It's Probably Haunted

Chapter 9

The next few days went by without incident. Unfortunately, I just couldn't come up with another plan to top my furniture moving scheme. I rented a dozen haunted house movies and watched them while Calvin was around hoping it would put him closer to the paranoid state I needed him in, but he just kept smoking and laughing and making jokes about Boo Radley, which I don't think he understood when he was telling them. His mocking tone nestled harshly in my mind and I found myself yelling at him without reason during a rather gruesome scene about two scientists realizing that the ghost they had been searching for was real and was ready to do them great harm. The bloody details of that scene are lost to me, but I'm sure you don't really care about that anyway.

We watched a few more haunted house movies from the eighties, mostly in silence aside from occasional coughing fits and Calvin's maniacal laughing, and then I decided to go for another walk around town. I needed to clear my head; a statement that means so much more to me now than I ever realized. My brain feels like it gets so bogged down with details sometimes and I just lose track of what I'm doing or talking about. If I just had the time to clear my fucking head, then what's happening probably wouldn't have to happen. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand yet? Probably not. Let's continue.

I walked around town that night for an hour, maybe more, and nothing exciting happened. No one stopped me in the street and tried to rob me. No one tried to give me drugs or sleep with me. No one even seemed to look at me as they drove by in their cars. I didn't stop anywhere interesting and I can't remember what I was thinking about but it must not have been important either. What I do remember though, is what was happening when I walked around the corner and saw my apartment building crawling with cops. They were worming their way up the stairs and into the building and I almost gagged thinking about the dream I had almost forgotten about.

I walked toward the house, keeping myself on the opposite side of the street, and walked past slowly, searching the crowd for any sign of Calvin being arrested. I immediately thought of Mina's threat to call the police but I never thought she would actually go through with it. I hadn't even spoken to her since then and there was nothing I could think of that I could have done to her since then to make her call the fuzz.

I sat down across the street on the stoop of an apartment building I knew no one lived in and pretended to be a curious pedestrian finding excitement in my mundane stroll through town. My disguise succeeded and I was able to watch as cops went in and out of the house; talking to each other and drinking what seemed like an excessive amount of coffee for an event that took thirty, maybe thirty-five minutes.

At the end of all this, I watched as they wheeled someone out on a gurney, white sheet covering their face. I watched as the nosy neighbors scampered off to their houses. I watched as the pigs rolled away in their black and white blankets, and the house settled back into its dull, dozing state. I didn't see Calvin. I didn't see Mina. I didn't see anyone at all, so I walked across the street and went inside.