Ghost Story Part 1

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They say that ghosts are paranormal and supernatural.  They are apparitions of the dead who have returned, revenants, and everything happens when things seem most ordinary, so that at first you only have a subtle, vague feeling of the uncanny.  Then gradually, as if it were something sneaking up on you, you realize that everything has changed, not just the atmosphere and the little usually unnoticed things that now are important, annoying, threatening.  Before you have a chance to be forewarned and so forearmed, the event has begun and there is no escape. It comes, it lingers like a foul order, and cannot be washed or wished away.

Let us say you are walking down your own street in your own neighborhood, and the dusk is as it always is, just a little bit dark, a kind of glare and glittery set of reflections from people’s windows and a stained glow on the underside of the clouds.  You find that nothing seems quite in focus, but at first you don’t mind, you hardly notice, because it is all so slight, and everything else seems to be so normal.  Late autumn it is, when the days get shorter and shorter, and the shadows begin to creep out of the trees, slide over the leaves with their musty smell of something rotten and dead in the street, and lean heavily on the walls of stone fences around front gardens, hovering over the hidden world of disappearing light.  But though it is such a short walk you are taking, merely from the shop at the corner back home, a small paper sack in your arms with milk and bread for tomorrow morning, the your steps don’t really take you very far.  You seem to be plodding through a thick mud.  Can it only be ten minutes you have been trying to reach your front door?  The hours are passing and the darkness enfolds you like a great winter coat, with the strange smell of mothballs and wet fur.

The usual colors have disappeared.  The clouds lower themselves until they touch the tops of the trees.  It is like moving through an old black-and-white film, a silent film, you realize, as the only motion you see or feel in yourself has become jerky and everything skitters from one blink of your eyes to the next.  For a moment you cannot remember whether you have a dog with you, and then you remember that was years ago, when you were a young person, when you had children at home and used the evening walks as an excuse to miss the rituals of getting them ready for bed.  At the same moment, though, you can actually feel the tugging in your arm.  It is only a memory.  It can’t be real.  Yet look, if you follow your nose, there is slimy excrement to be picked up somewhere; yet you look, and there is nothing there. 

The darkness closes in tighter, and yet the gloaming spreads out before you, then contracts into little spots of light.  Perhaps, you wonder, this is a sign of cataracts or something else wrong with your eyes.  The small pools of light swim around, merge into odd shapes, dissipate again, and the street, hardly seen, feels so different than you remember.  Can this be the house you have lived in for the past ten years, ever since the family moved away?  Isn’t this somewhere else, a place in some other country?  You used to play a game back then, that there was someone walking with you, a person from some book you had been reading, a figure from another century, and you were explaining all the features of modernity to him or her.  It was nothing serious, yet you found it interesting because it made you try to imagine how someone from several hundreds of years ago would be able to focus their eyes on cars driving past, electric lights on tall poles overhanging the street, the shape of houses, the noises from many blocks away.  The taste of meals long since eaten returns to your mouth. The odor of exotic foods wafts from the unseen windows, from behind yellowy curtains, and you feel the sick feeling of tables not cleaned for many years, as though the inhabitants had walked away in the midst of a dinner interrupted by death.  A cold draft blows up from the footpath.  You have not yet reached home though it seems you have been walking for hours, as though a whole lifetime has slipped by unnoticed.

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“Please come into the house, granddad,” she said. “You’ve been standing out there forever.  It’s time for dinner.”

He shuffled his way up the stairs, crossed over the porch, and walked through into the house.

“But this is not my house,” he said.

She laughed.  “Of course, it is.  Come sit down and tell me all about it.”

He could feel her condescension through the lovely warmth of her words.

“You’ve been standing out there for hours.  Now here, have a cup of coffee and tell me what you’ve been thinking, you silly old man.”

There it was.  He knew she couldn’t hide it.

But though he knew her all his life, he was not sure this was the grandchild who lived with and took care of him.  If it were, she surely would be well into her forties by now, not a girl of twenty or or so.  And he, well, for certain, if he remembered all this, he himself was still in his sixties, young enough to keep active, to go to work downtown as he always had done, and not been confined to the house, hardly able to go down to the shops on his own.

“I think you have me confused with someone else,” he said. “Are you sure you are in the right house, my dear.”

Before she could open her mouth to answer, he noticed that she was indeed someone else.  He must have wandered into the wrong place. 

“Away with you,” he said.  “I am going to call the police.”

Three officers who had been sitting around the table, stood up at that, and said, “Right-oh.  That’s enough for us.  We’ll take him off, madam.  He won’t be bothering you any further..”

He decided not to speak again.  Not to make a bother.  No use trying to fight against all these mad people who had invaded his life.

“Where did he go?” asked the first of the policemen.

The two others looked about, shook their heads, and shrugged.  “Like this too often,” said the second.  “Better get back to the station,” said the third.

“Won’t you have another cup of tea?” asked the middle-aged woman sitting there with them.  “It’s been lovely having you here again.”

The car drove off into the darkness.

He stood there on the street as they departed and tried to take another few steps but the thick night air pushed up against him.  A dog barked in the distance.