Chapter 5

Ghost did two more things that night. One was bad, but the other offset it.

The bad part was that he caused our exhausted bodies to fall into a deep slumber. We were asleep when our parents came home from their card game.

The good part was that he made Mom horny enough that nobody checked on us. They went straight to bed, instead.

When I woke up I was bathed in red light from the morning sun coming through the rose window. Other colors stained the things around us. I shook Emily awake.

“We fell asleep!” I whispered. “It’s morning!”

She stretched and, even though I was terrified, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her naked body.

“We have to get up!” I wheezed.

“Calm down,” she said.

“Calm down? We’re naked, Em. There’s no way I’m getting into that costume again just to leave the attic. That means we’re going down there naked. What if they see us?”

“Bobby, if they were going to catch us it would have been last night after they got home. They didn’t come looking for us. Ergo, they don’t know where we are or how we’re dressed. Have you heard them calling for us?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then go downstairs as quietly as you can and get to your room. I’ll put the costumes in the trunk. When you get dressed, come stand at the bottom of the stairs and I’ll wait until you tell me the coast is clear.”

“Yes!” I gasped. I didn’t think about whether it was a good or bad plan. It was a plan and I needed a plan.

I scurried down those stairs like a mouse, worried there was a cat somewhere near. The hallway was empty and my room was only two doors down. I got there and eased through my door. Three minutes later I was dressed and back at the bottom of the stairs.

Em was looking down at me. Her breasts were pale orbs in the darkness. I didn’t watch her, though, as she descended to my level. I watched the hallway. She had to push past me and she ran on light feet to her room.

I didn’t know what to do so I went downstairs and to the kitchen. If Mom was there I was going to try to act normal.

Nobody was there.

Emily joined me and looked around.

“Nobody’s here,” I said.

“It’s Saturday,” she said. “Maybe they slept in.”

“Maybe,” I said.

We got something to eat and the situation seemed so domestic, so normal that it was uncanny. I was afraid to talk about the night before because one of our parents could come in at any second.

“You okay?” I managed.

“I’m fantastic,” she said.

“Are you ... sore?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m just like you.”

“I’m a little freaked,” I said.

She looked at me over a spoonful of raisin bran.

“I’m not,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

I looked at the entryway to the kitchen. I didn’t hear anything.

“I really did see something last night,” I said.

“I believe you,” she replied. “Now, eat. We can talk about it later.”

We had awakened at seven. Our parents didn’t show until nine. By then we’d finished breakfast and were puttering around the house. I think we were just trying to keep busy.

Emily was doing homework and I was playing a video game when Mom came bouncing out of their bedroom.

“How’d it go?” she asked, excitedly.

“We won the prizes for best costumes,” said Emily, proudly.

“Oooo, I’m so excited!” squealed Mom.

“We were, too,” said Emily.

“What else happened?” asked Mom.

“What do you mean?” asked Emily.

“Did you dance? Did anybody ask you out? I assume everybody knew who you were, even though your faces were covered.”

“Yes, everybody knew. I danced every dance except one. The boys wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t even keep track of where Bobby was or what he was doing.”

Two sets of female eyes pinned on me.

“I danced some,” I said. “The girls I talked to all wanted to talk about Emily.”

“She looked sexy,” said Mom, as though that was a completely appropriate thing to say about her daughter. “Girls all want to talk about a sexy girl.”

“Some guys talked about her too,” I said. “I had to warn one of them to watch his mouth.”

“That’s to be expected,” said Mom. “Boys are horny all the time at that age.”

“Mom!” chastised my sister.

“Well, it’s true,” said Mom. “You’re almost adults, now. You’ll be entering the adult world in less than a year. You should be ready for that. It’s hard enough without being ignorant.”

“I’m not ignorant, Mother,” said Emily.

“Good. Now. I have to go get your father up. He wore himself out last night.” She pinked up. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

Emily looked at me and mouthed, “I do.” She winked at me.

“We’re going for a walk,” said Emily. “Take as long as you want to wake Daddy up.”

“Emily! I’m shocked,” said Mom. Then she laughed.

As she disappeared to “wake Dad up” we left the house. It was chilly, but not to the point that a jacket was absolutely required.

While we walked, we talked.

That might have been the most jarring part of things, as I look back on it. We had never talked extensively about what happened on Halloween night.

This time we did.

“So you’re really okay with what happened?” I asked.

She reached for my hand and held it with loose fingers.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “I can’t wait until we can do it again.”

