DESERT GHOSTS

 

A fluorescent light in the hallway flickered frantically before burning out. In the sudden darkness, I could still see the paint peeling off the walls. The worn wooden floors creaked with every step.

“The corner unit just opened up,” Dan, the building manager said. He had a devious twinkle in his eyes and wore all black, despite the Tucson summer heat.

Rory and I stood behind him as he unlocked the door to the apartment. As soon as it opened, we were blasted with sunlight. We put our hands over our eyes. Dan walked right into the blaze like he was impervious to it. The whole place was one room with a bathroom off to the side. The high ceilings gave it a feeling of spaciousness, but I felt trapped in there. I could almost see the walls closing in on me. As soon as we walked in, I wanted to run out. There was something there besides the three of us.

“It looks great,” Rory said. He would have said that of anything.

“Do you have anything else?” I asked Dan.

“This is the only one we got open now,” he said with calm indifference.

“Hey Crystal.” Rory turned to me. “It’s not like we have a ton of options and classes start tomorrow.”

“You’ll be a stone’s throw from the university,” Dan said.

“Can we have a minute,” Rory said to Dan.

“Sure thing, I’ll just be back in my office.” He left and closed the door behind him.

“Look, we can sign the lease and then break it if something better comes along.” Dan looked at me pleadingly, head tilted, his red, long hair hanging messily in his eyes. “We can always get out of the lease. Leases are meant to be broken. That’s what my dad says.”

“So, we can keep looking for something else then?”

“Sure.”

With that, I agreed. We left the apartment and headed down to the management office to sign the papers.

***

Despite a temperature of 116 degrees, moving day was easy, almost like we were being helped along with the process. We finished unloading the rest of our boxes when Rory said he wanted to go to the convenience store around the corner.

“I want to come with you,” I said.

“I think it’s better if you stay here, maybe start unpacking the kitchen stuff,” he said. “I’ll get you anything you want from the store.”

“I don’t want anything. I just don’t want to be here alone.” I made my big eyes bigger.

“C’mon. I’ll be like two minutes.”

I reluctantly agreed and told him to leave the door ajar. I opened the box full of kitchen stuff and pulled out the nonstick frying pan we used for almost everything. Just then, I heard what sounded like someone humming behind me. I became still as a statue so I could listen more closely. Troubled and dissonant, it got louder. I turned around swiftly, raising the frying pan up in the air, ready to strike what could only be an intruder. The humming ceased.

I had no time to process what had happened because as soon as the humming stopped, rain started coming into the apartment, almost horizontally. I ran to close the window and outside I saw lightning and a large black funnel cloud swirling angrily. All I could think of was Rory dying out there in the storm. Hollow with fear, I stood by the window watching for him outside.

“Holy shit!” Rory was suddenly standing in the doorway. “I didn’t know tornados could happen in the desert.”

I loosened with relief. He told me he came right back when the storm started so he never made it to the store. He said a massive tree fell outside in the parking lot. I imagined it falling on top of our car. We went outside when the rain let up to see that my fantasy was reality. Rory ran over to the car and started moving branches off the beaten old thing. It was on its last legs, and I was afraid this was going to be the thing that killed it.

I turned around to see Dan standing like a scarecrow with his arms outstretched, staring at the whole scene, expressionless. It was like he expected this to happen.

“I know just where you can go and get that repaired.” He grinned big and wide and told us about some place up the street that gave all their customers a card for ten free meals at Sizzler. He said this as though it would fix everything.

I went in the car with Rory who told me that even though it was running, we couldn’t drive it.

“Something’s dragging on the ground. The force of the tree must have knocked out the muffler or something.”

We got out of the car and went upstairs to our apartment. Rory lit up his bong and I went into the bathroom to cry. Having our car out of commission with no means to repair it broke me. That car was my only freedom. I sat on the toilet and went to grab the roll of toilet paper on the floor when it suddenly rolled away from me as if pushed by some invisible force. I ran to tell Rory, but he only looked at me with glazed eyes and a stupid, stoned smile. He took a long hit and choked some words out, “You need to get some rest.”

I went outside to get some fresh air, and in the entranceway, I ran into a pizza delivery guy dressed in bell-bottom jeans. He asked me where apartment number twenty-three was. I pointed him in the right direction and then, he introduced himself to me.

“My name’s Keith. Like Keith Richards.”

“That miracle of science?” I said.

He didn’t laugh. He just stared back at me curiously and said, “How long you been here?”

“This apartment? Today’s my first day here but it feels like longer.”

“This place is like that.”

“Like what?”

“Time moves different here. It’s like it stopped.” He looked up at the white stone building. If I hadn’t been so creeped out by the place, I’d call it beautiful. It had a turret in the center front of it that reminded me of a castle.

“What do you know about this place?”

