Before the Light
Warnings: disturbing imagery, swearing, stalking behavior, general mind screw. That should be about it, let me know if there’s something I haven’t remembered to put up here. This is also in the running for the creepiest thing I’ve ever wrote.
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The thing about ghosts is that they don’t realize they’re dead.
Some of them, now, they wonder, and they’re the easiest ones to pick out. The easiest ones to send on. They’ve got an inkling, the doubt is gnawing at them from the inside, they’ve noticed that something’s not quite right with their world. But most of them still believe they’re still alive, and that’s how they try to convince you that they are. Very lifelike they can be, screaming and pleading, but all of them eventually realize that they’ve already died.
Most people can’t stomach it. You have to make them realize that they’re dead, but since they think they’re still alive, they do a very convincing job of acting like you’re murdering them. They even bleed, and getting their ghostly fluids out of your clothes is hard. You’ve got to do it before any of the other people, who are selfish enough to think that they can live locked up in their little boxes and not extend the hand of mercy to end the ghosts’ suffering, notice and disapprove. It looks just like the real thing, too.
Me, I can’t let a ghost just go by. They’re in pain, you know, and the sooner they move on, the better for them. They don’t want to live the shadow-life where they are, and they can’t get back to the sunlight and the way that they were before. Best not to let them dwell on it - you can see the relief in their eyes when you’ve done it, when you’ve sent them on.
I have to look in their eyes to do it: that’s when I know that all of the begging and running, all the screaming for no one to hear, was only their fear holding them back. I take the happiness from the fading eyes of the ghosts and it’s enough, it’s a purpose in and of itself. Certainly enough to get me through my boring day job as a court clerk, and the nights of microwave dinners and bad old TV or bad new TV. All this nonsense about vampires and demons and werewolves? It’s crock. Complete and utter bullshit. There aren’t any monsters in the world, just people and the sad remnants of what once were people, but aren’t any more and haven’t realized it just yet. The crime shows are only a little better, most of the science is wrong and they always catch their guy, far too fast. He’s always boring, predictable, and I can see the plot miles away. A real killer, now he’d act like a normal person, or at least, a smart one would. Ever read about a serial killer in the paper? There’s a reason they haven’t caught him for the past ten years. Because he knows that someone is going to find the body, and that there’d better not be any way to connect him to it, and that the best way to do that is not to go all crazy and start killing everyone who fits his profile without a good way to make it like he was never there.
The point is, my life between ghosts is boring. Bland. Nothing to do but watch the TV or study Psychology through observation, reading over the courtroom records and trying to figure out what makes people so messed up in the head. What makes them want to kill and die. Why the crackheads and the deadbeats and the abusers never seem to have anything done about them until they’ve gone and fucked up the world somehow. It gets depressing, I’ll tell you, but crime TV and amateur Psychology are my only hobbies. Aside from the ghost thing, which is more of something I have to do to get any sleep at night. Maybe if I’d finished law school and been a lawyer, instead of just doing their paperwork, I’d be able to help the kinds of people I see in the records before they become ghosts. Maybe I’d have a wife and kids and a dog, and know I was doing my part for the world every day at work, instead of sitting here combing the internet while CSI plays in the background.
Jeez. You’d think that serial killers would know by now not to leave fingerprints or DNA. Especially the repeat offenders - you know they’ve got your juices in the system, so why do you leave them lying around? The CSI people always get killed in really gruesome ways, too. Like a simple death isn’t good enough: an overdose, a stabbing - no, it’s always multiple stab wounds, a gratuitous gunshot, fractured hyoid, blood all over some of it the killer’s, large bricks of cash or crack cocaine, gang wars, death by arson, chemicals that nobody outside of a Hazmat team even knows how to use realistically, and forty minutes of pretending to lead the case straight to the only guy who will turn out to have an airtight alibi. All of this supposedly makes for good drama.
I’ll tell you what a real crime looks like.
