Red Heather

by Aly Noble

  I didn’t say anything because I was back to being suspicious.

  Silence fell between us and a draft tickled my neck, making me shiver despite my layers of clothing. He noticed and proceeded to glower at the plastic-covered window over the kitchen sink. And the sliding glass doors. And every other glass fixture in the house. Even my wine glasses had to be replaced.

  “Are you going to get those fixed?”

  I glared at him through a few tendrils of newly violet hair. “You’re dead. You can’t possibly feel it.”

  “You can,” he pointed out. “You’re making me cold.”

  “Fuck off.”

  He sighed loudly. “Imagine… The interaction I get is minimal and on the scale from doll-obsessed neighbor child to a—“

  “Choose your words carefully.”

  Jonah’s expression screwed up some. “A… Forget it.”

  “No, now I’m curious,” I pressed.

  “You advised me to choose carefully, and I’ve decided silence is the best option.”

  “Smart,” I sighed, sipping my lukewarm coffee and pulling a face. “Ugh.”

  “You forgot the sugar, too,” he pointed out belatedly.

  “Why do you know how I take my coffee?” I asked as I got up. I dumped a spoonful of sugar into the mug before taking a handful of ice from the freezer and dropping the cubes into the mug instead of throwing it into the microwave. Considering I was already chilly, it didn’t really make sense, but it was what I wanted. “Never mind, I don’t really care.”

  “There’s not much to do around here,” Jonah murmured before adding under his breath, “and at least I don’t know how you shower.” I spat my coffee and luckily most of it ended up back in my mug. Most of it. He looked at me exasperatedly. “What? I like to watch people.”

  “So I hear,” I mumbled as I wiped my chin off and then proceeded to dry my hand of coffee spittle with a napkin.

  “Even I know where to draw the line though,” he insisted.

  “Sure,” I patronized, setting my mug down and pulling an elastic from my wrist. I pulled my hair back and wound it around until a truly messy bun was balled securely at the back of my head. When I turned, he was watching me—it was all he did half the time—and made a peculiar face. “I’m getting really tired of asking ‘what’ every time you scrunch your nose at me.”

  “So don’t.”

  “Be serious,” I muttered, and he just smirked in response. Asshole.

  “I just don’t know why your hair’s like that,” Jonah admitted after a minute.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I grumbled and picked up my coffee to go upstairs and get ready for work.

  “What?” he snapped after me and, despite the fact that he didn’t exactly emit footstep sounds, I could feel him following me. It was creepy. Not to mention annoying. “It was just a question.”

  “A question I get from almost everyone.”

  “Only almost?”

  “Shut up,” I groaned as I entered my bedroom and circled to the master bathroom. “Um, excuse you.”

  He blinked as if he hadn’t just almost followed me into the bathroom. “What was that?”

  “I thought you knew where to draw the line,” I said before I slammed the door in his face. I rolled my eyes and washed my face, glancing up from the wet washcloth to see his ghostly figure behind me in the mirror.

  In spite of myself, I shrieked.

  In spite of himself, he laughed.

  “Do you mind?!” I shouted, whirling and swinging the wet washcloth at him like a flail. It passed through his head with a barely noticeable warp to his facial features. He arched one sharp eyebrow at me, and I could only think once again that he was so lucky he was already dead.

  “You’re not doing anything…,” he paused considerately, “…important.”

  “You mean with fluids?” I said with the intention of grossing him out. It didn’t seem to work. “Go. Away.”

  “How many times are you going to tell me to go away?” Jonah wondered idly as he sat on the counter. The span of marbled countertop was meager, but he wasn’t solid, so he sat on my makeup tray without really sitting on it at all. Yet somehow he didn’t slide through the cabinets, which made very little sense to me. “Well?”

  “Are you levitating?”

  “A little,” he admitted.

