I have this... habit. I'm not really sure if I should feel bad about it. Sometimes I think it's a horrible habit, and sometimes I don't. I'm not a particularly religious man, in fact if I were to be completely honest, I would say I don't believe in a god at all. I still go to church and all, and I even spend some of my Saturdays volunteering at the homeless shelter with other people from my congregation. But it's mostly to be nice and decent. Most of the times I barely remember the time I spend there. The faces are all just a blur to me. I still think I'm normal. I used to have a habit of biting my nails too much, which I finally kicked in my teens when I started getting painful ingrown nails. It also doesn't exactly help trying to pick up girls when the ends of your fingers look like used erasers.
Not that I care much about getting girls these days. Or women. Life seems a little less colorful. Every day used to teem with possibility, each decision like a new adventure. Now, each day looks and feels just like the last. It was the nights that drew me in. And now even my nights are empty.
I used to pick my nose too. Actually, I'm not sure why I'm lying, I still do. It's purely a hygienic thing. There's nothing more satisfying than having a really disgusting bout of the cold, getting cured, and then pulling out a piece of snot so long you're sure it must've been anchored somewhere in the middle of your brain. In fact sometimes I feel like I must have pulled out a bit of brain with it. It would explain my habit a lot. But I continue to do it, because it just feels so cleansing. I read somewhere once that nearly 95% of people do it. That it's just society that makes us think it's gross or weird or crazy. It's a fact, look it up.
Like I said, I am not a man of god, so I'm not sure if I believe in ghosts. I'm not even sure if you have to believe in one to believe in the other, or if one needs to exist to have the other. But whatever it is, I see ghosts. Well, a little more than that if we're being completely honest. I see ghosts, and I destroy them.
I'm not like a ghost buster or anything as nearly awesome as that. I wish I had to deal with ghosts that were anywhere near as entertaining as that. Or friends as hilarious as Dr. Venkman. No, I just kind of make them disappear.
They are usually pretty harmless. I've done some research into my own encounters with them, and the only way you may have experienced a ghost is if you've ever felt sleep paralysis: a feeling that you cannot move, that someone or something is holding you down as you sleep, and yet you are wide awake to feel it. That's not to say there isn't also a separate, real, medical... thing. I am sure sleep paralysis exists as well, but in some cases, namely, my own, it could be a ghost. A good way to tell is to try to swallow or move your toes. Sleep paralysis, as I have read, affects your larger muscle groups (to hold you steady so you don't thrash around as you sleep), and if you use lesser used smaller muscles, it will stir your bigger muscles back. At least that's what I've read. Like I said, I don't suffer sleep paralysis. Or maybe I do, and it's just mixed with so much schizophrenia that I don't know the difference.
I considered that too. That maybe I'm just crazy, and they're all just figments of my imagination. I've never gone to see anyone about it. It's not like it was really affecting me. I could hold down a job, have friends, a social life, and it's not like I ever hurt a fly. Not a living one anyways.
I suppose I should finally explain this habit of mine. Ghosts, as I've come to calling them, are creatures that live on the edges of reality. Have you ever laid on your back on a clear blue day, and looked up at the sky, and saw little squiggly things floating above your eye. Those are bacteria. Think of that, kind of, but the opposite. They glow a little bit, and I've only ever seen them at night in dark rooms.
When I was a child, they used to come easily to me. Well, easily is a relative term. I wouldn't have to concentrate at all to catch glimpses of them at the edges of my vision. They shone a pale grey blue in the black of night. And only their outlines at first. I used to think they were those same microbacteria and thought nothing of them. Even the snatches of noise I would hear I put down to the house settling for the night.
It wasn't until I had that fever when I was twelve. And even then I didn't quite understand it. I was so dizzy and tired and disoriented I thought I saw figures looming over my bed, calling for me to come out. Nightmare colors tinged with black spun across the ceiling of my room behind their heads, as they held me down and the smoke of their voices filled my ears and nose. They smelt of fog, but all I saw was a black mist, the same emptiness as the dark of the room.
