The Girl Next Door Saw Ghosts

The Girl Next Door Saw Ghosts

I didn’t really know Ryan Majan was a bad seed when I introduced him to my best friend, Sheila Lunceford. She’d been my next-door neighbor as long as I could remember and was my best friend. Ryan on the other hand, I’d just met in a photography class. He looked the part so I picked him for a project I was working on with Sheila. It was a nightmare sequence, a kind of narrative told with pictures, but not like a movie. I’m not some pretentious movie director, I’m a real artist, a photographer. I had Sheila lay down on the bed in the guest room of our house. Then I had Ryan get dressed in a bunch of black robes and a freaky looking pink bunny mask. For the first picture, he was hiding in the closet, just starting to emerge as Sheila looked from her bed in terror. Next I had him watch her from the bushes outside as she sat by the pond behind our house. It was a series of black and white pictures- always with him stalking her somewhere in the background. At the end, the girl wakes up in her bed and sees the bunny mask lying on the floor next to her and realizes it was all a dream.
We had a blast spending a sunny Sunday afternoon taking the pictures, which turned out really well. I took them out for tacos afterwards to thank them for helping me and Ryan and Sheila teased and flirted with each other the whole time. I ended up getting an A on the project and they ended up going out.
When the photos got developed, I offered her copies of the pictures to have as a keepsake. Sheila took the pictures and put them into an envelope that she labeled in red ink, “Memories.” I asked her new beau if he wanted any copies, but he just combed his dark hair back and said “Nah.” He was not the type of guy to keep scrapbooks of pictures or medals from school or baseball cards, or anything for that matter. Yet Sheila insisted on his taking one of the pictures of her lying on the bed alone, sleeping on her side with a contented smile. Unbeknownst to the girl, the Bunny is right under the bed. It was the one that he finally agreed was the coolest, after she’d coaxed him for an hour about his favorites. He kept saying that he really didn’t care but she prodded anyway, oblivious to his zero shits given policy. She was blinded by a kind of puppy love that some lonely kinds of people get.
He was everything she’d ever dreamt of in a man. Unfortunately her dreams were fucked up by anti-depressents, drinking too much coffee and Mary J when she could get it. Ryan was handsome enough, to most girls. He was tall, dark, mysterious, slightly dangerous to boot. But my best buddy’s boy dreams weren’t that unique. Apparently about half the teenage girls in town had the same kind of dreams for a man and Ryan had been around to most of them. He had a reputation for breaking hearts all over town and I tried to warn Sheila about it but she just blew me off. She was way too into him to even care what anyone else said. He was just “SO BADASS OH MY GOD I would totally let him ravage me like in a prison movie,” she’d confessed to me on time when we were drunk. You know the look. Johnny Depp in Crybaby. Meatloaf in Rocky Horror. Fonzie. Only Ryan didn’t have a weakling build, or a pudgy one. He was six feet tall with chiseled muscles that had earned him a dozen and a half baseball trophies and about ninety-two teenage girls in bed. I mean, it was why I picked him. He had such an imposing presence; he was perfect as the evil, stalking rabbit, he said it was like the part he was meant to play. Anyway, Sheila was happy most of the time so I didn’t care that he could be a dick. Things were going well for them. Until April 25th of last year. She told me what happened the week after.
After a round of heavy, wet sex she found a mood ring in his dresser drawer. When she asked him whose it was, he just shrugged his shoulders and went on puffing his cigarette. While she was a nice girl, she was nobody’s dummy and even Ryan had to know he wouldn’t get off that easy. She had seen the same sparkling green ring before, in Barney’s. Throughout the evening, he had kept peaking over at the girl’s table. Now Sheila suspected the worst.
“Sweetie- you need to answer my question. Whose ring is this?”
“It’s nobody’s babe, why are you getting all worked up?”
“Because this isn’t my ring and it isn’t yours and I don’t know of any GUYS that carry around mood rings. You went out with that bimbo from Barney’s didn’t you?”
Ryan Majan rolled those intense black eyes and strolled over to the window to blow his smoke out. The leather of his jacket was shining in the moonlight streaming in through the window. Without looking at her, he said:
“Babe, it’s just a ring. Who cares who’s it is or where it came from?”
“Because I remember it! I saw it on that skinny little blonde bitch when we went out to east last week. Remember? You kept making pretty eyes at her and pretending to listen to me tell you about my dad.”
“Why do you have to bring that up? Every time we disagree on something you have to bring up the fact that your dad is dead. He ain’t coming back and using him to lay a sickly guilt trip me ain’t gonna bring him back.”
