Benjamin rolled over, closed his eyesagainand ignored the gay ghost standing by his bed. It wasn’t that he was homophobic or anything. He accepted that he might’ve been in a little bit of denial about himself, too. He just preferred straight people to the gay ones and that included ghosts.
The June night was warm and muggy, which didn’t help, either. He could feel the ghost’s stare on the back of his neck, and he couldswearhe felt that stare on his ass too. He‘d stopped sleeping in the nude two nights after the ghost had appeared for the first time. That was over a month ago.
Sighing, Ben threw the blanket off and turned around. It took him a while to locate the subject doing the nightly ass-staring, but he finally did see a mist of sorts suspended in the air nearby.
“What?” he asked, for the thousandth time. “Why me? Why here? What do you want?”
The mist hovered for a moment before it moved a few inches toward the bedroom door and vanished.
What now? Did it want him to follow? It hadn’t done that before, and he’d asked all of these questions quite a few times.
Ben huffed with annoyance and got up, walking to the door and out into the little hallway leading to the living room and kitchen.
He’d seen plenty of episodes ofGhost AdventuresandGhost Hunters, because his former roommate Jocelyn had been super into that stuff. Technically, he knew what he was supposed to do,ifhe believed in such things in the first place.
But what if there are other spirits here and not just the, so far, slightly too friendly one?He shivered a little and glanced over his shoulder.Or one of those demonic powers that scratches people?He couldn’t open himself up for that sort of thing!
The night light in the kitchen flickered.
“Fine.Fine.”Ben suppressed a shiver and walked toward the light as it calmed again.
The laptop he’d left on his tiny table caught his eye. Did it want him to communicate? Do research?
He’d owned his house for four years now, but the spirit had only come in five weeks ago. There had to be a reason for that. Besides, the little he could tell from the mist when it was at its strongest, was that the guy wore contemporary clothing.
Sighing—he’d done a lot of that lately—Ben pulled out a chair and opened the laptop. He’d left it snoozing with almost-full battery an hour ago, and it was just about empty now.What the hell?
“At least I know now where all that energy comes from,” Ben said, and the thought of talking to thin air didn’t even faze him.Time to do something about it.
He struggled to get the cord from the floor without having to get off his seat, and finally hooked the laptop in with what seemed like seconds to spare before the battery gave out.
“Now, I’m not smart enough for this shit, so you need to help me with it,” Ben explained. The lights flickered in answer. “You’re newly dead, I think, and something connects you to my house. Am I right so far?”
Flicker, then another.
“Okay. So, let’s see if I can find out who you are.” Ben opened his browser, and a search engine popped up. After hesitating for a moment, he began a search for deaths in his hometown in the last two months. Nothing showed up. “Not local, then? But something drew you here so there has to be a connection.”
Another search, slightly wider, brought a couple of possible guys between ages eighteen and thirty-five, but they both were family men, it seemed, and his haunter was gay, no doubt about it. He wasn’t sure how he knew—the ass-staring aside—but he just did.
“Gimme a hint here. Age first. Under twenty? Twenty to twenty-five?” A blink to the latter. Ah-ha! “You died around here? No? Well, the fine state of Kentucky anyway?” The light flickered once for Kentucky, and Ben revised the search again.
A few possible options, none of which seemed right, but then finally a hit he thought was right.
“Holy shit.” He wished he could see the mist, but it looked as if all the ghost’s energy went toward using the lights to communicate. “‘Unidentified male body found at roadside, near Saxton, Kentucky. Possible hit and run, with no witnesses.’”
The light went crazy, flickering like moth’s wings, and suddenly it wasn’t just a ghost Ben was dealing with, it was a mystery.
***
He tried to communicate more, figure out more, but something seemed to prevent the ghost from naming itself no matter what Ben did to help it, and the information he found online was scarce. The body was his ghost’s, but nobody seemed to know who he was.
The other problem seemed to be with the ghost’s limited energy. Some nights, they’d barely get started before it would abruptly disappear, and on the productive nights, the results weren’t that good either, if Ben was honest.
So when he finally decided to try a new approach, he could only hope the spirit was still strong enough to help him out.
He stood in the middle of his bedroom and cleared his throat before speaking to the same fucking thin air he had been talking to for several nights in a row
“Okay, you must be here somewhere, and if you can, help me out. I’m going to walk through all the rooms, I have all the lights on, and if you see something that might help us with this, give me a sign.”
