We’d surveyed the property weeks ago, deemed it fit for demolition, but I kept coming back. Taking the old country roads, past rabbit-bitten pasture, bored-faced cattle and abandoned barnyards, then out of my truck and strolling on to the forgotten farmhouse.
In the topmost window, the one on the left of the twin panes that stare out at the world unseeing, the Ghost Girl stands.
I wave.
She seethes, black eyes boring so deeply into me it I almost feel ashamed of my presence, the imposition of it.
I smile.
She presses herself against the glass, her mouth incessant. I imagine her breath fogging the windows, her blackened fingers splintering its gleaming surface.
But of course it doesn’t. Of course they don’t.
Her snarls reach my ears. I can almost feel their low guttural rumble.
I close my eyes, head heavy, heart thrumming.
So many stories; fraught, whispered accounts.
You would hear her wailing, bare feet pounding against the dirt, cutting wicked swaths across these fields, these hills, the town that once nestled so peaceably in the valley below.
All else? Silence, save for the blood roaring in your ears, your fervent breaths escaping your parted lips.
Wild, she’d run, hard and fast and dreadfully free as in her young life cut brutally short, the earth cowering beneath her naked abandon, the moon, veiled under conspiratorial clouds, repulsed by her audacity.
All else silence.
And then there she was, at your back, murmuring, dead lips grazing your ear.
(Would you dare face her?)
The last thing you’d ever know is her voice, all sweetness and slaughter, as you hung on every word, clung
to
every
last
succulent
syllable.
You could stop her if you wanted to: all you had to do was stop listening, ignore everything, every scintillating, mind-killing thing she had to say.
But no one ever has, or so the stories go…
…stories that end, here, at this shackled-up house.
I watch as the Ghost Girl appears at another window, then another; downstairs, upstairs again. I listen as she scurries and skitters down hallways. I know—I know—she did not fade out of one place and into the next. I know as I know my own hands, my own feet, that she ran, I can feel the battering of the hardened floorboards, the shaking of the unforgiving walls before me. The house is sealed up, tight as a drum, sound as any grave. The glass in the windows is immaculate despite their age—thick, as well as strong. Nails jut out of their frames, and there is indecipherable writing scribbled upon the house’s weatherbeaten siding, slashed across the front door in the same shuddering hand, harried by fear or remorse, it’s hard to say.
Ah. It appears I’ve crossed the threshold of the porch.
My hand, I see, is clutching the doorknob.
It turns from the other side, cold metal kissing the skin of my palm.
It stops, waiting.
All I have to do is let go.