A Little Terror
It is crying again. A loud, incessant wail that rattles the eardrums and causes the cutlery to tremble in the cupboards. Give it another few minutes, and the hollering will turn into a full-blown tantrum, with spectral fists smashing against the floorboards and tiny, invisible feet flying through the air to catch your shins when you least expect it. A mid-tantrum toddler is scary, but when that toddler also happens to be a ghost, it’s downright terrifying.
It’s still wailing when my husband, John, comes home. Little hands bang against the kitchen door, and I sigh as John drops his briefcase and car keys onto our kitchen island.
“Have you been letting the baby cry all day?” he asks.
“I don’t let it do anything. It chooses to act like this,” I say.
John purses his lips.
“Don’t refer to the baby as it. She’s an infant, not a creature or monster.”
“It’s a fucking poltergeist.”
John’s lower lip trembles. I worry that in another two seconds he’ll start crying as well.
“Don’t say that. She can hear us,” John says. He bends at the waist, patting the air around his shins as if there’s a lapdog sitting at his feet. “There, there, baby.”
I sink my teeth into my lower lip so I don’t say something hurtful like you look stupid when you do that. Instead, I settle on the more polite, “She isn’t over there.”
I know this because it has stopped banging on the kitchen door and is now clinging to the leg of my pants, its ghostly face pressed into my knee as it shudders and cries. At least now the sound is muffled by the cotton of my discount Victoria’s Secret pajamas.
John hums. “No, I’m sure she’s here. I can feel her.”
He flashes a smile, two deep dimples cratered in his dark skin. When I was younger, that smile would’ve made my heart skip a beat. I think once—after a couple of glasses of wine—I told a friend his smile reminded me of a young Denzel Washington’s. Now, I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes.
“Did you know children at that age already understand human speech?” John asks.
“Have you been reading ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting?’”
John’s smile deepens. “Yeah! I downloaded it on Libby. Do you want to read it?”
“I’d rather go to bed,” I say.
I leave him at the kitchen counter, still hunched over, patting the air.
The first exorcist arrives on a cold Tuesday, an evening John has reserved for a pickup basketball game with his college friends. I tap my foot as the old priest painstakingly removes layers of outerwear. He folds his scarf over three times before placing it into his bag. His hat, a hand-knit beanie, goes next. Then his leather gloves. His black parka, so large it must weigh at least five pounds, is hung on my coat rack. When he bends at the waist to untie his shoes, I find myself objecting.
“That’s not necessary,” I say.
A glance at the clock confirms that the man has wasted ten minutes disrobing.
Still hunched over, he huffs, “I must insist. It would be rude to track mud through your home.” He tugs off each shoe, revealing plain black socks, and places them onto my shoe rack in a neat row. “Now, how can I help you?” he asks with a smile.
We chat in the living room, our hands wrapped around steaming mugs of chamomile tea while I explain the situation to him. He’s a rather good listener, humming and hemming at all the appropriate spots in the story before asking, “Where is the ghost now?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
I cock my head to the side and listen for any of its usual noises: a pitter-patter of tiny feet, hands slamming into walls, low moans, and heavy breathing. There’s none of that now—just the never-ending ticking of our clock.
“Well, it does this sometimes,” I say. I tug on the end of my sweater where a loose thread has been dangling. “It gets quiet. I think it’s napping.”
The exorcist laughs.
“Ghosts don’t nap.”
He takes a slow sip of his tea, and I eye the liver spots on his hand. I’m tempted to argue with him. I know our ghost naps. I’ve seen the imprint of its little body as it curled around my pillow in the late afternoon and heard its soft snores.
Again, I glance at the clock. John will be home in another hour.
“Well, you must have a way of finding it even when it’s—” I pause to search for an appropriate word—“hiding.”
“Yes, let me get my tools.”
His tools, I discover, are the same ones used by the fictional priests in the horror movies John used to watch: holy water, a rosary, and a worn copy of the Bible. He keeps the rosary and Bible clenched in his left hand while, with his right, he flings water against my walls. He chants under his breath in Latin, I presume, as we move through the house. I cast a nervous look around the room as he begins, wondering if there’ll be a clear sign that a higher power has taken hold of my home and is preparing to cast out the tiny terror that’s been haunting me for the past seven months: rattling pictures, flickering lights, the sounds of angels singing. Instead, the two of us just awkwardly shuffle from kitchen to living room to dining room—him throwing water and chanting, me hoping that tonight when I lie my head on my pillow, there’ll be no ghost waiting for me.
