Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (9 page)

“What difference
does it make?”

“Well, there’s a world
of difference, Bob…”

“We’ll discuss it
later. Just get somebody over there!”

“A river of blood
just appeared next to the regular river of blood!” broke in another researcher
excitedly.

“Two rivers of
blood!” said the man next to him, slapping his forehead.

“Somebody just
dropped a house on the President!” said someone else.

I corralled one
of them as he went scurrying by and told him I was looking for two ghosts. He
looked at me like I was a hick.

“What kind of
cornball thing is that to be looking for?”

“Well, I dunno.”

He told me they
didn’t have time for old-fashioned ghosts like mine. This was the most
paranormal activity they’d ever monitored. Strange phenomena of all kinds were
occurring everywhere - weird manifestations that made my ghosts seem corny by
comparison.

“Like what?”

He thought for a
moment. “Well, last week the whole city was briefly under miles of ocean.”

“I must have been
in the can when that happened.”

“And then the
city was hit by a bunch of comets. And there was a World War there for a
minute. And the spitball was legalized briefly, so we could all throw spitballs
again without fear of being suspended. And there was that big Titanic race in
the harbor – a race that the experts had said could never happen. And…”

“Gee, I sure must
go to the can a lot.” A thought occurred to me. “Hey, maybe the government is
doing all this. Did you ever think of that?”

He sneered at
this idea. “Governments don’t do anything. That’s just something people say
when they don’t know what’s going on and want to sound like they do.”

“Well, yeah,” I
admitted, “I do say that when I don’t know what’s going on, but in this case…”

“Get out of
here.”

I said I wasn’t
leaving until I got some kind of clue, something to go on. This is where being
big and slow to be satisfied comes in handy. After a moment’s vain struggle to
release himself from my dull, uncomprehending grip, he said I might try The
Very Haunted House. I asked what that might be.

“We haven’t had
time to look into it,” he said, “but we’ve been getting a lot of reports from a
neighborhood a few blocks south of here. Apparently some house is so full of
ghosts they’re spilling out into the street. The neighbors have been
complaining about it.”

I thanked him,
and left. Finally I had a lead!

When I got to the
neighborhood he had told me about, I wished I’d remembered to get the exact
address. All the houses on both sides of the street looked pretty rundown. They
all looked like they could be haunted. I was trying to figure out which one to
try first, when I saw a ghost suddenly appear three feet above the street, fall
to the ground, sit up, looking confused, then run off.

I followed him.

I followed the
ghost to an old apparently abandoned Victorian home, and watched as he walked
up to the door, knocked, listened for a moment, then dissolved through the door
into the house.

I went up the
steps and knocked on the door. I heard a faint eerie “come in”, but nobody came
to open the door. I tried the knob. The door was locked. I tried shouldering my
way in, but only succeeded in hurting my shoulder.

I knocked again,
but all I got for my efforts were a couple of more “come ins”, a “wipe your
feet”, and another sore shoulder.

I tried to waft
through the door like I had seen the ghost do. You never know. But all I got
out of that experiment was a chipped tooth.

I took a walk
around the house to see if I could find an open window. At first I couldn’t
find one, but after awhile, when I was sure no one was looking, I found one. I
climbed through.

There didn’t seem
to be anyone in the place. It was, to all appearances, just an old empty house.
The furniture was covered with layers of dust. The mirrors were streaked with
grime. Rocking chairs were rocking by themselves. The fireplace was going on
and off. Just an old empty house.

Then I heard a
noise. A strange wailing sound. It didn’t sound human. Then I heard footsteps
on the stair. They didn’t sound human either. But when I looked at the
staircase (not human), there was nobody there! Then the wailing sound came
again. It sounded like it was coming from one of the closets, so I opened the
door. There were thousands of ghosts in there. They tumbled out and began
swarming all around me, shrieking and wailing, and laughing unearthly laughs.

Normally I would
have been scared shitless, because, like I said before, dead things that don’t
act dead scare me. But I’d seen so much of this kind of thing lately, it just
didn’t make much of an impression on me anymore.

