The actual reason he’s pissed, if I were to guess, is because of Christmas morning. He and the kids couldn’t wake me and had to go about the morning ritual sans mommy.
I get it. He had a perfect fucking family, and Christmas was magical. Well, the kids are almost teenagers. They don’t need mommy to get up and watch them open their presents. If I want to sleep in a little on a day off, then who the hell is Eric to judge?
He says I have a problem, and that I should talk to someone about losing my dad. I do have a problem, but it’s not the death of my loser father. It’s finding him in my house, breathing his poisonous tobacco, dragon smoke all over my life.
December 30
Everyone’s avoiding the living room. They don’t consciously realize he’s there, haunting our house, but they all feel it on some level. The TV only plays old, black and white shows and movies. Every channel is monopolized by the monochromatic dead. Kyle and Georgie don’t even bother with it.
Marla won’t step in there. She’s abandoned her dog bed and sleeps on the cold tile beneath the kitchen table. Even passing through the living room on our way out for walks makes her fur stand on end. She growls and yips in the direction of the couch, at that taunting, invisible specter.
Eric keeps complaining about drafts and insulation. He goes on and on about getting new windows, not realizing that the chill is emanating from my father’s rotten ghost.
January 2
New Year’s was a shit show. It started off well enough. We stayed in the kitchen, playing board games and listening to music. We ate cheese and crackers, and drank Pepsi and champagne. There was even an unspoken agreement to pretend that the living room didn’t exist. I was perfectly happy with that.
Around midnight Eric decided he wanted to watch the ball drop on the big TV. Georgie and Kyle seconded him. I nervously assented and we adjourned to the living room.
It was cold, and wreaked of smoke. Kyle’s nose crinkled in disgust, and everyone’s mood dropped three notches after crossing the threshold.
Eric turned on the TV. It went straight to a twilight zone rerun, the one where the last guy on earth loses his glasses and can’t read all the books. Dad’s favorite.
Eric fought with the remote and the cable box for two minutes before finally bringing up the New Year’s countdown. When the camera moved away from the gathered crowd and came to focus on Ryan Seacrest, in lieu of the late Dick Clark, the signal wavered sending ripples of static down the screen.
I turned to look at the couch. As I expected, an angry puff of smoke manifested in the air. My dead father was throwing a temper tantrum because he wanted The New Year’s host he was used to.
Eric grumbled about the cable company and the reception, but my eyes were focused on the pulsing ember that floated in mid-air. On the TV, all of Times Square counted down from ten, as did my boys, but all of that was background noise behind the labored moans of my paternal ghost.
Eric joined in with the counting, abandoning his grumbles about the wavy lines obscuring the broadcast.
Five. Four.
The smoke in the air took on familiar features. My father’s miserable, ethereal face stared through me and at the television. He looked the same as he had in life, greedy for misery and pissed at the world.
Three. Two.
The line of smoke that made his mouth twisted into a hateful smirk. A second before midnight the image collapsed into a formless cloud and the lights cut out. Sparks erupted from the power strip, the fixtures, and the sockets.
Georgie let out a cuss word that we ignored, then all was silence. After a few moments Eric chimed in with a sarcastic, “Happy new year?”
I disregarded my husband’s satire. My back was turned to my family. I stared intently at the couch, waiting for the orange dot of my father’s cigarette to appear. When it did I lost my mind.
“Get the hell out!” I screamed. “Get the hell out of my house!”
I can only imagine that Eric and the boys stared at me with slack jawed horror. A hand touched my shoulder, presumably Eric’s. I shrugged it off and continued my verbal assault,
“You can’t have this! You’re dead and this is mine! My house! My family!”
The phantom cigarette vanished and a puff of white smoke hit me in the face. I collapsed to the floor screaming, not words but raw emotion. I kicked and thrashed on the ground, until Eric eventually restrained and calmed me.
He got me into bed, then took the kids aside. He probably gave them some feel good psychobabble about how their mom wasn’t crazy, just emotionally strained.
