Ghostbusters (3 page)

No time to dwell on that now. I have a lecture to give.
And it might be the most important presentation she ever delivered. The fate of her wonderful, reinvented life depended on it. She adjusted her plain skirt and blouse before checking herself top to bottom one last time. The überconservative style choice projected an image of a serious scientist committed to teaching and research, and on a fast track to tenure at a major university.

Tenure! Go, Erin!

She grabbed her messenger bag and hurried off to her first lecture of the morning. As she left her apartment, she cast her mind back to The Incident, the catalyst that had ultimately led her into a life—and a brilliant career—in the world of hard science. She had been eight. So young to go through so much …

*   *   *

Second-grader Erin Gilbert was in love with life. She and her mom and dad lived in a picturesque little town in southern Michigan, a suburb of Battle Creek. She enjoyed being in the second grade and riding her bike back and forth under the canopy of tall trees on her street. Most of all she loved her little black dog, Corky. Her father said he was “part Spaniel, part who knows.” Her father worked as an executive in a big cereal company. Her mom stayed at home and volunteered with the Soroptimist club. Their house was built of white wood and brick, two stories with a wide, wraparound front porch and a two-person swing, tall, narrow windows, and it looked brand new, inside and out.

The house next door was also two stories, but with a very plain front like a box, and a few little bitty windows. It was painted a yucky yellow with ugly dark brown trim, and there was always smoke and a bad smell coming from the backyard because the old lady who lived there burned all her trash. Mrs. Barnard was short and round, with sunken eyes and wrinkles in her pale cheeks. When she wasn't dressed up for Sunday church, she wore an apron over her housedress and stomped around in big clunky shoes.

Mrs. Barnard kept chickens in her backyard on the far side of her burn barrel. She fussed over all her poultry, but most of all over her beautiful rooster named Ernesto. He had shiny black feathers on his back and wings and a copper-colored chest. She carried him around the yard cradled in the crook of her arm like a big cat, stroking his head and back, and talking to him. He cackled and clucked back at her.

Mrs. Barnard had no close family who visited her, but Sundays she drove to church in the '52 Plymouth sedan she kept in her sagging garage. Church and chickens and lots of smoke. That summed up Mrs. Barnard.

Plus
grumpy.

Every morning at sunrise, Ernesto woke up the Gilberts with his crowing. And when he started to crow, Corky started to bark. It made her parents angry (and sleepy), but there was nothing they could do about it, really. At least, that was what they used to say.

Corky was very interested in Mrs. Barnard's chickens, which were kept safe in a sturdy wire mesh coop, and there was a four-foot-high wooden fence separating the sides of the two yards. He'd tried to dig under the fence any number of times, but Erin lined the fence with stones to keep him on the Gilberts' side of the fence.

One day after school, Erin was playing with Corky in her yard, throwing an old tennis ball for him to fetch. He was a very energetic who-knows Spaniel and it took a lot of fetch to tire him out. She had just extricated the soggy ball from his mouth when a loud commotion at the fence made her and the dog look up. Waving his black wings to keep his balance, Ernesto perched on top of the fence, pretending to be an eagle.

Mrs. Barnard rushed up to the rickety wooden slats and tried to catch him, but she was too slow. The bird let out a squawk and flapped clumsily down into Erin's yard. Realizing the danger, she made a grab for Corky's collar. Her fingers couldn't get a firm grip and he shot away. In a blink, the dog jumped on the chicken. Over the terrible squawking and growling as the two fought, Erin could hear Mrs. Barnard screaming at her, and she saw the old woman trying desperately to climb over the chest-high barrier.

Then Corky got hold of Ernesto by the back of the neck and bit down. Bright blood started squirting in all directions as the two of them rolled on the grass. Ernesto stopped squawking and flapping. When he went limp, Corky ran off to his doghouse with the rooster in his mouth, dragging it inside with him. He was madly wagging his stub of a tail.

