Five Days of the Ghost

by William Bell

  “Might be you got too many troubles for one girl.”

  I could feel my jaw drop as he began to walk away, rolling his body from side to side, like a sailor. He was pigeontoed. But he sort of floated over the ground. When he got to the trees he disappeared like a faint light blinking off.

  I stared after him, lost in my thoughts. What did he mean by what he said to me? How did he know about my “troubles”?

  John’s voice yanked me back. “Noah, can I have the camera? I want to get pictures of the gravestones.”

  Noah turned his back to John so John could fish out the little camera. Soon the clearing was being zapped with quick flashes of white light, as if a firefly were saying hello to all the headstones.

  “Hey, Karen, look.”

  Noah was crouched down looking at the bare earth in front of the grave. He shone a flashlight, playing the round patch of light back and forth across the ground.

  There were no footprints.

  Noah turned to me, his face bright with excitement.

  “What we got here is a genuine, authentic, walking, talking ghost.”

  He stood up. “And,” he smiled, patting the camera, “we got him on video!”

  DAY

  FOUR

  Monday Morning

  We didn’t get back to the boathouse until two thirty in the morning. Noah was babbling on about talking to the ghost again, and getting it all on video. John was babbling too, saying “preternatural” as often as he could, but I could tell he was hooked on the supernatural.

  Me? I was in bad shape, but I tried not to let it show. Besides being scared to death by the ghost and his faraway gravelly voice and the fact that he could just disappear like that, I was really rattled when he talked to me. What did he mean?

  So I kept pretty quiet all the way back to our house. And I didn’t say a word when John and Noah made noises about checking out Noah’s video footage right away.

  The three of us went into the living room. While Noah connected the camera to the TV, John slipped up the stairs to make sure Skinny Minnie was still sleeping.

  “No sweat,” he announced when he returned. “She’s still in munchkin land.”

  Noah pushed the Play button on the camera. We sat in a row on the couch, on the edge, like zombies watching The Twilight Zone.

  We saw a lot of shadows, for a long time. We saw some gravestones. The picture jumped and jittered when we got to the part where Noah had walked toward Chief Copegog. We even saw the new gravestone that marked the new grave.

  But no ghost.

  Noah swore. “Nothing. He didn’t show up on the video!”

  “Let’s look again,” John suggested.

  While they played with the machinery, I went into the kitchen and poured myself a tall glass of cold milk. I sat down at the kitchen table. The only light was the one over the stove that we had left on when we sneaked out of the house. My hand shook as I lifted the glass to my mouth.

  I turned to look out the window. I froze. Kenny was outside, staring at me through the glass! I cried out and my glass crashed to the floor.

  “You idiot!” I said to myself, after I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in the window.

  My hands shook as I soaked up the spilled milk from the floor with a dishrag and swept up the bits of glass.

  I knew I wasn’t going to get to sleep too soon, so I kicked off my shoes and padded into my dad’s study to dig up a book to read. As soon as I switched on the big lamp over his drafting table I saw that something was wrong. His charcoal sticks were lying all over the table top. One sheet of paper was in the middle of the table, smudged and smeared, but in the centre of the paper was this:

  What the heck was going on? I turned the paper around, looking at the marks from different angles. What was it? And who did it? None of us could have done this. And I knew my dad would never leave his desk like that. In fact, if he saw the messy paper and his sticks broken and scattered, he’d have a fit. He was a real nut about what he liked to call “a clean workplace.” Would Minnie have been fooling around with Dad’s stuff? I doubted it.

  I tidied everything up, trying to put the strange marks on the paper out of my mind. I put the charcoal back, balled up the paper and threw it into the big wicker wastebasket. After taking a last look around, I grabbed a book of Herman cartoons and turned out the light.

  When I got to the kitchen again I found John and Noah tying up their packs.

  “What’s up?”

  “The voice recorder didn’t turn up anything either,” John answered, “so Noah thinks we might as well go back to Chiefs’ Island again tonight. We’re going over Noah’s uncle’s to borrow some tobacco. He smokes cigars—the uncle, not Noah.”

  I told them I thought they were crazy. And when they asked me to come with them I told them I knew they were crazy.

  “Come on, Karen. Maybe he’ll talk to you ‘gain. He seems to he interested in you,” Noah said.

  “No way. Not ever. Besides,” I added, “won’t your father wonder where you are?”

  “I told him I was staying here overnight, remember? Besides,” Noah said bitterly, “He doesn’t care where I am and vice versa.”

  After they left I climbed up the back stairs, went into my room, slid the bolt home, and clicked on my desk lamp. Boy, was I tired. I could feel a prize winner of a headache coming on. I dragged off my clothes and put on Dad’s old blue Western University Wrestling Team T-shirt. It fit like a tent and was great for sleeping in, especially in hot weather.

  I pulled the chain on my bed lamp, splashing a little pod of yellow light on my unmade bed. Then I went to the window and pulled the curtains closed. The last thing I wanted to see when I got up was Chiefs’ Island floating out there on the lake. I stepped over to my desk and just before I clicked off the light I noticed that something was wrong.