Soon after that he came to bed. We didn’t speak. He just held me as I cried. The smell of smoke wafted in, but I ignored it and gave myself to my husband’s embrace and to sleep.
January 7
They’re gone. Eric. Kyle and Georgie. Marla. Gone.
Eric kept begging me to get help, especially after New Year’s. I refused. What help was there to be had? Maybe if he meant an exorcist, but no, he wanted me to see a damn shrink, as if talking about my feelings would send the ghost in our living room packing.
It was becoming unbearable. The smoke, the blue flickering light of the TV, the bullshit happy facade of classic television.
I upgraded from Tylenol PM to Ambien. When Eric found out, he lost it. He threatened to leave me and take the kids. I knew he was bullshitting at that point, trying to scare me, but then my fucking father ruined everything. Just like he’d always done.
I know I put the cover on the pills. I know I put them away, but somehow they spilled. Poor Marla gobbled them all up. She died painlessly, but that didn’t make things easier for any of us.
Eric didn’t believe me when I said my father dumped out the pills and killed our dog. He didn’t believe that the dead bastard wanted to take everything from me.
We screamed and fought. Eric made terrible, unfair accusations. He said I was just like my parents, letting the boys find me passed out with pills strewn across the floor. He cried and hit the walls, blaming me for Marla’s death.
I fought back. I hit and screamed and told him it wasn’t my fault, but he wouldn’t listen. All the while my father sat there on my couch, puffing away, watching Wally and Beaver as my life crumbled around me.
That was yesterday. I called Eric today, but he wouldn’t answer no matter how many times I tried. At first, I was cordial. I tried to apologize and pretend everything was normal. Each time his voicemail picked up I grew angrier, until my messages were seething with venom and my voice was hoarse from screaming.
January 25
I’ve stopped avoiding the living room, and I can barely smell the smoke over the gasoline. Andy Griffith is playing on TV. I forgot how much I used to like it. Classic television is really one of the only good memories I shared with dad, so I might as well make the best of it.
It seems Eric and the boys aren’t coming back. Eric says he can’t let me near our sons until I get some help, but what help is there? This is just the hand I’ve been dealt.
I light up a cigarette and sit down next to dear old dad. The gasoline soaks through my jeans. The carcinogenic mist burns my lungs, but pain is a familiar place. Falling back into its embrace almost feels good. It’s like waking up from a dream of normalcy.
I tell my father that I love and forgive him. He places a cold hand on my knee. We both lay our cigarettes down on the couch and wait for the fire to take us home.
The Boy on the Red Tricycle
Dan Szczesny
Nothing prepares you for a ghost.
Not popular culture. Not funerals of your own loved ones. Walk through a thousand cemeteries at midnight, or fire up the Ouija board at a city morgue. You’d think that first time – that first feeling of electric air or the moment that your skin prickles – you’d be ready for it.
But you won’t be. I wasn’t.
It was Christmas. No wait, it may have been a couple days after. Two years ago. I’m not from New England, spent most of my life kicking aro
und the Rust Belt because that’s where the work was in the ‘90s. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were cleaning up their waterfront, burying all those heavy metals that came out of the steel plants, turning lakesides into preservation parks.
Did you know that there’s a wildlife refuge in Buffalo that is actually a giant dump, with mounds of asbestos, arsenic and mercury buried right under nature trails and concession stands? It’s true, look it up. So I moved around. Those outfits were always looking to contract outside guys for cleanup and landscape work, keep the dirty work away from local unions.
You know, not a lot of time for girlfriends or kids. Though yeah, weird how that works when the kid you end up having turns out to be a dead one. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Tech moved in after the steel mills finally dried up so I had to go someplace where technology hadn’t reached and that was New Hampshire, for sure. Don’t feel insulted. I like Manchester, really. It reminds me of those days when I was a kid in south Chicago – all alleys and beat cops. And you know, a few years ago they decided instead of tearing those shit-ugly mills down, they would turn them into condos and cafes.
