A Ghost of Fire

  * * *

  I sat on one of the barstools by the counter, plugged the laptop into the wall and fired her up. All the usual startup stuff played out across the screen. While it did I thought of the near absurdity of the ghost of a little girl holding the case out to me. She had wanted me to get it and went to great lengths to make sure I was on the task of using it. I wondered what ghosts knew about laptop computers, specifically mine.

  “But why? How is my laptop going to help her?” No, not her, I corrected myself: them. “She kept saying ‘us.’ Please help us.” Who was ‘us’? And how was my laptop supposed to help them? I wondered at it. I turned it over in my mind. It was all so strange and unreachable.

  The computer finally hummed to life, ready for its master’s touch. Before I could do anything a word processing file came up. The white electronic page was completely filled with a repeating series of letters and numbers. It read,

  pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpuslots3940414243444546pleasehelpudlots3940414243444546

  At first I thought it was just an accidental thing, a glitch in the system. I moved the cursor to shut the program off and laid plans to delete the file but the letters were what stopped me. It was easy for me to notice the pattern repeating there and soon I was picking out words. Shortly after that I noticed all the numbers were the same also. I stared at the screen and attempted to discern some kind of meaning.

  I pulled out a piece of scratch paper and a pen and began working it all out.

  The words in the puzzle themselves were child’s play. But then it was a child who put them there, wasn’t it? The words of the message were, “Please help us lots.” That was easy, I thought, and it was something I basically knew already. The little girl and whoever or whatever else she represented wanted help. Apparently they wanted lots of help. It struck me as a curious way to put it but then I reminded myself that it was written by a child. The real problem was the series of numbers. 3940414243444546. I counted them out individually. It was a number with sixteen digits. Or was it?

  If the words, though distinct, were all crammed together then maybe the numbers were put together in the same way and were also meant to be broken up into separate numbers. But how? With words it was easy because the letters only went together in certain combinations. With numbers it was different. They could go together into any combination and have as little or as many digits as possible. With a string of sixteen the possibilities weren’t exactly infinite but there were still lots of them.

  I’ve always been prejudiced against numbers. I’m sure to a mathematician they were as beautiful as language was to me. I’m sure a mathematician could make the numbers sing. I, however, could not. To me they were cold and lifeless. They were pure logic, all head and no heart. But I soon noticed one of them stood out above the others. The number four showed up eight times in the sequence. Exactly half of them were fours.

  I wrote out the entire strand and underlined each one of the fours. The first one showed up third in the sequence and the first four of them were spaced evenly, every other number. I thought perhaps the fours served as the boundary markers. I quickly discover I was right. What was once the sequence, 3940414243444546, quickly broke down into 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 and 46. Once I realized that, I couldn’t see it any other way.

  But now I was left with a new problem. I had the words and I had the separate numbers. What I didn’t have was a reason these two sets belonged to each other. Something was missing. I needed some kind of interpretive key to understand the mystery. I didn’t know it was staring me right in the face and I didn’t have the presence of mind to figure it out at that time.

  What I wanted then was connection with another person, someone to help ground me, even if I couldn’t tell them what was going on. I just needed to have some human contact that wasn’t a doctor, a self-important drunk driver or my parents. And I needed someone who wasn’t dead. Katie was the most apparent choice.

  I picked the phone up off the counter and dug the paper with her number out of my pocket. I dialed the number and waited. I got the voicemail message I had gotten when I tried calling before from the hospital. I didn’t leave a message this time, not wanting to appear desperate. It was enough that my number would show up twice on her missed call list.

  I put the phone back down. Light streamed into the apartment through the windows but it was turning orange. Afternoon would give way to evening not many hours hence. My apartment would be the scene for no more apparitions or visitations for that day and for a few days after. That suited me just fine. Little did I know it was the calm before the encroaching storm.