Ghost Program Read online

“You slept on my bed?”

  “Where else would I sleep? This is my room.”

  “Well, how....”

  “It wasn’t too comfortable if you must know....” he said with a sly smile. “I had to push your feet out of the way. Would have been nice if you’d left more room for me.” The computer still picked up and printed his words on the screen, same as always.

  “Were you whispering?” I asked.

  “Whispering? I don’t think I’d say that. I’d been trying to wake you for near an hour, but you wouldn’t wake. I just figured you were half deaf. Isn’t that why you use that machine? Because you can’t hear real good?”

  I took a few steps towards him, but not so close that we could touch. My heart was pounding in my chest, and my mouth felt dry. I just wasn’t prepared emotionally for a relationship with a ghost. Gregg studied me curiously from where he sat. He gave off a scent of cigars and faintly....cologne.

  “Do you sleep in my bed every night?” I barely squeaked, my voice betraying my nervousness.

  “More often than not,” he said. “Do you know you move around a lot in your sleep? And sometimes you talk. I never had a sister, until now. I didn’t really feel that way when you were ignoring me, like you were a sister. You were just there. Sometimes I even pulled your hair, hoping you’d talk to me, but you never noticed.”

  “Well, I’m noticing you now,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety.

  “You can come closer. I won’t bite,” he said, winking. “Promise.”

  The wooden boards of the bedroom floor suddenly felt very cold under my bare feet. I forced myself to walk very slowly towards the apparition until I was only two inches from him. He stared at me and the look in his brown eyes conveyed to me more than anything he’d said; that look suggested he’d been hunting for companionship for a very long time, longer than I had even lived; I’ll never forget the haunted loneliness that I saw in those eyes. I wondered briefly what that must feel like, to spend so long friendless. I wondered if Gregg’s parents lived in the house and if he ever saw them.

  He sighed, then reached out his arm and held my hand, the grasp firm and cold. And then I was out cold.

  I think my right knee hit the misty, hard floor and my head hit the mattress. When I came to, Gregg was leaning over me.

  “Are you alright?” he asked, concerned and gentlemanly.

  “Yes,” I murmured, sitting up, looking into his eyes, wondering if it was really happening, and taking deep breaths to stop myself from hurling last night’s dinner.

  “Wait a few minutes before you stand up. Bend forward; put your head in between your knees. That always helps. Do I really make you that nervous?” He laughed wryly. “I told you I wouldn’t bite. You didn’t believe me?”

  As I sat on the floor, Gregg rubbed my back. I’d heard the expression cold, dead hands before, but this was making it literal for me, and I shivered.

  The ghostly young man hovered over me, watching me heave; he then lifted me off the floor as if I was weightless and placed me gently down on my bed. His form dissipated as I watched, astonished. Tears came to my eyes, I think more from disappointment than from anything else. Why had I lost contact with him? I’d had my most meaningful interaction with a spirit only for it to be so short-lived and fleeting, almost as if it had never happened. If spirits could lift humans, what else could they do? I could’ve reinvented the entire field of physics with my newfound knowledge, but if Gregg never came back, I’d never get the chance. Frustration took over my emotions, and I cried bitterly. Depression set in, and I skipped my first hour of classes for the first time that year.

  *******

  Traffic was light, and I made it in time for my second period programming lab. The class was boring, but I was grateful for it. The instructor was a simpleton and because of that, the labs and tests were easy. Not having to study for Mr. Breame’s class had given me more time to work on my Casper software.

  The class was always the same drill: find a computer, set my backpack under the desk, open the programming book to the day’s lab, and work in silence. The students never spoke to each other except in the first minute or so of class, after which all that could be heard was the clacking of keys and the soft squeak of the instructor’s sneakers as he went from desk to desk looking over the shoulders of his students to make sure they were working.

  I found a desk in the corner and placed my backpack under my chair. I pulled my lab book out of my backpack and turned to page 14. I flipped the switch on the computer and waited for it to warm up. A few more students straggled in until everyone was present.