It’s broad daylight when a man and a woman get into an argument in their home with the neat border of geraniums. Doesn’t matter who hits first, but they get to throwing all the fury of their useless existences at each other and soon enough, there’s another ghost.
Thirteen year old and their cool older friends find mommy’s cooking sherry while studying math one Wednesday afternoon. Then they find Daddy’s whiskey. One ambulance later, another ghost.
In gangland, someone with more testosterone than brains pulls out a knife or a stolen gun. Another ghost.
A mother of two watches her beloved, perfect daughter, drive off with her new boyfriend and half of mom’s life savings, from where she’s lying sprawled on the couch.
Boy from behind the picket fence can’t get away from his friends, online, at home, wherever. At least, they say they’re his friends, because strangers don’t hate so vividly and with that kind of venom.
One day a man finds out that his wife’s up and left with some guy she met at work. She took the pictures off the wall and the papers in the fire safe, but she’s left their son’s artwork on the fridge in an otherwise empty house.
Everybody’s got more hate and more fear in this life than they know what to do with. They either let it blow up out of them, let it simmer and sour and spoil everything, or they bottle it up inside until they drown.
Me, I burn mine chasing after the ghosts that their lives make.
A couple thousand people in my town alone, hundreds of ghosts, one of me. I can’t imagine how many poor lost souls there are in this world, but I can’t even begin to think about expanding outwards. Like I said, most people are selfish. They just want to plough through their small lives, making more ghosts until they become one, they’re not willing to help set those souls to rest. And it takes a lot of work to make a ghost realize that they’re dead. A lot of time, and you’ve got to pick the right time. Ghosts get worse when they get away, they get scared and angry. After all, they still think they’re alive: as far as they’re concerned, you’re the sick bastard who just almost killed them. And they react accordingly.
I might start by telling you one of my ghosts.
It was a night in February and I was working late, nothing to look forward to but an article on paranoia I hadn’t finished reading and a pile of tapes of NCIS sitting by my couch.
Yeah, I still use a VCR. So sue me, it works.
I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a ghost in nearly a month, and that was especially bad because I hadn’t been able to get to the last one. It made me itch to know that he was still out there, miserable, and that there wasn’t anything I could do about it, when I was the only one maybe in the world who could have helped him end all the senseless pain. I wasn’t expecting to see a new ghost just yet, because sometimes they’re months in between, and then they’re months finding the right way and the right time to send them on.
See, there’s a lot of ghosts, but they’re still only a few in a couple of hundreds. And knowing how to spot them is only half the battle: you’ve got to get to know them a little in order to figure out how to best let them know that they’re dead. Different people get persuaded by different things, just like when they were real people. That’s where the psychology comes in. You’ve got to figure out what makes them tick, what’s making them hold on, why they still think that they’re alive. You’ve got to watch them and know what they know, and who they’ve hurt, and who they’re still hurting. And that’s only the ones that you can see and hear and feel, the ones that believe they’re alive so strongly that it really seems like they are. It’s easier for the ones that have forgotten what it’s like to have a live body, you just find out who they were and you draw their attention to their grave. I don’t like to dig them up - that’s rude and it brings the cops like flies - but a little bit of candlelight goes a long way towards hey you, look here, you’ve been dead half a decade. I like it, the fire has a traditional feel to it, like you might be sending off some Viking warrior or some fallen king. I suppose that’s the same reason that they use it in Séances, but I fucking hate séances.
They’re so stupid. Séances, I mean. All of the holding hands and such - the ones you can’t see can’t communicate with you, and the ones that can - well, they’re right there. In your kitchen. At your work. Down the road. Just fucking tell them they’re dead. Is it so hard? Sit down and tell them. Yeah, sure they’d be gone, but they’d appreciate it, probably more from someone that they know than from Jack-nobody who they just met. Just stick with it, they’ll believe you before their eyes go out, and they’ll be grateful. Don’t let them talk you around into believing you again.
The February night that I was talking about, it was special because I saw two ghosts. The first one was on her way to a court hearing, and the second was on a bus.
I kid you not.
