Terry

This was my final short story for that perspective and time course, and one that I really enjoy. It all came from a single thought I had written down ages ago in the ideas note on my phone: "allegedly spooky ghost fucks up, whispers your roommate's name in the dead of night when you're home alone" - I have no idea when I came up with that, but I'm so glad I finally used it.

Also, a little bonus note: that detail about the poltergeists who hung dishcloths over picture frames? I actually took that straight from the stories my Nana used to tell about her aunt whose house was haunted! True story.

For a while I didn’t really register the sound. A whispery noise, so low it was barely audible. At some point I got up from my desk and closed the window, thinking it might be coming from outside – the wind could make weird sounds when it passed between the old neighbourhood buildings at certain angles. But it grew a little louder over time, a little more distinct. I still didn’t notice for a while – like that saying about boiling a frog: how if you raise the temperature slowly, it won’t even notice.

Eventually, however, the sound definitely coalesced into a voice. “Maureen,” it hissed somewhere behind me. “Maureen!”

I paused with my hands on the keyboard, brow furrowing, and after a moment I turned and looked over my shoulder. Except for the light on my desk, the apartment was pretty dim, but I could tell it was empty. And yet… “Maureen!” The lamp out in the living room flickered on and back off a few times, before finally going out with the crack that indicated a burnt-out bulb.

I frowned further. “Maureen’s not home,” I said slowly.

A bottle of sunscreen on the edge of the coffee table wobbled and fell, and the silence that followed seemed stunned somehow, even though I still couldn’t see anyone. Then, “Fuck.”

I tipped my head to one side, puzzled, and swiveled my chair around so that I could look into the living room more easily. The pause lasted just long enough that I almost spoke, and then I heard the voice again. “So you’re not Maureen?” it asked, almost hopeful.

“Nope. She went over to her boyfriend’s place tonight.” I leaned forward a little, unsure what exactly was going on.

“Shit. I mixed you up.”

I squinted and licked my lips, thinking. After a couple more quiet seconds, I asked, “Sorry, but where are you? And, like… who?”

“Oh. Balls.” I wondered if the voice was drawing nearer, and then I started to see something – a sort of blurry shape in the living room, approaching and then stopping in the open door to my bedroom. It was human, approximately, but like the silhouette of a human through heavily frosted glass, featureless and colourless and really only barely-there. “Sorry. This is the best I can do.” Not even the voice – which was a little dejected now – seemed to have any identifying features: no accent to speak of, no peculiar word choice, the pitch just in that middle zone where you couldn’t even read it for a guess at a gender. “I’m new to this.”

“Yeah, I… I can tell,” I answered slowly.  “So you’re, like… a ghost?”

“Or something,” they said, and I was pretty sure they shrugged. “Are you sure you’re not Maureen?”

“Positive,” I confessed, finding myself a little apologetic. “Wrong roommate. Sorry.”

“Goddamn. That’s fucking embarrassing. And after all the effort I’ve been putting in…” They sighed, leaning against the doorframe with one shoulder and – I think? – crossing their arms. “The whole thing’s a bust now.”

“Well, don’t be hasty, you only screwed up in front of me,” I said, holding up my hands. “Maureen still doesn’t know. You have a shot with her.”

“Doesn’t much feel like it,” they answered.

“But back up a second. Effort? What have you been… doing?” I grimaced – the moment I said it aloud I realised how demoralising it was probably going to be. I swear their shoulders drooped.

“Well, I started with knocking things over. Classic move, or so I understand. Just kind of left your shit scattered all over the place.”

“Well damn,” I muttered. “And here I’d been giving Costello hell for all that.” I glanced guiltily over at him where he slept soundly on my bed.

“The cat got credit for all my hard work?” the ghost-or-something asked, sounding hurt. I cringed. “What about all the moaning and groaning, then?”

“Oh, we definitely thought that was the plumbing,” I said, though I had the sense to be a little ashamed of myself now. “I mean, it’s such an old neighbourhood. I – dang, is the janky kitchen light you, too? We blamed that on the wiring…”

Their moan now was dismayed, even a little heartbroken. “What– what about the note I left on the door? The big one that said ‘I’m watching you’?”

Embarrassed, I pursed my lips and glanced down. Coughed a little. “Well…”

“Please,” they said desperately. “Please tell me that one at least gave you guys the creeps.”

I took a deep breath. “If I’m honest, we thought it was the landlord. Maureen kind of figured he knew she’d been smoking up here even though the lease specifically forbids it.”

