Rivalry (3 page)

“
You’re welcome, it was my pleasure! When I was your guys’ age, we didn’t have VHS, so we’d always bike down to the local theater and try to get in to see a Lee Marvin or Bronson movie.”

Sharon took her headphones off for a moment. “Hey, why don’t you guys wash up now, and then you can stay up as long as you want. Owen, do you need anything?”

I shook my head. “Just a washcloth I guess.”

I unpacked my bag while Doug cleaned up and brushed his teeth. I had borrowed my dad’s old shaving kit to hold all my toiletries, and I slipped my little signal mirror into it before I went into the bathroom. Sharon had left me a washcloth, and I scrubbed my face and brushed my teeth staring at the blank wall above the sink. There were four small holes forming a square at head height, and the faint outline marking where something used to hang on the wall. Doug’s parents must have unscrewed the mirror from the bathroom when they moved here.

Alone and curious, knowing
something
was in the house, I spat and rinsed, then slipped the mirror out of my kit, holding it up in front of me so I could see myself in its reflection.

I wasn’t alone in the room. A pair of dark eyes, a glimpse of long, disheveled black hair, and a hand held up in greeting appeared over my shoulder in the mirror.

I jumped. The mirror slipped from my hands, falling into the sink and breaking in two. I spun around, thinking Doug’s mom had come into the bathroom while I wasn’t looking, but I was alone.

There was a knock at the bathroom door. “Owen, are you okay? I thought I heard something break.” It was Sharon.

“
No ma’am, I’m fine - I just dropped something of mine. Everything’s okay.”

“
All right, I just wanted to make sure.”

“
Thank you! I’ll be right out.”

Shaking, I picked the pieces of the mirror out of the sink, careful not to cut myself, and I refused to look directly into their reflections, instead wrapping each piece with a few sheets of toilet paper before tucking them away in the shaving kit.

That had
not
been my imagination -
something
had been in the room behind me, standing by the door, a hand raised up as if to say ‘hi’. It had looked like a girl, but I hadn’t gotten a clear view of its face, just a flash of eyes and hair. I finished packing my kit and took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves before leaving the room.

Doug was sitting on the edge of his bed, thumbing through a magazine.

“
Hey, what was that?” he asked.

“
Uh, nothing, it’s cool.”

He looked at me funny. “Did you...see something?”

“
Oh, I just startled myself, that’s all. I guess I’m getting a little spooked out now.”

Doug nodded and pointed to the Super NES. “Want to play?”

“
Sure.”

We sat down on the floor in front of the TV and fired up Super Mario World. We quickly got into the game, and soon we were laughing and joking, ribbing each other when we died and cheering each other on when we pulled off a great move.

After a while though, I began to notice something odd. Every so often, I’d hit a button on the controller, and whatever I was trying to do, something else would happen. It wasn’t consistent, and it only started after maybe twenty minutes of play, so I didn’t think it was my controller.

Doug began to notice my frustration. “You okay?”

“
Yeah, my controller is acting a little funny.”

“
Oh, yeah. I think that happens sometimes. Want to switch?”

“
Okay, sure.”

We saved the game and switched the controllers, but the problem persisted. What was weirder, as time went on, I noticed the sound become a little...distorted. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn I heard a girl’s voice coming through the speakers, very faintly. It sounded like an occasional giggle or other unintelligible noise.

“
Do you hear that?” I asked Doug.

“
What?”

“
There’s like, something weird coming through the speakers. Like maybe a program on TV? Could it be bleeding through?”

“
Uh, I don’t get any reception in here. That’s weird. Here, let’s turn the sound down.”

Even with the sound turned off, an odd static-like noise came though the speakers. The sound was intermittent, as if someone tried speaking, but with a great deal of difficulty. Doug could see that I was losing all interest in playing the game, instead trying to hear what was being said.

“
Hey, you’re missing all those coins,” he pointed out.

“
Yeah, sorry - that sound is so odd.”

“
Well, how about we turn it off for a while? Maybe break out some comics or something.”

“
Yeah, sure - it’s getting kinda late anyhow, we don’t want to annoy your folks.”

Doug turned off the console, then the television. As he pushed the power button on the TV, I could have sworn I heard the word “
wait
” come through the speaker.

“
Does your TV do that a lot, with the sounds?”

“
No, I’m not sure what that was. Maybe my dad needs to have someone take a look at it. It’s a few years old and we’ve moved, so maybe it got bumped bad?”

“
Yeah, I guess. It just sounded, I dunno - like a girl’s voice.”

