Spirits Read online

The wind died down and the air was static and stale. It no longer smelled like saltwater. It smelled like wet earth and the rot from dead leaves. The quiet unnerved her, but she trudged through the dew-dampened grass to the rusty playset. A pink plastic playhouse, sunbaked and moss-coated, had transformed over decades into a unique planter. Grasses and vines exploded from the open windows and doors.

  The chains of the swing screee-scrawed as the girl pushed herself back and forth. Tori felt awkward approaching her. She didn’t want to alarm her, but she also didn’t know if Chris would approve of someone playing on the set. She assumed it had once belonged to his daughter, and the thought made her stomach drop. Even so, the whole back yard looked like a tetanus shot waiting to happen.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a pitch much higher than her normal speaking voice. “Do you live around here? I don’t know if Mr. Silver wants anyone out here. This set is very old, and you might get hurt.”

  The girl didn’t acknowledge her and continued swinging back and forth, her back to Tori. Tori edged forward and extended a hand to touch the girl but thought better of it before she could make contact with her shoulder. Instead, she walked around the side of the set. A thorny stem raked across her leg, and a stinging pain slashed its way down her shin.

  “Shit!” She put her hand over her mouth before she’d even gotten the expletive out.

  She squeezed her way between the hedge and the back of the swing set and knelt in front of the girl.

  “Honey, where do you live,” she said, staring down at the girl’s tiny, pink sneakers. “I’ll walk you back …”

  Tori lifted her gaze and fell backward into the spiky hedge behind her. There was no face. Only a mass of hair. It ruffled like silk on the wind. Tori shrieked, the sound echoing off the trees, and slices of the child trailed off onto the breeze.

  She reeled forward onto her hands and knees and pushed herself to her feet. A threatening presence hovered over her. It was inexplicable. The child was gone, but the sensation that an angry entity wanted her out pervaded the air.

  The pressure of someone following her chased her back into the house. She looked over her shoulder to find nothing there, but she never stopped running until she was safely inside and slammed the door.

  She darted to Chris’s room and pounded on the door.

  “Please, let me in,” she hollered at the small crack between the door and the jamb.

  Something shuffled around inside, and footfalls approached the door. A click followed, and Chris swung the door open. His face was drained of color. Tears collected at his lash line, and she stumbled inside.

  “There’s something outside,” she sputtered. “A little girl, except she didn’t have a face. There was only hair.”

  Her breath came in convulsive hitches. “When I tried to talk to her, she flittered away.”

  Chris’s expression did not change. He looked down at the floor and brushed away the clot of tears at his eyes.

  “It’s my daughter,” he told her, his voice measured and calm. “She visits me sometimes. Usually when things are hard.”

  Tori studied him carefully. His eyes were dark and puffed beneath. He looked weak and drawn.

  “Listen, it’s fine. It’ll be okay. I need to lie down,” he said, turning and leaving her shaken and terrified.

  Chris walked back to his bed and flung himself onto it. Clothes were strewn about the floor, and his sheets were only halfway on the mattress. A corner of white quilting was exposed. She walked back out, more confused than ever.

  It had to have been a hallucination. One of the pamphlets she’d read at Amelia’s place said hallucinations weren’t an uncommon withdrawal symptom. She pulled Chris’s bedroom door shut on her way out, concerned about him and his behavior but determined not to bite the hand that had literally just fed her. She needed help now. No two ways about it. If she didn’t get help, she was going to die.

  Another wave of grief smacked Chris so hard, his shoulders heaved. More than twenty years he’d been sober. He’d had the urge from time to time, a longing to just have one drink. Each time, his resolve had been strong enough. The memory of his wife and girl was enough to pull him back from the brink. Something snaked through his guts and twisted so hard, he curled into the fetal position and rocked back and forth.

  The voice started talking to him at the AA meeting. God, the things it said to him wrecked his head. It taunted him, volleyed invectives at him, used his baby against him. It spat visions of his daughter, lifeless and crumpled after the accident, into his head. The anxiety those words caused made his hands tremble. The back of his neck sweated, and his temples throbbed. If only he could take the edge off.

  What difference does it make now? You’re an old man. You’ve had a whole lifetime. It’s more than your wife and kid got.

