Ghost Program (3 page)

   In the hallway, I ran into a girl from my math class, my last period of the day. 

   “Hi, Mel,” I said as she walked towards me, smiling.

   “You know we have a quiz today,” she said.  “Hope you’re ready.”

   “It shouldn’t be too bad,” I replied.

   “No, I don’t think so either.  You wanna walk with me to class?”

   “It’d be my pleasure,” I replied.

❃
CHAPTER 3
❃

  
I
got home in time to find a warm pizza on the kitchen counter.  Mom looked up and smiled as she vacuumed the living room floor, wearing a Juicy Couture sweatsuit that looked like it had been made for someone twenty years younger.  Her oversized boobs spilled out of the jacket, straining the zipper and fabric, and I could see every lump of fat on her ample butt.  I wished she’d quit pretending to be a teenager sometimes.

   “Everything go all right at school?” she screamed at me over the sound of the vacuum.

   “Yeah,” I yelled back.  “I’m gonna take a piece of pizza up to my room.”

   She nodded in response.

   I grabbed a paper plate off the counter and placed a slice of pizza on it, shook some parmesan cheese over it and black pepper and walked upstairs. 

   The drive home had been treacherous.  The roads were covered with water and several times I had to pump the brakes of my car to stop it from hydroplaning across the freeway.  During my drive, I saw a bolt of lightning strike a tree by the side of the road causing the branches to catch fire and the trunk to split straight down the middle.  I’ve heard that a car is considered a safe place to be during a lightning storm and felt myself lucky that I didn’t have to ride public transit.  Pulling into my driveway, I’d had a hard time convincing myself that a bolt of electricity wouldn’t strike me dead the minute I left the shelter of my car.  Finally on my porch, I had whipped open the front door after unlocking the dead bolt with my key and promptly tripped over a Costco-sized box of red wine sitting by the entryway.  I figured the mailman had brought it.

   Now I was alone in my bedroom.  I sighed in relief as I sat down on my soft and welcome bed clutching my lone slice of pizza.  I shrugged my backpack off onto the pink bedspread.  Outside my window, lightning cracked against the dark, cloudy sky.  The walls of my bedroom shook, and I guessed that the lightning was very close to the house.  The filmy lace curtains over the bedroom window began to sway back and forth although the window was closed.  That didn’t make sense to me, but then a lot of things didn’t. 

   The pizza tasted good; the crust was crisp and browned around the edges, the sauce sweet.  As though food were a strong sedative, I felt myself relax noticeably.  My ability to enjoy good food made me feel as if I was a very classy girl indeed, but it needed an extra touch, and I remembered the extra bottle of red wine I had on my closet shelf which hadn’t yet been opened.

   I jumped off the bed and stretched to grab it off the top shelf of the closet.  Then I found my personal bedroom corkscrew and removed its top.  I drank about a cup, then set the bottle down on the floor.  My cell phone rang, and I answered it.

   “Sam?” said a voice.

   “Brent?”

   “Are you surprised I called?”

   “Well, yeah.  Why
are
you calling?  You never call me.”

   “I wanted to know if you used your ghost machine again.”

   “Oh.  Well, sure I did.”

   “And?”

   “Well, I see ghosts now.”

   “You talked to one again?”

   “I also
see
them.  They show themselves to me.  And I can talk to Gregg without the software.  I don’t really need Casper anymore.  I’ll still use it, test it out.  It
is
my project for school.”

   “Can I come over?  I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened in your room.  I had been very skeptical but the longer I’ve had to think about what happened, the more I think it really
did
happen.”

   “Well, of course it did.”

   “Are you home around 5?”

   “Yeah.  Do you think I really have much of a social life?  All my friends went to the university.  I’m always alone.”

   “It’s going to take me a couple hours to drive in from Seattle.  That’s not too late?”

   “No, it’s fine.  It’ll be great to have a visitor.”

