The thing with being a paranormally sensitive person is that there is no on-off switch. You don’t get to have ‘consultation hours’ where residents of the netherworld can come and bother you and then later hang up the ‘Esper is OUT” signage and have a personal me-time. You’re a walking, talking beacon – and like it or not, once the doors have been opened, there’s no closing them back.
Case in point: Theresa sharing the tub with me.
“Could you maybe keep the cold to yourself?” I asked, rather growing tired of it. “Y’know, since the point of taking a warm bath is to take a warm bath?”
The cold seemed to even grow more intense and then gradually receded to a concentrated point somewhere about my feet. I sighed as loud as I can, having resigned to her stubbornness, and scooted over like a crazy person so the two occupants – one healthy, normal human male, the other, very dead female – can fit snugly in the tub.
“There’s nothing funny or sexy with you following me everywhere,” I said, closing my eyes as I rested my back on the tub’s sloping edge. The water in my side was warm and giving off that hazy steam of heat. A leg stretch’s distance away, however, the water turns to what I call now as ghostly cold. I tried my hardest not to look at how her drenched sundress clung to her, betraying the contours of her cold, dead body. The more I looked at the scenario, the queasier I get – it’s like witnessing Theresa telling the Laws of Heat Transfer to fuck off. Not sexy at all
“And now, I look like a crazy person talking to himself. Can’t you just get out of the tub and, I dunno, act like a normal person? Well, a normal dead person?”
In response, she simply traced a line – a very cold line from her fingertips to my toes to my knees to my leg, underneath the hot water; not freaky at all.
When grandmother declared that Theresa was with us in the dining room, my first instinct was to look over my shoulder and expect a ghostly apparition of the lady with a decayed hand and a head rotated 90ᵒ to the side as her mouth gaped wide enough to swallow me whole. It was nothing like that.
I saw Theresa calmly sipping tea and casually throwing a what-are-you-looking-at-? raised eyebrows on my direction.
I felt my jaw drop. I may have screamed, I don’t know.
“You see her now?” Grandma asked, following the pure look of disbelief in my face.
“You see her?”
“Yes,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“You’re blind.”
“No, you’re blind.”
“Don’t pull that shit on me - ”
“Language!”
“Pass the sugar please.”
I looked around in horror as Theresa simply stared back. She was deadly pretty (notice my choice in adjectives) in the same faded, white sundress, wearing that seemingly permanent empty smile, and far emptier eyes.
“Huh?”
“The sugar. Please. Your tea’s a little too strong for me,” she said a little more slowly and louder this time, as if the issue was I didn’t hear her properly.
I slowly looked back to my grandmother and with as much calm and dignified incredulity in my voice, I shouted: “WHAT THE FUCK?”
“Language!” Grandma said yet again, but I could swear she had this bemused expression in her face.
“She’s dead!” I exclaimed, eyeing the bluish tinge in her skin and how she seems less solid than everything else. She’s so … faded. Like a very 3Dish watermark against the real background; like she isn’t really a part of anything in this world. “Look at her!”
“So you can really see her now?” Grandmother asked, following my gaze to Theresa.
“Yes, he can,” Theresa replied.
“How can you see her? You’re blind! Why do I see her only now?” I asked. “And you, shut up,” I added, directing the words to Theresa.
“I am blind, but I see more than those who live with closed eyes. Like you’ve been all your life, until a few moments ago,” Grandma replied sharply. I strained to hear her as Theresa blew a ghostly raspberry, the sound echoing as if it came from a wide, empty space.
“Yeah, gonna need more than that, Gran.”
“We see what we want to see, my dear. But sometimes, even our baser instincts betray us. Did you even realize you prepared three teacups?”
“What-?” I started to ask when my eyes hovered to the open cupboard above the sink. It was empty. Three cups and three saucers were not there. “Why is she here?”
“Uhh, I can hear you, I’m right here,” Theresa interjected. She turned to face grandma, “Like I was saying, Gran, I didn’t do anything to anyone. I just want to find out who’s responsible for my … deadness. I don’t remember anything.”
“Oh, dear, when we move on to your side of the plane, there could very well be a chance of losing our former selves. When life is ripped from us, not much remains. And when that happens, we don’t know for sure what we become.”
“No, Gran, I swear I didn’t do anything to John’s friend. I may be a restless soul, but I brought no harm to anyone.”
