Halloween is by far my favorite holiday.  Consequently, I am sharing a short “scary” story that I wrote three years ago, that won a scary story contest on GhostsAndStories.com; it was published in their online magazine, Phantasm.  Which I’m not sure if they’re still doing or not.  Happy October 1st!  May it be a good, Halloween-y month.

Friday

Walking home from school in the biting autumn air I couldn’t help but ponder the creepiness exuding from the open spaces and fields surrounding me. What is it about the lack of people, of excitement, of repugnant crowds that conjures up a stew of uneasiness and suspicion inside my stomach?

In upstate, rural New York the neighbors all know one another, although the vast distances between the houses might suggest otherwise. They use the term “neighbor” loosely, as to be neighbors would imply living in close proximity to one another and this was not quite the case. At least, it didn’t seem that way to me, having moved to the tiny town of Red Poppy, New York from New York City, the most exciting city in the entire universe.

Back home – yes I am still referring to the city as my home – I had neighbors upstairs, downstairs, and on either side of our apartment building. Most times it seemed that the physical space between neighbors, between buildings, in New York City was equivalent to the amount of space in between your teeth.

Consequently, as I walked down the empty and lifeless street from school for only the second time, I observed the utter shortage of people and places and things. The street was practically a dirt road that stretched on for miles in front of me, like the hallways in The Shining. There were no cars puttering along this road, there were no pedestrians other than myself perhaps walking a dog or taking a stroll, and there was no convenience store or laundromat to peer my curious, boyish, teenage face into. The only thing that seemed to be in abundance were trees. The branches on these trees looked half dead, brittle, as if any small child could walk by and snap them in half like a crisp carrot.

Red Poppy could not differ more from New York City than if the two resided on different planets. I had moved here less than a week ago, and had just had my second day at school studying my junior year of high school with the rest of the forty kids in my class; there were four hundred and thirty-four kids in my last high school’s junior class.

To say that I was having difficulties adjusting would have been the understatement of the millennium.

I simply could not get over how one had to drive over an hour into Syracuse to go to the mall or to the movie theatre. I could not get over how lifeless everything seemed among all the desolate land and lack of civilization. I could not believe that my mother had chosen to move here and uproot my life in the middle of high school so that we too could be among those that are forgotten and abandoned up north. Even though there were still two days until November, this being the night before Halloween, the wind chill had lazily, yet effortlessly, descended well into the low fifties and was pursuing lower temperatures still. Though still early enough, the day was already mutating into the night, the gray sky seamlessly melting into blackness.

Tomorrow was Halloween and rather than going to a raging party back in the city like I normally would be at this time of the year, I had to accept the fact that I had been to two whole days in school and couldn’t possibly feel like more of an outcast. In a class so small everyone already knows each other and they all had looked at me on my first day, yesterday, as if I were an exotic but dangerous sea creature come to disturb their carefully crafted habitat. No, I would just have to accept the fact that my Halloween was going to be spent at home, with my depressed mother, who, it is my belief, came all the way up here to die alone.

Suddenly the wind picked up again and ruffled up my already disheveled hair; my hair was too long, according to my mother, according to everyone. The color of those delightful corks that are wedged into wine bottles, my hair was always messy and uncombed, just the way I liked it. I didn’t try to stop the wind from messing up my hair because who cared if it was in my face? It wasn’t like I needed to watch out for an oncoming car.

I wished that I could drive. I was sixteen, the age where one would start learning how to drive. Back home there was no hurry to learn how to do so as everyone took the subway and taxis. However, up here if you didn’t have a car you basically didn’t go anywhere other than the high school, which seemed to be the only building or business within walking distance of the already very spaced out houses.

I continued on my path allowing my hair to whip all around my face, teasing my ears, itching my eyes, and creeping into my mouth. Indeed, who cared if I couldn’t see where I was going? There would be no strangers bumping into me on the street as they did in the city, dangerous and obnoxious individuals. Regardless of their negative aspects, the nameless faces of New York City undoubtedly emitted a comforting aura about them; they were a constant, something to be counted on, something that would always be there. I was never alone.

I had never felt more alone than I did at this moment.

No cars, no people, no significant signs of civilization, just trees and – a cat?

Suddenly, I stopped short in my path and allowed my backpack to bump up against my back uncomfortably as I steadied myself. An all black cat had appeared seemingly out of thin air, and was suddenly crossing in front of me and continuing on to the other side of the street. Looking in the direction of where the cat had come from I could see nothing but grass with an occasional tree or bush; there weren’t even any houses on this stretch of road. Where had that darn thing come from? I watched it as it turned around once reaching the other side and sat down carefully, but deliberately, curling its tail around in front of it, and it looked right at me.

The cat looked right at me.

I felt as though a chill had suddenly run through my body, and it had nothing to do with the whipping wind. No, this was a quite different kind of glacial shudder and it traveled through my body starting with my chest and expanding outwards to the tips of my fingers and toes. This was an internal, frosty, deathly cold chill that seemed to puncture my soul. The cat’s yellow eyes widened as he watched me, practically looked right through me, and then he simply turned and went along on his way. He went beyond the road and headed towards the woods that resided about a hundred yards away. The night air around him seemed to get blacker and blacker, as though swallowing the feline whole and thus he was soon invisible to my naked eye.

