My Little Sister

My kid sister Becky has always been the odd one in our family. We weren’t a super religious family, but her interest in occult stuff has always made our parents uncomfortable. I think it was because she genuinely seemed to have some kind of psychic ability. She never floated tables around the room, or foretold disasters, but she once when we were walking to a friend’s house, she pointed to a wadded up paper bag on the shoulder of the road and said, “There’s some change in that bag.” Sure enough, when we peeled back the soggy wet paper, there was a handful of change in there. Once, she did some kind of ‘money spell’ that involved her staring at a candle for over an hour, while rubbing some smelly leaves on a dollar bill, then putting the dollar under the welcome mat of our house. We didn’t suddenly become filthy rich, but she won every scratch-off lotto ticket she played for a month. Most were $1 or $5, but she won $200 on one. I remember because she bought me a new pair of shoes with some of it.

Her room was cluttered with candles, jars of herbs, piles and piles of books, and 5 Ouija boards. It always had an earthy, herbal smell, with an undertone of snuffed candles. My friends, mostly football players like me, would tease her when they came over to hang out, calling her Sabrina, or trying to twitch their noses like that actress on ‘Bewitched’. I always told them to cut the crap, she was weird, but she was my kid sister. She could be strange sometimes, standing in the yard in a long dress and throwing salt around, or waving a wooden knife I’d helped her carve out of an ash branch, but she had a strange, sarcastic sense of humor, and she was kind almost to a fault. I loved her.
Since I was the older one, I was put in charge when our parents went out. Which was often because both of them served on several charity boards, and there always seemed to be a charity ball for the homeless, or pot luck supper for battered women, or penny auction for blind kid’s summer camp. Mostly Becky would curl up with one of her books or watch Twin Peaks on YouTube, but one night she got bored and wanted me to talk to the spirits on the Ouija board with her.
“Please? It’s no fun by yourself. No one believes me when he talks to just me. If you’re with me, you can tell Mom it’s real.”
“You mean your gangster ghost?” Lately our mother had been trying to get Becky to clean some of the weird crap out of her room, and Becky said she had been too busy talking to a ghost named Magnus on her Ouja board. I usually just rolled with whatever stories she told, but honestly, she talked about that board like it was text messaging. I figured she just didn’t want to clean her room.
“He’s not a gangster. He was set up! And the police shot him. He’s just lonely. Please?”  She had a line between her eyebrows that I recognized. She wasn’t going to stop bugging me until I gave in.
“Fine. But bring it down to the kitchen. I get a headache in your smelly room.” She gave a shriek of delight and ran up to her room to get her board. I waited at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of iced tea. Becky had made it, so it had a weird under taste, probably had eye of newt in it to promote luck.
She came pounding back downstairs with one of her boards, the pointer thing and a few candles tucked under her arm. She closed all the curtains and pulled the shades down, lit the candles and turned the lights out. She arranged the board on the table, and put the plastic pointer down.
“Now put your fingers on it. Lightly, like this.” She put just the tips of her fingers on the pointer. I did the same. She closed her yes and took a deep breath. “Magnus? It’s Becky. My big brother is here, too.”
The pointer began to move swiftly around the board, twisting and turning to point at different letters.
“HEY BABE”
“Babe?” I laughed. “Did your ghost just call you ‘babe’?” Becky blushed a little, and the pointer began to move again.
“SURE DID CHUMP”
“Don’t be rude, Magnus. My brother doesn’t really believe me. Neither does my mom. If you start insulting him, he’s going to tell her I’m making it up.”
“SORRY WANT ME TO POP A LIGHTBULB”
“No! I had to replace the bulb in my room twice. Make the candle flames move.”
“OK”
And the flames suddenly got bigger, the small orange flames rose to about 8 inches, growing fatter and hotter, the centers becoming a bright white. Wax began to waterfall down the sides, pooling on the lip of the candleholders. The hair on the back of my neck began to creep up.
“Becky.” I said, and my voice came out husky. My mouth was suddenly dry as the Gobi. I swallowed and tried again. “Becky, is this a trick?”
“No, it’s real. I told you. Magnus, tell him your story. How that detective killed you.” The pointer began to move again, moving faster and faster until I could hardly keep up with it. I glanced at Becky a few times, at her arms. The muscles were totally relaxed. If she’d been shooting that pointer around like that, I could have seen the muscles in her thin pale arms moving under the skin, bunching and flexing. But they hardly budged.