“Have any of you
seen a ghost named Ed Brannigan? Or Fred C. Cramer? Either one. I’m looking for
them. That’s Brannigan. B-r-a-double-n-i-g-a-n.”

The ghosts
shrieked louder and wailed even more hideously, but none of them volunteered
any information. I pushed through them and checked to see if maybe Ed and Fred
were in the closet someplace. Maybe behind that stack of old ghosts in the
corner. They weren’t.

When I
straightened back up and stood there for a minute, scratching my head, I
noticed the ghosts had stopped wailing and were floating in the center of the
room, staring at me and looking confused and vaguely pissed.

I pushed through
them to the kitchen and looked around there. They followed. One tried a “boo!”
but it didn’t get any response from me, so he didn’t try it again.

I came back out
to the living room, after finding nothing in the kitchen, and looked in the
closet again. The ghosts watched me, plainly not sure what the deal was with
me. I was supposed to be afraid of them. But I wasn’t. They didn’t get it.

I asked them
again about Ed Brannigan, and finally, after they had wailed some more, and I
had started giving them the correct spelling of the name again, one of them
answered me.

“He and Fred
aren’t here. They’ve been gone for almost a week.”

“Do you know
where they’ve gone?”

“No.”

“Well, crap.”

I sat down on a
chair full of ghosts. They scattered, grousing. I didn’t bother to apologize. I
was pissed. Ed and Fred used to be here. But “used to” only counts in
horseshoes. I had to find out where they were now. This place was just another
dead end.

Now that the
ghosts were convinced that there was no point in trying to scare me, they went
about their business. Which, I noticed, involved trying to get comfortable in a
severely over-crowded environment; with too many ghosts crowded into each
chair; ghosts stacked up on the tops of bookcases; ghosts neatly folded up in
drawers; even ghosts coming out of faucets. This house had a lot of ghosts in
it. I started to get curious about that.

“Hey, how come
there are so many of you?”

“We don’t know,”
said one of the ghosts standing on my head.

“We don’t know,”
said a ghost in the cuckoo clock. “We don’t know. We don’t know.”

“I know,” said a
ghost named Nugent.

I looked at him.
None of the ghosts there were particularly happy, but Nugent was easily the
glummest ghost in the place. He said that government interference had caused
the increased ghost population. I asked him how he knew that, pointing out that
I’d heard only stupid people who didn’t know what they were talking about
blamed the government for things, and he said he used to work for the
government, that’s how he knew. Worked for them for years. Then one day, right
in the middle of a top secret experiment, just after he had said “That ought to
do it”, he suddenly found himself here, dead. Some of his co-workers were here
too. I tried to pump him for more information – what was the nature of this top
secret experiment he spoke of, let’s take a look at the blueprints, and where
the hell were Ed and Fred? - but he didn’t want to talk anymore. He just sat
there sulking.

“I’m tired of
talking to you, Nugent,” I said finally.

“Ditto.”

I got up to go.
This had been a wasted trip. Just like all of the trips I had ever taken in my
life. What’s it all about, anyway? Would somebody please tell me that? Just
then, on that philosophical note, the front door opened and Ed and Fred breezed
in.

“Hi everybody,”
said Fred, cheerfully.

“What’s the
score, fellas?” asked Ed, rhetorically, as they both bounded up the stairs.

I stared at them.
It was Ed and Fred, all right, but there was something different about them.
All the ghosts were staring at them too. Then I realized what it was - what was
different. Ed and Fred weren’t ghosts anymore! They were real men! I suddenly
felt like I was in the middle of some kind of a Pinocchio picture.

The other ghosts
were stunned. They didn’t know what to make of it. But I figured out what had
happened quick enough. Ed and Fred had never hired me now, because I didn’t
exist, so they had never had an opportunity to be killed by me. That didn’t
explain why the other ghosts knew them so well. Or why they seemed to have a
room upstairs here. But you can’t understand everything. At least, I can’t.

I bounded up the
stairs after them.

When I found them
they were in their room packing up their stuff into two big suitcases to move
to their cool bachelor pad they’d just rented downtown. They had dates tonight,
they said, with a couple of dames who had bones that just wouldn’t quit.