I actually stopped walking for a moment to stare off into the distance of where the cat had just been. Why had that just been so weird, so eerily discomforting? It was just a cat, after all, and yet I still felt frozen in my spot, even after it must have long since reached its sanctuary of the woods.

“Walter! Walter Lamb!” a shrill voice called my name from a car coming up behind me, but I heard her before the car. Broken from my trance I turned around and sure enough, despite the chilling air there was the nuttiest girl in my new school hanging her head out the window like a carefree golden retriever, grinning like a mischievous cat.

Did she have to yell my name like that? I hated my name, always have. Walter Lamb. Walter, like an old man’s name. Lamb, like a fuzzy, ignorant animal.

Janie Kitzrick stopped her ghetto piece of trash car in the middle of the road; there was no need to pull over when she was the only car within sight. I wasn’t sure what kind of a car she had – I always pretended to know more about cars than I did – but it sure looked like something that had dragged itself coughing and wheezing out of the early eighties and here to present day Red Poppy. That car was a symbol of my new life in Hicksville.

“Whatcha doin’?” Janie asked me, sticking herself farther out of her open car window.

She was like a little kid or something, with those wide, curious eyes. Janie had soft, long, layered hair that indefinable color that seems to be in between blonde and brown. Her bangs were long and in her face, not unlike my own hair. Janie’s eyes were little mini saucers the color of crisp leaves with a morning dew left behind. Most people with green eyes have a kind of shade that seems to morph into hazel unexpectedly, but not Janie’s. No, her green was a darker, more brilliant shade, and it could never be mistaken for another color. My own eyes were gray, dull. I suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious about the color of my eyes, my hair, my clothes, anything and everything. I didn’t know Janie very well, but I knew that she was a little batty. This didn’t turn me off from her. In fact, I had a huge crush on her.

It all started yesterday, on my first day of class. We were in English class, and we were reviewing Macbeth. Or, I should say, they were reviewing Macbeth, and I was sitting there bookless trying to follow along.

Miss Cranston was telling us about Macbeth’s private and public face, and how he hid his evil plans to usurp the king from his wife when Janie suddenly raised her hand and said with such defiance and confidence, “Lady Macbeth is not stupid. She knew exactly what her husband was doing. She had her own public and private face and she was playing him, not the other way around.”

Miss Cranston looked completely speechless and didn’t say anything for about ten seconds, undoubtedly contemplating this new vantage point by which to interpret the play, and wondering why her high school teachers and college professors had never voiced a theory like that. It was then that I noticed her.

It was later in biology when chose to take an F for her grade over dissecting an innocent frog who, as Janie pointed out, may not have died of natural causes as they want you to believe, that I fell in love with her.

Unfortunately, I was the new kid, and an awkward one at that. I was like a howler monkey used to the craziness of the jungle and I was suddenly thrown into a tranquil meadow with some cows and was told to start bonding. I still had months of adjusting time under my belt before I would even feel remotely comfortable hitting on a girl. And right now, all I wanted to do was to walk this miserable walk home.

“Oh hey Janie,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“What the heck are you doing?”

“Um, I’m walking home.”

“Do you know how long this road is?”

“Yes, actually, I do, I walked it yesterday.”

“Do you know how brutal the winters get up here? There is no way that you’re going to want to walk this every single day after school for months on end.”

I sighed. “I know that, but what can I say? You guys don’t have subways running under ground up here.”

“You want a lift?” Janie grinned at me in such a way that let me know that she knew that she had the upper hand. I was cold, her car was warm. Period. Although, maybe not so warm with her window rolled down all the way like that.

“Oh, sure, thanks,” I said as nonchalantly as possible as I made my way around her car and jumped into the passenger side. The inside of the car was equivalent to the outside: old and falling apart with a bit of a musty odor coming through the seats. It wasn’t terrible though, and it was indeed warmer than the harsh outside.

Janie asked for my address and we continued on along the endless road. We made small talk; she asked about New York. I was feeling more depressed by the minute, but this was my first chance I had at making a new friend, and I supposed I should feel more up to it. The fact that I liked this girl was annoying. I would rather make friends with someone of my own half of the species, and consequently I wouldn’t have to worry myself with silly details such as how I looked, what I was wearing, and what was coming out of my mouth.

“Has anyone told you about old Mrs. Chambers yet?” Janie asked me.

I shook my head. We had now reached the end of the road that does not end and we had taken a right and continued down another road that also promised no relief for its travelers. There was an old run down shack of a house coming up on the right, and Janie pointed to it. “That’s Mrs. Chamber’s house,” she announced as if she were telling me it was Johnny Carson’s house.

“Oh,” I said distractedly. I opened my mouth to say something else but decided that any more efforts to appear casual and make small talk might as well go down the drain. I had no idea how to talk to these kids up here.

As Janie’s car crept closer to the shack I noticed how truly run down it was. It was a very small house, and it looked as though it may have been cozy once upon a time but that time had long since come and gone, probably around the Great Depression. The wood paneling had clearly started its journey of decaying a long time ago. It was chipping and breaking off like a lizard shedding its skin, only instead of a new protective layer underneath there was nothing but more dead material. The house itself seemed to practically be sinking into the ground, lacking any kind of significant foundation.

As we drew closer still, I could observe a window on the side, and it was cracked, allowing me to imagine a million spiders and additional insects racing through that crack and making their homes inside the cozy blackness beyond. I suddenly felt that same internal chill that I had felt before, and it wasn’t any more explainable this time around.