  I started on my lab, typing in commands next to a blinking cursor. Occasionally I glanced up and saw the instructor pacing around the room. I took a deep breath and detected a damp, moldy odor in the room that I hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to emanate from the front left corner of the room by a door with two clear windows set into its frame. A tall, skinny man stood there, his silver eyes staring at me, his mouth gaping open in a grimace. His black lips contrasted garishly against his white-as-walls skin. I looked on both sides of my desk and behind me. None of the other students appeared to notice him. The tall man wore a black trench coat and a mop of black hair fell across his ivory forehead.

  Who is he? I wondered. It may have been paranoia, but it appeared as if he had eyes for me alone. It was all rather peculiar.

  Standing in that brightly lit corner of the room, being ignored or unseen by all the other students as well as the instructor as if he was a figment of my imagination, he opened the buttons on his trench coat, revealing a skinny, naked form underneath covered only by black spandex panties. The contrast between his pale skin and the black underwear was harsh and unflattering. I’d all but forgotten my lab work by this time and so I just stared stupidly at the corner of the lab room where he stood. His sharp teeth smiled, and I looked desperately at the girl who typed next to me.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her. She didn’t reply. “Do you see that man?” She rolled her eyes and put a finger over her lips as if to tell me to be quiet.

  The pale man began to grind his hips in my direction, dancing the pelvic thrust, then slowly buttoned his coat back up, sparing me from the sight of his spindly form.

  “Who is that?” I said loudly, only to be rewarded with several angry stares as students turned around in their seats to see me. It was then that I realized that nobody could see the gaunt pervert except for me.

  He mouthed a command to me, his gaudy black lips moving in the form of words. I knew what he was saying:

  Follow me.

  I stared back at him, unable to either reply or take my eyes off of him.

  Follow me, he mouthed again.

  He vanished through the door. I could now see that he wore tall, black cowboy boots on his feet. I stood up from my chair and walked towards the front of the room. The students didn’t look up from their typing. The instructor saw me and smiled. Maybe he thought I was on my way to the bathroom or something.

  I pushed opened the door and found myself on a tree-lined walkway outside the building. A light mist of rain fell across my shoulders, and I wished I’d brought my jacket.

  The spook glided down the sidewalk, hovering above the ground as he walked, intent on reaching some destination at the end of the street, failing to look behind him at all to check that I was indeed trailing him, and I now wondered if his eyes were only for appearances only, if he was something from beyond my world that didn’t need eyes to see. I had to jog to keep up with his pace, then his black form turned into a driveway at the end of the block and disappeared through the front door of a rundown Victorian house with odd, medieval-looking turrets on its roof. I stopped a few feet away from the yard which was overgrown with dense weeds and blackberry bushes. The front porch boasted peeling paint and missing floorboards.

  The fact that the man had walked through the door, hadn’t opened it with a key or turned its knob, pretty much verified that he was supernatural,
and I had some real doubts about following him into such a place. Hearing a scream emanate from the house a few seconds later made up my mind to scram. I shivered as a cool wind passed over me then ran all the way back to class where I found the students beginning to shuffle out of the lab to their next class. Damn, I’d have to come back to the computer lab on the weekend to finish my chapter. I decided not to think about what had happened and what I had seen. I’d try to forget the bikini-clad freak that I had followed down the block and the rundown house he had run into. If I didn’t, I’d never get rid of the feeling of dread that was forming in the pit of my stomach. As I left the classroom, I heard a roll of thunder from outside. A storm was brewing over the college, and it would soon pour buckets.

  In the hallway, I ran into a girl from my math class, my last period of the day.

  “Hi, Mel,” I said as she walked towards me, smiling.

  “You know we have a quiz today,” she said. “Hope you’re ready.”

  “It shouldn’t be too bad,” I replied.

  “No, I don’t think so either. You wanna walk with me to class?”

