Chapter 11 - Revisited
Grumble arrived back with flair, slipping through the crack in the bin like a ribbon of shadow and popping up in the bin beside me. He was wearing a crown fashioned from a coffee cup lid and holding a damp envelope in his teeth.
“Mail for you,” he chirped. “Took me a while, but I finally found a route to Mark’s house that doesn’t require you to litter hop. One soul-scented target gained express delivery.” He spat the soggy paper onto my lap with exaggerated ceremony. “Your murderer's got curb appeal.”
I wiped bin juice off the envelope and read the scribbled details. Mark’s address was scrawled in psychic ink, visible only to the vengeful and the dead. It was two suburbs over.
“Chirpy doorbell too,” Grumble added, peering over my shoulder. “One of those that sings when you press it instead of ringing. Like a dying bird trying to smile.”
I groaned. “Of course he’d have a singing doorbell.”
We rode the waste stream like sewer tourists until we popped out of a storm drain across the street from Mark’s house.
I finally had the chance to see more, unlike my fleeting time with the empty soda can.
Everything about this place made my ghostly skin crawl.
He lived on a quiet street with a cream-brick house.
The front lawn was trimmed like a dollhouse garden.
The flower beds were lined with polished white stones.
A wooden welcome sign dangled from the porch that read ‘Home is Where the Heart is’.
I was thrown out like rotting takeaway, and here he was with hydrangeas and happy endings.
Grumble leered at the garden as if it owed him money. “Wife. Two kids. Son and daughter. A golden retriever named Muffin,” he muttered, picking up and licking a cracked yoghurt container that must have made its way here during a storm. “Also, he composts.”
“I fucking hate him,” I say.
After this visit, the haunting began subtly.
I started by watching. In silence. In the shadows. Now that I knew where he lived, I could follow him, learn his routine. I would perch with judgement in bins outside his office, curled in discarded lunch wrappers at his gym, hiding in the pedal bins in the change rooms.
It wasn’t just about fear. It was about knowing him. Knowing who he’d become after killing me. If he even remembered me?
He walked around as if nothing had happened. He was confident, clean-shaven. Faintly smug. A man who wore leather loafers without socks.
He joked with the baristas. Called his coworkers “mate.”
I imagined shoving him into traffic every time he smirked. Grouches don’t get intrusive thoughts. We are intrusive thoughts.
Grumble scaled rooftops like a demon squirrel–if he had a big bushy tail like one, it would be twitching. He’d watch him from a distance to see if I missed anything. When he came down, he told me everything he could. “He’s a surface-scratcher. No depth. Everything’s performative. Watch him.”
We did. For days.
Mark left Post-it notes for himself like ‘Buy milk!’ and ‘Tell Lisa I love her!’’
Who was Lisa? Probably his daughter.
He sent emails with way too many exclamation points. He called his dog “Lil-Muffin-Wuffin baby girl” in a voice that made my soul curdle.
It was… infuriating. Why did he get happiness and to live, when all I got was to rot!
He wasn’t broken. Not haunted. Not even guilty, just fine.
But his wife was never seen around the house. I don’t even know who his wife is, if he even stayed with Judy or if it’s this mysterious Lisa woman. His children moved out… he was alone with his dog.
So, I escalated my plans.
Mark was a creature of habit, and every day he would pick a ham sandwich to eat on a park bench.
The same bench.
Every day.
Without fail.
So, I knew I could begin haunting him even without Grumble catching on. There’s one trick fellow Bin-Spirits showed me, and I’ve been dying to try it out on someone who deserves this. And if he does what I hope he’ll do after I try this new trick, I’ll be able to take my haunting to the next level.
I waited in the bin nearby and then, like clockwork; he sat down. I slithered out and touched the bread as he went to take a bite of his sandwich.
The moment it touched his tongue, it decayed.
Rot bloomed beneath his saliva, spreading across the bread like revenge.
He took a bite of it, munched on it slowly, and then I could tell by his sour face that something wasn’t right.
As he looked down at his sandwich, he saw that the bread had gone completely black and green, the meat slimy and greying.
He spat it out in a furious panic.
“Fucking gross!” he said, spitting out the food, and tossed it into the bin. The same bin I was in.
It still had some of his saliva on it. This was exactly what I'd hoped he’d do. Grumble taught me I just needed a part of him, something he discarded, to form a connection. I figured Grumble meant something sentimental, but surely some of his discarded body products would work too?
I licked up his saliva globule and, like a sudden kick to the head, memories knocked my skull and flooded my mind. They weren’t mine, but they were of me.
A connection was made.
It was like I had gone back in time. Mark and I were in the throes of a pounding session.
He had me on all fours, facing away from him, but his massive hands were over my eyes, around my neck, pulling me back.
His tongue was deep in my throat after he had just eaten me out, my ass sweat all over my face.
His heavy breathing in my ear. Hot and wet.
His thick cock deep inside me. As he groaned and erupted inside me, he gripped me tight. Like he never wanted to let go.
Then the memory shifted.
He pulled out. Zipped up. Lit a cigarette. He didn’t even look at me as he went to leave.
“See ya, trash!” He said.
I jolted back to reality, sitting in the bin next to his sandwich bench, discarded rotted food still in my hands. I drop it. I was seething.
Grumble’s voice startles me–at some point during my vision, he had joined me in the bin. “Thought I lost you,” he then whistled. “That was a damn good ride.” He glanced at me and grinned, not his usual aloof or cheeky grin; this was sharper. Like a lightbulb had turned on in his head.
“You just memory bonded with Mark. That was much faster than any Grouch I’ve seen. You’re in now!”
“Memory bonded? In now?” I asked him, and he shuffled into an open burger box like it was a couch. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, flicking a discarded lettuce leaf off his shoulder, “you can get inside his head. Play tricks on him. Haunt him for real.”
And we did.
We hopped a ride on a rolling piece of trash and then rode the sewer line to Mark’s home during the day. The plotting of his true haunting could finally begin.