Agatha's Haunting
(Here is a short story I wrote recently)
When it began, Agatha dreaded the sunset. Dusk slowly descended from the East and Agatha's skin bristled with goose bumps. It wasn't pleasant seeing two ghosts slowly crawl up and down her bedroom walls. Every night, the ghosts materialized from the bland invisibility of still air just as the last dim layer of light melded with the darkness.
The ghosts never altered from the limiting position of the crawl. Agatha never saw them attempt to alter positions or even to remain still. It was always the same sluggish yet meticulous crawl. They crawled like they were crossing the Sahara without water. Slow, and as if their limbs were heavy despite the ethereal appearance of their wispy, opaque forms. One ghost crawled up the wall while another crawled down. They passed each other directly in the middle of the wall without variation. When they passed, they quickly and almost guiltily glanced at each others face. Their symmetry was infallible. They had mastered a perfection of precision that seemed to verify their otherworldlyness. In life nothing could be so unvaried. Even trained dancers stumbled. Even the most expert of musicians missed a note.
Agatha had many friends she loved, but she could not tell any of them about the ghosts. She ran with a caring yet stuffy crowd and she knew if she revealed the haunting her friends would be concerned but only about her sanity. The only person she did tell was an old friend from high school. The friend called to the surprise of Agatha who had long ago ceased to wonder about the friend after their sporadic communication dwindled years ago.
The distance both geographically and temporally made the friend feel safe. She was no real threat to Agatha's life because she was not at all part of it. The friend didn't believe in ghosts but politely humored Agatha by asking questions, hoping a feigned interest would mask the rudeness of her disbelief.
"They crawl? How strange. Are they babies?" The friend asked.
"No, they are full grown. A man and a woman. Always crawling, up and down, up and down."
"do you recognize them?"
"No, but they look old fashioned."
"Did anyone die in your house?"
"I've tried to investigate, but I haven't found anything about a death, let alone two."
The friend could think of no more questions to ask. There was a slow and thick silence.
"I have a call on the other line," the friend said "Do you mind waiting for a second?"
"Sure, go ahead."
the friend never returned to Agatha's line. Agatha stopped waiting and hung up the phone, feeling a little bit embarrassed but a little bit relieved after finally revealing her problem.
When the ghosts first emerged each night, they were not yet in human form. They looked like small flickering blue lights floating up and down. Within a half hour, they grew and melded themselves into the familiar forms of the man and the woman. Agatha could smell the ghosts before she saw the light. They smelled like cinnamon. As the night progressed, the scent of cinnamon strengthened and wafted around h two moving ghosts. At midnight, the ghosts promptly vanished. The smell of cinnamon lingered in the air long after the ghosts disappeared.
The woman ghosts had hollow eyes that were framed with long eyelashes. Her high cheek bones must have made her look elegant or refined as a human, but in deaths she looked skeletal and hungry. Her full lips were always parted to reveal a dark gap that must have been a glimpse into the darkness that filled her translucent body. Tangled, windblown hair framed her face like a frizzy mane.
The man's bluish ski was deeply grooved with part marks. A shaggy beard dangled room his chin. The beard hair seemed to blend in with his arms. The dark hollow of his eyes were larger and bleaker than the woman's.
Agatha loved everything about her house except for the nightly visits from the ghosts. When they first started their tedious trek up and down her walls, the ghosts scared Agatha. She no prior experience with the paranormal and and had never longed for it. She slept at friends houses, to avoid the ghosts, but she always came armed with an excuses: The house was being fumigated, or she had noisy neighbors. Eventually she eased into sleeping in the living room. She considered bringing the bed into the living room and keeping the door to the bedroom permanently shut. After a couple of months with the same repetition of crawling and nothing else room the ghosts, she became less intimidated. The commonality and predictability of the ghosts almost made them seem mundane, but still unwelcome. Even after she was less afraid, she still could not sleep in the room. They always glowed, and Agatha couldn't fall asleep with lights moving up and down the wall. As they crawled, their limbs made loud thumps against the wall. Whether they were scaring her or annoying her, she decided she could no longer live with the presence of these ghosts. Some how she was going to get rid of them.
The sunlight was steadily streaming through her open windows as she set to work. She could still smell cinnamon, but the scent of lavender drifted in from her neighbors garden, slowly mingling with the ghosts trademark smell. She doused the four walls with ghost repellent she had purchased from an internet sight. She was worried that the repellent was a novelty gift rather than serious ghost repellent. She stood on a chair and with a pint roller spread the repellent on her walls and ceilings. With a spray bottle usually reserved for her misbehaving cats, she spritzed the furniture and carpet. Before night, she would bathe in the ghost repellent and soak her own clothes with it, sot he ghosts wouldn't get any ideas about possessing her. Everything in the room would be covered with the repellent except for two glass jars.