We’re upstairs in the guest bedroom when we hear it: a thump. It’s two doors down—my bedroom. The priest and I lock eyes.
“The ghost?” he asks.
“Or a very large rat,” I say. When I see his frown, I add, “I’m joking.”
Together we step into the main bedroom. There’s an indent on the foot of the bed where it must be sitting. It wriggles when I step into the room with the priest. I pause in the doorway while the priest moves further into the room.
“Are you sure this is a human ghost? It looks a little small—”
His words are cut off by a small groan. It’s an unmistakably human noise, the kind of sound someone might make in the middle of a really good stretch. The priest freezes, his fingers spasming around the spine of his Bible. He spins on his heel, and I take a step back when I see the horrified expression on his face. His wide eyes and trembling mouth have my heart dropping.
“Wh-what’s wrong?” By the time I stammer out the question, the priest is pushing me past and darting down the hall, moving with a surprising amount of speed. I jog after him. “Do you need to get something else from your bag? Is there a problem?”
He turns around, and I nearly crash into his back. “That isn’t… That wasn’t…” His words trail off, and he takes a moment to wipe his face with his sleeve. “That is a child.”
“It’s a ghost.”
“I cannot remove it. It would be inhumane.”
He moves to leave, but I grab his arm to stop him. If he leaves, he won’t be coming back, and I’ll be stuck here, getting terrorized day in and day out by a ghost that can only communicate through screams and smashed objects. I can’t let him leave, not without exorcising the thing.
“It’s inhumane to force it to stay,” I plead. He tries to tug his arm from my grasp, but I won’t let go. I can’t. “Please, it can’t stay here.”
“It’s inhumane to exorcise an infant.”
“If it was an adult, you’d do it?”
“Of course, but it’s not.” He frees himself from my grip. I watch, dumbfounded, as he continues down the stairs. At the bottom, he turns again to face me. “You know, over time you’ll adjust to having an infant in the house.”
Indignation and fury wash over me. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to grab this jackass by his collar and shake him until he starts wailing like the ghost. Instead, I settle for storming down the stairs, grabbing his things in my arms, and hurling them out my front door.
“There’s no need for theatrics,” he says, but I’m already shoving him through the door as well. If he stays in my house, I’m liable to do something that’ll land me in a jail cell. I slam the door closed, cutting him off before he can offer up another empty platitude. I check the hallway clock. John will be home in twenty minutes, and I’m in desperate need of a drink. Maybe even a soak in the tub.
By the time John staggers into the house, sweaty, panting, and grinning so hard I’m worried his face will get stuck, I’ve already downed half a bottle of merlot. The wine dulls the sting of the exorcist’s failure and makes it easier than ever to feign interest when John wanders into the candlelit bathroom to regale me with the latest gossip from his basketball buddies. We make it through two divorces, a separation, and a botched vasectomy before he thinks to ask me about my day.
“Did the contractor come by?” he asks.
“Hm,” is my eloquent reply.
“The contractor? For the basement? You said you’d see if someone could install a wet bar down there.”
Oh, shit.
For a moment, I consider telling him the truth. I’d never called the contractor and had instead sweet-talked a priest into coming over so we could finally get rid of our little poltergeist. Then I remember the way he’d started calling it “my baby” and saying that perhaps it was our chance at finally having a family after years of failed IVF treatments. I place my empty wine glass on the bathroom floor and lift the half-full bottle of wine directly to my lips.
“It fell through. We’ll have to find another one,” I say.
“What a fucking disappointment,” John sighs.
Our bedroom is dark. Quiet, except for John’s steady breaths. His arm is a comforting weight around my waist, keeping me grounded as the room spins—a side effect of enjoying an entire bottle of wine by myself. My own eyes have begun to grow heavy, my breaths evening out, when a creak shatters the illusion of peace. The door handle jiggles. My lungs stop. My hands grow clammy. I can’t hear anything over the hammering in my heart, the rush of blood in my ears. I’m trembling, unsure of what to do, when just as quickly as it started, the door handle stops moving. My lungs deflate. A deep sigh escapes my body. My premature relief is shattered when the door’s hinges squeak, a long high-pitched note akin to nails dragging across a chalkboard. A beam of light breaks through the darkness, and I, terrified, tug the covers over my head.
“Go to John. Go to John. Go to John,” I plead.
