Scary Creek Read Free Page B

nodded as if no further explanations were required.
    “So tell me again, what did I buy and how much did I
pay?”
    “You made a five thousand dollar deposit on the Ryder
mansion and you have thirty days to pay the balance.”
    “Which is?”
    “... Twenty-five grand.”
    “I bought a mansion for thirty thousand?” I asked.
    He nodded again. “It’s a real bargain.”
    As far as I could tell, I was not out much and $30,000
for rural real estate was cheap, especially in an abandoned ruin in a remote county.
I plucked another tissue from the pack, not because I needed it, but because I
was feeling anxious.
    “So who’s holding the stakes now?” I said, worried.
    “Banks, the county and the estate’s executor; I suspect.”
    “And if my bank doesn’t clear it, or recognize the
signature?”
    “If they don’t honor it,” he said, “you will have some
explaining to do.”
    I breathed a sigh of relief. I owed Virgil an
explanation, even though I could not account for the draft he received, unless
Myra was involved.
    “I’m sure there is a good reason for my inability to
remember,” I said. “Perhaps it will come later.”
    He gave his head an anxious nod. I resisted a strong
compulsion to write a check for the balance, but reason kept intruding. I had never
seen the house, nor did I know the land's worth or the condition it was in. For
all I knew, it could have been sinking into a swamp for the past 100 years and
only stones from the chimney were still standing.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “How can the house you
described sell so cheap?”
    I was cynical enough to question the value of a bargain
and wise enough to know I could not tell the difference. I could imagine a week
from now suffering the throes and pangs of “buyer’s remorse.”
    “It’s haunted,” he said, without the slightest attempt
to conceal his smiling face.
    After years of standing knee-deep in killing fields
and gagging on the odor of decomposing flesh, I never encountered a ghost. Never
in ten years of photographing temples, battlefields, death camps or graveyards --
where bones and skulls were stacked like kindling -- had I experienced a wisp
of a spirit. I have met however, people who were not themselves; people who
seemed to be playing host to some parasitic, mind-altering consciousness. I
could never believe it was a spirit or ghost, but maybe they could.
    “Haunted?” I repeated, surprised. I thought I had a
leg up when it came to discussing the shadows of life and death.  “Are you
serious? You mean there are still people who believe in ghosts?”
    If only for an opportunity to test my convictions and
prove the contrary, I was secretly delighted by that remote possibility. Everyone
knows doubters are more desperately seeking things to believe in than the most
devout believers are .
    “That only makes it a better buy,” I continued. “You
know what the little old platitude makers say: ‘for every dirty little house
there’s a dirty little housekeeper; and for every house underwater, there are
ten divers; and for every haunted house…’”
    “For every haunted house there is what? Mr. Case.”
    “For every haunted house, there is a…skeptic like me.”
    No, I did not forget how to deal with superstitions. I
had felt useful roaming through those death camps and graveyards, as if I were
performing some essential service, not for the living, but for those who had
suffered such meaningless deaths.
    The dead, I firmly believed, had abandoned their
egocentric husks and evolved to a more enlightened form. They no longer cared
about a transient existence in a disease-ridden carcass, and they certainly
were not out to torment the living with tawdry tricks. 
    I was smiling and could not conceal it.  Virgil, however,
was not smiling. In fact there was something resolutely grim hardening the line
of his jaw and the pupils of his eyes.
    “I think you’re underestimating this ghost, Mr. Case.
Whoever or whatever it