I Would Haunt You if I Could by Seán Padraic Birnie

Author:Seán Padraic Birnie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, literary, short stories, ghost, collections
Publisher: Undertow Publications

*

The motion sensors don’t notice me and so the hall is dark, dark enough to make the slit of yellow light beneath the door of the flat below mine glow brightly. Usually I would hear them in, the ghosts of the third floor, moving about, murmuring to themselves, the retirees who spend most of the year in New Zealand but keep the flat for occasional stays, but this time I do not. What’s their role, I think. What’s their part to play? What’s their position in this bizarre company? I stand outside the door a moment, listening. I expect to hear my mother’s voice.

Instead I hear footsteps approach the door and in a sudden panic I jolt myself away.

Fuchsia, I think, seeing the bloody gift deposited outside Ethel’s front door, it’s just what I’ve always wanted!

Too late I realise I’m not dressed for rain but out I go, into the wind, into horizontal rain that stings my eyes and face. Was it raining before? I don’t recall. I try hard not to think, replaying a mantra

correlationisnotcausation, correlationisnotcausation

or

ihateyouihateyouihateyou

as I walk down to the beach. By the time I reach the Kingsway I’m sodden, but I don’t let that stop me. I stamp across the boggy Lawns then kick pebbles out in front of me as I march along the promenade. Aside from a handful of daft joggers I am alone. Through the gust and bluster, I walk, head down. Calves burning, I walk and walk.

I’m on the groyne by the statue of a Torus, which—I googled it—represents the universe, watching the mad rise and crash of waves as the sun sets. I wonder do I want to drown, to die. Is that what I want? Is that why I have brought myself here? It would be a good night for it. The storm’s just getting started.

Even from this low vantage I hear it: the call of the void.

I walk again, to stay these thoughts. Suicide is a focal point. It exerts a centrifugal force. Turned away from it, other thoughts circulate like water in a plug that never drains: of my dad and of my mother, of Jack and Gerry and Bryan, of myself as a child in a library reading of strange and terrible powers and of the hope that I too might one day wield strange and terrible powers, if I am a good student, if I apply myself, if I practice.

Sheet lightning shivers over dark water. As the waves crest the water glows.

All throughout my childhood I practiced.

I remember Jack, during another storm, hunched over his phone delightedly watching the registration of lightning strikes on a little map.

That was practically right on us! he says, and it isn’t hard to believe him. I think it hit the Starbucks.

I’ve gotten to Saltdean before exhaustion brings me to a halt. I realise how drenched I am. With each step my trainers squelch. The cold eats into my bones and abruptly I am aware of the lightning and of the danger it presents.

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