Ghost Program Read online

  GHOST PROGRAM

  Marion Desaulniers

  Copyright July 2014, Tacoma

  US Copyright Office

  All rights reserved.

  ❃ CHAPTER 1 ❃

  Most ghosts pass their time in denial, failing to realize that the world has moved on without them.

  It all started the year after high school, during my first year of community college in the town of Seaside, Washington. I’d probably always lived in a haunted house, never seeing the spirits that were in it. That is, not until the the spring of my nineteenth year.

  Which brings me to Gregg. He’d had the same tired ideas for over a hundred years and no amount of explanation on my part ever fixed that. He was animated, vivacious, and a most affable companion. He expected to become a millionaire at least once in his short life, but his plans were outdated.

  I woke up on Saturday morning immersed in that dim light that always shined through the my lacy window curtains whenever the sky was overcast. A thick, billowing fog rolled across the floor of my room, seeping out from underneath the curtains. It should have been impossible because the window was latched shut.

  And then Gregg was there.

  He wore his brown, woolen suit and paced around the wooden floor of my bedroom. I wouldn’t have called it my bedroom in front of him. He believed that it was his bedroom. I was just a girl who lived there. Which, strangely, he seemed to be fine with. Strange, because I wouldn’t have been so accepting if one day I had found a stranger, especially a man, living in my bedroom without permission. I wonder if being dead makes one more complacent and less questioning.

  So there he was, in his pleated jacket, matching knickerbockers, and brown socks. Today he was very excited because of some enterprising idea about starting a taxi service. You see, when he died, he was nineteen just like me.

  I remember, he wore a grand smile on his face.

  “You see, I will make a lot of money with this.” He continued his aimless, circular stroll across my bedroom floor as he discussed his pecuniary interests.

  There I was, in my flannel pajamas and white bedsheets, looking at him as if he was a character from a dream.

  “I now have my own stallion and I’ve finally paid off the carriage,” he boasted. “Passengers will pay me a dollar just to get outside of town across the bridge....”

  “Gregg!” I interrupted as I sat up in bed and rubbed my weary eyes. “You’re getting on my nerves! Do I have to hear this shit so early in the morning?”

  He looked at me in surprise, the smile slowly leaving his face.

  “Why do you swear?”

  “No one uses horses for transportation, any more. It’s outdated.”

  “Why not?” His face was pale, his brown hair fell across his eyes.

  “I don’t know why not. Why don’t you go downstairs and get some breakfast?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. I think I’ll stay right here. I don’t like it downstairs. I don’t like leaving the room.”

  “Why not?”

  “That woman downstairs, she never acknowledges me. It’s not polite. It frightens me. It’s like I don’t exist to her. Never once did she offer me some eggs or a croissant or one of those little glasses of orange juice.” His expression was petulant. “I never see my mother anymore, just that cook.”

  “She’s not a cook, she owns the house.” I stared at him hard. Soon he would see. That cook was my mom.

  “Where’s mother, then?”

  “I don’t know. It’s early. I wish you’d talk to someone else. I’m still tired,” I said.

  He vanished, leaving behind only a faint mist which quickly dissipated.

  I rolled over and fell back asleep, glad to be rid of him. Gregg wasn’t a proper ghost; he didn’t even scare people. If I was dead, I’d have a lot of fun with it, dragging chains across the floor and rustling curtains, keep it interesting. But Gregg didn’t like scaring humans.

  In my dream, however, I met a ghost who did.

  I dreamt that I had woken up late on Saturday and stumbled down the carpeted stairs. When I got to the kitchen, I looked for mom, but she was nowhere to be seen. There was no bacon sitting in a pile of oily grease in a pan on the stove; the smell of brewing coffee was absent from the air around me. The house was silent.

  I couldn’t hear my father yelling from the upstairs bedroom. The house was instead still, and an eerie mist rose up from the tiled floor. I felt a cold breeze stir through the kitchen and noticed that the front door to the house was open slightly.

  I should go shut it, I thought. But for some reason, my feet wouldn’t move.

  Then I saw Him. I saw His pale, tall form pass through the doorway, His black hair receding from his lined, pale forehead, and His irises shiny and silver, the color in conflict with His black eyebrows. His black lips covered a harsh overbite that made His teeth look like those of a shark.

  I stood in my flannels and stared.

  Smiling evilly, drifting slowly towards the kitchen, the tails of His coat lifting and floating on the slight breeze brought about by His movement, He turned towards me, murder in His expression, the soft glow of a table lamp accenting His hate-filled eyes.

  He only said two words. “I’m here.”

  Then I woke up, and I was back in my bedroom. I should have been relieved, but I could still feel His presence, and I wondered if He was still in the house.

  “Gregg? Are you still here? Can you show yourself?” I asked. He was gone, I supposed.

