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[3] MY CHANCE ENCOUNTER
I peered at the old house from between the bars of its rusty iron gates. The outer walls of the building were crawled over with vines and ivy. I could spot layers of paint cracking and flaking off, revealing the layer of dirt-red brick underneath.
I gave the gates a push—they swung open without a creak, which surprised me. Something about the old house was fascinating. It had a mysterious charm that lured my senses. I walked in on the stone pathway and waited on the doorstep for a moment. I felt like a guest, awaiting a very elusive but gracious host, the house itself.
“Hellooo,” I called out in a low voice. I rapped my knuckles against the door. Just in case there was anyone inside.
Nothing but quiet. I turned the knob and went in.
The sharp scent of fresh pine shot up my nose in an instant. The house was perfumed with it. The interior decorations of the house were lavish, though it must have looked even more opulent during the days when people were actually living in this place. I saw three gold-framed portraits—of a duke, a soldier on his horse with a scarlet-plumed helmet, and a little girl with soft golden curls standing by a window.
I heard a sound just then—
“Flumph.”
It came from upstairs. What was that? I was hit with visions, snippets of a headless ghost, a zombie that had been thrown back up from the dead, a body lying face down in a pool of blood…a murder, right here in the house I was in! Blood would be seeping through the ceiling…I was just letting my imagination go free. I knew I would be testing my luck going to investigate, but the itch to find out was too much. There was no way I could walk away and simply forget about it either.
I made my way cautiously to a velveteen staircase at the end of the living room. A broken chandelier hung right at the top. The glass shivered and tinkled as a breeze blew in. It made some of the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
And then, even that came to a freeze point. A figure had appeared on the top stair, an emaciated, skeletal non-visible figure, much like a flickering hologram. Its face was steeped in the furthest throes of pain and remorse. Ragged clothes clung to its drawn frame. Pallid, wasted skin stretched grimly over its bones. Most unnerving was the figure’s haunting familiarity.
My eyes came to rest on the figure’s right arm, and I gave a slight shriek as I recognized the faint glimmer of a distinct mark there. There was a thin outline of a heart just at the fold of the inner elbow. It was a permanent mark, no longer a daily scribble with a red ballpoint pen. I jumped back in shocking disbelief.
“Jess,” I gasped, “it’s you!”
The figure tossed its, ‘her’ I mean, head back. She placed a hand on her hip, in typical fashion, condescendingly.
“Well of courssse it is,” she hissed. “Who else could it be?”
Who else? Like the former occupants of the house, perhaps?
“I hate asking you this,” I ventured, “but…what are you doing here?”
Jess, the hologram Jess, shook her head as she stared at me with hollow, sunken eyes devoid of all expression. She looked as if she wanted to cry, but I knew better. She wouldn’t take her fixed gaze off me for a microsecond.
“What am I doing here?”
Jess flapped both arms down into the air in annoyance: “Flumph.” So that was the source of the sound. Jess whirled around, crossed her hands behind her, and paced slowly up and down, speaking her thoughts aloud.
“Not even a ‘how’ve you been’…or ‘it’s good to see you’…you’ve no manners at all, you’ve never learned. I think you’ll never learn anyway, Simon.”
She said my name as if she had seven lemon warheads in her mouth. She looked me down, from my cap turned sideways to my favorite white T-shirt, Levi’s 501 jeans and favorite pair of old skate shoes. She shook her head, again!
“I was so stupid to have even liked you,” she spat out.
Even after dying, she couldn’t ‘get over me’.
“Look, Jess—”
“DON’T YOU ‘LOOK JESS’ AT ME!!!”
That was Jess alright—except that her madwoman screeches were more shrill than ever. It ripped through the head like a high-pitched supremely distorted guitar solo riff from ear to ear. I couldn’t help but back up against the nearest wall. She was floating down the stairs now, and believe me, most people would have already run out the front door if they still had their heads on to will them to take flight.
“Okay, let’s start again,” I breathed out, slowly. “How’d this happen?”
The wavering possibility of something quite close to sanity passed over Jess’s face.
“I…I’d…gotten this note.” She rested her chin on a propped up hand, resting that arm on the other. “I don’t know from who, it was anonymous.”
“Note?”
“Yeah…I don’t have it with me anymore. But I can remember what it said, word for word, I think.”
I let her jog her memory for a little bit.
“2 p.m., crossroads, meet you there and we’ll get to Hell. Do remember not to tell.”
“My, that rhymes too.”
“Si-mon.”
That tone had not changed too.
“I’d figured that crossroads…must have meant the junction three blocks away from school. It’s the closest thing to a ‘crossroad’ around here.”
Jess gave a tired sigh.
“There’s not many cars on the road at that time, so I decided to go over and have a look.”
“Even when you had no idea who’d written you something like that? Or that it wasn’t for real?”
“How’d I know if I didn’t find out?”
Yeah, that was so like Jess.
The thing was, she hadn’t a clue I was just playing along, looking like I didn’t know what she was talking about until she explained about it more. The note from hell? I’d placed it in her locker when she was at Biology class. I knew she’d go out and try to figure out whatever the note said, even though it was all just a load of bullshit. She was into things like metaphysics, Wicca, “astral-projection,” spells…
Seriously, I never meant to kill her or anything. I will say though that I always found Jess the scariest, meanest, weirdest person alive. I’d seen the way she would buy some people and, man. She’d use them for homework, use them for attention, everything. You’ve got to have met her or been with her to know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t “with her” like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. God, I’d shoot my own self before anything like that to happen.
We’ve kind of known each other since I transferred to this school. Simply cos she’s had a huge crush on me since she first set her eyes on me, and my life has never known peace from then. The letters she wrote me, the things she’d do in class, all the hot, single, available girls she’d chased away from me! What’d I do to deserve all that?
