by Zuni Chopra
I marched out across the lot once again, the afternoon sun staring me right in the eye, offended at the various insults I had offered it this morning. Jerking my head suddenly to the left, I saw a silhouetted shadow lurking in the depths of the darkness, waiting innocently by the side of the road for me to waddle over. I felt that fear stick in my throat again, then swallowed it painfully down. She’s done nothing to you, I told myself. She’s just a girl. A little girl. If anything, you’ve been nasty to her. I looked down at my wriggling toes, suddenly overcome with shame. How could I have behaved that way with her? She was just trying to help! And I was no one to get caught up in all this occult Ouija board nonsense. I pinched the bridge of my nose and inhaled sharply. Squaring my shoulders, I walked right up to her.
‘I’m sorry I was scared of you. Thank you. For this morning.’
She yanked her oddly limp neck up to stare at me. For the first time, I saw something change in her eyes. Something that now whispered of shock, confusion and … was that … fear?
‘What?’
‘I said I’m sorry. You freaked me out a little, but that’s no reason to behave so pompously. I’m really sorry.’ I stuck out my hand. It lay there untouched, waving in the breeze like a lonely cactus.
‘But … but … I spat in your coffee!’
I snorted. ‘If you’d kicked dirt in my eye when I tried to help you, I’d spit in your coffee too.’
‘No, no, no. Oh gosh, this isn’t right …’ She reached up to pull at her oddly red hair. She seemed aggravated, passionate, filled with life, not at all the girl she had been a moment ago.
‘What?’ I spluttered, slightly stung at her reaction and growing tired of whatever game she was playing. I just wanted to spit out my spiel and head home.
She spun around sharply, as though struck by a gust of wind. Her eyes were wide and golden, her fingers clenched against each other so that they grew white as too-bright sunlight. ‘Why?’ she cried out, her rasping voice rising to a scream. ‘Why can’t you just be afraid?’
She staggered away from me, running around the building until she was out of sight.
I very nearly turned away with a scoff and eye roll – the standard reaction, really – when I thought of how young and child-like she had seemed the moment I’d mustered the courage to speak to her. With a sigh, I followed.
I found her soon. She was curled up in between the garbage bins, rubbing her wet, furiously yellow eyes on her filthy dress. She looked up sulkily when I approached.
‘How did you even find me?’
‘I just followed the sniffling.’
‘Typical,’ she muttered, hugging herself tighter, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘I can’t even hide from a human.’
‘Look,’ I began, indignant now, because I believed I’d really no fault in all of this and if I had, I’d accounted for it, ‘I apologized. Besides, what did you want me to do? Scream and flee?’ I laughed.
She glared up at me, the air around her trembling at her sudden emotion. ‘Yes.’
My smile faltered. ‘What?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I expect. Well, that’s what my parents expect anyway. I’m the only one in my year that hasn’t completed fieldwork, and if I don’t graduate, I can’t join my parents on the council! It’s what they’ve always wanted for me, and—’
‘Whoa, whoa! Slow down!’
She took in a slow breath. It didn’t seem to change her.
‘Which school do you go to?’
‘Harvard Annual Undergraduate. Their coveted Nightly Terrors and Evil Diploma Programme. And I have to graduate. If I don’t, like I said, I can’t—’
‘Hang on. I’ve never heard of that school … that programme, whatever. What did you say it was called again?’
‘You’ve never heard of Harvard?’
‘Just say it again!’
She huffed, annoyed at me for the constant interruptions.
‘Harvard Annual Undergraduate Nightly Terrors and Evil Diploma Programme!’
I blinked.
‘H.A.U.N.T.E.D. … Haunted?’ I gasped, feeling the familiar chill in my blood.
‘Hmmm … I guess it does spell out haunted! Gosh. Never thought of that before. You are smart.’
She slunk against the wall again.
‘I should never have tried to haunt you. I should have gone for a dumb one. I shouldn’t have overplayed it.’
