One spirit crawls onto the bed, slowly edging her way up my chest until her face is inches from mine. We stare at each other. She’s young. She must have been my age when she died. There’s very little difference between us; she a mirror of what I’ve become. I see the track marks pocking her arms and I realize she must have overdosed. Her stringy hair rakes over my face as she leans in. She breathes in through her nose, then slides her gray tongue across my chin. Her eyes roll up into her head in ecstasy. She can taste the Ghost oozing out from my skin.
I’m going to sweat this drug out of my pores and she’s going to lick every last drop and I’m reminded of something Silas once told me: how maggots are used to clean deep wounds by devouring the dead tissue. They eat away the necrotic cells, debriding the injury of its infection and I suddenly wonder if these lost souls will debride me of my own addiction. Can they lick the last of the drug out of me? Lap at the Ghost until it’s all gone? Oh god, they’re licking me clean. All six of them wrestle against one another just to get a taste of me, pushing and shoving as they lean down, shoulder to shoulder, lapping at my neck, my ears, my arms. Any inch of exposed skin is up for grabs and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. I can only lie there, losing my mind as they lick and lick and lick any lingering hint of this haunted drug and I just stare at the ceiling and pray for this to all be over soon, please end this, praying that I’ll flush the Ghost from my system fast and they’ll leave me alone before I snap. Even when I close my eyes, I can still feel the sandpaper scrape of their tongues against my body. I’m a mother pig, a desiccated sow getting devoured by her own litter. The spirits lean in, rutting for their spot to suckle and I think, if I die here, I’ll never leave this room again…
I don’t want to die.
I actually say it out loud, “I don’t want to die.” You can say it a hundred times over and never mean it. Not until you hit rock bottom. It’s then and only then, in the blackness of the abyss, when you truly hear the sound of your own voice, echoing all around as you cry out—Please don’t let me die.
I change my mind. I take it all back. Please, don’t let it be too late.
I don’t want to die. I keep repeating it as these spirits lick at my skin, licking me clean, a litany for survival: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.
I want to live.
homewrecker
I stopped paying attention to the revenants. They can tag along, if they want. I pick up a handful of stragglers as I wander past the NO TRESPASSING sign at the entrance to Shady Acres, letting them follow me through the tangle of streets. The more, the merrier, I say.
A funeral procession back to Hopewell.
I was a model patient, saying please and thank you and I’m feeling much, much better now, speaking only when spoken to, biding my time. Eventually my arm restraints were taken off. I had achieved a level of trust with the staff because I’d been such a good little girl and now they could unfasten my bruised wrists.
The first moment I was alone, I pulled the IV from my arm and slipped on my job interview dress turned memorial dress turned dinner party dress turned going away party dress turned getaway dress and walked right through the sliding glass doors of the main entrance. Nobody stopped me. No one noticed.
I take in the vacant houses with fresh eyes. It’s not just one house anymore—the phantasmal cancer has spread down Shoreham Drive. Every house is decorated with its own sigil, and I can’t help but wonder whose blood was used to paint them. I notice a few new neighbors peering out from the plastic tarps on their window, living skeletons taking in the sight of me as I wander down the road. I wonder who they could’ve been before they came here.
Tobias sure has been a busy boy. While I was strung out in the hospital, he expanded his spiritualist empire through the cul-de-sac. Before long, he’ll have an entire neighborhood of haunted houses filled with addicted phantoms.
The police questioned me in the hospital once I was coherent enough to talk. They wanted to know about Amara. She’d gone missing. I vaguely remember mumbling my answers from bed—our family attorney present, hovering over my shoulder like a Brooks Brothers vulture. I haven’t seen her since her going-away party.
What am I supposed to tell them? That her—
ghost
—body is still in Tobias’s house in Hopewell somewhere?
They wouldn’t believe me even if I told the truth. And if I did, who knows what the spirits would do to them once they arrived. I already saw what they did to Amara.
No. I have to be the one to go back. I have to find her, to save her from that house.
I owe her that. I owe her my life.
Mom visited me in the hospital a few times. I have the haziest memory of her sobbing in silence. I hope you know, she whispered, everything we’ve ever done for you was out of love…
She might’ve held my hand, but I couldn’t feel it. Dad never came.
The crowd grows denser the closer I get to home. I force my way through the horde of spirits. There have to be hundreds now, pressed shoulder to shoulder, the biggest block party I’ve ever seen. Our home, the supernatural pull of it, won’t let these lost souls go. All those séances, every last dose, has lured the homeless ghosts to our house. Tobias keeps calling out, drawing them in, only to slam the door in their faces. I know because he’s calling for me, too. I can hear him. I can feel the dull ache in my bones. I’m sweating before I even reach our lawn. The withdrawal hurts the closer I get. My body knows how close I am. My muscles burn before freezing before burning again and all it would take to make the hurt go away is one pill.
But I’m here to find Amara, I keep telling myself, repeating it in my head.
You can bring her back, Silas whispers. Bring her home.
Quitting Ghost means choosing life over death. That simple decision—I want to live—seems so obvious, but the real challenge is what comes next. Detox just won’t do. You have to give up your ghosts. The hospital might have flushed the drug out of my system, but when you’re haunted, truly haunted, you never let go of your phantoms. They follow you. I feel them on my back even now, pressing against my neck. The only way to escape my addiction is an exorcism.
A home starts from a place of love. But I look at this house—our home—and I realize, it was never loved. It was abandoned by its builders before it even had a chance to live. This neglected phantom will never know what love is. Only pain. Our pain.
No one’s on door duty. It’s unlocked, so I let myself in.
There’s no light. The windows remain sealed with plywood sheets. The air is musty, thick with a miasma that only grows stronger the deeper I walk down the hallway. I almost gag.
The wood warps and sags. Water damage spreads throughout the drywall, black mold overwhelming the ceiling. Rust-colored runes are scrawled everywhere, like a page ripped out of Silas’s archaic cookbook.
Lonnie is sitting on the hallway floor, facing away from me, his legs spread out. He’s smearing sigils made from his own fecal matter across the wall.
My little artist, I think.
He looks up from his scribbling with his eyeless face and grins. The hollow O at the center of his face expands, vermillion gills rippling. I hear him purr. He’s happy to see me. He knew I couldn’t stay away forever.