So my friend, Josh, and I…Josh’s older brother had just gotten a new gun. We decided to try it out, and I swear, we only meant to send a couple of bullets pass Jess’ head, or near her feet or something, just to scare the shit out of her, and have a blast as well. Turns out that Josh had the naturally better aim between us, and the one first shot was all it took to kill her on the spot.
We drove thirty miles out after that to get rid of the gun. We’d seen enough TV to know that leaving any kind of evidence around would be suicide for us. Josh’s brother would just have to get a new one.
I don’t know why Jess liked me so much, why she just couldn’t get off my back for once.
“Sooooo anyway, Si-mon…” she started with a pathetic whimper. She started to bring a hand up to twirl her hair. It was kinda horrific watching that bony finger reach out to touch the matted strands of hair. “How’s…life been?”
“Oh, I’ve been good.”
Jess sighed again. “Always the same, eh?”
I flashed her the biggest smile that I could, just short of a grimace. I decided to go on to say some mo
re, in case she’d decide to get mad and start screaming the walls down or pulling the house apart (though I wondered how she’d do that).
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said, looking her in the eye. Holding the eye contact for just the right amount of time was quintessential, or she’d know something was up.
It worked. She actually just smiled, and left it at that. I guessed she was getting to feel a little mushy too…I could see it in the way she was holding herself, trying to hold herself together maybe, and she didn’t say anything for a while.
I didn’t want to ask her much more. I honestly didn’t really care. I just wanted to get out and get on with my day, continue with some computer games (World of Warcraft!) or something. I should have just walked on by this damned old house, instead of getting myself stuck with of all people, strange freaky Jess, here.
“You know, I actually have something to show you.”
What could it be?
“Come upstairs with me?”
Jess floated up the staircase again, and I could either follow her, or take my chance and bolt out the front door as fast as I had ever run out of anywhere in my entire life. For the most inexplicable of reasons, I actually chose to follow her.
I made my way up the staircase, my footsteps a dull resounding thud upon each step. Was it me, or were the steps that I was taking getting progressively heavier, louder, as I reached for the top?
Jess had gone into the last room, at the end of the common walkway towards the left. Unlit candles lined the side of the walkway…ah…that was where the scent of fresh pine was coming from. All the other room doors were closed, and I could see from where I was that the open room was empty. There was just the wooden panels that it was made of, and nothing else.
She floated to the window, and I followed. I was half-expecting the wooden panels of the room to cave in on me, or swallow me whole. I didn’t know what to expect.
“Look.”
I was looking at Jess. I felt bad for thinking this, but I thought that her new look suited her better than when she had been alive.
“You see that row of spikes down there?”
Spikes? What’d spikes be doing here? She pointed out the window, and I went over to the edge to have a look.
It’s the last thing that I saw. Well, sort of.
The next thing I knew, I remember feeling horrible—I felt like goo, like I was just made out of muck, to tell you the truth. I was looking at my hand. It looked like rotting flesh. There was no stench, but the sight of it was quite something. I was grossed out at first. But I got pretty used to it after a short while, and it was quite cool actually because it looked like something you’d see on Ripley’s, or the Discovery Channel. I’d never had my real hand looking like this before.
I looked up and saw Jess still by the window, waving to me. She was pointing to the row of spikes too. That’s when I freaked out proper.
The morbid part wasn’t the fact that the spikes were covering a spot that was intended to be a flowerbed—the mangled bits of flesh splattered and caught in between the metal were me. What was physically left of it, I guessed. I felt like throwing up, and I did, just that, nothing exactly came spewing out. But I was still left with the feeling that I’d puked.
I deduced that fine, Jess had somehow found out that I had been the cause of all of this, and that I was to blame. I’d have to accept bravely my fate whatever it was.
That all changed when she drifted merrily down to meet me in the garden.
“I don’t care, Simon.”
Boy, did I have it coming.
“Call me evil, selfish, crazy—but I want you to be with me, so like it or not—there!”
What could that mean?
“You pushed me…” I worked out as quickly as I could in my mind, which I still had with me somehow, “you killed me, so that I can…be…with you?”
I look at her straight in the face, hollow sunken eyes and gaunt shrunken skin and all.
“In death?”
Jess grinned, nodding her head up and down.
So she hadn’t a clue at all that I was the reason behind it! I was absolutely fuming: did Jess think this was funny?! But then, I felt I kind of deserved what I had coming, what I did get, ending up being dead, cos I did kill her, although if you do consider Josh, I did it indirectly.
“I still find you hot, even when you look like this.”
I looked at Jess quizzically. Hot?—as a living-dead corpse-spirit whatever? It was the last thing I expected to hear, right then. That was supposed to make me feel better? I couldn’t take this.
Maybe she was playing me this time around. This was her way of revenge, and now I was stuck here with my whole life cut short, all because of a girl totally off her rocker wanting to have me to herself. Maybe we were both going to Hell. Or likely, I was already there. And I would be, for all eternity. What was I going to do now?
“C’mon, it’ll be more fun than ever, you’ll see. You can fly for one, if you’re here.”
Strangely, she was sounding more normal now that we were both, dead.
Or maybe I was just seeing and hearing her differently, for the first time. I shouldn’t say for the first time ‘in my life’.
Being me, it didn’t take long to adjust to the new way of things. Yeah it sucks sometimes, you get to see people eating their hot fudge ice-creams and sipping their milkshakes and stuff like that, but you can do a whole lot more too. We’ll probably figure what to do better with ourselves, once we do.
Jess won, this time. She really got even with me, and after spending these few weeks with her, I find her cool. Wait till she finds out that I’m the one who got her, first.