Private Monkey Ghost Story

Chapter 13

Mann relieved me at breakfast, and Stokes and I ate eggs and rat meat. Mmmm. Everyone looked sandy-eyed. I'd plugged in the phones about zero five hundred, and nobody had called. Pervert or not. I'd decided that the radiator had proven that this wasn't a haunting, this was a building that was old, falling apart, shittily maintained, and half-assed rebuilt.

Stokes was staring at me oddly when I stood up and stretched. Cobb was smoking a cigarette and I reached down and grabbed it, taking a drag, then handed it back to him. I didn't smoke, but the taste of the cigarette would get the nasty taste out of my mouth. Cobb grinned at me.

Mann had unlocked the doors, and I headed down to my room. Fuck this, I wanted a shower. Oh fuck, my laundry. I'd forgotten all about it. At least I'd put it in the drier. It had sat in there for several days, but I was worried that I'd open the drier and find old SS uniforms replacing mine.

When I went into the laundry room, my laundry was on the counter, neatly folded and separated.

No. No fucking way. I thought, picking it up and heading out of the laundry room. No fucking ghost, anywhere, is going to fold laundry. Not even some anal-retentive dead Nazi SS instructor. To me, it was just further proof that all of this was just structural.

I managed to unlock my room without dropping my laundry, and kicked the door shut behind me. I put away my laundry, and caught sight of the flask of Tequila that SPC Thompson had given me.

Fuck it. I took the bottle with me into the bathroom, turned on the water, and waited for it to heat up. When it heated up enough, I stepped in and sat down cross-legged. I pulled a couple hits off the bottle, stood up, set the bottle on the sink, and took care of business.

Finished with memories of my wife and last meeting, I washed off, then grabbed the bottle again. I took a long pull standing there, with the water sluicing down my back.

The lights went off in the bathroom, instantly plunging it into darkness.

I took another hit off the bottle and leaned my head against the tile of the shower.

I missed my wife. I missed my friends. I missed my twin sister.

The lights flickered.

I took another long drink, nearly emptying the flask, and thought about Susan. I used our wedding ring to make clinking noises against the bottle. The water was hot, smelled faintly of rust, but it was hot. I missed her voice, I missed her smell, I missed the way she would cuddle up to me in the middle of the night.

The light flickered, buzzed, and went out.

The light came on with a snap, and I turned off the shower. I dried off, drug on my blue and gold PT shorts, and went out into my room. I'd left the door open, and the steam had boiled out of the bathroom and coated the whole place with frost.

"What the hell were you doing in there, jerking off?" Stokes asked me. She was sitting in the chair that normally went under the desk, with her leg stretched out.

"Yeah. What the hell are you doing in here?" I asked. Oh shit. She probably knew I'd been wondering about her.

"It's too noisy down there. They're getting a block and tackle from Third Shop along with some pallet jacks, and they're going to load all that Nazi shit you found onto some trucks," she told me. "Mind if I sleep in here? Mine's on the first floor, and they're dragging all that shit right by my room."