“Well, rumor has it, it was built over an Indian burial ground” He leaned in towards me as if he were telling a great secret.

“Oh, like Poltergeist?” I said, jokingly.

But like with my other joke, he only stared confusion at me, and continued, “This building was used as a hospital in the 1800’s. I heard that Doc Halliday died here. And then, it was used as an insane asylum.” He smiled mysteriously.

“Isn’t that pizza getting cold?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I better go drop it off. Bye for now.” He went down the hallway, knocked on a door, and stood there for about a minute waiting. He then turned to me and said, “Guess nobody’s home. I’ll leave it and get the money next time.”

We said goodbye. He walked away and left the building, vanishing in the dark of nighttime.

Back in the apartment, Rory was playing a video game.

“Shouldn’t you be studying your books?” I asked him.

“Oh. c’mon, it’s the first week of classes,” he said.

I sat on the floor and began reading my organic chemistry book, all the while trying hard not to think about Keith’s narrative of the history of this place. I fell asleep, my face resting on the pages of my book.

Then I saw them. They were only a few feet away from where I lay. Blurry, amorphous shapes that moved in and out like an accordion being played by a crazy-eyed clown. They didn’t say or do anything. They didn’t need to. They were frightening just by being. I felt their pain, their anger, their entrapment. I felt them trying to bring me down with them, trying to pull me in like toxic quicksand. Finally, I screamed myself awake and with that scream, Rory woke up and told me to go back to sleep.

“But I just had the worst nightmare in the world!” I said. “Nothing was happening, but I felt their energy. They were right here with me. I’ll never be able to sleep in this place again.”

“Just close your eyes and lie still. You’ll get back to sleep.” He stroked the top of my head.

I got up from the bed and sat in the only chair in the place, studying until morning, when Rory awakened and said he had to rush to class.

“Wait for me,” I said.

“One of us has to stay here,” he said. “Dan’s coming by to fix the leak in the kitchen sink.”

“I didn’t notice a leak.”

“Well, there is one and we got to get it fixed. He’ll be here any minute I bet.”

I got completely ready for class so that I could leave as soon as Dan was finished. I only had a few minutes to wait for him, which I did in the hallway, sitting on the floor. He came over wearing the same black clothes and carrying a small blue toolbox that looked like the one that belonged to my grandpa.

“Hey there,” he said. “Why you out here in the hallway?”

“Oh, I needed a change of atmosphere,” I said, looking up at him.

We went inside to the kitchen sink. He opened his toolbox and the cabinet under the sink. He crouched down to look at the pipes. Just then, I got the sudden urge to grab something. I saw a screwdriver in the toolbox and thought, that’ll do. But I wanted to do more than hold the tool. I wanted to jam it into Dan’s neck. A part of me kept fighting the urge while another part of me coaxed me to do it. When he turned to look at me, my face was stiff with fear.

“I see the problem,” he said.

He explained the problem, but I didn’t comprehend a word of what he said, too lost in my head. I asked him if I could leave and let him lock up. He was more than fine with that. I hurried outside, where it was back to blue cloudless skies and an unrelenting sun. In the aftermath of the storm, limbs of trees were scattered on the ground like dead bodies. I let the sun wash over me, hoping it could burn the contamination I felt from those things that haunted my sleep.

I tried to imagine the life of one of those desert ghosts from my nightmare. A cowboy who’d been wounded in a shootout in some old west barroom. He was brought to our apartment building that was then used as a hospital. Maybe he stayed in the same room where Rory and I lived. He healed and was on his rotten way. Years later he murdered some poor Cherokee man in his sleep. The wife and small daughter of the Cherokee man woke screaming, wailing. The cowboy saw the look of unending pain in the eyes of the man’s bereaved family. He’d never stop seeing the pain in their eyes or hearing their screams.

Years later, he returned to the same place where he was once hospitalized, but the place was no longer for physically sick people. It was for those who’d lost their minds. He’d finish out his days here, tortured by what he’d done, waiting patiently for death, only to die and find himself even more trapped than he was in life. A desert ghost being kept alive by the dry, dead air that passed through him. Alongside all the other desert ghosts, always together but always alone.

Off in my own world, I lost track of time and now, I feared I’d be late to biology class. When I arrived, there was only one seat available, right in the front of the room. Normally, I wouldn’t care but after not sleeping all night, I feared dozing off in class and having the teacher see me. I managed to stay awake through the ninety-minute lecture by continually resituating myself in my hard, plastic chair. My eyelids, all the while, sliding down over my eyes as if pushed against their own will.

After the long and painful class, I walked to the library through the buildings to avoid the afternoon heat. As I passed a classroom with its door open, I heard a lecture being given.

“We’re going to be examining the ways the religious traditions of South Asia understand supernatural forces and beings,” the deep-voiced professor said to the class.