  “It’d be my pleasure,” I replied.

  ❃ CHAPTER 3 ❃

  I got home in time to find a warm pizza on the kitchen counter. Mom looked up and smiled as she vacuumed the living room floor, wearing a Juicy Couture sweatsuit that looked like it had been made for someone twenty years younger. Her oversized boobs spilled out of the jacket, straining the zipper and fabric, and I could see every lump of fat on her ample butt. I wished she’d quit pretending to be a teenager sometimes.

  “Everything go all right at school?” she screamed at me over the sound of the vacuum.

  “Yeah,” I yelled back. “I’m gonna take a piece of pizza up to my room.”

  She nodded in response.

  I grabbed a paper plate off the counter and placed a slice of pizza on it, shook some parmesan cheese over it and black pepper and walked upstairs.

  The drive home had been treacherous. The roads were covered with water and several times I had to pump the brakes of my car to stop it from hydroplaning across the freeway. During my drive, I saw a bolt of lightning strike a tree by the side of the road causing the branches to catch fire and the trunk to split straight down the middle. I’ve heard that a car is considered a safe place to be during a lightning storm and felt myself lucky that I didn’t have to ride public transit. Pulling into my driveway, I’d had a hard time convincing myself that a bolt of electricity wouldn’t strike me dead the minute I left the shelter of my car. Finally on my porch, I had whipped open the front door after unlocking the dead bolt with my key and promptly tripped over a Costco-sized box of red wine sitting by the entryway. I figured the mailman had brought it.

  Now I was alone in my bedroom. I sighed in relief as I sat down on my soft and welcome bed clutching my lone slice of pizza. I shrugged my backpack off onto the pink bedspread. Outside my window, lightning cracked against the dark, cloudy sky. The walls of my bedroom shook, and I guessed that the lightning was very close to the house. The filmy lace curtains over the bedroom window began to sway back and forth although the window was closed. That didn’t make sense to me, but then a lot of things didn’t.

  The pizza tasted good; the crust was crisp and browned around the edges, the sauce sweet. As though food were a strong sedative, I felt myself relax noticeably. My ability to enjoy good food made me feel as if I was a very classy girl indeed, but it needed an extra touch, and I remembered the extra bottle of red wine I had on my closet shelf which hadn’t yet been opened.

  I jumped off the bed and stretched to grab it off the top shelf of the closet. Then I found my personal bedroom corkscrew and removed its top. I drank about a cup, then set the bottle down on the floor. My cell phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Sam?” said a voice.

  “Brent?”

  “Are you surprised I called?”

  “Well, yeah. Why are you calling? You never call me.”

  “I wanted to know if you used your ghost machine again.”

  “Oh. Well, sure I did.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I see ghosts now.”

  “You talked to one again?”

  “I also see them. They show themselves to me. And I can talk to Gregg without the software. I don’t really need Casper anymore. I’ll still use it, test it out. It is my project for school.”

  “Can I come over? I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened in your room. I had been very skeptical but the longer I’ve had to think about what happened, the more I think it really did happen.”

  “Well, of course it did.”

  “Are you home around 5?”

  “Yeah. Do you think I really have much of a social life? All my friends went to the university. I’m always alone.”

  “It’s going to take me a couple hours to drive in from Seattle. That’s not too late?”

  “No, it’s fine. It’ll be great to have a visitor.”

  “Do you think you could show me, er...Casper, again? I’ve only seen it work once.”

  “I’ve made progress. The ghost we spoke to was invisible the first time. I’ve seen him, now.”

  “I know. You told me.” His voice sounded dazed. For a moment, we were both silent.

  “I’ll see you around 5, then,” I said. “If I don’t answer the door, just let yourself in.”

  “Okay. See you.”

  “Bye,” I said and clicked the phone off.

