Ghosts and Obligations
Ghosts and Obligations
Short Fiction about Honor And Mayhem
There are different levels of obligation. There’s the Hippocratic Oath, the pledge that all doctors make that holds them to the highest professional and moral standards. Sure, some of ’em fuck it up, but it’s there, and doctors gotta work too hard for too long at too great an expense to not take it seriously.
Then there’s the obligation, with a throat full of phlegm while edging the lawn, to spit it on your own property and not on your neighbor’s prize rosebushes that get trimmed and pruned every fourteen minutes, six and a half days a week. You didn’t ever promise not to, but…
Darren Elmore’s obligations floated somewhere in between those.
Darren is rich. That inherently comes with a lot of obligations, many of which rich people spend a lot of time and money trying to waltz away from.
But Darren wasn’t born rich. Darren didn’t wanna be rich. Or, more accurately, rich was never the end result for the few people in his field when he started.
Darren is a paranormal lecturer. Well, that’s what he started out as, speaking to small groups of disinterested or fanatical listeners at the Woodhaven Public Library. The disinterested and fanatical rubbed elbows…or mostly empty plastic chairs between them… in the same lecture.
Then Bill Gates, or Al Gore, or the mischievous ghost of Andy Kaufman invented the internet.
And Darren, bored, working at Diversified Clamp and Tubing between infrequent library speeches, got a Twitter account.
The disinterested faded into the dark reaches of the library’s lost and found closet and the fanatics flocked to him like college freshmen to a keg.
Darren, with the help of his Twitter account, the fanatics, and some trolls who don’t believe in ghosts or punctuation, got offered a television show. Late-night cable, low budget, driving in an RV to allegedly haunted locations nationwide.
And the show became a huge hit. A cash cow. A wight windfall. An apparition automatic teller machine.
Darren is famous. A great percentage of famous people are also rich, but the fame brings with it even further obligations than the money alone.
Some of the stresses involved with the show- the fame, the travel, the general malaise of emotion-bereft ghostly dalliances, helped Darren develop a pretty sturdy drinking problem.
His obligation to himself was to get sober, so he got himself a little place in Cavern Hollow, Tennessee, nestled away in a string of dry counties near the Kentucky border.
Darren wanted to get his groceries delivered to him in Cavern Hollow, and therefore he had to give his phone number to the fine folks at Ernest Blakeslee’s Meat and Produce.
Today, Darren’s obligation is courtesy of one of the charming bag boys at Ernest Blakeslee’s Meat and Produce, who recognized Darren’s name on the order sheet.
At first, Wesley Watkins, the charming bag boy, was just gonna ride up there on his dirtbike and ask the rich, famous, TV star for an autograph.
But then Wesley remembered he had to go home and climb up on the roof to realign the satellite dish for his momma, so she could watch the Mexican soap operas.
When Wesley got home, his momma was nowhere to be found. And he wasn’t allowed to climb on the roof without an adult present.
So he grabbed himself a sweet tea and flopped on the sofa, wondering where his momma was until on his third refill he saw a note addressed to him.
Aunt Lucinda is having a spell. She is crying and hollering and thinks her house is possessed.
I am going to check on her.
Love, Momma.
P.S. There is Sweet Tea in the refrigerator.
This is where Darren’s obligation began to begin.
After much discussion, and a great deal of skepticism on the part of Wesley’s momma,Wesley, Corinna (Wesley’s momma) and Aunt Lucinda all ended up on Darren’s front porch at the end of his winding driveway, which was partially obscured by dozens of majestic pine trees, behind six No Trespassing signs, only two of which came with the house.
Darren was on his sofa, reading Chapter Three of Zoroastrianism and Twelve-Step Recovery when there was a knock at his door.
He had been so relaxed the knock might as well have been a moose charging through. He almost wet his pants for the first time sober.
He thought about saying “Who is it?”, then he thought about screaming “No Trespassing!”, then he thought it might be Publisher’s Clearing House, not that he had sent in his entry, but you just never know.
Darren walked to the door. It was a polite knock, as knocks go, and he was now recuperated from the initial bladder-jarring shock.
He opened the door slightly perturbed, slightly hopeful (if it wasn’t Publisher’s Clearing House it could be a comely stranded motorist).