She muttered some more, but I wasn’t listening. One thing stuck in my mind: that this girl, whoever she was, went to a school full of ghosts. And that must mean she was … she had to be…
I began to back away, real slow, left foot first, like I’d learnt in bear survival class when I was nine.
‘You … are a ghost?’
‘How rude!’ she yelled at once, startling me enough that I stood frozen in my place. ‘Just like a human to say something insensitive like that! It’s the twenty-first century. Educate yourself.’
I nearly laughed, then held back lest I offend her further. ‘Okay, so what are you?’
‘A spirit.’
‘Ooh. Should’ve known.’
She didn’t respond.
‘And you are worried you won’t graduate?’
‘Obviously.’
That did it. ‘Spirit’ or not, I wasn’t about to take this much lip from a twelve-year-old.
‘I’d watch your tone. From what you’ve just told me, it sounds like you need me.’
She stood up suddenly, scowling. ‘I don’t need you. I could make your life hell if I wanted to.’ She swallowed. ‘But you’d have to be scared of me.’
‘Which I’m not,’ I snapped.
She looked down, wiping away a smudge of black on her cheek, trying to hold in her snivels. ‘Which you’re not,’ she repeated, dull and hollow as an empty well.
Guilt, an emotion I’d grown exasperated of, gnawed at my insides.
‘Come now, I’m sure it’s not that bad.’
Gosh. Me sounding motherly. Never thought I’d live to see the day.
‘But it is!’ she wailed, not able to hold back any more. ‘My mum insists I join her and dad on the council someday – the H.A.U.N.T.E.D. council. It’s the greatest honour of our world. You don’t get that without even graduating, let me tell you.’
‘Your world,’ I murmured, the sensation of having opened Tutankhamen’s tomb rising in me. ‘What does that mean? How did you enter this “world”?’
‘I don’t remember,’ she responded, now eyeing a patch of mould on the rain-splattered gravel. ‘My parents say we were in an accident. Look, how does that matter anyway?’ She began to pout, tears welling up like blood clots, tired of me and my ignorance.
‘It’s going to be fine. You can do this. Listen, how is your … er … fieldwork judged?’
‘Scare someone. Record their scream. That’s it.’
‘Brilliant! Okay, so I’ll scream. Do you have a camcorder or…’
She laughed for the first time. It filled her face with this sudden glow, as though her true heart was shining through her. ‘You can’t just pretend it, silly! They have ways to check if it’s real or not.’
‘Okay, okay,’ I conceded, chuckling. ‘Then I’ll just have to help you scare someone!’
She brightened up at this. She leapt up, took my hand, gripped it tightly until her own icy touch was warm, and skipped down the parking lot with me in tow.
Where were we going?
I’d no idea.
‘This is ridiculo—’
‘Sshhh!’ she hissed, frantically batting her hand in front of my glazed eyes to shut me up.
I was amazed at her. She’d picked our first victim, and she’d picked wrong.
As if a fat, beer-smelling, scruffy middle-aged man would be scared of a homeless-looking child bursting into his apartment.
‘He’ll scream, I know he will!’ she mumbled gleefully.
‘There’s a difference between screaming and yelling,’ I shot back. ‘He’ll kick us both o
ut the minute he finds you!’
The man in question slumbered into the room, his stray hand (the one that wasn’t holding a half-empty can) knocking over whatever it could find.
She leapt out a second too early, a minute too late. ‘YAAAH!’ she cried out, stomping her tiny foot on the wooden floor.
The man stared at her a moment, then burst into laughter. ‘Kids these days!’ he cried, wiping his eyes on his filthy shirtsleeve.
She paused, unsure how to continue, glancing back at me for advice.
‘You’re not … scared of me?’ she mumbled uneasily.
‘Oooh, I’m terrified!’ he giggled, pretending to back away like I’d done that morning. ‘I’m getting no sleep tonight, that’s for sure!’
