Phrog Spirits #2
“You didn’t let me finish. I was trying to say nobody knows why they left, but they moved out of state. The whole family.” When he said this, she sensed a hesitation, in his voice and his eyes. Like he wasn’t sure but was trying to dissuade her from digging further.
But did that mean he knew nothing else? Or that he knew… something else?
“And there wasn’t any kind of scandal or death in the family?” she asked. “A tragedy of some kind?”
He laughed. Again. “You know, when you put your hands on your hips like that, you think you’re looking all stern.
But what I’m getting is all sassy-cheerleader.
It’s more cute than it is persuasive.” He walked over and gave her a hug and added, “I’m gonna be late for work and you gotta get to school. ”
“But Dad.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “I’m not stalling, Rem. Okay? When we have more time we can talk about it until you feel better. What I’ll say for now is that there’s nothing in the walls. The house is not haunted. You did not see an eyeball in the vent. Come on.”
His expanding by calling it an eye-ball was not comforting.
Dammit, she thought. You describe it that way and I do sound crazy, like a hysterical little kid. I guess it’s possible that my mind was working overtime in the dark. It’s a new place. It’s unfamiliar. Maybe tonight will be better.
“Fine,” she said. Her dismissive thoughts were failing, though. Something was moving behind those walls, and she’d need to find a way to make him listen.
Dad blew her a kiss as she left for the bus stop down the street.
***
The spirit in the walls was hungry. Once the girl and the man left, it climbed back up to its den. No. It didn’t climb. It floated. It was a ghost and ghosts don’t climb.
It had been so long since a person had come inside.
Months. Such a long time to go without its preferred meal.
And the house was too remote for the ghost to find people on its own.
Ever since they’d moved in, the spirit was practically salivating over the thought of tasting human again.
The last time had been… before it died? Could that be right?
Yes, it realized.
Memories came.
Memories of its life and its death. Its last meal. All these moments accompanied by lots of shouting.
Some spirits may not understand how and when they came to be trapped on the mortal plane, in whatever state of existence they are confined to.
But the spirit in this house’s walls was an exceptional one.
It retained its human memories and hunger—and, at times, even the ability to use its form as if it were still a human body, like when it had peered out at the girl last night—despite this, it was most certainly a ghost.
Yes, it was an exceptional ghost and knew this, but was a ghost all the same.
Still subject to some of the limits of ghost-hood—not all of them, just some.
For one, it couldn’t venture far beyond the walls of this house, tied to this place for eternity.
When it got too far, an unseen force would pull it back, like a giant invisible band was tied around its mind.
A band that felt suspiciously like fear, even though ghosts have nothing to be afraid of.
It could go far enough into the forest to check its traps and forage, catch a few frogs from the pond or crawdads in the creek, though.
Use its hands just like a human to lift rocks and logs and eat the crunchy crawling things beneath.
Yes, before it had died, the ghost had been an excellent trapper, and now it could eat anything it caught raw—further proving that it was in fact, a ghost and no longer a human.
A human could never eat a raw dead bird and survive. Its stomach would mutiny. It would die.
Like it had died. He. The ghost had once been a human boy named Steven.
Steven had died when his family abandoned him.
Now the ghost of that boy had a different kind of hunger, not one of the stomach (for it had no stomach), a hunger of the soul.
It ate to remain on this mortal plane, absorbing not just simple calories but the very life force of its prey.
Before it died, when it had still been Steven, it had also been…
evolving. Nearing a sort of basic level of divinity.
Ascending.
Becoming something above humanity. Relating to humans in much the same way they related to their livestock.
Seeing its predecessors as the first Cro-Magnon must have seen a fish.
The way a snake sees a mouse. And this ascension had reached a point where only consuming a human would allow him to continue climbing.
And when Steven’s father had found out… walked into the woods where he (still a live boy then, but one becoming something grander) was roasting the leg of a drifter he’d hacked off with an axe… that’s when the shouting came again.
