wall of the room between my room and my sister’s room on the second floor was blackened with mold in the shadows of the windowsill. A trellis covered in kudzu sat next to the window, conveniently covering parts of the siding that had cracked and warped away. The window made me feel uncomfortable, so I tried not to look at it.
I didn’t get the idea to climb the trellis and look inside the locked room until Dad was away on a “book tour.” He needed a vacation from his daughters whether or not his novel was actually selling. A storm cut off the internet line somewhere miles away, and I was really bored. After rereading several of my books, I decided to walk circles around my house until I got too tired and took a nap. I’ve always had a low thrill center, but I suppose curiosity was always going to overtake me in the end.
It’s easy to ignore a locked room in your own house when you’re twelve and have no access to the key. Newspaper had also been wadded up and shoved into the base of the door, so no peeking could be done with my head on the floor. We were guests in the house of a man we barely knew. If our mom hadn’t died, we probably never would have gotten to know our actual father beyond the two years he’d been with us both after Pamela’s birth but before the split. He stayed at home, writing most of the time at a small living room table in eyesight of the middle room. There was an office he could have used, but I think he preferred to watch the room.
His room was across a gap from ours on the second floor. I realize now that we never mentioned to him that I thought Pamela was having horrible nightmares, and she thought I was. Maybe I saw the earplugs on his nightstand and realized that he knew and didn’t care who was screaming every night.
It was maybe fifteen or twenty laps around my house before I decided to climb up and have a look inside. It was impossible to discern anything about the room from below; the pane was too filthy and the room was unlit, spewing back the reflected light of the sun until it was too dark to see inside anyway. Up I went, finding another reason why we couldn’t see inside.
It was hastily boarded up from within. The boards were over the window recess about a foot deep into the room, leaving a few small cracks between the planks. I leaned out from the trellis until my face was against the glass, blocking the sun with my own head. When my head tapped the glass, I heard a screech like a dinner fork being dragged across concrete inside the room, and a board cracked in the middle of the window, bulging towards me. Underneath the crack, in the thin line looking into the room, a gleaming row of teeth grinned.
I fell off the trellis onto my back. Two stories is a big fall, and I remember knocking the air out of my chest with the impact, choking but unable to force breathing because I was shaking too much. Staring up at the window, waiting for something to break through, choking on my own tight lungs, I cried. My sister rushed out to check on me. I reassured her that I was fine before I explained what I’d seen. Pinky swears not to look into the room.
She was two years younger than me and two times more adventurous, so it was never going to last.
*****
The next time Dad left for two days, my sister opened the door to the locked room. She’d taken the key off his keychain.
I heard her yank hard on the stiff door. The door slouched heavily against its own frame and it made a cracking sound as if it had been broken. Even as I bolted out of my bedroom, I could see and smell the plume of dust bursting from the room as Pamela’s heel vanished inside. By the time I got to the doorway, Pamela was gone.
The room was furnished, if sparsely: a table and a chest of drawers with a small chair and mirror to the left, a nightstand and cobweb covered bed to the right. Hardwood floors with the heads of nails sticking out in odd places started where the carpeted hall ended. The room was at least a century old. It was dusty and hard to breathe, but I still screamed for Pamela. A gasp emanated from behind the bed in the corner, to the right of the window.
I didn’t see my sister there, but the floor and the walls in the corner were rotten with mold, and the rot appeared to be moving, writhing within the dull bluish paint. I couldn’t look at it directly because it made me gag, but some of the twisting patterns of the mold looked like snakes wrapped around the outline of a person.
I heard the sound again. A scraping that sounded like someone dragging a rake across a chalkboard emanated from the mirror directly behind me. It was a large mirror with ornate embellishments all around its exterior, and I could see the whole room through it. In the moldy corner, through the mirror, hunched a woman with twisted black veins and arteries running across her alabaster skin. She was perched on the balls of her feet running pale fingers across my sister’s hair. Pamela was curled into a lump in the same corner, crying without sound and looking up to see me looking at her, calling my name without sound.