“Mrs. Chamber is dead, and she haunts that house, she’s haunted it for years,” Janie explained matter-of-factly. “Her husband died in World War II, and ever since she was so depressed that she basically became a recluse and never left the house. Nobody ever saw her again.”

“Really.”

I thought of my mother, home alone at this moment, grieving for my father who passed just over a year ago. She wanted to move up here for a change of scenery, not that there was much scenery to look at. I think I knew the truth.

“Yup. She died alone, except for the cat I guess, like ten years ago or something. And now she’s a ghost, and she haunts that house.”

At this point we were passing the house, on the right side of the street so I had the best view of it, and I examined it closer as we drove along. The front door had a huge, brass knocker that reminded me of the one in A Christmas Carol. The porch was caked with dried, colorful leaves, but they were as dead as the house, and failed to bring any real life to the place.

“Sure she does.”

“She does. But even weirder than that is that her cat is still alive. They say that she sends the cat out when she’s mad, and whoever sees the cat, well, something really bad ends up happening to them. Her name is Friday.”

I sighed. Maybe this girl was indeed too nuts to get wrapped up in. “So, the cat is like, an omen of bad things to come or something?”

“Something like that.”

“Why is the cat named Friday?” I asked.

“They say that she found her on Friday the 13th. It’s an all black cat.”

Suddenly all of the moisture in my mouth evaporated, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth like a suction cup. “An all black cat?” I repeated.

“Yup,” Janie chirped cheerfully. “Aha, this is you, no?”

We had pulled into my driveway – I was still getting used to the whole having driveway and a garage thing – but I couldn’t even move. So I didn’t. I sat in the car for what seemed like hours and stared straight ahead of me, debating back and forth if I should mention what I saw to her. All I saw was a black cat crossing my path, right? That was all. Still, part of me was disturbed, the irrational part of me that still remembered checking under my bed at night as a young child for “creepy-crawlies,” the part of me that still believed that supernatural and fantastical things were at play in the world. That part of me couldn’t let go of what I saw. Which was a black cat that had appeared out of nothingness when no one and nothing else was around.

“What else do you know about this cat?” I finally asked her. Immediately after the words left my mouth I wished I could reach out and snap them back, like swiftly swiping jacks off of the ground before the ball bounces. I certainly did not want to imply to Janie that I had been in any way spooked by an ordinary house pet.

Janie remained unfazed though, as her green eyes looked off into the distance, pondering. “Well, what was kind of weird was that only a few people saw the cat before she died. I think she died maybe only a month or two after the cat came along, like maybe the cat caused her death or something, I don’t know. But any time someone sees Friday something bad always happens to them.”

“Like what?” I was no longer putting on a mask of calm serenity. I was fascinated now and there was no turning back.

Janie twisted herself in the car seat so that she was facing me, while simultaneously pulling her right leg up underneath her so that she was practically sitting on it. She raised her arms up in the air excitedly as she talked. “Well, there was this one time, over the summer, when my ittle brother was playing in the backyard on our tire swing and he saw Friday. Just out of nowhere, there she was, in our very own backyard, and Caleb told me that he and the cat looked at each other for a moment, and he felt all weird and stuff, and then he forgot about it, but that night when he was sleeping he said that his windows opened all by themselves, and this huge big wind came in and he was like totally freezing to death. And then, Friday just appeared out of nowhere. She talked to Caleb, and she said, ‘Death doesn’t just happen to other people, and it’s going to happen to you.’ And then he ended up getting a really, really bad fever the next day, and we had to take him to the hospital. He was there for over a month, and he was in a lot of pain the whole time, like his joints and muscles and stuff all just got really weak. He actually almost died.”

Her excitement faded away for only a moment, but then her eyes brightened again. “But he’s okay. He’s okay! It was an awful experience, and um, well, he’s so traumatized he’s in therapy now, but at least he didn’t die.”

I sat there for a moment in the now chilly car, which had mysteriously become cold even though the heat was still running, and watched my breath form in front of me as I exhaled, contemplating what I had just heard. The cat could talk now. I found that difficult to believe. I wasn’t sure what to say next.

Janie kept talking anyway. “She’s like a sign of death or something. This old man down the street died not long after he supposedly saw Friday. He was old though, so. . .”

As Janie trailed off I couldn’t help but wonder where she had been going with that thought. He was old so no one could tell if it was the cat that did him in? Or, he was so old it didn’t matter that the sight of a ghost’s pet possibly sent him over the edge?

“What are you doing tonight?” Janie asked me suddenly, bluntly changing the topic, obviously bored. I could tell that growing up as a little girl Janie had clearly been one of those ADD children who couldn’t focus on one activity for more than three minutes. How dare she change subjects like that when I may very well get deathly sick within the next twenty-four hours or so and end up on a shrink’s couch!

I paused for only a moment, still contemplating the now in my mind horrific image of the cat I had seen earlier. Had the cat really looked at me, practically through me, as I had felt so strongly at the time? Now I wasn’t so completely certain. It was really windy out, and I was tired from walking a long ways with that damn heavy backpack. Perhaps my own perceptions could not be trusted. As nutty as
Janie was, I couldn’t bear the thought of her thinking I was nutty as well right off the bat. Even as I was rationalizing to myself that it was a good idea not to tell Janie about the cat, I remembered feeling that same chill when passing the haunted house: the cozy home of the cat and her ghost master.