She scowled, on the verge of throwing a tantrum.
And … there’s my cue.
‘Sasha! What are you doing in here? I told you to pick up the mail, sweetie,’ I trilled.
‘Sasha?’
‘I am so sorry, sir. She must’ve wandered off while I was taking out the trash.’
‘Oh, not to worry! She’s absolutely adorable.’
At this, even I stared at him. He rubbed his whiskery chin, eyes like matches in the shadowy glow of his apartment.
‘I was a kid once. I know how it is. That’s a brilliant costume, by the way!’
‘Oh! Er … yes, thank you. Now, I’d hate to intrude any longer, and we really must be going. Come on, Sasha.’ I gripped her by the arm and dragged her and her grumbles out the front door.
‘I can’t believe you called me Sasha.’
‘Well, what’s your name?’
‘Liz.’
I snorted. ‘Like that’s any better.’
She smacked my arm. ‘Well, I bet you’re called Eva or something like that!’
‘What’s wrong with Eva?’
She smirked in triumph.
‘That’s it,’ I growled, rising from the trash can, a half-eaten cheese bagel sticking to my thinning chestnut ponytail. ‘We cannot keep doing this.’
‘But I was almost there!’ whined Liz, sticking out an ashy lip and glaring at me as though her third failure was my fault.
The first had laughed in her face.
The second froze, then took off running in the other direction.
And the third, a music-obsessed garbage collector, had just nearly run her over.
‘I’ll bet it’s ’cause he was scared of me!’
‘No, it’s ’cause he didn’t even see you, silly!’
She stuck out a blood-red tongue at me, trying her hardest to stay positive.
But I was losing energy.
The sun had dipped in the flaming orange sky, a gumdrop melting into the horizon.
It would be dark soon. And we’d be nowhere.
Literally. In the middle of nowhere.
The road was filthy with the dead weight of its travellers. The trees were cracked and broken in so many places that one, I was sure, would fall over onto us. And my thighs cramped angrily at the distance we’d just come.
‘Look Liz, I—’
‘One more!’ she begged, suddenly more fearful than I’d ever seen her. Her eyes had glazed over, yet she was looking right at me. She clutched at her torn dress with mucky hands, mouth hanging open. ‘Just one more and then … I’ll leave you alone.’
I swallowed the knot caught in my throat and nodded.
‘Just … think,’ she groaned, pounding her tiny fists into her matted hair. ‘Who’d be most easily scared of a creepy ghost?’
There have, no doubt, been a lot of low points in my life. A lot of times when I looked at my situation and thought, ‘Hell, it can’t get any worse than this.’ Like when I was nineteen, I got locked out of the college dorm for eight hours due to a pious roommate. I don’t want to go into the details, but I did wet my pants. Or that time when I was twenty, and spat out a friend’s homemade birthday cake in front of about a dozen people, including her. She hasn’t called since.
But this, surely – squatting down in a damp bush near an empty church in the late evening, pants rolled up, favourite shirt muddy, and one hundred per cent sober – was as bad as it could go.
So, Liz scuttled forward, chin jutting out like a chipmunk’s, looking like Pink Panther in a dress as she inched towards the front door. She pushed on it slowly, not daring to hope that it’d be open – it was. She gestured me forward like an excited puppy, bouncing from one foot to the other.
Before I could oblige, there was a flurry of movement. For one wild second, I thought an old white bird was caught in the door. The next second, I heard two sets of screams. One was high-pitched, screechy, undoubtedly hers. The other was shrill and angry, like the call of a meerkat. When my vision stopped blurring, they fell on an old, balding man in long white robes screaming his head off before a contorted, hideous, demon-like figure. Or, you know, just Liz.
She glowed with triumph, teeth shining through like moonshine emerging from clouds.
The man clutched at his throat, his eyes watery. Then he started to wave a small stick of metal in her face.
‘Begone, apparition! By the powers vested in me by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I command thee! Free the spirit of thy victim and return to the depths of hell from whence you came!’
