Ghost Program (2 page)

   “And?”

   “It said....
yes
.  Then I turned off the computer.  And I haven’t used it since then.”  I’d actually yanked out the power cord and ran down the stairs screaming.  But he didn’t need to know that.

“No, here’s the truth.  It’s only worked once.  I’ve used it four times, and it’s only worked once.  I had to keep tweaking it.  Three times I ran Casper.  And I never got a response.  I thought the program was faulty.  But I didn’t want to scrap a project that had taken me so long to design.  And then the fourth time....it answered me.  The session was a success.  Something answered me.  And something’s in the room with us now.  Can’t you feel how cold it is in here?”

   Brent looked at me, then at the rustling curtain.  “Well, the heater’s not running.”

   “It’s not that,” I said, but Brent didn’t look like he much believed me.  “Anyway, so ask it something.  Let’s continue the conversation.”

   “If this is your room, then shouldn’t we at least know your name?” Brent asked, addressing the ghost.

   The display on the computer pulsed once.

 
Gregg

  
Brent smiled.  “Well, I’m Brent, and the girl is Sam.  And you live in this room here, Gregg.  How old are you?”

  
19
, read the screen.

   “Good news, Sam.  I think your ghost is harmless.  I don’t think this so-called spook intends to harm you.”  If only he hadn’t said that.  I sometimes think that’s what made the others come.  Especially
Him
.  “You still here, Gregg?”

   The computer monitor was still.

   “He must have left.”  Brent’s smiled turned into a slight frown when he saw my look of disappointment.  Had I opened a door to the afterlife only for it to slam shut a minute later?

   I sighed and put my face in my arms.  Success in this project wouldn’t only mean an A in my class; it would affect my financial status for years into my adult life.

   “Sam?” asked Brent.

   “MMMmmmm,” I said into my elbow.

   “Look.”

   The screen displayed two words.

  
Later, love.

  
Brent smirked.  “I think it likes you.  You wanted my opinion on your project.  Well, I think it’s a success.”

   “I’m glad you came to see it,” I said.  “I’ll see you to the door.” 

   As we stepped into the hallway, a burst of warm air hit us.  My room was real cold.

❃
CHAPTER 2
❃

  
T
wo weeks later, I saw a ghost for the first time, and we were able to understand each other.  Somehow my brain had learned to interpret the whisperings without the aid of computer software.  I’d had two more sessions with Casper and so far, Gregg was the only spirit that spoke to me.  He was friendly, casual, pleasant, and confused about his place in the world.  Gregg believed that the world had stopped moving forward a hundred years ago and that his parents still owned our house.  I didn’t know why someone would have died at such at the tender young age of 19 and was afraid to ask.  Some part of me didn’t want to know.

   The first time I ever saw Gregg and knew what he looked like, it was early morning before classes.  The sun had just begun to come up, but the light in my room was dim, the entire town covered in a shroud of fog that had not yet burned off. 

   I’d spent the night before plowing through half of a large bottle of red wine and collapsed on my bed in a bout of drunken stupidity and dizziness.  Already, I felt my hangover starting and dreaded the moment when it hit me full force.

   I was awake, but I didn’t get out of bed; instead I grabbed what was left of the wine off my nightstand and chugged it down.  I felt my hangover receding just the way I’d hoped it would.  I liked the way the blankets felt on top of me, and I knew that my bedroom would be chilly once I got out from underneath them.  So I stayed there with my eyes only half open, hoping that I’d eventually fall back asleep when I heard a soft whispering from beside my bed.  I couldn’t understand it, but I was sure it was there.  It had a soft cadence that I knew had to be some kind of human speech.

   “Oh!”  I exclaimed, then jumped out of bed.  I was right.  The room
was
chilly, actually a little worse than I’d anticipated.  I quickly warmed up my computer and opened the Casper software.

   The needle on the screen began to waver back and forth, then the words were translated:

  Good morning to you.   Did you sleep well?

  
I looked around the room but didn’t see anyone.

   “Gregg?” I asked, uncertain.  “Is that you?”

   The needle moved again.

  
Yes.

  
“Why’d you wake me up so early?”

 
I was lonely.

  
“Well, where are you?  You’re right here in the room with me?”

 
Yes.

  
“What part of the room are you in?”

   Behind you.

  
I turned around and looked behind me.  I didn’t know if Gregg
chose
to show himself to me then or if I had done something to effect it.  I didn’t know if the half-bottle of red wine I had consumed the night before had upped my supernatural communication abilities.  Maybe I just wanted to believe that because I liked drinking wine and liked the way it made me feel.  But I saw him, just the same.  And he looked remarkably solid.  He sat at the end of my bed wearing his usual fare of a brown tweed coat and pants cropped at the knee and a charming smile.  I turned back to the computer screen in shock.  The needle on the audio screen was moving, producing zig-zagged lines to indicate speech patterns.

   Do you see me?

  
I turned back to the bed, and he was still there.  Still smiling, a few strands of brown hair falling across his brown eye.

   “Yes, I see you.  For the first time.  You’re very handsome.”

   “Gratified,” he replied.  Without the aid of the computer monitor, I had understood him!  I wondered if that’s how babies learned to talk, if one day they just understood all of a sudden.

   “How long were you sitting on my bed?” I asked.

   “A long time.  I slept the whole night on it.”

   “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.