  I pushed my blankets off and got up to look for something to wear in my closet. It was hard to ignore the chill that still hung in the air. Though I doubted it would do any good, I turned the key in the doorknob of my bedroom to lock it. I was that nervous. I pulled on some khaki capris and a sweater, looked at myself quickly in the mirror, and unlocked my door. Peeping my head into the hallway, I checked for the black-haired man, but there was nothing and nobody there. I hopped down the stairs to the kitchen and smelled coffee brewing and bacon cooking, as usual.

  *******

  Few weeks earlier

  Mom looked up at me from where she was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. After last night’s experiment, her lipstick-smeared botox lips had never looked better. Nor had her fake tan or bleached hair. At least I knew that she was human.

  “There’s breakfast on the stove,” she said, then went back to reading her paper.

  “I know,” I replied.

  I grabbed a plate from the cupboard and helped myself to some eggs with cheese in them. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, then sat down quietly at the kitchen table. After a few minutes, mom spoke.

  “Planning on doing anything today?” She still didn’t look up from the story she was reading.

  “Can I invite my calculus tutor over?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to show him my new software. It helps if I can get another opinion on it before I turn it in. I need a grade in this last class so I can transfer to university.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll probably go out shopping. The house is yours.” Her hair looked positively platinum in the glow of the kitchen lightbulb.

  “Good.”

  “Don’t go out anywhere alone. They just found another strangled girl in the park,” she said.

  “I’m staying right here,” I said.

  After high school, I decided to complete my first nine months of classes at community college as the cost was five times cheaper than the university, and they had all of my introductory classes there, anyway. In two months, I’d be in the computer engineering program at the UW. Our final project for our programming class was to design a useful software. I’d designed a computer program that communicates with the dead.

  That
’s where all the trouble started from.

  *****

  “It just takes a minute to warm up,” I said. I sat at my computer desk, staring at the computer screen as Brent leaned over my shoulder. Brent was a biochemistry student, so I think that his skepticism about my claims of supernatural communication came naturally to him, being that he had been trained not to accept any assertion as fact without proof, but I was sure that my program worked.

  The desktop icons all appeared, and I clicked on the graphic I had personally designed. It looked like Casper the ghost.

  Brent was only in Seaside for the weekend because he went to college in Seattle.

  “Ghosts try to speak to us,” I explained to him. “And we speak to them. The computer translates our language to the dead and the dead’s language to us.” I took a swig off of the wine bottle in my hand then passed the bottle to Brent. “The software detects sounds through the microphone, and I have the program set to detect both our voices and frequencies that only dogs can hear, the sounds that humans normally don’t, because that is what ghosts normally communicate in, those frequencies.”

  The program opened on the screen to reveal a graph of audio measurements and a text bar for translating otherworldly communications.

  “You’re about to witness history being made... Is there anyone in this room?” I asked the computer. The computer then spit out a series of sounds in a frequency that I could not hear, transmitting my words from its small, grey speakers.

  The needle on the display began to move up and down and soon I could see that it was bobbing in the cadence of speech. When it was finished a few seconds later, a text message appeared below:

  Why are you here?

  Brent laughed and straightened. I turned around, looking at his handsome, suntanned face, my feelings hurt. Surely he didn’t believe that this was all a joke?

  “Am I supposed to believe this?” he asked. “That’s it? Just a few words on a screen, and we’ve crossed the seemingly insurmountable barrier between life and death, a chasm between two worlds that’s never been crossed before? And this is what it looks like?” His giggling was offensive.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Ask it another question.”

  Brent stood in front of the computer, studying the words on the screen, his hands on his hips, squinting at the audio display, wondering when I would admit to him that this was all an elaborate prank, and seeing for the first time that I was likely insane.

  “What should I ask it?” he replied.

  “Anything.”

  “Why did you ask us why we were here?” he asked the ghost. “I mean, this is Sam’s house. Why shouldn’t she be here?”

  The pixelated needle again began to jiggle on the screen, starting and stopping.

  No, this is my house. Why is she in my room? Why is there a girl in my room?

  “Is that seriously what it said to us?” asked Brent.

  “Yes. The program doesn’t lie. It just interprets the speech.”

  “So there’s someone...a spirit... here with us?”

  “Of course there is.”

  “And you’ve done this before. Talked to it?”

  “Only once. I shut off the computer before I had time to find anything out.”

  “Why’d you do that? Shut it off, I mean.”

  “I was scared. That’s why I invited you over. I mean, I told you I just wanted your opinion on my project before I turned it in, but that wasn’t really it. I was afraid to use the Casper program while I was in here alone.”

  “So what did you ask it last time?”

  “I asked if anyone was in the room with me.”

  “And?”

  “It said....yes. Then I turned off the computer. And I haven’t used it since then.” I’d actually yanked out the power cord and ran down the stairs screaming. But he didn’t need to know that.

