Midnight Call
"Graveside Friday Night"
It was true, the men had chanced to make the right moves
for a conjuration, but as wireless receivers of the spirit world they were too drunk, profane, unbelieving and self-involved to bring awakened ghosts into more than a few seconds' visibility at a time. But the groggy spirits were taking in the whole tableau all right, and they were not happy. The vandalism! The vulgarity! The drunkenness! To suffer this they'd been called up?
Once one of the unwelcome mortals noticed something out the corner of an eye, the others would turn and stare, whether at cussing biddies, bawling children in pairs or threes, palsied patriarchs with killing looks, or sour-faced farmers pointing the way out. But no sooner had mortal focus gathered on inaudible ectoplasm than it winked out. And then someone else would turn toward another peripheral revenant.
It began to feel like a game. The men had too much mescal courage to imagine they faced more than hallucinations, and Morris, playing the gallant lest Joleen take fright at harmless bogeymen, started winging stones through them the second they appeared. "See? Don't be scared, babe, these things can't bother you none.
Hit 'em with a rock and they blip out just like in a video game. Just our imagination playin' tricks on us, that's all." It looked like fun to Lou and Vinnie too, and soon they were even breaking off layers of weathered grave slate and scaling it Frisbee-like at the apparitions.
Joleen alone wasn't laughing. To the trauma of being lost in night woods with three soused apes of men, the addition of a ghost show only hardened the state of shock encasing her. And as for the figment nature of the men's target practice, Joleen was the only one still sober enough to perceive and worry about the white figures' old-fashioned clothes, like those of the townspeople in Westerns or something. It took her a long time to find and say the words, "I think we should get out of here."
Nobody was listening. But by that time, at least, Vinnie and Lou had grown bored with ghost-pelting and were plugging away at killing the bottle. Morris, by way of reassuring Joleen, still carried on, aiming at phantoms to which Vinnie and Lou kept their apathetic backs.
It was true, the men had chanced to make the right moves
for a conjuration, but as wireless receivers of the spirit world they were too drunk, profane, unbelieving and self-involved to bring awakened ghosts into more than a few seconds' visibility at a time. But the groggy spirits were taking in the whole tableau all right, and they were not happy. The vandalism! The vulgarity! The drunkenness! To suffer this they'd been called up?
Once one of the unwelcome mortals noticed something out the corner of an eye, the others would turn and stare, whether at cussing biddies, bawling children in pairs or threes, palsied patriarchs with killing looks, or sour-faced farmers pointing the way out. But no sooner had mortal focus gathered on inaudible ectoplasm than it winked out. And then someone else would turn toward another peripheral revenant.
It began to feel like a game. The men had too much mescal courage to imagine they faced more than hallucinations, and Morris, playing the gallant lest Joleen take fright at harmless bogeymen, started winging stones through them the second they appeared. "See? Don't be scared, babe, these things can't bother you none.
Hit 'em with a rock and they blip out just like in a video game. Just our imagination playin' tricks on us, that's all." It looked like fun to Lou and Vinnie too, and soon they were even breaking off layers of weathered grave slate and scaling it Frisbee-like at the apparitions.
Joleen alone wasn't laughing. To the trauma of being lost in night woods with three soused apes of men, the addition of a ghost show only hardened the state of shock encasing her. And as for the figment nature of the men's target practice, Joleen was the only one still sober enough to perceive and worry about the white figures' old-fashioned clothes, like those of the townspeople in Westerns or something. It took her a long time to find and say the words, "I think we should get out of here."
Nobody was listening. But by that time, at least, Vinnie and Lou had grown bored with ghost-pelting and were plugging away at killing the bottle. Morris, by way of reassuring Joleen, still carried on, aiming at phantoms to which Vinnie and Lou kept their apathetic backs.
Jonathan Thomas
Reprinted by Permission, Hippocampus Press 2008
