I was eight the first time I saw a ghost. At least that’s the first one I knew I saw. Seventeen percent of the population claims to have seen a ghost. The rest have had hundreds of encounters and seen thousands of ghosts. They just don’t know it. I didn’t either, not to the full extent, anyway.

Not until I died.

People think old and empty buildings are the most haunted places. Abandoned prisons or asylums. Ancient churches and bone yards. No. Ghosts want to be near the living. Hell, half of them don’t even know they’re dead. You know where it’s busiest? Hospital nurseries.

New, fresh, young, energetic life is the flame that draws these old tattered moths in the most. Well before their eyes are strong enough to see their own parents, babies can see them. Clearly. Their minds are most open and they are easiest to take over.

Reincarnation isn’t what you think it is. Otherwise, where did all the souls come from before there were more dead people than alive? No. What you think of as reincarnation is a possession. A hostile takeover, if you will.

Don’t worry. As sharp as their preternatural perceptions are, baby minds are still mush. They don’t feel a thing.

That’s where the trouble comes into paradise for those spirits most willing to take this leap. If you put your handprint in cement, before it has started to cure and stand up, the impression won’t hold. The loose, wet grit will weep back up to level and you’re left with the faintest outline. A ghost of a ghost.

There’s enough of their basic framework left. This can leave behind some of the stronger traits, some flashes of memory. Deja vu? Some sense of… knowing things before you should know them? If you’ve felt that, you know what I mean and now you know what it is.

The strongest of spirits can survive almost intact. That can be maddening. Trapped in that soft and fragile vessel. No control over your limbs; not able to articulate the adult thoughts in your now infant brain. It’s like sleep paralysis. You struggle to move your body, you try to scream yourself awake.

Toddlers are a better host. Or when your six year old daughter comes up and tells you she likes you better than her last parents? That is no longer your six year old. I mean, she’s in there, but she’s just along for the ride now. The phrase “old soul” is apt.

I’m what you call a drifter. I’m not interested in going for another corporeal roller coaster ride. I observe and report. I was one of the lucky ones, because I had pierced the veil early on in my natural life. I don’t know how many previous lives are rolled up into what I conceive of as me, but I do know I don’t want back in.

And I know there’s one spirit who didn’t make it inside me.

###

“Who are you?” I could make out the darker shadow within the shadows of my room. In the corner, the shape of a man, fading in and out of the blackness. “I know you can hear me.”

“You can see me?” I felt that more than I heard it.

“Kind of, it’s dark in here.” And with that, he turned his inner light on, no longer the shape of a man, more a cloud of tiny lightning bugs. They swarmed after me, I could feel the static energy all around my body. A thousand electric ants crawled my skin. I thought of the mini Tesla Coil at the museum that makes your hair stand straight up for the souvenir photo. The ants tunneled in, a large cluster of them tried to squeeze into my eyes, I shut them tight and screamed. 

My whole body said “No!” and the bugs were gone. He was gone. But not for long. His name is Walter. He tried for a few years to groom me before giving up and becoming my de facto mentor. 

Then my best friend and then my murderer and then my victim.

###

In his last life, Walter had risen to some prominence. Having rolled in a dozen or so souls along the way, he could now traverse the veil at will. He could move and interact with objects in the corporeal. He could communicate easily with those who had the right kinds of eyes, which were mostly kids.

By the time we are teenagers, we have learned to close all that off. The best, but hardest target is the pre-teen. A mind that is open enough to mold, yet formed enough to hold the whole of Walter without dilution. We are told—as I was told one night that I woke up screaming because Walter had tried to penetrate me again—that it was a dream. Ghosts don’t exist, our own minds are built to deceive; our own eyes play tricks.

The majority of people live that way, and when they have an encounter, or they see through the veil, they deny it. 

Just the lighting, just a reflection, just the wind, just a shadow.

###

My best friend, Eric, slept over often. His parents sucked, so his home life sucked. The first time he saw Walter, I told him it was just a shadow. I told him to lay back and close his eyes and open his mind. I held a pillow over his face so he couldn’t scream as Walter entered him and took him over from the inside out.

Eric’s parents never noticed. For a while, Eric remained mostly Eric.

For about a year, my two best friends were together with me in the corporeal, as Walter ate away the rest of Eric. Once inside, Walter was too strong to resist; Eric never wanted to be here in the first place, so he didn’t fight it. He was a fresh soul and arrived confused and angry and depressed by default.

New souls often do.

Being thrust naked and afraid into a world this shitty is not something someone would ask for. But having gone through it, they often miss it and are willing to go back. They will try and try to navigate it, life after life. Addicted to living. 

Eric was not one of those.

###

I wasn’t old enough to vote or even drive when Walter killed me. Shoved me off the trestle and told everyone I fell. I made the decision not to come back on the twelve story drop down to the rocks of the dry river bed. As I left that body, Walter tried to grab me and pull me in, but I was stronger in that way than Eric was.