Standing there were a freckle and zit faced kid, an extremely attractive brunette Darren’s age, and a hunched over, elderly woman who looked like she was the meth sommelier for the whole county.
Darren said the word “Can”. There were more words to come in that sentence, but the freckly kid’s freckles began to dance in a maelstrom of facial energy.
“Mr.Darren Elmore, my name’s Wesley and this is my momma and my sainted Aunt Lucinda and we hate to bother you sir but it just seems like a sure-fire omen that you just moved to town because a demonic possession of some sort has taken over Aunt Lucinda’s home and I know that kind of thing is your specialty, sir and we don’t know how much you charge but you gotta see it sir because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life or my momma’s life, not even on your TV show, but maybe in the movies even though in the movies I knew it was fake, but this is real.”
Darren subtly wiped Wesley’s spittle from the front of his hoodie. Having begun to think of a blanket denial of his identity, which wouldn’t have been the first time, he was dismayed to realize that the hoodie was from the Season Six wrap party of his show.
Silkscreened on the front was Wraith Watchers: 6 Seasons, 6 Time Zones, 6 Emmy Noms.
His plausible deniability slipped out the window…yeah, you know, like a ghost.
Before he could ask Wesley to explain to him slowly exactly what made the threesome think that Aunt Lucinda’s home was possessed by demons, Wesley began to describe blood, his Aunt’s time travel, why the Titans will never go to another Super Bowl and the dearth of celebrities in Cavern Hollow.
Behind Wesley, Aunt Lucinda began to cry.
So Darren felt obligated as a paranormal researcher, a rich celebrity, and a guy who couldn’t stand to see a little old lady cry, to visit Aunt Lucinda’s home and investigate what these demons might be.
Lucinda Berryhill’s home was sitting on a bluff overlooking a creek that was probably wide enough to be navigable by canoe or kayak but not wide or fast enough to attract huge squads of college kids butt-chugging Fireball on tubes, which, of course, was frowned on anyway in a dry county.
It was a small ranch-style home, with a wood garage/barn-looking combo that had deteriorated to the point of neo-classical eyesore that Darren loved to feature on his show.
But the demonic mayhem that Wesley described hadn’t taken place there, it had taken place in the house.
Corrina Watkins was helping her Aunt Lucinda up the three wooden stairs to the front door, each of which had a ceramic goose on it.
Darren, eight months removed from the cancellation of his hit show and fresh outta rehab, had to grind his personality gears before he kicked into his professional and media persona.
He was pleased when he conjured the television and Comic-Con version of himself out of the slightly fried guy who had been reading about personal inventories.
“Miss Berryhill, please tell me the very first clue you had that something in your world was out of the ordinary.”
“I guess when I went to sleep on a Thursday and woke up on Saturday.”
Darren, who had never graduated from college, responded with a very professorial “hmmm”.
Corinna Watkins turned before she opened the door to the home.
“I’ve never seen your show, Mr. Elmore. My son says you are a highly respected professional, but I have to warn you, this is a graphic scene.”
Darren nodded with the solemnity he felt he was obligated to nod with, and Corinna pushed the door open.
Wesley excitedly pushed past them through the foyer and made a sharp right into the living room.
He pointed at a stool that had a bright red stain on robin’s egg blue upholstery.
“There,” he said, then pivoted and pointed at the armrest of the sofa, “There”, he said again as though he was a dentist showing someone cavities on an X-Ray.
The bright red stain there had a labial quality to it, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud.
Then Wesley pointed to a red stain on the robin’s egg blue carpet next to an overturned coffee table. The stain was the size and shape of a large Bassett Hound, and the thought struck Darren that he would have assumed a single woman in the hills would have a dog for companionship instead of ceramic geese, but what did he know?
Wesley looked at Darren with the hopeful certainty of someone attempting to answer the million-dollar question on a quiz show.
“ A demon murdered someone here, Darren Elmore.”
“In my house!” Aunt Lucinda wailed and began to sob.
The TV personality was not a touchy-feely guy, but he had gotten used to hugs at AA meetings back in the city, and he felt obligated to hug the distraught old woman.
On his show, he would have told the homeowner he was bringing his EMF detector and crew and that they would do the accompanying historical research to find the probable identity of the wraith or apparition or gremlin.
But his gear was in storage and his crew was probably working on Storage Wars, for all he knew.