Doug got quiet for a moment and looked away.

“
Hey? Is the ghost...is it a girl?”

Doug looked at the floor and shrugged.

“
I had a little mirror in my bathroom kit, and...well I thought I saw a girl in it for a second.”

Doug looked up at me sharply. “We don’t use mirrors around here. That’s why. It shows up in mirrors too much.”

“
Well, yeah, so I found out. What’s the deal, Doug? Do you know who it is? I mean, who it was, when she was alive?”

Doug stood up, turned away and walked to his closet. He started rummaging around.

“
I think we should just go to bed, I’m tired,” he said.

“
What’s going on? Why don’t you want to talk about this.”

“
Because
. I just don’t want to, okay? Stop being an asshole about it.”

A crackle of noise came from the television. We both turned and looked.

“
Dougie? Dougie, don’t be mean to him...
”

The voice was distorted, but clearly a young girl.

“
I thought you turned the TV off...”

“
Yeah...I did.”

Doug walked over and hit the button twice, turning it on and off again.

“
Dougie, don’t be mad.
”

Doug reached around behind the TV stand, pulling the power cord.

The television continued to crackle with static. I felt a cold sweat break out all over my body.

“
Hey, what the fuck?” I asked.

Doug backed away from the TV. “She hasn’t done this before...”

“
Owen? Please play again. I’m sorry if I was being mean. I like to play the games with Dougie.
”

There was movement in the television screen. Not on the screen,
in the television itself
. Faintly at first, a cloudy, swirling motion was visible, as if the dark grey of the television tube was made from a muddy silt churned by an unseen current. Doug and I stared, dumbstruck, as the TV tube roiled and eddied.

I found myself crying out in shock. A hand, a small, feminine hand, slapped up palm-first against the inside of the picture tube, as if emerging from the clouded silt inside an aquarium and pressing against the glass. The hand thumped again on the glass, and this time we actually heard it - the distinct
whump
of an impact.

“
Doug, what the hell, what the fuck, what is that?”

“
Shit, it’s her. She’s never done this before...”

Some small, analytical portion of my mind urged me to grab my camera. Without looking away, I reached down into my bag and rummaged around trying to find the Polaroid. The hand was beating against the glass urgently now, and I could hear the muffled voice again, not through the speakers, but with the distant, hollow sound of someone on the other side of a thick glass window. In truth, it sounded as if the girl had been bundled up and stuffed into the television tube, and she was trying desperately to get out.

My hand closed on the camera, and I brought it up to my face, opened the flash, and turned it on. Through the viewfinder I now saw a young girl’s face pressing against the glass next to the hand. Her eyes were wide, her hair swirling in the cloudy picture tube, her mouth open and speaking.

“
Dougie, I want to come out! I want to play with you! I want to meet Owen! We can all play together!
”

I heard the whine of the flash charging, and as the whine steadied, I forced myself to lean close, a few feet from the television, in order to get a clear photo.

Just as I clicked the camera’s shutter, just as the flash pulsed, the girl in the glass screamed, her hand struck the inside of the tube one more time, and the television exploded, spraying shards of glass, plastic, and metal throughout the room.

I woke up in a hospital room eight hours later. The doctors told my parents that I had fallen back and hit my head against Doug’s bureau when the television exploded. I received a few nasty cuts from flying debris, but no other obvious injuries. The concussion had put me out, and the doctors had kept a close eye on me to ensure I wasn’t bleeding internally or anything else. By the time I woke up, it was believed I would make a full recovery.

Doug hadn’t been so lucky. A fragment of razor-sharp glass as long as my index finger had pierced his neck, puncturing his carotid artery. While I laid there unconscious on the bedroom floor, my friend bled to death while his parents, screaming, applied pressure to the wound in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.

A week later, after Sharon and Mike had packed their moving van and prepared to leave another town, my school bag and other belongings were mailed to my home. Doug’s parents had done their best to clean any trace of his blood from my clothes and other things, but here and there a dried, crimson speck could still be found. I wound up burning most of it a few weeks later.

I also discovered the Polaroid camera had probably saved my life. A chunk of the television tube had smashed into it, rendering it useless, but not before the photo had been taken. The photo itself hadn’t ejected all the way, and with a pair of tweezers and shaking hands I extracted the picture.

There she was, surprisingly clear in the photo. Hand against the glass, face pressed close, like a drowning girl screaming against the porthole of a flooding ship. I could clearly make out her long black hair, her dark, sad eyes, her pale complexion.

That’s when I understood.

I don’t think ghosts are cool any more.