On the other side of the fence, Mrs. Barnard shrieked and screamed for the longest time. “You!” she shouted at Erin, over and over again. “You better watch out!” Her face throbbed bright red and her nose ran and she sobbed and wailed. She kept stopping in the middle of crying to put the ball of her fist against the middle of her chest and she closed her eyes like something in there hurt.

Then Mrs. Barnard disappeared into the house. A little while later, Animal Control came out and she ordered them to take Corky away and put him to sleep. But the lady told Mrs. Barnard that Ernesto had flown onto private property so it was trespassing and fair game. And Corky was licensed with all his shots, so there was nothing to be done.

After that, every time Mrs. Barnard saw Erin and her dog she yelled threats at them: “You better watch out!” And she took to burning her trash at all hours, so the nasty smoke would blow into their house. She seemed to get angrier and angrier by the day. Erin asked her father if she should apologize or send her a card, or maybe they could get her another baby rooster, but he said that would only stir her up more.

The Incident created a very tense atmosphere on the quiet, tree-lined street. At her parents' request Erin stopped playing in the backyard with her pup. Poor Corky got very restless and barky, which made her parents cranky. They said they didn't blame him, but Erin was worried. What if
they
called Animal Control and ordered them to put Corky to sleep?

Then Mrs. Barnard started parking her junky car in front of their driveway, blocking it, and instead of just burning her trash she took to throwing it over the fence.

Erin's father had to call the police. The officer took notes and then went over to talk to Mrs. Barnard. It was very exciting and at the same time scary.

The day after the policeman came, when Erin walked home from school she saw an ambulance parked in Mrs. Barnard's front yard. She got a glimpse of the old woman laid out on a gurney as people wheeled it out of the front door. She was covered up to her chin with a warm, soft blanket and an oxygen mask covered the bottom half of her face.

Erin's mother hurried out and pulled her inside their house, so she didn't see what happened next, but later she overheard her parents talking about how Mrs. Barnard had died in her front yard with the paramedics trying to save her. They took her dead body away in the ambulance very quietly, without running their siren or lights.

“That old lunatic won't ever bother us again,” her father said.

But that night, Erin was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a cock crowing. She recognized the rooster's voice at once—it was Ernesto. She listened with her covers pulled up to just below her eyes, but the noise didn't repeat. And Corky hadn't heard it or he would've started barking downstairs. It couldn't have been Ernesto, she assured herself. She had watched her father pull his mangled body out of the doghouse—a rooster that would never wake up anybody ever again.

After a minute or two, she decided she must've dreamed it. She slipped further down in the warm bed and closed her eyes. She was just drifting off again when she smelled something icky and familiar—burning trash. Her heart started to pound. With eyes tightly closed she was suddenly wide awake.

Then something touched her on the nose. Cold like an ice cube or a snowball.

“You!”

She jerked and her eyes flew open. She would have screamed, but her throat closed up.

Death had changed Mrs. Barnard, and not in a good way. Her skin was gray and her eyeballs were white. Her compact, grandmotherly body was stretched like a funhouse mirror; she was sticklike and tall, legs and arms so long that she could stand flat on the floor at the foot of the bed and reach over it to grab both sides of the headboard. Her fingernails scratched into the wood as she shook the bed. Erin flopped left and right, struggling not to fall off.

“You better watch out!” the apparition shrieked down at her.

The burning trash smell blasted from Mrs. Barnard's gaping mouth and as it washed over Erin, she held her breath to keep from inhaling it. She was terrified and at the same time fascinated by the strange turn of events. If Mrs. Barnard was dead, was this really her ghost? The old woman's face seemed to pull this way and that, milky eyes by turns bulging then sunken, and Erin could see through the shifting form to the curtained bedroom window behind it.

“You better—uh, uh…”

The ghost convulsed above her, as if choking on something deep in its guts, eyes squeezed shut, mouth gaping, strange narrow tongue extended onto its chin.

“Uh, uh…”

Then the dam broke. With a mighty lurch that quaked the bedframe, Mrs. Barnard threw up.

