Holy Ghosts

Holy Ghosts

On a brittle winter evening in March 2007, I went to my
three-year-old son Eddie’s bedroom to get him a pair of
socks. The night was cold and the room was dark except for
a small night-light that cast a soft puddle of stars on the
wall. Action figures and plastic toy blocks were scattered on
the floor, and the bed was covered with folded laundry that
needed to be put away. Wind was rapping the windows,
and outside I heard a number of car doors slam almost simultaneously.
This was not unusual. Our house is close to
church, school, and municipal parking lots and there’s always
someone getting in or out of a car. That night, for some reason,
I pulled the curtain aside and looked out the window.
Across the street and down the block the lights of Macken
Mortuary, with its ornate Victorian-style gabled roof, burned
brightly against an aubergine sky. I saw a small group of people
in winter coats walking slowly to the corner, their bodies
close together, their heads tucked low like pigeons warming
themselves over a sewer grate.
I turned away, closed the curtain, reached into the
dresser drawer, and felt something strange behind me, as if
someone had been hiding in the shadows. There were only
three people in the house at the time—me, my wife, Grace,
and my son—and two of them were downstairs in the living
room. I was startled, to say the least, as if I had been standing
alone in a forest and heard a branch break behind me. My
head jerked to the side and I quickly turned around, but there
was no one there. I looked around the room, saw nothing
unusual, shrugged it off, grabbed the socks, and as I was walking
to the doorway I experienced something quite out of the
ordinary—sort of like an electric hand rubbing the length of
my back. I stopped and couldn’t move, not because I was
stuck but for the simple reason that the feeling was so strange.
What the hell is that? The sensation then changed and I felt like I
was being pressed like a grape, that something was coursing
through my body like blood in my veins. Then the pressure
seemed to break apart and for a brief moment I felt like I had
a million little bugs crawling all over my back and neck. I
raised my shoulders to my ears and tried to shake it off, and
within seconds everything was back to normal. “Weird,” I said
out loud as I left the room and walked downstairs. And while
what happened had been odd enough for me to take notice,
by the time I handed the socks to Grace my mind was on
other things. Namely, her.
Two days before, I had been at work when, by early afternoon,
I suddenly felt like I was coming down with the fl u. At
the time I was editor-in-chief of Quality Paperback Book
Club, a division of Book-of-the-Month Club, whose offices at
One Penn Plaza sat above the netherworld known as New
York Penn’s Station—one of the busiest, and, with its bad
lighting and cramped surroundings, most claustrophobic
transportation hubs in the United States.
Copyright © 2010 by Gary Jansen