I was riding Madame Smithson last night as we lay in bed reading Dante when I heard Old Man Smithson walk in, dropping his PJ bottoms and exposing his ridiculously large but flaccid member. I could tell that Ronnie was riding him, and I could not bear the thought of submitting to that kind of abuse. I gave old Harriet a good yank, to which she immediately responded, telling the old man to go away, she had a headache. Of course, once she got a headache, I got one as well, and there we were, our evening perfectly ruined.
The old man was insistent, and was now becoming erect. This fact further evidenced Ronnie’s influence, as the old man could not have done that himself. Not any more. Oh no! I made Harriet say, you’re not sticking that thing in me! She got up out of bed, and ran out of the room, with the old man following close behind with that thing flopping out in front of him like a war club. She ran downstairs into the parlor, and there was the whole family, playing bridge. They looked up at the sight of Harriet in her flannel nightgown and the old man in his PJ top chasing her, and all eyes traveled in unison down to the offending flesh between his legs. It was standing straight up now and reached past his navel. We ran a circle around the group seated at their gaming table, and then tore into the dining room. As we left, I heard Peter ask whose lead it was.
In the dining room, I had Harriet grab up a lamp and hold it menacingly toward the old man.
“I swear to god, Ronnie, I’ll brain him good if you don’t give up”, I said. I meant it, too.
“Oh, Phillip, you’re such a spoilsport”, Ronnie responded impishly. “I guess we’ll just have to go bang Rita. She appreciates this magnificent specimen, if no-one else does”. The old man gave his penis a stroke as he said this.
“Okay, Ronnie, you go sleep with the maid. Everything will be back to normal. Just don’t fuck anymore with me, okay?”
“See you around, Phil old boy” he said, and the old man strutted out of the dining room in the direction of the servant’s quarters. I neglected to remind him that this was Rita’s day off. The old man would just have to go jerk off in the garden, a frequent occurrence when Ronnie was riding him and they had nowhere to stick it.
Meanwhile, Harriet was standing there in the dining room, breathing heavily, and wondering why the old man had given up so easily. She put the lamp down without even thinking about it. Apparently the headache was not that bad, after all. I could tell she had half a mind to go seek out James, the butler, to satisfy that itch she had suddenly acquired. I put a stop to that, gently interspersing images of the ninth circle of hell into her lustfully confused thoughts. She debated to herself. Dante or Desire? Which would it be? I was determined. She and I would be doing our reading tonight. She could have her dalliance another night, when it was Joseph’s turn to ride her. I twisted her headache knob ever so slightly to the right, and that decided things. We went back upstairs and curled up with our book, and read ourselves to sleep.
It occurs to me that the above confusion of pronouns, gender, and odd behavior may seem somewhat confusing to the average reader. I admit, sometimes I get confused as well. I’m getting used to it, by now. Back in the days when I was a brand new spirit, I sometimes forgot who I was. I would be riding Peter as he rode Danielle and I would lose my identity, thinking I was still alive, that the blood pumping through my veins was my own. What an experience, to be the confident young scion of the family, enthusiastically planting his seed, and to suddenly have Greta talking to me from Danielle’s lithe body, bringing me down from my high, letting me know who I really was. But it had to be done, you see. They tell me that if I lose myself for good, I lose my soul, what little there is left of it.
I had the hardest time convincing them that I didn’t really want my soul, what good had it ever done me? Especially here in the afterlife. I mean, wasn’t the common wisdom that, during life, you saved your immortal soul, so that it could ascend to heaven when you die? I didn’t think this was heaven, so why was my soul worth saving? Lately, what with my re-acquaintance with Dante, I had begun to wonder if this was hell. It was purgatory at the very least. Either that, or God had a very strange sense of humor.
I can see that I’m digressing again, and I need to get to the point. This is difficult for me. Time doesn’t quite have the same meaning for me as it might have for you. I live now, or at least exist, in a never-ending present. The past is like the novel I read last night, having a beginning and an end, but no continuity into the present. The past ended when I died, and there doesn’t seem to be any future. The only referent I have is the cycle of birth, life, and death of my mortal hosts. Nevertheless, I shall try to formulate my story into a chronicle.
For the benefit of my patient readers, I shall begin at the beginning, which is when I died. Dying is the first thing I clearly remember. My mortal life before then is a haze of vague memories. I remember I was married, but don’t remember my wife or how sweet it was to make love to her. I remember I had children, but I don’t remember their names, their sexes, their number nor how fulfilling it was watching them grow up. I don’t remember my life, my occupation, my passions, my successes, my failures. My companions tell me that is common among us. Only a few spirits carry their memories fully into the afterlife.
But I remember dying as clearly as you might remember lunch yesterday. It is difficult to forget. My death was a hairless old man’s death. I was cancer ridden, connected to tubes which kept all the fluids flowing but draining me of life. I was helpless. I shit myself endlessly, before I stopped eating. I like to think I faced my death bravely, but I don’t think it is possible for anyone to endure such misery with dignity. I just cannot remember. The clearest memory is at the moment of truth. I remember thinking that this was not what I expected. I had imagined that I would just gradually fade into blackness, without being able to assign any particular moment of time to the state of death. I expected to just slowly become more and more non-living. But that is not how it happened at all. Oh, the process in getting to that point was slow, steady and painful. But I reached a point where the pain lessened, and I felt like I was becoming more lucid, although I suppose mortal observers might have concluded the opposite. Yes, things just seemed clearer and brighter through my half-open eyes. I remember thinking: and now I am dead. And I was. I lay there for a moment savoring the thought.
Then the storm hit. I suppose if one could remember their own birth, it might be something like what I experienced. A torrent of incomprehensible sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings assaulted me. I was catapulted into a strange, new world. Nothing made sense. I wanted to scream, but had no lungs to store the breath, no lips to form the sounds. I wanted to run, but had no legs. I felt like I was moving, even though there was no body to move. I was bouncing around, touching hot things, sharp things, stinging things, piercing my non-existent body. My brain, which also no longer existed, screamed out in pain. I wanted it all to just stop. I wanted to ease into non-existence, the way I had always expected it to be. Ah, the comfort of just ceasing to be. But however much I wished and prayed, it just went on. I began to think I had been relegated to Hell, and that this was to be my everlasting punishment for sins I no longer remembered. This was my birth into the spirit world.
