Safer at Home: A Ghost Story by Zoe Cannon

Author:Zoe Cannon
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Horror, Occult & Supernatural, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
Publisher: Zoe Cannon
Published: 2021-04-04T08:17:28.992447+00:00

* * *

Ben wonders how bad a head injury has to be before you need to go to the hospital. This headache is probably a bad sign, along with the ringing in his ears, and the way the world lurches to the left every time he tries to move. He would look it up, but he doesn’t have a phone anymore, or a computer.

Then he realizes that no matter how bad it is, he would rather take his chances than go anywhere near a hospital in the middle of a pandemic, and so he stops worrying about it.

He isn’t sure how long it takes for his head to clear. When he’s lucid enough to remember the concept of time, he looks up at the door and sees light pouring through the window. He’s lost the whole night, probably more. He may have spent some of that time sleeping, but he isn’t sure.

But now, when he shifts, the world stays steady. His headache pulses a little more strongly, but that’s it. He eyes the space in front of the door, where the tableau played out last night. “Are you going to let me stand up?”

His voice doesn’t shake this time. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for him to be so much less afraid than yesterday, after the ghost probably gave him a concussion and almost did a lot worse. But even though things were blurry for a while after his fall, he knows he didn’t imagine the scene he saw unfold in front of him.

And now he thinks he understands what’s happening here.

When nobody answers, he pushes himself to his feet. None of the weapons scattered across the floor—his knife, the laptop, the sharp-edged ball that used to be his DVDs—rise up to stop him.

“Let me guess. Still locked in.” He tries the doorknob. Sure enough, the door still won’t move. He tries the living room window, for good measure, and get the same results.

The ghosts attack last night provided him with a number of implements that would be a lot more useful against the window glass than a knife. But he doesn’t reach for any of them. Instead, he walks drunkenly back toward the stairs—his balance is still a little off—and sits down on the bottom step.

“Tell me if I’ve got this right,” he says.

It feels silly, talking to empty air. But the remnants of his boxes, lying fused together in unnatural shapes on the floor, are enough to tell him he’s not alone in here.

“I thought you were the woman with the knife,” he continues. “You’re not, are you? You’re the other one. The one she killed.”

No answer.

“She killed you. And now you’re stuck here reliving your death, and making anyone dumb enough to ignore the warnings and move in here relive it with you.”

Still nothing.

But Ben keeps talking. “That’s why you didn’t want to let Emilie in. And why you won’t let me go see her. You didn’t get violent until she tried to come inside. The worst you did was seal the exits—and I guess even that could be a twisted way of protecting me.

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