The last rays of sunlight dissipated behind the far off horizon, and the two ghosts predictably appeared from their invisible realm. They attempted to resume their nightly scuttle up and down the walls, but were swiftly thwarted by the repellent. They slipped down the walls and each plopped into an open jar. Agatha merrily screwed on the lids.
"I caught you." she whispered smugly to one of the hosts, who had not yet assumed the human form of the late night, and only flickered in response.
Agatha was concerned that as midnight swiftly approached, the ghosts would transform from the small flickering lights into full grown human ghosts, and in the process break their glass enclosures. But as midnight approached, they did not grow. Instead they manifested into tiny human ghosts. Once midnight arrived, the ghosts did not disappear. They remand in the from of three inch tall versions of their humanized form.
Agatha had not made plans for what to do with the ghosts after she captured them. She hadn't really believed that it would work. She kept the jars side by side on a shelf on her bookcase. For the first week, the two shrunken ghosts mostly sat motionless in their jars except for the flickering of their hazy forms. They slouched in the jars, each deflated. But as time stretched on, the two ghosts took more of an interest in each other. They started at each other across the jars. Their shadowed eyes seemed to hunger for each other. They would stretch out their arms to each other and press their faces against the glass. Agatha watched them unsuccessfully try to climb up the side of the jar. The longer the ghosts sat side by side in their jars, the more they turned to each other with desperate and lonely expressions on their faces. The silent interaction of the two ghosts gave Agatha the heebie-jeebies. She put a book in between the two jars so they could no longer see each other. But instead of reacquiring their original bland expressions, they looked at Agatha with the longing expression. Every time Agatha moved through the room, the ghosts followed her with their hollow eyes.
But it was the scent of cinnamon that was the most intolerable to Agatha. The smell grew stronger with each passing day until the entire house smelled like the spice. The smell seeped into her skin. when she went to work, coworkers curiously glanced at her. One of them asked if baking was her hobby. Another mentioned her cinnamon perfume. A particularly insipid male coworker began to refer to her as cinnamon buns.
Agatha needed to somehow dispose of the two ghosts. She considered freeing them in an abandoned house. They could have all the walls they wanted to scuttle about. But she did not want to risk that they would find their way back like a dog lost on a road trip meticulously and miraculously tracking its way home.
Even though she didn't understand it, ghosts and the paranormal were much revered about and speculated over in the popular culture. Agatha decided to capitalize upon the cultures fetishism of the paranormal by selling her ghosts to a ghost enthusiast.
She listed the ghosts separately on Ebay, each starting at twenty dollars. The female ghost sold for 45 dollars but the male ghost only sold for 37. The woman ghost was going to Georgia and the male was off to Alaska. She felt a surge of guilt knowing the two ghosts would be separated. Mostly, she was relieved to get rid of the ghosts who had been nuisances. She felt spiteful toward the ghosts. She resented the interruptions to her sleep and the added element of eeriness they brought to her life. The attribute she had craved most out of life was normality. Boredom never depressed her, unoriginality never felt threatening. With the ghost money, she bought a used TV for her bedroom and a new pair of jeans.
About a year after she sold the ghosts, she began having strange reactions to the smell of cinnamon. She would go into a trance and have a waking dream. In her dreams, she saw the same two people. A beautiful young woman with long dark hair and large, thickly lashed eyes. A man with rough skin and a long beard but a a sweet smile and a glimmer in his eyes. Sometimes she saw them dancing in a meadow. They were surrounded by wildflowers and the comforting warble of country birds. They laughed while waltzing together. Sometimes they just held hands and twirled in circles. Sometimes she saw them at the seashore. The man pointing out to the sea and talking. Agatha never understood what he said. She heard the steady murmur of his voice but the meaning of the words were muffled by the crashing waves. The woman bent down collecting seashells while the water lapped at the hem of her long dress. They looked happy but underneath it all she saw the flicker of the ghostly hunger they always wore in the after life.
Agatha tried to avoid the smell of cinnamon. At the grocery store she never went down the spice isle. She took a longer way tow work in order to avoid walking by a bakery that always smelled strongly of cinnamon. Sometimes after the trances, she felt like a ghost her self.
By the time Agatha was a very old woman, she no longer disliked the trances. She sought them out. She kept cinnamon in her cupboard and every morning took a deep inhale of the smell. As an old woman Agatha would wake up in the middle of the night feeling an intense sensation of fear. What she was afraid of was that she had missed out on something in life. When she watched the ghosts during the cinnamon trance, she felt comforted. Every night before falling asleep she would smell the cinnamon. In her dreams she would be watching the life of two people who would eventually become ghosts as they slowly glided in a a waltz across an open filed , long ago built over.