The hunched woman noticed me and stood up. She must have been at least six feet tall, because it seemed like she had to hunch not to brush her black hair against the ceiling. Her dress was grey and could have been made of soot. Her eyes were dark enough that it seemed like she had none. In a blink, her arms were wrapped around me, fingernails tracing patterns and scratching on my skin. I still saw her in the corner, wrapped around my sister in the mirror. The aroma of mold and decay flooded my eyes and nose, and as her hands slithered up to my neck, everything went dark.
“I love you,” she said through my hair, as images of a different death and life started to light up the dark in my eyes.
*****
She died in this room. Her family didn’t realize that it had happened. One of her brothers responsible for taking care of her decided to pretend she had never been in the room rather than trouble himself moving her body and paying for the funeral expenses. The rest of the family lived elsewhere and became distracted by other things while her brother busied himself ignoring her body.
A hurricane rolled in three days after her death and tore the siding from her room, leaving a damp residue over her corpse. After a checkup on the house she was properly found and buried.
She had no great ill will towards her brother but a fantastic longing for all other souls. A newborn baby was put in the room her brother and I both slept in shortly after her brother moved out. The parents left the baby there for hours unattended and made the woman’s room a storage closet--she tried to get into the baby’s room or go through the wall to comfort the baby when it cried, so the parents locked the door, barricaded the window, and painted the room in this strange, light blue paint that kept the woman from moving through the wall.
When the baby grew into a child, the parents moved from occasionally checking in to almost never going into boy’s room. Detained in her own cell, the woman could only listen through the wall as the boy played with stuffed animals, conjuring elaborate stories where the toys were always on his side and always loved him.
The ghost grew attached enough to the boy to call out responses for the different characters he had created, and soon it was like a running dialogue. The boy’s parents didn’t care enough to see what he was saying to the woman in the wall. The woman warped into something more than a ghost over time, twisting because no one cared about the boy. Twisting because the boy cared about her.
The older he grew, the more she loved him as if he were her own son, or husband, or something totally different.
The boy inherited the house. The boy became a man and met my mother. They decided to leave the South and moved to Wisconsin just as she was pregnant with me. My father knew that the attachment of the woman in the wall had gotten too large.
“Stay with me,” his old teddy bear would whisper. He put the bear in the trash.
“Stay with me,” his video game console would whisper. He sold it.
“Stay with me!” and the shriek of the woman pushing through the ghost-proof paint sounded like a brass instrument was smashed and dragged across asphalt. She appeared in his room, smothering him in his bed. It took all of his strength to pry himself free and pick up his fiancé and drive. Mom did not notice until after my sister was born that the ghost was chasing him, stalking him from tree to tree in the shadows of cold winter nights, waiting for the moment that would pull my mom and dad apart.
The moment came when my bear started talking. Talking about intimate times spent whispering to my father through the walls. Talking about how wonderful a future they could have if he made my mom disappear.
My dad left and the spirit followed. My mom died of lymphoma eight years later, and my dad shrugged, convinced the spirit to stay in her room knowing that she’d have us as company on each side of her and my dad always nearby, and moved us to the house in which he’d been raised.
*****
We spent a long time in the darkness of the tall woman’s body, mold creeping into own skins. My dad found the door open and rushed into the room when he returned.
“No no no! You promised you wouldn’t hurt them! You promised!” he cried, reaching into the mold of the wall and prying us free from the blackened paint. I’m not sure exactly how the woman stored us inside the wall, and I’ll never be able to ask my dad. He pushed my sister and I out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Now he lives with her. As an adult, I write him letters all the time and slide them under the crack of the door, which I knocked free with a clothes hanger. He says he’s doing well and not to worry, but he never really answers any of my questions. I tell him that I’m worried that he’s actually dead and gone, and he just tells me that he’d rather be where he is than “dead because of a coffin fit.”
I never really got Dad’s humor.
“Why?”
“Water damage. Need to get someone to repair it.” That’s all he would say, no matter how many times we asked, like the real joke was being breathtakingly consistent in his non-answers. I never really got Dad’s humor.
