The society was called The Central City Center For Psychic And Paranormal Research, or TCCCFPAPR for short. It was a beehive of activity when I arrived, with researchers running around clutching stories hot off the newswire with wild looks in their eyes.
“Ghost train on the West Side!” yelled one.
“You mean the train has ghosts in it, or the train itself is a ghost?” he was asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, there’s a world of difference, Bob…”
“We’ll discuss it later. Just get somebody over there!”
“A river of blood just appeared next to the regular river of blood!” broke in another researcher excitedly.
“Two rivers of blood!” said the man next to him, slapping his forehead.
“Somebody just dropped a house on the President!” said someone else.
I corralled one of them as he went scurrying by and told him I was looking for two ghosts. He looked at me like I was a hick.
“What kind of cornball thing is that to be looking for?”
“Well, I dunno.”
He told me they didn’t have time for old-fashioned ghosts like mine. This was the most paranormal activity they’d ever monitored. Strange phenomena of all kinds were occurring everywhere - weird manifestations that made my ghosts seem corny by comparison.
“Like what?”
He thought for a moment. “Well, last week the whole city was briefly under miles of ocean.”
“I must have been in the can when that happened.”
“And then the city was hit by a bunch of comets. And there was a World War there for a minute. And the spitball was legalized briefly, so we could all throw spitballs again without fear of being suspended. And there was that big Titanic race in the harbor – a race that the experts had said could never happen. And…”
“Gee, I sure must go to the can a lot.” A thought occurred to me. “Hey, maybe the government is doing all this. Did you ever think of that?”
He sneered at this idea. “Governments don’t do anything. That’s just something people say when they don’t know what’s going on and want to sound like they do.”
“Well, yeah,” I admitted, “I do say that when I don’t know what’s going on, but in this case…”
“Get out of here.”
I said I wasn’t leaving until I got some kind of clue, something to go on. This is where being big and slow to be satisfied comes in handy. After a moment’s vain struggle to release himself from my dull, uncomprehending grip, he said I might try The Very Haunted House. I asked what that might be.
“We haven’t had time to look into it,” he said, “but we’ve been getting a lot of reports from a neighborhood a few blocks south of here. Apparently some house is so full of ghosts they’re spilling out into the street. The neighbors have been complaining about it.”
I thanked him, and left. Finally I had a lead!
When I got to the neighborhood he had told me about, I wished I’d remembered to get the exact address. All the houses on both sides of the street looked pretty rundown. They all looked like they could be haunted. I was trying to figure out which one to try first, when I saw a ghost suddenly appear three feet above the street, fall to the ground, sit up, looking confused, then run off.
I followed him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I followed the ghost to an old apparently abandoned Victorian home, and watched as he walked up to the door, knocked, listened for a moment, then dissolved through the door into the house.
I went up the steps and knocked on the door. I heard a faint eerie “come in”, but nobody came to open the door. I tried the knob. The door was locked. I tried shouldering my way in, but only succeeded in hurting my shoulder.
I knocked again, but all I got for my efforts were a couple of more “come ins”, a “wipe your feet”, and another sore shoulder.
I tried to waft through the door like I had seen the ghost do. You never know. But all I got out of that experiment was a chipped tooth.
I took a walk around the house to see if I could find an open window. At first I couldn’t find one, but after awhile, when I was sure no one was looking, I found one. I climbed through.
There didn’t seem to be anyone in the place. It was, to all appearances, just an old empty house. The furniture was covered with layers of dust. The mirrors were streaked with grime. Rocking chairs were rocking by themselves. The fireplace was going on and off. Just an old empty house.
Then I heard a noise. A strange wailing sound. It didn’t sound human. Then I heard footsteps on the stair. They didn’t sound human either. But when I looked at the staircase (not human), there was nobody there! Then the wailing sound came again. It sounded like it was coming from one of the closets, so I opened the door. There were thousands of ghosts in there. They tumbled out and began swarming all around me, shrieking and wailing, and laughing unearthly laughs.
Normally I would have been scared shitless, because, like I said before, dead things that don’t act dead scare me. But I’d seen so much of this kind of thing lately, it just didn’t make much of an impression on me anymore.
“Have any of you seen a ghost named Ed Brannigan? Or Fred C. Cramer? Either one. I’m looking for them. That’s Brannigan. B-r-a-double-n-i-g-a-n.”
The ghosts shrieked louder and wailed even more hideously, but none of them volunteered any information. I pushed through them and checked to see if maybe Ed and Fred were in the closet someplace. Maybe behind that stack of old ghosts in the corner. They weren’t.
When I straightened back up and stood there for a minute, scratching my head, I noticed the ghosts had stopped wailing and were floating in the center of the room, staring at me and looking confused and vaguely pissed.
I pushed through them to the kitchen and looked around there. They followed. One tried a “boo!” but it didn’t get any response from me, so he didn’t try it again.
I came back out to the living room, after finding nothing in the kitchen, and looked in the closet again. The ghosts watched me, plainly not sure what the deal was with me. I was supposed to be afraid of them. But I wasn’t. They didn’t get it.