  Did it matter now? Wouldn’t just one drink take the edge off? He felt like he could claw his way through the mattress. Knowing that Emmy visited killed him inside. He rolled himself off of the mattress and hit the floor with his knees. They cracked, and he winced at the pain.

  You should watch out for the bitch in your house. She’s killed before. A kid, no less.

  Chris struggled to his feet and walked to the window. He peeled the edge of the curtain back, unsure if he really wanted to see her there. Her face appeared on the other side of the curtain, nose pressed to the screen, eyes blackened and wide. Chris jerked the curtain shut again, unsure if he’d really seen her. He touched the curtain edge again, horrified to pull it back but unable to stop himself from doing so. It was irrational that she should be there. Even if she was real, there’s no way a two-year-old could see into his window from the ground.

  Are you rationalizing ghosts? What kind of dumb shit are you?

  He pulled the edge of the curtain back again and caught sight of her hair. Her skin, smooth and plump, was pressed against the screen. Her button nose was flattened. She stared quizzically inside.

  A pain it had taken him more than thirty years to bury ripped open inside him and he cried out. His face contorted, mouth agape, as a flood of tears erupted.

  He tried to summon QuickSilver, but there was no response. He’d never tried to use it to save himself. He didn’t even know if that was possible. Chris felt like a man who’d been abandoned in the desert. He had an oasis inside him, but he couldn’t tap it. Something had taken up residence inside him and laid claim to it. His chest felt like a rubber band pulled taut in the throes of his panic as he tried again and again to access the hero within him.

  You know what will help. Go on upstairs. It’s waiting for you.

  How could it have known? He’d forgotten about them himself., even in his most desperate moments. How many years had it been up there? At least a decade ago, he’d hit a low point. Emmy had been in the yard for days, tormenting him, tearing away at his already-frayed nerves. He’d walked down to the bait ‘n tackle, mostly to clear his head. That’s what he told himself anyway. The newsstand by the window kept him busy for a few minutes. He thumbed through the latest issue of Flights of Fantasy, paced up and down the aisles, and read the nutritional information label on every bag of chips on the rack. Eventually, he’d come to the beer cooler in the back. His whole body had trembled looking at the six packs. He decided on Old Milwaukee, the shittiest beer known to man. What if he only drank one? He could prove to himself that he had willpower if he could stop at one.

  He’d opened the cooler and it chilled the sweat to his skin. The six pack felt heavier than any six pack he’d ever carried as he took it to the counter. Dave had smiled as he rang up the order, but Chris felt the judgment behind it. Guilt washed over him as he passed him a twenty and waited for his change.

  The walk back home took twice as long as it should have as he’d wrestled with the beer and the even heavier choice of whether to drink it. By the time he got home, the decision had been made. He couldn’t do this to himself. He couldn’t desecrate the memory of his wife and child by poisoning himself.

/>   The weight of that decision pressed on him even now. The voice that spoke to him gnawed at the back of his neck like a mosquito, buzzing and nagging until he felt hot and angry.

  You remember where you left it, right? Of course you remember.

  Chris wrung his hands and shuffled over the same worn patch of carpet again and again. His fingers tangled themselves in his hair. Just one wouldn’t hurt.

  He put a hand on the doorknob, walked into the hallway, and pulled down the ladder to the attic. He stepped gingerly up the rickety stairs into the stifling air of the darkened attic and batted around for the light string.

  It smelled musty. Cardboard boxes were stacked one on top of the other. Cobwebs reflected the light. Something scampered around in the far reaches of the attic, some critter or another. A plastic Christmas tree stood undecorated in the corner.

  Chris knelt at a box of waterlogged comic books, the salvaged remains of a flood he’d had back at the shop on Beach. Beneath the wrinkled, brown-stained paper he saw the six metal cylinders. They might as well have been bullets he could put in a revolver to blow his brains out. He ran a hand over the aluminum. They felt cold and smooth. Clinical. He pulled one of the cans from its plastic ring and studied it. It looked both alien and familiar at once. It had been a long, long time. He pulled the tab. It hissed.

  Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel’s short fiction has appeared in a number of publications over the past decade. Spirits is her first novel. She lives in the Northeast with her partner, writer Matt Bechtel, her three children, and an 80-pound lapdog named Nya.