  I wondered what had gotten into him. He had more interesting people to hang out with than me. I carried my plate down to the kitchen. It appeared that I was the only person home. The house was completely silent except for the sound of my dish being loaded into the dishwasher. My footsteps on the tile floor echoed eerily against the ceiling. I wondered where mom had run off to. I’d see her downstairs only thirty minutes earlier.

  I decided to take a shower and change my outfit before Brent came over. I don’t know why it occurred to me to do that. I hardly ever get dressed up for anybody. I don’t even usually do my hair as I figure that if they can’t handle seeing me au naturel, then they don’t deserve to see me at all.

  I walked upstairs and took a right into the bathroom. I pushed back the shower curtain and turned on the shower nozzle. The stream ran into a claw foot tub surrounded on three sides by curtain and one by a tiled wall. Soon, steam filled up the entire room, and the white fog covered even the mirror so that I couldn’t see myself undress in it. I pulled my sweatshirt and bra off, throwing them on the floor, knowing that as I did so, they probably became damp from the falling mist, then kicked off my boots and pushed them into the corner of the bathroom with my foot.

  Lastly, I unbuttoned my jeans, slid them down my legs, and kicked them off my feet, throwing my panties on top of them. The mist in the bathroom was now so strong that I had to feel around just to find the shower. I stepped into it, feeling for the curtain which was covered entirely by a shroud of moist fog, then turned the shower nozzle to the right, and the hot water felt good on my skin. I leaned back so I could get my hair completely wet, and as hot water streams rolled down my face, I closed my eyes. The smell of mold hung in the air.

  And something stepped on my foot.

  “Ow!” I said. Tears rolled down my cheeks from the sudden pain.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” something whispered.

  I opened my eyes. Evilly leering, his silver irises boring into my soul, black Joker lips open menacingly, displaying razor-sharp shark teeth, the black-haired entity wrapped his ice cold hands around my neck and began to squeeze, the rough fabric of his black coat rubbing against my bare chest and stomach, and as a gap in the mist passed before me, he was revealed in all his horror.

  I tried to scream and found I couldn’t get any air into my lungs. His grip tightened, and I was certain my trachea was about to collapse. Wisps of fog passed over the spirit’s pasty white face and in between the clouds, I could see his teeth were sharpened down to fine
points and that his eyes were bigger than they should have been. I reached with my open fist and felt the fabric of his coat, pulling as hard as I could on it, trying to wriggle my suffering neck out of his grasp.

  There was a thump and a commotion, and the back of my head slammed against the tiles of the shower wall. Bursts of sparkling light filled my eyes as pain flooded my senses. Then I was aware that the demon had let go of me, and although my throat was still sore, I could now breathe. I shuddered when I remembered the feel of his corpse-like fingers. My head ached, and the pervasive mist once again blocked my vision. I’d heard the saying “fog as thick as pea soup”, but this was more like bundles of cotton, completely obscuring the view in front of me, leaving me helpless to ascertain my situation. I heard a shriek that I assumed came from my attacker, a voice beast-like and evil, holding all the sentiment of a man-eating tiger on a kill. I slipped on the wet floor of the bathtub and landed on my butt, still seeing only haze in front of my eyes. Gasping, I wondered what had become of the black-haired man. Had my would-be murderer simply fled for no reason? Had he been attacked by another demon? Or was he just laying in wait right outside the shower door with a knife, ready to finish the job he had started? I closed my eyes. Maybe when I opened them, I’d find out that it all had been just an unpleasant dream.

  My armpits were roughly yanked upwards, and I felt strong hands pull me out of the bathtub, then felt a towel being wrapped around me, and I opened my eyes, whimpering, expecting to find myself on some kind of blood-covered sacrificial altar devoted to an ancient god, but all I saw was Gregg kneeling over where I now lay on the bathroom tiles by the toilet, concern evident in his brown eyes, brown hair falling over his fine eyebrows as it had before; he gazed at me and smiled, pulling me up to a sitting position by grasping my moist hand. Miraculously, mercifully, I had been saved from death.