In my mind I quietly visualized all of those uncomfortable and unexplainable thoughts I was having as materializing into a large, but manageable, pile of dirt that I could conveniently shovel away into some void.

“Tonight? I’m not doing anything tonight,” I replied.

“Well. . .you know what tonight is, don’t you?”

I stared at her blankly. She had a long purple scarf wrapped around her neck; I had not noticed this before. Unlike in New York City, where girls wear scarves for fashion purposes, I knew that this one was for warmth. She looked cozy and content and cute inside of it, and not like the type of girl who would wear a scarf in the middle of the summer just to follow the fashion trends.

“It’s Mischief Night! Devil’s Night! The night before Halloween! Aren’t you going to go out and make some mischief?”

“Make some. . .don’t you think we’re a little too old for that? Are you going to go trick-or-treating tomorrow night too?”

“Maybe if you come with me.” Janie flashed me a smile. “No seriously. Mischief. We take it seriously out here in the boonies, we’ve got nothing else to do to entertain ourselves.” I laughed in spite of myself. That much at least was probably true. “So what do ya say?”

I started to shake my head only because it was a school night, and I wouldn’t want my mother to worry. She seemed so sad and stressed out all the time, and the last thing that she needed was to lose even more sleep being up wondering where I was. If I went out she might not even take her pills. Not to mention that I would be, in fact, literally out making mischief.

On the other hand, part of me still resented her greatly for uprooting my life in the city and moving me up north to the middle of nowhere, to a place where fields of nothingness replaced towering skyscrapers and brilliant lights at all hours of the night. Why not go out for one night of fun? Maybe I could work it so that she wouldn’t even find out.

“I’m in,” I stated in what I hoped confident tone.

“Sweet! I’ll pick you up in a few hours then?”

“Is there any way we could make it a little later? My mom’s kind of strict, and I might have to, you know, sneak out.”

There was no way I was getting into my mother having been on antidepressants since my dad’s death, and how I had to kind of shift occasionally into the adult role, taking care of her during this weak period of her life. No, it was much simpler to pretend that my mother was like all other mothers of teenagers: an evil and destructive force set out to ruin my life and any chances I may have at having fun.

Janie raised her eyebrows and grinned another devilish smile. “Sneaking out! How even more exciting. Okay, get out of my car now I have to go home. I’ll park down the street a little bit over there, just keep an eye out for me, okey dokey?” Janie pointed absentmindedly down the road in one direction.

I returned her smile. “Sounds good to me.”

After I got out of the car and stood in front of my house waving goodbye to her she stuck her head out of her open window once more and called out, “Don’t run into any black cats!”

No, we certainly wouldn’t want that, would we.

* * *

Later on that evening, after a quiet and lonely dinner between my mother, me and two Lean Cuisine boxes, I found myself lying on my twin bed staring up at the ceiling, contemplating my life. It was just mind numbing how things could change quicker than the blink of a lightening bug in the shadows. Less than a year and a half ago I was part of a normal family: a normal only child with two perfectly normal parents living in New York City with a million other people. Now, it was me and my phantom doppelganger of a mother against the small, yet increasingly frightening, Red Poppy population.

Even though I had yet to check for Janie’s lovably amusing excuse of a car happily purring down the street, I didn’t feel like staying awake worrying any longer – is it possible to get an ulcer at only sixteen? I allowed my eyelids to droop, slowly blanketing over my eyes like white sheets sheltering a recently deceased person.

Out of nowhere a massively cold pocket of air surround me, and it was so chilling that it shocked me that this freezing amorphous substance wasn’t, in fact, a solid, frozen brick of ice. My eyes popped open, and I instinctively remembered what Janie had told me about the demon cat coming in through her brother’s window. My head whipped to my window on the opposite side of my room as the bed; it was closed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t even have two seconds to breathe a sigh of relief when I saw at the end of my bed a blacker than tar cat manifest out of thin air – thin air! My mouth went dry and I began shivering as I could feel the icy air envelop and entrap me. I did not blink once. In one fleeting moment my entire perception of reality and all that that word implies and encompasses had simply flown out the window, along with any certainty I may have previously had about my sanity.

The cat appeared as an apparition, hologram-like, and then quickly morphed into a more definable, concrete animal. She stared at me again, and I began to shake uncontrollably.

In my mind I flashed back to my childhood, when I went through a good eight-year phase of being completely and utterly obsessed with comic books. Every year for Halloween I dressed up as a different super hero whom I idolized. What would Superman say if he could see me now, at my lowest moment, positively petrified at what should be a run-of-the-mill house cat? If only I could sprout webs from my wrists and dart out the window like Spider-man.

I knew it was the right cat because of those eyes that looked right through me. Her ominous eyes widened, exposing a piercing shade of yellow, the color of a squashed slug. Right before my eyes the ghost-cat vanished again, all except the eyes, which remained behind in a Cheshire cat kind of way. Only, it wasn’t the creepy smile staring at me from the other side of the comforter but fiery hot, unfriendly looking eyes, almost unfitting to the atmosphere of the room; the chilling vapor-like air engulfing me yielded to a severe temperature drop in the room. After a few moments, her eyes disappeared too.

The coldness eventually followed suit and faded away as well, although not the iciness inside of me; no, that was still as alive as my heart pounding away in my skinny, hairless chest.

Holy mother of God, something bad is going to happen to me.