“Fuck.” The figure threw their arms up in the air. “Pathetic. I give up. I’m not cut out for this.”

Damnit. I hadn’t meant to be so discouraging. “Listen, I– do you have a name?”

They sighed again and let their arms fall. “Not that I’m aware of,” they muttered.

“Oh. Okay.” Just calling them ‘ghost-or-something’ seemed rude, though. “Can I like… pick one for you? This conversation feels weird if you don’t have a name.”

“Yeah. Whatever,” they answered, crestfallen.

“Cool. Uh. I’m gonna call you…” I wracked my brain, glancing briefly at my overflowing bookshelf and then back away, dismissing all of the names that jumped to mind because they belonged to famous fictional ghosts. I wasn’t going to call them Casper or Slimer or Johann Kraus; that just seemed insensitive. “Um. T… Terry,” I stammered. It was the first thing I came up with that was gender-neutral and didn’t belong to anyone from a book or movie.

“Okay.”

They seemed to be giving up, now, kind of slouching against the doorframe. “Uh. Listen… Terry,” I began, increasingly uncertain. “For starters, how did you… you know… get here?”

There was a hesitation, and I worried. Finally, they confessed, “I really don’t know.”

“Aren’t ghosts supposed to be dead?” I asked, deciding that it wasn’t really worth beating around the bush on that point.

“I’ve heard as much,” they agreed. “But I don’t really know if I am? I don’t remember ever being anyone else. Or anywhere else. I was just… here. With the sense that I ought to be scary.” They shifted their weight with yet another sigh. “Clearly it’s not working out for me.”

“Oh. Okay.” Guilt settled in the pit of my stomach, and I was struggling to come up with a solution on the spot. “Don’t, you know, just… just give up. I’m sure we can figure this out. You totally have that spooky potential. It’s just, like you said, you’re new to this. Right?”

“Yeah… I guess,” they said. “I dunno, maybe this just isn’t the thing for me. Not like I have anything else to do, but…”

“No, no, I’m sure you can pull it off,” I insisted. “You just have to change up your methods a bit.”

“You think?” Terry asked, beginning to sound hopeful again. They perked up a little, and I nodded enthusiastically.

“Totally!” I agreed. “We can definitely workshop this. Okay. So. You were knocking stuff over, making spooky noises, messing with the lights, leaving threatening notes… anything else?”

“Well, I tried to scare you by whispering your name in the middle of the night when you were home alone, but I made a bit of an ass of myself, didn’t I?” they said, the sarcasm evident.

I shook my head. “Nah, don’t even worry about that, it’s an easy mistake to make. Me and Maureen have, like, almost exactly the same hair from behind. Listen, right off the bat I think I have a few ideas for you.” I leaned forward again, planting my hands on the edge of my seat between my knees. “If you want?”

“Yeah, I mean, at this point I guess I’ll take anything I can get,” they answered, finally standing up straight again. “Uh, hey, can I come in?”

“Oh. Yeah, for sure,” I said, taken by surprise. They stepped into the room, crossing to the corner and perching on one edge of my bed. The mattress didn’t move, but Costello woke up suddenly, his fur bristling, and with an irritated noise he took off for the living room. “Oh jeez. Sorry. He doesn’t really like strangers. And, um, sorry it’s kind of a mess in here.” I glanced around, self-conscious suddenly of the stacks of comics and piles of dirty laundry on the floor, not to mention the cereal bowls on my bedside table. The smell of the cat box suddenly stood out to me, and I tossed a dirty look at Costello where he sat just outside my door, tail twitching.

“I live here,” Terry said simply.

“Hm. Point taken.” For a moment I considered that, distracted. One more roommate than I’d thought. Well, it could probably have been worse. I mean, anyone was better than Glen. I shuddered at the memory and returned my attention to the matter at hand. “Anyway. Well, uh, I think you have to take your setting into account. People are happy to take the most readily-available explanation for anything, you know? So when we could blame things on the cat or the old construction or the landlord we didn’t really think past that.”

“Hm. That’s true,” Terry admitted. “I didn’t think about that. Guess I need to be like, a bit more creative in my approach? I don’t know if I’m very creative, but…”

I chewed my tongue, thinking, then snapped my fingers. “My grandmother used to talk about the poltergeists at her aunt’s house. They did stuff like leave dishcloths draped over picture frames,” I said. “You just have to do stuff that can’t happen by accident, or logically be attributed to someone else. I’m sure you’ll start getting the hang of it once you come up with the first few things.”

