Afterimage It was the night of Christmas Eve when Uncle Richard came to visit. The roads were so iced over you couldn't see them, and the snow howled around his car, making the navigation of the tiny roads to my house difficult; but he made it to our quaint little home in the woods as he always did. He brought with him, as was custom for the holiday, an armload of presents for my sister and I. My mother knew she couldn't provide us with a Christmas as extravagant as my cousin's and she was grateful for Richard's help. I personally didn't care about how many gifts I got, or if I got any at all. I just liked the holiday itself. It made me feel like my life wasn't completely worthless. My half sister was infatuated with my Uncle Richie; he was a police officer and a super hero in her eyes. Every time she saw him she'd ask if he'd caught any bad guys. He'd always respond "Caught em , locked em up, ate the key." Ginger laughed when he said that, an innocent six-year-old giggle. We were all sitting around the television, me and my mother on the couch and Ginger in Uncle Richie's lap, when he told us about a duty of his we'd never heard of. Actually, my mother had known about it but she was distant and uninterested in the conversation. "You're a ghost hunter?" my little sister said, more at awe than usual. "Well, they're not really ghosts," explained Uncle Richie. "The ghosts your thinking of---you know, the scary chain rattlin things---those are just. . . what do you call it, movie magic." "Huh?" "He means ghosts aren't real, Ginger," I said. "The things he's talking about are something else." "That's right," agreed Uncle Richard. "All they are is like, a copy of a person after they die." "I don't get it," replied Ginger. Richard, who hadn't had a six year old child in quite a while, tried to find a simpler explanation for the little girl who's attention was permanently his. "Okay, think of it like this: They're like the TV." He pointed to the television and Ginger followed his finger eagerly. "What you're watching is a picture of a person, but it's not real. It's like leftovers." Ginger still didn't understand. "Yes, hun, he's a ghost hunter," my mother said. Uncle Richard and I laughed. Later, after Ginger was asleep in her bed, the topic of "ghost hunting" came up again. "How old are you, Stan, fourteen, fifteen? You know what I'm talking about, right?" I nodded. "Actually, I'm seventeen. But yeah, I get it. These things pop up after someone dies and kind of wander around, right?" "Yeah, that's it," Uncle Richie said. "They're called afterimages and they don't show up all the time. Actually, we've probably only had, like, two this year. But when they do appear, it could be years after the person actually died. Like this one time, a few years after these people bought a new house the afterimage of an old woman appeared in it. Scared the Jesus out of the wife. She was washing the dishes when she saw it." "Oh yeah, I heard about that." "These things are a nuisance because when they show up, they're not confined to stay where they died. They can go anywhere and get in a lot of people's way. I got one walking down the street one time. A little girl in a dress." "What do you mean you 'got one'?" I asked. Uncle Richie pulled something off his belt that looked like a flashlight handle. He pressed a button on it and a long, thin silver spike sprang out of it. "When you find one," he went on, "you prick it with one of these." He pressed another button and the spike was engulf in what look like green lightning. Tiny lighting bolts traced the length of the spike and when they reached the end, they hissed and sparked. "Does it hurt them when you do it?" I asked. "No, they can't feel anything. Afterimages are just mindless copies of a person. It's like tearing up a photograph." "Oh, I see." "You know what, I actually got a call on the way here concerning an afterimage sighting." "Really?" "Yeah, why don't come with me tomorrow?" "I'd like to but I'd have to see if I could first." "Go if you want to," said my mother from the kitchen. There was something in the way she said this that made me a tad uneasy. "As long as you're back before twelve. I need a sitter for Ginger, until her dad gets here anyway." Ginger would be spending the next few days with her dad, who had divorced my mother shortly after Ginger turned three years old. Uncle Richie reattached the flashlight/spike to his belt. "Oh, we'll be back long before twelve." he said. So the next day after the presents were opened (and in Ginger's case, opened and broken) Uncle Richie took me with him in his police cruiser to where the afterimage had been spotted. He parked the cruiser in front of an apartment and told me what I could expect to see. "They can't hurt you, so don't worry about that. And you have to be quiet or it'll run away. Got it?" I nodded. "Okay, let's roll." We approached the apartment and I was confronted by an unexpected feeling of déja vu. But it was an unusual case; it didn't dissipate as it usually did. The closer I got to the building the surer I became that I'd been there before. By the time we reached the door I was certain. "I used to live here, didn't I?" I asked. Uncle Richie pushed open the heavy wooden door and we crossed the threshold into the musty smelling building. "Oh, yeah. You lived here for a while with your mom," he said. "I'm surprised you remember. You were a little thing." "I don't really. It just seemed like I'd been here before." "Oh, I see." We climbed the stairs until we reached the Managers apartment. Uncle Richie pounded on the door with a gloved fist. The man that answered was old and looked as if he'd been sleeping moments before. "I called you people yesterday," snapped the manager. "I didn't think you'd show up at all." "I apologize but afterimages aren't a high priority, especially on the holidays," my uncle said. The old man continued to rant until finally he handed over the key to the apartment in which the afterimage had been spotted. He'd had been repainting the walls for the next tenants, the manager claimed, when he was "attacked" by two of them. "They