by DM Sinclair
Ryan didn't make it to the end of the pamphlet before the man with the mustache returned.
Ryan sensed right away that something was different about the man. But he was slow to figure out what it was. When he finally put it together, he couldn’t believe it had taken him so long.
The man with the mustache was dead.
He had gone in alive, and half an hour later he came out dead.
And he looked delighted about it.
Ryan knew that he was staring at the man, wide-eyed and agape. But the now-ghostly mustache man ignored him. He drifted languidly through the waiting room to the exit. And missed the exit door by a foot or so in his reverie, passing right through the wall instead.
Ryan struggled to explain what had happened. Unless the man had been murdered during his appointment—which seemed unlikely given how happy he appeared—how had this happened?
Ryan didn’t have long to wonder, because seconds after the man departed, Ryan’s name was called.
He quickly pulled himself together, delicately picked up Sye’s chair by the two halves of its back, and carried Sye with it into the appointment.
FOUR
The fluorescent lights in the examination room buzzed like surgical saws.
Ryan suspected this room had been used for embalming in the funeral home days. It was in the basement, and had a corresponding damp chill. But at some point since the demise of the funeral business it had been dressed up in a simulation of comfort. The slab table was covered with a thin cushion and a fitted sheet, and the walls were painted a pale blue that, beneath the incessant lights, was more blinding than soothing. Whatever instruments of horror he imagined had once been down here were mercifully gone, although he could still see the drain set into the tile floor where God-knows-what used to sluice down.
He wished Sye would say something. Or at least move. But the old ghost sat with his chair propped against the exam table, staring hatefully at the wall as though robin’s-egg blue was a mortal offense to him.
A lab-coated woman strode in. She went right past Ryan like he wasn’t there and gave Sye a clinical smile. “Hello,” she said coolly.
Sye, unsurprisingly, didn’t respond.
Ryan guessed that the doctor was probably only recently into her 30’s, but it was hard to tell anything about her because under the merciless lights she just looked, as anyone would, sallow and green. All he could see for sure was that her hair was tied up tightly, she wore glasses, and she seemed utterly unwilling to acknowledge his presence in the room.
She sat on a wheeled stool and rolled it close to Sye. “Just need to scan your SES, don’t move please.” She dipped the end of a hand-held scanner into Sye’s side and held a button down for several seconds. That done, she pushed her glasses up her nose and studied him intently. “At least a seventy percent particulate density, resolved down to the millimeter or less.” Ryan didn’t know why she was saying this out loud. It seemed like the sort of information that would normally be noted on a chart. Did she expect him to know what she was talking about? He was relieved when she pulled a chart from a drawer nearby, and noted things on it.
She leaned in close to study the old chair where Sye’s form touched it. “And you’re looking for an unhaunting?”
No answer from Sye, so Ryan piped in. “I think so.”
The doctor looked at Ryan for the first time and pushed her glasses up her nose as she studied him. The way her gaze scanned over him made him feel like she was precisely calculating his surface area. “You’re family?”
“Well, no, not family.” He fumbled for a way to explain the situation. “We eat breakfast.”
She sighed. “So I presume he haunts where you live?”
“Yes.”
She lost interest in him right away and spoke closely to Sye. “Mr. Matney…”
“Um… I’m Mr. Matney,” Ryan interrupted. “I don’t know Sye’s last name, so I just filled in the form with my name. Sorry.”
She glanced at him again, and he felt like in that moment of eye contact she was breaking down his chemical composition component by component. But she said nothing and returned her attention to Sye. “You want to not be in the chair anymore. Is that right?”
“Yes. Please,” Ryan said.
“Sye?” she said, pointedly ignoring Ryan.
Sye stared straight ahead, giving her only what he ever gave Ryan. Ryan let the silence drag out for a few seconds before venturing another try. “He doesn’t say… or do… anything. Ever.”
“Then how do you know he wants out of the chair?”
“It’s a guess. I mean, why wouldn’t he?”
She let out an exasperated snort. “Let me guess. You want him out of your house.”
“Well, yeah, but…”
She stood up from her stool and emphatically closed her file. “I’m not an exorcist, Mr. Matney. Who are you to say what this man wants or doesn’t want?”
“I think I…” Ryan didn’t know what he was going to say, but she wasn’t interested anyway.
“I get people like you in here all the time. We all have ghosts in our homes. They are people. People do not stop being people just because their bodies are gone. They have rights. They…”
“Touch him,” Ryan interrupted her as calmly as he could muster.
“Excuse me?”
“Touch him. Please.”
“We are not allowed to…”
“You want to know what he wants or doesn’t want, just touch him. I have. By accident. I would be happy to have him out of my house, that’s true, but believe me, there is nobody who has ever wanted out of anything as much as this man wants out of this chair.”
She hesitated, studying Sye’s face again, maybe hoping for some sign that he was listening to them.
Finally, like she was poking an avocado on the shelf to test for squishiness, she let her finger deftly dart out and poke into Sye’s torso. Only for a second.