It wasn't until the next time I got sick that I decided they weren't just white blood cells in my brain making connections where there shouldn't have been any. A month after my next fever, I caught a glimpse of them in the corner of my vision, in the black corners of my room, but this time I didn't dismiss it immediately. I tried to focus on it. But they slipped away as easily as they came. As soon as I shifted my eyes to settle my stare on them, they scurried away. For eleven nights, I tried, each night catching a glimpse before they disappeared. On the twelfth night I had given up and gone to sleep, but woke again halfway through the night. There they were, figures hanging about just to the edges of my eyesight. I couldn't see their arms, but I could feel them, all holding me down. I fought the urge to panic, and instead of moving my eyes to put them into focus, I felt a muscle in my head tense that I had never felt before. It felt like the beginnings of a headache, starting in my temples, but without the pain. I felt something slick wipe over my eyes, and suddenly they were there. Dozens of them, standing around my room. Silvery grey and blue outlined figures, whispering for me to come out, and yet holding me down to the bed. But I was wide awake. I screamed, but instead of noise, white fog poured from my mouth, thick and viscous. As dark as the room was, the fog was bright and swallowed up the figures one by one. I screamed a noiseless scream of smoke until I felt their grip loosen from me, and screamed still as the entire room filled with the pure terror I pouring out of my own mouth. I leapt and crouched and hid under the covers in a corner of my bed, eyes shut, and crying.
I don't know how long I cried for, or hid under the covers. But finally, under the safety of the blanket and my own shut eyes, I started to reason that what I had just seen, it couldn't possibly have just happened. I spent a good bit of time convincing myself until I finally opened my eyes. The darkness under the blanket was as black as the backs of my eyelids. I slowly pulled back the covers, fearing what new monstrosity I might be greeted with.
My room was empty. No figures, no smoke. Just the usual clutter of a 12 year old boy's room. And yet, something was still off. The room wasn't as dark as it should have been. Light was emanating from my window, casting a pale grey hue on everything in my room. And then there was the murmur. At first I thought it might have been the furnace in the basement, but it was coming from outside. Slowly, without looking out, I opened the window, and I could make out what the noise was. "Come out, come out". I looked out the window, and gone was the neighbor's house, the green lawn, the driveways and cars and streets and streetlights. It was neither day, nor night. The clouds crowded without a break above, reddish brown, the color of winter sky over a busy city, and before me, a sea of silvery grey creatures, as far out as I could see, and all trying to draw as close as they could.
It was then I caught my reflection in the window, my face illuminated by the glowing throng forming outside the house. My eyes, normally a dull brown, were now the same silvery blue as the creatures milling about outside, and my temples were swollen and an angry red. I touched them softly, and felt them spasming hurriedly under my fingers. I massaged them slowly, and slowly they stopped spasming, and finally bent and retracted back into my skull. And with them, I felt a film pull back from my eyes, my eyes stinging as if not having blinked for a very long time. I closed and rubbed them until the stinging sensation went away, and looked out again. Just dark night, and the brick wall of my neighbour's house. No silvery spirits anywhere, no whispering.
The next day I spent the entire morning staring in the mirror. Staring at my eyes. Rubbing my temples as hard as I could, trying to remember which muscle I had pulled the night before. I did the same thing for the next several days, too afraid to try at night alone in my bed. The comfort of the daylight made me brave enough to try and face the creatures again. I didn't figure it out then, but I did learn how to raise my eyebrows individually, and make my ears wiggle.
It wasn't until a month later that I got brave enough to try at night. I had brought my baseball bat into bed with me before trying. And without even touching my forehead, I felt that same feeling go across my eyes (later I would realize it was the same feeling as putting on contact lenses) and suddenly the room was filled with creatures. This time I didn't move, or scream. I just watched them.