“ARE WE SERIOUSLY HAVING THIS CONVERSATION? AND STOP REFERRING TO MY GRANDMA AS GRAN! SHE ISN’T YOUR GRAN!” I shouted, completely beside myself. Imagine just how bewildered I was. My great grandmother and a very much dead girl were conversing casually over tea like it was their usual Tuesday afternoon thing.
“Stop overreacting,” Grandma snapped. “I told you, your science voodoo can only take your smartass so far. There is so much more you have yet to see.”
She looked away and remained silent as if for dramatic effect. What the actual fuck? I looked at the girl behind me and the old woman in front of me and tried to decide who is the craziest of all of us in the room. I felt myself start having another panic attack. I sipped my cold, icy tea just to do something, anything other than focus at the fucked up matter at hand: the very much dead Theresa.
“Uhh, the sugar?”
“Shut up. Get it yourself,” I replied, rather rudely. Theresa scoffed as grandma pulled herself back into the conversation.
“Stop being rude to her, Johnny - she can’t.”
I just raised my eyes in question. I don’t know why I suddenly felt grumpy and irritated. Was it because the laws of physics I revered since I was a child and cold, factual reasoning which is effectively my language, just got their asses handed to them by an old woman and a dead girl and I had no way to refute it? Ha! Surely, not.
“She’s from the other side. She has no business in this plane, no offense, young lady,” she nodded towards Theresa. The latter just waved off a hand in an nah-it’s-cool manner. What the fuck!? “The only way she can interact with this world now is through mediums. Mediators between this plane and the next. Us.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, nuh- uh, no way Gran, this won’t be how you’re gonna take me over to your side of the cuckoo family business, no,” I said, continually shaking my head. “And you,” I addressed Theresa. “My Gran here’s the best … medium you’ll ever need. Leave me alone now.” I started to rise from my seat when grandma interjected, rather heatedly. It was the tone in her voice, more than anything else that held me on the spot.
“It doesn’t work that way. You can now see, but you refuse to listen. There is no cuckoo side of things, idiot grandson of mine! There is only this side and their side! And now, being the situation is as it is, you’ve become a medium - her medium, like it or not.” She coughed from straining her vocal chords; I hastened over the sink to fetch her tap water.
“Alright,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. I swallowed down hard before speaking further. “Say I believe now, hell, I have no way to deny that these things are happening, save for the tea being full of weird-ass drugs. Say that, yes, indeed, the world isn’t as clear-cut as I’ve always claimed it to be. Why do I have to be her medium?”
“You’re her only hope at peace. You’re the first contact, is that right?” Grandma asked Theresa. Theresa nodded in answer. How my Gran sees this, I do not know to this day. She drank the glass of water I gave her and continued speaking.
“Johnny. Oh, Johnny, my dear. The world will seem like it has changed. But I assure you that this has always been how the world is. You’re just going to see it in its entirety from now on.”
“Okay, Gran, Baby steps.” I never thought the day when I’d actually ask her for clarity about the paranormal would come. I just wanted to get it over with. “What’s this first contact?”
“It’s quite literal. You’re the first one she was able to contact … to successfully interact with since her passing. Therefore, the ties she has with you are stronger than anything else she has on this world.”
“And?” I could swear Theresa was listening as raptly as I was.
“Sever this tie and Theresa shall be left with nothing in this world. She’ll lose the little sense of self she has – she’ll be condemned to wander this plane for all eternity in unrest or worse, she’ll be corrupted by this world and turn malevolent.”
No one said anything after these words.
“So, uhh,” Theresa says tentatively. “I have to stay with this rude dude? So I won’t be … uhh, evil and stuff?”
Grandma considered this before she nodded her confirmation. “Yes, I am afraid so.”
“Let me guess, the only way I can be free of her is to help her find her peace. Solve her murder and all?” I asked, knowing the answer already. Fuck this.
“It isn’t as easy as that. But yes. Essentially, yes.”
After what seemed like an eternity of silence, where I still haven’t found a way to digest everything, Theresa spoke up.
“Johnny. Pass the sugar, please?”
“YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
I am an engineer. I was no investigator. So my first brilliant idea was to report to the police. Say my statement, hand over Theresa and let the police do the rest. But then I relented in fear of being called crazy. After all, my witness is a very much dead girl, who, either way, remembers absolutely nothing of her murder.
I don’t have much of a case to build an indictment on.
But I did have a suspect. The owner of the pub. Owner John. I shared this theory with Theresa as I drove back home.
“I don’t know, I don’t remember,” she replied rather nonchalantly.
“Excuse me? This is your possible murderer?” But she simply smiled her empty smile and shrugged her fragile shoulders. Then something caught my eye as I looked from Theresa to the window.
