Group 74
A Ghost Story
A Stairwell
A Hamburger
Brief Synopsis: After a séance brings back an evil spirit, Darcy must flee down twelve floors as her possessed friend gives chase. Her attempted escape turns into a fight for her sanity
Twelve floors. Darcy was sure
that’s how many floors she and Casey climbed just minutes earlier. A lump
formed in her throat thinking of her best friend. Until now. Until that damned
spirit called back to this world by that witch had scooped out the soul of her
friend and claimed the remaining shell as its own.
Bam! Bam! A fist pounded on the
door behind Darcy. She stumbled forward, finding the railing in the stairwell despite
the only illumination being a strobing red light as if a police cruiser was
chasing a speeder somewhere above.
“We’re a little old for
hide-and-seek, don’t you think?” Casey shouted. “I like it better when we play
doctor! Show me where it hurts, Darc.”
“SHUT UP!” She screamed. “You’re
not Casey!”
She descended the concrete stairway
before her, knowing that after eight steps she’d reach a landing. There the
stairway turned for another eight steps before coming to a landing and a door
for the floor below. One hundred and ninety-two steps to freedom.
“That’s not nice. We were married
in blood. Don’t you remember your vows?” The door’s hinges creaked as it opened
behind her.
“I remember it was rainy and muddy
and creepy that day,” she yelled back. His interest in the occult was alluring
to her once, but over the last few months she regretted ever indulging his dark
fantasies, most of all the pagan wedding. Yet she conceded to his desire to
meet the witch in this abandoned high rise for the séance, as if appeasing him
this time would save their relationship. She felt like the British in the
1930s, begrudgingly making concessions to the Nazis right up to the point the
tanks rolled into Poland.
She reached the first landing,
pivoted her weight and continued down the next flight. Her heart raced and her
twenty-two-year old lungs burned. Too many smokes.
Casey’s voice called out.
“What are the roots that clutch,
what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”
They shared both an admiration of
T.S. Eliot and a history of various psychological maladies, making “The Waste
Land” their favorite. The poem served almost as a talisman in their
relationship, pulling them back from the brink of every drama.
“Come in under the shadow of this
red rock…”
Darcy risked taking two steps at a
time, hoping the distance would muffle his voice.
“I will show you fear in a handful
of dust.”
“SHUT UP!” she screamed again, as
she neared the seventh floor.
“Darcy. That is no way to talk to
your friend.”
In the pulsating red light on the
landing, her father stood behind a charcoal grill. He wore an old blue cap and
a white apron with “Caution Man Cooking” written across it in a font made to
resemble flames.
“I hear he wants to play doctor. Don’t
blow this, you’re a cute girl, but looks won’t last forever. Better bag him
while you still can.”
“Daddy?” Tears welled in her eyes.
She hadn’t seen him since that day twelve years earlier when a Mack truck
T-boned his Corvette on his way to pick her up at her friend’s house.
“Hurry up and apologize, your burger
is almost done.” He lifted a patty with his spatula, and even from feet away,
she could see maggots crawling on the pink beef.
“You’re not real.” She rushed
passed him, catching a glimpse of the left side of his face and the mangled
soup of muscle, flesh, and bone that remained after the accident.
“You’ve always been a
disappointment,” he said. “You know right as that truck hit me, the last thing
I thought was that this is all Darcy’s fault.”
Salty tears stung her eyes, and her
dad started singing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Casey’s voice interjected
with more lines from Eliot. The last six floors were a blur, the sounds mixing
with the strobing light.
She came to the final landing where
there was only a door. Silence echoed behind her, she couldn’t even hear
Casey’s footfalls descending the stairs. Perhaps, he gave up. She tried the
door, but it didn’t budge. Casey had told her only the doors to the floors were
locked. She dug into her purse for the key Casey had stored there. He detested
carrying things in his pockets. The key fit the lock, the door clicked, and she
plunged through.
Her heart plummeted to her stomach.
She expected to find the lobby, but instead she was greeted by the
twelfth-floor hallway. Two doorways to her left, candlelight flickered into the
hallway.
“This isn’t possible.”
Her feet carried her to the open
door, and inside, they remained seated in a circle. The demon spirit with
horns, a bull’s snout, and blazing red pupils wore Casey’s clothes, and the
witch was no longer a gray-haired woman but a giant python with two feeble long
arms. Two other grotesque minions were also there.
“Come, Darcy,” Casey said. “Let’s
consummate our bond. Waiting will only make this more painful.”
She wailed, her last shreds of
sanity spilling out in high octave notes. She retreated back to the stairway,
where she ran down and down and down and down.
***
“You think she’s possessed,” said the
witch, who was really no more than an old woman named Kara.
“No, but I’m worried,” Casey said. “She’s
had episodes before, but never for this long. We should call for help.”
“Shit, if the cops are coming, I
need to hide a few things,” Kara struggled to her feet. Casey dug into Darcy’s
purse for her cell phone.
Across the room, Darcy kept
stomping in eight-step triangles. Her eyes were distant and wild, and she
murmured lines of Eliot and fragments of old songs. As Casey dialed, he made
out one line.
“I could not speak, and my eyes
failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing looking into the
heart of light, the silence.”
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