They looked a little bit like those photos people take, where they draw pictures with lights in dark rooms and take pictures of it. Their edges weren't constant, but shifting. Not exactly shifting either, a section would fade away in one part, and reappear somewhere else in a different position. And this time I noticed their eyes. They were very hard to see, but they had them. Somehow against the darkness of the room, their eyes were black holes floating in the middle of what must have been their heads. They didn't have anything on them like a pupil, but still I just had a feeling I knew what they were looking at. Some of them observed the pile of homework on my desk, others on the chest of toys in the corner. None of them seemed to pay any attention to me. Feeling a little braver, I sat up to look at them, and the bed creaked.
They reacted instantly. At one moment they were all perusing through my room, and the next, they were all upon me at once, holding me down, and chanting "Come out, come out". I screamed, but again it was only smoke that came out, not noise. And again, once I had stopped, the room cleared and was empty.
I was only a child, I didn't understand what I had discovered. To be fair, I still don't. But back then, I felt like I had unearthed a super power. I soon learned that any kind of scream would produce the smoke, and always the figures would disappear. Every night I would clear my room of the spirits before going to bed. But every night there would be fewer and fewer of them. It wasn't for months until there were nights I would stay up and not find a single ghost in my room. It wasn't until I was thirteen that they would no longer come into my room at all.
I then moved onto the house. Every night I would clear the house of the creatures. I had lost all my fear of them, knowing all they could do was hold me down, and it took only a shriek to evaporate them. Once they stopped appearing in my house, I started to do the neighborhood, sneaking out of my house at night into the featureless landscape that replaced the houses and streets when the ghosts came out, and every night I destroyed whole swathes of them.
Like I said, my daytime life wasn't affected at all. I never felt tired, I still kept up my grades, I still had all the same friends. I didn't bother trying to tell anyone about the ghosts. I was sure no one would believe me, and even if they did, I didn't want to share it with them. I wanted to ghosts all to myself.
Until about halfway to my fifteenth birthday. And I didn't see the ghosts anymore. I went out night after night, and didn't find a single one under the reddish brown clouds. Finally, I gave up. Every few months I would try again, and sometimes I would find one or two of the ghosts looking through the things in my room, or another one or two outside, but never many. By the time I was sixteen, I didn't even try anymore. Back then I had half convinced myself that it was just a recurring dream I had, that there was no way it was at all real.
The next time I even thought about it was when I was nineteen. I had moved out of state to a college across the country. I had gotten a pretty decent scholarship and I had jumped on the opportunity. My first year of school had been a blur, but in my second year I moved in with a bunch of guys in my program. We were all broke, despite all of us getting scholarships (we had all gotten into psychology together), and were now living eight guys into a 4 bedroom bungalow. It had used to be a 2 bedroom house, but the I guess the landlord decided he hadn't been making enough rent, and split the rooms in two. To be fair, the original two bedrooms had been massive. Now, there was barely enough room for our two single beds in our tiny room, but at least I had been fortunate enough to beat my room-mate at paper-scissors-rock to get the bed by the window. Even more fortunate, we hadn't gotten the worst room: that would be the one in the middle of the house with no windows, and space enough only for the bunk beds setup in there. We were sure the whole house violated a slew of fire codes, but the price was right.
The first night we slept, I saw them again, in the corners of my eyes. I looked over to my room-mate and saw him, eyes wide open, head straight up but his eyes rolling desperately in his sockets. His entire body seemed tensed. By instinct I tensed my temples, and I saw them, a whole group of ghosts roiling over and around and under his bed, chanting and chanting. I shrieked until the room was filled with the smoke, and as it cleared I relaxed my temples. There was my room-mate, sitting straight up and staring me straight in the eye, asking what I had just done. I said I had no idea what he was talking about, and asked if he was feeling better. That he had looked ill while sleeping.
He admitted to me then that he had suffered sleep paralysis his whole life, that sometimes he would lie awake for hours unable to move and simply panicking. That this had been the first time he had ever come out of an attack so quickly.
"You opened your mouth at me."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you opened your mouth, as if you were saying something. Screaming even. But you didn't make a noise. And then I could move again"
"I have no clue what you're talking about"
Four more times he had attacks that year, and all four times I rescued him. But never again did he ask me about it, and neither did I try to explain.
