Bring on the Poltergeists

by T Paulin

  No ghost.

  No whispering voice telling him he sucked, either.

  “Show yourself,” Eli said to the quiet room.

  The room seemed to get even more quiet—the kind of absence of noise that makes your ears ring. Eli breathed in deeply. The air had a new scent. Ozone. Like the edge of the ocean.

  More boldly, Eli repeated his words. “Show yourself.”

  The air seemed to thicken around him, like a breathable gel.

  A breathable gel.

  Something that felt like a warm wave of water moved up Eli’s back and slid over him like a blanket.

  He remembered something that was his own memory—a memory from the time before his life began, before he was found wandering the ruins of the Zone.

  He was in that thick air, that breathable gel. He grew, and he lived without living, and he watched. People talked around him, their words like shapes. Triangles and squares. They opened their mouths and geometry came out, only it was just code. Code Eli didn’t understand yet.

  Eli slithered into this memory. He slid down, down, down. He heard a thump.

  Chapter Eleven

  Eli opened his eyes. He was looking up, at a face he didn’t recognize as a face, much less a specific person. The face was geometry. Points and lines on a plane. Light and shadows.

  “Fainting is better than vomiting,” the face said.

  Eli’s throat was dry. With a scratchy voice, he replied, “Anything’s better than vomiting.”

  The face looked concerned. It was Khan. He was the one with white hair and black eyebrows. Khan was his friend.

  These thoughts came to Eli as though being fed to him by someone else.

  Everything was wrong now.

  He used his elbows to push himself up to a seating position. He looked around the child’s bedroom in alarm.

  “Khan?”

  “Why were you taking a floor nap? You fainted, right? Did you hit your head when you went down?”

  Eli rubbed the back of his head. There was a tender spot, right on the back of his skull.

  “Well, that’s helpful,” Eli mused. “When you fall down and hit your head, you get a bump and a sore spot. That way when someone asks if you hit your head, you can tell them you did.” He rubbed the spot some more. “Isn’t the body a marvelous thing?”

  Khan didn’t seem as amazed. “We’re calling it a day.”

  “But we haven’t caught the ghost yet. Unless you did already? How long was I out?”

  “I don’t know. After you said those arrogant things to me, I had to get outside for a walk. I figured it was better for me to blow off some steam than to punch you in the face on your first day.”

  Eli noticed that Khan’s breath smelled like beer. He also noticed that the sun had gone down outside, and the child’s bedroom was now lit by a ceiling light.

  “You left me here alone?” Eli asked.

  “Not entirely alone. There was a squirrel. That was the scratching we heard.” Khan sounded terse as he explained the situation. He seemed angry at Eli, like the bad mood was growing now that he wasn’t as worried about Eli being hurt. “I left the window open, and the squirrel seems to be gone now. Problem solved. Case closed.”

  Eli’s insides felt scrambled with emotions. He couldn’t bear Khan being upset at him, and he felt bad about whatever he’d done. Sure, he’d questioned Khan’s methods, but he hadn’t been arrogant.

  He started to apologize for the umpteenth time that day, but stopped. Why should he apologize?

  Now Eli was feeling abused, and rightly so. Khan had left him, passed out in a pile of drool, alone with a ghost. And a squirrel.

  “You left me alone with a squirrel? What if it had been rabid? I could have been bitten.”

  “You should have thought of that before you said what you did.”

  What had Eli said? They’d come upstairs, and he’d gone to search the rooms on one side of the house. Everything had been fine, until…

  “Khan, it was the ghost. I heard it, too. He came to the doorway behind me and whispered that he was watching me. And that I was terrible at this job.”

  Khan hiccuped and staggered back.

  He slurred, “That’sh what you said. Don’t you tell me what you said to me, because I know. You said I was good for nothing. Worthless.”

  “So you went for a drink?”

  “It’sh what I do best.”

