Ghost Brother (Spooky Short Stories by Kathryn Meyer Griffith) by Griffith Kathryn Meyer

Author:Griffith, Kathryn Meyer [Griffith, Kathryn Meyer]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Published: 2012-09-09T18:30:00+00:00

***

The next thing I knew I was sitting on a cot in a jail cell; four by eight feet at the most. The walls closing in on me were a gun metal gray to match the bars across the front. It was gloomy, depressing. It smelled like urine and dirty underwear. I could hear weeping and someone shouting and cussing somewhere down the long narrow hall my prison looked out onto.

A gruff voice pleaded in the cell adjacent to mine, “I’m innocent. Innocent, I say! I didn’t mug, knife, that tourist and take his wallet. I didn’t. Somebody please come and let me OUT of here. Anybody!”

Someone was throwing up in another cell, though it could be the same man who was weeping or the one who was shouting, I didn’t know, and the stench drifted in to my cell. I gagged.

I got up and threw myself at the bars. My hand, my arms, shadows, could go through them, but my body wedged between the iron and I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t run away. And, oh, how I wanted to. I didn’t belong here. I’d done nothing wrong…so why was I caged like an animal? What was going on?

Again I thought: what was this? Hell? And why am I here?

Why can’t I go home to Tessa and have the life I’d once had?

“Because you’re dangerous,” a soft voice behind me said, “and need to be locked up, that’s why.”

I turned and there was Gerald lounging on the cot, laying prone, his arms tucked up under his head. He was grinning at me with that evil I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile of his. The one I hated. It always meant he’d done something bad.

“Oh, great. If you’re here, it can’t be good. What do you want?”

“Not much. Just to keep you company, brother. Help you remember…things. At first it can be a little disconcerting to find yourself here.”

“Here?”

The ghost on the cot waved his hand in a circle above his head. “You know, the land of the dead. Ghostworld. Limbo. Whatever you want to call this place.”

“Ah, so I am dead, huh?”

“You had any doubt?”

“No, not really. I think the first time I was zipped to another location like somebody beamed me up, I kind of suspected.” I looked out through the bars again. There’d been a noise down the hallway somewhere. Voices. Maybe they were coming to let me out.

Over my shoulder, I asked my dead brother, “Okay, so what am I doing here in this cell? And why can’t I get out?”

“You have a lesson to learn. This place is great for that.

“I bet,” my brother was standing beside me now, “you’ve already learned a few things since you got here.”

I met his glittering eyes and shrugged. “Most of it I didn’t understand.”

“You will.”

Then my brother’s ghost was gone.

“Gerald, you can’t just up and disappear like that! What is it I’m supposed to learn? What am I supposed to do next? Come back!”

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