“You mean next year?” I said.

“I’m not waiting a whole year to feel that again,” she said. “Do you want to wait a year?”

“No,” I said. “I’d do it right now, if we could.”

“Then we’re not waiting a year.” She sounded so confident, so sure.

“But we’ll be in college this time next year,” I said. “What if we don’t come home at Halloween?”

“You’re still talking about a year from now,” said Em. “We just decided we weren’t going to wait a year.”

“I don’t know what to think,” I sighed. “We’ve never wanted to do things if it wasn’t Halloween.”

“You mean the ghost was satisfied if all we did was fool around on October thirty-first,” she suggested.

“I guess. I mean look at last year. Tasting you was amazing. I loved it. But the next day I could go without tasting you and it was okay. This feels different.”

“I think it is different, this year,” she said. “I don’t know why. All I know is that what happened last night will happen again, and soon.”

We walked on, still holding hands. There was nobody around but even if there had been, I don’t think we’d have felt compelled to break that contact.

“I wonder,” she said, eventually.

“Wonder what?”

“Each year the ghost wanted us to do more. But each year he went back to sleep, or something. Then, this year, we did everything. Maybe he’s been waking up a little more each year and now he’s all the way awake. Maybe he isn’t going back to sleep this year.”

“You mean he’s only been haunting us on that one day, when the spirit world is in closest alignment with the corporeal world, but now he’ll haunt us all the time?”

“I’m no expert on ghosts,” she said. “I never even had any interest in ghosts until this year. But when October got here and I started feeling all these ... urges ... I had to pay attention. I felt like something kept knocking at a door inside me, wanting in. I even talked to it!”

“You never told me that,” I said.

“I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you to laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing. So, what did you say?”

“I asked it what it wanted. I told it to leave me alone. But the closer it got to Halloween, the stronger the feelings were. And by the time the dance was over, I didn’t care if it had gotten inside of me. I just had to be with you ... that way.”

“Maybe we’ve been thinking about this the wrong way,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been thinking that Ghost was one of the guys who went off and died in the war. Maybe it’s not one of them. Instead, it’s one of the girls who got left behind. Maybe she wants what she could never have back then.”

“Bobby, they all died, eventually. I don’t know what the afterlife is like, but surely everybody goes to the same place. I mean those spirits eventually ended up together. What do they need us for?”

“I don’t know,” I moaned. “I never thought I’d have to figure something like this out. Do you have a theory?”

“Yes,” she said. It’s because they don’t have bodies anymore,” said Em. “They can’t feel things the way you and I can. So they use us to feel things.”

“So we’re being haunted by as many as six ghosts?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I know I felt like there was somebody else there with me last night.”

“That was probably me,” I pointed out.

“No, I mean besides you. When you told me about that light you saw, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t see it, but I felt something kind of soak into me.”

“That was also probably me,” I said.

She squeezed my hand.

“I don’t mean when you came in me. This was something I felt with my entire body.”

“It can’t have been six ghosts,” I said. “That many would have made us go crazy.”

“It probably wasn’t all six,” she said. “If every ghost with that kind of unfinished business got involved with humans, the whole world would go crazy. No, I think it’s only one of them, or maybe two, one man and one woman. Maybe the others went on with life. Imagine this. If you died, you’d watch out over me. I know you would. And you’d want me to be happy. So if I did eventually fall in love with some man, and had his babies and lived a full, happy life, you’d be satisfied and never haunt me. Maybe this is a couple where she was so heartbroken after he died that she didn’t go on and live a full life. So the guy ghost was never happy, and the girl ghost was never happy, and because they loved each other in this house, they’ve hung around here all these years, until we came along and they finally had a boy and a girl they could possess to finish what they could never complete.”

“There have been plenty of people who lived here before this,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but we don’t know which of them was the ghost, and anyway they weren’t as close as we are. We’re twins. We’ve always been more closely connected than most other people ever are. Even husbands and wives aren’t as close as we’ve always been, since the day we were born.”

“Okay,” I said. “But last night they got what they wanted. Why are they sticking around? We never felt their desires after Halloween in the past. And they had to have gotten what they felt like they missed last night. I’ve never felt closer to anyone in my whole life than I felt last night. Not even you.”

“Like I said, maybe we made them stronger each year and this year they were able to form a permanent tie to us.”

“I don’t know,” I sighed.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All that matters is that we stay connected.”

“We’ll always be connected. You know that.”

“No, I mean we will always stay connected like we were last night.”