“I WAS NO SAINT BUT I DIDNT DESERVE WHAT THAT BASTARD COP DID TO ME I DID SMALL TIME STUFF FOR A FEW GUYS WHO WERE REALLY DANGEROUS I HAD TO OR THEYD KILL ME THEY KNEW WHERE MY KIDS LIVED THEYD HAVE KILLED THEM TOO AND MY EXWIFE THE COPS COULDN’T CATCH THE REAL BIG FISH SO THEY NEEDED SOMEONE TO CATCH TO PARADE IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING TAXPAYING ASSHOLES SO THEYD LOOK LIKE THEY DID SOMETHING BESIDES EATING FUCKING DONUTS AND TAKE BRIBES FUCKING COPS THEY SET ME UP WITH A BUNCH OF GUNS SOME DRUGS MADE IT LOOK LIKE I WAS MOVING ALL THAT SHIT AND THAT FUCKING TWITCHING DICK REYNOLDS SHOT ME DOWN LIKE A FUCKING DOG”
“Magnus. You don’t have to use such bad language.” Becky said calmly when the pointer came to a halt.
“SORRY I GET CARRIED AWAY YOU WOULD TOO YA KNOW”
“I would.” She said soothingly. “We’re going to stop now, though. I think my brother is a little freaked out. He’s never talked with spirits before.”
“SEE YOU LATER BABE”
She took her fingers off the pointer, and I practically snatched mine back, folding them together and squeezing them between my thighs. Becky looked at me thoughtfully.
“You ok?”
“Yeah. That was just… Different.”
“Do you believe me now?”
“I… yeah, I guess I do.”
“Thank you.” She said and smiled. She turned on the kitchen lights, blew out the candles, and brought her stuff back up to her room. I figured she’d run strait to our mom as soon as she came home and tell her how I was a believer now, but she never said a thing. I guess it was enough that I believed her. My mom eventually gave up on trying getting her to clean her room.
A week later, my laptop crashed, and I was forced to use our ancient family desk top computer while it was being repaired. Our parents rarely used it for anything but email, so it was almost exclusively Becky’s. She had been declared ‘too young for a laptop’, which I figured meant my parents didn’t want her to have a mobile computer. She might then disappear into her room forever.
I was looking up a bunch of stuff for school, and accidentally closed a tab I needed to look at again. I pulled up the browser history to find it again, and saw a list of occult websites in there. I was hardly surprised, but they all seemed to be about ‘mediums’ and ‘possession’. Curious, I opened a few of them, and read a few of the articles.
“Inviting a spirit into your body was once thought to be a gift granted to few, but it can be accomplished by almost anyone with enough practice and meditation. It is not something to be taken lightly, as some spirits are evil, and will use your body for evil deeds. Care should be exercised to prevent the spirit from taking over the body completely.”
I would have thought that utter crap a few weeks ago, but that was before I’d seen that angry message pouring across that Ouija board. I looked at the history again. One link didn’t seem to be from an occult website. I clicked it. The web site for the local paper came up. It was an article about the attempted capture of a wanted felon that had resulted in a shootout, the wounding of 5 officers and the death of the felon. There was a video interview with the detective in charge.
Detective Michael Reynolds was about 40, with a receding hairline who looked tired as he spoke into the reporter’s microphone. He was still wearing a bulletproof vest over his button-down shirt, and there was a small cluster of red drops on his left shoulder.
“I feel that we were somewhat successful, we’ve stopped a major shipment of both automatic weapons and heroin. We hoped to bring the man responsible in alive, but he did not come peacefully. 5 of my fellow officers were wounded, 2 quite seriously, and we had to use deadly force to subdue him.” He paused, and his left eye suddenly cramped in a twitch.
There was more to the video, but I didn’t watch it. I went upstairs to Becky’s room and knocked on the door.
“What?” She yelled. Her voice sounded strained, like she was in there lifting weights.
“Becky? Can I come in? I wanna ask you something.”
“No! I’m busy! I’m doing something!”
I opened the door anyway. Becky was sitting at her desk, her head lowered. On her desk was an assortment of candles and bundles of herbs smoking in ceramic dishes. She was breathing hard, her back heaving. She made a sharp whistle when she inhaled.
“Becky!” I ran to her and put my hand on her back. I immediately snatched it away. It felt like she had hundreds of tiny bugs squirming around under her shirt. No. They felt like they were under her skin. “Stop! Don’t let him in! He’s not a good guy!”
“He just needs to explain! To that detective! That he was wrong, he shot the wrong guy!” She said. Her breathing got more and more strained. “He’s going to go after that! He can’t move on!”
She suddenly jerked backward in her chair, she would have fallen to the floor, but I caught her wrist. It had that same squirming feeling under the skin. I wrapped my arm around her waist and tried to set her on her feet. She seemed to shiver violently in my arms, then went totally limp. The squirming feeling stopped.
“Becky?” I placed her gently on the floor. “You ok now?”
Her right hand shot up, balled tight, and smashed into my mouth. I felt my lips split open on my teeth. I staggered backward, and she pistoned her legs out, catching me in the shin and knocking me over. I hit the floor with a hard thump.
“You kids cut it out up there!” My mother yelled up the stairs. I opened my mouth to scream to her, but Becky was up like a flash, and kicked me square in the stomach. My scream woofed out in a big huff.
