Rafters
A Ghost Story
By
Island D. Richards

There was just enough light seeping into the cavernous basement from the few windows scattered along the walls to dimly illuminate the bare-boned skeletal walls of rotting two-by-fours that zigzagged through the underground room like a maze. Wonderful, Jerry thought as he peered into the seemingly endless darkness, fumbling with the battery powered lantern trying to get it to light up again, where the hell are we gonna find a fuse box down here.

“Shit,” Michael said from behind him, “the fucking door is locked!”

“What do you mean it’s locked? That door doesn’t lock!” Jerry was on the verge of blowing his top. First the house lights, then the lantern, and now this.

“Fuck you if you’re so smart. Try it yourself, asshole,” Michael answered with a hiss.

“Knock it off guys, this is bad enough without you two chewing each other’s heads off down here,” Sally said from the place near the wall to the door’s right that she had moved to after coming out of the stairwell. “Can you please just get that light back on?”

“I’m trying, babe. Let me see if the connections are loose. It’s a new battery dammit, it shouldn’t be dead already.” Why me, he thought as he fumbled with the screw-on bottom of the lantern. All I friggin’ wanted was a night alone with Sal. Why’d she have to bring along her sister and that thick headed fuck, Michael?

“What the hell is that?” Michael said. “What are those?”

Jerry could hear a tremble beginning to build in Michael’s voice, in fact, he could almost feel Michael’s fear start to charge the air that filled the few feet between them. In that same moment, he could swear that the temperature in the previously warm and humid basement dropped twenty degrees. “Come on you pansy, there isn’t anyth…” Just then, Sally screamed, and Jerry looked up to see what they were so afraid of.

There, in the darkness among the struts, were a pair of pinpoint lights that hovered there in the air, almost as they were floating on air currents, watching them like…like eyes, Jerry answered himself. But, as Jerry stared at them, trying to see what they could be attached to, they flittered from his sight. Then more pairs of these eyes began to twinkle into existence in his peripheral vision. First one, then three, five…but every time he tried to focus on any particular pair, they simply flickered away like candlelight in a cold breeze.

“Jerry! What are they?” Sally was crying now, he could hear her behind him over his right shoulder.

He noticed now that every time he attempted to focus on any one pair and prompted its disappearance, the others that he saw in the periphery seemed to get closer. As they did, he thought he could start to make out shadows floating behind the pinpoints. Almost like entities, but he just couldn’t get a visual grasp on them. Every time he tried, they once again disappeared and the rest drew closer, seemingly bringing the darkness with them. In a panic now, he tried to simply focus on the darkness of the room and found, surprisingly, that the many pairs of starlight, in the dozens now, seemed to stop advancing and, yes, he was sure of it now, to even retreat.

“Don’t look at them Sally, OK? Just look down and pretend you don’t see them,” Jerry told her.

“But I…”

“No! Just do what I tell you,” Jerry said as he started to slowly back toward her, the hair on his neck prickling and a lump forming in his throat. Is this what a deer feels like when wolves corner it? Are we being hunted?

“What the hell are you?” Michael suddenly began to yell at the pinpoints in the darkness. “Stay away! I’m warning you! I got a gun you fuckers!” He was screaming at the top of his lungs now.

Did he just say he had a gun? “Mike, listen to me! Don’t look at them. Don’t look, do you hear me? Pretend they aren’t there!”

Michael wasn’t listening though. He’d drawn his .380 from its hiding place in the small of his back and was trying to hold his sights on a pair of the tiny eyes as he yelled at them. But every time he would sight in one pair, it would disappear and more would come closer. One after another he pointed his automatic at them, and one after another they would disappear, only to bring the others nearer. Then, a pair appeared virtually right in front of him, mere feet from his face. Panic stricken, he lifted the gun, pointed right between the eyes and pulled the trigger.

Jerry felt as if he’d just received a sledgehammer blow to his left ear when the first shot rang out. Then came another, and another, with white hot flashes filling the darkness, but illuminating nothing. “Stop! Stop shooting,” he screamed. Then Sally grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arms around him and pinning his arm against his torso, making him drop the lantern to the dusty floor.

When it hit the ground, it suddenly came alive, flooding the basement with its light. Jerry was looking directly at Michael as the light began to fill the room. As it reached out and filled the air around Michael, Jerry could see something else reaching out of the darkness toward him as well. What looked like a burly and grotesquely muscular arm, hairy, gray, and with long, yellow, talon-like claws at the tips of it’s long fingers swiped through the air at Michael’s head, as if were about to tear it from his shoulders. But, as the light covered it, it seemed to dissolve in midair as a dawn shadow does when it is found out by the sun’s morning rays.

Michael saw it, too. He didn’t stop screaming for a long time.