I mean, honest to God, I never thought that would work. This idea that tourists would come to look at hundred-year-old, leaky, broken warehouse buildings just seemed stupid. But you know what, it worked! Well, I don’t have to tell you something you already know.
Anyway, that’s where I come in. I was hired to do some landscape and cleanup work around Mill No. 5, the one over by the bridge. Pay was shitty, it almost always was, but this time they were putting me up in one of the old brownstones next door, free. So hey, a two-year gig with free rent? That sounded good to me. Trouble was, those brownstones were old and a mess, but I figured as long as the roof didn’t leak and the heat worked I could fix up the rest. I can do drywall and I know a little bit about plumbing, so I moved in.
That was the fall of 2014. I had to hustle to get the place up to code before winter set in. You know, this city needs to do something about its code enforcement. No way those residences were ready for occupancy, not even for a lowlife like me, but I figured the developer must have paid a pretty penny to City Hall to keep that quiet. Anyway, I didn’t care.
I don’t own a lot of stuff. I managed to pick up a couple chairs and some kitchen things like plates and forks from the Salvation Army thrift store. But it wasn’t until I got my bed – just a cheap frame and mattress really – that Denny showed up. Maybe he just waited that long because, I don’t know, a bed made it real, like I was there to stay. That was maybe two months after I moved in.
There was no warm-up or hints ahead of time, no slamming doors or knocks from the attic. That’s all bullshit movie scare tactics.
Here’s what happened.
I’d just come home after a late site visit, long day, filthy. The shower head had been clogged for days so I just went to bed, figured I’d wash the sheets the next day, which was Saturday so I was pretty excited to be able to sleep in. My bedroom sits at the end of a long hall, second floor and for whatever reason the light switch is outside the room, that’s just how they installed them when the place was upgraded, I guess. It was freezing out, this was March remember, and I had four blankets on me.
You know how you get right to that place before sleep when you’re not quite dreaming but not awake either, like you’re standing in a doorway? Like you’re no place yet?
Right at that moment, way in the background of my head I heard it. At first I thought it was a dream, but then I figured if I’m actually thinking it’s a dream it must be real, right? It was the sound of little, squeaking tires against a wood floor. Then a little bell, you know like the kind on a kid’s bike. I remember turning toward the door, but it was super dark and I don’t have a lamp. But a window near my bed faced the street and every so often if a car was coming down off the hill, its headlights would light up the room for a second or two. That’s what happened. That bike got closer and closer, the bell pinged one more time, but then it stopped.
Everything was quiet, and I tried squinting into the darkness but nothing. The air was full of static or something; the hairs on my arm were popping up. Then a car outside rounded the turn, a couple seconds of light flooded the window and the kid was there, right next to my bed, sitting stock still on a red tricycle.
Here’s another thing you don’t realize about ghosts until you actually encounter one. You don’t think it’s a ghost. My mind just didn’t go there. All I could think of at that second was how the hell a little kid got in my house and managed to get upstairs on a tricycle.
“Jesus Christ, kid,” I said. “you nearly gave me a heart attack, what the hell are you doing here?”
I rolled to the other side of the bed and felt my way around to the doorway, and clicked on the light switch. When I turned back to look at him, he hadn’t moved, meaning his back was facing me.
That’s when I started to scream, because the back of the kid’s head – well, it was gone, just a mash of blood and bone. I could see his brain. Like someone had taken a sledgehammer to a five-year-old. And as it turned out, that’s exactly what had happened.
* * *
Why are you looking at me like that? I mean, wouldn’t you go straight to the liquor cabinet after seeing something like that? The kid? Well, I guess my screaming like a little girl must have spooked him, pardon the pun. He just faded away, right there in front of my eyes.
I wasn’t really sure what to do then. I drank a lot, I mentioned that already. I turned all the lights on in the house, which when you think about ghost sightings seems like a weird reaction. Because as it turned out, Denny didn’t care if the lights were on or off, he just wandered around whenever.