A torrent of what looked like blood gushed from her mouth and poured onto Erin's face and chest. It was red like blood but it wasn't warm, and it was so gooey and sticky it was barely liquid. Mrs. Barnard kept retching and the stuff kept splattering down. Erin struggled for air, thinking for sure she would drown in it.

Somehow she twisted away and slipped out the side of the covers. She ran out of her room, barefoot and screaming down the hall to her parents' bedroom. They were already awakened and sitting up in bed when she burst into the room. She burrowed into the covers between them, burying her head and pleading, “Don't let Mrs. Barnard get me! Her blood is all over my bed!”

Her father jumped out of bed while her mother held her and tried to comfort her. When he came back he said, “There's nothing there.”

“You just had a nightmare, Erin,” her mother said. “No more ice cream for you after 7
P.M
.”

“Nightmares just happen sometimes, honey,” her father said, trying to assure her. “They're nothing to worry about. They're perfectly natural.”

After the perfectly natural nightmares—the cock's crow, the smell of burning trash, the angry spirit barfing buckets of red goo on her face—repeated night after night for the next month, her parents told her they were going to get her some help. She assumed they meant that they would help her get rid of Mrs. Barnard. But she was wrong.

*   *   *

Erin sat alone in the backseat of their car as her father and mother drove her to see a new doctor. She was scared when they first told her, but her parents promised she wouldn't be getting any shots because this wasn't a “shot doctor.” They pulled up in front of a one-story house in a different suburb of Battle Creek. It didn't look like a doctor's office. They went up the walk to the front door and her father rang the bell. When the door opened, it smelled like someone was baking cookies inside.

Erin thought Dr. Marsha Malone was pretty. She had beautiful chocolate skin and gold jewelry. And she was fun to talk to. She made jokes while just the two of them played board games, asked a lot of questions, and unlike her parents, never seemed upset by the answers Erin gave her. Her office was like a living room, only in a separate part of the house off the driveway, and it always smelled like ginger cookies.

“Why do you think you're having the nightmares, Erin?” Dr. Malone asked one day.

“I don't know.”

“Your family had some problems with Mrs. Barnard before she died, didn't they?”

“She wasn't a very nice neighbor,” Erin said softly, staring down at the game board. “After Corky ate Ernesto she got even meaner. I was afraid of her. So was Corky.”

“Do you feel guilty about Ernesto?”

“If I had kept Corky in the house it wouldn't have happened. Ernesto wouldn't have gotten killed.”

“But you didn't know Ernesto was going to get free and hop into your yard,” Dr. Malone said. “You had no way of knowing that. And you couldn't have stopped him from flying over the fence. So that isn't your fault. What about Mrs. Barnard? Do you feel guilty because she died?”

Erin fidgeted in her chair, squeezing a game piece. “Kinda.”

“She was an old lady, and she had a bad heart,” Dr. Malone said. “She wasn't taking her medicine. You had no control over what happened to her, either.”

Erin looked up at her. “Then why doesn't Mrs. Barnard know that? Why is she after me?”

“Erin, do you believe ghosts are real?”

She met the doctor's gaze and nodded emphatically. “Will she get me? What will she do to me? Can you make her stop?”

Dr. Malone sat quietly for a moment. Then she inclined her head as if she had decided something.

“Erin, could you please wait here for a moment while I speak with your parents? I'll be right back.”

After she left the room, Erin started to feel weird being alone. She got up and went down the hall after Dr. Malone, hoping to find the source of the cookie smell. On the right was another room with the door slightly open. She could hear the doctor talking. She stopped outside and listened.

“Honestly, Mr. Gilbert, there seems to be no family history of mental illness on either side of the family. I don't think this is something you and your wife need to worry too much about. I think this is a passing phase. It could be an attempt to remain a helpless child and draw your attention. A final burst of infantilism is not uncommon at her age. I think the dreams will stop when she realizes she's not going to lose your love if she grows up.”

“So she's lying about the ghost in order to manipulate us?” her mother said.

“This goes much deeper than that, below the conscious level. I don't think Erin is at all aware of the need she's actually expressing. She sincerely believes what she has seen is real.”