Instructions Unclear: How to Haunt Your House's Ghost

Transcript

To whomever should find this letter, being alone is crucial. That's how he ensures you're paying attention. When conditions and the time are exactly right, he simply shows up, his body making no noise as he comes to rest in the room.

But make no mistake, he is by no means silent. In fact, the important thing one should note is that he is always talking, usually recounting some story or other which lays bare long forgotten scars in the places and people of the unreachable past. A secret stone here, an extraterrestrial encounter there, the occasional avian murder mystery.

My recollection of our first meeting is admittedly hazy. It should have struck me at the time that prior to leaving for the estate, the emerging smell of old wood as well as creeping dread saturated the air everywhere I went. My offices, my apartment, even in shopping centers or simply Even in shopping centers or simply on the street.

Please note that these are classic symptoms hinting at his arrival. They grow stronger as he comes closer and in fact, by the time I drove under the two bright lights of the last service station outside of my destination, I was too distracted by my own thoughts to notice the out of place and pungent scent of cedar as he settled comfortably into my passenger seat already chatting away. I am a scientist by trade and a spiritualist by nature.

I've spent much of my time and life seeking to understand the inexplicable, to dissect and get to the root of life's most occupying mysteries. I am accustomed to occupying two universes, asking complicated questions, receiving puzzling responses. On top of that, I've worked in this field for five years.

However, despite all of my hypothetical preparation for such matters, his invasion scared me nearly to death. As I swerved first over the gravelly shoulder and then back onto asphalt, heart in my throat, my mind was divided. Initially, I was full of demands to know how this thing made its way into my space.

Why was it here? Would it go away? As I reoriented myself back to completing my journey safely, I began to wonder whether this might be some sort of messenger from the farm estate I was to be occupying, or was it not to do with my professional work at all, and instead I was personally being entrapped by something I had more incidentally disturbed.

If the thing, if he, could know my thoughts, he gave no indication. An hour passed and I, or I supposed we, crossed the property line to the charming little farm estate that was to be my new home. The entire way there, his rambling didn't cease, even once.

The real problem is that he's always so pleased with himself, as though he's painstakingly unearthed some precious treasure, and he's determined to hold it in just the right light for my examination. It's hard to reject his eagerness, feeling as it does like some sort of commonly disturbing Victorian courtship ritual. For the first several weeks, he only came to me in the car, left alone too long with my own thoughts, and they'd soon be overrun by some emphatic retelling of shipwrecks and mysterious islands, of hucksters and fairies and all that has been lost to them.

At first, the constantly fluctuating adrenaline was unbearable. Every random story was a warning, raising my heart rate and prickling my skin with uncomfortable heat, preaching compulsive caution against entities too ancient to have names. At a point, though, anxiety managed to become curiosity.

During a number of late-night drives, I found myself chancing fleeting glances out of the corner of my eye that soon became seconds-long gazes under the glow of a stoplight. His body is of endless fascination to me. It's there, but it isn't.

In his hands can appear simultaneous scars of rope burns and battle-sharp bayonets, in his stomach a terrible hollowness of famine. Even his usually attractive, unthreatening grin can suddenly be filled with centuries-old blood and venom, dripping between the skeletal mounds of sometimes-missing teeth over his lips and chin, with no acknowledgement from him whatsoever. I've since become used to this constant mixed feeling of intrigue and horror.

In fact, for several months, I've allowed his stories to be my constant companions, every proven theory and new discovery burning away at my work and my nerves as I navigate old buildings and even older paperwork. So great was my desire to understand everything about him that I even allowed him to join me in new places. Libraries, high-rises, city halls.

His voice even echoes pleasantly in my ears while I make my way through the winding halls of my current home. Most evenings see him splayed out across the formal dining room table, talking to the chandeliers about witch hunts and decrepit hotels, and not answering my questions. It's become something of a routine, these little sessions, and in fact, several of my previous findings have his robust knowledge base to thank for their existence.

However, regardless of that, I'm often reminded that not everyone sees the value in such companionship as I do. The way that visiting friends and associates react when I tell them about him has become as predictable as it is exhausting. It always starts as genuine curiosity, it always starts as genuine curiosity.

Perhaps they've glimpsed him in a hallway, heard him whispering through the air in the study, maybe he's even tried speaking to them directly. They'll insist that I describe him in detail, to explain the way his voice touches the mind like a caress to the spine, the way his eyes seem soft as winter mittens, and yet, if you look at them for too long, you might notice that he sometimes has three translucent pupils, and the way his irises seem carved into the formless miasma behind the reflective silver of his glasses. They're equal parts amazed and aghast that I've spent enough time with him to notice the way the air changes when he's preparing to tell me something new.

