The porch light hadn’t worked when Nate stepped outside to grab the bag, and he’d felt the cold, dark strangeness of the world.

  Nate wonders why his dad chose to come back to him and not Beth. Why did he get the bag of fingers and not Gabe? The second question is easier because Nate is eight and ready to take on responsibility. He’s eight going on nine and needs to think about getting older and taking care of his mother. He thinks about how sad she seems most of the time and wishes he could make her smile. These thoughts make his head hurt. He stays in bed even when he can’t sleep and watches car headlights from the street play with shadows on his ceiling. He thinks about the dark strangeness of the world and the pain in his head. He stays in bed and thinks about the things ghost-Charlie whispers to him.

  Did you hide them well?

  I’m proud of you.

  I love you.

  Nate wonders and worries a little about things like responsibility and what his father would want him to do. Sometimes he dreams of dead M’busai warriors with nine fingers and flint-sharpened spears. Of course, he’s never seen a M’busai warrior, no living person has. The dreams flash like lightning, and he always wakes sweat-dampened and heaving. His room is opposite Gabe’s, so they don’t share a wall. No one hears him gasp.

  It’s on those nights, the nightmare nights, that Nate lies in bed thinking as sweat cools and causes thick, gooseflesh puckers on his skin. He thinks through everything like a puzzle, like a jigsaw without a picture, and imagines places to hide the eggs. He calculates crevices and shadows and things about which his father might be proud. There’s a delicate balance to the game he plays with his mother, certain rules to hide-and-seek.

  She should find all the eggs and the fingers inside.

  But not too easily. Never too easily.

  And maybe, just maybe, it might make her smile.

  * * *

  Beth only sleeps two or three hours most nights. The good sleep is gone, lost with the end of her Lunesta prescription and the discovery of human remains in plastic eggs. Of course, for Beth, good sleep meant four, maybe five hours a night. She lies awake thinking of the boys. She imagines she should tell them how wrong their little game is. She can’t imagine where they found the bones. She doesn’t want to believe the bones are real. They are, in a way, exactly what she needs: evidence of the M’busai and their rituals. But these bones can’t be M’busai bones, not here, not halfway around the world in her comfortable house on a quiet street.

  She knows her imagination conjured the figures in the yard, but wonders why Gabe saw them too.

  Thinking about these questions draws extra lines on Beth’s face. It wears on her and hangs black rags under her eyes. She wants to be pretty and a good mother and everything she never was but wishes she could have been for Charlie.

  Charlie is dead. The M’busai are dead.

  Dead, dead, dead.

  The words ping in her skull like old typewriter hammers.

  Dead, dead, dead.

  She can’t sleep so she searches the house, trying to find plastic eggs in the dark. It’s a game. Their pastel colors mute to grey in the midnight house, but she won’t switch on the light. She won’t enter the boys’ rooms, either. They’re asleep, she thinks, or should be, but Nate lies awake staring at the ceiling and wondering.

  * * *

  Nate continues to tell Gabe about Charlie, about Dad and how he’s come back and how he brought the bones. Gabe nibbles his lip and whimpers and his eyes swell with tears.

  When Gabe tells Beth, Nate and Beth have the Big Conversation.

  “Your little brother doesn’t need this from you,” she says.

  Nate shrugs his shoulders. He’s sitting on his bed, knees pulled to his chest, staring at the wall behind his mother. Her mouth continues to open and close, words falling out, but they’re lost in the carpet. Her tired eyes pinch shut. Her head wags from side to side. She looks unreal, standing there. Nate imagines his father and tries to put the puzzle together. Maybe the ghost was warning him, telling him about his mother and how she was.

  Maybe Dad chose to die, he thinks. Maybe he wants me to join him.

  “Do you understand?” Beth asks.

  “I think so,” Nate says. His voice is cold and low and hurts his throat a little.

  “Good.” She smiles. Her lips struggle with the smile, up then down. “I need you to be responsible. I need you to help.”

  Nate hears the word “need” and it feels like a stone tied to an itchy rope around his neck. He scratches involuntarily and says, “Sure.”

  When she leaves, he lies in bed and thinks about all of it, the bones and eggs, his father and mother, the little game he invented with his chicken-shit little brother… He thinks about all of it and wants to know something other than plastic eggs and clear tape. He wants to imagine something bigger than hunting for dead mysteries like his mother and the cold grey stone marking his father’s grave. He doesn’t want to cry—his mother hadn’t at his father’s funeral—but the tears come, warm and heavy.

  And that’s when he decides to leave.

  * * *

  The police can’t solve Nate’s puzzle. He’s left no plastic eggs behind as a trail. He’s left nothing except a bag of human bones under his bed and a little brother who now sleeps in his mother’s room because the world is too dark and strange at night. They lie together in the same bed, mother and son, one of them awake and the other snoring tiny, six-year-old snores, while the strangeness of the midnight world wheels toward dawn.

  She is a good mother, isn’t she? She was a good wife, but now Charlie’s dead. Questions haunt Beth like the puzzle of the dead M’busai and their strange rituals. Maybe her life needs ritual, maybe it’s missing something. Maybe Nate ran away from home because he was missing something too.