I asked them again about Ed Brannigan, and finally, after they had wailed some more, and I had started giving them the correct spelling of the name again, one of them answered me.
“He and Fred aren’t here. They’ve been gone for almost a week.”
“Do you know where they’ve gone?”
“No.”
“Well, crap.”
I sat down on a chair full of ghosts. They scattered, grousing. I didn’t bother to apologize. I was pissed. Ed and Fred used to be here. But “used to” only counts in horseshoes. I had to find out where they were now. This place was just another dead end.
Now that the ghosts were convinced that there was no point in trying to scare me, they went about their business. Which, I noticed, involved trying to get comfortable in a severely over-crowded environment; with too many ghosts crowded into each chair; ghosts stacked up on the tops of bookcases; ghosts neatly folded up in drawers; even ghosts coming out of faucets. This house had a lot of ghosts in it. I started to get curious about that.
“Hey, how come there are so many of you?”
“We don’t know,” said one of the ghosts standing on my head.
“We don’t know,” said a ghost in the cuckoo clock. “We don’t know. We don’t know.”
“I know,” said a ghost named Nugent.
I looked at him. None of the ghosts there were particularly happy, but Nugent was easily the glummest ghost in the place. He said that government interference had caused the increased ghost population. I asked him how he knew that, pointing out that I’d heard only stupid people who didn’t know what they were talking about blamed the government for things, and he said he used to work for the government, that’s how he knew. Worked for them for years. Then one day, right in the middle of a top secret experiment, just after he had said
“That ought to do it”, he suddenly found himself here, dead. Some of his co-workers were here too. I tried to pump him for more information – what was the nature of this top secret experiment he spoke of, let’s take a look at the blueprints, and where the hell were Ed and Fred? - but he didn’t want to talk anymore. He just sat there sulking.
“I’m tired of talking to you, Nugent,” I said finally.
“Ditto.”
I got up to go. This had been a wasted trip. Just like all of the trips I had ever taken in my life. What’s it all about, anyway? Would somebody please tell me that? Just then, on that philosophical note, the front door opened and Ed and Fred breezed in.
“Hi everybody,” said Fred, cheerfully.
“What’s the score, fellas?” asked Ed, rhetorically, as they both bounded up the stairs.
I stared at them. It was Ed and Fred, all right, but there was something different about them. All the ghosts were staring at them too. Then I realized what it was - what was different. Ed and Fred weren’t ghosts anymore! They were real men! I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of some kind of a Pinocchio picture.
The other ghosts were stunned. They didn’t know what to make of it. But I figured out what had happened quick enough. Ed and Fred had never hired me now, because I didn’t exist, so they had never had an opportunity to be killed by me. That didn’t explain why the other ghosts knew them so well. Or why they seemed to have a room upstairs here. But you can’t understand everything. At least, I can’t.
I bounded up the stairs after them.
When I found them they were in their room packing up their stuff into two big suitcases to move to their cool bachelor pad they’d just rented downtown. They had dates tonight, they said, with a couple of dames who had bones that just wouldn’t quit.
I confronted them angrily. “Look what you bastards did to me,” I said, pointing at myself. “I don’t exist anymore. I was never born. My library card’s not valid.” I took the card out of my wallet and held it up to them so they could see.
“It’s not our fault,” said Ed. “How could it be? We’ve never even met you now.”
“That’s right,” said Fred. “We couldn’t have caused you any trouble, because there ain’t no you!”
I was getting steamed. “If you confuse me one more time, I’m gonna…”
“You’re gonna what?” jeered Ed. “What are you gonna do?”
I landed a haymaker on Ed’s chin, then drove a left jab into Fred’s new solar plexus. They both went over backwards, squawking.
“Hey, Rube!” yelled Fred.
As I jumped on them and began knocking their teeth loose, the other ghosts joined in the fight - kicking me, biting me, and, by combining their forces and using all the ectoplasm they had, lifting up heavy objects and braining me with them.
I had Ed and Fred down and was punching them for all I was worth, but I had been hit so many times I was starting to get a little woozy. The third time the ghosts brought the dresser down on my head, I finally collapsed to the floor on top of the unconscious forms of Ed and Fred.
The ghosts all piled on top of us, banging away at my head with everything they had. Finally, after I hadn’t moved or said “ouch” for several minutes, they stopped hitting me and backed away. Then one of the ghosts shrieked in terror.
Three new ghosts were rising up from the bodies on the floor: Ed, Fred, and me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You killed us again, you bastard!” howled Ed.
“And I just bought a full length mirror!” complained Fred.
“Never mind that, you little pricks, look what you did to me!” I pointed a transparent finger at my twisted corpse. “I’m dead too!”
“Good!” said Fred.
“We’re glad!” said Ed.
We all swung our fists at the same time, the force of the blows blowing us all apart. We spent the next ten minutes retrieving our body parts from under the furniture and yelling abuse at each other, with my mouth under the couch having a shouting match with Ed’s face in the fireplace, while our hands and arms looked for us.
