Ghost Story (A Newt Run Module)
By Chad Inglis
Copyright 2012 Chad Inglis
The second night I was back in town I got filthy drunk with a few friends at the local down on 4th Bridge. I was in no shape to drive and I wasn't about to wait in the cold, piss drunk, for a bus, so I asked Mark if I could crash at his place, which was only a few blocks away. At that time he was still living with his parents (something he had a long and increasingly ludicrous explanation for, but which boiled down to the fact that he'd quit his job and was broke.) He said it was fine as long as we didn't wake anyone up and we waved off the rest of our friends and started out. It was snowing, a white/black blur that covered over everything, the street and us in it, and anything the two of us might have said to each other. Nothing else is clear until we reached his door and got inside. Then Mark pointed to a couch in the living room and went to bed. I don't even remember lying down.
It was the shouting that woke me up, wrenching me into a momentary panic of where I was and what the fuck was going on. At first I thought someone had been killed, but then I realized it was just Mark's parents getting a head start on the day's arguments. I've known Mark a lot of years, and his parents have been fighting since we were kids, but the big, irrevocable blow-out had yet to occur and the much talked about divorce was still pending. Anything could set them off, from geo-politics to the type of shampoo they used in the house, but regardless of the topic their arguments were always essentially the same: abstract and semantic in the way of highly academic people who have no idea how fragile and twisted their own self-images are (they were both PhDs at NRU, in political science I think, or maybe literature.)
It was just after 6 in the morning and my head felt like the scorched remains of a grease fire. There was a taste of dead earth in my mouth, and a dull ache behind my temples; listening to those two intelligent, insecure people hurl well-phrased insults at one another was more than I could take. I peeled myself off the couch, threw on my boots and left.
The morning was bitterly cold, and I buried my chin in the collar of my jacket, keeping my eyes on the ground until I passed the graveyard where my father was buried.
I'd never been to see the grave, not since the funeral back in middle school. I never wanted to, never felt the need, but that morning, treading a fine line between still drunk and hung over, I suddenly had an urge to see it again.
I went in through the front gate and walked along the single, gravel path to the far end. The grave site was where I expected it to be, just underneath a tall pine that stood next to the fence, but beside it was another tombstone. Engraved there in thick, stately letters was the name of my grandfather. That I wasn't expecting.
Of course I knew that he was dead, but it happened while I was living overseas and I couldn't afford the ticket back for the funeral. I vaguely recalled my mother telling me that they'd buried him next to my father, but at the time it didn't register.
The two graves stood in front of me like a pair of mute fists, and I stared at them, stunned maybe, or maybe it was just the hangover, and the cold, and the fact I hadn't slept enough, but it felt like being stunned, like there was nowhere left for me to go, nowhere to hide from this, three generations of men in my family, and two of them in the ground.
Still, in the end they were just a couple of graves. It's not like I had the bodies in front of me, not as if they meant anything. So after what I hoped was a reasonable amount of time standing there, I left the graveyard and walked until I found a restaurant where I ate a plate of eggs and sausages cooked by a fat, nearly silent man in a grease-stained apron.
That night I had a dream my grandfather was sitting at the foot of my bed. In his left hand was a glass of whiskey and next to him on the floor was the bottle, already half empty. I was surprised, because he'd been a recovered alcoholic for more than 30 years by the time he died, but I guess he'd fallen off the wagon.
"Good," he said. "You're finally up. I was getting tired of waiting around like an asshole." His voice was thicker than I remembered it, gravely, as if along with the whiskey he'd taken up smoking in the afterlife.
"I'd offer you some," he said, when he saw me eyeing his drink. "But you can't get drunk in a dream. Or you can't unless it's your own dream, which this isn't."
"Who's is it?" I asked.
"Shut up and listen," he said. "I didn't come all the way here to answer questions. If you can't figure it out that's your own problem, and if you have to ask you'll never know."
That surprised me too, because I remember him telling me once that there were no stupid questions. It occurred to me then that this might not even be my grandfather, that it could just be someone who looked like him, an impostor or identical twin, but if it was, the performance was impeccable; other than the booze and thickened voice and the slightly threadbare clothes he was wearing (my grandfather had always been a fastidious dresser) he was exactly as I remembered him: thin and angular, with stooped shoulders and a pair of nervous, fidgeting hands, and the wrinkles beside his eyes that looked as if they'd been cut with a razor.
"I came here to tell you a story," he said. "So just relax and pretend the story is the dream. Because that's probably the truth anyway."
That at least was familiar. He told a lot of stories, mostly about people he'd known, bizarre, quasi-historical episodes that, isolated and out of context, sounded like lies. I used to sit at the table and listen to him, up at the cabin by the lake where he continued to live even after my grandmother died, when my mother and her brothers pleaded with him to move south, but he told them no, that he was comfortable there and the view was better than anything they could offer him in town. He used to go on for hours, or what felt like hours, telling one story after another, until I was too tired to listen anymore and he said it was time I went to bed.
