Chapter One: Things that don't really disappear.
The swingset is haunted
Hi, my name is Daniel. I am forty-two years old and if someone had told me a year ago that I would be living alone in a drafty old house on the outskirts of Remus, Michigan, I would have laughed my head off. But life has a funny way of throwing your plans all upside down when you least expect it
My life split open like a rotten log when I lost my job at the factory in Mount Pleasant. My wife, my sole partner in a universe of bad luck, took off with some guy from upstate, leaving me with nothing but a half-packed suitcase and a son too young to understand the word 'abandonment'. Now it was just us, tucked away in the middle of nowhere, scraping along with a farmhand's job and a crooked little house that looked like it had been scared half to death by its own shadow.
The house was part of the job. “Free” was relative peeling paint, sagging roof, creaking floors even when you were holding your breath. The yard sloped down out back to the woods, like it was trying to run away. There was a swing set rusted, forlorn two faded plastic seats hanging from brittle chains, the kind of thing you saw in old polaroids and nightmares.
I thought little of it at first. Just junk left from the last folks, I told myself, and maybe I would have left it at that, had it not been for the day my boy came barreling in from the yard, face pale, eyes wide, as if he'd swallowed a secret too big for him.
“Daddy,” he said, pulling my sleeve, “there’s a little girl out there. She swings. “I want to play,” she says.
He's just a little boy, no more than six years old. I will not tell you his name. Some things you keep safe. Even from the ghosts.
I tried to shake it. Told him to stop making shit up, that I didn’t have time for games. He looked at me, really sad, the way kids do when they think you don't believe them, and I felt like the world's worst father. But I went out anyway, my shoes sucking in the wet grass, my heart thumping for reasons I couldn’t explain. The sun was bleeding out beyond the trees, shadows long and thin. All the swings were empty but one.
The swing to the right was underway. Not merely swaying in the wind but pumping as if invisible feet were kicking it up and up. Clinking chains. I stood there, frozen, the cold creeping up my spine like a spider. My son clung to my leg, his little hands twisting in my jeans.
The swing was constant that night. Always on, always creaking, rain or shine, noon or midnight, like someone was out there, playing when no one was looking.
I tried to shut it out. It was hard enough. New job. Single dad. Just trying to keep the lights on. The old couple who owned the place lived up the road. I paid them a little rent, enough so we wouldn't feel like squatters. My ex-wife hadn’t called for months. She was gone and I was left to haul feed, tend cows and try not to hear the chains shrieking through the dark.
Three months went by. I slept less and less, the sound of those chains shredding at my nerves. One night, I woke up to the sound of my son’s voice, a whisper from his bedroom.
My heart thumped as I staggered down the hall. “Who are you talking to, buddy?” I said, voice thin.
He sat cross-legged on his bed, looking into a dark corner heavy with shadow. “The girl on the swing,” said he. She’s right there, Dad. 'Can't you see her?
And for a moment I did. I saw her, a small girl, soaked and pale, her hair stuck to her face, a torn dirty dress, eyes too old for her size. She looked at me like she’d been waiting a very long time.
I took my son and ran, locking us in my room. He couldn't understand. “She’s not going to hurt us, Dad,” he said in a voice of innocence. But I couldn't get the terror crawling under my skin out of my head.
The next morning I cornered the old couple in the main house. I asked them about the swing, about the girl. The old man's hands shook. The woman began to cry.
“That was Missy,” she said softly. Our girl. She...she went under in the back pond. She was nine.”
And that's when I learned some ghosts are not a shadow. They mutter. And sometimes if you listen real close they ask to play.