Just Like John Wayne

 

MATSUI FUYOKO, SCATTERED DEFORMITIES IN THE END, 2007 

     I'm not a religious man, I don't believe in any kind of god and I certainly don't believe in life after death, so the idea that a spirit could come back from an afterlife and 'haunt' me used to seem preposterous. Despite this I've always loved ghost stories, so the one I'll tell you here is one that I experienced first hand. 

     I started to believe in the realm of the supernatural soon after I moved into a new home in the south of Manchester when I was 21. It was the final year of university for Josie, Hannah and I, and we had all been looking forward to moving in to the house we had fallen in love with when we saw it on the first viewing. The house itself was at the quieter end of Davenport Avenue, just off the student bustle of Withington High Street. Considering that the size of the area's student population led to a such a vicious demand for housing we were stunned that no one had snapped up this gem. The estate agent explained to us that the landlord had lived in Australia for years, and that apparently we were the house's first tenants for about four or five. 

     A few days after we moved in, I was having a shower when I heard Hannah calling out from downstairs. 

     "Oh my God Tom lookwhaddifound, amazing!"

     Once out of the bathroom and dressed I ran down to see what the excitement was about, but she was not in the living room. 

     "Down here!" 

     I went down to our small basement to find that she had moved aside an old empty filing cabinet that had stood against the wall, or what we had assumed was a wall. In fact it had concealed two small doors to another smaller room with a very low ceiling. It was completely full of rubbish as far as we could see, but we got a torch to have a little poke about anyway. The room was littered with dusty papers, half a bicycle, an ancient computer screen and a few packing cases - nothing really of any value or interest. Then we looked a bit harder. 

     At the back in the corner there was a large red leather trunk; I remember what struck me as most odd was the fact that it was not even half as dusty as the other bits of junk in the basement, almost as if someone had cleaned it recently. It pricked at our curiosity so much that we decided we would have to open it, so Hannah went and fetched the hammer, and I smashed the padlock apart. Curiouser and curiouser. Spread out in the trunk under a huge silty covering of what looked like ash (we blew it off), was - of all things - a plethora of hardcore pornographic publications. Gay porn at that. And there on the front cover of the magazine at the top of the pile was a muscular man with a neat moustache and an erect penis opening out like the largest telescope that ever was. Oh how we did laugh.

     Of course we took out a few of the best and paraded them upstairs and out of the chilly basement to peruse and show Josie when she got home. I remember that we cut up a few of the magazines and used the saucier pictures as decorations for Hannah's birthday a month later in October. That was roughly when the trouble started. 

    

     We noticed something odd was going on when things started mysteriously disappearing, or in other cases appearing, around the house. Later on in the month things had started going missing from the kitchen, mainly. At first we argued amongst each other - we all thought that one housemate was stealing the others' things. It was not until much later that we noticed the connection between all the missing objects - a cucumber, a rolling pin, some vaseline, an electric toothbrush, and several carrots. Always the goddamn carrots.

    

     There were noises too. I spent many a sleepless night because of them. At first we merely assumed we had some prolifically randy neighbours, until one night when the groans were particularly loud, we turned the volume down on Come Dine With Me and noticed that these noises were coming from somewhere within our very own house. The source of the noises we located to the basement, and with the two girls close behind me I edged down the stairs with the torch on, but as soon as my front foot touched the bottom stop the moans ceased. I walked over to where the entrance to the smaller basement room was only to find that its little doors were impenetrably fastened. We had not even known they could be locked - there was certainly no keyhole on the outside, or anything resembling a catch or bolt. I shuddered in the cold of the basement and turned to go back upstairs. We sat around smoking with the television still on mute and discussed, with no fruitful result, how we might go about dealing with this state of affairs. We all agreed that the disturbances must have had something to do with us opening that chest.

     "The one that had the porn in it, all covered in ash."

     "Well we can't very well return all the mags, we've cut half of them up to make gay bunting for fuck's sake!"

     "I could have like, an excorcism wank down there or something?"

     "Urgh. Tom you are neither funny nor helpful."

     On a Thursday in January we organised another party for my twenty-second birthday. It was on this day that things really began to get serious. I had just come back home from staying at my girlfriend's the night before, and I was lying on the sofa with a beer when Josie rushed in with a face like thunder.

     "Tom you are a fucking disgrace! Look what you've left on the floor outside your room, it's disgusting."

     "What have I left on the floor outside my room?

     "A used condom you fucking douche!"

     "No I haven't. I wasn't even here last night bab."

     "What?"

     "I stayed over, remember?"

     "Well it's not going to be Hannah's is it? You don't suppose it's.......no. Surely not." Josie clasped her hand to her mouth and looked at me wide-eyed.

     We had no choice but do dispose of it and try and forget about it. The rest of the morning and afternoon passed in a blissfully uneventful manner, and by about nine o'clock guests began to arrive for my little fiesta. At about one, even over the loud music and talking, those terrible groans and grunts could be heard from beneath our feet again. Ricky, a friend who had come over from Leeds, gave me a cheeky elbow to my ribs.

     "The fuck's going on in your basement man? Who'd you invite?"

     We went outside the front of the house for a smoke and I told him everything. Speaking encouragingly in the most eloquent of tones, said Ricky: "Well let's go and bust this bum-boy then!"

     The lights had fused in the basement, and as ever it was a few considerably noticeable degrees colder than the rest of the house. I cautiously ran my fingers down the exposed brick wall until I found the torch, which I handed to Ricky. Extingushing cigarette under foot I reached for my lighter and lit the three-pronged candelabra that stood on the radiator cover. Glad to have him with me, I approached the locked doors to the little room, and before I could say anything Ricky had put a heavy foot through the wood and pulled them half off their hinges. Glancing the light over them we saw that they were covered in some kind of dripping opalescent goo. 

     "Have you seen Ghostbusters? The first one. Look, it's like that stuff that the poltergeist leaves behind in the library. Ectoplasm, that's it!"

     "Actually dude I think it's semen."

     "Oh. Euw that's foul man. In my fucking house of all places. I so dare you to go in."

     Ricky, never one to refuse a dare even in the face of impending doom, obliged, and stepped up into the shallow cave of a room, bowing his head low as he did so. It was when he was fully inside that everything happened at once. The doors, that had been seemingly knackered, swung shut with a bang, the candles blew out and I could hear the torch bulb burst in its glass. Ricky was a hostage, and as much as I kicked and pulled and smashed the doors with a hammer they would not budge, and the hole he had made with his foot was certainly not big enough to pull his whole body through. The screaming was terrible. I sank to my knees and held my hands over my ears to try and block out the sound.

     Fortunately, however, it was all over relatively quickly, and I thankfully relit the candles. Ricky managed to knock the doors down from the inside and crawl out sheepishly. Are you alright? What the hell happened? Did it touch you? Are you hurt? No answer, he just slumped the ground at my feet and burst into tears.

     How we managed to pick ourselves up and carry on the party after that, I don't know. But the important thing is that we did. Even better, after that day, the disturbances ceased altogether - we never saw nor heard any trace of the poltergeist for the rest of the time that we lived in the house. But I will never forget the way Ricky walked up the stairs. Just like John Wayne.