And…whatever this was, it wasn’t blood. Bloodstains turn dark, almost black after a few days. Of course, you never debunk a client right out of the gate.
“Miss Lucinda,” he asked, “Please tell me everything you did on Thursday before you went to bed.”
The old woman wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweater and began.
“Not a whole bunch, because my arthur-itis was acting up something fierce, in fact, I skipped dinner because of it. I just listened to some cassettes of Conway Twitty, played a few hands of solitaire, filled the hummingbird feeders, went out to the barn to take a sip of my new arthur-itis elixir…”
Darren stopped her with a gentle squeeze of her tiny shoulder.
“Why do you keep your arthritis elixir in the barn?”
“Because the man who sold it to me made me promise I would because it’s flammable.”
So out to the barn they went, Darren thinking to himself that he had a pretty good idea of what happened and even he wouldn’t try to bullshit his way through an hour episode of this story.
At the same time, Corrina was fussing at Aunt Lucinda.
“Auntie, you did not tell me you bought any arthritis elixir! You are supposed to let me go with you to pick up prescriptions because your eyesight ain’t so good anymore and…”
Wesley swung the one-hinged door, already open, back a little further so all four of them could walk in.
And on an old workbench, next to some motor oil and some weed killer, some paint cans, and a whole bunch of stuff whose labels had faded to the point of being unidentifiable, were ten shiny Mason jars of clear liquid and four one-gallon jugs of a red liquid. Two more Mason jars were empty and one of the gallon jugs was half empty.
“This is your arthritis elixir, Miss Lucinda?”
“Yessir.”
Corinna put her head in her hands
“Ohhh Auntie, what man sold you this?”
Darren unscrewed the cap of the half-empty gallon jug. He sniffed, flashing back to vomiting on his senior prom tux and to varnishing an antique armoire.
It was wine, but only in the loosest definition of the term and if it smelled like varnish, he could only imagine…
“The man said to mix four parts of the elixir to one part of the grape juice. It doesn’t taste very good, but my pain went away within minutes.”
Corinna Watkins slapped herself on the forehead like a frustrated mother in a laundry detergent commercial and said “Auntie, I think he musta meant…
Wesley folded his hands in front of his chest and his freckles danced a bit in a scowl. He interrupted his mother, saying “ What does arthritis elixir have to do with unleashing a demon?”
No one is obligated to not say out loud the first thing that pops into their head. But it is very often a good idea to think before you speak, and there are a few idioms and axioms that guide people in this department.
However, those idioms and axioms failed Darren Elmore on this day. He was in TV personality mode, he could hear the theme music that played before they cut to commercial, it was time for the big reveal. His adrenalin would spike on that take and he was flashing back to those takes now.
He looked at the freckly bag boy, lowered his voice an octave as though there were a boom mic above him and a viewing audience of millions waiting to hear his pronouncement, and he said: “ Wesley, your aunt is the demon.”
Wesley Watkins had never punched anyone famous before and he never knocked anyone out in one punch before, either. Most of his fights had been in flag football, as a kid when he was too scrawny to knock anyone out.
Corrina Watkins was thrice mortified. One, that her sainted aunt had bought moonshine and homemade wine as an arthritis medication. Two, that a famous man had called her aunt a demon, though she was fairly certain he just meant that Aunt Lucinda had gotten hammered and trashed her own place. And three, that her sweet little hardworking boy had punched the only TV star she had ever met besides the weatherman from Gatlinburg.
Corrina made Wesley get ice, and a pillow, and Corinna, a hairdresser by trade, went into nurse mode.
And having no formal nurse training, nor any idea of her son’s victim’s previous Greco-Roman wrassle with distilled spirits, she thought it just might be a good idea to give Mr. Darren Elmore a small sip of arthritis elixir when he woke up.
It was Darren that helped himself to a second sip, sometime during his explanation of what he meant by his remark, and Wesley’s quaint but insincere apology.
So it was that three weeks later, when Corinna Watkins found herself, at the age of 44, quite pregnant by the second TV star she had ever met, that Darren Elmore felt obligated to ask her to marry him.
And Corinna Watkins looked at him, well aware that he had cozied up to her aunt’s confiscated stash of arthritis medication, and was obligated to herself to politely decline.
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