Ryan heard her breath catch in her throat. She shivered. Her face transformed and softened in an instant as a wave went through her. Ryan knew exactly what she was feeling because he had felt it.
She hovered for a moment, looking deep into Sye’s eyes. Her eyes were wide, and he thought perhaps teary.
Finally she said “This should take about five minutes.”
The doctor rolled something out from its hiding place behind a counter. It was an electronic box riding on the top shelf of a wheeled metal cart. The box itself was as utilitarian and nondescript as it could be. It was gray, about the size of a microwave, with a simple LCD display embedded on the front. It had various knobs and buttons whose purpose he couldn’t guess. On the cart’s lower shelf was a power supply brick the size of a cinder block, which struck Ryan as probably being dangerously high-voltage for something riding on an eight dollar craft-store cart. Attached to the main box by a baffling spiderweb of wires was a collection of things that late-night vacuum infomercials refer to as “optional attachments”. Some were shiny steel prods, some were paddles, others looked like spatulas and old radio microphones. He counted eight different inscrutable accessories, two hanging on each of the cart’s four sides. The whole assembly gave the distinct impression of having been cobbled together from kitchen appliances and jumper cables.
The doctor flipped the biggest switch on the box, a rocker that took up an entire edge of the front console. Even from where he sat, Ryan could see that it was labeled “Master Power” with a plastic strip printed out of a label maker.
“This will just take a minute to charge up,” the doctor said. She directed all her attention to writing on her chart, evidently to shut down any attempt he might make at conversation.
Ryan was desperately curious about the box, with its array of inexplicable lights and its various tentacle-like appendages. But she already seemed annoyed, and the fear of annoying her even more overruled everything else. He stayed silent.
The metal box made a steady, pulsating drone that rose in pitch as a progr
ess bar on the LCD display inched from left to right.
Ryan’s curiosity tugged at him. Attempting to look like he was casually passing the time, he strolled around the exam table. He pretended to study the paintings hung on the walls, all the while seeing if he could get close enough to the box to read the other labels stuck to the front of it.
“Stand back, please,” she said without looking up.
He obediently took a few steps back. “Sorry, I was…” He didn’t have an actual excuse and she didn’t appear to want one. So he stopped speaking.
He waited.
When she still hadn’t looked up after another twenty seconds he tried a different tack, leaning towards the box but moving no closer to it. He leaned as far as his balance allowed, but he still couldn’t read the small text on any of the knobs and dials. He squinted and held his pose, hoping that she’d look up and notice that he was curious.
Out of the corner of his squint he caught a flicker of movement. She had glanced at him.
“Sorry,” he said, “I was just trying to read the…” he flicked his finger in a circle, vaguely pointing at the box.
She finally spoke again, still writing on her chart. “If you have a specific question…”
“How does it work?”
She grunted irritably. “That question is the opposite of specific.”
“Sorry.”
She stopped writing. “Strong emotional attachment in life creates a molecular bond between the ghost and an object or a place.”
“How?”
“We don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“This appliance breaks the molecular bond with directed electrical charge.”
“And that works?”
“We wouldn’t be in business if it didn’t.”
Ryan obligingly went silent.
He considered asking about the mustache man from the waiting room, but he let the box get to half charge before he dared speak again. “Oh, doctor… I meant to ask…”
“I’m not a doctor.” The words were icy enough to chill the air.
“Oh. Sorry. But I meant to ask…”
“Mm hmm,” she said, while clearly implying “shut up”.
“Before us there was a guy who came in. He was alive when he came in, but when he left…”
“Mm hmm,” she said again. Still not looking at him.
“Why…” Ryan started. He wasn’t sure how to phrase the question. “I mean… what happened there?”
“I can’t discuss other clients.”
“No, of course not.” He let the box’s pitch climb another octave or so. “But hypothetically…”
“Extraction,” she said curtly. She glanced at the machine, most likely hoping it was done charging so she could end this conversation now. But it wasn’t.
Ryan pressed on, fascinated. “Extraction? Extracting what?”
“We don’t do teeth here, Mr. Matney.”
It sounded ridiculous in his head but he said it anyway. “You extracted his ghost?”
“Correct.”
“Why?”
“He was not my client, but I assume that he requested it. It is one of the services we provide.”
“But why would he want that?”
“You’d have to ask him, wouldn’t you?”
“Okay. Put it this way: why would anyone want that?”
She looked at the ceiling. “If you want to discuss the possibilities, you need to speak with…” She chewed on the name like a sharp bone found in her chicken. “…Roger. The owner. Upstairs.”
As if it had been listening to her and wanted to hit its cue, the box’s drone reached a crescendo and overlaid that with a tinny ping. She failed to conceal her relief. “Please stand back,” she said.
Ryan obediently took a step backwards. He watched as the not-a-doctor lifted two horseshoe-shaped paddles off the cart and uncoiled the long wires connecting them to the box. She leaned in close to Sye, holding them in front of her. Sye still showed no awareness of anything happening.
“What are you doing?” Ryan couldn’t resist asking.