Footsteps creep across the carpet. The air beneath the covers is hot and heavy. Sweat beads on my forehead and my breathing becomes labored as if I’m suffocating beneath our soft Egyptian cotton sheets and goosefeather duvet. The footsteps pause at the foot of the bed. There’s a tiny, questioning moan. A test cry. A warm-up to the full-bellied scream it’ll release if neither John nor I react quickly enough, soothing it with nonsense words and cooing noises. John doesn’t react. His body is as still as a corpse. The ghost moans louder, and I, moving without thinking, kick John’s leg. He wakes with a jolt, and the mattress dips as the ghost crawls onto his side of the bed.
“Huh?” John’s groggy voice. I hear him turn over, make a noise of surprise when he feels the ghost’s little body in our bed. “Oh, hey there. What’s wrong? Couldn’t sleep?”
As he speaks, his voice climbs in pitch, turning into the odd baby voice most adults use when talking with small children, but his cooing isn’t enough to satisfy the creature; I feel it fling its body against the mattress, and I swear the floorboards quake as it begins to scream.
“Oh shit.”
John’s hand lands on my shoulder. He shakes me so hard that I’m forced to give up my pretense of sleep and emerge, sweaty and frustrated, from beneath the duvet.
“The baby is crying,” he says when I glare at him.
I grind my teeth together.
“I thought you liked being awake with the baby.”
He gathers the ghost into his arms, then dumps its wiggling body into my lap. I try to hold the thing like the mothers I’ve seen in passing, carrying their squirming toddlers in their arms as they navigate through Metro gates and Whole Foods aisles, but I can’t quite figure out where the creature’s invisible limbs are located. An arm is mistaken for a leg. A foot catches me in the chin. When I try to reposition us both into a more comfortable position, I’m rewarded with the crown of its head colliding with my nose. All the while, it continues screaming at the top of its lungs.
John watches us with a grimace. “Maybe she wants some milk.”
“Milk?” I ask. “It can’t drink.”
“She likes the smell. You should heat some up in a saucepan.”
“Could you do it?”
John’s frown deepens.
“You’re already holding her. Plus, I need to get back to sleep. I have a big meeting tomorrow, so I need a full eight hours,” he says.
I imagine strangling him, wrapping my manicured hands around his neck and squeezing until his body has grown still and he can join this fucking ghost in the afterlife. Instead, I take a deep breath and force my mouth into something that may resemble a smile.
“You owe me,” I say.
The second exorcist tells me that babies—even undead ones—are blessings, and over time I’ll grow to love its presence in my home.
A third recommends deep breathing exercises and a family therapist.
Another says the ghost is suffering because it can’t move on. When I beg him to exorcise the damned thing so we can both get some peace, he lectures me on responsibility. What responsibility, I want to yell. I didn’t ask for this. I shouldn’t be responsible for an infant I can’t care for and don’t want.
Two months after the first exorcist came to visit, the ghost wakes me up at 3 a.m. for five consecutive nights. On the sixth day, I fall asleep in the middle of a Zoom call with the other adjunct professors at the university where I work. I wake when the ghost hurls a flower vase against the wall.
By the time the man with dreads hanging down his back comes striding through my door, I’ve lost count of how many exorcists I’ve seen. The man’s sneakers have a hole at his big toe where a navy sock peeks out. I can’t tell if he bought his distressed jeans with that hole in the knee or if, like his shoes, they’re so old they’re beginning to fall apart. His leather jacket, at least, looks new.
“You’re a priest?” I ask, half-convinced I’m being punked.
The man hangs his jacket on my coat rack. “I’m more of a spiritual guide,” he says.
Yeah, I’m definitely about to get scammed.
“So where’s the ghost?” he asks.
“It’s napping.”
“It naps?”
I stiffen, ready to once again insist that yes, ghosts can nap, but the guy—who seems way too young to be a priest—just nods his head thoughtfully.
“That’s good. That means you get at least a few hours to yourself each day,” he says.
My shoulder drops, relieved by his casual acceptance of the situation.
“It is nice,” I admit. “But the peace and quiet usually don’t last too long.”
He smiles, and he somehow looks even younger than before. I’m tempted to ask for his ID just to see if he’s even old enough to legally drink. Maybe he’s not a priest, but a random college kid with an obsession for the occult who saw my desperate post on the r/ghosts subreddit and decided to satisfy his curiosity.
“Can you tell me more about it? The ghost?” he asks.
I lead him into the kitchen. He settles on a stool while I heat the kettle.
“It was here when I moved in,” I begin.
I knew our rowhome was too good to be true. It was walking distance from a Metro station, there was a mom-and-pop café a few blocks east, and a popular used bookstore was right around the corner. It was only $300,000.