  “Hmph,” I scoffed softly before shrugging and reaching through his hip for my concealer. He looked aghast, but it was put-on and I ignored him, dotting the cosmetic on my fingertip before beginning to paint my face.

  He watched silently before mumbling, “You don’t need that, you know.”

  I gave him a withering look. “Aren’t you princely.”

  “You know, any other young lady might have swooned.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I noted. “Any other ‘young lady’ would have likely hightailed it by now. Unless they’re as broke as I am, in which case they would have glared at you, too.”

  “Things have certainly changed.”

  “From what? The glory of house angel days?”

  “From when ladies were delicate and gentlemen were…”

  “Well?”

  “…Not.”

  “I don’t know, you seem relatively delicate to me,” I pointed out. “And a dick, simultaneously. Tough to pull off.”

  “So you don’t like the brooding Victorian ghost,” he concluded. “Fine. I get it. What do you like?”

  Why’s he trying to earn my favor? “I’m not interested in your ghost penis—go away.”

  His brows rose. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

  “I don’t like bullshit. And you’re still bullshitting me.”

  Jonah stared at me for a long time. I could feel it. He did that a lot and it aggravated me, but I had decided across the span of the past three days that I preferred his blatant staring to not knowing where he was. That being because, typically, the absence was temporary and he couldn’t seem to understand that showing up behind me in a mirror, popping out of the wall I was approaching, or literally appearing out of thin air directly in front of me was not the way to get me to like him.

  That was the one thing I had on him. For whatever reason, he apparently wanted me to like him. Or want him. Or something. It was weird and I was highly aware of it.

  I drew on my eyeliner with a steady hand and kept my eyelids down until it dried, screwing the top back on and setting it aside before applying a few coats of mascara and calling it a day. Jonah was looking at me again when I turned to look at him. “Doesn’t hurt, does it?” I asked rhetorically in response to his earlier statement that I didn’t need it.

  Jonah smiled and exhaled a little in a gust meant to mirror a half-laugh. It was one of the first genuine expressions I’d seen on him since he’d arrived, using the term loosely. “It doesn’t.”

  • • •

  Three days earlier.

  “Oh, my god,” I gasped, clutching my chest as the distinct sounds of shattering glass erupted from all sides. “Oh, my god. Oh, my god.”

  “God has nothing to do with this,” Mirror Man noted vaguely, looking around at the pandemonium unfolding all around us. “What are you doing?”

  I was currently hurling whatever I could grab onto and easily lift at my computer and missing by spans of inches. As I shotput a copy of Red Dragon, I shouted, “Do something,” at him above the noise, the black bile bubbling from my laptop continuing to slither off the edge of the coffee table to the floor.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asked, seeming entirely unbothered by the situation.

  “Something! Clearly!”

  “This isn’t my fault.”

  “Oh, well whose is it then?!” I half-screeched.

  “Yours. Kind of.”

  My gaze had slipped to the computer screen, and the shadow figure in the video was flickering past the edges of the panel, bending out of the two-dimensional surface. “Mine?” I repeated, a faint tremor entering my voice. This is
really happening. I’m not dreaming. I was right.

  “More than mine anyway,” he confirmed unhelpfully.

  “Wh-Why?”

  “You're in her house,” he said with a dispassionate shrug, “and she's made it pretty clear she wants you gone.”

  “Who does?!” I demanded, frustrated tears stinging my eyes even as I swiped them furiously away. “And what... N-Nevermind, just make it—her—go away!”

  “It’s not that easy,” he told me impatiently. Even as the wind from outside began whipping through the smashed windows and sending my papers and hair all over the place, every aspect of him stayed completely in place.

  “Then what is?” I demanded spitefully. “There has to be something.”

  Mirror Man stared at me for a long moment and sighed, glancing toward the specter emerging from the computer. “Do you have salt?”

  I threw a teary, but still withering glance his way. “Salt?”

  “Salt,” he repeated. “Table salt. Sea salt. Whatever.”

