Chapter Five
After I left the bookstore the harsh reality of what it might look like to have to balance a new job, a potential new girlfriend and a recurring experience of some restless spirits of the dead began to sink in.
“At least it can’t get any worse,” I comforted myself against the dark thoughts. Later I would change my tune.
On the way back to the hotel I stopped and treated myself to a fast food dinner, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Now that I had a job I wouldn’t have to subsist on meals which, about sixty percent of the time, were made of those prepackaged dried noodles to which you add boiling water and a tiny dry seasoning pack to create a weak soup. On special nights I boiled the noodles, drained them and added a can of chili. It wasn’t gourmet but it was better than living on crackers.
Night had fallen and I sat on the hood of my car in the restaurant parking lot eating my burger and fries puzzling out ways I could keep the respective different worlds of my life from mingling together. I knew if such a convergence took place on even a small scale it would create disastrous results. There would be no recovering from that.
“How long can this last? How long can I last?” I was answered indifferently by a gentle breeze.
Cars passed in the darkness bearing away their passengers with lesser problems. Jealousy stabbed at me then. What were the travelers on this road facing in their lives? Could they even begin to compare to what I was going through? I didn’t think so, not by a long shot. I thought I would gladly pick a car at random and swap troubles with the driver if I could.
A competing thought arose within me then, a contention demanding I quit whining about how bad I had it. I had recently hit a run of small but important wins. At least that was something, wasn’t it? What did I have to cry about? It was a life and while I may not have chosen it I could certainly choose what I would make of it. Not all difficult paths end in disaster and neither would mine.
My gut level response was that I wanted to argue with this voice but knew it was the voice of reason which struggled to bring some order to the chaos. I had allowed fear to take root and grow to such proportions that it had started to strangle my ability to think rationally. If I ignored or pushed the calm voice away it would be a grave mistake, one I thought I might live to regret.
I continued to watch cars make their ways to homes and hideaways. They were away to countless points unknown. I thought about this, too, turning it over in my mind like a gem catching multiple facets of light. These people, they were leaving something behind every time they went somewhere else.
“Could I do the same,” I wondered.
“What if I moved out of my apartment?” Would a geographical change instigate a situational change? I thought people must have done this kind of thing for ages. They moved away from home to start a new life. They moved out of town, state and country to find different jobs. They moved to escape abusive spouses. Could people move to escape abusive spirits? I thought it was entirely possible. I even imagined people had done that very thing.
In fact, I knew for sure they had. I’d read a few such accounts just a few hours before in the bookstore. One family moved out of their house where their young son was allegedly terrorized every night. A Pop singer checked into a Bed & Breakfast one afternoon only to check out late that night, citing a presence watching her, touching her and even appearing to her. A few others like these paraded through my memory. I began to feel an excitement, thinking I might have latched onto a real possibility.
A different voice spoke up within me fielding a different and contrary thought, one I was not sure I wanted to hear. This voice told me while others may have done this, I couldn’t escape so easily. I had seen the girl in the dirty dress outside my new place of employment first. And yet later that day I had heard her in my bathroom. And she had turned the lights on and off in there. The next morning her voice had appeared on my answering machine.
If I tried to move to a different apartment I thought the ghosts might just as easily follow me there. I began to wonder if that had already happened.
I’d gone to a hotel to get away from the apartment for at least a night. Had it worked? A memory of myself being emotionally struck by watching a scene from a movie in the hotel room told me that I had not escaped. Whatever had attached itself to me may not have fully caught up with me at the hotel yet, but I thought it soon would. It made me wonder what I would find when I went back to the hotel.
Something told me that this was the same voice which informed me of the next songs to come on the radio station before they aired. It was the voice which told me with unshakeable certainty I would be getting the job. I knew better than to argue with this voice. This voice was not that of reason but of psychic intuition.
Yet, I didn’t think of myself as a psychic. That was for scam artists who operate telephone hotlines and waved hands over crystal balls or consulted a deck of cards with strange pictures on them. As far as I was concerned all of that was a show, smoke and mirrors and misdirection and it was strictly for suckers.
I was no carnival booth fortune teller nor could I become one if I wanted to. I didn’t think it worked that way. It came in flashes uninvited by my intent. I couldn’t see them coming and couldn’t stop them once they were there. Nor did I believe I could prevent them from retreating though I had never tried.
“Maybe that’s an experiment for another day,” I absentmindedly noted to no one.
For now I would have to orchestrate a way of operating a semi-normal life amidst the dark mists of a haunted one. One of things I’d read suggested that some people who believed they lived in haunted locales just continued to go about their lives, navigating around the occasional spiritual outburst. It was an interesting thought but probably, I realized, not one for me to consider.
“Help us, mister,” I recalled the girl saying on the message recording. She wanted something from me and I feared she wouldn’t quit hounding me until she got it. And she would follow me everywhere, even to the ends of the world, until I helped her.
