Life as a Ghost - Part 3: Confusion Reigns

Read the First installment, first:Life as a Ghost - Part 1: The Dead Life

Read the Second installment:  Life as a Ghost - Part 2: It Begins

I left the bedroom and headed downstairs.  As I passed the study door, the telephone rang.  Forgetting everything, I dove for the phone.  And through it and the desk!  Damn!  This was no fun at all (not yet, anyway).  The phone kept ringing.  I sat down at the desk.  It was odd how I could ‘sit’ in a chair, or ‘walk’ on a floor, just as if I had a body.  So long as I wasn’t making frantic violent movements, my lifetime of habits kept reasserting themselves.

The phone finally quit ringing.  I looked at the clock.  Who in hell would be calling me at three a.m.?  And why?  I wasn’t likely to have heard the phone if I was sound asleep upstairs, and if I had, I wouldn’t have made it downstairs to the study before it quit.  I gave the matter serious thought.  I pondered, I cogitated, I fixated on the question.  Anything to avoid thinking about my situation.

Sirens brought me out of my cocoon.  There was pounding at the front door, and I could see red lights flashing off the walls of the study.  I went to the front hall, just as the front door burst inward and three firemen hurtled through it, and me, and up the stairs, dragging a hose.  “Back bedroom!”  Someone yelled.  I followed them upstairs and into my bedroom.  The window was open (no air conditioning) and some of the smoke had cleared, but it was still pretty thick.  One of the firemen hit the lights.  I couldn’t resist looking at the bed.  I was still there, and I was still dead.  One of the firemen said, “Uh-oh,” and bent over my body.  He checked for neck and wrist pulses, and turned to the others.  “Better call an ambulance,” he said, “but I think it’s too late.   Maybe it’s a good thing.  He’s in pretty bad shape.”

I looked at my body again.  Maybe dead was better.

Fire companies didn’t have EMS units then, and no one had heard of CPR (neither had I, and I didn’t for years), so things moved pretty slowly.  One of the others trotted downstairs to use my phone, while the remaining two checked out the bed and the body.

“Weird,” said the first one.  “Wonder what put out the fire.  Looks like it was going pretty good, and then it just went out.”

“Plenty of smoke,” the other one said.  “Good thing Mr. Dilton came home late and saw it coming from the window.  If this guy had shut off his yard lights like he was supposed to, he wouldn’t have seen it at all.”

“Of course!” I thought.  “I was too drunk to remember the lights.  I’ll bet the call was from Dilton to complain about the lights shining in his bedroom window.”  And it turned out that he had done exactly that.  When I didn’t answer, he went back into his bedroom and tried to pull the curtains tighter to shut out the light.  That’s when he saw the smoke, and called the fire department.  By then, of course, I was already dead.

One of the firemen came upstairs with a fan, and set it by the window to pull the smoke out.  I decided to help, and blew hard toward the window, giggling to myself.  I could still affect air!  Boy, could I!  Smoke went through the fan like it was turbocharged.  I damn’ near blew the fan through the screen!

“Holy Christ!” yelped one of the firemen, “What’s with that fan?!?”

I quit blowing, and the fan fell back from the screen and balanced on the sill.  I just stood there, looking at it and ignoring them.  They stood around, looking at each other.  Then they moved closer together.

“That was weird!” said the first fireman.  ‘Weird’ seemed to sum a lot of things up for him, but I couldn’t argue.  ‘Weird’ seemed to cover it.

Before long, two men came with a gurney, hustled my body onto it, and with the three firemen helping, and apparently glad of an excuse to be out of my bedroom, they soon had it in the ambulance.  I got in with it, and we took off for the half-hour ride to the hospital.  I don’t know what I thought – maybe that they could do something at the hospital, and I’d be alive again, burns or no burns.

Then again – maybe not!

As the ambulance went by the end of the driveway, I stopped moving with it.  It continued on, and I passed through the back of it, and hung there at the property line, suspended in mid-air, unable to pass an invisible barrier I couldn’t even feel.  I was too stunned to react.  I’d never see my body again, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do.  I was devastated.

