Ghost Bully

by Brian Corley

  “Love you.”

  Nic hurried out the door and took the tension in the room with her. Thank god the vision we saw was chemically induced. Max laughed to himself as he absentmindedly picked up around the house.

  “You guys have any eye drops? I’m Nic. I’m an investigator.’ My sister is a cop and doesn’t know what weed smells like.”

  “What kind of weed did you put in there, and how did you do it without either of us noticing?” I asked.

  “This new stuff called Monster’s Ink. The guy said it was a heady high, but Christ on a bike, that shit is strong.”

  “Yeah, but seriously, how did you get it in the smudge?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “Fine, you’re smooth. Got any more?”

  He did. It was really good stuff. We unpacked a couple more boxes and turned in early; it had been a long day.

  If what I’d read in books and seen in movies had anything to say about it, that Saturday was a sign of bad things to come. Of course, if books and movies had more say in my life, I’d probably come home to my sexy vampire girlfriend every night instead of Max.

  We ended up regretting unpacking while high, and had a hell of a time finding anything from the night before, but other than that, we didn’t really see or hear anything unusual for the rest of the weekend. I spent most of Sunday whipping the yard into shape, and we somehow convinced the cable company to come by and activate the line. Monday morning came around like an old friend for once, but it was still hard to get up and face the day.

  “What time did you get to sleep last night?” Max asked, pouring me some coffee as we leaned against the cabinets in the kitchen.

  “I don’t know. I nodded off pretty quickly after I got into bed. Why?” I said, half-growling, taking the mug from Max and downing my first sip of the day.

  I tried to let the caffeine do its work to lift my mood. I was not a morning person, but my job and work ethic required me to be an early riser.

  “Thought I heard you moving stuff around until pretty late,” Max said.

  “Huh, I thought that was you,” I said.

  “Maybe it was one of the neighbors, and just sounded like it was in our house.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “and maybe it was the restless spirit of a broken man inside the house.” The joke was enough to get an early morning laugh out of my roommate. “We need more information. I’ll put that on the to-do list.”

  I wandered over to the far side of the kitchen, rummaged through an open box, and produced a small white board, complete with dry-erase pen, that we had stuck to our refrigerator all through college. I slapped it on our new fridge.

  “Why do you still have that?” Max asked, pouring himself what was likely his third cup of coffee for the morning.

  “For times such as these,” I said, making two squares on the board with the aforementioned pen. I wrote CREATE CHECKLIST next to the first square and then checked it as completed. Slightly below that: INVESTIGATE.

  I went back to my room to grab my stuff for work. Even though it was still dark, it was time to start the day. I searched for my keys, but couldn’t find them where I normally left them on the bedside table. Damn you Monster’s Ink.

  “Hey, have you seen my keys?” I yelled.

  “What?” Max yelled back.

  “My keys, I can’t find my keys.”

  “Have you checked the middle of the kitchen floor? I know how you like to leave things there.”

  “Thanks, I’ll give it a look,” I replied sarcastically, but I did actually check the kitchen.

  Sure enough, there they were, in the exact same spot where I found my wallet. It was plausible that I somehow dropped them earlier and didn’t notice, but for some reason, it still struck me as strange.

  “Max, are you fucking with me?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He would have already been in the kitchen laughing if he did it. I chalked it up to his strong weed and my bad decisions, gripped the keys, and hurried out the door for work.

  I pulled up to the office in my eight-year-old green F-150, grabbed my work badge from the console, and put it on while walking up to the front door.

  The office was a converted warehouse among a park of similar beige warehouses. I worked as an analyst for a medium-sized, esoteric testing lab on the southeast side of town. It was more of a job than a career, but a job paid the mortgage for now. I could always find my calling later.

  Austin was the corporate home where decisions were made, meetings were held, and bills were processed. I walked with purpose to the break room to fill my mug with some palatable free coffee, then on through a maze of dividers to my desk within what could be described as a cube farm. One could easily get lost in such a labyrinth, but after a couple months on the job, I knew enough to get to my cube from the break room.

  Arriving at my desk, I set my coffee down and started my morning routine. My little area was spartan, just a Travis Louie print on the wall to my right, a D20 die for critical decisions left to fate, and an infinity top that I liked to spin during conference calls.

  I had two managers who sat next to each other in an office with actual walls and a door. It was almost soundproof, but faint bits of crying still leaked out of the occasional performance review. I’ve heard it said that no one can serve two masters, but I guess our executive staff decided to give it a try.

  As an analyst, my day started off by booting up the computer and engaging in small talk with my neighbors while consuming as much caffeine as possible. After that, I’d look at spreadsheets and bend data to my will for the rest of the day with a break for lunch and a couple trips to the break room here and there. I was good at my job, and productivity was up significantly for the entire team since I started.

  I was staring at my screen, distracted by everything that went down over the weekend, when Hank leaned against the entrance to my cube. Hank was the type of guy whose clothes looked like they were pulled from the hamper right before work, having passed a “clean enough” sniff test. He was funny though, and had worked at the company for years.