I confronted them
angrily. “Look what you bastards did to me,” I said, pointing at myself. “I
don’t exist anymore. I was never born. My library card’s not valid.” I took the
card out of my wallet and held it up to them so they could see.

“It’s not our
fault,” said Ed. “How could it be? We’ve never even met you now.”

“That’s right,” said
Fred. “We couldn’t have caused you any trouble, because there ain’t no you!”

I was getting
steamed. “If you confuse me one more time, I’m gonna…”

“You’re gonna
what?” jeered Ed. “What are you gonna do?”

I landed a
haymaker on Ed’s chin, then drove a left jab into Fred’s new solar plexus. They
both went over backwards, squawking.

“Hey, Rube!”
yelled Fred.

As I jumped on
them and began knocking their teeth loose, the other ghosts joined in the fight
- kicking me, biting me, and, by combining their forces and using all the
ectoplasm they had, lifting up heavy objects and braining me with them.

I had Ed and Fred
down and was punching them for all I was worth, but I had been hit so many
times I was starting to get a little woozy. The third time the ghosts brought
the dresser down on my head, I finally collapsed to the floor on top of the
unconscious forms of Ed and Fred.

The ghosts all
piled on top of us, banging away at my head with everything they had. Finally,
after I hadn’t moved or said “ouch” for several minutes, they stopped hitting
me and backed away. Then one of the ghosts shrieked in terror.

Three new ghosts
were rising up from the bodies on the floor: Ed, Fred, and me.

“You killed us
again, you bastard!” howled Ed.

“And I just bought
a full length mirror!” complained Fred.

“Never mind that,
you little pricks, look what you did to me!” I pointed a transparent finger at
my twisted corpse. “I’m dead too!”

“Good!” said
Fred.

“We’re glad!”
said Ed.

We all swung our
fists at the same time, the force of the blows blowing us all apart. We spent
the next ten minutes retrieving our body parts from under the furniture and
yelling abuse at each other, with my mouth under the couch having a shouting
match with Ed’s face in the fireplace, while our hands and arms looked for us.

Once I had put
myself back together again, and got my eyes into the right holes, I saw that Ed
and Fred, and some of the younger ghosts, were over in the corner of the room
kicking my corpse and calling it a fat son of a bitch. That really made me mad.
I’m not fat. I’ve just got fat bones.

The first fight
I’d had with the inhabitants of The Very Haunted House had been frustrating.
Round Two was a pleasure. I was finally able to lay a glove on the bastards. We
were on equal terms now, substance-wise. And I had the advantage of being
bigger and angrier than any of them. So it was no contest. I beat the stuffings
out of them. I was literally mopping the floor with them. Beating the rugs too.
And ringing the doorbell. I tried painting the walls with them, but the paint
wouldn’t stay on their wispy little heads, no matter how far I dunked them into
the can.

The battle didn’t
last as long as I wanted it to. Nothing really worthwhile ever does, the
philosophers tell us. And they are right, as usual. The ghosts weren’t enjoying
the fight as much as I was, so after fifteen or twenty minutes, most of them
split. I’m not sure where they went, but I did hear screams of “Oh no, not
again!” from one of the neighboring houses. So that’s probably where they went.
That’s where I’d start looking.

I worked off my
remaining excess energy and anger by trashing the place. That is, I tried to
trash it. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had much experience at being a ghost yet. I
couldn’t materialize enough to get a good grip on anything valuable. My
ectoplasm kept fading on me. Then I’d have to start all over again. I managed
to tip over a small odd-shaped table after twenty minutes of sustained effort,
but it wasn’t the kind of wholesale destruction I had been hoping to cause. And
it turned out that the odd-shaped table had actually been tipped over already
and I had spent the twenty minutes getting it right-side-up again. At that
point I figured the hell with it.

I went back
upstairs to take a look at my body. It was in pretty bad shape. Dents
everywhere, limbs pointing in all the wrong directions, the odd tooth gone, and
footprints all over it. It was a mess. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do
with it, but I was pretty sure I shouldn’t just leave it where it was.