  Ever since I saw that old movie, Razor Blade, where a crazy guy who had escaped from a nuthouse hid in a big walk-in closet in someone’s house and slit the throats of the whole family one by one—ever since then I’ve always kept my closet door closed. And locked, with one of those hook-and-eye latches.

  Now the little hook hung uselessly and the door stood open about six inches.

  I groaned. I was sick of mysteries. Sick and scared.

  Then I thought maybe Mom or Dad had been in there for some reason before they left. But why? They never came into my room without asking me. I dashed over to the door and slammed it shut and slid the hook into the eye bolt.

  I climbed wearily into my waterbed and started leafing through the Herman book. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. John and I always argued about the proper way to read a Herman book. I liked to open it anywhere and read, then flip and read, backward and forward. That drove John nuts. He’d start at page one and work through the book, cartoon by cartoon, like he was reading Peter Pan. He laughed at the nutty cartoons as much as I did, though.

  I flipped and read, trying to find something funny, trying to get tired. But I didn’t. The stuff that had happened lately—Chief Copegog’s ghost and the scary events in the house—played in my head like scratchy background music. I tried to block the thoughts out, but I couldn’t.

  I dropped the book onto the blanket. What was happening I thought, and began to cry. Why is it happening to me? John and Noah were having fun, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know why, but I started to think about Kenny and the ache inside me flared up like a wound. “Why can’t things be like they used to be?” I said out loud, crying harder.

  As if they were answering me, the wind chimes tinkled.

  I looked up. The chimes, blurred by my tears, hung motionless. But the tinkling turned to jangling.

  And the louder and more violently the chimes jangled, the colder the room got.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and clapped my hands over my ears. “No, no, no.” I begged. “No more!”

  The chimes stopped jangling. Outside my room in the hall I heard a quick skittering laugh, then foot
steps running away. I lay back and pulled the blankets over my head.

  Silence. I peeked out, staring at my door, waiting. Sure enough, footsteps crept down the hall toward my room, creaking on the hardwood floor.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! on the door. The banging went on and on, getting louder and louder, filling the cold air with the terrifying racket. The door shook in its frame. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Then the doorknob began to rattle and shake as if a huge hand, frustrated, was trying to rip it out of the wood.

  I cowered in my bed, moaning and shivering. I was paralyzed, unable to do anything. I thought the pounding and rattling was going to drive me crazy.

  Finally the deafening noise faded and the footsteps walked away down the hall toward the front of the house. I thought I heard them on the front stairs, but the stairs were carpeted so I couldn’t be sure.

  I began to calm down. And the calmer I got, the madder I got. I’d had enough!

  I climbed out of my waterbed and sat on the edge.

  I was shivering and my toes felt the way they did when I’d been skating on the lake too long—icy and stiff. My fingers were stiff, too.

  I heaved myself to my feet and stepped across the frigid rug to the door. I put my hand on the knob. Icy.

  Footsteps ran down the hall toward me!

  I dropped my hand and practically flew across the room, and jumped into the bed. The water rolled back and forth, lifting and dropping me.

  Laughter outside my room, echoing in the hall.

  Then I heard strange noises on the floor out there. Something hard being dragged across the wood. And click, click, click, like two pieces of plastic tapping together. The noises would go to the end of the hall, then come back.

  And the full force of the cold came with them.

  I lay down, trying to keep control. I was trapped—too scared to open my door, feeling like my mind was being stretched too thin and that it was going to break soon. I had a monster headache that banged away inside my skull.

  After I don’t know how long the clicking and the footsteps stopped moving back and forth. I drifted off to sleep—at least I think it was sleep. Every once in a while I’d hear the wind chimes and I’d scrunch down under the covers, pinched by the cold.

  And once I heard thump, thump, thump outside the door.

  I remember waking one time and looking at my clock radio. Five fifteen. It was quiet in the house so I hopped out of bed, and to the window, and drew the curtains. I scooted back into bed. I knew it would be dawn soon and I knew that I wouldn’t sleep right until I saw the light.

  A little later I heard noises in the kitchen. Noah and John were back. That’s when I fell asleep.

  I came down to breakfast late, about ten-thirty, wearing yellow terry shorts and a white T-shirt. I couldn’t sleep anymore. My headache wouldn’t let me. Noah and John were sitting at the table. Noah was wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt with black letters that said STOP GLOBAL ARMING. He was chasing a few soggy Cheerios around with a spoon in half a bowl of milk and John was shovelling some kind of mess into his mouth—I could see cottage cheese and strawberries but I couldn’t recognize what else was in there. And I didn’t want to know. He had on jogging shorts—although he never jogged anywhere in his life—and an O.D. tank top.

  There was still some tea in the pot so I poured a cup and sat down, holding my head.

  “He wasn’t there,” Noah said.

  “Huh? Who wasn’t where?”

  “Chief Copegog. When we went back with the cigars, he wasn’t there. And the graveyard was, like, normal temperature. So we put the cigars and a book of matches on the gravestone and left.”

  “Cigars? You left him cigars?”

  “Yeah,” said John past the goop in his mouth. “Big ones.”