Through it all, I began to hear a comforting voice. I calmed down, slowed my gyrations. I remember thinking that this might be my mother’s soul, welcoming me to Heaven, even though I do not remember her voice or what she looked like. The piercing slowed, and then stopped. Warm lights bathed me in a gentle glow. The soothing voice seemed to be coming from the brightest, reddest light. The jumble of images resolved into something familiar; people gathered around, dressed in somber finery. Some were crying, some were laughing. This was a funeral! A horrifying thought came to me. Was I at my own funeral? I rushed over to the casket at the head of the room and peered in. An old man, but the face was not familiar. I’m not sure I would have recognized myself, but relief flooded me. I was not ready to peer into my own dead face. The pinpoints of light I had noticed before seemed to flock around me as I stared at the body. I ignored them. I clung to the familiar.
I looked around me. People were doing what they do at a funeral. Talking softly. Family and friends come for a reunion, the only chance some ever had to catch up with the doings of the various cousins, uncles, nieces and old acquaintances. Renewing old friendships, revisiting old feuds, freshly regretting past transgressions. One man was obviously trying to make it with a beautiful young woman, half his age. One woman stared with startling hatred at a man. Another woman stared with equally obvious longing at the same man. Eloquent expressions of sorrow, silent hugs of compassion. None of these people were familiar to me. None of them paid the slightest attention to me, even though I was an intruder on their grief. It was as if I were invisible. The lights were dancing around me, illuminating me, and yet I was invisible to everyone.
I was drawn toward a woman whose anguish was palpable. She must have been the widow, by the way people lined up to express their condolences; the way she avoided looking toward the casket. I could not stop myself from drifting toward her. I only wanted to express a brief message of sympathy, but I came closer and closer. She did not notice me. How could she not notice me? I was standing right next to her, and the lights were flying around me, and they were saying things, but I was so entranced by the woman I ignored their voices.
All of a sudden, I was the woman. I don’t mean I was inside her, controlling her movements, like we do now with the old man and the old lady. No, I was her. I completely believed that I was her, thinking her thoughts, making her moves, dreaming her dreams. I no longer existed, only she existed. We looked back on our life, how we had spent decades as the wife of the deceased, enduring thoughtless insults and downright meanness at his hands, yet never quite having the courage and confidence to end the loveless marriage. We had left him once, but came back to him. We could see that we were not grieving for someone else, we were grieving for our own life that might have been. The only consolation was the joy of watching our twin daughters grow up. We looked back on the moment we had given birth to them. Our memory of that event was the culmination of our life; it seemed like everything we had done in our brief life before had been all in the service of that moment. Everything since then had been aftermath, a slow descent toward the present. We looked further back, to the first time we had engaged in intercourse, how it had completely shattered our dreams of what it was supposed to be like. It was dirty, it was furtive. Our lover was inexperienced, and had spent himself almost before we realized it had started. Afterward he had rejected us. He had treated us like a filthy slut, all because we had agreed to his begging entreaties.
We looked back even further, to a time when we had been innocent of that, and life had been full of glamour and potential, and we dreamed of romance and adventure. We had taken dance lessons and dreamed of being a great ballerina. We had read gothic novels and dreamed of playing the part of the heroine. We had ridden horses, been a cheerleader, been the star player on the basketball team, been the class president. Farther back and we were playing dolls with our friends, imagining great stories of domestic bliss. The farther back we went, the more innocent we became, the more full of love, and the world revolved around us and filled us with great joy.
We could not endure it. We could not watch this progression from faded old woman back to happy child, knowing that the reality was the opposite. We fled this place. We ran outside, trying to get away from our own existence. We screamed our rage as we ran. Our lights followed us, and they talked to us, trying to calm us down, trying to break the connection. Our beautiful twin daughters, now grown women, followed us, their faces expressing their concern. Our lights were all around us, talking to us all at once, and we swatted at them as if they were glowing, stinging insects. We fell down in a heap in the lawn outside the funeral home, and broke down weeping. Our daughters came and hugged us, and spoke soothing words, but we would not be consoled.
And, just as suddenly as it started, it was over. The connection had finally been broken, and I was yanked brutally out of her. I was myself again, and the old woman was beside me, still crying softly as her daughters held her. I wanted to go back to her, to rejoin her soul and mine. I wanted this woman to fill in the missing pieces of my own life, to tell me who I had been and who I now was. And if that could not be done, I wanted her life as a substitute. I wanted to lose myself and become her again. I wanted this woman to provide what was now denied to me. I desired it with a passion I could not deny.
Even as I pondered this, the lights surrounded me, and blocked me from attempting a reunion with the woman. The lights were powerful and merciless. I begged them to let me go back. They refused. I swatted at them, but it was useless because I had no arms. The thought suddenly dawned on me: What was I? I looked down at myself, but I was not there. I got up, and looked around frantically. I raced back into the funeral home, into the grand hall where the large mirror stood. I looked at the mirror. And saw in the reflection nothing but the swarm of fireflies. They were all the colors of the rainbow, and there were colors I had no name for. They were all circling around a dim, faint, midge in the middle. It came to me. That dim light was me. Another realization came. The lights swarming around me were others of my kind, whatever that now was.
“Relax, young one, relax. Keep your soul.” The voice of the red light talked to me. “The woman is now lost to you.”
I didn’t understand. But I found myself responding to her. Finally someone, or something, acknowledged my existence. All I could think about was that I was not alone. I struggled to find a voice, to speak to these beings as they spoke to me. I still could not make a sound.
“Sound is not how we communicate, Philip”, the red light said. It was a beautiful, throaty woman’s voice. “You are still trying to use your mortal body, which you no longer have. You will learn in due course. Until then, listen and learn.”
Who are you? What are you? What am I? Where am I? Try as I might, I could not communicate these questions. How did she know that my name was Philip, when I didn’t even know?
