A Ghost's Story

It starts with the nightmare. Not every night, necessarily, but enough of them to burn an image into my mind’s eye, like staring into the sun. It climbs the stairs leading up to my room where I sleep, where I work and eke out my meager existence. I shouldn’t call it an It, really, when I know in my gut that it’s a He.

He calls himself Stanley; that’s what I hear in my sleep, whispered in my ear where his breath touches me like wisps of smoke. Sometimes he does more tangible things than that. I hear Him walking up the stairs leading to my room; heavy bootsteps thudding on each step: boom, boom, boom, with great weight and substance. Before I know it, this Stanley figure is outside my door with a weighty BOOM!

I jolt upright in the chair I sleep in, and my senses are on High Alert. All men to your battle stations! I dare not move, and my body is frozen, cold sweat beginning at the nape of my neck. With a creeping dread, I call out with false bravery.

“H-hello? I know you’re there…” I pause, reluctant to say what needs to be said. “Stanley. I know you’re there, you loud prick! You can’t just walk around my house thinking you’re the only one around here, the only one that’s real.”

A surprisingly quiet knock comes at my door. It isn’t latched, so the door slowly swings inward, the squeaking hinges adding to the sense that I’m in some dang horror movie. In a way, I am. I am haunted; by the cold dread in my head, and the actions that are part of my daily ritual. A voice, a noise that bursts the bubble of pressure built up in my room.

“I can hear you, Stanley, and I want you to knock it off. This is my house, not yours.” I declare my own deeply personal independence.

Apart from me, no one resides in my house. No one like me. I am alone, left vulnerable to the whims of souls that swim around me; once I had a beautiful wife who loved me—she loved me, yeah, yeah, yeah, as the song goes. And I loved her with a passion my heart couldn’t hold, fit to burst its chambers with all of that love and light. She has moved on from this life, taken by a disease no doctor at the time could understand—her aorta burst as she was walking across the room holding her Spring-cleaning supplies. A sudden, silent death, and I was left alone to pick up the pieces of her broken memories.

I never made my peace with her death, and God how I’ve wanted her to visit me from the Great Beyond, wanted it so badly it hurt, and I swear it shattered my soul. Do I even have one left? I don’t know the answer to that one.

But now, when it’s just me in the house typing away at my old-fashioned typewriter (the clackety-clack-clack-ding! brings the words forth better than the Muses) I am left to my own devices. I’d play records to listen to while I worked—from soft blues and jazz to classic rock-and-roll. That has kept me busy for years, that is until I was bothered by the likes of Stanley.

You must understand, I can hear all of them; they are a veritable legion of a once happy set of lives. I see their dark shapes dart out of the corners of my eyes, black and white outlines defined by distinct auras. A small child darts around the edges of my vision, playing one-sided games with a friend I can’t quite make out. And then there are the pets, soft golden hues that suggest a cat and a dog residing here. You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but I can see auras all around me each and every day. Being disabled, you’d think that I can’t see many people every day, but you’re wrong. You understand me? I can look out a window and see an attractive woman jogging down a sidewalk outside my house in workout attire—her aura is blue; another man, shoulders stooped from age and weariness, walks to the fast-food joint with slow methodical steps holding an empty coffee mug—his aura is a pale green.

Soul after soul after soul, I see them all outside my window. But Stanley is nothing but black. And last night—last night he called out my name.

“River,” he said, and no he wasn’t just calling out random bodies of water. River is my first name.

I hadn’t heard my name called out in ages by anyone, so shuttered I have been in my home.

“Y-yes?” I stammered, unsure at first how to respond to the home invader who stayed for dinner and a bed.

Then, my palm cold and clammy, and sweat dripping down the back of my neck with icy layers of fear thrown in for good measure, I heard it again.

Much louder.

“River!” Stanley’s deep, confident voice addressed me from the doorway to my room. “Get out here you friggin’ old man!”

I got up from my desk in the corner of my room where I worked, and slowly walked across the hardwood floor. My steps were hesitant to say the least, and I felt like I was stuttering in and out of existence like a radio wave, the dial quickly spinning through stations with snippets of voices spread throughout the ether. It set my teeth on edge.

I walked to the threshold of my room and paused in the doorway.

We stood there, two men sizing each other up. I focused on eyes I had never distinctly seen, but now I noticed they were a dark, storm cloud blue. He, on the other hand, seemed to stare straight through me, as if searching my face but not quite grasping my mortal clothes.

“What do you want, Stanley?” I asked him, a cut-to-the-chase attitude in my voice.

He brought some device up to his ear, and pressed on it. In a scratchy, tinny noise I recognized my voice strangely echoed back to me.

“What I want is for you to get out of my house, River. You don’t live here anymore. I do. My son does. But not you.” His voice was firm and resolute, but I didn’t understand what he was trying to get across, my mind unable to tell whether this was some cruel entertainment for his own benefit.

“What? I live here. I always have!” Anger heated the words that poured from me better than any fire could warm my cold body.

Once again, he repeated my voice, listening intently. He shook his head, this time he looked sad. “No, River. You died a decade ago. You’re River Worthington. You were born—” He scanned a piece of paper in his other hand.”—in nineteen seventy-one. You died of a heart attack in Two thousand-thirteen. Today is the year two-thousand and twenty-three. Do you remember this?” He was not unkind in the way he conveyed his message; I’ll give him that.

But the words still found a way to wound me, gouging a hole in my heart that was just as tell-tale as Poe's.

And suddenly, like a bright spotlight illuminating the recesses of my mind, I remembered. I was typing on my typewriter, working on a story, when my left hand—I’m a southpaw by the by—went cold and numb, followed by a terrible pain in my chest. For me, there was nothing beyond that. Nothing like what you’d see in the movies. No light at the end of the tunnel, no floating outside my body and seeing it from a third-person perspective. It was like falling asleep in my chair, only to wake up and realize it was the next day.

I died and did not even know it. How can such a thing be possible? All those souls I saw outside my window that lived the lives I could never again experience. My jaw dropped just thinking about it.

My world turned upside down, and suddenly the floor was the ceiling and vice versa. I realized the images I saw were of living people out in a world I could never reach. I truly was disabled, just in a much greater capacity. I couldn’t go beyond the limits of my own front door. Hell, I’m not even sure I could go outside my own room. I tested the theory out and placed a foot in the hallway. The floorboard creaked slightly, but that was all I could do. The effort left me utterly drained.

Stanley noticed this sound and looked down at his own feet. I realized when he looked back up at me that he finally saw me. A feeling of warmth spread through my soul, and I smelled my wife all around me—lilacs and lilies.

Home. Home came to me, not the other way around. I looked around me and saw a white-gold aura dart out of the corner of my eye and I wanted to chase it. I felt more alive than I had in ages. The pain of wanting swept through me, and I wanted to be there, wherever there was. But I did not know how to get there.

So, I walked back over to my desk, sure of the one thing I could do.

Sitting down, I noticed a blank page was ready for me in the typewriter. I adjusted it as best I could. I looked at my chair that had seen so much use that my body was imprinted on it as indelibly as a fingerprint and settled myself into a comfortable position. What is comfort to a ghost? For me it was memory. I set my hands on the keys. Stanley walked into the room, following the sounds of my presence.

“That is for you, River,” he called out, looking around the room, obviously unable to see me. “If you think you can use it, I promise to read it.” He was pointing at the typewriter, my one Constant amidst all the Variables throughout my life. “I’m sorry, River.”

I prepared myself for the act of remembrance, to turn it into creation. After all, I had a story to tell. And, it seemed, one last reader.