   “Do you think you could show me, er...Casper, again?  I’ve only seen it work once.”

   “I’ve made progress.  The ghost we spoke to was invisible the first time.  I’ve seen him, now.”

   “I know.  You told me.”  His voice sounded dazed.  For a moment, we were both silent.

   “I’ll see you around 5, then,” I said.  “If I don’t answer the door, just let yourself in.”

   “Okay.  See you.”

   “Bye,” I said and clicked the phone off. 

   I wondered what had gotten into
him
.  He had more interesting people to hang out with than me.  I carried my plate down to the kitchen.  It appeared that I was the only person home.  The house was completely silent except for the sound of my dish being loaded into the dishwasher.  My footsteps on the tile floor echoed eerily against the ceiling.  I wondered where mom had run off to.  I’d see her downstairs only thirty minutes earlier.

   I decided to take a shower and change my outfit before Brent came over.  I don’t know why it occurred to me to do that.  I hardly
ever
get dressed up for anybody.  I don’t even usually do my hair as I figure that if they can’t handle seeing me
au naturel
, then they don’t deserve to see me at all.

   I walked upstairs and took a right into the bathroom.  I pushed back the shower curtain and turned on the shower nozzle.  The stream ran into a claw foot tub surrounded on three sides by  curtain and one by a tiled wall.  Soon, steam filled up the entire room, and the white fog covered even the mirror so that I couldn’t see myself undress in it.  I pulled my sweatshirt and bra off, throwing them on the floor, knowing that as I did so, they probably became damp from the falling mist, then kicked off my boots and pushed them into the corner of the bathroom with my foot.

   Lastly, I unbuttoned my jeans, slid them down my legs, and kicked them off my feet, throwing my panties on top of them.  The mist in the bathroom was now so strong that I had to feel around just to find the shower.  I stepped into it, feeling for the curtain which was covered entirely by a shroud of moist fog, then turned the shower nozzle to the right, and the hot water felt good on my skin.  I leaned back so I could get my hair completely wet, and as hot water streams rolled down my face, I closed my eyes.  The smell of mold hung in the air.

   And something stepped on my foot.

   “Ow!” I said.  Tears rolled down my cheeks from the sudden pain.

   “Excuse me, ma’am,” something whispered.

   I opened my eyes.  Evilly leering, his silver irises boring into my soul, black Joker lips open menacingly, displaying razor-sharp shark teeth, the black-haired entity wrapped his ice cold hands around my neck and began to squeeze, the rough fabric of his black coat rubbing against my bare chest and stomach, and as a gap in the mist passed before me, he was revealed in all his horror.

   I tried to scream and found I couldn’t get any air into my lungs.  His grip tightened, and I was certain my trachea was about to collapse.  Wisps of fog passed over the spirit’s pasty white face and in between the clouds, I could see his teeth were sharpened down to fine points and that his eyes were bigger than they should have been.  I reached with my open fist and felt the fabric of his coat, pulling as hard as I could on it, trying to wriggle my suffering neck out of his grasp. 

   There was a thump and a commotion, and the back of my head slammed against the tiles of the shower wall.  Bursts of sparkling light filled my eyes as pain flooded my senses.  Then I was aware that the demon had let go of me, and although my throat was still sore, I could now breathe.  I shuddered when I remembered the feel of his corpse-like fingers.  My head ached, and the pervasive mist once again blocked my vision.  I’d heard the saying “fog as thick as pea soup”, but this was more like bundles of cotton, completely obscuring the view in front of me, leaving me helpless to ascertain my situation.  I heard a shriek that I assumed came from my attacker, a voice beast-like and evil, holding all the sentiment of a man-eating tiger on a kill.  I slipped on the wet floor of the bathtub and landed on my butt, still seeing only haze in front of my eyes.  Gasping, I wondered what had become of the black-haired man.  Had my would-be murderer simply fled for no reason?  Had he been attacked by another demon?  Or was he just laying in wait right outside the shower door with a knife, ready to finish the job he had started?  I closed my eyes.  Maybe when I opened them, I’d find out that it all had been just an unpleasant dream.