When it began, Agatha dreaded the sunset. Dusk slowly descended from the East and Agatha's skin bristled with goose bumps. It wasn't pleasant seeing two ghosts slowly crawl up and down her bedroom walls. Every night, the ghosts materialized from the bland invisibility of still air just as the last dim layer of light melded with the darkness.
The ghosts never altered from the limiting position of the crawl. Agatha never saw them attempt to alter positions or even to remain still. It was always the same sluggish yet meticulous crawl. They crawled like they were crossing the Sahara without water. Slow, and as if their limbs were heavy despite the ethereal appearance of their wispy, opaque forms. One ghost crawled up the wall while another crawled down. They passed each other directly in the middle of the wall without variation. When they passed, they quickly and almost guiltily glanced at each others face. Their symmetry was infallible. They had mastered a perfection of precision that seemed to verify their otherworldlyness. In life nothing could be so unvaried. Even trained dancers stumbled. Even the most expert of musicians missed a note.
Agatha had many friends she loved, but she could not tell any of them about the ghosts. She ran with a caring yet stuffy crowd and she knew if she revealed the haunting her friends would be concerned but only about her sanity. The only person she did tell was an old friend from high school. The friend called to the surprise of Agatha who had long ago ceased to wonder about the friend after their sporadic communication dwindled years ago.
The distance both geographically and temporally made the friend feel safe. She was no real threat to Agatha's life because she was not at all part of it. The friend didn't believe in ghosts but politely humored Agatha by asking questions, hoping a feigned interest would mask the rudeness of her disbelief.
"They crawl? How strange. Are they babies?" The friend asked.
"No, they are full grown. A man and a woman. Always crawling, up and down, up and down."
"do you recognize them?"
"No, but they look old fashioned."
"Did anyone die in your house?"
"I've tried to investigate, but I haven't found anything about a death, let alone two."
The friend could think of no more questions to ask. There was a slow and thick silence.
"I have a call on the other line," the friend said "Do you mind waiting for a second?"
"Sure, go ahead."
the friend never returned to Agatha's line. Agatha stopped waiting and hung up the phone, feeling a little bit embarrassed but a little bit relieved after finally revealing her problem.
When the ghosts first emerged each night, they were not yet in human form. They looked like small flickering blue lights floating up and down. Within a half hour, they grew and melded themselves into the familiar forms of the man and the woman. Agatha could smell the ghosts before she saw the light. They smelled like cinnamon. As the night progressed, the scent of cinnamon strengthened and wafted around h two moving ghosts. At midnight, the ghosts promptly vanished. The smell of cinnamon lingered in the air long after the ghosts disappeared.
The woman ghosts had hollow eyes that were framed with long eyelashes. Her high cheek bones must have made her look elegant or refined as a human, but in deaths she looked skeletal and hungry. Her full lips were always parted to reveal a dark gap that must have been a glimpse into the darkness that filled her translucent body. Tangled, windblown hair framed her face like a frizzy mane.
The man's bluish ski was deeply grooved with part marks. A shaggy beard dangled room his chin. The beard hair seemed to blend in with his arms. The dark hollow of his eyes were larger and bleaker than the woman's.
Agatha loved everything about her house except for the nightly visits from the ghosts. When they first started their tedious trek up and down her walls, the ghosts scared Agatha. She no prior experience with the paranormal and and had never longed for it. She slept at friends houses, to avoid the ghosts, but she always came armed with an excuses: The house was being fumigated, or she had noisy neighbors. Eventually she eased into sleeping in the living room. She considered bringing the bed into the living room and keeping the door to the bedroom permanently shut. After a couple of months with the same repetition of crawling and nothing else room the ghosts, she became less intimidated. The commonality and predictability of the ghosts almost made them seem mundane, but still unwelcome. Even after she was less afraid, she still could not sleep in the room. They always glowed, and Agatha couldn't fall asleep with lights moving up and down the wall. As they crawled, their limbs made loud thumps against the wall. Whether they were scaring her or annoying her, she decided she could no longer live with the presence of these ghosts. Some how she was going to get rid of them.
The sunlight was steadily streaming through her open windows as she set to work. She could still smell cinnamon, but the scent of lavender drifted in from her neighbors garden, slowly mingling with the ghosts trademark smell. She doused the four walls with ghost repellent she had purchased from an internet sight. She was worried that the repellent was a novelty gift rather than serious ghost repellent. She stood on a chair and with a pint roller spread the repellent on her walls and ceilings. With a spray bottle usually reserved for her misbehaving cats, she spritzed the furniture and carpet. Before night, she would bathe in the ghost repellent and soak her own clothes with it, sot he ghosts wouldn't get any ideas about possessing her. Everything in the room would be covered with the repellent except for two glass jars.