Sheila’s brown eyes were watering and she bit down on her lip to avoid saying something that she would regret. She stepped towards him and held out her arm, holding the ring with her thumb and forefinger like she was proposing
“Don’t talk like that to me about my dad! I asked you who’s ring this is and you keep on ignoring me.”
“I told you I don’t fucking know who’s ring it is!” He grabbed a lamp off his bedside table and hurled it against the opposite wall. The room went dark as the glass shattered and Sheila screamed, “Where are you going?!” as she tried to grab him by the arm. But, he cocked his hand back like he was going to slap her and she believed him and fell back.
“I’m going out for a drink. Why don’t you do something useful and drop off the face of the earth?” He slammed the door behind him, but Sheila followed him, shouting all the way.
“What the fuck is your major malfunction, Ryan? I ask you about a strange girl’s ring and you say THAT to me? How dare you! Don’t you walk out that door! Look at me!”
But he was already out the door and revving up his Harley that had purple flames painted on the sides and chrome all over. The enormous machine came roaring to life and he released the kickstand. Sheila was out in the lawn in her white cotton panties, grabbing his coat and shouting at him. The grass was wet with dew, which soaked her feet, and a fog was rolling in off of the pond. She screamed so loud that the lights in neighbors houses came on.
“Don’t you walk out on me!”
Ignoring her, he gunned the engine and pulled out of the driveway.
“I’ll come back when you aren’t acting like a bitch.”
“Go to hell!”
And in only a few moments he was just a speck on the horizon, the blazing orange sun setting before him. Those were the last words she got to say to him.
Being an unabashed outlaw, Ryan didn’t see a need to follow the rules, especially minor ones like turn signals and speed limits. About two miles down Highway 99, half way to the bar of his choice, he got into an accident with a green Volvo and died. Not being the most popular guy in a small Midwestern town, Ryan’s demise didn’t meet with a lot of wailing. Both of his parents had been in the ground ten years already and his only brother was strung out on amphetamines in a hole in New York somewhere. Nobody cried at the funeral, except for Sheila.
That was almost a year ago, today. Nobody seemed to even notice or care that he was gone. Good riddance, whispered the soccer mom serpents and barbequing dads. Sheila mourned in traditional Italian bride fashion by dying her hair black wearing shadow around her eyes. She stopped going for long walks around the pond or hanging out by Barney’s diner all hours of the night. It was the only 24-hour restaurant in our piss-ant town and therefore all the kids gathered there at night.
Whenever I called her to see if she how she was doing, she would just sigh and say she was tired and then pretend to small talk for two more minutes before hanging up. Since she lived next door, it was hard for me to not bump into her once in a while. More and more she seemed detached and disinterested. She kept going through those pictures of her and her dead boyfriend, staring into them like they were a puzzle you could only figure out by gawking at for long enough. Soon she got lost in a world that included heavier anti-depressants, grunge, Edgar Allen Poe and old Dracula flicks. She became a self-pitying shut-in again. I couldn’t blame her. First her dad when she was just 16 and now again four years later.
So, imagine my surprise when last week she called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go out for ice cream at Barney’s, like old times.
“Of course.”
“Great, see you Wednesday.”
She looked like the last months had been especially rough on her. Her hands kept twitching every few moments and she glanced nervously this way and that. It looked like she’d been eating a lot of sweets since the accident. I saw her face had grown more plump but made an effort to not say anything.
“So, how have you been?”
“I’m alright. Things have been… a little rough this year.”
“No kidding. I haven’t even seen you in months. You just totally disappeared after, you know…” Sheila nodded slightly and took a scoop from her chocolate sundae. “I mean, you weren’t even this sad when your dad…” She shook her head, for once not in the mood to talk about his heart condition and those agonizing preteen years when she knew it was coming and could only watch him die, slowly.
“This was different. I didn’t have any warning. It was like boom! One minute you’re kissing a guy or arguing with him and the next, he’s roadkill. It was so sudden, I… I just didn’t know how to react.”
“Cutting yourself off from everyone that cares about you isn’t a great idea.”
“I know. Look, I need to ask you something and I need you to promise me not to laugh at me or to think I’m crazy.”
I chewed down a part of my banana split and raised an eyebrow at her.
“Ok, I’ll try. But I have no idea what you’re going to say. So you have to be ready for any reaction.”
“Fine.”
“Alright. Have you ever seen anything before in your life, that you know shouldn’t be there, that you know isn’t real, but you saw it anyway”
“Like what?”
“Like something supernatural. That couldn’t possibly exist.”
After thinking about it for a moment, I shook my head.
“Well, I did. You know I’m not a hysterical kind of person and I don’t belief in heaven or hell or Buddha or any of that, but… the other day I saw something that I can’t explain in any other way.”
