Who is? (short horror-like story)
There’s something wrong with the air. You stand in front of your grandmother’s house, arms wrapped tight around your stomach and try to take a deep breath. You remember doing this in your childhood, inhaling the scent of freshly mowed grass, fading curry spices and moonlight with the rough planks of the porch biting into your feet. Your remember the way your lungs filled until they were fit to burst and then watching the way your exploding breath disturbed the spider webs hanging from the gutter.
Now, it seems like no matter how much you breathe in, your lungs are never full.
There’s something wrong with the air.
You wrap your robe tighter around you and go inside. Your grandmother is not newly dead, but she is recently passed. The funeral’s come and gone and all that’s left is to sort her store of treasures and sell the house. Dusty bibles, cracked romances, piles of newspaper and dozens of leather-bound diaries. It seems like she never threw a word away. There’s so much of her voice still here that you don’t know if you’ll ever be ready to sell.
You pass through a cold spot on the way to the kitchen and grimace. Or, indeed, if you could sell. Did you have to disclaim ghosts to potential buyers? And, if you did, would anyone be willing to live alongside the headstrong church-lady that raised you?
Glass shatters in the kitchen as soon as you turn down the hall towards the bedroom. You pause, one foot in the carpeted hall, the other freezing on the foyer’s linoleum. You don’t turn. Even if you turned on the light to better see into the darkened kitchen, you wouldn’t find the culprit. This isn’t the first glass to break and there’s always more trouble to come if you follow where this ghost leads you.
Nana wouldn’t break the glass. Immediate panic. Your grandmother was frugal. She’d never destroy anything if she could help it. Think, fool.
“I know,” you say out loud and then pretend you said nothing at all. Your grandmother wasn’t a kind woman. She couldn’t afford to be. She raised your mother alone and, later, you as well. You know you were loved, but you weren’t cared for. That’s why you’ve been able to fool yourself for so long. That’s why it didn’t bother you that this ghost isn’t kind either.
There’s the sound of heavy footsteps behind you as you continue down the hall. They aren’t your grandmother’s footsteps.You tell yourself that ghosts aren’t obligated to keep the sound of their feet the same after they die. You know that it’s a poor excuse.
Baby, your grandmother’s voice pleads in your mind, think.
You don’t want to think. You’re a child and alone in the world. You came here chasing your grandmother’s memory and you don’t want to admit that the only ghosts she left here are the ghosts she jotted down on blank pages.
There is hot breath against the nape of your neck. You don’t turn and walk into the bedroom. It’s probably from the vents. Maybe you didn’t turn off the heat.
(The company did a week ago when you closed her accounts.)
Your grandmother was a simple woman with simple tastes. Her furniture is all matching oak, her closet filled with earthy gowns and her bedspread a plain green. On the wall is a frame of her favorite psalms and poems.
The frames of each psalm is cracked, the glass spider webbing and obscuring the words. The poems fare worse and the spectral energy that’s inhabited the house sent each crashing to the floor the first day you got here. All except one.
My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound by Thomas Hardy
Think, your grandmother wails into your mind.
It’s the newest poem added to the wall. Your grandmother’s last favorite bit of writing as her body failed her. It’s all about how the narrator won’t be found in his grave–he will be found in the best places, the memories and the events he left behind.
Nana isn’t here either, you think. You shake your head and ignore the weight that settles on the opposite side of the bed when you climb in. She has to be. She has to be here because, otherwise…