  “How’s the new house?” he asked.

  “Yeah Jonah, how’s the house?” Debra asked as she walked over to join Hank. Debra was a sweet lady in her forties who let me know she was a Wiccan and natural gardener within about thirty seconds of meeting her. She always dressed well but made a point of buying her clothes secondhand as a strike against consumerism while doing her part to reduce waste and save the environment.

  I filled Hank and Debra in on the weekend and thought it would be fun to start with the mundane and build to the spectacular ghost sighting and cracking of glass.

  Hank looked entertained, but Debra seemed concerned.

  “Wait,” Hank said, “how could you not know someone died in the house. Wouldn’t it come up in any type of query? You Googled it, right?”

  “Yeah, I just didn’t find anything on it,” I lied.

  Hank grabbed his phone, unlocked it, and pulled up a search. Jeez, Hank, let it go.

  Debra fidgeted with her fingernails and, after a few false starts, said, “I’m afraid you may have stirred up the spirit rather than moving him on this weekend. What kind of ceremony did you use?”

  Ceremony? No one said anything about a ceremony.

  “Uh, we used this technique we found online,” I lied again.

  “Oh good,” she said, “most people just half-ass it and wave around the smoking bundle like idiots. You have to clean and bless. Never can be too careful.”

  “Oh my god, look at this,” Hank said and motioned us over to share his handheld screen.

  It was outtake video of a local news team interviewing Ms. Keller shortly after the discovery of the body. So it was her. I thought back to Allison’s description of the scene—the smell, the state of the corpse.
You could tell Ms. Keller was excited to be on TV; however, after a few moments of recounting the details, the focus changed to a cop rushing out from inside the house and retching into the flower bed. One of his compatriots calmly walked over to console him only to have his shoes covered in another volley of sick. That officer’s face turned a shade of green right before he shared his breakfast with the world.

  A crime-scene investigator emerged from the house and casually pulled a protein bar from her jacket to snack on while she observed the incident unfolding in front of her.

  “Ew, right on his shoes,” Hank said as he slid the toggle back and replayed the moment. “Look, look! Right there, you can see when he realizes what’s about to happen, but he can’t move in time. How did you not see this, Jonah? It’s like the top twenty hits for the search. Look how many news outlets picked it up.”

  “Did you notice the one lady eating?” I said and laughed, trying to shift the focus away from my poor research instincts.

  Our bosses appeared from behind their closed office door. “Alright, you three, we’re not paying you to joke around and look at each other’s phones. Get back to work.”

  The door shut as quickly as it opened. Hank turned on his heel and marched back to his desk.

  “Congratulations on the house, Jonah,” Debra said. “Things will probably settle down, but let me know if they don’t. Seriously, I mean it.”

  She pulled her hair behind her ear as she walked back to her desk.

  “OK, will do … thanks,” I replied.

  I spun back around and stared blankly at my screen for a while until the ping of a new message came across a few minutes later. I clicked on my inbox; it was from Max. The title read FW: WILLARD HENSCH. Nic was able to dig up a few things on our guy and sent them along to her brother. She included a few links, the first of which was to the interview we saw. The second was to the obituary from the Austin paper, which provided some details from Willard’s life.

  Another link pulled up a search related to social media posts: one of him complaining about kids on his lawn, another about how loud the cars were a few streets away, and a few other posts about loud kids again. Apparently, the guy liked himself some quiet, and not much else.

  Nicole summarized everything she found in a brief commentary: only child, survived by his parents, lived alone, and was an accountant. He lost his job, couldn’t keep up with the payments on his house, and decided to end it all. Sad stuff.

  The last link was from an image search and pulled up a cache of pictures that perfectly matched my mind’s eye of someone who would go by the name Willard.

  I know that’s not exactly fair. People can’t help what they’re named, and you should never judge a book by its cover—but this time the mental shortcut applied. Willard was in his late twenties or early thirties. Narrow-faced, slight of frame, and looked to be someone who maintained a well-regulated army of cats. Thankfully for Max and me, the last part wasn’t true as we were both allergic. One picture featured Willard sitting in an antique chair at an angle, but looking straight into the camera, perfect posture, hair cemented in place with a healthy dose of gel. A feebly regal look of a fragile but proud young man looking to present his best side to the world. A motivational poster hung behind him emblazoned with an Einstein quote: “I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious.”

  I turned my focus back to work, pulling up a spreadsheet and downloading raw data from the night before. I didn’t entirely hate this type of work, but it wasn’t all that interesting. I summoned my inner statistician Conan and went to battle with numbers, popping in my earbuds and focusing on the screen before me. An ’80s greatest hits channel motivated my spreadsheet manipulation.

  It wasn’t too long before I received another notification from Max. I pulled up his email to reveal a Photoshopped picture of Willard. Instead of sitting in an antique chair, he was sitting on top of a pyramid of wallets and keys, and the motivational poster now said, “IF YOU’RE CURIOUS ABOUT WHERE YOUR WALLET AND KEYS ARE, I HAS THEM. IS MY TALENT. MY PASSION. MY PRECIOUS.”