  Beth rises and goes to the window.

  This time, lightning flashes. Thunder rumbles all around. She sees their faces, dozens of them drawn with dark ink, with impossibly big, white eyes. Charlie is in the middle, smiling. He’s alone among the warriors. For a moment, she’d hoped to see Nate standing next to him. The nighttime yard flashes with light again. The lightning bolt strikes the shed and it burns, sending the sweet odor of marijuana—some of Charlie’s hidden stash—into the sky. Maybe Nate is hiding in the shed, she thinks, and the thought catches her heart with a sudden squeeze. But no. In life, puzzles aren’t solved so easily. Never so easily.

  Then, only then, as the emergency sirens swell, does she sink to her knees and cry.

  Aaron Polson is a high school guidance counselor, recovering English teacher and author of weird tales. His stories have featured magic goldfish, monstrous beetles, and a book of lullabies for baby vampires along with other oddities.

  Polson’s work appears in the anthologies Blood Lite II: Overbite, Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted and Dead Bait. His short story “The Thing About Ray’s Smile” appeared in Black Heart Magazine and “The Summer I Fell in Love” is featured in Niteblade Fantasy and Horror magazine.

  Born on the Ides of March, Polson currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and six children. He’s now at full sitcom level. Rumor has it he prefers ketchup with his beans.

  You know, it’s a funny thing walking through the valley. Thy rod and staff and all that stuff. None of it matters a jot. There is no tunnel. There is no white light. There is no comfort. All of that is there to mollify, to give the fearful something to hold on to. I, for one, am not one of the fearful.

  There were no particular fireworks when I passed. It was something of an anti-climax, truth be told. The only things that really change are the priorities, and now that the priorities are set, I have a plan.

  You’ve got to have something to hold on to. Do you believe in love at first sight? That place where you connect with someone and you know, without a trace of doubt that you two are meant to be together for ever. It was a rude awakening that it didn’t quite work like that, was not necessarily meant to be that way. I’m not sure which was greater, the shock of my passing, or the magnitude of that realisation by itself.

  Suddenly, without warning, I was gone; she was not.

  * * *

  ghost gōst

  noun

  1. The spirit of a dead person, especially one believed to appear in bodily likeness to living persons or to haunt former habitats.

  2. The centre of spiritual life; the soul.

  3. A demon or spirit.

  4. A returning or haunting memory or image.

  5a. A slight or faint trace

  5b. The tiniest bit

  6. A faint, false image, as:

  6a. A secondary image on a television or radar screen caused by reflected waves.

  6b. A displaced image in a photograph caused by the optical system of the camera.

  6c. A false spectral line caused by imperfections in the diffraction grating.

  6b. A displaced image in a mirror caused by reflection from the front of the glass.

  7. Informal A ghostwriter.

  8a. A nonexistent publication listed in bibliographies.

  8b. A fictitious employee or business.

  9. Physiology A red blood cell having no haemoglobin.

  * * *

  When I read that definition, it makes me laugh. Apparently I am a ghost. But Jennifer, to all intents and purposes, is my ghost.

  Can a ghost have a ghost? Apparently so. See numbers 2 and 4.

  Well, having been convinced that was the case, I set about to exorcise the particular ghost that was haunting me. Is that recursive? Perhaps so, but it’s real. Then again, I wonder whether 6c provides an adequate description of the separation of realities between the corporeal and non-corporeal worlds, if we were to think of them that way.

  I needed to pass that diffraction grating to deal with my non-corporeal nature. Only then could I set about doing what I desired, to step beyond that veil between. I was more than a false spectral line—so much more. And I planned to do something about it.

  * * *

  The very first time I saw Jennifer, it stopped me in my tracks. I knew right then and there—in that very instant—that we were meant to be together. We were at a coffee shop. I was waiting for my drink to be delivered—a nice, skinny cappuccino—and she was in line, waiting to be served. Shiny, auburn hair, pale complexion, perfect skin and blue eyes almost verging on indigo. She happened to glance across as I was watching, and in that brief moment of eye contact, she gave a little half smile before looking away to attend to her order. I knew with certainty that that look contained my destiny. It was only the first of many. In the weeks and months to follow, she would show me how much she loved me in so many different ways, all of them full of the meaning that only Jennifer could convey. She was so very special. And, of course, I loved her back.

  Imagine my surprise when I made my unplanned rendezvous with the truck that smashed me against a wall. That hadn’t been in any of my plans, and it was just too cruel. There was so much more I still had to do. Of course, above all, there was my life with Jennifer and everything that went with it. That was the most important thing.

  I loved her with all my heart and soul. It’s an interesting concept that last one—soul.

  So, here I was, removed from the mundane, transported, aware, but still removed. It took me a while to adjust. In this place, the sunlight filters through like greenish, glimmering water. The moon is no different, though the touch of its light is more blue. It is as if we swim in the world, amongst you, in an out of the streets and buildings that we used to walk in body. Although I could sense that there were others here, I could not see them, could not touch them directly. I didn’t even bother reaching out to them, trying to make contact, for there was only one sole thing that mattered.