“My name is Greta and I am an angel. Your name is Philip and you are an angel as well. You have been chosen as God’s servant, and it is our task to teach you how to serve God’s will.”
“Don’t listen to her” another voice piped in, from the exquisite violet sparkle beside Greta’s red. “You are a ghost, a spirit, a will-o-the-wisp. You are a droplet of urine from God’s penis, nothing more.”
“Now, Ronnie, please don’t upset him”, Greta’s voice rejoined. “He’s going through enough as it is already. He doesn’t need your cynical attitude to confuse him further. He’s still confused about his own existence.”
“His existence”, said the violet light. “Such a strange phrase to use. Such an odd way of describing this state of being. We who cannot influence anything, except through the living. As if through the very process of existing, we establish some purpose for ourselves, some justification. Greta will tell you that we are God’s creation, just as the living are, and that we serve God’s purposes. My response to that is always to shake my non-existent head, and to ask if God is insane. Why would any sane deity create such as us? My own theory is that we are the sludge of the Universe, some leakage of fluids from a great machine which recycles souls, a waste by-product of the great circle of life. As long as the leakage is minimal, God ignores us and goes about His business. We are a necessary evil. We are inconsequential.”
“We don’t need your holier than thou attitude to cloud the picture, Greta”, said another voice, a deep blue star pulsating with white.
“Joseph, Ronnie, please”, enjoined Greta’s voice. “Philip is getting upset.”
At that point, the entire constellation of fireflies erupted into noise. They flitted about like over-stimulated fairies. Each was trying to out-shout the other. I was getting overloaded. This was all too much. I needed some answers. I had to put a stop to this. I summoned all of my psychic energy and shouted:
“Quiet!”
It was not very loud, relative to the volume of voices around me, but I could tell I was being heard. A few voices dropped out of the uproar. I summoned another burst of energy, and shouted again:
“QUIET!”
This had the intended affect. The cacophony ceased. I decided to exercise my new-found voice.
“Now I don’t know anything about you fairies”, I started, “but for cripes sake I can’t hear myself think when you carry on like that. Let’s have a civil discussion and…”
“Who you calling a fairy, faggot?” interrupted another voice from the crowd.
“Yeah, you think you’re something special?” asked another. The voices erupted again, even more raucous. If only I could put my hands to my ears and shut it all out.
“QUIET!” This came from Greta. The power from her voice scattered the cloud of spirits like leaves in the wind. I found my own incorporeal body flying away from the center of the gathering. I watched Greta’s ruby light pulsate from the effort, beating like a great bloody red heart. Her exertion even seemed to have some effect on the material world, as brochures sitting on a table beside the great mirror scattered as if blown by a wind.
“This will not do!” she said angrily. “This will not do at all. Everyone just please go away, I will take care of Philip myself.”
“No way, Greta”, said Ronnie’s voice. “You will not corrupt this young ghost with your prattle.”
“Very well, Ronnie”, said Greta. “You shall stay, and Joseph, you also. The rest of you, be gone, or I shall really get angry with you.”
Amazingly enough, the cloud started dispersing. Greta commanded some odd kind of respect from this multitude. To this day, I don’t know how she does it. Try as I might, I have never been able to duplicate her trick of creating a powerful gust to disperse spirits and mortal objects alike. I know from experience that her powers are quite potent. Perhaps she has demonstrated such power in the past, and impressed the other spirits with it. Even Ronnie, a very free spirit himself, defers to her on occasion. She is the oldest among us, that anybody is aware of, so perhaps that contributes to her power as well.
“Ah, much better” said Greta. “Now we can concentrate on the task at hand.” As she was saying this, her light was expanding. Her ruby light assumed a shape; the shape of a woman, a stunning woman with long waving grey hair dressed in flowing garments. She had a pleasant middle-aged body shape, not thin but not fat. She was radiant but translucent, a red phantom who almost seemed to crackle with energy. I felt myself awed by her beauty. Ronnie and Joseph were taking form as well. Ronnie was a well dressed, handsome young apparition in violet. A dandy of a ghost. Joseph took the form of a powerful grey-bearded man, a Zeus in deep blue.
“Well, Philip”, said Greta. “It didn’t take you long at all to find your voice. I believe you’ve set a record in that regard. Most new spirits take quite a while longer. Now, I’m sure you have a million questions. Where shall we begin?”
“Okay”, I said. “The first thing I want to know is why you are calling me Philip?”
She didn’t reply. She merely pointed down the hall, back toward the room where the funeral was still in progress. I didn’t understand what she was pointing at. Perhaps I didn’t want to understand. But then I noticed a sign on a stand beside the doorway into the viewing room. On the sign was the name of the deceased: “Philip Goodson”. Nothing else. Merely a name. No explanation. There really is no need to say anything else, here in this place, is there?
“Now wait a second”, I said in an increasingly frantic voice. “You don’t think that’s me in there? That’s not me. That cannot be me. I know it’s not me.”
“How would you know?” asked Ronnie. “You don’t remember anything about your past life, do you?”
“I remember enough to know that is not me in there” I said, although the confidence in my voice was feigned.
“The deceased is always the last to know”, said Greta. “Philip, face the facts. We always find new spirits near their body. At their funeral, or at their burial, or in the morgue. Hanging about the place where they died or were murdered. It is inevitable.”
I couldn’t argue. Here I was talking to a scarlet ghost. How could I deny anything she told me? I could only think about that woman I had just possessed. Such a brief time, and yet I had learned so much. I had learned that I was a failure as a mortal, and I had brought her down with me. I had caused her so much pain. I had turned that beautiful, innocent, optimistic young girl into the disillusioned old woman she had become. God, what kind of life had I lead?
“Of course you are not him”, continued Greta. “Not anymore. You have been transformed. God has given you a second chance to atone for your sins. Very few get that chance. You must now prove yourself worthy.”
“Greta, stop that”, said Ronnie.
“Ronnie is the self-appointed Devil’s Advocate”, said Greta. “He opposes everything I say and believe. I tolerate him. You will find that Ronnie believes in nothing. Nothing except the pleasures of the flesh. He believes in no great purpose, no explanation for us. I cannot abide by that. I need an explanation.”