Still, Dad wasn’t wrong. The exterior wall of the room between my room and my sister’s room on the second floor was blackened with mold in the shadows of the windowsill. A trellis covered in kudzu sat next to the window, conveniently covering parts of the siding that had cracked and warped away. The window made me feel uncomfortable, so I tried not to look at it.
I didn’t get the idea to climb the trellis and look inside the locked room until Dad was away on a “book tour.” He needed a vacation from his daughters whether or not his novel was actually selling. A storm cut off the internet line somewhere miles away, and I was really bored. After rereading several of my books, I decided to walk circles around my house until I got too tired and took a nap. I’ve always had a low thrill center, but I suppose curiosity was always going to overtake me in the end.
It’s easy to ignore a locked room in your own house when you’re twelve and have no access to the key. Newspaper had also been wadded up and shoved into the base of the door, so no peeking could be done with my head on the floor. We were guests in the house of a man we barely knew. If our mom hadn’t died, we probably never would have gotten to know our actual father beyond the two years he’d been with us both after Pamela’s birth but before the split. He stayed at home, writing most of the time at a small living room table in eyesight of the middle room. There was an office he could have used, but I think he preferred to watch the room.
His room was across a gap from ours on the second floor. I realize now that we never mentioned to him that I thought Pamela was having horrible nightmares, and she thought I was. Maybe I saw the earplugs on his nightstand and realized that he knew and didn’t care who was screaming every night.
It was maybe fifteen or twenty laps around my house before I decided to climb up and have a look inside. It was impossible to discern anything about the room from below; the pane was too filthy and the room was unlit, spewing back the reflected light of the sun until it was too dark to see inside anyway. Up I went, finding another reason why we couldn’t see inside.
It was hastily boarded up from within. The boards were over the window recess about a foot deep into the room, leaving a few small cracks between the planks. I leaned out from the trellis until my face was against the glass, blocking the sun with my own head. When my head tapped the glass, I heard a screech like a dinner fork being dragged across concrete inside the room, and a board cracked in the middle of the window, bulging towards me. Underneath the crack, in the thin line looking into the room, a gleaming row of teeth grinned.
I fell off the trellis onto my back. Two stories is a big fall, and I remember knocking the air out of my chest with the impact, choking but unable to force breathing because I was shaking too much. Staring up at the window, waiting for something to break through, choking on my own tight lungs, I cried. My sister rushed out to check on me. I reassured her that I was fine before I explained what I’d seen. Pinky swears not to look into the room.
She was two years younger than me and two times more adventurous, so it was never going to last.
*****
The next time Dad left for two days, my sister opened the door to the locked room. She’d taken the key off his keychain.
I heard her yank hard on the stiff door. The door slouched heavily against its own frame and it made a cracking sound as if it had been broken. Even as I bolted out of my bedroom, I could see and smell the plume of dust bursting from the room as Pamela’s heel vanished inside. By the time I got to the doorway, Pamela was gone.
The room was furnished, if sparsely: a table and a chest of drawers with a small chair and mirror to the left, a nightstand and cobweb covered bed to the right. Hardwood floors with the heads of nails sticking out in odd places started where the carpeted hall ended. The room was at least a century old. It was dusty and hard to breathe, but I still screamed for Pamela. A gasp emanated from behind the bed in the corner, to the right of the window.
I didn’t see my sister there, but the floor and the walls in the corner were rotten with mold, and the rot appeared to be moving, writhing within the dull bluish paint. I couldn’t look at it directly because it made me gag, but some of the twisting patterns of the mold looked like snakes wrapped around the outline of a person.
I heard the sound again. A scraping that sounded like someone dragging a rake across a chalkboard emanated from the mirror directly behind me. It was a large mirror with ornate embellishments all around its exterior, and I could see the whole room through it. In the moldy corner, through the mirror, hunched a woman with twisted black veins and arteries running across her alabaster skin. She was perched on the balls of her feet running pale fingers across my sister’s hair. Pamela was curled into a lump in the same corner, crying without sound and looking up to see me looking at her, calling my name without sound.