“What did you see?”
“Well, I was going into town for some toilet paper and that black lipstick shade that I like… and I saw a ghost.”
“What? Where?”
“Along Highway 99. I was going by at about 50 miles per hour, but I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I swear to God it was a ghost.”
I tried not to laugh and took a long look at Sheila. When we were kids, we played this game all the time. She loved to tell ghost stories and could do it better than anyone I knew.
“So, how do you know it was a ghost?” I jeered. “Was it wearing a white bedsheet and jump out and say boo?”
“This isn’t funny, Matt. I came here to try to tell you something because I trust you and you make fun of me? Fuck you. Fuck off.”
I hadn’t meant to set her off like that, so I apologized. “Sorry.” Sheila’s eyes were starting to tear up and she lowered her head and took a few deep breaths to try to regain her composure. But then she jumped up from her seat and put on her coat, getting ready to go. “Come on, Sheila. I didn’t mean to… why are you getting so upset?”
She leaned in real close to me and whispered so that only I could hear.
“It was Ryan.”
Then, she stormed out. I watched her go out, holding my dripping ice cream spoon in my hand and mouthing ooookaay in disbelief.
The next day around noon Ms. Lunceford came over and knocked on our door. Since her husband died, she had worn black more often than not. She was wearing an ankle length black dress and her skin was pale, but her hair was done up all nicely like she was going out for a night on the town. She said she was worried about Sheila because the last few days she had been acting very strange and she hadn’t come home the night before. The poor woman had been through a lot, so I decided not to share her daughter had seen a ghost. I told her not to fret and that I knew exactly where I could find her. She managed a quarter of a smile before thanking me and heading out.
I found Sheila hiding out in her tree-house in the backyard. Had her mom simply turned around and looked outside from the kitchen window she would have seen her. That’s usually the way it works; the things that we’re looking for are right under our noses but we can’t see them until they’re pointed out to us.
As I ascended the slippery wood ladder steps, I caught a wiff of pot drafting down from the fortress we’d built in 1989. I hadn’t seen Sheila smoking since, well, you know, the thing four years ago. Poking my head into the damp, low-ceiling tree fortress, I spotted her in the corner. She was lying on her old blue beanbag and blowing puffs of smoke into the air. In her hands she held a picture that I had seen before. Ryan was sitting on his bike, before it had been smashed to a hundred and four different pieces. He looked particularly menacing with the black robes flowing down on either side of the hog. Behind him, Sheila sat on the passenger seat, her arms wrapped around his dark, clothed waist. When she saw me coming in, she quickly slipped the picture under her seat, but made no attempt to conceal the joint hanging loosely from her chapped lips.
“Hey.”
“You here to make fun of me again?”
“No. Your mom’s looking for you.”
Sheila rolled her bloodshot eyes.
“She should know where to find me by now.”
I stepped in closer and had to duck because apparently I had grown a lot since I was six years old. That’s when I noticed an old, faded brown cotton blanket draped over her.
“You didn’t sleep up here, did you?”
She nodded.
“You didn’t tell anyone else what I told you yesterday, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. I don’t need anyone trying to throw me in a loony bin. You do believe me, don’t you Matt?”
“That you saw a real ghost or you saw something?”
“I know what I saw. You know I’ve never lied to you before.”
“I know that but for God’s sake, your dead asshole degenerate boyfriend comes back from the grave to haunt you exactly one year later? What do you expect me to say to something like that?”
Just then, we heard a roaring off in the distance. It was a very familiar sound. The roar started suddenly, but then steadily grew louder and more intense. “Do you hear that?” Sheila started shaking and she sat up, the indentation of her body still heavy on the beanbag. She crawled over to the one window we’d cut into the wall, facing the street. The sound grew louder and I felt the flimsy wooden foundations shake. I knelt down beside her and peered out the window. We looked both ways up and down Elmore avenue, but saw no vehicle to match the sound.
“Sounds like a bike.” I said. Her eyes grew wide and she turned to face me and her entire face went white.
“I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. Even in my dreams.” She said as she flicked the J out the window into the gentle rain.
“Maybe it would help if you stopped dwelling on it. I mean, you’ve been staring at those pictures like you can’t help yourself even.”
The noise was almost deafening. It sounded like an entire troop of Hell’s Angels was rolling along down Elmore, but not a single bike was to be seen. The street was empty, save the puddles starting to form here and there from the rain.
“Maybe.” She said, still shivering. I pulled her closer to me and although she said nothing, she seemed to appreciate it very much. After a few more moments, the noise died down. We retreated back from the window and I took a seat across from her on the floor.
