Work Text:
Ever since the night it happened I can’t help but think about the inherent contradictions in our cultural ghost lore. They are the souls of our dead loved ones...and yet we’re terrified of them. Everyone would like to speak to their dead grandma again, but no one wants to spend a night in the haunted house down the way. It’s a weird sort of doublethink, and is pervasive to the point that in The Ring it was legitimately plot twist when it turned out the ghost--who had killed several innocent people by this point--was evil. In movies, ghosts who were wronged in life lash out at anyone they can get in their grasps and we accept it as natural, even sympathetic, in spite of this being the defining trait of a terrorist.
I think that deep down inside, we know better. That’s why we’re scared of the shade of kindly old nana Ennis who never hurt a fly in her entire life. That’s why we don’t seriously question why one house can be haunted when another house with a nearly identical backstory is not. The fact of the matter is that as far as I can tell no one has ever plausibly claimed to have sat down and had a conversation with a ghost and in every photo I’ve seen that might be real they’re at best vaguely humanoid...so where does the idea that they’re the spirits of our dead come from? Deep down inside, we know that’s a comforting lie; these malicious demons never were human.
Sorry for frontloading y’all with diatribe like a Lovecraft protagonist, but I just had to get that off my chest, y’know?
Anyway, I had this friend, let’s call him John because I don’t feel like speaking ill of the dead. John’s a good guy, he just doesn’t come out of this story looking great. You have to understand, he was in this terrible car crash when he was a kid; both parents died and his sister was crippled, and in some ways the worst thing was that he was miraculously unscathed--I think it ate at him. Like, “Why was I spared?” you know? Like, yeah, Jane (also not her real name; sue me for not being imaginative) also survived but at least her scars are visible.
I almost typed “at least she was punished” there, and honestly? That’d probably be the more honest description of his thoughts. Not exactly woke, but none of us are at our best when under that kind of stress.
Don’t get me wrong--John dealt with it, most of the time. He worked, went to college, took care of his sister, played video games and beer pong and made jokes and laughed and all that good shit. But he also watched every single one of those ghost hunting shows they had on the SciFi channel (or SyFy, unless they changed it again) and was frequently ordering obscure books from the library. Presumably his internet searches were also pretty fucked up.
One time he forced Jane and I to play Ouija with him on the street where the crash happened. Though it pales in comparison to the first, that was the second scariest experience of my life--not because of anything supernatural, mind you, but because it was late at night and we were in the middle of a road where I knew for a fact that at least two people died and it was wet from recent rains; every time I heard an engine in the distance, my heart jumped into my throat. It also didn’t help things that I was sitting cross-legged in the damp.
That accomplished nothing, though, and neither did a million other things he tried (most, thankfully, less extreme). You no doubt noticed that I called that incident the second scariest experience in my life; the first, as you can no doubt guess from various non-subtle hints I’ve dropped so far, was the time he succeeded.
For a given value of success.
I will not describe the ritual John used. After all, if I did so, you might try it. And also because it’s taking all of my willpower not to simply type “and then they died--The End” and bail right here. But I can’t chicken out now; I’ve committed to telling this story, and by whatever God there may be in this sick cosmos, I’m going to tell it.
Suffice it to say, he gathered Jane and I and another guy, Joe, to his apartment. We spent most of an afternoon practicing various lines and actions, and then the proper time approached and he gave us the proper materials. Some of said materials made me shiver. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t perform a human sacrifice or rob a grave or anything, though given the fact that some of the materials were illegal and others were...questionable...I’m not sure grave-robbing would have been beyond him.
We performed the ritual. When it ended, we waited with mixed weariness and anticipation. This was not the first time we’d humored John, after all, and after so many times of nothing happening it would have been beyond the capacity of human beings for us not to assume the pattern was going to hold, and yet every single time he was so earnest, and his earnestness was contagious enough that every single time there was that little voice inside us that said maybe this time it’ll work. Maybe this time John will contact his parents.
For a second, nothing happened. John’s face began to become crestfallen, as had always happened previously.
And then.
Every candle in the apartment went out. Lights that had been carelessly left on burst. The only illumination was from streetlights through the windows--and also the bioluminescent blue-ish glow of two humanoid figures in the middle of the room.
John stood. When he spoke, his voice cracked: “Mom? Dad?” It may be my memory playing tricks on me, but I do believe tears were already streaming down his face as he stepped into the salt circle. And then
And
And then they were on him.
...Do you imagine that, if the situation ever called for it, you’d be a hero? I think we all do. I certainly did, once upon a time. I had this fantasy that if I had been in Nazi Germany I’d have been in the resistance, helping to free Jews from concentration camps and just being generally daring and badass. That image I had of myself is now shattered. Maybe I’d have stayed home out of fear--maybe I’m even such a lowly wretch that I’d have convinced myself to believe whatever propaganda there was about the camps not being so bad or the Jews deserving it rather than face that fact about myself. I don’t know. All I do know is that on the night in question, I ran. I ran. Joe was the hero; he grabbed Jane’s wheelchair and tried to save her and it got him killed.
I will not describe how they died. I will not describe what I saw in the split seconds before I reached the door or what I heard leaving or what I saw when I lead the cops back to the apartment and which proved I’d been lucky to have seen and heard so little first hand or the nightmares I’ve had ever since. I will only say that no human being could have done that--certainly not parents to their own children.
Maybe the spell John got was whack, maybe he summoned the wrong ghosts, or maybe undeath just twists you like that. But I don’t think so. I think that when you die, that’s it, and ghosts are something else entirely. Something alien. Something malevolent.
I think we make up stories that humanize ghosts because we can’t deal with the fact that there’s something out there that hates us that much.