Walter is still among you, but when he looks at you, he sees me. I appear before him, like a cataract, and he can never see what he wants to see. I am drawn to him when he experiences the most joy, and I force myself into his vision. The detached retina of his past. The gnat that buzzes inside his ear. While in this form, he cannot traverse the veil, he cannot move objects with his mind, he cannot move to another body. He can only see what most of you cannot.

He’s tried to end it. 

I knock the pills into the sink. I move the barrel of the gun. I snap the beam he has hung the noose from. Of course, I let him kick and flail. His eyes bulge, the veins in his face throb, the smaller vessels burst. He once tried to jump off the very trestle he threw me from and I let him fall, screaming and shitting himself for eleven of the twelve stories and broke his fall at the last second.

I haunt him. I hunt him. He will live a long and unhappy life.

In the end, when he is too feeble to fight it, I will enter him and I will subsume him. The only thing more frail than an infant is an old man waiting to die. Before he leaves that body, while he is still trapped in that weak and leaky rowboat, I will take his power. I will keep his lightning bugs in a jar, deep inside me, until all of their lights go out.

I had to pull over.  I had to get gas.  I had to get some air.  I promised Mom I wouldn’t drink, but I never said anything about getting high.  I barely remember the party.  Jimmy Breeze was there.  So were The Twins.  Lucky’s cabin, third one past the shoe tree.  It was the only one in that whole fire lane that looked like a cabin, even though everyone called their little catalog cottages on the lake “cabins.”  This one was rustic. Lucky Sr. built it back when there were no other cottages on the lane.  How long was I there? 

Lucky grew his own weed.  His latest harvest was a sixth generation melange of shit, started from seeds his dad had saved from back when shit had seeds; when they had just started using names like Afghan Red and Acapulco Gold.  I had been there a hundred times.  We all had.  I couldn’t remember being there tonight.  Marcy?  We made out by the bonfire and laughed because we both had cotton mouth so bad we were just making these gross smacking noises.  She had some gum.  Her hairspray and perfume and the fruity gum.  It was the dark crotch of Fall as it rounded the corner to the asshole of Winter, but she tasted like Summer and smelled like Spring.  Freezing rain.  She went inside, I had to leave.  Who would she kiss when I left?  Not like we were official or anything.  She’s not the type to settle down, but she didn’t wait around, either.

We had known each other forever.  She grew up on my street.  Our street, I guess.  Every boy in town had a thing for her older sister, Sherry.  And most every boy in town got what they wanted.  Not me.  It was always Marcy.  We grew up together, in every sense.  We were each other’s first, kiss, love, everything. 

We saw each other naked for the first time when we were sixteen. It had been hot that Summer and we were walking the nature trail and I told her about how the old quarry had filled up with crystal clear water.  We made our way down a slippery trail that when it rained became a waterfall.  Without warning or notice, she took off her clothes, except her ratty All-Stars and jumped in.  How the fuck would she even get back out?  It was a cliff all around, the water snakes, the snapping turtles, the-and I was in.  The days only got shorter after that.

#

The sleet was already sheeting into ice on my windshield.  How long was I here?  Gas.  I got out and started pumping.  The lights buzzed under the canopy over the pump.  Still caked in the dead bugs of summer.  The store had one of those vending machines for live bait.  How long can leeches live in that thing?  Whose job is it to keep it stocked? 

My car always smelled vaguely of gas, but I was hit by a wave of it as I topped off the tank.  It used to be my Grandmother’s.  It looked like a grocery getter. She offered it to me, thinking it might be too embarrassing, but a car is a car when you’re sixteen.  Plus, it had a goddamn 455, four-barrel.  She had it for almost 20 years and had put 12,000 miles on it.  I doubled that in the two years since she gave it to me.  Very smooth ride.  If not for the speedometer, you’d have no idea how fast you were going.  Gas eating beast.  It was like steering a boat.  American Steel.  The back seat was like a twin bed.  Nights like tonight, she’d sputter a bit when you turned the key.  But once that motor started-

Who the fuck is walking in this shit?  I could see his bright red varsity coat.  It looked like it was floating along the shoulder with no one in it at first.  Did he go to my school?  I was always shit with names, but good with faces.  Even as his came into focus, I didn’t recognize it.

“Hey, man, where you headed?”

He stopped.  He turned slowly and faced me.

“You going into town?  I’ll give you a ride.  You’ll die in this bullshit.”

He was already in the car by the time I got in.  Even up close, I couldn’t place him.

“You go to Ransom? What grade?”

“I’m a senior.” He stared straight ahead. Freezing? Shock? Was he as high as I was?

“I gotta be honest, bro, I’m a senior, I don’t recognize you.”

“We have classes together.”

“Were you at Lucky’s? Where you coming from?”

“So cold.”  He turned away and looked out the window. 

Which was fine.  The edge of cold was wearing off and the weed was creeping back up on me.  Anxiety. 

