Call me D. I never thought I was the kind of person who'd believe in ghosts, much less run from them. But then I suppose no one does until it happens to them.
It was twenty-eight years before I finally saved enough for a down payment on my own little place. Somewhere in the middle of the country, a double-wide, private enough that the only neighbors were the deer and the occasional pack of yapping coyotes. The price was almost too good to be true, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I worked second shift at a chicken farm in Saranac, washing the endless piles of plastic flats the eggs came in. The hours were strange, but the pay kept the lights on.
I moved in about the 5th of Nov. The first was ideal. The sort of quiet that you only get in the country. The stars were so bright you could reach up and pluck them out of the sky. The air was clear and pure. I’d sit on the porch after work, have a cigarette, listen to the owls and just breathe.’
But peace did not hold.
I noticed it maybe two months after I moved in. First, nothing. Just a feeling. Like the tingling at the back of your neck when someone across a crowded room is watching you. No one was here. The feeling followed me in the house, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the little back bedroom that I used as an office. Sometimes at night I would look in a window and see my own reflection and I could have sworn there was a shadow just over my shoulder. I told myself it was the shift change, the isolation, maybe too much caffeine.
But the feeling got stronger. It was no longer a murmur in the back of my mind. It was like a weight, a pressure, like someone was inches from my face, breathing the same air, waiting for me to see. It made my flesh crawl. Sleep was impossible. I lay in bed, pulling the covers up to my chin, my heart pounding against my ribs, watching the shadows form in the corners. I would shut my eyes and wish for morning.
One day I was feeling tired so I took a nap before my shift. My head was full of dreams. Cold, wet dreams. Dreams where you run, but you never get anywhere. I woke with a start, sweating, a fear so deep that my bones seemed to freeze. I was going to call in sick but bills don’t pay themselves.
The only other employee working that night was the security guard, and he did his rounds and mostly ignored me. The second shift was lonesome. But I was used to it. I decided to go outside for a cigarette at about 1:00 a.m. The parking lot was empty. The moon hung low and full and everything was filled with sickly silver light. I stood beside my car. Smoke coiled around my face, my breath fogging the cold.
That's when I heard it. A little scraping noise under my car. I dropped my cigarette and crouched to see what the noise was. There was something moving down there, slow and deliberate. I thought it was some animal, a stray cat or raccoon. But then I saw (read:
The impossibly thin hand, pale as a death mask, reached out and grabbed the gravel. Then a face, gaunt and hollow, eyes too wide, mouth slack. It was a boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, but his body was all wrong, stretched-out, limbs too long, skin pulled tight over bone. He crawled out from under the car, pulled himself across the lot toward the field, his head bouncing at an unnatural angle.
I retreated, my heart racing, fear building in my throat. The boy didn't look at me. Didn't speak a word. He ran away and disappeared into the tall grass, swallowed up by the night. I froze, then the security guard's flashlight swept past and snapped me out of it.
The rest of my shift was jittery, every squeak and clang making me flinch. Back home I felt even more strongly than before that I was being watched. I shut all the blinds, locked all the doors, but it still felt like something was outside waiting.
Sleep wasn't an option. I went into the livingroom, the lights were on. I didn't dare look out of the window till about four in the morning. That was when I saw him.
He was just beyond the porch light. The edge of my yard. Skinny teenage boy. Skin almost transparent, clothes draping off him in rags, wet looking. He looked right at me, black bottomless eyes, mouth moving silently, like trying to talk. But I could almost see the world in him, like you see the world through a smudge on glass.
I went crazy. I took out the phone and rang the people I bought the house from. I asked them what they had never told me and my voice trembled. Long silence. Sigh.
“There was a family living here,” said the woman. Their son... He is dead. Suicides. He was seventeen. Sorry. Apologies. “We ought to have said something.
I let it go. You thought it didn't matter?" You sold me a haunted house!
But anyway I told them if they did not give me my money back I would see them in court. They resigned. In a week I was gone, all my stuff packed in boxes, the double wide left to whoever was watching me from the shadows.
I rent a little apartment now, up above a dry cleaner. It smells like detergent and it's loud but I don't care. I sleep with the windows open and I have never felt that weight, that pressure, that mind-bending certainty that someone - or something - is watching me.
Sometimes I close my eyes and see that boy crawling out from under my car with his black bottomless eyes. I hope he is resting now. I hope so too. All I know is, I'll never look at an empty field or a cheap country house the same way again.