  By the way Khan grabbed on to the edge of the client’s dresser, Eli could tell he had no small amount of alcohol running through his veins.

  Eli glanced around the room. It wasn’t safe to talk here. He didn’t know if it was safe to talk anywhere, but right here seemed like the worst place to plan their next steps.

  “Khan, it was a trap,” Eli said.

  “Life is a trap.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Eli got himself standing. His legs were shaky, but he was doing better than Khan, who was now muttering incoherently about people blaming things on ghosts. He continued muttering, and began launching karate kicks into the air around him.

  Eli received a few drunken kicks in the legs before he got Khan calmed down and back downstairs. The client still hadn’t returned home, but Eli didn’t want to be there with his drunk boss when he did. He gathered up the sensors and other equipment, returned the spare key, and dragged Khan back out to the van.

  It was dark outside, and even though it was a spring evening, the air had a chill that reminded Eli of Halloween.

  Naturally, Khan thought he should drive. At least he’d walked himself to and from the nearby pub while Eli had been passed out, so the van was still parked where they’d left it, and didn’t have any street signs or people embedded in the grill.

  After a brief scuffle inside the vehicle, Eli got Khan belted into passenger seat and began to drive away from the house. Eli glanced over his shoulder at the old house. They’d turned off all the lights on their way out, but now the windows were glowing orange, taunting him.

  Eli clenched his hands around the steering wheel.

  That ghost was really getting on his nerves.

  It could try and scare him all it wanted, because that only seemed sporting. But this business of coming between him and Khan, trying to destroy their budding friendship, that was not okay.

  Whatever it took, Eli vowed to stop at nothing. By whatever means necessary, he was going to get that evil spirit into the smallest D6 cage available.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the drive home, Khan tried to get Eli to visit a strip club with him.

  Eli politely refused. Oh, he wanted to go and enjoy some beer, nudity, and male bonding, but not like this—not with Khan drunk and surly before they even walked in the door. Khan seemed ready to pick a fight, and being around someone like that was a surefire way to get punched in the face.

  “You’re going home to sleep it off,” Eli said. “It’s a school night. Now give me your home address.”

  Being drunk and surly, Khan refused. “I live at the north pole,” he said. “Come on, we’ll just go to one club. It’s not even a big one. We’ve got to support the city’s stripper economy. Come on, Eli, do a good deed.”

  “It’s almost my bedtime.”

  Khan howled with laughter, thinking Eli had been joking about having a bedtime. He was not.

  Eli drove toward the storefront, figuring he’d be able to track down Valentine and get her to help, or dump Khan there.

  They were still ten minutes away from the shop when Khan turned to Eli and slurred, “Promish you won’t touch the stuff. I’m serious.”

  “Your equipment?” The bags sat on the floor of the van between their bucket seats.

  “Not one finger.”

  “I wasn’t planning to touch it. Why?”

  Instead of answering, Khan flung the door open as they passed a strip club. “Seeya later, sucka!”

  Eli slammed the brakes and ground the van to a halt just as Khan snapped off the seatbelt and jumped out in one fluid motio
n. He ran crookedly to the door of the club and disappeared.

  * * *

  Eli got home just after nine o’clock, which actually wasn’t as late as it had felt when he was driving home.

  He found Brenda on the couch, watching TV while reading a magazine and texting on her phone.

  He cast a suspicious look at the brown recliner, then knelt on the floor before her and rested his head in her lap. She ran her fingers through his hair.

  “How was your first day?” she asked brightly. “Is my Eli tired?”

  “Tired.”

  “Do you want to tell me all about how it went?”

  “No.”

  She sighed. It wasn’t clear if she was sighing out of sympathetic disappointment for him, or because trying to get details about his day was always so taxing.

  A quiet moment passed, with only the rabble of a singing contest on the television. She prompted, “Did you catch a ghost?”

  “No.” He pressed his face into her jeans. After a long day in unfamiliar surroundings, the scent of the fabric softener they used was as soothing as Brenda’s fingertips on his scalp.