Terry nodded, I was fairly sure. It was a little hard to focus on them properly. “Yeah. I’ll have to give it some thought, I guess. What else were you thinking?”

“Maybe, like… get to know your audience, basically?” I suggested, trying to decide how best to phrase what I had in mind. “Like, both individually and societally. We’re super saturated with haunting movies lately, and a lot of them are really formulaic, so a bunch of the classic stuff is more cheesy than scary. Weird moaning and vague threats and oozing walls are kind of cliché now, you know?”

“I don’t think I can even do oozing walls,” they commented.

“Well, even better. Removes the temptation,” I said, trying to be as encouraging as possible. “I just mean, you know, come up with something a little fresher if you can. Pioneer with your own style. I think even if you were doing things less inherently scary than shaking beds or replacing the tap water with blood, they could be spookier just by virtue of being new and unfamiliar.”

“People do fear the unknown,” Terry admitted, and I wondered if I could hear a smile on their voice. “So if I can come up with something people haven’t seen before…”

“It should be a bit more effective! Exactly!” I answered. “And then, if you know the fears of your individual target, you can like… customise the experience just for them, so to speak. Figure out what scares them in particular and you’ll probably be way more successful.”

“Yeah!” They seemed enthusiastic now. “That all makes a lot of sense! I can totally work with that!” There was a pause, and then they deflated a little, apparently realizing something. “Of course, I don’t know who I’ll be able to try all of this out on, since I’ve blown it with you…”

“…There’s still Maureen,” I suggested, hesitating only briefly. “She didn’t witness tonight’s little goof.”

“What – and you’re not going to tell her?” they asked, surprised. “I kind of thought at this point you wouldn’t want me to scare her. I mean, it seems rude to go after your roommate after you’ve been so helpful and supportive.”

“Well…” I tipped my head side to side, considering it. “I mean, she’s given me a few good starts of her own over the years. I feel like she deserves a bit of a fright, you know? What goes around comes around, and all that.” True, there hadn’t been ghosts or anything involved the last time she’d startled me, but I was plenty scared all the same. What was I supposed to think when I heard someone climbing in through a window?

“Wow,” Terry said. “You’re honestly too kind. I feel like if I can nail this one it’ll do wonders for my self-confidence.”

“And you deserve that!” I told them. I’ve been known to get a little too into a good pep talk. “Listen, I know I can help you out here. Maureen and I have been living together for a few years; I know her backwards and forwards. She hates spiders and spiderwebs, and moths freak her out a lot too. She can deal with blood no problem, but vomit really bothers her. Um… she can’t stand heights, or having her eyes covered, or being able to feel something but not see it. Oh! And we watched this movie last year where the monster had these horrible, wide, bloodshot eyes that never blinked, and she couldn’t shake that image for weeks.”

“Wow,” they answered. “Thank you so much! I can work with that, I think… Moths? Really?”

I nodded. “Oh yeah. I know it seems odd, but hey, people are afraid of all kinds of weird things. Like, I hate wet squelchy sounds, and birds, and having to put my hands in places I can’t see. All of those give me the creeps hardcore.”

“Wow. I never would’ve known,” Terry said thoughtfully. “I really can’t thank you enough. This has been a huge help.”

“You’re quite welcome!” I answered, smiling. “I’m sorry we haven’t been appropriately frightened so far. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I’m sure you have it in you.” If you had told me that morning that I’d be giving a not-quite-ghost a pep talk by two am, it would have sounded crazy. But it felt pretty good, all things considered.

They got to their feet. “Yeah, I’m feeling a lot better about this. Wow. I think I’m gonna go think it all over before Maureen gets home. Work on a bit of a plan, and stuff.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I said with another nod. “You’re totally getting it. I know you’ll work it out this time.”

“I think you’re right!” they agreed. “Thanks again. I have so much more to work with now.” They headed for the door, and Costello leapt to his feet once again, hissing and then disappearing further into the dark apartment. Terry paused in the doorway and – I think – looked back. “I really do appreciate it, you know. This has been a great talk. I just want you to know, nothing that happens from here on out is personal. Really.” They faded back into invisibility, the lamp on my desk flickering as they did so.

My smile faded a little as that last bit sunk in. What did they mean it wouldn’t be personal?

“Hang on,” I called out. “Terry?”

There was no response. For the first time all night, the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up.