  I breathed out a quiet laugh and replied to Max’s note: “Good one, but why does Edgar Allan Poe talk like Gollum as an Internet cat?”

  The rest of the day passed slower than most, and I couldn’t stay focused with all the things going on at home. I left the office that evening with some of the excitement of new home ownership still intact, but now the dread of something a little more sinister had woven its way through.

  The weird thing was, I kind of resented the ghost for ruining what should be a great experience for me, and an indignation began to replace the fear.

  Chapter 3

  My truck’s headlights swung around the side of the house as I pulled into the driveway; it was getting dark. As I shut the truck’s door, I heard Ms. Keller’s voice from behind our shared, overgrown hedge. I made a mental note to clean it up with some garden shears next weekend and tried to locate where she was.

  “Hello, I’m over here,” she said as she waved through the hedge and walked over to my yard.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I don’t want to bother y’all while you’re settling in, but I felt bad about delivering such dour news and ruining your big day. That was so careless. I shouldn’t have been so tacky. Anyway, I baked you this blackberry cobbler. Hope you like it.”

  “Wow,” I said, “thank you so much. You didn’t have to go to all that trouble, and honestly, I’m glad you told me. Always better to know, I think.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it. It’s just what we do in this neighborhood. Y’all enjoy that cobbler now, and I’ll talk to you later.”

  I waved to Ms. Keller and made my way toward the house as I balanced the dish and fumbled for the keys. Unlocking the front door, I opened it to a living room shrouded in darkness. My smile waned as I used my free hand to search for a light switch. Maybe it was the situation, maybe it was years of scary movies and horror fiction, but I was a little creeped out.

  No luck finding the switch, so I eased inside and made another mental note to unpack the voice-enabled lighting system. Although it was dark, I could still make out some large shapes I assumed to be furniture.

  Furniture or monsters? Furniture.

  I knew there was another switch by the kitchen. I just needed to find it. From the back of the house, I heard a creak.

  Is it getting darker? Feels darker.

  I paused, listening. Nothing.

  I moved ahead slowly, protecting the cobbler, and deftly navigated my way around the couch and a few random boxes.

  Another creak. I stopped and listened, quiet. I could make out a few outlines in the dark, but nothing out of the ordinary, and thankfully, nothing moving toward me.

  Probably just the house settling.

  My heart was bouncing around inside my chest.

  How long am I going to be creeped out by my own house?

  As I moved again, I heard the echo of footsteps from one of the bedrooms—no, not an echo …

  “Max?” I called out.

  I stood stone-still, looking into the inky black of the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

  “Max!”

  I tried to control the seemingly irrational fear that someone was in the house with me. If someone was, I might as well will it to be my best friend, right?

  No response.

  “Hello? Is someone here?”

  Good night, did I really just say that? Do I want to find myself in a horror film?

  Silence.

  As swiftly and quietly as I could, I moved to where I thought the light switch would be, feeling for obstacles and balancing the precious baked cargo as I looked for something coming through the gloom. I made it to the wall, reached for the switch, and flipped it on to reveal an empty kitchen and living room still littered with unpacked boxes.

  I set the cobbler
down on the kitchen counter and worked through a breathing exercise. Thank god for the thirty-second meditation app. Freaking out wasn’t going to help. Once I had my breath back under control, I turned and started to explore the house. Switching on a lamp as I moved through the den, I walked carefully until I stood in front of the door to my room.

  It was slightly ajar.

  My hand lightly touched the door and thrust it forward. The air in the room was tense, cold. It felt as though a set of eyes were peering out at me, breath held … waiting in the darkness. Hoping to exploit any wrong move.

  I fumbled my hand over the wall until I found the light switch. A flick and the light burst forth to reveal a neatly made bed. The closet was wide open.

  Nothing there.

  Suddenly, I heard a noise from the front of the house and turned on my heel to face it.

  Fear hardened to a kernel of courage, and I bolted to the living room to discover a shadow standing in the door.

  Electric needles coursed through my veins and electricity tingled and forked its way across my skin as a voice cracked the silence.

  What are you doing here?

  I steeled myself. My adrenaline spiked as my fight-or-flight response kicked in. I had nowhere to run, so I would have to stand my ground and confront the nameless enemy at my door.

  “Since when do you beat me home from work?”

  Thank god, it’s just Max.

  Funny how people adjust to situations. One moment, I was prepared to take on a faceless intruder, perhaps an evil phantasm, hell-bent on taking my life and stealing the essence of my immortal spirit. The next—dessert.

  “Hey man, free cobbler.” I pointed in the direction of the kitchen, relieved my soul was safe for another night, then thumbed the direction of the house next door. “Our neighbor, Ms. Keller, brought it over.”

  “Outstanding, I’m starving!” Max replied, walking to the kitchen at a pace just short of a jog. Sorting through drawers with one hand while undoing plastic wrap with the other, he settled on the most ridiculous implement available to cut into the pie-crusted blackberry treat. Pie crust, not bread. The best way to make cobbler.