Seven o’clock, you’d think, would be a little late for a court hearing, especially one with kids involved, but I suppose they had to have them when the parents would be off work. It was a divorce case, so not the kind of thing that immediately draws my attention, except for the fact that the ghost was walking down the hall, holding her brother’s hand so tight, you could see the red marks forming on it. Their parents weren’t looking at them or at each other, even when the little boy tripped over the carpet and nearly crashed on his face. He looked like he was just about the right age to start school, she was maybe eight or nine.
That kid’s going to be pretty fucked up when he realizes that his sister’s dead.
Yeah, that was my first thought. I can’t afford to get involved with all the ghosts. I mean, I feel sorry for them, especially the young ones, the ones who had so much life left to live that it doesn’t surprise me that they still think they’re living it, the ones who haven’t had time in their life to screw up and hurt someone, make another ghost. I like to think that each of them might have become that rare kind of person who doesn’t make more ghosts, or help, but who stops people before they become one, saves a life. Or at least somebody, school councilor, teacher, police officer, fireman, confidant, friend, whose saved lives balance out the hurt they accidentally deal.
But kids are hard. I’ve sworn off kids. It’s almost impossible to make them realize that they’re dead, because they didn’t understand the concept when they were alive. And for obvious reasons, their parents and everybody around them wishes so hard that they were still alive that they don’t have the first idea about it, not consciously anyway. It’s called denial.
That’s the second thing about ghosts: they try to make it so that you don’t realize that they’re dead. See, that old lady in the bookstore? A ghost. Woman in the check-out aisle at the grocery? Same. Man trying to sell you a wrench when what you really need is a screwdriver? He’s a ghost too. You can tell by the way he stops what he’s doing and stares, as if the whole world had come crashing down on him, as if he realized for a moment what was wrong - and then he picks right back up, carrying that damn wrench again. Not all of them have that kind of tell, though. You’ve gotta keep your eyes open.
Anyhow, much as it would make my month better, I don’t go to the files and look up where the girl lived, don’t make a note to cross-reference her picture with the public school yearbooks. Kids are harder to track too, they don’t use the internet or pay bills and sign for things, and their records are off the books even when they’re dead. And if you start watching them in the park to try and figure out how they died the cops will haul you off as a pedo.
If you’re going to try and help send off ghosts, stick to teenagers and adults. Yeah, you might put a kid out of an eternity of misery, but when you’re behind bars you’ll have all the years of other souls that you could have saved on your conscience. Think about whether it’s worth it.
Oh yeah, most cops will fall for a ghost’s insisting that they’re alive too. At least, the really convincing ones, the ones that have a lot of life in their not-life. Partly, it’s the human brain, filling in the dots where there’s really no substance between them, partly it’s that cops can’t go on no evidence. And most people want to deny that ghosts exist. Any book or TV show that you see, it’s wrong or mocking the idea, because they’re afraid to show the truth or even admit it to themselves. They’re not gonna show you the real clues about how to figure out if you’re staring at the dead, they’re going to slap a lot of red cornstarch on a costume and paint a man’s face grey and call him a zombie. Because anything that looks that fake isn’t a threat. It’s somebody’s imagination, Poe’s nightmares, nothing that ordinary people need to worry their heads over. And then all the sparkling vampires crap and werewolves and wizard kids and super powered vacuums. Ghostbusters we ain’t.
So, much as it hurts, I let the girl go, and I hope that she doesn’t magnetically pull her brother after her, now when he’s looking up with his adoring brown eyes, waiting to see her smile again. Because she’s the only dependable person in his world right now, and she’s not even really there. Her eyes, the way they don’t focus on anything, really, except when she visibly remembers to do it? That’s because she’s seeing what she thinks would be there if she were alive, and the smile that she gives her baby brother while she’s still wearing them, just before they turn around the corner and out of sight, is the kind that you have because you’ve forgotten how your face works, you’re just moving muscles trying to get what you might think is the right expression.
Damn, I’m going to need a beer when I get home, to get that out of my head.