I sat up straight in bed, petrified, panicked. “I’m going to get sick,” I said aloud to myself. “I’m going to get a high fever, and be hospitalized, and possibly die.”

How did that old man die after seeing Friday? Why had I not thought to ask Janie that earlier? How did I end up getting myself into a situation much more bizarre and confusing and terrifying than anything any teenager should even remotely endure? What if I didn’t end up getting sick but something different happened, something even worse? Janie only said that something bad happened each time someone saw the cat; she didn’t specify the uniqueness of her brother’s situation. What did it mean that the cat didn’t talk to me? Did it simply choose not to, or was Janie wrong about that?

What I needed to do was to not hide under my covers from creepy-crawlies in the night, but to get up, get out of this possibly now cursed bedroom, and go find Janie. Teenage puppy love and making new friends aside, I had to bury my insecurities and my ego away and be straightforward to her about what was going on. If she thinks I’m a lunatic, she thinks I’m a lunatic, I rationalized. But I now had a seriously scary situation on my hands with a ghost-cat and I needed help.

I leaped out of my bed faster than one would leap out of shark-infested waters. I ran to my bedroom door, flung it open, bounded down the hallway, rounded the corner, and tore down the stairs. As this house was still very new to me I wasn’t completely used to all of the nooks and crannies. Consequently, I banged my elbows and knees a couple of times on my journey to get out the front door in the dark and outside faster than a speeding bullet – faster than Superman.

I was not concerned about my mother waking up and hearing me; this was not going to pose a problem. Her Ambien, or Sonata, or whatever wonder drug her doctor had prescribed her, was assuredly lulling my mother into a sleep bordering on a coma right about now. Just for good measure I slammed the door a little bit on my way out. How dare she sleep during such a crucial moment in my life. At the same time, I couldn’t bear to try to disturb her.

“Walter! Walter over here!”

Well, so much for subtlety. Janie was parked only very slightly out of the area that would be considered directly in front of my house. The car was running, the lights were on, and they were glaring at me as angrily as Friday had earlier and with a not dissimilar yellow glow. Janie was, once again, sticking her entire head out of the car window and waving frantically.

Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I gathered myself together to continue running over to her car and climb into the passenger side once again. As soon as I got into the car I realized before I could sit down that I had to shove toilet paper, spray paint, shaving cream, and eggs onto the floor.

“Careful!” Janie demanded. “Eggs break you know.”

I slammed the door shut. “Okay, yeah, well, we kind of have way bigger things to deal with.”

Suddenly, I heard someone sneeze in the backseat. Startled, I turned around to see a boy of about nine or ten resting back there. After finishing his sneeze he leaned his head back against the seat and looked out of the window; he looked more angelic and vulnerable than his age would suggest, as if he were years younger and a mere infant in a car seat.

Janie rolled her eyes. “Bless you, buddy! Are you guys ready to have some fun?”
Oh, no. This was not allowed. This was somebody else who would inevitably be dragged into our already way too screwed up situation.

“Who is this?” I demanded. “Who are you?” I asked him, choosing to address him directly instead of bothering to try to get an answer out of Janie. I noticed that he had the same exact shade of blonde/brown hair that she did. “Are you her brother?”

“Yeah,” the kid replied. He continued staring out the window without affording me the pleasure of making eye contact with me. “I’m Caleb.”

Janie leaned over and whispered to me, although I didn’t know how Caleb couldn’t have heard her, “He hasn’t been the same since. . . the incident, and I thought it might do him some good to bring him out. Hope you don’t mind.”

I ignored Janie and turned back to the backseat. “Wait, Caleb! Janie’s brother! The one that saw Friday! Dude, you have no idea what just happened to me. That cat is not real! I mean, she’s not alive! She’s a ghost and I just saw her in my room, she appeared on my bed and then disappeared except for the eyes, and then they disappeared too!” I found myself talking as fast and as excitedly as Janie tended to speak, but I couldn’t help it, and I no longer cared about looking girly or wussy.

I knew what I had seen. I knew it as clear as I knew what my name was. I was no longer able to rationalize to myself what I had felt when I saw the cat the first time, by the road. I was no longer able to look back at that moment and wonder if I had been imagining things, thinking about Halloween too much, feeling lonely out here in the middle of nowhere and letting things get to me and spook me out. I was no longer able to say to myself that I was being silly and imaging things, like I used to as a little boy. I had absolutely seen the ghost of a cat appear on my bed out of nothing, manifesting out of thin air like someone teleporting himself in an old science fiction movie. What I had seen defied the laws of the universe, and my own stupid adolescent feelings of unstableness seemed so petty and unimportant now, like the feelings of a gold fish or a plant. Sure, one or two people may in theory advocate for the poor, helpless creatures of the world, but ultimately I was insignificant.

That didn’t mean that I was ready to be hospitalized with fever and pain awaiting the Grim Reaper himself’s deathly visit, or whatever torture Friday had in store for me.

Caleb’s youthful eyes widened as he looked at me with curiosity and something else: fear. “What did you just say?” he asked me.

There was something in his eyes that caught my own eye, and that something was nothing at all. Once again the idea of nothingness being both creepy and immensely sad at the same time baffled me. I kept looking at him, and he looked at me, though without saying anything. There was no light in his eyes, there was no sparkle, there was no laughter. Instead there was nothing but greenness dissolving into a pool of hazel, as if Caleb was doomed forever to fade into the background, unnoticed. Where was the twinkle? Where was that child-like innocence, the part of a kid that looked at the world as a big, wonderful place just ready to be explored? What happened to the feeling of being special and unique?

