Liam's Ghost Story

Liam's Ghost Story (Chapter 2)

Liam's breath caught in his throat, halfway to a scream, but muscles convulsed and locked in a panicked reaction to the wrongness in front of him. After half a beat, his well conditioned mind calmed his body enough to draw a breath, "What the hell is she?" Liam's voice grated from deep down in his stomach where his heart was currently hiding. His eyes were still locked on the brilliantly burning cold blue orbs of the little girl.

"Oh, can you see her?" Gretty turned her head and looked to where the girl had appeared a second before. The dead girl swiveled her head as if it were on a rusty hinge, jerking around spasmodically to stare at Gretty, eyes unblinking, no muscle twitching or flexing to support the movement. The side of her face that she exposed to Liam looked as if it had been softened like cheese left in the sun on a hot afternoon. The flesh was smooth and bloodless-white, rolls of the melted skin pooling down around her neck, the lump of what was probably an ear hung in a shapeless fold two centimeters above her jaw line. The exposed skull was darkened with soot and pitted as if acid had been splashed recklessly on the girls naked skeleton.

Gretty shivered as the corpse's eyes raked over her. "You must be something special to be able to see the poor soul. Only the real psychics I have brought in here have even been able to tell me she was here, and only one ever claimed to see her." Gretty pulled her shawl in closer and reached over to turn up the kerosene lamp. The light jumped higher, and the burned girl seemed to shrink some back into the shadows, a horror from a macabre pop-up book that had been shut just a little bit. Shadows also danced higher in the brighter light, perhaps more tormented souls reaching out to be heard.

"I don't know her name son, but she speaks to me sometimes in my dreams. She died in a fire years ago," Gretty sniffed and pushed her glasses up her nose causing the reflected flame to shatter and bounce around the room again. "Her and maybe fourteen other girls and their parents, all immigrants living in this building. Or at least where this building is now.

"After the building burned down with the families trapped inside, this building here was built and the whole thing forgotten. But about four years ago now, not long after my husband met his end, the girl started coming around and shaking things up a bit.

"You can understand that not many people are superstitious these days, so somehow they always seemed to find an excuse to back out of the lease or find something more pressing that they need to get to doing. The last man who took this place over was a well known antique collector. The place was busy for a time, he was well known in his field you understand, but then after a couple of accidents, people came around less and less. Well, Mr. Hawthorne was not a superstitious man, he would walk around scratching his head and play with the air conditioning and wiring, trying to figure out why there were cold spots and why the lights would randomly flicker on and off. He would assert there was no such things as ghosts, and anyone who thought otherwise was an imbecile. Mr. Hawthorne dismissed the psychics I called in, calling them charlatans and even chasing away the one who claimed to have seen the little girl.

"Then he met with an accident himself." Gretty sighed and shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. The dead girl continued to stare sightlessly at the side of the old woman's head, doing her best imitation of a scarecrow. Liam envisioned the lifeless thing gazing down into a field of corn waiting to be harvested, motionless but still creepy enough to keep the birds away. He shuddered. It was getting to be a habit he was not enjoying.

"While working on some electrical wiring, the poor man must have slipped and reached for something to keep from falling. I found him a couple of hours after the power went off down here. Apparently the breaker was faulty, so the fire department told me he was electrocuted for more than ten minutes before he caught on fire." Gretty shook her head and pulled her spectacles off her nose to clean them needlessly on her shawl.

"Horrible way to die. God rest his soul." The little girls head twitched at the mention of God, her head rotating slightly, and one side of her melted lips curling up in a snarl. "I have not had the time or the money to get the breaker box fixed down here since. Nor the desire if the truth is to be told. I did not figure there was much reason to do anything with this, so I just left it alone.

"Something wronged her long ago, and she will keep haunting this place until things are put right. Damn me if I know what it is I can do to put her little soul to rest." Gretty's glasses went back on her face and she looked up at Liam again, oblivious to the dead girl's eyes boring into the side of her head.

Liam swallowed and moved his gaze from the un-breathing child to Gretty's pained and fatigued eyes. Wrinkles crisscrossed the old woman's face, showing the canals and trenches that pain and laughter had dug into her once supple flesh over the years. The older deeper wrinkles were at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, signs of laughter and merriment. The newer wrinkles were cut into her face shallowly as if done with an ice-pick on concrete, not clean even lines of happiness, but rather ragged gouges of pain and fear, scoring her jowls and the points between her brows.

Liam gathered himself , taking a deep breath of the foul old air as if pulling back in the pieces of his mind that had run away when the girl had appeared so suddenly. Seconds passed, and Gretty sat patiently as Liam regained his composure. Years of concentration and meditation helped the process to go quickly, and calm settled around Liam's shoulders like an old and familiar shirt. He exhaled through his mouth, now back safe inside his own head, fears banished to the outside where the little girl stood, fears he could look at and he could deal with. He did not need to add to the situation with his own internal demons.

A slow and deliberate smile crept across Liam's face, and he looked up to meet the eyes of the poor old woman sitting across from him. She seemed surprised by the change that had come over him, and sat up a little straighter herself, paying closer attention to the cold looking and hard-bitten young man in front of her.

"Well Gran, it just so happens, I think I can help," Liam said confidently, a real grin splitting his face.