“What you came in for,” she replied unhelpfully. She positioned one paddle beneath the seat of the chair and the other behind the backrest. He was impressed with how steady she was able to hold them, not touching the chair or Sye, but perfectly still in what seemed precisely calculated spots. She was good at this.
She pressed gently with one foot on a pedal wired to the bottom of the cart. She did it so exactingly that the rest of her body stayed motionless. The paddles in her hands still didn’t move at all. They seemed locked rigidly in space. Ryan wondered how she did it.
The machine made a heavy pop like a giant flashbulb.
The paddles in her hands ignited with bursts of blue energy that crackled for only a fraction of a second, but were powerful enough to jolt the chair violently. Half of the broken back came loose and dangled by the one screw holding it on.
The drone from the box dropped to silence, then immediately began rising through the octaves again, much more quickly this time. Another burst was coming.
Ryan sprang forward, grabbed the dangling half of the chair back and swiveled it into place. He didn’t know if the broken back would affect the procedure, but he thought it better to be safe. The technician, or whatever she was, ignored or didn’t notice him. She kept the paddles rock steady as another pop rattled the cart. Ryan jumped back, barely getting out of the way of the burst of crackling energy. He felt it tug at the hair on his arms.
She held the paddles steady for another few seconds, and then took her foot off the pedal and withdrew the paddles, careful not to let them touch the chair.
The box’s drone descended fast to nothing. A fan on the back switched on.
She relaxed. “That’s it,” she said.
Nothing appeared to be different. Sye sat in the chair, staring angrily straight ahead. Ryan had expected him to leap triumphantly out of the chair, and perhaps to shower Ryan with gratitude. In some of Ryan’s more optimistic imaginings of this moment, Sye even started to break-dance. But none of that happened. He didn’t move at all.
“Did it work?” Ryan asked.
He was surprised to find the technician smiling softly, watching Sye with what appeared to be wide-eyed wonder. Ryan warmed up to her a little. “It worked,” she said. “Give him a second.”
Sye remained seated and still for what felt like minutes.
And then Ryan was astonished to see the anger on Sye’s face melt away, replaced with an expression of curiosity and puzzlement. Ryan had never seen any expression other than anger on Sye’s face, so although he had been expecting a change, the transformation still took him by surprise.
Sye shifted in his seat and looked down at his chair quizzically, like it wasn’t the color he remembered it to be.
“He feels it,” the technician said. “He’s figuring out that he’s not haunting it anymore.” She looked like she might cry. Like someone who had just set a rescued fawn loose in the wild.
Ryan held his breath. He still held out some small hope for the break-dancing.
Sye—perhaps for the first time since his death—stood up.
He bounced tentatively, testing the unfamiliar weight on his legs. But right away he stooped, holding his back. He stumbled backwards and sat in the chair again. He immediately looked relieved to be off his feet.
Ryan was immeasurably disappointed. “What’s happening? Why is he sitting again?”
Sye shifted his weight backwards in the chair and closed his eyes. Like he needed a nap already.
The technician, too, seemed let down. “Give him time,” she said. “He obviously wants to get up. But he’s old.”
“He’s a ghost!”
“He’s a man who died old. And surely you’ve heard, whatever your state at the time of death, that’s the state of your ghost. If he had problems getting around before he died, then he’s going to have problems now.”
“That’s not f
air.”
“That’s life. And death.” She closed her file and stood. “Take him home. Give him a little time.” The chill returned to her voice. “You don’t have to kick him out today, you know.”
Ryan was slightly offended that she thought so little of him when he felt like he was being heroically considerate.
Sye’s eyes were still closed and he hadn’t moved, aside from clutching his knees with both hands. It seemed cosmically unjust to Ryan that Sye would be like this forever. It was hard, he was sure, to spend a few years alive in that state. But to spend the rest of time enfeebled? It almost seemed worth getting your ghost out before—
Something clicked in Ryan’s head. The mustache man. “This is why people do it,” he said. “Extraction. They get out of their body early, while they’re young, so they get a good ghost. So they don’t have to spend forever like Sye.”
“Yes. That is why they do it. More often than not.”
Ryan let the idea meander around in his head. He waited for it to settle. Wondered if it might stay for a chat. “It kind of makes sense,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
She paused on her way past and looked at him. She seemed to want to answer. But she struggled with it, and finally just said “Will you let me know what happens with Sye? If he goes anywhere?”
Ryan could tell by her voice that this wasn’t professional interest. She cared.
“Sure,” he said.
The technician-who-was-not-a-doctor nodded and disappeared into the corridor, leaving Ryan alone with Sye.
Still in his chair.
Ryan carried Sye’s chair home from the Clinic the same way he had carried it there: over his shoulder, with Sye glued to it like it wasn’t moving at all.
The street was already far more populous than it had been just over an hour earlier when he arrived. The ghosts were dense enough now to give him the sense of walking through foam with thousands of eyes floating in it. He tried to ignore their stares and their occasional pleas for conversation. He ducked off Mass Ave. as soon as he could, and into the relatively less-dense side streets. It would take him longer to get home, but it would be worth it.