“Wait a minute”, I said. “Pleasures of the flesh? We have no flesh. How can we experience such pleasures?”
“Ah, Philip, you have a great deal to learn”, said Ronnie. “I shall take great satisfaction in teaching you.”
We went on, hovering in the entry way of the funeral home, they in their ghostly raiment and myself still a dim point of light. The funeral ended. The people slowly drifted out from the viewing room, passing by us and through us. They hardly noticed, except that some felt a chill in the air and donned their winter coats before exiting. I saw the old woman leaving, arm in arm with her daughters. She was still beautiful, despite her wrinkles. Her daughters were so beautiful I felt an aching pain. They were dragging me along with them, but Greta would not let me go. They left, and that is the last I have ever seen of them. My companions do not think it is healthy to cling to your prior life. It is unhealthy for the spirit and it is unhealthy for the living. I disagreed at first, thinking that I could atone for my sins with them, somehow. I spent a long time deliberating how I could do that, but have never come up with a solution. The only ability we spooks have to affect the living is by inhabiting their bodies, and that is not something I desire for them. Not anymore. That one painful possession was enough.
And so, I passed from my second birth into young ghost-hood. I was now an apprentice spirit. I went with Greta, Ronnie, and Joseph back to their haunt, the Smithson household. The Smithsons were old money, a family accustomed to luxury and decadence. They were lorded over by Claude Smithson and Dame Harriet Smithson. Their sons, Peter and Jeffrey, and their daughter, Harriet (we called her Harriet Junior), freeloaded there with their own husbands and wives and children. Their domestic staff consisted of Rita, the maid, James, the butler, and Ansel and Deidre, the cooks.
I learned from my mentors how to assume a shape. This ability really had no great purpose, other than as a means of impressing our fellow specters. Mortals could not see our shapes. I learned that I could assume any shape I desired. The tendency was to assume a pleasing youthful shape, as Ronnie did, or an imposing shape, as Joseph did. I myself adopted the shape of a youthful Clark Gable, one of my heroes. Greta was an exception. She could be any movie starlet she desired. She could be a young Marilyn Monroe, or an Ursula Andress, or she could assume the classic beauty of an Audrey Hepburn. She chose, instead, to assume a shape which was still spell-binding in its beauty and yet which was not a symbol of youth and vigor. In this shape, she reminds me of Lauren Hutton, who is still a sexy lady even in her sixties. She has never explained why she assumes this shape, when she could be so many other people. I guess when you’re a four hundred year old spirit you can do anything you please.
We spirits are enamored of the mortal world. The age old dictum that spirits yearn for their lost humanity has some basis in reality. Our own plane of existence is a rather boring place, with nothing in it except we spirits ourselves. There are no tables, chairs, beds, books, TVs, or computers in the spirit world. The only way we have of entertaining ourselves is to enter the body of a mortal. This trick I learned as part of my apprenticeship. I learned that we can enter a mortal body, and passively ride along as they go through the motions of daily life. The mortal has no inkling that he is being ridden. I had already experienced it to a small degree when I possessed the body of the old woman whom I think was my wife. That was nothing compared to what I learned from Greta and Ronnie. I learned that I could assume control, and make the mortal body obey my wishes. Again, these poor souls were unaware that there were invisible creatures directing their actions at times. They could only puzzle at what made them do certain things. They could only attribute their actions to temporary insanity, or God’s will, or to say the Devil made them do it.
We each had our preferences. I preferred Peter and Harriet. Greta strictly inhabited the bodies of the females of the household. Joseph preferred Harriet Junior and Jeffrey. Ronnie alone flitted from body to body, never preferring one over the other. Occasionally we shared. Joseph might borrow Harriet for a while, while I inhabited Harriet Junior.
And the thing which entrances us spirits the most is, as Greta described it, the pleasures of the flesh. Dear God, even I am embarrassed at some of the things we made that poor family go through. To us spirits, the closest to heaven we can get is second-hand orgasm. Even Greta, the high-handed moralist, participated. We cannot resist. We cannot stop ourselves. Maybe there is a higher-order spirit world, with demons who ride us, and cause us to do things we later regret. Whatever, the Smithson household was the raunchiest, randiest, most sensual family you are ever likely to meet. There were constant shenanigans, with husband cheating on wife, while wife was cheating on husband, while the lord cavorted with the servant, while brother bedded sister, and child seduced grandfather. It was a house of debauchery. These people, left to themselves, might have been staid, upright, uptight, and proper. But they were never left to themselves.
Ronnie tells me that we could not survive at just any household. He says that a mortal cannot be made to do that which they find undesirable. He says that if a spirit were to attempt to seduce a saint, the saint would eventually end up committing suicide, unable to live with himself. That was why we stayed on at the Smithson household. We were just accentuating their natural tendencies, according to Ronnie. Of course, that is Ronnie speaking. I sometimes think he has an urgent need to justify his own actions. Most of the most outrageous behavior in the Smithson house can be laid at his feet. A prime example is the night he rode the old man as he chased Harriet around the house. You may have noticed that the family hardly batted an eyelid at this. They were quite used to such behavior. Several of them had done similar things, themselves. The family predilection for alcohol doesn’t help. They were a family of drinkers, and Harriet Junior was probably the worst.
I myself like to think I temper things to a slight degree. I stick with ordinary, everyday heterosexuality. When I ride for sex, I prefer Peter as he fucks his beautiful bride Danielle. They are very passionate people, and marriage has done nothing to dampen that passion. Of course, I am a large factor in preserving that fire. When it comes to sex, three heads are better than two, I always say. I frequently find ways to, ahem, enliven the experience, convincing them to do things they might not consider on their own. Oh, I don’t think I’m disproving Ronnie’s theory. I’m not making them do things they don’t want to do. It’s just that mortals have such curious inhibitions when it comes to sex. I can hear Peter thinking that he’d like to do this or that, but he doesn’t think Danielle would approve and so he doesn’t ask. Meanwhile, Danielle is thinking that she’d like Peter to do this or that to her, but she is embarrassed to talk to him about it because it is such a filthy thing to do. I’m just fulfilling my role as the middleman, finding out each of their desires and getting them to meet in the middle and close the deal.
