The Girl on the Porch
Stephen Loiaconi
From the case files of Roy Murtaugh, paranormal investigator and licensed chimney sweep:
The first thing you learn when you’re hunting ghosts is, there are no happy endings.
If you don’t find anything, you’ve wasted your time and money and likely embarrassed yourself in front of however many people to whom you swore you weren’t just seeing things and you absolutely weren’t crazy.
You find something, and well, you’re dealing with a ghost. That is, to say the least, not an ideal situation for anyone.
This is what I tried to tell Keith Solomon, but people don’t listen.
It started one night a couple months back. Keith was lying in bed, wide awake and listening to Mary, his wife of almost five years, snore up a storm. Watching her chest rise and fall. Trying to ignore the whistling of the wind and the scraping on the windows by the skeletal limbs of trees he was convinced would teeter over and take out his roof in a bad storm.
He was hesitant to look at his phone at times like this because the light of the screen would sometimes wake Mary, and that was a fight he’d had too many times. Still, he couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t especially want to be alone with his thoughts, so he decided to scroll through his social media feeds, see what urgent nonsense the world was outraged about that would probably be forgotten by morning.
Anyway, they had one of those doorbell cameras that sends you an alert anytime someone or something triggers the motion detectors. A notification came through, but he didn’t think much of it, assuming it was just a hungry raccoon or an overzealous squirrel. Then the doorbell rang.
His wife shifted a bit but didn’t wake. He thought maybe he imagined it. Then it rang again. His phone vibrated in his hand with another alert. Haltingly, he tapped the screen.
The grainy image popped up. A girl, maybe ten years old, frilly white dress, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, a mordant smile, and hollow, vacant eyes.
She looked at the camera quizzically, like she was staring back at him through it, just as confused as he was. She opened her mouth and wailed. She pounded on the door twice.
Keith thought about waking Mary. She turned onto her side, facing away from him. Another knock. He lumbered out of the bed and put on his slippers, then crept down the stairs, unsure what he would do if he got down there and there was indeed a young, oddly well-dressed child on his porch.
As he got to the bottom of the stairs, there was another knock. His eyes fixed on the front door, he reached for the coat rack in the foyer and fumbled for an umbrella to, if necessary, defend himself. A strong breeze shook the bushes outside the bay windows in the living room, and brittle branches tapped against the glass.
Keith put his hand to the door. He no longer heard anything. He pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen. The girl was still there, silently staring forward. After a few deep breaths, he peered through the peephole.
Nothing.
He pulled back, then took another look to confirm. He glanced at his phone again and the girl was gone.
He didn’t fall back asleep that night.
The next couple of nights, similar things happened. The ringing of the bell, the girl on the porch, the wailing and knocking. And then she would vanish, seemingly as sudden as she appeared. He never saw her through the peephole. He never opened the door. He never woke his wife. Never mentioned it to her in the morning. He would just lay awake in bed, alone next to her, wondering if he was losing his mind.
So, here’s the deal with Keith and Mary. “Rough patch” wasn’t really the word for it. They were in a perpetual state of stormy seas at that point. Fertility struggles can do that to a marriage. After two years of trying to have a child, way too much money spent on hormone treatments and drugs, having bland, mechanical sex on a schedule, arguing, blaming themselves, blaming each other, they lived on the raggedy edge of oblivion, neither wanting to dare the other to give them that final push.
He would tell me they were still in love, and I didn’t see any reason to doubt it. But getting through the day, dancing around each other, avoiding invisible tripwires embedded in every exchange of pleasantries, it was wearing on them both. You could see it in their eyes when they looked at each other, in the rare moments they socialized with friends together.
So no, he didn’t want to come to her with, “I keep seeing this mystery girl at the door at night” because a) he knew how nutso that sounds and b) what the hell was she going to do about it? He wasn’t certain it would start an argument, but he wasn’t certain it wouldn’t, either.
That’s when he called me. We were old friends whose lives had taken very different paths since our days living across the hall from each other in a college dorm. He was a high school English teacher at some fancy-ass private school in Wealthy-old-money-ville, Connecticut. I was once an investment banker in Manhattan, and then some things happened, and then I quit. Now, I investigate paranormal occurrences, which is something most people don’t take seriously until they experience a paranormal occurrence.
Before that day, we rarely talked about our work. I didn’t particularly care about his, and I never knew what he thought about mine. But he called me on the office line and said he had a problem, and he didn’t know who else could solve it.
I hopped a train out to Stamford on a Saturday and took a cab to their house, a three-level home built in the 1960s that I’m sure the real estate listing called “charming.” Like something out of a black-and-white sitcom. Picket fence, fancy shutters, old-timey mailbox, the whole deal. I knocked on the door, a six-pack of moderately priced craft beer under my arm.
“Who you gonna call?” I said with a smile as he opened the door, and I immediately realized I’d woefully misread the situation.
Keith glared back at me, exhaustion dripping from his eyes, ill-fitting sweatpants sagging off of him like he’d lost a good ten pounds. “Roy,” he said, his voice like gravel and glue. “Get in here. And hurry.”
