“Yes?” I asked.
“The boy’s still there, hauntin’ whoever tries to live there. Hell, they haven’t been able to get anyone to stay in that place longer than a week since the kid died.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“No kidding, son.”
I paid the man and got out of there.
It was around sunset when I got back to the cottage. I threw a steak on the grill, popped open one of the new beers, and started putting together a salad. I knocked out the first beer, which was pretty strong at 7.2% alcohol, and grabbed a second. With a nice little buzz already going, I went to the sunroom and sipped the drink as I looked over the ocean.
I didn’t know what to make of the old man’s ghost story but it didn’t matter. The cottage was mine for the summer and I had to start getting some ideas together. Writer’s block had never hit me like this before and it was a bit unnerving. What if this was it? What if the well had run dry? I sighed, finished off the beer, and went to take the steak off the grill.
After I’d finished dinner I went for a walk on the beach and, when I got back, grabbed another beer and sat down at the computer. The purple sky over the ocean had a few remaining traces of red in it and a half moon had risen over the mountains. I rubbed my hands together and prepared to let the creativity flow.
And nothing happened.
Fragments of images skirted in and out of my mind but nothing cohesive, nothing exciting. I drank another beer and gazed out at the ocean. Time seemed to move in slow motion and as the sky turned black I could feel myself falling asleep again. Maybe if I just lie down for a bit, I thought.
I got up and went upstairs to the bedroom. A sliver of moonlight crept through the window onto the bed and without bothering to close the bedroom door I crawled onto it and quickly fell asleep.
My eyes popped open when I heard a creaking noise in the room. I lay there for a few seconds and my skin froze when a high-pitched voice murmured in the hallway. I couldn’t tell what it was saying; it was just a frenzied mishmash of words. I reached over and turned the lamp on.
The bedroom door was closed.
Sitting up, I listened as the voice moved along the outside of the bedroom wall and then back to right outside the door.
The voice slowly became clear.
“Yooou left me. Yooou left me. Yooou left me.”
Over and over again.
I slid out of bed and moved to the door. The words flowed into the room like a whisper and a scream at the same time. After about a minute the voice faded and then went silent. I opened the door a crack. Nothing.
And then I heard water rushing from the bathroom faucet.
I pushed the door open and went into the hallway. Through the darkness of the bathroom I could see a thick line of water streaming into the sink. I flipped the bathroom light on.
In the mirror the boy stood right behind me.
My heart pounded as we stared at each other. After a few seconds I turned around and he was gone.
It was just after 2:00 a.m. and I badly needed to get out of the cottage. I hurried downstairs and walked towards the sunroom, my skin chilling when I saw the soft white glow of my computer.
Lines of giant question marks filled up the page.
I looked over at the doorwall. It was locked.
I went into the kitchen, made some coffee, and spent the rest of the night sitting on the front porch.
When the sun started to come up I went back inside and took a quick shower. That old man hadn’t been kidding, and I now knew my eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on me when I saw the disappearing kid in the ocean. After I got dressed and went back downstairs, I half-heartedly tried to get some writing in but gave up after about a half hour. My lack of sleep had caught up with me and I went over to the recliner and closed my eyes. When I woke up I could tell from the bright yellow sun that it was around noon, so I got up, had lunch, and then went out onto the beach.
The waves were about three feet high. As I gazed down the empty stretch of beach towards the mountains, a scream that could shatter glass shot thought the air. My eyes snapped back to the water and I saw the boy neck deep in the ocean and frantically waving his arms.
What the hell was I supposed to do? I’d rented a haunted beachfront cottage, couldn’t write a book to save my life, and now had to watch a ghost kid go through the motions of drowning every day.
And then it hit me.
I hurried over to the rowboat and pushed it into the water. The waves smacked against the boat, causing it to jerk up and down, but I managed to climb into it and started paddling towards the boy. It was a real bitch fighting the tide and my arm muscles burned like fire as I pushed over the waves. I looked back at the cottage and then at the boy again. He didn’t seem to see me and he kept going through the same waving motion like he was stuck in some kind of repeating loop. After a lot of thrashing and queasy ups and downs I cleared the rough part of the