It was gone.

Janie suddenly looked uncomfortable since the first time since I had met her, which was yesterday. “Um. . .maybe we shouldn’t talk about this. Let’s just go trash some houses, okay?”

I glared at her. “Janie. It is not okay. I am serious. A cat appeared out of thin air on my freakin’ bed, and then disappeared right before my eyes! If anyone can help me it’s your brother, who saw the essentially the same thing.”

I looked back at Caleb, about to bombard him with questions, but Janie cut me off. “I wasn’t entirely truthful to you earlier, Walter,” she said. She looked down at the floor of her beat up car to avoid eye contact with me. “The situation may have been a little bit more . . . serious than what I implied.”

“I’m sorry, it’s more serious? How more serious?”

Janie glanced back at Caleb, who nodded his head to her, communicating without words his unspoken permission to continue. “He didn’t just get sick, and have a fever. He started hallucinating stuff, and claimed that he saw ghosts everywhere he went. He saw dead people, really messed up dead people, like all decayed and stuff. Anything ugly and horrifying that could happen to someone he saw it. They almost took him away from us. I wanted to make light of the situation, I guess . . . it’s really hard to talk about, ya know? The old story of Mrs. Chambers used to be so much fun, the only claim to fame that Red Poppy has. But when it affects your family . . . I don’t know, I just wanted to enjoy a normal kid’s night out for once. And I wanted him to, too.” Janie nodded towards the backseat.

I attempted to relax my expression to tell her that I was softening, understanding what she was saying, when really I was panicked inside. How could she have declined to mention this before? The ghost-cat could now not only supposedly talk, but had the potential of causing severely more damage than previous believed.

“Do you still see ghosts?” I asked Caleb.

The little kid nodded.

“Are you pretending to your parents and doctors that you don’t, so you don’t end up under psychiatric care?”

He nodded again.

“All right, we are going to get to the bottom of this, and we’re going to start by going to Mrs. Chamber’s house. Have you seen her then, since she is supposed to be a ghost?” I asked Caleb.

“No, actually, I haven’t,” he replied. “I see ghosts all the time though. Some of them are nice, but most are really scary. But when I think about it, or talk about it . . .”

As he trailed off I finished the sentence for him. “It just leads to you being put under psychiatric evaluation.”

He nodded.

“Well, let’s go, because this is the only thing I can think of, maybe confronting Mrs. Chambers somehow. If you can see ghosts, then there is a good chance that you can see her, and maybe we can kind of use you as a translator
to communicate to her.”

No one spoke what we all must have been thinking – that there was a good possibility I would be able to see ghosts now, and I could see and connect to Mrs. Chambers myself.

Janie took a deep breath as she pulled her car into the street and headed in the direction of that run down house that we had passed earlier today, when it had just been a house that some crazy girl thought was haunted. Now it was the home of a ghost and her ghost-cat whom I had now seen, without a doubt, twice, and the consequences of seeing this cat seemed to be getting more crucial by the minute.

I felt like before I moved to this town I was the equivalent of Caleb: a young, innocent boy oblivious to the dangers of the real world, which apparently not only included murderers and thieves and what have you, but actual real supernatural entities that possessed the ability to turn your life around quicker than one might casually turn the page of a novel to find out what exciting event could happen next.

Now I was different, changed for life; I had gone through a metamorphosis like a caterpillar, but instead of emerging as a beautiful butterfly I was an uglier creature than even before. I was wiser, sure, but also bitter, and scared, and felt hollow inside. It was like there was a hole inside me when my dad died, and in the year since it just grew bigger, and bigger, and the move to Red Poppy would surely lead to the hole devouring me and leaving nothing behind.

“I was hoping we would just go out and have some fun tonight,” Janie was saying, staring straight ahead of her at the road. Then she glanced at me before continuing. “It used to be fun to talk about Friday and Mrs. Chambers, like I said. It was our town’s very own ghost story, something going on. I still like to laugh about it and whatever when I’m not home, but, it’s like, ruined my brother’s life. I wanted to make the whole story fun and games again, but I mean, that’s not going to happen, ya know? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

I sighed, actually softening for real this time. “I’m sorry to put you both through this, but in my defense I am terrified right now. I’d really, really like some answers, and as soon as possible, so that I don’t end up going to the hospital tomorrow – the hospital-hospital or the crazy people hospital.”

“Then let’s get this over with.”

We rode in silence for what seemed like hours but was in reality about eight minutes. Before I knew it, Janie had pulled in front of Mrs. Chambers’ house and the three of us sat in the dark car, in the dark night, peering out at the house. Something inclined me to look at my watch – it was nearly midnight. How oddly appropriate. Halloween was nearly upon us.

“Have you ever seen Friday?” I asked Janie, likely just stalling for time, because I was suddenly in anything but a hurry to get out of this safe car and onto the lawn of the mystical and the inhuman.

“No, I haven’t,” she responded. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to find here, but I think I should stay in the car and be with my brother. I don’t want him going in there.”

I opened my mouth to protest but shut it quickly, realizing that it would be rather selfish to subject this poor kid to more than he already should have been put through at his innocent age.