The hunched woman noticed me and stood up. She must have been at least six feet tall, because it seemed like she had to hunch not to brush her black hair against the ceiling. Her dress was grey and could have been made of soot. Her eyes were dark enough that it seemed like she had none. In a blink, her arms were wrapped around me, fingernails tracing patterns and scratching on my skin. I still saw her in the corner, wrapped around my sister in the mirror. The aroma of mold and decay flooded my eyes and nose, and as her hands slithered up to my neck, everything went dark.
“I love you,” she said through my hair, as images of a different death and life started to light up the dark in my eyes.
*****
She died in this room. Her family didn’t realize that it had happened. One of her brothers responsible for taking care of her decided to pretend she had never been in the room rather than trouble himself moving her body and paying for the funeral expenses. The rest of the family lived elsewhere and became distracted by other things while her brother busied himself ignoring her body.
A hurricane rolled in three days after her death and tore the siding from her room, leaving a damp residue over her corpse. After a checkup on the house she was properly found and buried.
She had no great ill will towards her brother but a fantastic longing for all other souls. A newborn baby was put in the room her brother and I both slept in shortly after her brother moved out. The parents left the baby there for hours unattended and made the woman’s room a storage closet--she tried to get into the baby’s room or go through the wall to comfort the baby when it cried, so the parents locked the door, barricaded the window, and painted the room in this strange, light blue paint that kept the woman from moving through the wall.
When the baby grew into a child, the parents moved from occasionally checking in to almost never going into boy’s room. Detained in her own cell, the woman could only listen through the wall as the boy played with stuffed animals, conjuring elaborate stories where the toys were always on his side and always loved him.
The ghost grew attached enough to the boy to call out responses for the different characters he had created, and soon it was like a running dialogue. The boy’s parents didn’t care enough to see what he was saying to the woman in the wall. The woman warped into something more than a ghost over time, twisting because no one cared about the boy. Twisting because the boy cared about her.
The older he grew, the more she loved him as if he were her own son, or husband, or something totally different.
The boy inherited the house. The boy became a man and met my mother. They decided to leave the South and moved to Wisconsin just as she was pregnant with me. My father knew that the attachment of the woman in the wall had gotten too large.
“Stay with me,” his old teddy bear would whisper. He put the bear in the trash.
“Stay with me,” his video game console would whisper. He sold it.
“Stay with me!” and the shriek of the woman pushing through the ghost-proof paint sounded like a brass instrument was smashed and dragged across asphalt. She appeared in his room, smothering him in his bed. It took all of his strength to pry himself free and pick up his fiancé and drive. Mom did not notice until after my sister was born that the ghost was chasing him, stalking him from tree to tree in the shadows of cold winter nights, waiting for the moment that would pull my mom and dad apart.
The moment came when my bear started talking. Talking about intimate times spent whispering to my father through the walls. Talking about how wonderful a future they could have if he made my mom disappear.
My dad left and the spirit followed. My mom died of lymphoma eight years later, and my dad shrugged, convinced the spirit to stay in her room knowing that she’d have us as company on each side of her and my dad always nearby, and moved us to the house in which he’d been raised.
*****
We spent a long time in the darkness of the tall woman’s body, mold creeping into own skins. My dad found the door open and rushed into the room when he returned.
“No no no! You promised you wouldn’t hurt them! You promised!” he cried, reaching into the mold of the wall and prying us free from the blackened paint. I’m not sure exactly how the woman stored us inside the wall, and I’ll never be able to ask my dad. He pushed my sister and I out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Now he lives with her. As an adult, I write him letters all the time and slide them under the crack of the door, which I knocked free with a clothes hanger. He says he’s doing well and not to worry, but he never really answers any of my questions. I tell him that I’m worried that he’s actually dead and gone, and he just tells me that he’d rather be where he is than “dead because of a coffin fit.”
I never really got Dad’s humor.