So I finish up for the night, pack up - kids file wasn’t in my pile, one of the other clerks must be dealing with it - and I head out to the bus stop to catch the seven fifteen.
I like the bus. It’s warm in the winter, like tonight, and cool in the summer. It gives me some extra thinking time, the time I wouldn’t get if I were driving and swearing at the moron who just ploughed through a red light in front of me, and it’s a proven location for spotting ghosts. Not that more of them take the bus than drive - pretty much they do whatever they did in life - but you don’t get to pick them out when they’re hidden behind car windows. I’m probably missing a whole class of ghosts, the ones who don’t take the bus or come to the courtroom or live in my neighborhood, but I’ve gotta start somewhere, and it’s not like you can tell a person is a ghost without meeting them. Official records will often say that they’re still alive because the EMT’s or the family members or the cops or whoever believed the ghost.
So, that night I was thinking hard about the little girl, wondering what must have happened to her, wondering if she was sticking around because of her brother or because of one of her parents or because she’d just never noticed that she was dead, wondering what the little boy would do when he grew up a bit and noticed that his sister wasn’t one of the living. The way the parents hadn’t looked at them, I doubted anyone else would see it.
I almost missed the man with the guitar.
Now, I knew he wasn’t a street musician, because he was wearing slacks and business shoes. He wasn’t some garage-band rocker, because he didn’t have electrical equipment on him. I suppose he might have an amp at home and an amp where he played, but most musicians like to know their own equipment well. Also, again, he dressed and acted like a low-rung businessman. None of this attracted my attention. It was his attitude, his way of standing, sort of like a sadness oozing out of him that let me know that he was lost. Most people don’t see that kind of stuff. They don’t want to. Me, I go looking, and I’ve gotten good at picking it up. Like some kind of shark.
Because of the guitar, he had to sit in the front, next to me. I nodded once and pulled out the paper from my briefcase, because I’d been staring up at the bus ceiling and wanted an excuse to look around closer to earth.
See, ghosts don’t like when you stare at them any more than living people do. And the living people, who don’t want to think about the fact that who you’re staring at is a ghost, start to get creeped out too. I looked at the guitar case over the edge of the business section.
It was black and made of cloth and had a bunch of zippers that had to be pockets for things other than the actual guitar. There were scuffs on the bottom. I couldn’t really tell if it was an electric guitar or an acoustic without opening the case.
I’m not Sherlock Holmes.
I looked up after a moment at my neighbor. “Guitar in the case?” I asked, in a noncommittal, let’s-make-small-talk-while-we’re-here sort of way.
“Yeah,” he replied, “Wesson.”
I don’t know shit about guitars, but he’d said it kinda proud, so it wasn’t some piece of crap with strings. I nod like I know what I’m talking about. “Yeah. Good instrument.”
He cracks what would be a smile if it reached his eyes, and this is when I know for sure that I’m talking to a ghost. There’s always something in the eyes, showing you that they’re lost, showing you that they’re trapped in there, that they don’t know how to escape.
It always sends chills down my spine.
“It’s not much, but it’s mine,” he says. “And all my students think its cool, even if it doesn’t have black flames painted on it or anything.”
I’m thinking, music teacher somewhere, which honestly doesn’t tell me much, except that he’s not obviously poor or obviously rich and a public school teacher or a private lessons teacher wouldn’t be either. I’m thinking, I need to be able to track this guy down again, and Caucasian man, brown hair, blue eyes, 5’7”ish, maybe thirties, maybe forties, carries guitar, big grey coat, might teach music somewhere, isn’t a good place to start.
“High school students?” I ask, because it seems like an okay guess. And because at this point I just want to keep him talking.
“Middle school,” he says, fidgeting with one of his gloves, pulling it up higher on his wrist, “Just old enough to think I’m an old fogie.”
If I’d been paying attention to where he got on, I might have someplace to start.
“Ah well,” I say, because it’s my turn to say something, “They’re young. They’ll wise up soon.”
He gets up as the bus hits the stop, nodding.