After awhile, the firemen jury-rigged the front door shut and left.  A policeman was detailed to stay by the front door; to guard against looting the Sergeant said.  In Hudson?!?  People in Hudson were money people.  The town had the Western Reserve Academy, an exclusive private academy that drew rich kids from around the country (well, from much of the New York area, anyway).  Rich people don’t loot!  I glared at the cop as I started to float through the door.  “Rich people don’t loot!” I sneered.

“Hunh?” from the cop at the door.  “Who said that?”

I stopped halfway through the door.  “I did,” I said.  He didn’t seem to hear me.  He was looking right at me.  He didn’t seem to see me, either.

“Coulda sworn...” he said, and his voice trailed off.

I was going to try again, but I decided against it.  I wasn’t sure how he’d heard me in the first place, and I wasn’t sure how either of us would deal with an extended conversation.  I went on into the house.

There wasn’t anything there for me to do, so I wandered through the house.  A ghost!  I was a ghost!  I didn’t believe in ghosts, dammit!  I was a ghost.  My house was a haunted house!  Haunted by me!  I was dead, and I hadn’t gone to heaven.  I didn’t believe in heaven.  I was a ghost.  I was dead and I hadn’t gone to hell.  I didn’t believe in hell.  I was a goddam ghost!  I was locked into this house forever!  I was a gibbering hysteric.  I told my brain firmly to, “SHUT THE HELL UP!”

I was standing in my bedroom.  I didn’t remember getting there.  I looked at the bed.  What a mess!  Why a ghost?  No unfinished business occurred to me.  It still hasn’t.  Did this happen to everybody?  It turned out that it doesn’t.  I still haven’t met another ghost.  If this is the afterlife, the rules need some amendments.  I wanted to cry, but real ghosts can’t cry.  I found myself weeping.  How did that happen?  That simple question snapped me back into a less frantic state.  I discovered that concentrating on the effects of my new status helped me avoid the horror of it.  I also identified horror as my present emotional state.  Time to calm down.

Crying.  That was a physical act.  Real water ran from my eyes and dripped on the floor, making small splashes.  But I wasn’t real.  I tried to formulate a scientific explanation.  High school biology wasn’t much help.  I’d apparently missed the chapter on ghosts and their physical manifestations.  Maybe by ‘wanting’ something, I caused it to happen.  Perhaps I unconsciously concentrated water from the air where my eyes should be, and thus ‘cried.’  That would also explain my ability to move air.  This could be interesting.  I moved to the window.  By concentrating, I ‘imagined’ myself breathing the smoke in and pumping it out.  I looked down at my body, and my whole body was filled with concentrated smoke.  As I turned to the window and breathed out, my body emptied, starting at the feet.  I had another thought.

If I were a ghost, and if my body was insubstantial, as it appeared to be, perhaps it would be possible to modify it.  I looked at my right hand and imagined it as being totally permeable.  I extended one arm into the room, and concentrated on permeability.  The arm began to fill with smoke.  I extended the other arm through the screen.  With a little effort, I turned my entire body into an air pump, pumping smoke into my body through one arm, and out the window through the other.  In short order, the room was clear.  I wondered what else I could do.

It occurred to me that it might be nice to be clothed.  I felt no temperature, but being naked was not a comfortable state for me at the time.  The fact that no one could see me was irrelevant.  Now that I was thinking about it, I was embarrassed.  I wondered if I was blushing.

I concentrated.  Slowly, jeans and a tee shirt took shape around me.  I added western boots.  I went to the bedroom mirror.  Oh well, I hadn’t really expected a reflection.  I looked down.  It would do for now.  I wondered if the cop would be able to see me now, so I went downstairs and through the door.  I stood in front of him, and he looked right through me.  Didn’t even blink.  Didn’t move.  Damn!  I had hoped!  I wished I hadn’t.  I went back inside.

I moped around the house for the next few days, practicing clothing changes and peering into things.  I wished I’d left the TV on when I went to bed that night, bad as ‘50’s TV was.  Or even the radio.  I was bored.  But that soon changed.

Read the Second installment:  Life as a Ghost - Part 4: Julia Takes Charge

© 2009 - All Rights Reserved R C Larlham