“What do you say now, still think I’m crazy?”
“I never said you were crazy, and that could have been anything. Maybe there was a bike going by a few blocks away and we just couldn’t see it.”
“Right. And I’m the magic fucking Easter Bunny.”
“I still think if you just get rid of those pictures and start moving on with your life, you’ll feel a lot better. It’s not healthy to dwell on things that you have no control over.”
But Sheila just shrugged and then said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
Ok, so the motorcycle noise thing was weird, but I wasn’t about to sign up and say that I believed Ryan was haunting her. I outgrew that kind of thing a long time ago. Maybe Sheila really needed help, like professionally. What she needed was to go back to a shrink. I felt bad for her, but I had my own problems that I had to attend to.
I was working about 1332 hours per week split between two shitty jobs, the shittier of which was the bowling alley across town. Life had to go on. And so I settled back into my regular routine, calling Sheila every few days to check in on her. She said that she hadn’t seen the ghost in three days. Then six. Then two weeks. Eventually, I put the whole thing behind me and forgot all about it, my attention consumed by three part-time jobs and a fledgling (payless) photography career.
It was a rainy Tuesday night, late in April and business was slow; there were only a few lanes occupied by a couple of drunks that hooted every time they knocked over more than 2 pins. I passed the time mopping up the free lanes and getting them their drinks. Half way through cleaning number four, I heard a strange squeaking noise behind me, so I turned towards the glass windows at the far side of the building. Outside, I could see the drizzle coming down and the few lonely cars in the lot, but nobody was there. I went back to my work, but a few minutes later, I heard the SQUUUUUEEEEEEEEEAAK again. The pink neon number clock over the lanes let me know it was 9:33. My balding, vulgar boss, Mr. Glenco yelled from behind the counter where they keep all the ugly cleets. “Mattie- go and have a look see what that noise was.” I flicked off the switch for my industrial mop and started heading towards the coat rack to grab a jacket since it was raining. Probably high school sophomores or some other kind of rodent.
After pulling on my black windbreaker, I turned to walk towards the far window and I froze. He was standing just on the other side of the glass; the dark, hollow rubber eyes were like portals into the blackness outside. He was sliding his rotting, bony hand down the smooth, wet surface, leaving a greasy streak of black and red behind. A wave of freezing air washed over me and goose-bumps popped out all over my chest, arms and legs. His black robes whipped in the breeze and I felt a shiver crawl up my spine like a centipede with a hundred icy legs. Despite the retarded apron I was required to wear, I suddenly felt very naked. He seemed to be staring directly into my soul, fear grabbed me by the throat and I felt myself almost choking. His dark crimson blood was thick and clotted and clung to the clear, glossy surface along with beads of rain.
A clatter of pins behind me pulled my attention away for only a second. The middle-aged drunks were all exchanging high fives after a strike. They spilled beer on the floor and hooted like Bears fans from the 80’s. When I turned back to the window, the ghost was gone.
“Mr. Glenco! Did you see that? Tell me you saw that!”
“What now?”
He waddled from behind the counter over into the view of the window.
“I didn’t see shit, get backta work that lane ain’t gonna finish shining itself.”
I ripped off my work-apron and sprinted to the doors and threw them open, just in time to see a black Harley pulling out of the west end of the lot, tires screeching.
Sheila.
I didn’t know how the hell I was going to do it, but I knew that I had to stop him. He wasn’t going to get her, not if I had anything to say about it. I rushed to my tan Minivan and started the engine and hauled ass out of the lot. Fire me tomorrow, asshole, I thought. There are some things that are more important. Soon, I was blowing by every red light in town and hoping I could outrace the ghost bike. Please, let me get there in time, just let me GET THERE IN TIME!
In record time, I made it across town and pulled into my driveway more recklessly than a senior driver. Sprinting across the lawn to the Lunceford’s Victorian cookie cutter house, I heard the roar of that engine again in the distance. At least I was there first.
“Open the door! Sheila! You have to let me in! Open the god damned door now! Now now now now now!”
After a few moments, the door swung open and I burst inside. Sheila was wearing a blue silk bathrobe and a towel draped over her head. She looked burnt out, confused and annoyed with me.
“Matt, what in the shit are you freaking out about? I was about to take a shower.”
“I SAW HIM! I believe you. I saw him with my own eyes, at the bowling alley!”
“What?”
“Ryan. He took off on his bike but I made it here first, Sheila! He’s coming! Can’t you hear it?”
She leaned out the door and strained her ear, then I saw her visibly shudder. Whispering “ohmygodohmygodohmygod” she trembled and slammed the door shut.
