The Ghostening: Part the Third; The Longest Part

We know you’re all white-knuckling it at at this point. The tale continues.

Originally published on facebook dot com.

Damn. So the nonsense theory I made up so that I could stop staring at the ghost at the edge of my yard and return to bed did not, according to James, hold water. No pun intended.

“Okay, so if it’s not the river, then WHAT IS IT?” James has at least a vaguely scientific mind. He moved his head around, as I had done 45 minutes before, trying to see if it was merely a reflection of some sort. I explained the peripheral vision trick, and he tried it out, and agreed that it was “shaped like a man” and super-difficult to make out when looking at it directly. He poked the window screen in multiple places. He made some “hmmmm” sounds. He snuck into Sylvie’s room to see if it could be seen from her window, which is on the same side of the house (interestingly, it could not be seen from Sylvie’s room). He returned to the office, flummoxed.

“It’s a ghost, isn’t it.” I said. I remembered the stories I heard growing up in Wilton, about the Blue Lady of Vale End Cemetery. On moonlit nights, she appears as a shimmering blue mist or column, and hovers above and around her grave. I relayed this to James, and then said “Does this mean we have to dig up the yard? Is there a body buried right there, do you think? Is the ghost telling us where its corpse is?”

At that moment, Gricket, our less-girthy-but-still-pretty-fat cat joined us by the window. James picked him up and put him on the sill. “Look out the window, Gricket!” James instructed, and gently turned Gricket’s head in the direction of the ghost. We expected his hackles to rise, his back to arch, and perhaps a cat-growl to emanate from his doughy gray body. Instead, he twisted his face out of James’ hands and immediately jumped down from the window sill. He returned to the futon, where he slouched over his own cat-gut to lick his hind end.

James said, “Biscuit saw ghosts all the time in our old apartment on Washington Street. Maybe he would do better.” He got up from the floor and approached the light switch. As he turned it on, I yelled, “Are you crazy?! Now it knows we’re in here! IT CAN SEE US, NOW!” He rolled his eyes at me, and came back to the window to see if the thing was somehow more visible. With the bright light in the room, we couldn’t see anything outside at all. He turned the light off and it gave me an idea: “The camera on my phone has a ‘night sight’ feature. Maybe it will pick up the image and we can zoom in on it.”

“Cool, where’s your phone?”

I swallowed. “I, um, I left it plugged in…downstairs.” We blinked at each other for a moment. Firmly, James said, “It’s your phone. You go get it.”

I tried to think of some reason why I was unable to do this. Maybe I could say my foot was asleep, or that I had a charlie horse from crouching for so long. But, no. It was my idea. I was grown-ass woman. I needed to get my own phone.

I needed to be brave.

I took another minute to collect myself, while James opened and shut and then reopened the window, to see if that somehow made a difference in ghost-clarity. “OKAY,” I said to James. “I will be back.”

“Uh-huh,” he replied, squinting into the dark.

I crept downstairs and made my way into the kitchen. I unplugged my phone and warily approached the high windows above the sink, which also face the backyard. I stood on my tiptoes and looked out. I couldn’t see jack. One of the two very large lilac bushes on either side of our screen porch completely blocked my view of the yard edge.

“Hmph.” I said, and tromped up the stairs back to the office to find that, in the time it took me to collect my phone, a film of clouds had covered the moon.The ghost was still there, but much fainter, and the yard much darker, than it had been minutes before. As I pulled up my camera app, James said, “It’s pretty dark out there.”

“Who knows, it might still work.”

I carefully snapped a picture and we waited with bated breath while the night sight app ‘developed’ it. The result: A lot of black, with some random spots of slightly darker black. I tried to downplay my disappointment: “Okay, so maybe not.”

James sighed. “I’m going to go out there.”

I grabbed his arm. “NO, YOU ARE NOT, I FORBID IT!”

“Ali, we’re never going to know what it is unless we go look it. And we’re not going to be able to go back to sleep unless we know what it is.”

I considered this. Was I really content to spend the rest of the damn night squatting next to a window, my face scrunched against the screen, trying in vain to look at a supernatural something-or-other that was clearly impossible to see at such a distance? I can be a major bitch when I don’t get adequate sleep, and already I had sacrificed over an hour of precious time to this endeavor. Ghost or no ghost, I still had to go to work the next day. So, for the sake of my child, co-workers, and husband, I acquiesced: “I don’t like it. But I will allow it.”

James made his way to the bedroom to put clothes on. I remained at the window, biting my lip.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, coming back into the room, clad in jeans and a t-shirt. He puffed up his chest. “I’ll have my flashlight.”

I nodded, full of pride, impressed with the valiant specimen I had married. “I will stay right here and watch everything, so that I can, you know, stop it if it tries to eat you or something.”

“Well, if you stay right here, you won’t be able to stop it from eating me, you will only be able to witness it eating me.”

“That’s true. Okay, I will stay right here and watch everything so that I can witness it eating you, if it comes to that.” (I don’t know why I presumed that the ghost would be of the man-eating variety. It was late and I was tired.)

I touched his shoulder tenderly. “I love you. Go see what the thing is.”

“I love you, too.”

He left the room. I turned back to the source of our anxiety and confusion. It glimmered maliciously in the darkness. I felt the need to document what was happening for posterity; Facebook seemed like the obvious choice. I picked up my phone and updated my status with the honest truth:

‘My husband is going outside to confront the ghost standing at the edge of our very dark yard and I am scared shitless. #244am’

I heard James make his way through the kitchen, into the entry room, where he was doubtlessly going to put his sneakers on, so that he may venture outside, cross our length of lawn to the woods, and confront a fucking troublesome spirit.

Bolstered by wifely love and admiration, in the direction of the ghost I whispered, “So help me God, if you possess my husband or hurt him or otherwise do any weird shit I will ghost-bust your dead ass so hard…”

James had turned the light on in the entry room. I heard him step out onto our screen porch, on the back of the house. He engaged his flashlight, the bright bluish light scattering shadows across the porch. “JAMES!” I yelled down to him. “IF I EVER DOUBTED YOUR MANLINESS IN OUR ELEVEN YEARS TOGETHER I PROMISE I WILL NEVER DOUBT IT AGAIN!”

I heard him say “Heh. Okay.”

I looked back at the ghost, and found that the lamp James had turned on in the entry room had shed some light on the subject, so to speak. Things were put in perspective.

I gasped.

“BUBB! JAMES! I CAN SEE IT! I KNOW WHAT IS!”

“WHAT IS IT?!” he yelled up at me.

“IT’S….IT’S NOT A GHOST!”

COME BACK SOON FOR THE VERY-NOT-THRILLING, DEFINITELY-EMBARRASSING CONCLUSION OF: THE GHOSTENING.