   My armpits were roughly yanked upwards, and I felt strong hands pull me out of the bathtub, then felt a towel being wrapped around me, and I opened my eyes, whimpering, expecting to find myself on some kind of blood-covered sacrificial altar devoted to an ancient god, but all I saw was Gregg kneeling over where I now lay on the bathroom tiles by the toilet, concern evident in his brown eyes, brown hair falling over his fine eyebrows as it had before; he gazed at me and smiled, pulling me up to a sitting position by grasping my moist hand.  Miraculously, mercifully, I had been saved from death.

   I sat on the wet tiles, gasping and struggling to catch my breath in a bout of uncontrolled panic, then crossed my legs in front of me when I realized the towel only covered my top half.  My head ached, and when I touched the back of it, I felt a sticky substance that could only be blood.

   “Great,” I muttered and placed a hand on the floor to steady myself.

   Gregg looked in the bathtub with a frantic air about him.  “He’s gone,” he observed.  “Who was that?”

   I looked up at him.  He looked as scared as I felt.

   “I-I don’t know,” I said.  “I don’t think it was human.”

   “Well, it looked like a man to me.  He had stepped into the bathtub with you.  I heard your scream, and then I saw him try to strangle you.”

   “I didn’t scream.  I mean, I tried to....but I couldn’t get enough air....” 

   “You screamed all right.  I opened up the glass door, and there
He
was.  I’m not much of a  fighting fellow so I yanked his legs out from underneath
Him
.  It nearly stopped my heart, the sight of you laying there as if dead afterwards, but then I heard you moan.”  His brow wrinkled in confusion.  “And then
He
was gone, disappeared into the mist.  It is
so
foggy in here.  Perhaps we should open the window.”

   Had I screamed?  Or did I communicate with Gregg in some way that wasn’t completely physical?  How could I hear him without the computer translating his words?   How could he hear me?  Perhaps our conversations had a telepathic element to them.

   “You understand me,” I gasped.  Without Casper running in the background, Gregg had deciphered my words. 

   “I’m afraid for us to stay in here for too long. 
He
might come back,” said Gregg.  He frowned.  “Oh, you’re hurt.  Look at your head.  There’s blood on it.”

   “It’s fine.”

   “At least put a washcloth on it.  Here, stand up and let me look at it.”  He held out his hand, and I took it.

   As I stood, the towel fell off.

   “Oh,” said Gregg.  He looked embarrassed as he picked up my towel off the floor and wrapped it around me, and as he moved close to me, I smelled his cologne.  The towel fell off again.  “There’s blood on your hair.”  He picked up a washcloth from the towel rack and pressed it against my head.  He didn’t mention my nudity.  “Let’s step out of here.  I fear that bastard’s reappearance.”  Wraith-like mists swirled around us as he grabbed my clothes off the floor and pulled me by my arm into the bedroom.

   Gregg motioned for me to sit on the bed and handed my clothes to me.  I pulled my shirt over my still-damp body and managed to squirm my damp legs into jeans and button them.

   Gregg sighed and re-adjusted the washcloth on my head.  “It’s still bleeding.” 

  
He
must have smacked the back of my head against the decorative whales ensconced in the tiling. 

   “Lay back on the pillow,” said Gregg.  “That’ll hold the towel on, and maybe the bleeding will stop.”

   My eyes watered with forming tears.  “What’s to stop
Him
from coming back and finishing the job?”

   Gregg looked confused.  “Job?”

   “What’s to stop
Him
from killing me?”

   He smiled.  “Of course. 
He
won’t bother you in here.  Because I won’t leave you.”

   I wiped my eyes with my hand.  “Where’d you go last time?”

   “Last time?”

   “The last time I saw you, you vanished....”  I spoke with my eyes closed as my head pounded something awful.