I took her by the wrist, and led her upstairs to her bedroom. In one smooth motion, I pulled her inside, locked the door, and grabbed the nearest thing I could find to hit him with. This just so happened to be a coffee mug Sheila’s mom gave her on her tenth birthday. “Here’s to better days” was stenciled on it in pink letters, along with a smiley face. I held the ceramic mug back, my muscles tense and ready, waiting to pounce on the ghost once he entered. We waited. And waited. Finally, after what seemed like eternity, I lowered my arm.
“Are you sure that you saw him and that he was following you?”
“Well, I beat him here. I took all the shortcuts.”
“Alright. What are you gonna do? Hit him with that mug? It’s a fucking ghost, Matt! What good is that going to do?”
My voice lurched up a notch, here I was trying to save her life from a ghoulish creature and she gets smart with me.
“Well, do you have any better ideas?”
Sheila shrugged her shoulders and began rubbing her arms. Her black lipstick was smudged and she looked worn out.
“Christ, I need a cigarette.”
She sat down on her bed and fumbled a menthol with shaking fingers. She let it with her fancy aluminum Zippo with the flip cover. The air was still in the house and chillier than it should have been. Puffs of smoke drifted into my nostrils and I coughed.
“You know, if that ghost doesn’t kill us those cancer sticks of yours will.”
She giggled with a pinch of annoyance. “You’re probably right. But I ran out of pot and I need something to help my nerves. Maybe you were right about everything and I should have listened to you. You said he was a dick 2 weeks after we met. Maybe I should just throw these god-damned pictures out, every time I start looking at one of em’ I feel a shiver go up my spine.”
“Well, I’m glad you realized that, but we have more pressing things to deal with here.”
She bent down under her bed and pulled out that old manila envelope and started thumbing through the pictures and sighed.
“I guess I kinda fucked up when I introduced you two, huh?”
Finally Sheila smiled and rose from the bed. She kissed me on the cheek and pinched me on the butt at the same time. It was something she hadn’t done since she was six; a special way of endearing boys; with welts and smeared lipstick. At least some part of her was still my old friend.
“You could say that again.”
At long last I heard thunder in the distance, west down Elmore. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I looked Sheila in the eye for what I thought might be the last time.
“He’s here.”
“Help me, Matt. Oh my god, what are we gonna do?”
I dropped the mug of coffee back onto the bedside table. A heavy pounding resounded throughout the house and then a great crash followed. Footsteps echoed on the tile floor of the Lunceford’s living room. I told Sheila to hide behind the bed on the other side and tried to comfort her.
“You know, he is just a spirit who has creeped us out. Who says that he can hurt the living? What are we even afraid of?”
The door flew open and a giant shadow filled in the light streaming into the room. The top of his rabbit ears scraped the ceiling and the entire room filled with a cold, blue light.
“You can’t hurt us! Go back, Ryan! LEAVE HER ALONE!”
His long, black robed arm shot out and he took me by the throat and lifted me off the ground. I stared down into those empty pools of black eyes and I saw a hundred summer nights spent with Sheila in the tree house, trading spooky stories until the light of dawn.
He threw me up against the wall with a cruel strength he never possessed in life. I crashed headfirst and then hit the ground with a thud. Soon I felt warm liquid running down my cheek. A ringing buzzed in my ears and I tried to crawl forward to stop him, but I couldn’t move.
Sheila pulled the covers back and shrunk away into the corner as the ghost turned his haunting gaze towards her. She was still clutching one of the pictures in her hands, shaking like she was in the middle of a blizzard. The tall, dark figure glided across the room and then mounted the bed. He began to reach down for her and Sheila screamed. His rigid, bony, rotting fingers were inches from her face when suddenly a spark lit in her brown eyes.
She pulled the photo in front of him; it was the one of the bunny hiding under the bed. Something in the shadow remembered and it titled its head to the right, but then Sheila then yanked her lighter from her jean pocket and held it up to the photo. The creature lunged at her, but it was too late. Fire leaped from the aluminum Zippo and the picture burst into flames. The bunny, girl, bed and all began to bubble and melt in her hand. At the same moment, the ghost’s long robes burst into flames. Ryan’s ghost let out an ungodly howl that I still sometimes hear in my nightmares to this day. As he was dissolving into a smoky cloud of black dust, Sheila repeated the last words that she said to him in life.
“Go to Hell!”
The picture finally burned into a crumpled ball of smoking carbon and she dropped it to the floor when it singed her palm. The eerie blue light faded away and it felt warm again inside the room. A dark stain on her pink sheets was removed with Clorox the next morning, the last remnants of the ghost swept away forever.
Ryan never came back to haunt her again.