As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes I’ll be riding Peter and Greta will be riding Danielle. That is the ultimate experience, and we wisely refrain from doing it often so as to preserve the novelty. When we do it, I’ll be pumping away at Danielle, and she’ll gradually transform, becoming Greta in her Lauren Hutton persona. That will excite me so much I’ll pump all the harder. There is just something about the thought of screwing a grand old dame like Lauren Hutton that gets me off. Of course, Peter and Danielle don’t know this is going on. All they know is that this is one of those special magical nights when they both experience pure ecstasy.
I don’t want you to think that being a part of the spirit world is one big orgy. Mortals get tired, they get sore, their various tissues get rubbed raw. At such times, we spirits must content ourselves with the other pleasures of life. We watch TV, we play on the computer, we participate in sports, we go to parties, we go to work. My favorite host at such off-times is Harriet. It seems as if we were made for each other. We have similar interests, and so most of the time I really have to expend little effort to get her to do things I find interesting. I can go passive, just depending on her judgment and tastes to guide us. We read a lot. We both love movies, particularly old-time golden era classics. We do volunteer work, helping run Red Cross blood drives or running bible study groups at the church. I find this particularly rewarding, remembering Greta’s admonition that our purpose in this life is to serve God. Maybe I’m just assuaging my conscience, I don’t know. What’s a spirit to do, anyway? We can only be what we are, and yet we must constantly justify our borrowed existence.
Spirits are a strange lot. Besides our addiction to mortals, we are quite sociable among ourselves. We like to gather into small groups to haunt a family. I hesitate to use the term coven, since we are not witches and don’t practice magic. We usually just include ourselves as a member of the family we are haunting. We often refer to our group as our “family”. We do not generally congregate in larger groups, mainly because that creates conflicts as to who gets to ride whom. One could almost say that our proclivity to small groups is a compulsion almost as strong as our attraction to mortals. You just rarely see a lone spirit. Those loners you do see are quite maladjusted and we normal spirits stay away from them.
At times, we must just get away from it all. Sometimes Greta will call a conference, wanting to castigate one of us (but usually Ronnie) for some particularly disgusting transgression. Or, we’ll all just need to take some rest from the exhausting work of haunting the living. We’ll each divest ourselves of our host of the moment, and meet somewhere away from the temptations of the flesh. We’ve had many a rewarding discussion in such meetings. I remember one of many times we philosophized about our condition. Greta advanced the theory that only a small number of the deceased actually become ghosts. If it was otherwise, the world would be filled to the brim with dead spirits, and there would hardly be enough mortals to go around. This seemed like a reasonable enough conjecture to me. She also said that spirits eventually pass on, because otherwise the world would again be filled with them. She had known spirits who had just one day disappeared, and she always thought that they had passed on to another plane. She called it “going to Heaven”. Ronnie called it mopping up spilled fluids.
I entered the discussion by wondering why we spirits always seemed to stick with a group of mortals. Why didn’t we get tired of one group of mortals and move on from host to host? Greta, despite being the oldest of the group, had no answer. She herself had been through several families over the centuries. But once she found suitable hosts, she tended to stick with them. Ronnie scoffed. He had been haunting the Smithsons for only a few decades, and thought he might move on at some point. Greta smiled at this, as if she knew something Ronnie didn’t.
The conversation continued on to the subject of souls. Greta advanced the opinion that our pinpoints of light were actually the visible manifestation of our souls. Joseph thought that the soul-lights, as they were referred to, were concentrated bundles of psychic energy. We discussed what happened to souls before life and after death. Ronnie, being a mechanically oriented sort and applying his thermodynamic knowledge, theorized that the total amount of psychic energy was fixed in the universe. It was neither created nor destroyed. After death, most souls were recycled as new human beings being born. Except us, of course. Greta agreed that she thought souls were reincarnated. However, she objected with the observation that the population of humans on earth had increased steadily throughout history. It certainly appeared that new souls were being created in order to keep up with the population. He had an answer to that. There was a great pool of potential psychic energy, and this pool was borrowed from as the population increased. Call it the great Cosmic Strategic Reserve. We had fun wondering what would happen when that pool was exhausted. Would the birth rate go down? Or would population continue to increase, with each individual just having less of a soul to work with? There was no way to prove any of these conjectures, but we had fun trying.
We speculated about ghostly abilities and the legends surrounding them. You know, rattling chains, and séances, and so forth. Again, Greta, with her long experience, was our font of knowledge. Obviously, Greta had some small ability to affect the material world. She had known some spirits who could raise winds, and extinguish candles, and perform other such parlor tricks. No ghost she had ever known, however, had abilities matching the legends. She had never known any ghost to be able to raise a tambourine and rattle it, or wield a sword, or carry its head on horseback, or knock over a gravestone. But supply us with a mortal and the possibilities were endless.
On the occasion of another ghost meet, on a stormy evening, I
asked Greta about her past. She had died
in 1643, of smallpox, in
“Don’t you wonder when it will all end?” Ronnie asked her. “I mean, here you are, after all of these centuries of doing God’s work, and you just don’t seem to have earned God’s forgiveness. Don’t you think you’ve paid for your sins? Do you think that maybe God has forgotten about you?”
She gave Ronnie an evil stare, from which even he shrunk. “God’s work is never done” was all she said.
“You must have led a horribly sinful mortal life, to be paying for it all of this time”, he said. Sometimes Ronnie just didn’t know when to quit.
“That’s enough, Ronnie”, she said, and a strong wind shook the walls of the house.
Trying to steer the conversation to safer ground, I asked her about her mortal life.
“Suffice it to say that my mortal sins were grave, and I regret them even now after all of this time”, she said. She then got up and left the room. The meeting was over.
I had survived my apprenticeship, and was now into my unearthly adulthood. There was no graduation ceremony. I just realized that the others were no longer treating me like a child, constantly advising me and warning me about what or what not to do. It was about this time that a new ghost came into our household.