Oh yeah, Denny. That was his name. Is his name, sorry. I’m talking about him like he’s dead – he obviously is dead. Never mind. His name is Denny.
I think I sort of went crazy for a while there, trying to figure out should I move? Should I tell anyone? Go to the police? I went online and there’s tons of paranormal groups out there, but nothing really seemed to fit for Denny because he wasn’t hurting me, or doing anything, really. But think about it: he was the victim. Somebody bashed his head in with a hammer. This was just one sad ghost.
Anyway, a couple days later he showed up again. That’s when he told me his name. I was back in my bedroom, only this time with the lights on, just laying in bed reading. No noise, no tires. I felt that electricity in the air again, and looked up. The kid was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, two feet from me. There was an indent in the bed where he was sitting. He was just staring at me.
“What are you reading?” he finally asked. I was so startled at hearing his voice, just a kid voice, young and wispy, that I just tilted the book cover toward him. Honest to God, he rolled his eyes, just like any kid would. “I can’t read that, I’m only five.”
“A novel,” I croaked. “Da Vinci Code.”
He shrugged. We sat there looking at each other for a minute. I swallowed hard, then said. “Can I touch you?”
“Why?”
“I – uh, I, just let me, OK?”
“OK.”
I didn’t know what to expect. I suppose like all the movie ghosts, I figured my hand would just drift right through him. But nope. I cautiously touched first his cheek with a finger, then laid my whole hand on his shoulder. Solid. Flesh and bone. Other than the musty old wool clothes, the kid was an actual solid human. Except of course that he wasn’t.
“Well, you’re real,” I said.
“I’m Denny.”
I reached out my hand and he took it and we shook. “Nice to meet you, Denny. I’m Sam.”
The kid smiled then, and I felt something burst in my brain or my heart, or wherever something is supposed to burst when you fall in love with your own child. That burst and I began to crumble. I honestly had no idea how badly it would all turn out.
* * *
There was the issue of his burst open head of course. Every time Den
ny would turn his head or I’d come up to him from behind, there it was, blood and brain spilling out all over the place. Of course, he was a ghost, so there wasn’t actual blood pouring out or anything. I tried talking to him about it, but every time I brought it up he just winked out of existence. Sometimes he wouldn’t come back for days or weeks and I missed him when he was gone so I stopped asking.
That was a mistake, I see it now. I should have pushed harder to figure out what happened – then maybe I would have had some perspective. Or maybe not. Who knows?
Anyway, Denny started popping in pretty much every day. Sometimes he’d be waiting for me in the morning, other times he’d show up when I got home and was sitting around watching TV. Once, I woke up in the morning to discover him sleeping in bed with me. Well, technically not sleeping as I’d never actually seen him sleep, but he was right there, three inches from my face, eyes open but certainly relaxing. I just shut off the alarm that day, called in sick, put my arm around him and went back to sleep. It was nice.
I started taking quite a few days off, actually. Being a private contractor allowed me some freedom, but really it was just about being with Denny. You know, being a good dad.
This is the part of the story where I suppose it won’t surprise you to learn that my dad was a violent shit? Nah, I’m messing with you. He was fine, no daddy issues for me. Steady job at a bank, always taking me for ice cream and baseball games. Good advice. The works.
He always did want to be a granddad, though, shame he didn’t live long enough.
Anyway, before you think I’m some sort of weirdo, I did do some independent research on the row house and on Denny. And speaking of daddy issues, it only took me about twenty minutes on Google to figure out that Denny was murdered by his dad, a carpenter named Benjamin. It was a big thing in Manchester back at the turn of the last century, the library had a whole folder on it. Thing is, nobody knows why. Seemed like a perfectly normal guy, worked on some of the original mills. Church guy. Denny was an only child and his mom had died of consumption or one of those horrible things we don’t have any more.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 6