After I entered, he slammed it shut and locked the deadbolt. He glanced up the stairs toward the bedroom and motioned for me to follow him to the basement. We sat on a weathered old couch, and he walked me through what happened. It had been almost two weeks, this thing showing up almost every night, knocking, wailing, vanishing.
“Mary’s starting to think I’m hiding something from her,” Keith said.
“You are hiding something from her,” I noted.
“What am I supposed to do, tell her the truth?”
I let that thought hang in the air for a moment, then I moved on. “If we take care of this quick, she’ll never need to know,” I said.
“That,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I want to do that. How do we do that?”
I pulled out my notepad and got down to business. Wrote down dates and times, to the extent he could remember them, drew some sketches of the spirit he described, started trying to make some sense of it all. I took some readings with my equipment and confirmed there was some sort of lingering spectral energy on the porch.
“You have any photos or videos of this thing?” I said.
“I’ve tried recording it,” he shook his head. “The file glitches out every time, for however long she’s out there. It’s all static.”
“That’s inconvenient. Okay, this is important: has she ever threatened you?” I asked as I studied the doorbell camera. Nothing appeared to have been tampered with.
“She doesn’t say anything at all,” he shrugged. “She cries sometimes.”
“Is it that she can’t talk or she just doesn’t want to?”
“How the hell would I know?” he asked, taking a seat at the top of the front steps and resting his head in his hands. “I mean, when I don’t open the door, she screams, this shrill, bone-shivering screeching like, I don’t know--”
“Like a banshee? Interesting.” I made a note. “I know this is going to sound strange, but has anyone been murdered and/or buried on the property?”
“Not that I know of,” he said.
There are a lot of reasons a spirit might haunt someone. Frankly, it’s helpful when they can talk. Otherwise, it’s like trying to figure out what your dog is telling you when it barks at the window. They’re usually looking for something, or someone. Some unfinished business on the mortal plane. Revenge, longing, lust. A deep unabiding need for one last human connection. Under certain circumstances, it can be oddly romantic, maybe even a little sexy, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Of course, sometimes, ghosts just like to mess with you.
This, I was fairly certain, was not that.
What it was, was harder to say. From what Keith told me, the spirit didn’t seem especially malicious, but it was persistent. And it was targeting him specifically. I wasn’t even sure Mary would have been able to see it if she wasn’t sleeping through these episodes.
Back in his living room, I offered him my preliminary assessment of the situation.
“From the sound of it,” I said, “you’re dealing with something a couple hundred years old, give or take. I suppose we can’t rule out the ghost of someone who died on their way to a more recent Victorian-era themed costume party, but that seems like a longshot. Anyway, this is probably some apparition that came untethered from whatever site it was originally haunting, maybe it was a bad exorcism or whatever, but it’s been floating about aimlessly for some time and latched itself onto your camera for some reason. Could have been at the factory, could have been after you installed it, doesn’t really matter. Point is, it’s in the camera.”
Keith stared at me blankly.
“It’s a techno-geist,” I added.
“I honestly think you’re just making up words.”
“Face it,” I said. “You’ve got a ghost in the machine, my friend.”
“What do we do about it?”
I sank into the soft cushions of the couch as I thought about it.
“Forgive me if this seems obvious, but have you tried turning it off?”
His sheepish silence assured me he hadn’t considered that. That’s not uncommon, mind you. People panic in the face of things they can’t explain, and their response to something that doesn’t make sense doesn’t always make sense. Our brains aren’t wired to deal with this shit. Folks like to mock characters in horror movies for making irrational and dangerous choices, but if you haven’t been chased by an ax-wielding cannibal through a backwoods cemetery in the middle of the night yourself, I don’t want to hear it.
“Murtaugh’s Law,” I said. “The simplest solution is, like sixty-five, seventy percent of the time, the best one. Let’s give that a go.”
The first night he left the camera off, Keith heard nothing from it. Stayed awake for hours, just waiting. Jumping at every sound, real or imagined. The next night, he eased into as deep a sleep as he could recall. When he awoke, he had three alerts on his phone that motion had been detected. He raced down the stairs and out the door and confirmed the camera was still off.
Unnerved, he yanked the camera off its base and spiked it to the ground. He attempted to stomp on it with a slippered foot, nearly losing his balance. He picked it up, dumped it into a trash can, and dragged it out the curb. By the time he got home that night, it was gone. Mary asked him what happened to the doorbell camera, and he didn’t answer.
Around 3 a.m. the next morning, Keith was jolted from his sleep by a muffled shriek. He tried to ignore it, buried his head beneath his pillow, hummed softly to himself, but he could still hear it. Mary managed to sleep through it all. After ten or fifteen minutes, he shuffled down the stairs. The wailing grew louder as he approached the front door. When he placed his hand on the door, the sound ceased. He cautiously lifted his head to the peephole.
The girl was there, eyes without pupils somehow staring back at him through the hole.
He ducked down. Then the scratching started, tentative at first before growing more intense. Kneeling on the floor, he saw a shadow moving frantically on the other side of the door. He scurried back to the stairs and scrambled up toward the bedroom. He cowered under the covers. Mary shifted and stirred but didn’t wake. Eventually, he dozed off.