I was afraid of him catching me on the prowl. My room-mate I mean. So I never went hunting with him around. But whenever he went out for a late night of partying or away back to his parent's place, I would hunt. It was like I was a kid again. Swarms of the ghosts were everywhere on campus, and every night I could I went out and destroyed them. I can't explain why, but it felt so cleansing.
The next year, and each year afterwards, I started living on my own. And every night after everyone else had gone to sleep, I went out. I wasn't as voracious as I had been as a child. I would limit myself each night, make sure not to destroy entire swathes of ghosts. Just any that happened to be in my room, and maybe a dozen more afterwards. There were far more ghosts here than there had been in my own neighborhood back home, and I was less bothered with venturing out far from home. Some nights I got so far that I was too tired and lost to head back home, unable to find my building again in the vast field of nothingness that overtook the world when I hunted ghosts. I relax my temples, find myself in some dark part of the city I had never been before, and find a bench or hidden alleyway to rest until the sun came out. I learned to shriek in short bursts, a little bullet shaped cloud would zoom away from my mouth and race towards a ghost. And on impact, it would just, dissolve away.
In the first year of college my mind had been on nothing but girls. College was my chance to re-invent myself, to become someone that some hot co-ed wouldn't mind going home with. I wasn't a virgin when I had left high school, but I wasn't very far away from being one either. By the end of my first year of college I had built up enough confidence, and notches in my bedpost, to pick up girls with some regularity. By second year though, this habit of mine intersected with the other, both normally taking place at the dead of night. At first it wasn't a problem (I was more horny than I was... whatever feeling it is you get from destroying ghosts), but after awhile I would wake up in the middle of the night, still feeling a bit of after effects from alcohol, some strange girl, both of us asleep in a strange bed, and shifting my view to the hordes of ghosts walking around outside.
It finally got to the point where I would stop going to parties or bars, instead saying I was tired, or had too much to drink the night before (of course, the night before I hadn't drank and used the same excuse), and go back to my room, sleeping until four or five in the morning. Where I would wake up. And as everyone would be at home asleep in a drunken stupor, or clumsily making love, I was out on the hunt.
By the time I graduated, there weren't many ghosts left. The ones that were still around would usually run at the sight of me. I didn't really think about them as people. Or living. Or thinking. They were just, things. Like my nails, or the mucous in my nose. Things that I had to get rid of. It was just a habit, and just felt cleansing to me. And nobody was getting hurt after all.
I don't particularly remember a lot from the years after that. I got a job, I think. As a market researcher. I can't remember the specifics, all I know is that it involved travel. I had made sure of that. It was a steady job, it paid the bills and mortgage on the condo I had bought, but all I cared about was the travel. The day no longer mattered to me, people no longer mattered to me. It was just the noise, the filler. It was like sleep to me. Necessary, even slightly relaxing, but altogether skippable. All that mattered was the night. The hunt.
Every night I would go out. Every night the ghosts would call for me, "Come out, come out", and I obliged them every night. Different cities, in different countries. It didn't matter. No where they were safe.
And then some nights I would go out, and there would only be a few around. And then other nights there would be none. I hung up a map in my living room, and as I encountered different cities that had completely dried up, I put a pin in them on the map, to make sure not to go back. Friends asked why after all these years I was now marking the places I had been. I said better late than never.
It would take several nights before I even found one. I made sure to savor it. I would chase it down as it tried to escape. I would even spend hours chasing it across the empty fields until I finally made it evaporate. I started spending frequent flyer miles I had amassed on my many business trips to go places I wouldn't normally go. Then I ate into my savings to find more crevices of the world I had not yet been.
I was the talk of all my friends. They always asked for stories of my adventures to strange and exotic lands. For some reason all the travel seemed to make them think I was interesting. And the more and further away I traveled, the more I cared about the hunt and less about my day life, and people. And the more they seemed to be curious. Friends would circle about trying to prod stories of my latest exploits out of me, and I was starting to realize I couldn't remember what I had done besides hunting on any of my past trips. Women flirted with me with little subtlety, and perhaps too much alcohol, but I had nothing I wanted to say to them, much less do with them.