I finished up the last of the greasy food, walked the garbage over to a nearby trashcan and returned to the car. After I started it up again I hesitated before putting it in gear. Did I really want to go back to the hotel room? I’d have to go back to check out for sure, but did I have to go back to the room?
“If I don’t go back to the room all I’ll lose is the cost of the room and a paperback book.”
Practical arguments won out this time. I’d already paid for the room so I might as well use it. I thought I could use it as neutral ground to regroup my thoughts and plan a bit of personal strategy. And besides, the book I’d left behind was a favorite of mine which had gotten me through a few sleepless nights in the past. It might be able to cover my back a few more nights.
The car exited the parking lot and began to cruise back to the hotel. My right arm stretched forward and ended with my hand on the steering wheel. My left arm lazed out the rolled down window of the driver side door. On the drive back to the hotel my mind wandered back to ways I might be able to bring a little balance to my strange new life. I noticed the potential surrounding Katie was quickly taking precedence for me.
I’d had a few girlfriends in my time. None of them had been really serious though. Before the incident at the school from which I’d moved on I had been flirting with another teacher from the staff. When the accusation came out it became harder and harder to reach her outside of work. Finally she had stopped returning my calls or even making eye contact with me at work. I could have pursued it. I could have defended myself to her but I knew it would have only made it worse for the both of us in the end.
After I’d cleared out my desk and had been instructed never to return to campus again, I reflected upon how I had no one close to me to support me through it all. Sure, I had friends like everyone else did. Some of them had even stood up for me publicly. Some had written angry letters to the board. One had punched out a parent of one of the a
ccusing students during a meeting.
The man stood ranting on about allegations and demands of immediate termination, even arrest. He refused to give up the podium under protest of several people from the audience and two from the school board. After a few minutes my very good friend, Kent, who’d accompanied me to the meeting stood up from his folding chair, walked up behind the raving lunatic and gently tapped him on the shoulder.
We all watched it coming, some of us enjoying it more than others. When the parent whirled on him and snarled something about not being finished Kent drew back his fist and let it fly, cracking the guy across the bridge of his nose with merciless force. The man crumpled to the floor. Kent simply turned around and calmly walked back to his seat to thunderous applause from half the audience and shocked disbelieving silence from the other half.
I have to confess that’s one of my favorite memories from those days and it makes me smile whenever I think of it. It made me smile as I thought of it in the car on the way back to the hotel. But the smile was soon gone when I remembered the long sleepless nights afterward. I may have had friends willing to crack a few skulls on my behalf but I’d had no one who could comfort me in my most intimate moments of despair. In that way I was always alone.
And then there was Katie. An unexpected breath of fresh air in a choking chamber filled with the poison gas of depression and self loathing. How could a woman I knew for so little time come to mean so much to me? Perhaps it happened in the same way a few drops of water quickly came to mean life to a person who has been dehydrated for days. When you have gone without something for so long it becomes easy to appreciate it when it shows up.
Katie would mean more to me than just someone to hold at night, someone with whom I could be physically drawn together. While I was just as aware of my newly awakened physical desires as any guy would be at the chance of new love, my instincts and intuition mused about something deeper and far more meaningful than an embrace of flesh.
She could be someone to face the ghosts with.
Alarms began to go off in my heart. Face the ghosts? Where had that come from? It didn’t feel like a thought which belonged to me. It felt as if it had come from outside of me like a fish entering a new ocean from an old familiar river. It was a sketched line which seemed to fit all the others within me but originated from an entirely different design. It was a concept which had been placed in my head from elsewhere.
With that realization I became more and more aware of the danger inherent in the currents swirling about me. Could I invite someone like Katie to step into those same waters? Irreparable harm might come out of it. If something bad happened to her I didn’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself. But the thought of walking through it without her seemed somehow incorrect. Was she meant to play some part in it too? And if I took steps to prevent her from doing so would I end up causing even more damage?
There were so many questions to which I couldn’t find answers. And as I struggled with the question set before me more of them seem to proliferate.
“Where is this all headed?” I wondered in the darkness of the car speeding along.
I entered the parking lot of the hotel and found the same space close to my room I’d parked in earlier that day. The lot seemed just as empty as it had when I left, a testament to the loneliness of the life I had been living. I took a deep breath before I exited the car and headed toward the room. An empty room and a lonely paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 awaited me.
As I slid the electronic key card through the lock a famous line from the book I left on the bed jumped into my mind.
“It was a pleasure to burn.” My voice sounded hollow as I spoke into the night. I thought it should have reverberated off the door in front of me more than it did yet it seemed absorbed by the dark, unable to play out its full meaning. But far more disturbing was the line from the book itself. It had come from out of nowhere.
That gave me pause. I wondered why I should have thought of that line at that moment.
I looked down at the door handle with my hand around it. After I had slid the keycard through the electronic reader I had pushed the door slightly ajar without even thinking about it. I finished the job and pushed it the rest of the way open. I hesitated a moment, feeling something was waiting for me on the other side. I thought about how I had wondered earlier if I had escaped the presence which followed me.
