Enemy of my Enemy
The neighborhood smelled of smoke and rotten meat. Frank couldn’t think of the last time he had experienced anything like it. Not on that scale. It smelled like someone had been burning corpses on their lawn.
Hargreave Circle was a little cul-de-sac neighborhood at the forgotten end of a town that was barely a blip on the map. Thirteen houses were there, all at least a half mile from their nearest neighbors, arranged in a circle on the west side of a pond and a sprawling forest in eastern Vermont. The entire neighborhood was haunted.
Emil Beckham lived square in the center of Hargreave in a little house bordered by fir trees and rose bushes. Everything about his home, and all the homes in the cul-de-sac, looked charming from the outside. But appearances were almost always deceiving, Frank had learned. At least when it came to the dead.
“It’s been two years,” Beckham had told Frank when he first made contact.
“Two years? Did you contact anyone before me?”
“No.” Beckham laughed. He had a nasal voice, and he was prone to laughing at inappropriate times. “How could we? How could anyone? Sometimes, it went away for a month, maybe even two. We only found out later that it was at somebody else’s house. None of us wanted to tell our neighbors about it. We all thought the same thing, that everyone else would think we were crazy.”
“How did you find out?” Frank asked.
“It’s a small neighborhood. We’re all friendly if not exactly friends. But with everything that was happening, my wife wanted to lighten the mood. She wanted to be normal again, so we had a Christmas party.”
He sighed then, and Frank just let him keep talking.
“We invited our neighbors, and maybe half of them showed up. Mrs. Tavistock mentioned it just after dinner. It was an off-handed comment, and she’d had too much to drink. She talked about not wanting to go home in case ‘it’ was there. You’d think someone had pulled a gun on everyone in the room the way we all reacted. All she said was the word ‘it’. She said, ‘Maybe it was going to be there’ when she went home, and it was like everyone knew. Instantly, all of us knew. We’d all been experiencing the same thing.”
“So, this ghost haunts the entire neighborhood?”
“We eventually got in touch with the other neighbors. We just came right out and asked. Not everyone wants to talk about it, as you can imagine. Some of the things we’ve seen…”
He trailed off.
“Has that been the extent of it? Seeing things?”
“No,” Beckham said. “It has for me and my wife, but not everyone.”
