Chapter Two The Dead Hate The Living
Sold it.
God damned ungrateful little punks.
And my brother is dead? Has to be Nicky. The youngest.
I don’t make myself known to the monsters and humans that live in this town.
I don’t think they know about me, either.
Didn’t even know there were any freaks like monsters until I was a ghost, and then I realized that the plumber up the road here was a big, gray non-human guy, and over the years there have been all kinds of non-humans in the cemetery—not like zombies roaming around, like Orcs with flowers and vampires giving beautiful eulogies to the human friends that are leaving them behind.
Did I mention they buried me in the cemetery next to my house? I have a unique situation. I can go all the way down the road and back, between my physical body and my house, AKA prison.
Over the last seventy years, the place has been empty most of the time. For a long time after I died, I couldn’t seem to get the hang of this “not living but existing” thing, and I was just a mess, not really “here.” I was a vague presence, a painful feeling, confusion.
And then my brothers came back. With their wives. Their kids. They’d paid off the house with the life insurance policy I had when I left the Army, the one that made Ma the beneficiary.
I got to hear “Uncle Johnny” stories about what a swell guy I was. Watch my brother drink beers in my honor. See the girls they picked out. See my little namesake, Joe’s first kid. Named after me, can you believe it?
For a couple of weeks a year, I was happy, and being happy made me more connected to this world, to myself, too.
And they left things behind. Radio, the kind with batteries.
Transistor. Joe, the college boy, married a nice college girl.
She left books. There were tools. That was my younger brother, Nicky, the one who became a carpenter.
He was always wearing a toolbelt around the apartment, even when we were kids, and said he wanted to be the super when he grew up, which pissed Dad off no end.
Doesn’t matter now.
My nephews couldn’t keep this place in the family? They fucking sold it to some bank?
After all the time I spent taking care of it for ‘em, too...
Little shits.
And those “little shits” are old men now. In their sixties and seventies, maybe.
I’m frozen here in my twenties, finding fewer songs I know on the radio, re-reading the same books over and over, a couple new ones left behind every year or so to keep me going until I can steal some out of suitcases the next time.
Damn it, I’ve been a good ghost. An uncle and a brother you never see. A ghostly caretaker in the house where I was murdered! Do I go around banging doors and wailing in the night?
No.
Hell, I was the one who turned off the coffee pot Nicky left on one summer. Saved the whole place from burning down.
And what does that get me?
Some stranger living in my house, and a centaur and a troll or ogre or something moving in furniture I don’t even recognize.
Not. Fair.
And I’m not putting up with it.
I can move around now, pick things up, control things like the tiny little particles of energy in the air.
I slowly slide out of the closet in the back bedroom. I know most people can’t see me—my brothers and their families never managed it—but the second I saw the moving truck arrive and that centaur step out, I knew he’d spot me if I didn’t hide. Takes one to know one, as they say.
The truck left.
The woman is still sitting huddled over a little round table, head in her hands.
On her phone. I’ve seen those things shrink from something the size of a shoebox down to a wallet over the last couple of decades.
Or has it been longer?
Doesn’t matter. I’m out of hiding. I’m still the boss in this house, and I want it back. Maybe if I scare off every new buyer, one of my great-nephews or nieces will want it. Maybe one would even move in.
But maybe not. They got their money. They couldn’t agree on who would own it, couldn’t share it, so they just sold it when it was theirs for the taking. I doubt they’ll pull together to get enough money to buy it back.
More strangers will come.
I’ll just keep scaring them off.
If the bank can’t keep anyone in it, maybe they’ll tear it down. Will I get to “cross over” then?
I pause behind her chair. All my brothers are gone now. Mama. Pop. If I could just figure out how...
Not how to cross over.
How I died. I know it was murder, but what kind of poison? Was it meant to just make me sick, or make me die? Why did he do it? Was it really Harry? I trusted him. Never saw him even mildly upset until I threw him out of my house. Was it because he wanted Nancy for himself?
Did they ever catch him? Did he pay for it?
You’d think after all these years, my family would have let it slip once. Something about a trial. Or left a damn newspaper. Or said, “Poor Old Uncle Johnny... He was murdered here.”
No. They only ever said it was a sad place, and “Poor Johnny. Died so young. So sad.”
What does that mean? So sad he was murdered? So sad he died? Does that mean Harry Rogers got away with it?
And even if he did, what does it matter now? He’d pay for that in the afterlife. That’s outta my hands. He must be dead for now. So why can’t I leave and “cross over,” too?
I don’t know what to do about my predicament, but I know one thing.
This little human with wild gold-brown curls and tired eyes isn’t going to stay here.
She has to go.
September 18th, 2026
It will hit you one day. All at once.
That was my dad’s sage commentary as I kept fighting to fix myself and get better after the accident.
“If you don’t stop for a breather, you’ll crash,” he warned.
The crash arrived as soon as I put the milk away. It was the last of the items delivered by the DirectCart driver. I found my phone charger in my purse, filled my water again, tore the leg off of the rotisserie chicken, and collapsed on my bare mattress ten minutes later.
And slept.
And slept.
I had the strangest dream.
Doo-wop music. Ghostly gray eyes. A permanent frown on a handsome, old-fashioned face.
The next day, I putze around a little, unpacking this, calling for washer-and-dryer delivery and hook-up (thank you, Mr. Nigel and Hugo), and working my way through a legal pad to-do list.
Peacefully. Sweetly. With a playlist on (a Golden Oldies one, inspired by my dream), wearing nothing but a tightly tied bathrobe, a bonnet, and my spa slippers. I drink as much pumpkin spice chai as my kidneys will allow. I nibble cheese, grapes, and cold chicken.