In the morning, he considered that perhaps he had dreamt it all. But on his way out to work, he noticed the scratches on the door and the splinters of wood on the porch. He called me that afternoon and asked what other options we had. He didn’t love the answer.
I don’t know what he told Mary to explain why I needed to spend the night. Maybe he didn’t even bother with an excuse. By the time I got there, she was on her way out the door with an overnight bag. She glowered at me as I passed on the walkway with my backpack full of gear. She and I hadn’t gotten along that well even in the best of times.
Inside, I posted some basic warding in the entryway, a few sigils in the closet where Mary likely wouldn’t notice. Simple but generally effective for keeping ghosts from crossing the threshold uninvited. After that, Keith and I sat in the living room, sipping whiskey and waiting for his spirit to arrive.
“Look, if I’m right, it’s essentially a homeless spirit now,” I explained. “Like a panhandler, if you will. If you ignore it long enough, it’ll eventually go away.”
“What if I don’t?”
Keith walked over to the bar and picked up a crystal decanter filled about a third of the way with a smoky, golden single malt.
“I haven’t been, you know, a good husband,” he said as he topped off both our glasses. “I know that. I’ve failed her. Not by choice, not maliciously. I didn’t cheat, I didn’t hurt her, but I don’t know... I’ve made mistakes.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” I replied, recognizing the emptiness of the platitude as I said it, but also not having anything more profound to offer.
After a moment, he said, “Mary wants me to see a professional.”
“I’m a professional,” I offered.
“One hundred percent not what she means, but thank you.”
Keith sat back and took a couple of long, slow sips. He looked toward the door, then up the stairs, then back at me. He leaned forward and spoke softly.
“We suffered a loss,” he said. “About six months ago. She was pregnant, and then she wasn’t. We were still in the first trimester, didn’t even know what we were having yet, but it was brutal. We had heard its heartbeat just a couple weeks earlier. She even had the audio file of it on her phone. Then we just... lost it.”
I am not unfamiliar with trauma. I’ve dealt with some crazy shit in my life and a hell of a lot more of it in my work. I’ve consoled husbands and wives whose spouses were possessed, parents whose children were terrorized by haunted dolls, cat-lovers whose pets were torn apart by hellhounds. But occasionally I do find myself wildly out of my depth.
Keith swirled a melting ice cube around in his glass. He closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath.
“We don’t talk about it,” he said, louder. “To anyone. To each other. The doctors said there was nothing we could have done differently, but you know, who believes that?”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said, because that seemed like the appropriate response.
He swigged down the last of his drink and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Of course I can,” he said. He sat up in his chair. “So, the thing is, the way I see it, I lost an abstraction. The idea of a child, you know? But Mary lost an actual living, human thing growing inside her.”
You could see the pain weighing on him, the way his shoulders perpetually sagged. It occurred to me that a malevolent spirit could have been drawn to emotion that deep, but again, healing that psychological wound was pretty far outside my lane.
“You’re allowed to grieve,” I offered.
“Yeah, well,” his voice trailed off as he looked up the stairs. “I had this dream a couple months ago, back when I was still sleeping, Mary and I were in this shopping center and I guess there’s, like, a food court. I go up to this sort of generic Chinese place--the kind they always have in malls where they’re handing out the free samples all the time--and I order a couple bowls of fried rice. I don’t know, Mary really likes rice. Not in real life, I mean, but in the dream. Which is weird in itself, but not the point. So the guy gives me a receipt, says he’ll bring it over when it’s ready. An hour goes by, we’re still sitting there, and Mary’s getting hangry. Finally, I’m like, fine, I’ll see what’s going on. I walk over to the counter, and the guy says, nobody ever placed any orders. I go to pull the receipt out of my pocket and it’s gone. So I’m standing there arguing with this kid behind the register, and Mary starts texting me, like, the baby’s losing his mind, get back here. And I hear this faint crying that gets louder and louder. I race back to the table and Mary’s sitting there alone, super pissed off. We get back in our car to head home, and I notice there’s an empty car seat in the back. Mary turns to me and says, where’s the baby? And... then I wake up.”
Keith stepped away from the stairs and gazed furtively at the front window. I peered down at my watch and saw it was well past midnight. Outside, lightning flashed, momentarily slashing through the darkness of the living room. As the thunder boomed, Keith’s head darted toward the door.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“The storm?” I said.
“No,” he said. “She’s knocking.”
He crept toward the door. I still couldn’t hear anything. I pulled myself up from the couch and walked over to him. He placed his hand on the door frame. The rain spattered against the window next to us. Wind whistled through dead leaves.
I leaned forward and peered into the peephole.
That’s when I saw her, exactly as he had described. A young girl, bleach white, a frilly dress, vacuous eyes. She tilted her head up, as if sensing me watching her. I ducked back down. My mind raced through the inventory of tools in my bag that might be of use.
Then I saw Keith’s hand inch toward the doorknob.
“You don’t want to open that door,” I said, grabbing his wrist.
He shook loose from my grip and shot me an irritated glance. “Come on. What would happen?”
“Any number of things. ...
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