"You're not going to believe what it's like to be dead," he said. "The whole thing is one big cock tease. It's not like they tell it back when you're alive, not like the books say, at least none I ever read. First of all you wake up from it. That's the first damn thing. You die and you just wake right up again. They don't even have the decency to give you a little time off. I mean it's not easy, dying. It's no walk in the park, especially the way I went out, pancreatic cancer, although I guess there are no easy ways, because getting shot can't be much of a picnic either."
He paused to take a drink. The air in the room was very still, and dry, exactly like the air inside of a tomb, I thought, except that was an exaggeration and even if it wasn't I'd never been in a tomb. I told myself it was just the situation getting to me, and the room was only dry because I'd left the heater on.
"So boom," he went on. "You wake up, except you don't know where the hell you are and you're not even sure what that means anyway, 'you', where 'you' are. That word loses its luster pretty quick, believe me. It's a rare soul can hold onto that, the word 'you', which is really 'I': 'I am', 'I will', 'I think.' All that shit goes by the wayside. You're not you anymore, so forget that, OK?"
"Ok," I said. "I got it."
"You got shit. You got nothing, that's why I'm here. I'm trying to tell you about some things so you'll be ready."
"Except that it won't be me."
"That's right smart guy, it won't. You're gone, but you wake up anyway. Don't ask me how that's possible. It's not like they give you a damn manual. You have to figure things out on your own."
"Except it's not you who's figuring them out."
"You, not you, what's the difference? Shut up. Now picture it will you? You come to in a room. A big room, made of wood."
It has the look of an old temple. The floorboards have been worn smooth with age, and the low, buttressed ceiling is supported by a number of evenly spaced pillars. Both the pillars and the
ceiling are painted with odd, geometric shapes reminiscent of the patterns woven into rugs. The paintings must have been beautiful once, but now they are all faded, and indistinct, blackened by the smoke of long-dead fires.
The bowl is the only thing in the room. It is made of plain, chipped porcelain, and inside it is a cone of incense that's not much larger than the tip of a thumb. A thin, blue/gray line of smoke rises from the incense to the dark ceiling, curling this way and that depending on the movement of invisible currents of air, but all the while burning steadily, with a remorselessness like the will of some dark, implacable god.
"Watch that incense burn as long as you want, the thing won't ever go out," said my grandfather. "Trust me on that. I wasted a lot of time waiting for it. What else was I supposed to do? When you're dead you've got nothing but time."
You see now that it's been burning this way for ages, and will go on burning until the end, when the wooden pillars finally give out and the roof collapses, or until the spring of the world winds down, which in this case amounts to the same thing. Without fully understanding why, this knowledge starts to bother you. It sits like a bad taste in your mouth, growing worse the longer you stand there, until at last it becomes unbearable.
"So what else can you do? You snuff the thing out."
The last breath of smoke stutters up from the dish without ever reaching the ceiling. Instead, it coalesces in the air in front of you, coming together in a rough shape, the billowing outline of a smiling face.
Silently, the face forms a word: 'Eat,' it says, and nods at something behind you. Then it smiles once more, benevolent, and quickly dissipates into a formless puff of air.
You turn around. On the floor behind you is a single piece of fruit.
"You have no idea what kind of fruit it is," said my grandfather. "You're not an expert. The closest thing is to say it's an apple, but it isn't an apple. Remember that."
You bend down to pick up the thing that is not an apple. Its skin is dry and leathery, and as green as young leaves. You bite into it and joy spills over your tongue, a radiant happiness that courses down your throat to the pit of your stomach and spreads outward from there. The feeling only lasts a moment, and once it's gone you're left shaken, but refreshed, as if a gust of clean air had passed through every cell in your body. You look around, and realize the room has changed: the little dish with the incense is gone, the columns are standing in different places and the designs on their sides are all freshly painted. These designs are a kind of blocky geometry of shapes within shapes. Tracing the patterns further, your sight is inverted, or warped, and suddenly the columns have become walls, hemming you in. You look up, because the only light in the room is coming from above, a long, long way up. There are no doors, and no ladder or hand-holds on the walls. You're trapped. 'Shit,' you mutter, or maybe you mutter 'What now?' or maybe you just laugh and then later you cry a little or beat on the walls with your fists. But the walls are hard, and there's no budging them. Finally you sit down.
"Hours, days, weeks - what's the difference? Months, more like it. Years. Decades. They're all the same. After a while those words start to bleed together."
He paused, and rolled what was left of the whiskey around in his glass.
"Then what?" I asked.
"Then? Nothing. Maybe at some point you fall asleep, and maybe once you do you have a dream like this. You find yourself here, talking to someone like you, and you might even get a little drunk, because you're not sure when you're going to wake up back inside that prison. So you tell me genius, what's the point of this story?"
"That you'd better get used to the idea of eternity," I said sleepily; I felt like a child again, in bed at the cabin by the lake, too tired to go on listening. The last thing I remember was the figure of my grandfather nodding at me, I thought, with approval.
The next day I called my mother and we talked about other things, a customer at the bakery where she worked who'd made a big deal about how good the soup was, the horrible service she'd received at the bank, a squirrel that kept eating all her bird seed, until finally I just came to the point and asked her how my grandfather died.
"What?" she said. "A heart attack. Can't you remember?"
"Not cancer?"
"No. Who are you thinking of?"
I quickly changed the subject.