But, honestly, chasing women is a young man's game, as is seeking the adulation of your peers. I was always kind and courteous, I stayed friendly. I just simply didn't care. And my habit didn't hurt anyone, after all.
I made sure each trip I would do something exciting or noteworthy in the day, simply to have something to talk about when I got back. Somehow I managed to remember an anecdote or incident from one of my latest trips that would make them gasp in wonder or laugh at my wit. I can't remember any of those stories anymore. Back then they wouldn't have lasted much longer than a few weeks before those stories too evaporated into the recesses of my mind. I would have dinner parties at my house, to keep up appearances, and soon it was simply my friends telling my other friends stories of the amazing things I had seen and done on my travels that I could no longer remember. They sounded like things that had happened to someone else.
Still, I kept up the hunt. But then it took weeks. And then months. Finally at one point, I had realized an entire year had gone by without a single ghost sighting. The map in my living room was a sea of red push pins, and the only places that were still showing on the map were either blue, or tiny green islands, inaccessible without a private plane or boat.
My savings were non-existent, though it hardly mattered because I had nothing to really save for. I had no interest in buying things before, and now none of my trips seemed to matter either. And yet I worked and worked, and as soon as I had money again, I took a trip to another part of the world, hoping and praying to see another ghost. I never once found one.
By the time I was forty, the nights were empty. I would lie awake for hours, or sit at my windowsill staring out at the vast empty fields and reddish brown clouds. Every few months I would happen upon one. I would go chase it the whole night until the sun came out and my temples relaxed and I would discover myself to be halfway into another city. And I would rent a hotel in that city, and that night find that same ghost and chase it again. Days would go by like that until I finally destroyed it. After the eighth time this happened in three years, they finally let me go. At least I think that's what happened. My memory is still hazy about the whole thing. All I know is after awhile I was working in a beer factory. I would just watch the conveyors whiz by and bottles fill and generally do nothing all day, except clear the few jams they had a week. I didn't really care about any of that any more.
I vaguely recall a gathering at my house some time after that. It was all my friends. At least they said they were my friends. Only a few looked familiar, most looked like downright strangers. It was an intervention of some kind, on my behalf I think. I don't think they were really sure what they were intervening against, but they knew whatever it was, I had to stop it at once. I told them I wasn't hurting anybody, that my habit was harmless. They asked me what habit that might be. They accused me of taking drugs, of who knows what else. That I needed to change my life. I told them to mind their own business. My habit hadn't hurt any of them, and hadn't hurt me neither.
And then, finally, one night, it happened. I'm not sure how old I was, as I'm not even sure how old I am now anymore. But I woke up, and I was being held down. A weight, pressing down on my chest. I could barely contain the excitement I felt. My temples tensed, and there it was. A ghost, holding me down. I held my breath, scared that in my excitement I might let out a gasp of fog and accidentally destroy it.
"Come out, come out" it chanted over and over. I just watched it, staring into the black marbles of its eyes floating in the space above my bed. After some time, it let me go, it released me.
"Come out, come out", and headed out of my room. But this wasn't a chase. It was leading me somewhere. Out into the field, it glided away in front of me, me walking behind.
"Come out, come out." I followed along. Throughout the night, and into what must have been the next day and following night. And several days and nights more. Never once did sunlight break through, nor buildings pop up in the vast emptiness, or the clouds break their reddish-brown haze over the sky.
And finally off in the distance, a single dot, a speck, obviously opposite from everything around it. The ghost headed for it, with me in tow.
As we grew closer, the figure took shape. It was a tree, made of the same translucent silvery grey outline as the ghost. It was rooted firmly in place, and swayed in a breeze that I couldn't feel.
The ghost came to a stop.
It looked me straight in the eye.
With its dead, black, marble, empty eyes.
And said
"Come out, Come out"