John had fallen in love with the charming interior, recently remodeled with restored hardwood floors. The kitchen had new stainless steel appliances and a large window to let in the morning light. When we toured the home, I stood at the sink, imagining myself preparing dinner after a long day of grading papers. I’d pan-sear chicken breasts. John would come home with a bottle of wine tucked under his arm.
The basement had enough room for John to store his Peloton, which admittedly had become a sort of towel rack in our cramped apartment. There would still be enough space left over to add a wet bar, something that we both thought would be nice when old college friends stopped by to visit.
“There’s an extra bedroom,” the realtor had said when he showed off the upstairs. “Perfect for an office. Or maybe a nursery.”
John’s arm, which had been wrapped around my shoulders as we wandered through the empty house, returned to his side. “Maybe in a few years,” he muttered.
He and I were both thinking of the red stain that’d marred our bed sheets that morning. A clear sign that the miracle baby we’d both prayed fervently for hadn’t survived, that my womb had once again failed to bring a new life into the world. I’d stared at the tacky blood between my thighs in silence, hating myself for being unable to fulfill my wifely duty, and hating myself even more for feeling relieved.
A movement by the bedroom window caught my eye. “Is that a cardinal?” I asked.
Here, in the present, with the man who might but might not be a priest, I find myself looking out of the kitchen window. I put up a bird feeder when we’d first moved in, hoping to catch another glimpse of the cardinal, but in the nine months since we’ve lived here, I haven’t seen a single bird.
“It took about a month for the ghost to appear,” I say.
The priest looks surprised.
“A whole month and there was no paranormal activity?” I shrug.
Of fucking course there was paranormal activity. We were just too stupid or naive to recognize the signs. There was all the stereotypical shit: flickering lights, strange thumps, rattling pipes. We’d just thought the house had been flipped by a pair of newbies who didn’t know what they were doing and had fucked up all the electrical wiring and plumbing. We assumed they were too cheap to fix it, so they lowered the price and hoped nobody would notice the shitty job they’d done until after the cheque cleared.
“Maybe it just took a month for the ghost to throw a tantrum big enough to get our attention,” I say.
“Naptime, tantrums. You make this ghost sound like an unruly child,” he jokes.
Steam rises from the kettle’s spout. I turn off the burner before the whistle can wake up the ghost. I busy myself with fixing two mugs of tea, wondering how he’ll react when I tell him the truth.
“Well,” I say once I’ve given him a cup, “it is.”
“It is what?”
“A child.” When the priest remains silent, I add, “It’s actually a little younger than that.”
I wait for the chastisement, the scandalized look. I wonder what unsolicited, bastardized parenting advice he’ll give me in lieu of performing the exorcism. He probably thinks I’m a soulless, amoral woman for wanting to get rid of a toddler’s trapped spirit. I ditch the tea and grab an opened bottle of wine from the fridge. I don’t bother with a glass, just tip the contents straight into my mouth.
“What are you looking for?” he asks in a gentle voice. “I can give you some options. There are ways you can managespirits to make them easier to live with.”
“I want it gone,” I say.
I’m startled when the priest extends his hand. Even more so when his long, thin fingers land on my wrist. He gives it a squeeze, a gesture that reminds me of my father, long dead.
“I understand,” he says.
“Do you?” I ask, my voice wavering. “I can’t live like this. There’s no peace. There never will be. It’ll keep haunting us and screaming and shattering glass. It’ll never grow old or realize that it’s dead or understand why it’s always suffering. What kind of life is that?”
The priest gives my hand another squeeze.
“The ghost doesn’t deserve to suffer,” he says. “And neither do you.”
I don’t realize I’m crying until the priest presses a handkerchief into my palm.
“Do you want to stay in the house, or would you rather go for a little walk?”
Upstairs, I hear tiny feet pattering around my bedroom. The ghost is awake. I’ve become so attuned to the little poltergeist. It’s still groggy right now. It will stay upstairs for another few minutes, then wander down here to demand my attention. If it can’t find me, it’ll panic. It’ll smash things, bang cabinets, pull books off of shelves. It doesn’t do well with strangers. It’ll be terrified. It might hide. Who knows how long it’ll take for the ghost to come back out or for the priest to find it? I can’t communicate well enough with the ghost to make it aware of what’ll happen to it, and I can’t go with it to the other side, but I can hold it, soothe it, and maybe ease its fear as it passes on.
“I’ll stay.”
About the Author
Ki Ki Hobbs is a fiction writer based in Florida and a graduate of the University of Maryland. Her work has been featured in Hot Metal Bridge, Room Magazine and Rigorous Mag.