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Helen and Eric spent the rest of the
afternoon taking selfies in front of the dinosaur ghost poop.
“This is awesome,” Eric said. “We’re going to be famous.” He put his
arm around Helen. “Smile,” he
said.
Helen tried to smile, but her anxiety
level was rising. Oh my gosh, he’s so cute, she thought.
Just then, her iPhone started playing “La
Cucaracha.” Looking down at the phone,
she saw James’s face glaring up at her.
As in all photos, he was sticking out his tongue and using his fingers
to make devil horns over his forehead.
“I’m sorry, Eric. I have to take this,” she said.
“No problem,” Eric said. “I’m going to post these photos to Twitter
and Instagram.”
Helen walked a short distance away and
pressed the answer button. “Hey, Baby,”
she said in a voice normally reserved for talking to actual babies.
“Don’t ‘Hey Baby’ me, Babe. Where the hell are you?” James asked. She heard a sound and knew he was crushing a beer can against his forehead. A golf match played in the
background.
“I told you,” she said. “I had to do that thing. With the dinosaur bones. You know, to help me get into grad school.”
She looked over at Eric. He was smiling
and dancing around while talking into his cell phone. He was obviously celebrating. She wanted to go celebrate with him.
“Yeah, well, I need you here,” James
said.
“But James, this is important.”
“Oh, and I’m not?"
"Of course you are."
"If that's true, you'll come home right away. I can’t find the remote control anywhere, and
I’m sick of watching commercials.”
“Did you look under your butt?” Helen
asked.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing, it’s just that the last time you
lost the remote, you were sitting on it.”
“Damn it, Helen! I’m not sitting on the remote.” There was a sudden pause on the other side of
the call.
“James?
Are you there?”
“Okay, this time I was sitting on it,
but the next time it could really be lost. I need you to come home right away.”
“Baby, please.”
“Don’t ‘Baby, please’ me, Babe. I said, come home right now.” The call ended.
“Darn it,” Helen said. She gazed up at the sky and screamed, “I am
so sick of my boyfriend!”
“Thompson! Who is this person?”
Helen was startled to discover that
another character had stumbled into their scene. He looked to be in his early sixties. He had
thinning hair and a white beard that he stroked in between puffs off a rather
elegant walnut tobacco pipe.
“That’s Helen, sir. She’s been... helping me.”
“I see.
Perhaps if you weren't out here getting “helped” by some harlot, I wouldn't be missing a bloody stegosaurus!”
“Now, see here...” Eric began.
“No, Thompson, you see here. You see here this instant. You’re fired!”
“What?” Eric looked as if he’d been
punched in the stomach. “Please, Dr.
Watson. Allow me to explain.”
“I think you have explained quite enough, Thompson.”
“You asshole!” Helen cried. Even as she spoke she could hardly believe
the words coming out of her mouth. She
went over to Dr. Watson, grabbed the arm of his tweed jacket, and began leading
him toward their discovery. “Eric has
done nothing wrong here. If you would
just close your mouth for one second and listen, you would realize that Eric has made the paleological find of the century.”
“Helen, there’s something I have to tell
you.” Eric said.
“No, Eric. I won’t let him do this to you. Dr. Watson, come look at this. It’s right
behind this boulder over here.”
“Helen, I've been trying to tell
you. Look at your phone.”
“What about my phone?” Helen released
Dr. Watson. She glanced down at her
phone. It looked fine.
“Check the camera roll,” Eric said.
“And just what is it I’m supposed to
see?” Dr. Watson asked. He was standing
by the boulder.
Open
your eyes, why don’t
you? Helen wanted to say. She continued to scroll through her
pictures. What was it she was supposed to see?
“I've had quite enough of this. Thompson, I want your office cleaned out by
the end of the day.”
The pictures! There was Helen, and there
was Eric, but where was the poop? It had vanished from every single photo. It was almost like you couldn't take pictures of ghost poop or something.
She dropped the phone and ran to the
boulder.
Eric hung his head.
Dr. Watson hopped in his jeep and drove
away.
Helen searched the area,
but it was no use. It wasn't just the pictures.
The entire poop had vanished.
Eric came up next to her. “There goes my
career.”
Helen nodded as if realizing something. “Of course it disappeared,” she said. She searched her bag for one of
her thingamabobs and then used it to scan the
vicinity. “The poop was just a temporal
imprint. Like ghosts themselves, their
poop is only visible for a short time before it returns to the ghost netherworld from whence it came.”
She gathered her gear and started
walking to her car.
“What are you doing now?” Eric asked.
“I have to go.”
“Wait,” Eric said, running after
her. “What are we going to do about
this?”
Helen stopped, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll meet you at
your office later. We’ll get to the
bottom of this, but there is something I have to take care of first.”
“But... but... but...”
Helen slammed the door of her Volvo and
drove away.
“But I don’t have a ride,” Eric said
softly, but there was no one around to hear him.
Back at her apartment, Helen dropped her
purse on the kitchen counter and called out to James.
“James,” she called, “we need to talk.”
She followed the noise from the
television into the den. A professional
badminton game was playing (one of James’s ten favorite sports), and a bucket
of chicken bones (gross!) rested on the floor beside his recliner. James was no where to be seen.
He
must be in the bathroom, she thought.
“James,” she said, going to the bathroom
door. “I've made a very important
decision. When you come out of there, we
need to talk. Is this going to be a long
one?”
Looking down, she noticed red liquid sliding
under the bathroom door. “Oh no,” she
said. “The water turned red again. I’ll call the super. James, don’t try to fix anything. James? Do you hear me?” She reached for her cell phone, and started
scrolling through a list of names. She
could see the bathroom light through a crack in the door and heard water
running in the bathtub. “James, turn off the water. You’re making a huge mess.”
She reached down to turn the knob,
noticed the door was ajar, and gave it a gentle push.
She gasped when she saw James on the toilet, slumped over, another
bucket of chicken bones resting beside him.
Running to him, she called out, “James! James, wake up!”
Red water continued to overflow the
bathtub. James is dead and the pipes are broken: this is too much for me to deal with
right now, she thought. She pressed two fingers against his neck and confirmed her worst fears: he didn't have a pulse. And
what happened to your shirt?
A trio of slice marks ran down the front
of his wife beater, almost as if some kind of large animal had attacked him. She lifted his shirt, probed his rolling belly
fat, and found three scratch marks, not deep enough to end his life--that appeared
to be a result of a heart attack--but clearly visible.
Whatever did this wasn’t human,
she told herself.
It was difficult to see through all the
steam rising from the hot water faucet, but she managed, with shaking fingers,
to tap out the numbers 9-1-1. Looking up, she stared at the steam-covered mirror.
“What is your emergency?” A woman’s
voice asked.
Helen continued to stare at the mirror, unable to
speak. In crude, rudimentary scrawl,
someone had written in the steam. It was
difficult to read, but Helen clearly recognized the single word and understood its
implications. This is what it said: ROAR.
Continue to chapter 6
Continue to chapter 6