  “Of course I have salt,” I muttered. “But—“

  “Go get it.” When I didn’t move immediately, he punctuated his order with a stiff, “Now.”

  I hurried past the armchair to the dining room and snatched the salt shaker off the table, bringing it back to him. He shook his head. “You have to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  He scoffed and nodded for me to face the computer. “Dump some into your hand and cast it at her.”

  “Isn’t this exorcist stuff?” I asked fretfully. “Don’t I have to say some kind of prayer or biblical verse?”

  “Do those things mean anything to you?” he asked.

  “No, but—“

  “Then they won’t do anything for you,” he murmured as if I were oblivious. “Cast it.”

  “What would she do to me if I didn’t?” I asked.

  “Ask me that later when she’s not trying to do things to you.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered, dumping the salt into my hand and tossing it forward. It rained down on the computer, but nothing changed. “There. Satisfied?”

  “You have to believe it’ll work,” he instructed.

  “I don’t even know what it’s supposed to do! Also, I’m in a pretty stellar state of panic right now, so—“

  “You’re going to panic harder when she gets out of your computer. Get a move on.”

  I nearly bit through my lip as I poured another half-handful of salt and threw it to no avail. The third time, I focused hard out of sheer desperation even as I felt like a complete idiot. Screwed my eyes shut. Hurled the salt forward. The whole nine yards.

  I’d started to open my eyes when a cold hand was clamped over them, and an unearthly screeching erupted in front of me. I tried to pry the hand from my face because I wanted to see the thing die, but it didn’t give. The sound became gradually less severe and more gurgled and wet, dispelling entirely within a few moments. It was only then that the hand, which had to belong to the apparition I now suspected was Bethaline’s Jonah, dropped from my face.

  The coating of black bile remained slathered across my laptop, coffee table, and the floor. The screen was blue. Everything around us was still broken. A clump of the black stuff squelched as it slid off the table.

  “That’s disgusting,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “I thought stuff like that disappeared when the ghost disappeared.”

  “Isn’t that Hollywood-convenient,” he said dryly.

  “As if salt isn’t Hollywood-convenient… Why did she show up here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “As I said, she lived here once.”

  “She did? Then who—wait a second, if you haven’t been doing all this stuff, what are you doing lurking around?” I accused.

  “Because I live here currently,” he said with a sharp roll of his eyes as he meandered out of the soiled living room toward the kitchen.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” I pointed out with a heavy dose of snark, following him into the kitchen as glass crunched under my shoes. “What do you mean you ‘live’ here? Why didn’t you just say so instead of being super creepy and skulking around in dark hallways? Not to mention running my damn car off the road, why would—“

  “Running your ‘damn car’ off the road?” he repeated pretentiously.

  “Yeah, and giving me a bald spot to boot.”

  A faint smirk graced his thin lips at that. “I’m not the cause of your wreck or your bald spot.”

  “Yeah, right,” I murmured, not buying that for a second now that I was getting a better grasp of what had been going on. “Why did the salt kill that thing?”

  “Enough,” he groaned, dropping into a chair. One of my dining room chairs. Like he owned the place.

  “Don’t ‘enough’ me,” I snapped. “Acting like you know me. Please.”

  “We’ve been roommates for the past few weeks, I have some idea of who you are,” he pointed out.

  My eyes narrowed and I felt half-responses push against my throat, but none felt strong enough to bear. Instead, I tipped the other dining chair forward, letting the debris slide off the seat to the floor before I sat down across from him. He watched me intently, and I wondered if he’d forgotten that I could see him for an instant. “Is it dead?”

  He leveled a gaze at me that was slightly more guarded. “She was already dead. Now she's passed on. It was long overdue anyway... But no, the dead apparition is not, in fact, doubly dead.”

  “Can I punch you in the face?” I asked evenly despite the irritation upping my pulse.

  He smirked. “You can try.”

  “What did the salt do exactly?” I asked again.