Greta called a meeting, and told us that a new spirit was being born. We would go to ease its passage into its new world. When I asked how she knew this, she only told me that she had heard it from another. I said before that time works in different ways for us. We were on our way in a mortal instant. There was no time wasted in the spirit world. The body was probably still warm. We ventured out into the wide world, and as we proceeded we were met by throngs of spirits. Soon we were a large luminous cloud, just as it had been when I had been born. As I’ve said, spirits are generally anti-social creatures and their paths seldom cross. The only exception to this rule was when a birth occurred. Then and only then did we come out of the shadows and gather. We had shed our shapes as we traveled. Greta had made it clear that newborns were frightened by ghostly apparitions, and we were to come across as non-threatening as possible.
We did not go to a funeral home. Instead, we went to the city morgue. This spirit had died in violence, a murder victim. We got there, only to discover no ghosts anywhere. One of the spirits, a green sparkle named Joshua, inhabited the night attendant at the morgue, and looked in the records for recently murdered arrivals. He reported only one such victim, a man named Samuel Valentine. Dead from gunshot wounds just this evening. Body kept pending notification of relatives. So far, nobody had been willing to come claim the body. Joshua directed the attendant to the designated bier, the spirit cloud following closely. He opened it, exposing the gruesome body. It looked like a gang related killing, bullet holes everywhere. Joshua was just sliding the body back into its vault when a brilliant yellow light, the soul of Samuel Valentine, flashed out from the darkness and bounced around the room. We had found our newborn spirit.
The cloud surrounded Samuel Valentine. He already had a phantasmal body surrounding his yellow essence, something rare for us but not unheard of. The translucent body clung to him, hanging at an odd angle, like a vestigial appendage. The body was, well, ugly. Not something I would have chosen for myself. I didn’t think Mr. Valentine realized yet that he could clothe himself anyway he pleased. He was clinging to his mortal appearance. His body was squat and fat, and his head seemed squashed. He had Peter Lorre eyes underneath long greasy hair. I was repulsed. Even I, who like all of us had an irresistible attraction to all mortal likenesses, was repulsed by his appearance.
It took forever to settle him down. Even newly born, he was a powerful spirit. We would no sooner corner him and start crooning to him than he would escape and bounce around the room, looking for an escape. He had yet to realize that solid walls were no barrier. Greta and Joshua re-clothed themselves, hoping to shock the newborn into compliance. Soon, all of the spirits had re-clothed themselves, and the room was filled with beautiful wraiths. They occupied every corner of the morgue, from floor to ceiling. It was a reunion of the dead. There were more beautiful people gathered in the room than in all of the Academy Awards ceremonies put together. There was conversation everywhere, like an unearthly cocktail party. Spirits were whizzing by Valentine to get their first close look at him. He would occasionally take a swing at them, and they would fly away laughing
Valentine stared in shock at the sight of these specters surrounding him. Greta, Ronnie, and Joshua had him cornered, and were talking softly to him, too softly to be heard over the hubbub of the gathering. Greta called Joseph and myself over, and introduced us, calling him Samuel. Ronnie was already well into his spiel about God’s penis. Greta and Joshua stepped aside, and seemed to be engaged in an argument. I discreetly wandered over so I could overhear their discussion. They were arguing over who would take Samuel under tutelage. Joshua argued that she had gotten the last one, and now it was his turn. Greta argued that Samuel was a special case, and needed extra care and attention, something only she could provide. They argued for quite a while. Finally, Greta seemed to win the argument, and Joshua flew away moaning, followed by his flock. Greta bade the other spirits to leave. They drifted away, cursing her for her selfishness but unwilling to make an issue of the situation.
Finally, we were alone with our newborn ghost. He had not yet found his voice, although he had spruced up his body somewhat. It was now standing more natural, not hanging from him. His body was becoming thinner, and less squashed. The eyes opened wide, losing their ghastly appearance and appearing almost cartoonish, like those anime characters you see everywhere nowadays. This spirit learned quickly. Soon he uttered his first, halting, spirit words.
”What the bloody fuck is going on here?”
Well, it was a beginning. We continued trying to sooth him. We told him who and what he now was. We told him about ourselves. We hugged and kissed him. We babied him. He responded with snorts of disgust, and again tried to get away. Ronnie stopped him, and took charge.
“Look Samuel, you don’t have many choices here. We want to help you, but you have to help us help you. We want to teach you. We want you to learn. Won’t you come with us? There’s a great adventure awaiting you, and you only need to trust us to begin that adventure. Otherwise, you can slink back into that vault with your decaying body and watch the worms invade. The choice is yours. Choose now.”
That seemed to calm him down. Trust Ronnie to find just the right words. This spirit did not respond to human warmth. He seemed to respond only to threats and negatives. That was his way throughout his miserable mortal existence, and extended into the afterlife as well. Over time, we dragged the entire story out of him. Samuel was one of the unfortunate few who remembered perfectly well his mortal life. It was not a pleasant memory. He had been involved in gangs, and drugs, and had been in and out of jail. He had been raped, and robbed, and finally murdered with an automatic assault weapon, all for the sake of a handful of money. I was not at all sure that I wanted this monster adopted into our happy little family. But Greta was adamant, and what Greta wanted, Greta got. Ronnie regarded him as something of a challenge, and took him under his wing.
Samuel began his apprenticeship. We all tried to contribute to his education, but he didn’t seem to respond to anybody but Ronnie. Ronnie became rather possessive of Samuel, insisting on being his primary mentor, and asking that we leave him alone to this task. Joseph and I didn’t object very strongly, but Greta was insistent that all contribute. We tried, but it didn’t seem as if Samuel was listening to any of us except Ronnie. I had a deep suspicion of Samuel from the very start, and I think Joseph did as well. It was partly his history, but also a matter of his attitude. I think that Samuel sensed these feelings, and developed his own distrust of us.
He developed his body into a passable, if not particularly beautiful, apparition. His body was powerfully built. The face was his weak spot. Try as he might, he could not develop a fair countenance. It was as if he could not escape his mortal image of himself. This increased my trepidation. How can you trust one who is careless about his own appearance?
