So I asked my landlord. His name is Mentor and he is one of my best friends, my beer drinking buddy and the guy I talk football with. I told him I am seeing a ghost and this good buddy of mine laughed at me. “You been hittin those Millers pretty hard, have you?” he says to me.
I told him I was serious and he tried not to laugh. I asked him what the deal was with the history of the place and he told me.
Mentor’s wife’s name is Marigold. When she married her first husband they moved into this house. It was owned at that time by her in-laws who lived downstairs, where we live now. So Marigold’s husband dies in a car accident and she stays in the house with her in-laws still living downstairs. She marries Mentor shortly after they die.
So a guy did live here and die here. Marigold’s in-law. In this house, in our part of this house.
His name was Tony. He was a print setter, and he had his own printing press in the basement. He was a short guy, which this ghost sort of is, and he had a bald spot and dark hair until the day he died. His hair never went gray. He was not fat. But Mentor never said that Tony was a thin guy either. Tony had diabetes real bad. He had to have his toe removed because of it. Not long after the toe came off his foot followed.
So maybe that is him, I think to myself, and I even said, “Maybe it’s Tony,” and Mentor brushes it off saying ,”No can’t be him.” I am excited now because maybe it isn’t Tony. Maybe it’s Jack fucking with me. I look to Mentor to hear what his proof is that this ghost I am seeing isn’t Tony and he says, “He wouldn’t have a suitcase or a bag with him.”
That is what he gave me. That is his proof that the guy in my living room isn’t Tony.
So I think he is wrong. I think this is Tony and that he is here for something or some reason. I think he is waiting for something to happen, and I think I am going to have to just wait for it, too.
It is possible that this is Jack. Last time I saw him was when my wife bought the movie “The Strangers”. She says that Tier said that Jack wanted it and that she should buy it soon.
This is a huge thing. Jack doesn’t ask for things. The process for him is that he starts to show me things. He will show me a skinned body laying sprawled out on my desk. These things will then escalate. Next maybe the body I see is one of my dearest friends. I will start to hear things happen outside or deep in the house at night. I will feel things touching me or touch something that should be one texture and find out it is covered in blood or bile. In the end it always goes to my dreams. He will start giving me nightmares. They will be commonplace things until something goes very wrong and my wife or my child is hurt. Then he will start showing me their dead bodies. Once I walked into a room filled with thousands of dead Rayphs. I had a friend with me who didn’t know about my mind and didn’t know about Jack. I had to wade into the room acting like everything was okay.
So he will start fucking with me, until I finally have Bekah ask him what he wants. Then it is some small thing, a movie he wants to watch or a song he wants us to buy for him. So the one time that he had Tier straight out ask for a movie I was doing backflips.
This guy is too mundane to be Jack I think. This guy is not scary in anyway and it is not escalating at all.
But hey, Jack is a sick fuck. He was once called a Demon. Maybe he is going to build to something horrible.
I’ll keep you posted.
—Shadow, 2008
Jesse Teller 