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.