  Noah looked embarrassed. “My uncle always has a few lying around. He won’t miss them.”

  I didn’t care anyway. I didn’t want to know.

  “We’re gonna go over to the library and get into some heavy research on this house,” John continued.

  “Spend the whole day there. Noah figures there must have been some kind of disaster happened here. That’s what’s causing the poltergeist to appear.”

  “Too bad we only have one occurrence,” Noah said, sweeping his hair back from his face, sounding really professional. I could tell that was the kind of word he read in his ghost hunting books—”occurrence.”

  “Two,” I said before I thought about it. After I said it I wished I had kept my mouth shut.

  “You mean—” John’s jaw dropped, revealing a white and red pudding inside his mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  I told them all about it. Noah took notes, like a newspaper reporter, and asked me questions.

  “So the only thing different last night were the two strange noises?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you can’t place them, eh? You don’t have any idea what they were?”

  “Nope. A click and drag, a thumping sound.”

  “Were you scared?” John put in.

  I shot him a Boy Are You Dumb look and took a sip of tea.

  Then, “Hey, wait. No, it’s probably nothing,” I said.

  “What?” said Noah. “What?”

  He slapped his notebook on the table.

  “Just a second.”

  I hauled myself from my chair and walked down the hall to the study. When I came back I tossed a ball of drafting paper to Noah.

  Noah unscrunched the white paper and flattened it out on the kitchen table, smudging the charcoal lines a little.

  We looked at it.

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me,” John said.

  “Dad probably did it and forgot to clean up.”

  “As if he would,” I shot back.

  Noah scrunched up the paper again. “Let’s go to the library,” he said to John. “That doesn’t mean anything.” As the two boys stood up to go he added, “I don’t think.”

  After John and Noah left for the library I cleaned up the kitchen and climbed the stairs to my room. I locked the door once I was inside. Warm morning sunlight poured through the window, spilling gold across the floor. I unhooked the lock on my closet, drew a breath, and pulled the door open fast.

  Nothing. I locked it again.

  I fell onto the waterbed, pulling the covers over me, and fell asleep.

  Monday Afternoon

  Someone was pounding at my bedroom door! The doorknob rattled and the door rumbled in its frame.

  I rolled over and faced the wall, pulling the blankets over my head.

  I won’t listen to that anymore! I won’t! I thought.

  The pounding kept up.

  “Karen, wake up!” It was John’s voice.

  I stuck my head out from under the covers.

  Blinding sunlight shot through the window, stabbing into my eyes. I rolled over again and faced the door. I felt hot and my mouth was sticky. I still had my clothes on.

  I dragged my body out of bed and unlocked the door. “Come on in,” I croaked.

  John and Noah tumbled into the room like two kindergarten kids, practically knocking me down.

  Noah’s eyes flashed. “I was right! I think.” For once he didn’t sound like a forty-year-old.

  “Sure you were right. We found it. For sure.” John was breathless. He was chewing bubble gum and after he said that he pumped out a huge bubble, big as his face. I could never understand why the gum didn’t stick to his braces. Above the big pink bubble his blue eyes sparkled. He sucked the air back into his mouth so the bubble collapsed slowly and drooped on his chin.

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know. Then I said, “What time is it?”

  John ignored me and started to talk. “We spent half the day in the—”

  “About three o’clock,” Noah cut in.

  “—library reading until our eyeballs were ready to fall—”

  “—I never read so much at one time in my li
fe! This brother of yours is a—”

  “—out and our nostrils were full of dust from old books and—”

  “—microfilm! Wow, that stuff is like reading fuzzy words through binoculars! Talk about—”

  “Stop!”

  I had my hands clapped over my ears and my eyes shut. I was sitting on the bed. John and Noah were still standing at the open door. John’s hand gripped the knob as if he wanted to tear it off. Both of them looked like puppies who just stumbled on a spilled bag of Milkbone. Their mouths hung open. I guessed I had shocked them.

  “Sorry,” John said in a low voice. “Do you have one of your headaches?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you take a pill?” Noah suggested, almost whispering.

  “It won’t help her,” John answered for me, a little of his Lecturing tone creeping in. “She gets these migraines. Pills don’t help. Nothing helps. She started getting them after our brother—”

  I shot him a look and he shut up. Noah looked embarrassed.

  “Anyway,” he said, “want to hear what we found out, Karen?”

  I was still boiling hot from my sleep under the covers. My head felt like it was full of taffy.

  “Let’s take a swim first,” I said.

  The three of us were lying side by side on the dock. The late-afternoon sun was sinking behind the house and our shore of the lake was shaded and cool. But Chiefs’ Island was still brightly lit and over the calm water I could see the flat rock where we had landed on our trips to the graveyard. There was a light breeze whispering in the weeping willow.

  “Well,” Noah was saying, “we made progress at the library.”

  “Yeah, after we got that old twig of a librarian to let us into the so-called historical archives we started checking local histories.”

  “And they led us to the microfilms of old newspapers.”

  “How about skipping all the dramatics and getting to the point,” I said. I guess I sounded mean, cutting into their big moment, but I didn’t really feel like waiting till doomsday.