Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this story:
The Tale of The Morse Code Ghost.
Last night was the second-to-last of house-sitting for the Smiths. Ay and I spent a quiet evening making dinner, drinking, and watching the Simpsons marathon. (I later did as the movie promotional commercial instructed me and tried to Simpsonize myself. It did not work.) By all accounts, this was an enjoyable, lovely evening to begin drawing this venture to a close.
About one, we went up to bed. I was pretty beat, so I fell asleep first, while my counterpart stayed up to watch a little more TV. I woke up about 4 hours later. Ae had dozed off, as he so often does, with the television on. I turned it off, and rolled over to go back to sleep.
I have always felt that there is something about the country that has an effect on people, and therefore the places in which they live. I have been tent camping with my mother nearly every autumn without fail since I was a toddler. And every year, I get the same sort of feeling when the sun sets over the orange Appalachians. Bumpkin-desperation mixed with the cold and throw in a few weird noises, and I’d have myself a regular creep-fest. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, all through those years out there. Even when my aunt bought a cabin in Rabun Gap when I was fifteen, and our mother-daughter fall foliage outings moved indoors, it was still there. Desolate sensations; no-one-can-hear-you-scream, someone is watching me.
In the sudden darkness after the television’s doused light, I could hear something, and I felt that old fear settle on my brain like a cold blanket. A was fast asleep, snoring gently, while my heartbeat was quickening and sweat was collecting in my eyebrows. It was a clicking, popping, cracking, quiet at first and then louder. It would go on for a while, then stop and start again quietly. It was coming from the ceiling, in the corner furthest from the bed. The rotation of the ceiling fan was cooling my sweat, and I shivered but couldn’t move. I was completely terrified.
Who had died such a grim and untimely death that their restless soul felt that they should come back, here and now, to torment me? Who did I owe anything, and why now? What had happened here? Beaten to death and crammed in the attic of the farmhouse that stood in this very spot, on the very farm that was bulldozed to make way for this neighborhood, sometimes she returns, sometimes she clicks…sometimes she clicks…
By six a.m., I had spun the whole sad story in my head, and I was petrified. I shook A awake and, though my throat was clenched as tightly as my clammy hands, I squeaked, “Do you hear that?”
But he was dead! Killed right next to her in bed, and she felt the sticky blood and screamed, and the ghost kept clicking —
“Turn off the fan.” He muttered, snorted, and went back to sleep. I steeled myself, opened my eyes as wide as I could, curled my toes, and shuffled over to the wall and flipped the switch. The clicking stopped immediately.
All things considered, I slept great this morning. I am a bit dissapointed, though. Because I know deep down, the whole reason I feel the way I feel, whether it’s huddled in a sleeping bag or wide-eyed in the darkness of a huge house, is because I want to hear the ghost. I want to let the countryside effect me in that way, because it’s fun, and it makes this region even more special to me.