jumped right out at me. A big un, and a little un," he'd said. We continued our ascent up the dusty carpeted stairs to the top floor, of which contained only four apartments. Uncle Richie pointed to the one the farthest from us. "That's the one you lived in, actually," he said. The atmosphere of the building retained it's former unexpected familiarity in my mind, in the way that a recurring dream is familiar. Or a nightmare. Uncle Richie unlocked the door of the apartment we were to investigate and we went inside. The smell of wet paint still hung in the air. An open paint can and several brushes were scattered here and there, presumably where the manager had left them. "Now, keep an eye out for it," said my uncle. "Them," I corrected. "Right, right. Just look around, and remember, they're harmless." The apartment wasn't very big, but the emptiness of it gave it an enhanced illusion of space. Every footfall on the thin carpet and every creak of the heavily trafficked floor echoed off of the bare, wet walls. But amidst the din that my very footsteps made, I heard singing. I tried to pinpoint where the voice was coming from but I realized I couldn't. It seemed to be coming from my very thoughts, like when your mind is fixated on a song and it plays in your head on a perpetual, unrelenting loop. While my uncle busied himself in the front part of the apartment, I wormed my way to the back, drawn by a voice that I couldn't actually hear. I opened the first door I came to but found nothing, only clean walls and a freshly vacuumed floor that still held the indentations of recently moved furniture. I tried my luck with several others but the outcome was the same. With only one room left unchecked I stepped up to the final door. The singing voice didn't exactly get louder, but kind of became more demanding presence in my mind. I pushed the door open slowly and I knew I'd found what I was after. I froze in the doorway, in the middle of stepping into the room. I slowly lowered my foot and gaped at the things my uncle said weren't ghosts. A girl sat cross legged in the center of the room, a small boy resting on her lap. She swayed back and forth, singing a hauntingly familiar melody. I found that I couldn't quite focus on the apparitions, yet they remained situated firmly in the center of my field of vision, neither blurry nor clear. I tried to call Uncle Richie, but the words were heavy in my throat. Luckily he appeared behind me shortly. "There they are, good job Stan," he said. I managed a half-strangled thanks. He stepped passed me and into the room. The two "ghosts" looked up at him almost uninterestedly. "She was singing to him right before you came in," I said when I rediscovered my voice. Uncle Richie looked at me over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. "How'd she manage that?" he said. "These things can't make any noise. Maybe it was from next door." "I heard her. I know it." He shrugged and pulled the flashlight/spike from his belt. He crouched and with the tool poised behind his back he pressed the button. The spike sprang from the handle and the green mini-lightening returned to lick it's shining surface. "So it won't scare them," he explained. I wondered why, if afterimages were mindless, Uncle Richie was careful about frightening them. The thought was a brief one and was cast aside when the little boy stood from the girl's lap. The girl seemed torn between stopping the child and keeping her distance from my uncle; I could see this by the look on her face. The little boy stepped out of the older girl's reach and even closer to my uncle. I paid no attention to this, however. I was captured by the girl's expression. I was about to tell Uncle Richie that these things looked anything but mindless when he thrust the spike into the boy's stomach. My head was instantly filled with screams of pain and I sunk to my knees. I pressed my hands to my ears but it did no good, the cries persisted. I looked up just in time to see the boy explode in a flash of blue and green. The air suddenly felt very charged, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The boy's cries had stopped, but in their place came sorrowful wails from the girl. She stood suddenly from the floor, her eyes wide and frightened, and bolted through the wall behind her, her sobbing slipping from my mind like a bad dream. "Damn," my uncle said. "I hate when they get away. Little one blew up pretty good though, huh? That's always my favorite part. What're you doing on the floor?" I slowly rose to my feet. "You didn't hear the screaming?" "I already told you, afterimages are incapable of making sound. I don't know what you heard but it wasn't them." Uncle Richie clicked a button on his "ghost" taser and the gleaming spike slid back into the handle. "Come on, we have to find the other one." I shook my head. "I don't think so. That was awful, I can't believe you didn't hear it." I knew I hadn't exactly heard it either, but I kept this quiet. "She's gone anyway." "How do you know that?" "I just do." I talked my uncle into forgetting about the girl and we left without seeing any sign of her. There must have been a troubled look on my face when I came throught the door because my mother immediatly asked me what was wrong. "Afterimages got to him," Uncle Richie answered for me. "And I think you should go get his ears checked." "Why's that?" questioned my mother. She pulled a pair of shoes from the side of the chair she was sitting in and slipped her foot into one. "Because I heard the Afterimages and he didn't," I replied and made my way to the couch. I dropped myself onto one worn out end and picked up a book that I'd left on the coffee table. My mother paused in tieing her shoes and looked up at me. "You can hear them?" "Jesus, Melissa," my uncle said with a sigh. "Don't start that again, okay? I don't feel like hearing it." "Yeah I can hear them," I said. "And what's he "mean don't start that again"? You sound like you've had this discussion before." "Don't worry about it, Stanley, it doesn't matter," Uncle Richie fumed. To Be Continued . . .
Copyright © 2004 J Shartzer |