I had a house gig, before I came here. A house gig is nice — you can watch TV, you can sit in the kitchen, smell the cooking smells, listen to the conversations.

Not everyone digs it, though, which I can understand, because if you don’t get a house where they don’t notice you so much, or where they’re at least cool with the supernatural, it can turn into a pain in the ass very quickly, and then you’re stuck there until someone thinks to call a priest or something. I wound up at my parents’ house. Not a good situation at first. My sister and her family had moved in for a while, and I love Julie and everything, but her kids…I could do without her kids. Real high-strung and whiny, both of them, and they don’t like to play outside really at all, and the little one, Janie, saw me in the upstairs hall one night — I guess she got up to go to the bathroom — and she winged a Barbie at my head and just started wailing. She’s got a set of lungs on her, I’ll give her that. Good aim, too. Alive, I would have got a black eye from that Barbie.

So, yeah, I stayed in the attic after that, because as it turns out, you can still get a headache even if you don’t technically have an actual physical head anymore. I hung out up there for a year, until Julie’s husband got a job in Dayton and Mom and Dad decided to move out there and live near Julie and the grandchildren — thank Christ. I feel bad putting it like that, but I couldn’t hack those kids anymore.

Then the Breslers moved in. They were really mellow. The first week they lived there, Don Bresler spotted me coming up the stairs. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him. He said hello, and I said hello back. Then he asked if there was anything he could do for me, if I was okay, and I said I was fine, you know, sorry to bother you, and he said I wasn’t bothering him at all, but if I wouldn’t mind not sneaking up on people, that would be good, and also to stay out of the bathroom when his daughters were in there — they had three teenage girls, good-looking girls. I said no problem, and he said he’d see me around, and that was that. So that was cool, because they knew I was there, but they didn’t really care. I mean, they cared in the sense that they didn’t ignore me; they’d blame me if they couldn’t find their keys, stuff like that, but that was cool too — it was like I was part of the family, but without any of the hassle that goes with that, usually.

But the Breslers moved out after Tanya went to college, and a hippie-ish couple moved in, the Edstroms. I had a bad feeling about the Edstroms from the beginning, because the house had a termite problem when they bought it, but Mrs. Edstrom didn’t believe in killing any living creature — you know the type. So, instead of calling an exterminator, she tried all these folk remedies to get them out, including this one Pied Piper deal where she walked around the house playing the flute, which apparently was supposed to lure the termites outside to commune with music. It’s harmless, and the flute-playing was pretty funny, but the thing with these really sincere vegan types is, they really want to help you, and they mean well, but their idea of helping you is to get a Wiccan prayer circle going and basically kick you out of the house “for your own good.” Thanks, but no thanks.

Sure enough, I got kicked out of the house. Mrs. Edstrom decided that she sensed “unfriendly vibrations,” so she invited her friends over to do a spell. The vibrations were coming from me, probably, in which case, it’s my own fault, but if she hadn’t put up all those dream-catchers…I couldn’t turn around without getting tangled up in one of those stupid things. But after the termite fiasco, I wasn’t all that worried about the spell. They’d light some candles, do some chanting, pretend to each other that they’d felt a cleansing wind or something, but nothing would actually happen, right?

Wrong. One of the women brought sage. She pulled it out of her bag, she lit it up, and the next thing I knew I was out on the front walk, coughing up a lung. I stood there for a minute waiting for my head to clear, and inside, I could see them holding hands around the table…I started thinking about the time me and Jimmy scared Julie so bad with ghost stories that she hid under Mom and Dad’s bed and wouldn’t come out until they got home.

The boy in the wall — that was the one that did it. We told her there was a boy exactly Julie’s age who used to live in our house long long ago, and he wouldn’t obey his older brothers when his parents left them in charge, so the brothers killed him with an axe and bricked him up in a wall in the basement, and that’s not the furnace clanking — that’s the boy, trying to get out of the wall! That’s not red paint on the floor in the corner — that’s his blood! You can scrub and scrub at that stain — but it’ll never come out! Julie got really scared, but she kept it together until Jimmy snuck downstairs and banged on the side of the hot water heater with a broom, but oh man, did she flip out then — up the stairs, down the hall, and in under the bed in about three seconds, yelling her head off the whole way.

That was hilarious, for about fifteen minutes, but if we couldn’t get her out from under there, we’d get in shit with Mom for picking on her, and she was not about to come out until an adult showed up, either. We were so desperate, we even said we’d play dress-up with her — she was always begging us to “do dress-ups,” and we were always saying okay and then giving her an Indian burn instead, so for us to say we’d do it was a big deal, and when she wouldn’t even consider it, we didn’t know what to do. And she just kept bawling — she wanted Mom, she wanted Dad, she wanted her Teddy-O. So Jimmy said we might as well leave her there, and when she heard that, she bawled even louder — “don’t leave me, don’t leave me alooooone!”

So Jimmy told me to go to her room and get her Teddy-O, and to our room and get some comic books, and to come back; we’d just sit next to the bed and read for a while, and maybe she’d get bored and come out. So I got Teddy-O and the comic books, and when I got back to Mom and Dad’s room, Jimmy was under the bed except for his feet, and I heard him telling Julie, “It’s okay, don’t worry. Rob and I can take that dead kid. Don’t worry. It’s okay.” I stood there for a minute, and when he didn’t come back out right away, I was like, the hell with it, and I went and got a flashlight from the kitchen and then I crawled under the bed too. We read comic books under there for two hours until Julie passed out, and then we dragged her out by the feet and put her in bed.

We got in trouble anyway, the next day, because Julie had so much dust all over her. “What did you do to her — she looks like a hobo!” Julie didn’t tattle, though, just said we’d been playing, so we got off with a talking-to — I guess she had fun once we got under there with her. I had fun myself, squeezed in there, not that I’d have admitted it to Jimmy. That’s what I was thinking about after Mrs. Edstrom’s coven banned me from the house — being under the bed with my brother and sister on a Saturday night.

I didn’t know where to go after that. I knew the name of the memorial park where my parents put the plaque for me, but I didn’t know how to get there, so I walked around town looking for someone to ask, and finally I ran into a girl in a cowboy hat on Hilltop Road and she told me how to get here. And now I’m here, and…it’s decent. I don’t hate it. It’s just different from being in a house, because being in a house…you’re in the house, period. The house belongs to a cool family, the house belongs to an annoying family, doesn’t matter. You stay put. Here, you can come and go, and that’s a good deal in theory. I just don’t have any particular place I want to go right now. But I’ll figure something out.

My name is Rob Rixon. I died in a fall August 4, 1985.

May 5, 2003

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