I sit in my seat until the next stop comes. Then I get up and get off the bus and as soon as it’s pulled away I’m headed back down the street, back down the three blocks towards the brick-fronted buildings that are a line of quaint, mom and pop stores during the daytime, nothing but a row of bars that the city ordinances can’t keep up with at night.
I don’t know which one he’s gone into, except that he’s not there on the sidewalk. I don’t expect him to be.
Halfway down the block, I stop. I turn around and see it, there in the window. A drawing of a saxophone. Palmero’s music.
With a grin I head across the street to the bar and get my beer. The seat by the window is next to the radiator and I stare out into the grey street, slush still holding up where it leans against the telephone poles and the streetlight, my breath fogging up the glass. Everybody else in the bar thinks I’m waiting for someone or lost in my own thoughts, and they mind their own alcohol.
I’m thinking, it’s a good thing I didn’t stay later, try futilely to figure out how to help the girl, when I’ve got a lost soul about to open the door to Palermo’s music and come out on the street any time now.
Half a beer later, I’m right. He comes out without the guitar case, looks around, hand in his pocket. It’s too dark for me to see his face, but I don’t get up and follow him just yet. There’s a moment where he’s the only thing in sight on the other side of the glass, blending chameleon-like into the evening and the grey February slush, just like a real person, then he crosses the street and opens the door to the bar. He gets a beer at the counter, and I’m watching him in the cold black mirror of the dead TV hanging over the tables. I can’t see much of him, but he’s standing like the lost stand, even worse than on the bus, and I swear I can see the shadow of the guitar on him, like a ghost on a ghost.
His face when he turns to look out at the tables is no surprise then. Looks like the cliff of life has cracked and crumbled under him. Looks like he’s in the middle of the sea and decided to drown.
Damn, this ghost already knows. He’s just not admitted it yet.
I make myself bored and inconspicuous - making yourself small actually attracts more attention - because I’m the furthest table from the main lights of the room, away from all the people getting cheerfully buzzed by the pool tables, and it’s a busy night. I’m thinking, if he doesn’t see me, he’ll head for the shadow I’m currently hiding in. Ghosts are sad. They know that they don’t belong.
I’m lucky, so he sits down. Then he does a double take, seeing that there’s actually somebody there.
“Sorry. Didn’t know this table was taken,” he said.
I shrug. “I don’t mind.” Go back to playing with my beer like I’m drowning my sorrows too.
He cracks his open and takes a long sip, stares into the night like he’s waiting for the world to dissolve, his flesh to melt, the long soliloquy on the stage of life to no audience, only darkness and silence watching (besides me), to cut the lights, drop the curtains, and be over. Alcohol pulls out the metaphors in me.
Then he takes another double take. Triple take, maybe.
“You’re the guy on the bus.”
I frown a moment, like I hadn’t recognized him immediately. Like I hadn’t been looking for him. “Oh yeah. Are you they guy with the guitar?”
And I watch his face crumple like the bar napkins. The guitar.
“Not anymore,” he says, doors closing, life retreating out beyond his grasp. I decide, the hell with waiting. Poor sucker doesn’t deserve another night like this. I reach into my pocket, touch my wallet, double check. He’s already convinced that everything’s over, he’ll go quiet, not like the mistakes, the early ones who bled and begged and screamed and didn’t understand until they were almost gone. Not like the ones that never came off my hands, not like the first ghost that never even noticed and looked at me with screaming eyes while his face turned purple and he drowned in the high school pool. Gotta make sure they already know, so that they won’t have such a terrible time in the last few seconds of their not-lives. Even aside from mercy, mistakes like that make it so that everybody who ever knew the ghost gets involved. Make it look like an accident, like an overdose or a suicide or a car crash or a fall, people get to move on with their lives. They accept that well, the world sucks and then we die, and you don’t make more ghosts by sending one on, you don’t make more people check out of life and pop the pills of apathy. It’s hard to forgive myself for the ghosts I made by helping the first one. Benny’s mom was the hardest. She’d made cookies for my birthday once, when my mom had a cold, and if drowning Benny was hard, cutting his mom’s brakes was harder. She even knew that she was dead, that her life had ended when her boy’s eyes had turned to pearls under the waves and of his bones were coral made - metaphorically of course, really he just became a bloated thing in the chlorine of the high school pool, a human pickle - but she couldn’t do anything about it.