I flipped on the light switch and my question was answered immediately. When I had left the room it was as spotlessly clean as I had found it. Now it was a complete mess. The covers were thrown off the bed, the chair was tipped over, a lamp lay in the middle of the floor and there were tiny bits of shredded paper everywhere.
I realized at once that the pieces of paper were the remains of my once favored book. The spine and cover were empty and torn husks on the floor. I stooped down and picked up one of the pieces of the front cover and examined it. As I looked closely I noticed the smallest parts of the very edges were blackened as if burned. The piece was also warmer to the touch that it probably should have been. I let it drop to the floor.
I walked a little farther into the room to see if there was anything significant about the disaster of a hotel room or if it was simply just a mess. Whoever—or whatever, I reminded myself—was responsible had done a thorough job. I didn’t think it was the little girl who had done this, though. She had tried soliciting my help. This was an expression of unrestrained intimidation.
This was the work of the owner of the third voice I’d heard on the answering machine. On the recording it had given me a warning. Now it had followed up with a demonstration. As far as I was concerned it was a very effective demonstration. My stomach felt like it had moved six inches north of its original address.
The voice of reason returned to snap me out of my frozen state. It told me I had to take a step back from myself and think about what I was seeing. I could miss something important if I wasn’t careful. I took a deep cleansing breath, closed my eyes and exhaled. I needed to slow my heart down otherwise I would become a wreck and descend into emotional uselessness.
“Get control of it, Steve.” I opened my eyes again. Surveying the damage I was able to gather two insights from the scene before me. Both served to set my nerves on edge.
The first thing was that the spirit of the little girl wasn’t the only one that could follow me around at will. Anywhere I went the owner of the third voice could follow also. It wanted me to know this, I’m sure of it. The ransacked room in front of me was the thing’s way of saying it was watching me.
The second insight I gained was that these things could manipulate objects. Like everyone else I’d heard stories or seen movies where ghosts would throw objects around a room, upend furniture and generally alter or manipulate a physical environment. But until you see the evidence of that kind of activity with your own two eyes you don’t know how it will affect you. That opened up a new world of possibilities. But one possibility made its way to the top of the pile and shouted for attention.
“If they can rip apart a book, what can they do to me?” There was something else hanging onto this realization. I began to pace, reaching out to touch parts of the wall, fallen lamps, scraps of paper. The feel of these things against my skin sent shivers of fear through me. But balancing out the fear was another emotion. I felt encouraged.
That was when it occurred to me. I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Why would it want to give a warning? Well, there’re only two reasons you give a warning.” I was onto something now, I could sense it. The heart of the matter was opening up and I could see into it.
“The first,” I said, lecturing to the ruined room and anything else that might be listening, “is that you’re afraid for someone. You don’t want them to get hurt, so you warn them. But that’s not you, is it?” No, it wasn’t. The tone on the recording made that abundantly clear. It growled like a corned animal. It hated me.
“You don’t care one lick ab
out me, do you? The little girl might, but you? Not a chance.” I went back to pacing because when my legs moved so did my brain. It was a habit my former students found amusing and a little distracting at times. But it worked just fine for me, thank you very much.
“Whatever did this is afraid,” I announced to the overturned chairs. I turned around and addressed the empty space of the room. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” There was no answer. I had expected none. I continued my lecture, teaching the emptiness and exploring more of the motivations of ghosts.
“You see, the second reason you issue a warning is because of self preservation, because you’re afraid for yourself.” I thought just about everyone is afraid of ghosts but then I began to wonder how often we might think of this subtle possibility: could ghosts be afraid of us? If they could affect us and our environment in some way then there was at least the possibility of the reverse being true.
“If it can rip apart a book, what can it do to me,” I had asked only a few minutes earlier. But that question didn’t allow for the fullness of the circumstance.
“The right question is; if it can rip apart a book then what can I do to it?”
I thought that even if I couldn’t hurt it I could at the very least stop it from doing something bad it wanted to do.
My pacing stopped again. I had assumed all of the scattered bits of paper were randomly and angrily thrown about. Most of them were. The ones that had just caught my attention, however, were most definitely not. Some of them were arranged neatly, using letters and words from the torn pages to spell a message. It made me think of an old-school ransom note from movies where kidnappers used newspaper and magazine clippings to deliver their messages.
“I have burned before,” I began to read the first line out loud. “I will burn again. Stay away or I will burn you.” The bottom line of the message was an entire sentence from one of the book’s pages and it was a phrase I was intimately familiar with.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
It was a reminder that even though the ghost might be capable of feeling afraid it wasn’t powerless. Far from it. The gravity of my position was bearing down at full strength on my shoulders. Looking around the room I saw that the thing could do serious damage if it wanted to and I was in its path.
“So much for ‘it can’t get any worse,’” I said, mocking my earlier optimism. “Damn it.”
A Ghost of Fire Page 9