She stood at the edge of the casino’s sidewalk.
I snapped the Zippo shut and took a deep drag. As usual, I couldn’t see details of her face, just a sort of oval-shaped black shadow with transparent shoulder-length black hair and a wispy hourglass body.
I took another pull on the cigarette and flicked it into the parking lot. There was a bottle of scotch waiting for me at home and movies on Netflix. If ghost girl wanted to join me she could, but mostly likely the scotch would relax my guilty subconscious and it would just be me and the fifty-two-inch Sony.
I hurried over to the Charger—I’d sold the Mustang the second I’d crossed into Pennsylvania—and hopped in. My neck was starting to get a little tight from not having a drink in ten hours and I fired the car up, backed out, and peeled off. Flipping on the radio, I played around with the stations as I checked the rearview mirror. I didn’t see any ghost girls following me and I sped off down the two lane stretch of moonlit desert highway.
When I got back to my house, I showered, threw on my old Syracuse lacrosse shorts, and grabbed the scotch and a rock glass from the onyx wet bar in the living room. I’d been renting the house for almost two years now and at $1,700 a month, it wasn’t exactly a steal but it was a lot nicer than any of the apartments around here and it gave me some space. Besides, there was no way in hell I was about to buy anything. Not for a while yet anyways.
With my bottle in one hand and glass in the other I flopped down on the leather couch, flipped on the TV, and started scrolling through the movie section on Netflix. They had a Schwarzenegger collection now and I felt like some mindless fun so I went with Commando, which somehow I’d never seen. After an intro with a few scenes of serious-looking guys killing people, the credits and 80s synthesizer music started to roll and I poured myself a drink. I took a sip and my back muscles eased as I settled into the movie. Schwarzengger’s character lived in some nice big house up in the mountains of what looked like Colorado or Idaho and as I took another sip it hit me how much I missed skiing. I’d done a lot of it growing up and had been good, real good, but it’d been at least ten years since I’d hit the slopes and my life had been all about forgetting the past for the past three.
An hour or so went by; I rubbed my chin and lifted the bottle off the cube. As hoped for, the movie was dumb and entertaining and I poured myself my fourth or fifth drink.
I set the bottle down and saw her standing in the hallway that led to my bedroom. I took a drink and closed my eyes. Usually she would be gone when I opened them again.
But when I did she was still there.
She hovered over the floor just high enough to show me what she was but low enough that it seemed like she was trying to present herself as human. I swallowed hard and turned back to the movie. If I ignored her she would eventually go away. She always did.
But this time she floated towards me. I pretended not to see her and stared intently as Arnold rubbed camouflage all over his body and strapped himself with enough weapons to blow up a small army, which a few seconds later is exactly what he began to do.
Coldness wrapped around me like an invisible icy blanket and she let out a piercing shriek of pain that made my neck tighten and my ear drums twist. She’d never made a sound before and I knew it was to let me know what it’d felt like when my car had slammed into her. I shifted my body down the couch hoping she’d go away but she kept coming, past the coffee table and then up over the couch so that she was hovering right above me.
And then her black, skeletal like hands reached for my face.
I jumped off the couch, stumbled to my room, hit the bed, and passed out. Hours later I woke up to a bad case of cotton mouth and a warm sunbeam in my face.
I sat up and looked around the room.
She was gone.
I pushed myself out of bed, showered, and got dressed. After frying up a few eggs and a couple of cups of coffee, I went out for a three-mile run. When I got back I had a voicemail from the casino asking if I could fill in for one of the dealers just from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Friday nights were usually good nights to work and I called them back and said no problem. I spent the rest of the afternoon lying out by the pool wondering if I should go back to seeing a psychiatrist. The first time I’d gone to see a shrink had been in the second month of the “ghost” visits. My doctor had seemed like a good enough guy and had even prescribed me Valium after my first visit, but to me the whole thing was pointless. No way was I telling him what I’d done in New York and I figured I could just keep self-medicating until my head decided to make this all go away.
And hell, if I really was being visited by a dead girl’s ghost there wasn’t anything some shrink could do about it anyways.
But things were only getting worse.
Around four in the afternoon I got up and went to run some errands. When I got home I threw a California Pizza in the oven and went to the