She hugged me so hard and cried at his funeral, casket closed. Said she was glad I hadn’t been there, that I might have been drowned too. Said she wished I’d gotten there sooner, I was a lifeguard, maybe I could have saved him. Maybe if I’d had my phone the EMT’s could have rescued him. I didn’t say anything back, because it was my fault that Benny was dead in the first place. If I’d gone to that party with him he’d still be alive.
Drowning him was just putting the ghost out of his misery.
I’m down to half an inch in the bottom of the bottle, sitting there with the ghost without a guitar, and now is the time to do it, before he finishes his bottle and leaves. I put the bottle down on the table.
“Gotta pee,” I say, “Watch my bottle, okay? I don’t want somebody to drink it while I’m gone by mistake.”
I head for the men’s room door, and the whole place is empty. I whip out my wallet quick, open up the zipper, pull out a condom. It looks like a condom, but actually I’ve just glued the wrapper shut around a little white pill. I run some water, in case somebody can hear me or walks in while I’m standing in front of the sink, put the pill in the palm of my left hand, let my fingers close around it. I’m right handed, so it’ll be my right hand he’s watching.
I go back to the table and put my left hand in my lap. Take another drink. Look down and decide that his beer is too far from his hand, in the fashion of somebody whose booze is cheering him up and decides his neighbor should take advantage as well.
I pick up his beer bottle with my left hand, fingers around the lip, palm a bit above it, and the pill, already dissolving in the sweat from my hand, is inside.
“Hey,” I say, “You’re letting your beer get warm.”
He looks at me but doesn’t take another drink.
I look at him in a drunken confusion. Really, I’ve been having the same beer for the last two hours, but I’m acting like I’ve been drinking all night.
“’S just that you look like life kicked you in the ass today,” I say, “And I hate to see a good beer go to waste.”
He looks down into his drink, and I think for a second that he’ll see the pill. It might not be gone yet. But there’s no worry of that, he’s looking into forever, into the past, just the way that ghosts do.
“You know who gave me that guitar?” he said, suddenly. “My dad. He gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday, I’ve had it twenty years, not a scratch. Mom didn’t want me to be a musician. Not with my grades, I was going to be her little doctor. Only thing I’ve got left of the old man.” He took a drink. “Taught myself to play. Old man came to the one and only concert, back when I was gonna be the next Phil Collen. Only thing we ever really agreed on, only thing we had like father and son were supposed to. And know what I’ve done with that guitar?” He looked at me, but not at me, ghostlike and demanding an answer from the world. “I’ve sold it. Might as well have thrown it away.” He knocks back the rest of his beer at one gulp. And in his eye, in the world ending, I see the relief of having told somebody, of not letting the last thing you ever do be meaningless, the last few seconds before the light.
“Damn. I’m sorry,” I say, and I swig the last of my beer. “Wish there was something I could do.”
“Eh. You listened,” he shrugs, “It’s not the end of the world. Wish I didn’t have to, but the old man will understand.”
I nod and stand up, beer empty. He’s accepted his death. I’ve got to be gone, I have no idea how long it will take the pill to take effect, but I’ve already seen the death and the relief in his eyes. It’s strangely peaceful, a ghost that will have his last beer with you. Tidy and neat, a life wrapped up in a little box, not splattered on the carpet.
“Take care,” I say, because I don’t like them to feel like I’m not paying attention. He nods and turns back to the window, and I head out the door into the frostbitten night, happy now and at peace. It’s better when they’re transparent, just a moment, before the light consumes them and they’re really, finally gone.
In the morning I’ll search the papers to know when and where the cops find the body.
Even after I’ve killed them, they’re good at making people think they’re real.