“God! This is the life!” I shout, and I don’t know if I’m praying or just really excited to feel something like freedom after eight years of a rat race that I sometimes thought would kill me and a car accident that almost did.
Honey calls. “You busy as hell?” she asks.
“No. No, I’m not. I don’t start school until January.
I have my investments to live off of. I don’t have rent.
I’m living like a hermit, and I love it.
This is how people should live, you know.
If people lived like this, they’d live happier.
I bet the incidence of heart attacks and strokes would go down. ”
“Oh, you drank the Mountie version of the Pine Kool-Aid.”
“Mounties are the Canadian Royal Mounted Police, Honey. That’s a whole different thing. And I haven’t even been out of my house.”
“No ghosts yet? No creepies and crawlies from the ‘neighbors’?”
“Nope. Not a one. It’s nothing but good vibes and looong naps.
” I grin. “I’m going to take my laptop back to bed, pop some microwave popcorn, and binge mindless trashy television.
I don’t even need the cable guy. Everything just streams. And I don’t need a television—laptop.
” I kick my feet. “I’m living simple. And all the money I’m saving—”
“The money you’re not making at all?” Honey has the gall to point out.
“Yeah, that. I’m gonna do this place up in Mid-Century Modern. Gonna antique this shit. In fact—forget the trashy television, I’m going to binge DIY home renovation shows.”
“God. Just don’t fall off a ladder, okay?”
“No promises—ooh.” I swivel too fast, and there it is. That sharp, shooting lower back pain that travels all the way up to my shoulders. “I’ll start by just watching shows for some ideas.”
Something is wrong with the invader. The intruder. She sleeps all the time. She winces away from bright lights even after she’s been awake for hours. She’ll stop walking suddenly, and her hands will fly to her back or her neck.
She’s not that old.
And she’s still where she’s not supposed to be.
She’s got it so easy, and I hate her. She doesn’t even realize what she’s got, even with her aches and pains, and whatever else is wrong with her. She’s alive.
Alive people pick up the phones and call their loved ones. They get in cars and cruise. They get married. Have babies. See their kids grow up from the front row, not the misty, invisible sidelines. They get to go to weddings, funerals, and just out of the damn house!
I hate her with a passion that surprises me. How sharp and bitter it is, how angry it makes me. The lights buzz and flicker when I think about it too hard, and this chick doesn’t seem to notice.
That makes me madder.
I ought to just go to another room, but I don’t.
Even though I hate her guts, I can’t help but watch her, seeing her have all the things that should have been mine, that would have been mine if it hadn’t been for that no-good, two-faced Harry Rogers.
I won’t lie, she is pretty, too, and not like any woman I’ve ever seen, not up close.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen a whole bunch of beauties in my travels, but that was a long time ago.
I haven’t seen a beautiful woman in my house since Nancy—oh, not that my brothers and their boys were slouches when it came to the girls they brought here over the years, but they were family.
I never looked at them with that kind of eye, you know?
This girl is called Amber, and it fits the color of her curls—even though she hides them under a black silk bonnet most of the time.
I don’t have to do any snooping for that, because she’s on the phone a lot now that she’s awake, and she keeps calling people to set up things, and so I hear her say it over and over again: “Amber Pierce, Amber Pierce” and my address!
She keeps telling them that my house on Haven Way belongs to her.
If I had any blood, it’d be boiling.
You know what else ticks me off? She was asleep for hours and hours, and I hovered over her, trying to be all ghostly—and this chick literally opened her eyes at one point, stared right at me—and went back to sleep. Now that she’s awake?
Can’t see me if I’m five feet in front of her.
Like right now. I’m pacing at the end of the bed while she watches something on her “laptop” (her words, not mine. Never seen it anywhere near her lap), and she hasn’t looked at me once.
“Damn it!” I shout, and fling the closet door shut.
She left it open when she decided to put a few things in it earlier, and now I close it so hard that the hinges rattle.
A screw falls out, a hinge dangles, and let me tell you, I keep all the hinges and things nice and oiled, nice and tight with the toolkit my brothers left here back in the day.
There’s no way she can miss my outburst with the closet, I tell myself.
And I’m right.
Amber hears it. Sees it, too.
She jumps out of bed, gasps in while chewing a handful of popcorn, chokes, and her eyes immediately go wide.
Holy shit, I think she’s actually choking. Can’t breathe.
Staggering. Panic on her face. Popcorn spilling all over the bed as she reaches for her phone and knocks over the half-empty plastic bowl.
If she dies, she’s going to be my permanent roommate—and I think if I cross over, I might end up in Hell, because maybe this will count as murder. Or manslaughter?
With all the skills I’ve saved up over the last seventy years, I turn my translucent form—a see-through image of the man I used to be— into a corporeal form.
Anyone who says ghosts can’t do that just hasn’t met the right ghost, or the ghost isn’t working at it.
All we are is matter, and we can let it fan out until we’re a scary, shadowy mist in the corner of the room or a semi-solid being, the kind that feels like warm, over-set Jell-O.
I slam into Amber like she’s an enemy lineman with the ball, a real forward tackle that drops her to the ground, and the stuck popcorn comes flying out.
She’s breathing. Half-sobbing, half-coughing, scrabbling around on the hardwood floor in a sea of spilled popcorn.
And she still doesn’t see me. I know, because she hauls herself up and falls back on the bed, robe hanging open now, showing smooth legs all the way up to the place I got no business looking.
Yeah, I’m shaken up. Just a little.
Go down the hill. Sit on my headstone for a while.
I left the house—but just for a little. I’ll be back.
Ain’t no living doll gonna put me out of my house.
She still has to go—just not leave the world in the permanent sense.