The boy’s father, with his rudimentary human thinking, had panicked, cursed at the boy, chained him in the attic. And left, taking the boy’s mother and sisters with him. Never to return. No more shouting.
In that dark, bug-filled attic is where the boy named Steven had died.
After a few days (measured only by the sun and moon slowly exchanging their positions in the sky), there were no more bugs to eat, and the bucket of water was empty.
The boy grew so thirsty, so dehydrated, he couldn’t cry any longer.
No tears would come. And on a night when the moon was high and the crickets sang so loud they sounded angry, the boy screamed for hours, crying out for freedom, thrashing against the chain, kicking the bolt holding it into the wall, until everything went black.
And when the blackness faded, he found that he was free. The chain had slipped off his ankle and he could move again. Everything felt… different. There was no better word for it.
That’s when he knew he had died and come back as a spirit. Even though that spirit was thirsty and hungry. Because ghosts can be hungry too, it had found.
Now, after months without consuming human matter, the opposite of ascension was happening.
It was dissolving. Devolving. Degenerating into something below human.
When it moved through its paths between the walls, up into the attic where its den was, it was becoming more and more hunched.
Yearning to walk fully upright again, but not daring to be seen by the living.
Desiring to speak, even at a whisper. To communicate like the demi-god it had once been becoming.
The magnificent life form it had ascended to before its death.
Only, now the girl had seen it. The spirit knew it would need to be much more careful. But that was okay, because it didn’t need to wait much longer. It needed only to lure the man downstairs.
***
“Remy, have you seen my tape measure?” Dad called in from the kitchen.
Remy had been working on her homework on the couch and hadn’t heard him come in.
“No, Dad,” she answered. “Why would I have that?”
“I don’t know, but I left it right here on the counter with my other tools, and there’s no one else around that could’ve moved it.”
Her dad was many things, and handy was not one of them.
But neither was he forgetful. He didn’t own many tools, and didn’t use them often, so he had no issue keeping track of them.
And with all the repairs hanging over his head, losing his only tape measure was causing him more stress than it probably should.
Still, Remy’s reaction was stronger. A chill crept across her arms and she hugged them around herself.
The ghost moved it, she thought.
“Swear I left it right here on the counter,” Dad said. He spun around in agitation and walked out of the room, scratching his head.
“Shouldn’t swear so much,” she said, hoping one of his own calibers of bad jokes might ease the tension a bit.
She’d had a hard time focusing at school, which wasn’t like her at all.
Usually she could count on the classroom as a serene and comforting place.
But today her nerves were jangled, and it felt like something was pricking the bottoms of her feet and her palms, almost like her body warning her to run.
Throughout the morning, she had assumed this agitation was due to lack of sleep, or the disruption of her routine, her loss of stability with the move and all the other changes that had taken over her life recently.
But just before lunch came a nagging sense of something worse being the cause.
The eye inside the vent was planted firmly across the movie screen inside her head. Only, it was more than just that. Something about the conversation with her dad? Him brushing off her concerns?
No. That was frustrating, sure, but this sense of danger, of foreboding, was coming from the eye itself.
As she took the third bite of her school-cafeteria pizza, it hit her like a bus. It wasn’t just that she had seen an eye inside the wall vent in her strange new room.
The eye had seen her too.
She didn’t just catch a glimpse of a ghost in her wall.
She’d made direct eye contact with it, and had lost this fact as she ran screaming down the hall to Dad.
Remy watched her share of shows like Paranormal Witness and Ghost Hunters; she’d seen investigations and heard renditions of supposedly true accounts of encounters with the supernatural.
Combining that with her sharper-than-average adolescent rationale (which would normally be directed at the teacher and not internally this way), she figured this could mean one of two things.
First, it wasn’t what was often called a ‘residual’ spirit.
Because that kind of ghost wouldn’t be aware of her presence.
It also probably wouldn’t hide in the walls.
It would go about its business as if still alive, not even realizing it was a spirit.