Samuel learned how to ride and control mortals with an ease which astonished us. Like I said, Samuel was a quick learner, and he experienced none of the problems in control that I did. Samuel started riding Harriet Junior, and we watched him closely. His first excursions were fairly uneventful. He did not perform sex riding her at all, which we all thought peculiar; being that it is our favorite pastime. Most of the time he was passive, and Harriet Junior went through her daily routine without incident. He started going out with her, to work, shopping, and to the bars she frequented, and Joseph and I followed along unclothed to make sure he didn’t do anything untoward.
I’m afraid we neglected the other members of the household. Rita started acting strangely. She neglected her work, and James was constantly correcting her mistakes. It turned out that Samuel was playing us. He had learned something that none of us knew how to do. He would go out riding Harriet Junior, whom we would follow. He had learned to disguise his soul when riding, but that is something we were all adept at to one extent or another. We could usually unmask a rider if we concentrated hard enough. Unknown to us, Samuel had mastered this ability. He had also learned the trick of jumping from one host to another. While we were bored to death (so to speak) watching Harriet Junior drink Margarita after Margarita, Samuel jumped from her to Rita. He would have his way with her, and then jump back to Harriet Junior in time for the trip home.
This went on for a long time before we found out. Ronnie was riding Rita one day, and came across a huge rock of crack cocaine in her room. This was just not Rita’s style. Her tastes ran to an occasional drink of wine, but drugs were definitely not one of her vices. What effect cocaine would have on a spirit was beyond our imagining, although we each had enjoyed the family’s alcoholic libations. We had a meeting, at first not including Samuel, and agreed that he had somehow managed to corrupt Rita. Now, we spirits are not saints by any stretch of the imagination. However, Samuel’s actions had a potentially disastrous effect on the entire family, and they could not be tolerated. We discussed what could be done. Punishing a spirit is no easy task. You cannot kill someone who is already dead; even Greta agreed that could not be done. Nor can you imprison a spirit. The most unpleasant punishment we could think of was to ostracize Samuel.
We confronted him, and threatened to toss him out of the family. He said all the right words, and promised not to do it any more. Ronnie was on his side, defending him and promising to watch him more closely. We put him on probation and everyone watched closely. Samuel straightened up and seemed to be keeping his side of the bargain. I didn’t feel comfortable about the situation, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. With Samuel’s abilities, we could never be sure we were watching him close enough. With all the tension, our happy little family was no longer quite so happy.
I asked Greta one day if she had ever seen this long range jumping ability.
“I’ve seen something like it”, she said. “I knew a spirit once, the leader of our family long ago, who sometimes seemed to possess two or three mortals at once. I never knew how he did it, and he wouldn’t tell me. Now I think I see the answer. I think maybe his abilities and Samuel’s are related.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We can’t stop him from jumping, and seemingly we can’t discover him doing it. You know he’s going to get into trouble again.”
“All we can do is watch him closely”, she said. “I’m not ready to give up on him yet. I think there’s some good in him somewhere. We’ve got to bring it out of him.”
That was our Greta. Always trying to save souls. I didn’t think this particular soul was salvageable, but I knew better than to argue with her.
“What happened to this powerful spirit?” I asked. “Maybe we can enlist his aid.”
“He passed on. He saved our family from a renegade spirit, not unlike Samuel. But he passed on.” She was thoughtful after that, and would say no more.
Life went on, so to speak. We all tried to keep tabs on Samuel, and he seemed to be on his best behavior. He even helped Rita get through her cocaine addiction, riding her through the toughest times and keeping her from suffering too much.
We should have been alarmed when the crime streak started. Gang violence was up, armed robbery was up, drug trafficking was at its highest peak in years. But so what else was new? When is crime not up? We were each too involved in our passions to notice. When time passes as it does for us, you just don’t notice things like that. Samuel seemed to be behaving. He would inhabit Harriet Junior, and they would do their drinking at home. There was always the uneasy suspicion that Samuel was not all there, but no way to prove it. Harriet Junior started bringing people home. That was our first inkling that things were not as they seemed. The people she brought home were rough looking, tattooed, unkempt biker types and skinny, dirty, drug-hazed whorish women. They would stay and drink the night away. At least there were no drugs involved. I made sure of that.
We had another meeting, and confronted Samuel again. He denied everything. He became belligerent. He accused us of plotting against him. He accused us of hypocrisy. Ronnie could get family members involved in an adulterous homosexual pedophilic triangle and no-one would bat an eyelid. Samuel just brought a few people home and he caught hell. We again threatened him with ostracism. He told us to go ahead and try. He then jumped into Harriet Junior and stomped out of the house. I got ready to follow, but Ronnie said he would go, it was his responsibility. Greta, Joseph, and I spent the evening discussing what we could do. Nobody had any ideas.
We were still discussing it when Ronnie rushed in with the news that Harriet Junior had been arrested. She had been caught in a busted drug deal. We found out that she had been regularly dealing, and had been under investigation by the police for weeks. Soon after, the police called and broke the news to the old man and lady. Harriet almost had a heart attack. I had to jump into her real fast and get her calmed down. Ronnie helped settle the old man down. Joseph and Greta went out to look for Samuel. The household had almost settled down when they returned with Samuel. He didn’t want to be there, that much was obvious. But Greta had somehow compelled him to come with her. Our second family meeting of the evening commenced.
“That does it!” said Greta, in her powerful voice that brooked no argument. “I’ll not have you wreck our entire family! We have worked too hard to get where we are today, and you have been destroying it. We have tried to save you from yourself. We have tried to rescue your soul, but you have refused our help.”
“Fuck you, bitch”, said Samuel, oratory ability not being one of his strong suits. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve lorded over this family far too long, and I think it’s time for a change.”
“You are hereby expelled from this family”, she said. “You shall wander the dark streets alone and shall never know peace or fellowship. You are ostracized!” I was cringing from the power in her voice. I had never heard her speak so forcefully. The walls shook, as if a hurricane was battering the house. If I had had ears, I would have covered them. As it was, I had no defense. I could only thank God that her wrath was not directed at me.