Looking at the house looming before me it suddenly seemed a lot bigger than it had before – where had that image in my head of a tiny shack gone? It was suddenly huge, towering over me, almost like its own living organism, breathing in and out, sighing and creaking with the wind, staring at me through those broken eyes of windows, and waiting, waiting for me to get out of the car so it could consume me through the front door. Here went nothing.

I thought about my mother as I got out of the car, and thinking of her made me relate to Caleb even more. How terrible it is when bad things happened to good people, and their minds became broken like a useless child’s toy. It was still there, but it wouldn’t wind up and play the way that it used to. The mind was present, but it wasn’t there at the same time; it was almost like the mind took off somewhere, and left behind in its place its ineffective counterpart, shed from the entirety of the entity like a bad habit. My mother and Caleb had something in common in this way, which was that something had been taken from them, and they were doomed to wander the Earth without this significant segment of themselves, forever searching for something that could fill the void and make them whole and complete once again.

More terrifying than the thought of becoming one of those people was the aftermath: if I became one of those lost souls then my mother would not have someone to look out for her because I would be as misplaced as she. I couldn’t allow that to happen; I was all she had left now. There was a gray stone path leading up to the front door, surrounded by patches of half dead grass on either side. I imagined in the winter this place might look a little bit better, brightened by the white of the snow, which would encompass it, protecting it from itself, and from others. The wind screamed all around me, however, like before, it wasn’t the external forces at play that chilled my bones, but an internal, arctic feeling that radiated to every inch of my body. Although I had now had this feeling several times in one day the familiarity of it failed to comfort me, but instead raised my panic to a new level.

I walked up the path feeling like it wasn’t me doing this, but someone else, and I was watching. Yes, that was it, I was in the car, with Janie and Caleb, safe and sound watching some other lunatic walk up to a haunted house that, up until a couple of hours ago, was nothing but a beat up shack in some hick town upstate. Now the horror of it was more real than ever, and the fact that this town that provided a home for something such as this was now my home as well, well, that was a very chilling thought indeed.

Raising my arm up to the knocker, I peeked inside the small, framed windows on either side of the door, but could see nothing but blackness. I knocked once, twice, three times. Waited. I turned around and looked at my comrades in the car; Janie smiled encouragingly, Caleb looked in the other direction, undoubtedly wishing he were anywhere in the world but where he currently was.

When no one came to answer my knock I bravely took the doorknob in my hand, turned it, and opened the large wooden door. At this point I thought about looking back again to the car but I was too afraid that Janie and/or Caleb would be screaming at me, waving their arms around like they were trying to get the attention of a celebrity, telling me whatever I do, do not go in that house, you crazy person.

Unfortunately, time did not allow me the luxury of thinking about my actions before I exercised them. I could lose my mind and be in a psych ward by tomorrow.

As I pushed the door open, the blackness gave way to some gray; there wasn’t exactly light, but I could at least see my surroundings. I was in the front hallway, with stairs in front of me, and a room, presumably a living room of some sort, to my right. There was a stand next to the door with a vase on it; the vase was empty. I hoped that at one point in time Mrs. Chambers had put many beautiful, blooming flowers in that vase, and I hoped they gave her great joy. But, if that was the case, perhaps she wouldn’t be sending her cat out to do her dirty work of slowing driving everyone crazy and . . . and what? And taking over the town? What could her ultimate goal possibly be?

Suddenly, the door slammed behind me. I whipped around and stared down the old wood. Then I quickly turned around again, aware of the darkness surrounding me, and although I could see some, it wasn’t nearly as light as it was a moment ago.

Then, there came a voice. “You won’t find what you’re looking for.”

I blinked, focusing my eyes in the darkness, hoping to adjust to it with the accuracy of, ironically, a cat. “I’m sorry?” I said aloud. I would have felt quite foolish were it not for the sheer terror that had taken over me.

Friday appeared on the staircase in front of me as she had before, first emerging as transparent, showing the wooden stairs behind her, through her. Within seconds the image had filled to reveal a complete and whole cat, albeit with demon yellow eyes. The coldness inside of me seemed to amplify and mold itself to every crevice inside of my body, running along with my blood stream, pumping along with my heart, and breathing in and out with my lungs.

The black ghost-cat spoke to me, repeating itself, making it clear that it had been the one to speak to me just a moment ago before physically appearing in front of me. “You won’t find what you’re looking for,” she repeated.

When I had learned that the cat could talk I had kind of imagined the voice to be crackling, unclear, and perhaps distant and lost. This cat spoke with clarity and certainty, like a politician; she seemed sure of herself, but was unmistakably being shady about at least something.

“I won’t find what I’m looking for?”

“No,” she replied, her yellow eyes never breaking eye contact with me. “You will not find Mrs. Chambers here. I suggest you go away.”

I was stunned. “Go away? But . . . I mean. . .I saw you, I see you, I am looking at you right now. Am I going to go crazy and get sick? Am I going to die?”

“Probably not today.”

I took a deep breath and tried to stand tall and firm and authoritative, even though all I really wanted to do was go sit in a corner and suck my thumb and have my mom tell me that everything was going to be okay. But I wasn’t a child anymore, it was my mother who now needed caring for, and everything was not going to be okay.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked Friday. “Why are you like this, why are you trying to scare people and turn them into pseudo-zombies for the rest of their lives? What is it that you’re trying to prove?”