The last rays of sunlight dissipated behind the far off horizon, and the two ghosts predictably appeared from their invisible realm. They attempted to resume their nightly scuttle up and down the walls, but were swiftly thwarted by the repellent. They slipped down the walls and each plopped into an open jar. Agatha merrily screwed on the lids.
"I caught you." she whispered smugly to one of the hosts, who had not yet assumed the human form of the late night, and only flickered in response.
Agatha was concerned that as midnight swiftly approached, the ghosts would transform from the small flickering lights into full grown human ghosts, and in the process break their glass enclosures. But as midnight approached, they did not grow. Instead they manifested into tiny human ghosts. Once midnight arrived, the ghosts did not disappear. They remand in the from of three inch tall versions of their humanized form.
Agatha had not made plans for what to do with the ghosts after she captured them. She hadn't really believed that it would work. She kept the jars side by side on a shelf on her bookcase. For the first week, the two shrunken ghosts mostly sat motionless in their jars except for the flickering of their hazy forms. They slouched in the jars, each deflated. But as time stretched on, the two ghosts took more of an interest in each other. They started at each other across the jars. Their shadowed eyes seemed to hunger for each other. They would stretch out their arms to each other and press their faces against the glass. Agatha watched them unsuccessfully try to climb up the side of the jar. The longer the ghosts sat side by side in their jars, the more they turned to each other with desperate and lonely expressions on their faces. The silent interaction of the two ghosts gave Agatha the heebie-jeebies. She put a book in between the two jars so they could no longer see each other. But instead of reacquiring their original bland expressions, they looked at Agatha with the longing expression. Every time Agatha moved through the room, the ghosts followed her with their hollow eyes.
But it was the scent of cinnamon that was the most intolerable to Agatha. The smell grew stronger with each passing day until the entire house smelled like the spice. The smell seeped into her skin. when she went to work, coworkers curiously glanced at her. One of them asked if baking was her hobby. Another mentioned her cinnamon perfume. A particularly insipid male coworker began to refer to her as cinnamon buns.
Agatha needed to somehow dispose of the two ghosts. She considered freeing them in an abandoned house. They could have all the walls they wanted to scuttle about. But she did not want to risk that they would find their way back like a dog lost on a road trip meticulously and miraculously tracking its way home.
Even though she didn't understand it, ghosts and the paranormal were much revered about and speculated over in the popular culture. Agatha decided to capitalize upon the cultures fetishism of the paranormal by selling her ghosts to a ghost enthusiast.
She listed the ghosts separately on Ebay, each starting at twenty dollars. The female ghost sold for 45 dollars but the male ghost only sold for 37. The woman ghost was going to Georgia and the male was off to Alaska. She felt a surge of guilt knowing the two ghosts would be separated. Mostly, she was relieved to get rid of the ghosts who had been nuisances. She felt spiteful toward the ghosts. She resented the interruptions to her sleep and the added element of eeriness they brought to her life. The attribute she had craved most out of life was normality. Boredom never depressed her, unoriginality never felt threatening. With the ghost money, she bought a used TV for her bedroom and a new pair of jeans.
About a year after she sold the ghosts, she began having strange reactions to the smell of cinnamon. She would go into a trance and have a waking dream. In her dreams, she saw the same two people. A beautiful young woman with long dark hair and large, thickly lashed eyes. A man with rough skin and a long beard but a a sweet smile and a glimmer in his eyes. Sometimes she saw them dancing in a meadow. They were surrounded by wildflowers and the comforting warble of country birds. They laughed while waltzing together. Sometimes they just held hands and twirled in circles. Sometimes she saw them at the seashore. The man pointing out to the sea and talking. Agatha never understood what he said. She heard the steady murmur of his voice but the meaning of the words were muffled by the crashing waves. The woman bent down collecting seashells while the water lapped at the hem of her long dress. They looked happy but underneath it all she saw the flicker of the ghostly hunger they always wore in the after life.
Agatha tried to avoid the smell of cinnamon. At the grocery store she never went down the spice isle. She took a longer way tow work in order to avoid walking by a bakery that always smelled strongly of cinnamon. Sometimes after the trances, she felt like a ghost her self.
By the time Agatha was a very old woman, she no longer disliked the trances. She sought them out. She kept cinnamon in her cupboard and every morning took a deep inhale of the smell. As an old woman Agatha would wake up in the middle of the night feeling an intense sensation of fear. What she was afraid of was that she had missed out on something in life. When she watched the ghosts during the cinnamon trance, she felt comforted. Every night before falling asleep she would smell the cinnamon. In her dreams she would be watching the life of two people who would eventually become ghosts as they slowly glided in a a waltz across an open filed , long ago built over.