Someone to Love

4

That night, hotter and more humid than the one before, Jasmine continued to tremble despite the balmy clime. What kind of weird, intermittent cold could she have? Perhaps she wasn't sick at all. Perhaps she merely missed the warmth of Mack sleeping beside her. But she hated him. She'd only stayed with him for the two years because she'd wanted someone to love. He'd never won her heart, let alone her soul. Her problem was more likely her new surroundings—the house and its peculiar quietness. Where were the honking horns and irritated shouts that made a person feel less alone? She had not smoked, and thinking about smoking, weirdly, made her smell smoke. Yes, smoke of the cigarette sort. She sat up and squinted into the eerie navy blue of the night.

"Are you a girl or a boy?" It was the strange baritone again.

An earthquake crashed through her chest as she fumbled the switch on the lamp and the bulb exploded with a pop!

"Correct me if I am wrong," the thing said. "You are female, from the sound of your voice."

Straining to see, Jasmine sat wide eyed and blind. The moon's rays filtered through the palm fronds of the courtyard, producing only weak, watery beams. The voice seemed to come from the ceiling. She pulled the sheet up to her neck.

"Your hair is strange for a girl. I suppose that's the modern way."

"Where are you? What do you want?"

"Oh, for goodness sake, I'm right in front of you."

An enormous plume of smoke fell from the ceiling as if riding a slide at the playground, and she ingested a hideous lung-full.

"So you are a girl then," he asked.

"Yes," she said, hacking out the word.

"I noticed you enjoy a smoke now and again, though I am quite sure your brand is foreign to me."

Was he joking—or maybe crazy?

"I'd rather not smoke alone if I do not have to," he continued. "You too?"

"I don't smoke cigarettes," she said.

"I see. And I want you to know that I take no offense."

"Why would you?"

"My dear girl, you are proving to be quite the ignoramus. I grow tobacco. It has been the family profession for many hundreds of years."

She heard the sound of an exhale, and a second gray slide of smoke lowered from the ceiling and settled around her head like a cloud. "Geez-us!" she yelled. "Have you not heard of the ill effects of secondary smoke? Please go to the smoking lounge and do your damage there."

The man sighed. "I suppose you are right; it is dreadfully stuffy in here. These low ceilings." She gazed upward, past the posts of her four-poster bed. The ceiling was at least ten feet high.

"I insist you join me," he said.

"I don't think that's possible since I'm pretty sure I'm not awake," Jasmine told him.

"Awake. Asleep. Doesn't matter to me. ..."

The bedside lamp snapped on then, its dim glow enough for Jasmine to make out an enormous translucent boot on the floor just beyond the foot of her bed. Two of them, actually. Pointy toed and closed with hefty buckles. The light grew brighter and a pair of thick legs clothed in knee-height socks and pantaloons materialized. They rose toward the ceiling as wide and misshapen as the trunk of one of those sprawling live oaks. The pants topped off in a belt and the upper half of the body curved like a vaporous cobra clad in a brass-buttoned jacket and hovering horizontally at ceiling height. The sight of the gigantic ghoulish head with gnarled hair and deeply sunken eyes made Jasmine scream with such vigor that no sound—nor air—made its way out. The sizeable skull swooped toward her—its nose to hers—and a malevolent smile opened into a hideous laugh.

Jasmine squeezed her eyes closed and prayed she would faint.

When she looked again, she saw what might have been the enormous ass of a smoggy elephant squeezing through the relatively small opening that led into the hall.

"Goodnight," the giant of a ghost said, and he left her shivering cold.