  “No, here’s the truth. It’s only worked once. I’ve used it four times, and it’s only worked once. I had to keep tweaking it. Three times I ran Casper. And I never got a response. I thought the program was faulty. But I didn’t want to scrap a project that had taken me so long to design. And then the fourth time....it answered me. The session was a success. Something answered me. And something’s in the room with us now. Can’t you feel how cold it is in here?”

  Brent looked at me, then at the rustling curtain. “Well, the heater’s not running.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, but Brent didn’t look like he much believed me. “Anyway, so ask it something. Let’s continue the conversation.”

  “If this is your room, then shouldn’t we at least know your name?” Brent asked, addressing the ghost.

  The display on the computer pulsed once.

  Gregg

  Brent smiled. “Well, I’m Brent, and the girl is Sam. And you live in this room here, Gregg. How old are you?”

  19, read the screen.

  “Good news, Sam. I think your ghost is harmless. I don’t think this so-called spook intends to harm you.” If only he hadn’t said that. I sometimes think that’s what made the others come. Especially Him. “You still here, Gregg?”

  The computer monitor was still.

  “He must have left.” Brent’s smiled turned into a slight frown when he saw my look of disappointment. Had I opened a door to the afterlife only for it to slam shut a minute later?

  I sighed and put my face in my arms. Success in this project wouldn’t only mean an A in my class; it would affect my financial status for years into my adult life.

  “Sam?” asked Brent.

  “MMMmmmm,” I said into my elbow.

  “Look.”

  The screen displayed two words.

  Later, love.

  Brent smirked. “I think it likes you. You wanted my opinion on your project. Well, I think it’s a success.”

  “I’m glad you came to see it,” I said. “I’ll see you to the door.”

  As we stepped into the hallway, a burst of warm air hit us. My room was real cold.

  ❃ CHAPTER 2 ❃

  Two weeks later, I saw a ghost for the first time, and we were able to understand each other. Somehow my brain had learned to interpret the whisperings without the aid of computer software. I’d had two more sessions with Casper and so far, Gregg was the only spirit that spoke to me. He was friendly, casual, pleasant, and confused about his place in the world. Gregg believed that the world had stopped moving forward a hundred years ago and that his parents still owned our house. I didn’t know why someone would have died at such at the tender young age of 19 and was afraid to ask. Some part of me didn’t want to know.

  The first time I ever saw Gregg and knew what he looked like, it was early morning before classes. The sun had just begun to come up, but the light in my room was dim, the entire town covered in a shroud of fog that had not yet burned off.

  I’d spent the night before plowing through half of a large bottle of red wine and collapsed on my bed in a bout of drunken stupidity and dizziness. Already, I felt my hangover starting and dreaded the moment when it hit me full force.

  I was awake, but I didn’t get out of bed; instead I grabbed what was left of the wine off my nightstand and chugged it down. I felt my hangover receding just the way I’d hoped it would. I liked the way the blankets felt on top of me, and I knew that my bedroom would be chilly once I got out from underneath them. So I stayed there with my eyes only half open, hoping that I’d eventually fall back asleep when I heard a soft whispering from beside my bed. I couldn’t understand it, but I was sure it was there. It had a soft cadence that I knew had to be some kind of human speech.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, then jumped out of bed. I was right. The room was chilly, actually a little worse than I’d anticipated. I quickly warmed up my computer and opened the Casper software.

  The needle on the screen began to waver back and forth, then the words were translated:

  Good morning to you. Did you sleep well?

  I looked around the room but didn
’t see anyone.

  “Gregg?” I asked, uncertain. “Is that you?”

  The needle moved again.

  Yes.

  “Why’d you wake me up so early?”

  I was lonely.

  “Well, where are you? You’re right here in the room with me?”

  Yes.

  “What part of the room are you in?”

  Behind you.

  I turned around and looked behind me. I didn’t know if Gregg chose to show himself to me then or if I had done something to effect it. I didn’t know if the half-bottle of red wine I had consumed the night before had upped my supernatural communication abilities. Maybe I just wanted to believe that because I liked drinking wine and liked the way it made me feel. But I saw him, just the same. And he looked remarkably solid. He sat at the end of my bed wearing his usual fare of a brown tweed coat and pants cropped at the knee and a charming smile. I turned back to the computer screen in shock. The needle on the audio screen was moving, producing zig-zagged lines to indicate speech patterns.

  Do you see me?

  I turned back to the bed, and he was still there. Still smiling, a few strands of brown hair falling across his brown eye.

  “Yes, I see you. For the first time. You’re very handsome.”

  “Gratified,” he replied. Without the aid of the computer monitor, I had understood him! I wondered if that’s how babies learned to talk, if one day they just understood all of a sudden.

  “How long were you sitting on my bed?” I asked.

  “A long time. I slept the whole night on it.”