A man had his face planted firm against Theresa’s side of the car. We were in a moving vehicle so I can only imagine how fucked-up the thing was, running sideways like a crazy, demented crab, all the while having its face pressed up against the window. Did I mention he had an infestation of maggots in his eye sockets and the fucking creepy crawlies fell on the hollow hole in his face where his fucking nose is supposed to be? I’m sorry for the mental image for that last statement but he’s actually a lot worse than that, I promise. The skin on his mangled face was taut and pale, revealing dark veins and hollow flesh. These details registered themselves late as I missed my turn and the car went colliding into a thicket of shrubs before I had the sense to hit the brakes.
I checked to see if Theresa was okay, momentarily forgetting that she was, in fact, dead.
But she was not okay. There were silent tears in her eyes as she stared at the creature which eerily stared back at her with maggots spilling out of the latter’s eye sockets. If Theresa was emanating a ghostly chill, Maggotface had this horrible stench that reminded me horribly of dead, decaying rats. The smell permeated through the closed windows and I retched at the thought of standing face to face with the creature.
I did not even think about it as I jostled the stick on reverse and pulled the car from the shrubbery. Maggotface, ever persistent and creepy-as-fuck, still had his face against Theresa’s window. My ghost, being clearly not as good at ghosting as Maggotface, covered her face with her tiny hands and buried her face on my legs, screaming incoherently.
Maggotface, with the apparent need to up the ante, showed me one clammy hand and slowly brought it down to what I believed to be his crotch (I personally thank my passenger door so I did not have to see what he did next). And then, with a dark green slime dripping off his exposed chin, his offscreen hand proceeded the quick, tiny motions that could only mean one thing – MaggotMcFuckFace is the creepiest fucker I’ve seen, in life and death.
Fuck this.
I floored the gas and launched the car to about 120mph. The engine groaned in discomfort but I willed it to hang on, until we reached the destination I had in mind. The creature didn’t seem fazed at all by the speed of the car. He clung like glue to the window as we sped along the interstate highway. Theresa had her face planted firmly against my leg as she put her arms around her ears – apparently, the gross creature was creaming things only she can hear. She was crying and all I could do was to drive as fast as I could to the one place that popped into mind.
My Uncle’s place.
“Just a little further, Theresa,” I hushed her, surprised at where my new-found kindness stemmed from. “Just bear with it a little longer.”
I gasped as she bit down on my leg, in an attempt to quite herself from screaming. She was shivering, not from the cold, but from complete fear. MaggotMcFuckFace was now climbing along the side of the car. It took all I had in me not to look at its progress as I dedicated my all into my driving. The car was filled with the unworldly smell and Theresa’s cold was not helping. It felt like I was in a refrigerator filled to the brim with decayed meat. The clammy hand slammed itself on the far side of the windshield – I dreaded what’s next to come and then –
It was gone.
I reached my destination.
It took quite an amount of time to coerce Theresa into letting my leg go. A large part of it was wet. How a ghost’s bodily fluids can affect the fabric of this world, I knew not. During those times, I cared for little, save for thanking my own brilliance in driving off the fuck-up thing.
When Theresa next spoke, her words were few but weighed heavy.
“Don’t let me become one of them. Please, John.”
The creature was one of those corrupted, restless souls Gran talked about. Somehow I knew that the instant Theresa said those words. Gran’s words came rushing back and mingled with Theresa’s tears and the look of fear on her – my mission was never that simple.
I have to help a soul find her peace. For if I can’t, I’ll be condemning her to an eternity of being one of those creatures.
I looked at Theresa and said the words that would start everything.
“I won’t.”
She beamed at me, smiling now with something a little closer to warmth. “Really?”
“You won’t do much good as a ghost anyway,” I joked. “Have you ever seen a ghost spooked by another ghost?”
“Oh, yeah?,” she snapped cooly. “And who pissed himself while driving from not-so-scary-Mr.-Ghostman-?” She used the air quotations in the most mocking way I’ve seen anyone use it.
“That was your drool and snot, you little - ”
The argument was cut short by a smart rapping on my window. For one crazy second, I thought CreepyMaggotMcFuckFace was back – but as I turned around, I sighed in relief.
“Never thought I’d see you here in this lifetime, John.”
“Never thought I’d find myself here, Uncle. Or should I call you Reverend Father?”
Submitted February 05, 2017 at 08:24PM by MaXINyx http://ift.tt/2kvx5Uu nosleep
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