Liz, now calmly brushing her hair back, responded, ‘Dude. Chill.’
He went puce, thrusting his crucifix forward, spluttering in her face: ‘Begone, foul demon! Creature of the Devil! Torturer of Souls!’
‘Hey!’ I said, irritated now. ‘That’s just a little girl!’
‘It is … is it … alive?’ he gasped, shaking.
‘Well … no, but that’s no excuse,’ I shot back.
Liz rolled her eyes, bored of the affair already.
He straightened himself up. ‘Then it must go. It must return to the sky from whence it has been banished or lost.’ With a sudden flick of his wrist, he threw water in her face.
She shook her head like a wet dog, shoving him away and yelping.
‘Let’s go, Liz,’ I commanded, dragging her away before either of them had a chance to do more ridiculous things.
She was practically skipping beside me as we started the long walk back to my place, through the gentle fog of the late evening. I didn’t know how far she was coming with me; I didn’t think it polite to ask. I was smiling too, in a way that I hadn’t smiled for years. It was a ‘me’ smile, a smile unaware of and uncaring for an audience. Small and warm, it seemed to guide me in the night like a lamppost in a blizzard.
We were each of us quieter than we’d ever been. Her thoughts, no doubt, were like disoriented firecrackers going off every six seconds. Mine, however, seemed to churn and simmer within themselves, looking for an answer to an unasked question.
Finally, she broke the silence, trilling like a nightingale in the woods.
‘This is fantastic, Eva!’
‘Isn’t it?’ I responded, cheerily.
‘I passed the test!’
‘You did!’
‘I worked three years for this!’
‘And you did it!’
‘I’m graduating!’
‘You are!’
‘And now Mum will be proud!’
‘I’m sure she will.’
‘And then … I’ll be joining … the council,’ she trailed off, her smile shrinking like shorts in the wash.
‘You don’t sound thrilled.’
She looked at her palms, grey and scarred, rubbing her fingers against each other as though trying to feel her own skin. ‘I’m not.’
I blinked, like a too-fat fairy godmother who’s just sat on her wand and snapped it in half.
‘Liz, I need to know. Do you want to be on the council?’
She bit the inside of her cheek, sucking it in so that her face sunk around her.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then why don’t you do something else?’
‘There is nothing else! And you don’t
get it!’
‘Why isn’t there anything else?’ I murmured, trying to be patient.
‘Either you join the council or you’re a regular spirit, haunting people.’
‘So haunt people.’
She turned to me, something more than anger in her eyes, something like a tortured sadness, a hidden soul begging, pleading, betraying that it was not, and had never been, ready to die.
‘I’m not evil!’ she cried, tears crawling through her flesh. ‘I’m not!’
‘No, Liz,’ I responded, something within me knowing I was true, ‘you’re not.’
‘And the council,’ she gasped, sucking in the universe. ‘The council is full of the best and brightest and snobbiest. And I won’t ever be one of them. I’m not my parents, cold and precise and miserable. And you know what?’ Her flaming carmine hair, the very hair that had drawn me to her seemingly decades ago, began pulsing once more in the moonlight.
‘I don’t want to be.’
She began to shimmer suddenly, all of her, twinkling like the heavens in the eye of God. I cried out, frozen in place. She stared open-mouthed around her, looking at the world like it were new, like the light trailing through her fingers was not her own.
‘Liz!’ I burst out, falling back onto the ground as the soft yet powerful wind around me seemed to sweep her up higher.
Her eyes filled to the brim with tears and stars and galaxies.
‘I see white and blue and silver.’
‘S-silver?’
‘I see the clouds. All around me. Sparkles and orange and faded sea blue. It’s dawn, Eva. It’s dawn and there are clouds and…’
She gasped softly, gentler than the fall of the last autumn leaf.
‘Sails. Great, billowing, ivory sails. Coming towards me.’