…the children come out from the alcoves and holes, ragged scavenger ghosts huddled together and shuffling along the dusty floor, their hollow eyes sweeping back and forth, mouths gaping . . . they are in thrall to an old woman, an older ghost, who herds them like cattle and feeds off of their misery…
I stand on the rickety wooden steps, watching them from above, not daring to step down into the range of their clutching hands.
Sitting on the toilet in the back bathroom, I hear a sound at the door — as through someone pressed against it from the outside, maybe one of the cats?
But the door has nearly an inch gap at the bottom. I can see nothing outside.
A few minutes later I am jolted into a panic by the sight of something coming quickly towards me — it is as if it passed through the door.
It is white and ragged, trailing fluttering strips of cloth. I have an impression of gray hair, a wrinkled face . . . an old woman who vanishes just before she reaches me.
I am startled. I am scared. My hair is standing on end. The akin on my arms feels prickled and tight, almost sunburnt.
This was not a vague impression or an easily explained corner-of-the-eye episode. I saw something.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated December 6th, 1996]
…I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. I take one down, finding [ILLEGIBLE] and poetry, handwritten recollections between the pages — it dawns on me that these are the rooms of my great uncle, the missionary to Burma, and that only I know he is dead.
The guard eyes me through the front windows and I move on to the inner rooms, marveling at the collection of antiques, souvenirs, and artifacts [ILLEGIBLE] the grimy gray walls, the peeling paint, and the dusty windowpanes.
Within the inner rooms, I come upon a woman — elderly and wholly lovely. She embraces me and slowly we back to an old bare mattress with a brass frame and headboard tarnished and lovely.
…and then the guard is knocking at the window and shouting and I am still standing at the bookshelf, a book open before me with a picture of an alluring elderly woman open on the page.
And I know I am dreaming, but still I set the book back upon the shelf and move once again into the inner rooms, coming to the place of the woman yet again, embracing and being embraced yet again, awakening once more at the shelf of books with the guard behind me, knocking on the window of the dead man’s rooms.
And again, I turn to pass back into the inner chamber again,
And again.
Again.
Until I wake in the dark morning.