“No, you are the one who will leave”, he said, just barely audible over the echoes of her voice.
“BE GONE, SPIRIT!” she cried, and his phantasmal body was extinguished. His soul-light shrunk to a tiny speck, and faded from its brilliant yellow to a dull brownish white. It was expelled from the room, through the wall and out into the yard. She followed it outside, still screaming in that terrible voice. Once we recovered from the shock, we followed. She was outside, alone.
“Where is he?” asked Ronnie.
“Halfway to Hell, I hope”, she answered.
But we had no such luck. Things were quiet for a while. The family bailed Harriet Junior out of jail, and the old man used his money to make the charges go away. But he made her life miserable. He cut her out of his will, and threatened to throw her out of the house. Harriet, with a small amount of cajoling from me, convinced him to let her stay. The poor thing was so confused. She just didn’t know why she had done such a thing. She was genuinely sorry, but the old man would not hear her apologies and promises to reform herself. No amount of persuasion by any of us could change the old man’s mind. He had reached the limit. We could not push him past his anger. Even absent, Samuel had managed to break up our happy family.
But he was not done yet. There came the evening when it all changed. Harriet Junior was in her room drinking, as she was doing frequently lately. We avoided riding her; her despair was too much for us to bear. We avoided the old man’s anger as well. We were all about our business, Joseph riding Rita, Greta riding Danielle, Ronnie with Peter, and me riding Harriet. No playing this evening, just each of us doing our solitary things. Harriet and I were reading, on the verge of sleep. The household was quiet. I heard some crying from somewhere in the house, but I had heard a lot of that lately and paid it no mind. The crying stopped and we continued reading.
The scream came from downstairs. I bolted upright in bed and jumped out of Harriet so quick she was left reeling. I raced downstairs, with Joseph and Greta following. Ronnie met us at the bottom of the stairs, and we raced into Harriet Junior’s room. We were too late. She had cut her throat with a kitchen knife, and her blood was spurting out of the artery in her neck and splattering everywhere. Her hand was still clutching the knife. We raced back and jumped into our respective hosts, who were just now coming from their rooms to investigate. Harriet ran to the phone and dialed 911. Danielle and Peter did what they could to try to stem the flow of blood while waiting for the ambulance. Rita ran around screaming, Joseph no longer able to control her. James came in, grabbed Rita and tried to stop her panic, to little avail. Our mortals were doing everything possible, and so we disengaged to have a conference, right there in the middle of pandemonium. Where was the old man in all of this? We rushed upstairs to find out, only to find him dead of a heart attack, lying on the floor of his bedroom. He had apparently been attempting to get up and find out what all the commotion was about when it hit him. The family did what they could for him, but again they were too late.
The wait for the ambulance was unbearable for us. That 20 minute interval seemed endless in spirit time. Harriet Junior’s heart stopped beating before the ambulance arrived. The medics arrived and did what they could, but it was too late, both for Harriet Junior and the old man. They rushed them into the ambulance and carried them away. Neither of them made it. Their soul-lights did not appear to us, either. Now, some doctors will tell you that it is impossible for someone to commit suicide by cutting their own throat. The police actually suspected foul play for a while afterwards, but finally convinced themselves otherwise, given Harriet Junior’s recent troubles.
But that came later. What came next was the final denouement in this tragic tale. We spirits were gathered together in Harriet Junior’s room, while the mortals were in another part of the house. We were in shock. We were moaning, and crying, and shouting our anger at the world. It was a while before we noticed another presence in the room. Samuel’s apparition gradually became visible to us. His body had resumed its original appearance, squat and flattened and all askew. The head, hanging almost sideways, showed a horrible rictus of a smile, a mirthless, smirking grimace, and it was laughing. His laughter was terrible in the way only the dead can laugh. We stared at him for a moment. I felt a black hopelessness; there was no way we could ever rid ourselves of his evil presence.
Greta screamed a horrible banshee wail. She threw herself at him, and their phantasmal bodies erupted in sparks as they grappled. Their coupled bodies bounced from wall to wall. Still he laughed, and still she wailed. As strong a spirit as he was, she was stronger. She pushed him once more through the wall to the outside, and we followed. She was pushing him down the street, slowly rising as she did so. They were tearing pieces of their souls from each other. A stream of sparkles flowed behind them, a horribly beautiful mixture of emerald and gold. Their bodies disappeared, leaving behind only their slowly extinguishing soul-lights. The laughter and wailing started to fade as they rose higher in the air. We struggled to follow, but they outpaced us. We could finally go no higher, reaching the end of our tethers to the mortal world. They continued rising, higher and higher. We watched as the lights finally disappeared, either too high to see them or because they had found a way to destroy each other. We waited to see if one of them would come back, but our wait was fruitless. They never returned.
We had witnessed the passing of not one, but two spirits. We each hoped that they had “gone to heaven”, as Greta would have put it. We’ll never really know until it is our time to pass. Judging by Greta’s span in the afterlife, that will be a long time in coming. It will be an eternity in spirit time. It will be an eternity because we can no longer be quite the innocent spirits we once were. We now see what effect we can have on our beloved mortals.
I have inherited Greta’s legacy. I have become the leader of what remains of our family. My first act as leader was to abandon the Smithson family. We have haunted them enough. We have moved on to another, and we have toned down our passions. Even Ronnie agreed that this must be done. He felt guilt over his role in Samuel’s education and his fall from grace. I have taken to performing good works, hoping that I can atone for my sins, both in mortal life and as a spirit. I hope I can pay half as well as Greta paid for hers. I still have my doubts about everything: angels, God, Heaven and Hell. But I’m convinced that our purpose here in this ghostly realm is to do good, and that I will do, until I too pass on.
And, if you find yourself sitting around one night, and you are suddenly overcome by a sensual urge for no good reason, be vigilant. If you find yourself fantasizing your deepest, darkest, secret desires, be steadfast. And if you find yourself acting out those fantasies, say hello. You are haunted. The ghosts have come to call.