  “If you didn’t catch a ghost, what did you do all day? He’d better be paying you overtime.”

  Eli kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to tell Brenda he’d slept for a few hours, thanks to fainting. And what was that fainting business all about, anyway? Except for the times he’d been strangled by the cat wraith, Eli had never fainted before. And that was a shame, because he’d certainly been in plenty of embarrassing situations where he’d hoped for sudden unconsciousness.

  Eli retraced his steps. There’d been a voice at the door, and then Eli had challenged the ghost to show itself. Then the air in the room had gone funny. Perhaps the ghost had drained out the oxygen, or put in some other gas. Several theories sprung to mind, but none were a perfect fit.

  Brenda kept rubbing his scalp, smoothing out his thoughts. She was so good at calming him. She excelled at making him irate, and also calming him.

  She gave up on getting details from him and turned up the volume on the show.

  With his head still in her lap, Eli said, “I’d rather tell you about my day when I’ve got something good to share.”

  “I know, I know.”

  A moment passed.

  Eli asked, “How was your day?”

  She put the TV show on pause. “You know Rachel, the one with the mole? The one who thinks people can’t tell she’s got some tragic eating disorder? Always cooking those sweet potatoes in the microwave? I think she’s trying to get with Jeffrey, even though he’s barely separated from his wife, and everyone knows you have to wait at least a year, and Carol told me that she saw an email Rachel sent to Rosco, after the whole printer toner incident, and…”

  As Brenda explained the drama from the first half of the day, Eli closed his eyes.

  To his surprise, Brenda’s words stopped being words. All he had to do was lean his mind a little to one side, and her words became abstract. Notes in a song. He leaned a little in the other direction. The notes turned into shapes. Triangles and circles, lines and dots.

  That was different.

  He connected this new experience with the memory that had come to him after he bumped his head. The memory was weak, though, and when he looked harder, he tripped across memories from Donny.

  Now he was overcome with sadness over the death of Donny’s girlfriend by overdose. He had been doing chest compressions for no more than ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity. He’d felt her rib crack. He kept going.

  Eli’s mind flooded with grief. Life was so full of disappointments. He gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw.

  Brenda was still talking. The triangles turned back into words. “I know, right? One of these days, she’s going to get fired for not doing her job. I don’t care what she does with her free time, but a person needs to do her job. Just think about how much better the world would be if every single person just did what they were supposed to do.”

  Eli pulled his face out of Brenda’s lap, sat up straight, and looked into her eyes. She seemed surprised to see him there.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I need to do my job. Starting tomorrow, no more goofing around. I won’t let my mind wander. I will catch that poltergeist.”

  Her eyes widened, the thick fringe of mascara-coated eyelashes rising dramatically. “Poltergeist? That sounds fun. If I can get a ride, I’m going to come see you at lunch time. Will you be at the store, or on location somewhere?”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Don’t you get a lunch break? You should get a lunch break. And a dinner break, too, if they’re working you overtime.”

  “Brenda.” He shook his head.

  She broke eye contact and pretended to be intensely interested in the TV show.

  “We can talk about it next week,” he said, but it was too late for compromise. She refused to look at him, which meant the Silent Treatment was in effect.

  He got up and went to rummage in the fridge for a late dinner. He had no appetite, but he needed to keep his energy up for tomorrow. He ate leftover dead cow loaf standing over the sink, and then went to the bedroom with his laptop.

  They didn’t have a desk in the small apartment, so he propped up pillows for his back and sat cross-legged on the bed.

  He fired up the laptop and started with the search request he’d been thinking of most of the day: how to catch a poltergeist.

  The results were not as helpful as he’d hoped. He mostly found spec scripts by aspiring screenwriters. He did find one interesting webcomic, and lost himself for a while reading the archives, which had very little to do with catching poltergeists, but were quite funny.