The cat broke her stare for just a moment, looking down at the floorboards before responding to me. I shivered as a fresh chill kissed the back of my neck. “The world is a terrible and lonely place. The sooner people realize this, the better off we’ll be. I’m simply a catalyst in the equation.”

A catalyst cat. That almost would have been funny if the situation was happening in perhaps a cartoon or a television show created by an overactive imagination and I was being entertained by the amusement of it all. But it wasn’t fiction, it was happening right now, to me, and I did not laugh.

“Who gives you the right to decide how people live their lives? How can you take innocence from children, and allow the ghosts of God knows who to become visible to them, terrifying them forever? Are you acting out some kind of sick revenge for your master, because she lost her husband at war? I lost my father not long ago, okay? Things happen. People pass on to heaven, or to another life, or wherever they go. That doesn’t give you the right to take away the life, the sanity, and the sense of well-being of those around you.”

I surprised myself as I heard the words coming out of my mouth. I was acting on pure instincts at this moment, attempting to ignore the coldness inside of me, trying to forget about Janie and Caleb in the car twenty or so feet away. I tried to forget that a cat was actually talking to me, like Garfield or some other television cat. Did they let you watch television in psych wards? Because I sure as hell would not be able to fake it and pretend that nothing had happened to me as poor little Caleb was doing; consequently, I would undoubtedly be taken away by “them,” probably tomorrow, unless I did something right now.

The ghost-cat looked at me for a moment, and if I could read kitty facial expressions, I could have sworn that she was contemplating what I said, taking it all in, thinking about how to pose the response. As she fixed her yellow eyes on me the room suddenly got a bit brighter, as if there were dimmer lights on the ceiling and an unknown third part was standing out in the hallway, hand on the switch.

“I am Mrs. Chambers. Friday is the name of my feline side.”

I stood there, dumbfounded, not believing my ears. How could this get any more confusing?

“I am Olivia Chambers. I was a witch when I was alive. Witches can turn themselves into cats. However, there is a catch: we’re only allowed to do it nine times.”

“Nine lives,” I whispered.

“Yes, after the ninth time you die, for real. As I died as a cat, appropriately my ghost is a cat. There is no ‘ghost of Mrs. Chambers’ as they say, or at least, not in the way that you think there is, not the human form of me. It’s just me, ‘Friday’, my alter-ego that has allowed me to warn others for years of the inevitable death they will experience in their life, both theirs and of their loved ones. And yes, I have been bringing harm to Red Poppy and terrorizing children and adults alike by putting spells on them so they see ghosts, but it is for their own good! They must be aware of how awful the world is, how God takes people from us, and leaves you alone on this Earth!”

As Friday/Mrs. Chambers talked her yellow eyes grew brighter, angrier. “I am merely showing them the light. Showing them dead people, showing them ghosts, showing them that death is here, all around us, and it is never leaving or backing down.”

Despite the anger the ghost-cat gave off it was obvious that some sort of weakness had been exposed. Perhaps it was the Mrs. Chambers from long ago, grieving for her husband, a victim of war. I didn’t say anything for a moment.

Pausing briefly, she broke eye contact with me, then said, “I suppose I shall leave you alone since you lost your father, and perhaps you understand death and loss more than most your age. I will leave you be. Now, please return the favor to me and leave my house. Just leave me alone.”

“I don’t think you really mean that, Mrs. Chambers,” I said, softly. “I think maybe, for the first time since you lost your husband, you don’t really want to be alone. Not anymore.”

* * *

The next night I stood next to Janie in my new living room as my mother took a picture of the two of us. I was wearing a Batman costume and she was wearing a Catwoman costume. Sure, we were sixteen, a little old for trick-or-treating, but hey, this might be the last year to do it and really enjoy being a kid at Halloween, right? Plus, we wanted to show Caleb, our little ghost, a good time. Caleb insisted on having his white sheet go past the ground so that he was practically dragging it and tripping over it, but he didn’t want any chance of his feet being exposed and giving away that he wasn’t really a ghost.

“All right you spooky little thing, you get in front of them now so I can get all three of you in the picture,” my mother said to Caleb.

“Yes, Mrs. Lamb,” he said obediently, joining us for another picture or two.

The three of us glanced into the living room before leaving, observing our new feline friend as she perked her ears up at us. Friday – she asked to be called Friday as an embracement of her alternate identity – was curled up on our faded blue couch, contentedly resting against a pillow. She had remained in that spot since we brought her here this morning; briefly before that she was in my mother’s arms, being cradled like an infant. Once my mom held Friday she agreed to let her stay here. Perhaps my mother was too out of it to complain, or maybe she didn’t protest because we didn’t tell her Friday’s true identity. Maybe I’ll tell her one day, but at least she has a companion for now.

My mother had tried a filled candy store’s worth of pills for more than a year now and nothing seemed to work; she had been in what seemed like a permanent state of sadness. A cat, even a ghost-cat, could maybe be exactly what she needed. As soon as the two had met Friday’s yellow eyes suddenly didn’t seem so sharp, but mellowed instantly into a soft dandelion shade. That softening of the eyes indicated to me the empathy that Friday felt for my mother, and I knew from that moment that I had made the right decision and that these two could be good for one another.

“Have fun and be safe!” my mother said, scooting the three of us out the door. She smiled at me for the first time in what seemed like ages.

“Of course!” Janie said back to her.

“Of course! I thought to myself, smiling at my own amusement.

After all, what could happen in a sleepy, rural town like Red Poppy on Halloween night?