Once I had put myself back together again, and got my eyes into the right holes, I saw that Ed and Fred, and some of the younger ghosts, were over in the corner of the room kicking my corpse and calling it a fat son of a bitch. That really made me mad. I’m not fat. I’ve just got fat bones.
The first fight I’d had with the inhabitants of The Very Haunted House had been frustrating. Round Two was a pleasure. I was finally able to lay a glove on the bastards. We were on equal terms now, substance-wise. And I had the advantage of being bigger and angrier than any of them. So it was no contest. I beat the stuffings out of them. I was literally mopping the floor with them. Beating the rugs too. And ringing the doorbell. I tried painting the walls with them, but the paint wouldn’t stay on their wispy little heads, no matter how far I dunked them into the can.
The battle didn’t last as long as I wanted it to. Nothing really worthwhile ever does, the philosophers tell us. And they are right, as usual. The ghosts weren’t enjoying the fight as much as I was, so after fifteen or twenty minutes, most of them split. I’m not sure where they went, but I did hear screams of “Oh no, not again!” from one of the neighboring houses. So that’s probably where they went. That’s where I’d start looking.
I worked off my remaining excess energy and anger by trashing the place. That is, I tried to trash it. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had much experience at being a ghost yet. I couldn’t materialize enough to get a good grip on anything valuable. My ectoplasm kept fading on me. Then I’d have to start all over again. I managed to tip over a small odd-shaped table after twenty minutes of sustained effort, but it wasn’t the kind of wholesale destruction I had been hoping to cause. And it turned out that the odd-shaped table had actually been tipped over already and I had spent the twenty minutes getting it right-side-up again. At that point I figured the hell with it.
I went back upstairs to take a look at my body. It was in pretty bad shape. Dents everywhere, limbs pointing in all the wrong directions, the odd tooth gone, and footprints all over it. It was a mess. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it, but I was pretty sure I shouldn’t just leave it where it was.
The problem was, I didn’t know how to move it. My hands just went right through it when I tried to pick it up. I knew it was possible to move it, because I had seen Ed and Fred move solid objects around with relative ease. But darned if I could figure out how they did it.
I tried sliding into my body and operating it from the inside. That didn’t work. I didn’t think it would, but it was worth a try. I wouldn’t recommend other people trying it though. It’s pretty nasty in there. Dark, claustrophobic, damp and smelly. And I think I heard rats in there. I got back out of there pretty quick.
After experimenting for awhile, I found that by clenching every muscle in my ghostly body - sort of gritting myself - I could materialize enough to be able to move things around. The more I practiced, the better I got at this.
Finally I decided I was ready. I picked up my corpse’s legs and began dragging it slowly out of the room. I hit the head on a few things, but I decided that that probably didn’t matter at this point. I didn’t know whether I would ever be using that head again or not, but I certainly wasn’t using it now.
I dragged my body down the two flights of stairs to the living room, my head thumping on each step, then dragged it out of the house, across the yard, and onto the sidewalk, as the few remaining ghosts in the house watched me from the window, occasionally rubbing the knots on their heads. They didn’t try to stop me or get me to come back. They’d had enough of me. They probably wished I had left sooner.
Now that the battle was over, and I had successfully retrieved my personal property, I took a moment to review my situation. It didn’t look good. I was in a pretty tough spot. Not only was I never born, now I was dead too. Things hadn’t been going too well for me lately. I decided the first thing I should
do was seek medical help. My body was looking worse by the minute. One of my ears was about to fall off. It had never been this loose. I needed to see a doctor right away.
I spent the next three hours laboriously dragging my corpse down the street towards the hospital – with people screaming and running away, policemen anxiously blowing their whistles at me, and dogs trying their damnedest to pull my corpse in the opposite direction from where I wanted it to go. It was a pain in the butt. And I mean that in both the literal and the philosophical sense.
After awhile I noticed I was scraping my body’s eyebrows off on the pavement. I didn’t care. I never knew what eyebrows were for anyway. Artists have since told me that you need them so you can move them around to express your feelings. Surprise, or anger, or mounting fear. Useful expressions like that. I’ve always kept them in the same place on my face. Maybe that’s been my problem all along. Maybe that’s why I got passed over for promotion so many times, and why I never made it in Society, and why I got arrested and ambushed so often. Maybe I should have been using my eyebrows more. Anyway, I scraped ‘em off.
By late that afternoon I was sitting in the hospital waiting room, reading a magazine, with my body in the chair next to me, surrounded by every fly that had ever lived.
A terrified nurse finally ushered me in to the doctor’s office. I dragged my body in and got it up on the examination table, while the doctor watched from the top of a filing cabinet. When I finally convinced him that I wouldn’t be leaving until he had examined the body, and if he didn’t hurry up, I would start bringing it up to where he was, he reluctantly climbed down and began to check it over.
It was a difficult examination for a number of reasons. There was no pulse to check, no breathing to listen to, no reflexes to measure, no eyebrows to indicate my current mood, nothing. But probably the biggest problem was communication.
Dead Men Scare Me Stupid Page 7