  For the first few weeks, I laboured over trying to get Jennifer to notice me. Perhaps I would have given up and simply drifted away were it not for the fact that our bond seemed so strong. I had to be with her and I knew she had to be with me. I concentrated all my will into manifestation, becoming solid, whatever it was, and that was part of the problem. I didn’t know what it was. There is no primer, no instruction manual that tells you what to do. One moment you are there, and the next you are here, slowly spinning around, seeing but not understanding, trying to come to terms with what has happened. The whole thing with the truck took place so fast and then, here I was. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been different if my death—there, I’ve said it—would have been slow and lingering, giving me time to prepare.

  It seemed that I would have the time to prepare now—all the time in the world.

  That’s not to say that there wasn’t some sense of urgency about my plan. I was, now, just as I had been when the truck wrenched me from life, or at least that was my perception. I had not changed, except for the fact that I was whole again, instead of some gruesome smear on a wall. I presumed that would hold true for her.

  I wanted us to be together as she was right now, maybe not as she might be in ten or twenty or thirty years. Sometimes we mark the passage of time by the frequency of those periods of boredom. Since I had been here, I have never been bored. But then, watching my Jennifer was never boring.

  First, I tried to whisper in her ear. I thought if she could hear me, there was the chance she’d recognise my presence and we’d be partway there. I did that for a few days, but with limited success. The most it elicited was a brush with one hand at the side of her face, as if she’d been bothered by a persistent insect. It was something. I took hope.

  Next, I tried touch. My fingers passed through her arm, drifted unregistered through her shoulder, passed uselessly through her hair and left me grasping nothing. I jumped up in front of her, but she walked right through me—not even a shiver. My frustration grew.

  My next recourse was her dreams. I’d heard about people being haunted in their dreams, though I preferred not to think of what I was doing as haunting. But I couldn’t help but think about it in those terms. You know the stories. Someone sees their long-lost love in their dreams. And then, one day, they meet somebody new and get the blessing from their dream lover, allowing them to move on with life and set up house with their latest love. Well, that wasn’t going to happen here. I was sure of that. It was me and me alone that she was destined to be with. Our love was pure.

  I returned to waiting, watching, desperate for that moment when she would close her eyes and drift to sleep, her form curled within her bed, shimmering vaguely through the water veil that separated us. I moved closer to watch her eyes, hungry for the tell-tale movement that would signal she was deep within the throes of a dream. At last it came, and I was there, at the perfect moment.

  I was lost.

  How was I supposed to get into her dreams?.

  Several times I tried, and each time I failed. Awake or asleep, she was unaware I was there. If I didn’t manage something soon, I feared she would move on with her life, despite her love for me, despite my love for her. Eventually, people do. It might take some of them longer than others, but eventually they moved on. I had to face up to that.

  I was weak.

  The next few days I took a different approach. I followed her. Over and over again, I summoned my will, tried to make myself known, tried to make her see me. Nothing. I felt myself fading. I started to question the purity of our love. If I couldn’t make her see me, if she didn’t recognise my presence, how strong could our bond really be?

  Then came the moment I’d been waiting for. I saw her striking up a conversation with another man.

  Something sparked inside me, something raw, something that blossomed like a flame and filled my senses. It was fear. Jennifer was talking to someone new. It was her first step to moving on. There was no way I could allow that to happen.

  The fear—the desperation—filled me and I grasped it, held it and shaped it. I forced it through my resolve, my desperation and gave it a new form, willing myself to be there, to be there with her.

  She gave a start.

  “What was that? Did you…?” She shook her head.

  The guy she was with looked around. “What?”

  “I just thought that, for a moment… No, forget it. I guess I’m just seeing things. Just my imagination. I haven’t been sleeping that well.”

  I haven’t been sleeping that well. Had I managed, at least in part, to achieve what I had set out to do? I wasn’t sure, but now it didn’t really matter. I had my proof.

  For the next two weeks, I practiced. I needed to get this right. I stayed away from Jennifer altogether. I tried it on other people, those that I had known before. I didn’t want her to get used to me, not yet. Too much depended on it.

  Gradually, I became more confident. Little by little I gained strength, bunching that will, that raw emotion, and shaping it into something I could use

  Once I was secure enough with my new ability, I formed a plan. I started following her again, tracking her movements, re-familiarising myself with her daily routine and the moments that would serve my plan. And finally, at long last, the time was right.

  It was the end of the work day, even though time was not really something that mattered to me. Jennifer left her office amongst the rest of her colleagues and headed down the street for her journey home. The evening was dark, chill, an oily sheen across the buildings and streets. There was something special about the look of the evening, even through the watery green of what I saw. It was auspicious. About ten minutes later she reached the station. As she passed through the barriers, I followed close behind. Already I was holding my will, starting to build it, forcing it into a tight, bunched shape deep within me. She reached her platform and passed along its length. Still I followed.