  “Made the thing go away,” he said in a dumbed down tone.

  “But how?” I groaned, crossing my arms over my chest.

  He sighed. “Salt purifies. Isn’t that what human lore has persisted across the span of time?”

  “I suppose, but when I think of salt, I think of sodium chloride. Or that it goes well on bland food. I don’t think about exorcisms.”

  “This was far from an exorcism,” he murmured.

  “What happens if I throw salt at you?”

  “I’ll throw it back.” He grimaced my way. “And that’s far from a thank-you for helping you.”

  “I helped myself. I had to do it, remember?”

  “You would have never known how had I not told you,” he murmured, folding his hands under his chin. “We did it together. You just had to do the throwing.”

  His elbows pressed against the shard-coated table and I watched the glass pieces sink into nothing. His presence simply folded over what was already there like a fog. “What exactly are you?”

  He leveled a scolding gaze my way. “That’s an impertinent question.”

  “Okay, what’s your name?” I hedged, wanting to confirm what little I thought I knew.

  He skipped a beat before saying, “You already know my name. Jonah.”

  “So you are, in fact, Bethaline’s little friend?”

  Jonah smiled at that. “I suppose I am.”

  “So… What else are you?”

  He laughed harshly. “You think that’s less impertinent than your first phrasing?”

  “No. I just want to know,” I countered.

  He seemed to measure his words. “I’m an entity. Obviously.”

  “Now, was that so hard?”

  Jonah rolled his eyes. “Terribly. You ask too many questions.”

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know I’ve run out for the time being,” I muttered, standing up and looking around. “Any chance you’re a spirit of cleaning?”

  “Not a single chance,” he mumbled, putting his feet up on the table.

  “Figures. And get your damn feet off my table,” I snapped.

  He glared. “What does it matter? I’m basically transparent at this point.”

  “It’s impertinent. I’d think a proper ghost like you would get that,” I said as I
moved my chair out of the way and then dragged the table out from under his feet. His legs remained inclined on nothing but air. I really started to hate him then. “Get out of here so I can clean up this mess.”

  “You sound like you blame me for this.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why ask?” I demanded as I hunted for a broom and dustpan, tugging out the trash bin from under the sink.

  “Because I am, in fact, blameless in this,” he insisted.

  “Your emphasis on your blamelessness makes you look guilty,” I said tiredly. “Seriously, find something to do so I can pick up. And for the record, you could’ve given me a heads-up way sooner than the exact moment I was about to perish by the hands of a gooey, nasty demon.”

  “Ghost.”

  “Piss off.”

  • • •

  The days following were more of the same. I’d snap, he’d condescend, and I’d promptly tell him to get out of my house, which he never did. He was the worst after I tried proclaiming disinterest in the cocky entity haunting my otherwise perfectly normal (cue some severe sarcasm) house. That was when said entity had exhibited extreme interest in me.

  By the time that tense morning of walking past plastic-draped windows and spitting coffee into my mug arrived, I’d been existing in that draftier-than-ever house with that whatever-he-was and dumping coffee or whatever existed in my hands at the time on my shirts more times than I cared to admit.

  More than that, he had no sense of my humanly fragile tolerance for all things frightening, which I’d thought was solid until weird shit started happening to me. While I’d been in the process of dying my hair the day before, he’d surfaced out of the sink basin. When I was picking out clothes that morning, he walked out of the back of the closet. I spent eighty percent of my time on edge and the only reason there was a remaining twenty percent was because there was a chunk of the time that he was in my view. Even then, I was wary because I didn’t quite buy his persona yet.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Jonah, who was lingering in the doorway with his shoulder half-phased through the wood. Snorting softly, I shrugged on a polar fleece and then tugged on my coat, feeling nicely stuffed into a couple layers to combat the November chill. I’d seen a flurry of early snow a few days prior and, frankly, I was appalled although I figured that ultimately this was my fault for moving north and expecting Corolla weather.