More so, they are appalled and embarrassed at the way my breath quickens while relaying the awful discoveries I've been subjected to. In the spring, during a relatively normal meeting, a concerned colleague clutched my arms and, dragging me from my seat, demanded to know why my notes mimic novels and mimic novels and songs and poems too numerous to count. The sickening, vivid intimacy was too much for her, and I had no adequate explanation.

When I left that afternoon, amid my blank-eyed wandering and bitter fuming, it took him less than half a block to appear at my elbow and keep pace with me as I made my way. My frustration and embarrassment inevitably gave way to nosiness, and I pondered with him over the letters of despondent husbands and terminally optimistic wives in the frontier days of Australia. Would my own diaries from these days be so significant? Would there come a future time, a future tenant, who might hear of my own coexistence with this apparition, read my notes?

I didn't know. You know, somehow utterly unrelated to all of this, I am prone to bouts of insomnia. It's not usually brought on by much of anything, but the hours nonetheless crawl by me as spidery cracks of blood and exhaustion work their way across my eyes.

One such night, some time ago, I once again tossed and turned, as all the light leached from the sky, an impenetrable blackness coming to rest over the world. I was plagued by racing thoughts and a thundering heart, everything and nothing all at once. Every creak and sway of the house shot through me, ratcheting up the tension in my muscles and drowning me in stress and indecision.

Eventually, as a clock somewhere in the house told 3am, I became utterly desperate for something, anything, to force my body to register fatigue in the middle of this sleepless night. I gave in and turned to my bedside table to relieve my tension. So deep was my preoccupation with matters at hand that I managed to ignore the thick scent of winter pine rolling in on the sudden draft in the room while I looked for sleep's redemption under my duvet.

Almost as though my nocturnal vulnerability had summoned him by name, the texture of my vision began to change and the sound of shutters banging rhythmically against the house matched the impact of my heart beating in my throat. I shot up in bed following a terrible chill up my spine as he materialized inside my bedroom for the first time. More humanly than anything I'd ever experienced from him, he reached out to me with hands that hung limp and open, velvet-lined and steel-boned traps patiently waiting to crush me.

In my hysteria, I even thought I heard other voices filtering into the room through the walls. A true nightmare, yet more ghosts and demons to torment me. But no, it was me.

I was pleading over him, begging him in rough whispers to liberate me from whatever punishment this was. As I huddled there helpless in my bed, the fervent blinking back of tears and dryness of my mouth were of no concern to him. He needed no permission and he offered no comfort as he settled what body he had on the edge of my bed and loomed over me.

For hours, his voice dragged through me like razor wire, scraping and slicing and mixing even the very marrow of my bones into an incomprehensible mess of indescribable pain. I struggled to breathe and maintain consciousness as he deftly recounted the evils of the soil underneath us. This time he spoke in rolling, rumbling murmurs which contained the reverent pleas of women and the sorrowful bellows of men.

Every nerve I had roiled and writhed, a cruel and perverse imitation of my attempts at distraction, overstimulation in the worst sense of the word. In brief moments of lucidity, I wondered to myself if I had made some sort of critical error in my lifetime, if I had already become inextricably fused to whatever world he came from by my own actions either directly or indirectly, if perhaps ignoring the warnings of my childhood and making a life of reaching between this reality and the next had opened me up to being stolen away by something I couldn't understand. He evaporated out of my bedroom as the 5.13am sun faded in.

Idly I watched that sun come up as I lay ragged and ruined, flat on my back, drifting in and out. I did not rise until afternoon had passed, throbbing soreness and exhausted incoherence sweeping over me as I attempted to resume my work. I chose not to examine how, despite what felt at the time like paralyzing terror, the sensed memory of the night's agony made my hands shake pleasantly and my blood gather in my face.

I ignored the way my thoughts involuntarily kept hold of every word he'd uttered across those hours like prayerful mantras. I even did my best to convince myself that the fatigue of my mind wasn't in its own way deeply satisfying. Regardless of my best interests, I nonetheless clung to the memories of that night.

As it would turn out, that would be all that was left to me anyway, because he disappeared as the sun rose that day, and he didn't come back. A week passed, and then two more. A month later, and many of my nights remained as sleepless as they had always been, now characterized by a humiliating sheen of cold sweat as I tossed and turned in bed.