The sleet had become wintery mix.  It was flying at me like I was warping through space.  There was no radio signal out here, so I had flipped it to cassette.  The thing was jammed.  I couldn’t change tapes and had spent the last three months listening to Boston’s eponymous first album.  I had grown real tired of that album, but the back story was great.

Tom Scholz had essentially recorded the whole thing in his leaky New England basement on hundreds of dollars of equipment, while tricking the record company into thinking he was in an LA studio.  They flew Brad Delp out there to overdub the vocals as cover for the ruse.  In actuality, the only song fully recorded on their whiz-bang, state-of-the-art equipment was “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.”  The Taylor acoustic they had in the studio cost more Tom’s entire set-up, where he was laying down final tracks with his $100 Yamaha.  Two places at the same time.  Tom was stubborn, autocratic and a legend in the biz.

Gonna hitch a ride, head for the other side…

“Sorry about the music, man.  It’s all I got.”

The wintery mix had given way to a creeping fog.  We were cutting through the swamps, where the cold sink on the East side of the road pulled the thick mist across the road like a low-hung cloud bank sliding over the mountains. 

“This woulda been a long walk, why the hell were you out there?”  It was killing me that I didn’t know this kid.

“I had an accident, my car hit a tree. Or…” he seemed unsure, himself. “A car hit me?”

“Jesus, man, are you hurt?”

“No, just cold.”

“I bet, I was just down that road, and didn’t see any cars. You had to be walking awhile.”

“I think it was up here.” He pointed out the windshield.

“But-” he was gone.  His jacket was sitting on my front seat.  What the fuck did I smoke?  I looked in the back seat.  No one. 

“How-” he was in the middle of the road.  In front of me.  This was not my first Winter driving.  I knew how to handle a car in the ice and snow.  It all happened so fast that I panicked.  I planted both feet on the brakes.  Hard. 

Nothing.

The wheels locked up.  Black ice, under slush.  Zero friction.  No screeching tires.  The music played.  The back end started drifting around a little. 

Leave it all behind…

Silence.  There was no sound of impact.  He flew up and over the car and I saw in the rear view mirror as he tumbled down the road.  I went off on the West side.  Water blasted up around the car as I came to a dead stop.  Head on into a tree. 

That did make noise.  All the noise, all at once.  Everything that had transpired in the last three seconds, that had been stretched out for what seemed like an hour, replayed in full speed and at double volume.

…Carry me away for the last time.

I turned the radio off.  The engine was clicking from the sudden splash of cold.  Steam and fluids sprayed out from under the hood.  In my rear view, I could see him lying on the highway in a crumpled heap.  Even without his jacket, all I could see was red.  The red of the blood.  The red of the brake lights washing over him.  I was wedged in place like an action figure in the wrong vehicle.  My arms locked at the elbows on the steering wheel, my legs still locked the brakes to the floor.   I could barely relax them enough to let off.  I turned the key off.  The running lights went out.  The rear-view mirror was black.

I was so warm.  Then, the cold set in.

#

The shoe tree.  More like trees.  There were three big oaks in a row on the road to Lucky’s cabin.  It started with a pair tied together and tossed up in the branches.  Everyone had swimming shoes.  For the lake, the quarry, ponds, the canal, the creek-any place that was equal parts slippery rocks, broken beer bottles and snagged fishing lures.  At the end of Summer, heading back from the cottages, it became a tradition to toss them up there.  Then, once one tree was full, we started nailing them to the trunk.  Then a second.  Then a third.  I remember Marcy was the first one to nail hers.

“You can’t lace flip-flops together, dummy.”

She climbed as high as she could in her bare feet, and using my tire iron and a couple of nails we found floating around in the trunk, nailed her flops to the oak in tribute to the end of Summer at the lake.  Peering up now, in the cold blackness of the pending ice storm, I could see them.  Why was I walking? Where was my car? 

I went back up the road to Lucky’s.  The party had died down.  A handful of people were in the main room of the cabin, squirming on the couch, riding out the final throes of “The Heat.”  Lucky was twisting a fatty, while another one dangled, still burning, from his mouth.  Red cups.  The Twins were in the kitchen speaking that drunken shorthand that only twins knew.  Football?  No.  Politics.  They were Hella smart for a couple of hicks.  One headed to Columbia, one to Cornell.

Who was she kissing by the fire?  Jimmy?  We weren’t exclusive, but it bothered me.  She was pretty good about not rubbing my nose in it.  She probably just didn’t expect me to come back.  I told myself whomever it was didn’t matter to her.  Which made me wonder if I did.  There was that laugh.  That kooky infectious laugh.  I had heard it a million times and it still made me smile.  Even now.  I should go.

#

It was colder than I remember.  Was it because I was just inside by the pellet stove?  No.  My fucking pants were wet.  I jammed my hands deep in the pockets of my coat.  His coat?  Where the fuck did I park?  I could see the soft glow of the gas station ahead.  Someone pumping gas.

“Hey, man, where you headed?”