I stopped and stood by the door so she could hear more.

“Take the Indian sect of Jainism. These people believe in demons and even possession. They believe that these evil spirits walk among us, that they have power, and they’re here to antagonize the human race.”

The professor saw me standing by the door and invited me into the classroom. He told me it wasn’t too late to sign up, and that the name of the class was “Gods, Goddesses, and Demons: Divinity in South Asia.”

“Thank you,” I said, walking away. The thought of taking such a bullshit course made me want to laugh. I studied the hard sciences after all.

***

I got home around seven that night. I could have come back a lot earlier, but I wanted to stay away as long as possible. I decided to stop by the apartment where Keith delivered the pizza to find out if whoever lived there ever got it. I knocked on the door and in seconds, some girl with long black hair and about a pound of makeup appeared. I couldn’t see her eating a pizza under any circumstances. An adorable tabby kitten stood behind her, hissing at me like I was the devil.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “She never hissed at anybody before.”

“And I’ve never been hissed at before,” I said.

“Bad girl, Flower,” she said to the kitten.

“No worries. I live down the hall. I was wondering if you got your pizza last night.”

She furrowed her brows and said, “You sure you have the right place? I never ordered a pizza.”

Despite the temperature being somewhere in the high nineties, all the hairs on my arms were standing straight up. No wonder Keith wore bellbottom jeans, and he didn’t understand my references to Keith Richards and Poltergeist. 

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.” I slipped away and went off to my apartment.

There, Rory was playing a video game, his loyal bong on the floor beside him. I went over to my clothing boxes to get a t-shirt out and saw that they’d all been opened.

“Hey, Rory,” I said, turning towards him. “I appreciate your encouragement, but you don’t need to open my clothing boxes. I’ll unpack my clothes when I’m good and ready.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t open any boxes.”

He stared at me like everyone else had been staring at me tonight—in utter confusion. I thought he must have opened them and then forgotten in his stoned stupor, so I asked him if he was sure.

“Of course, I’m sure. I didn’t even unpack all my stuff yet. Why would I care about yours?”

I’d been reluctant up until then to say anything to Rory about my encounters, not just because he’d tell me I was insane, but because I didn’t want to say any of this stuff out loud. I didn’t want to make everything more real than it already was, but I couldn’t hold my tongue.

“Have you had any weird encounters since we’ve been here?”

“Like what?”

“Like I never opened these boxes, and you never did, so how did they get opened?”

“You probably opened them and forgot about it.”

“Have you heard the sound of someone humming?”

He just looked at me like I was crazy, so I stopped. I opened the fridge and was delighted to see there was a six-pack in there. I drank one after the other until I passed out, thinking that the alcohol might somehow protect me from the hauntings. But I was wrong. They’d returned with a vengeance, suffocating me with their endless pain. It lived mostly in the minds of their rotted-out skulls. Their cries of anguish were silent, but I could hear them loud and clear. They were imprisoned in their pain, and they wanted to escape this place even more than I did, but they had surrendered a long time ago. If they couldn’t leave, they’d see to it that I couldn’t either.

Again, I screamed myself out of the nightmare and looked up to see the greatest horror of my life! A gargoyle sat in the chair where Rory was once sitting, its eerie wings draped over its hunched back. Its thickly, wrinkled face, strangely composed. That was the last thing I remembered. Weak with fright, I passed out. When I came to, Rory was sitting in the chair. The gargoyle was gone but I knew I’d never stop seeing it.

***

During the fall semester, weird stuff kept happening. I’d come home to find all the kitchen cabinets opened. Those bored desert ghosts would hide my stuff all the time. They loved to hide my keys most of all. I supposed it was a way of trapping me in with them. I kept having those terror visits in my sleep. For a while, I stopped sleeping at home all together. I drank coffee and stayed up studying all night and slept on a couch at the library in between classes. Then one day, a library worker told me I couldn’t sleep there anymore. I went back to sleeping at home and just dealt with the nightmares.

At some point, I stopped screaming myself out of sleep. I stopped being so afraid of the visits. I just went with them. I figured they were all in my mind so they couldn’t do anything to me. That was about the same time that weird stuff stopped happening in the apartment during my waking hours.

And that was about the same time Rory left me. He said I wasn’t the same person he met years ago. He said I had changed. He told me he’d help with the last few months’ rent because that’s what good people did, but I told him to keep his money. I’d make it somehow. When I told Dan, he told me that if I could help him out with maintenance of the building—vacuuming the hallways, cleaning apartments after tenants vacate—he’d ask the landlord to reduce my rent by half.

So, I help Dan out and I get the whole apartment to myself, mostly that is. The spirits remain. It’s surprising the stuff you can get used to if you want to. Only a few months ago, I wanted nothing more than to get out of this place. Now I never want to leave. Something tells me I never will.