“Sorry, Mom!” She called. But it wasn’t her. I knew it wasn’t. She turned to me, and her bright, sweet eyes had gone cold as lake ice. “I should just kill you. But I got some shit to take care of first, and I don’t need anyone looking for this girl yet.  So, you’re gonna take a little nap instead.”
He dropped to her knees quickly, and pulled my head against her chest. He wrapped her arm around my neck and tightened the muscles in her forearm. I suddenly couldn’t breathe, and the room got dimmer and dimmer. As I passed out, I shrieked her name over and over in my mind.
I don’t know how long I was out. I woke up with my shoulder bent uncomfortably upwards, pressed against my ear. I tried to move, but I was squeezed into somewhere narrow, my right arm wrapped around my head. I shifted a little more and got my head turned around. I was looking at the floor of Becky’s room. He’d shoved me under the bed. I had to twist and grunt and shuffle for 2 minutes to get myself out.  I looked wildly around the room. How was I going to find where that Detective Reynolds lived? I doubted cops who hunted down drug lords were listed in the phone book. Something white caught my eye. Along with her 5 Ouija boards, Becky owned an old fashioned planchette, the kind with a pencil attached to it, so messages from the spirits were written in pencil, instead of being spelled out. The white was the notepad she used with it.
I snatched it up, and saw ghostly dents of past conversations in the smooth surface, and a series of scribbles that was deeper than the others. She’d really been bearing down on the planchette. I grabbed a pencil out of the cup and began running it lightly over the paper. The word that had been gouged in was Freemont.
“Freemont Avenue.” I said, and bolted for the stairs.  My mother called to me as I hit the bottom step, but I kept running. It was a quarter mile to Freemont Avenue, but I never stopped or slowed down. I silently thanked my football coach for all the extra laps he’d had us run that fall.  It was a nice neighborhood, quiet in the ending dusk. The road ended in a cul-de-sac, and I began reading the mailboxes, working my way around the circle. Four mailboxes had no names, just numbers, and there were no Reynolds. I was about to panic, I’d have to start knocking on random doors, and I doubt any of his neighbors would point his house out to a wild-eyed sweaty kid with a big fat lip. I looked around hopelessly, and I leaned against a car parked at the end of a driveway, breathing heavy. I looked in the window, and saw something on the floor. A blue light. The kind you plugged into the cigarette lighter and could pop on the dashboard when you needed it.  I ran up to the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked harder, and the door swung in, just a bit. A smell came out, metallic and bitter. I pushed the door open a bit more.
“Detective Reynolds?” I called. “I need to talk to you, it’s important!” It was dark in the house, and suddenly, the streetlight behind me on the curb flickered on, casting a wedge of light across the foyer. There was a splash of blood on the wall, still red and running in big drips down the wall. There was a handprint, too. It was small and neat. It had a narrow palm and long graceful fingers. Becky and I had made our mom one of those concrete garden stones for Mother’s Day once, with bits of seashells and colored glass surrounding our handprints. My broad, wide one, and her narrow, graceful one.
I stepped in the foyer, and was careful not to touch the blood as I made my way down the hall. I passed a living room cluttered with paper and file folders, and came out in a small kitchen. The fridge was open, and by it’s bright white light, I could see a lot of blood. It swirled and looped and splattered across the linoleum, and ended in a big puddle by the sink. In the middle of the puddle was a smeared red shape that I assumed had been Detective Reynolds. I think he had been almost entirely skinned. I turned away, trying not to puke all over the place. I saw something else. Small foot prints leading out of the puddle to the back door.
He was gone, and had taken Becky with him.
Almost a year has passed since then. I thought I’d miss Becky less as time went on, but I miss her more and more every day. The cops assumed Detective Reynolds was killed by a drug addict or an insane person. There was never any mention in the papers about the small hand and foot prints they must have found at the scene. My mom and dad seem like ghosts, and they hardly talk to me. They saw my busted face, and assumed I’d done something really mean to Becky and she hit me and ran away.
I don’t care. I’m going to be leaving soon too. Those websites are right. Anyone can be possessed, if they put in the effort and have a willing ghost. It just took me a little longer to get the hang of things, since I don’t have Becky’s natural talent. But I had someone to help me. I’m going to find Magnus. He’s probably smashed Becky into the furthest corner of her mind, taken completely over. I’ll probably have to kill her body to get rid of him. But I know there’s such things as ghosts. She’ll be free to wander the earth, or disappear into the universe. And I can go with her. I’ll have to kill myself when this is over. To set the ghost in me free.
I finish packing a few things in a duffel bag. I put on my heavy coat and head for the door. As I pass the mirror in the front hall, I see my left eye scrunch up in a twitch.

End

*I wanted to write a ghost story, and I also wanted to try writing as a guy. I think I wound up writing as the big brother I always wanted. I also have a thing for revenge, it's one of my favorite themes.