  After reading all the webcomic archives, he did more searches on poltergeists, getting nowhere.

  Bedtime was approaching. A yowling sound from the alley below startled Eli. He turned to face the dark window and listened. More yowling. It sounded like a few cats.

  Eli turned back to the laptop and did a search for cat wraiths. He found nothing that matched what he knew about the entity that had allegedly told Brenda his name was Monty.

  He did find an ancient Egyptian cat-god named Montsumatchu, who decided the fate of entire villages based on its whims. The cat-god sounded like a real psycho. The artist’s rendering of Montsumatchu ripping out beating hearts was not the kind of thing one should look at before bedtime. Eli bookmarked the page.

  He had only five minutes until bedtime. Brenda was already brushing her teeth.

  Last-minute inspiration struck, and he did a search for the manufacturer of the Ray-gun.

  Eli queried: Azzure, manufacturer Ray-gun #112.

  He hit the search button, and the screen went white, hanging. He waited twenty seconds, then clicked the refresh button. Still nothing but a white screen.

  He opened the other browser installed on the laptop and repeated the search.

  The computer whirred noisily.

  “Ouch.” He lifted the laptop from his thighs. The machine was overheating, burning him. The fan must have stopped working, or something else was overclocking the CPU.

  He held the laptop up to his mouth and blew into the vents like he was playing the harmonica. All this accomplished was putting an acrid taste in his mouth.

  He did a hard reboot and tried the search a third time.

  Azzure, manufacturer Ray-gun #112.

  The white screen came up, only this time it was accompanied by a dialog box, black with a green blinking cursor. The prompt read: Enter username.

  Eli looked around the bedroom. The back of his head tickled, the way it had back at the poltergeist house before the orange thing had flashed by.

  He looked at the dialog box again, and he typed in: Anonymous.

  He pressed the return key.

  The screen flashed red, and the speakers began to emit a mind-shattering squeal. Eli clapped his hands over his ears. How was this possible? The speak
ers had stopped working a year ago, and now they were louder than the apartment’s smoke detector.

  Brenda came running in with her hands over her ears.

  Eli used his elbows to close the laptop.

  The sound wouldn’t stop, and now the computer was hotter than ever, burning his thighs. He flipped it off his lap and covered it with a pillow. The squealing was still loud, but now he could remove his hands from his ears. He tossed a second pillow on top of the first, and then threw his body over top of everything.

  Brenda yelled, “Stop it right now! You’ll have the whole building at our door in a minute.”

  “It’s malfunctioning. I didn’t do this on purpose.”

  “Make it stop.”

  The squealing wasn’t so loud, muffled between the mattress, two pillows, and Eli’s stomach.

  “It should tire itself out in a few minutes,” Eli said. “The batteries should run out.” The squealing pitched higher, but fainter. “See?”

  Brenda narrowed her eyes. “What were you looking at on your laptop, Eli?”

  She didn’t say it, but he knew she was referring to the Pinup Girl Incident from two months ago.

  “Did you install something on the laptop?” he asked.

  “Should I have?”

  The squealing laptop under him now sounded sad and pathetic, dying.

  “Brenda, what did you do?”

  She crossed her arms. “I don’t know, Eli. What did you do? Were you making donations to good causes again? We don’t need any more calendars.”

  “It was only twenty dollars. And it really was for a good cause.”

  She pressed the remote control to close the curtains. “Bedtime.”

  The laptop emitted one final gasping squeal, then went silent. Eli rolled to the side and pulled off the pillows. A burning smell wafted up and made him cough. He had a bad feeling the laptop wasn’t going to boot up again.

  The possible death of his only computer would have ordinarily ruined Eli’s night, but he wasn’t without hope. There was a chance Valentine might be able to fix the laptop.

  And tomorrow was another day.

  He put the laptop away and got ready for bed.

  As he brushed his teeth, he thought over what he knew about hackers—real hackers, who did stuff over the internet.