Dissections Horror E-Zine

Artwork: Slapping the Pavement by Will Jacques

What Ghosts Are Before
Graeme Wend-Walker

Flagstaff Sprocket was not having a good day.

Would you look at that, he said straight at what he did not want to see.

A bee lit upon his celery, but his eye had gone over the salted brim and fallen into his living room. Out beyond it a mango, ripe and also unseen, slipped quietly over its own briny rim. His eye, both of them, all of his eyes landed between these seas of undifferentiated scale, fixed on this rectangle of firm terror where it sat cocked nonchalantly on its plastic stand as if the world weren’t now at risk of ending.

His living room.

His … living … room.

He flicked the bee. He rose like a sun. He scudded on his flops. He was done.

He checked out of the hotel, luminous and raging in seersucker, and returned home in the upright position. Between call-button jabs and demands for the promised Wi-Fi, he watched again with a blossoming seethe as the room flashed on and off like a closing down sale at a whorehouse. But these downloads were ghosts of a predicament, and as unsettling as they were to watch they were also a false comfort, an infuriatingly uneventful mask over an unspeakable possibility. Denied a view into his house as it was, his mind scoured instead the dark corners of his fear.

It had been wise, he reminded himself, very obviously and most certainly wise, his strategy to disguise the looming vacancy, and his fist made the armrest understand this. Not just wise, but mature and responsible. Feeling in a very sensitive way, deep down in his parts, all the tremorous weakness that would certainly prevail in the absence of his tender care, he had devised and implemented a program that would maximate defensive attributes and exceptionalize protective flexions. These words were in no way from brochures; the order of them was his alone, and so too the plan he evolved from them. All of it was his. And the plan was brilliant. He would guard this vessel from afar without resort merely to bolts and locks. He would, of course, lock everything up. Extra deadbolts went without saying. But he would not rely on them, those perennial invitations to chastity-breaching scoundrels! No, his solution was as elegant in its simplicity as it was grounded in the incontrovertible: a habitation could not be made vulnerable by its emptiness if its emptiness were not discoverable. He would disguise all the emptiness. It was his master dream.

Lighting was how you did it. Smart bulbs, electric eyes and routers, and a whispering between them. It came together in stages. Chairs, first, were to be ascended, bulbs replaced and brackets affixed. Cameras pointed and software installed, all of it responsive to his remote command. Second came the programming that held it all together, a schedule by which things would switch themselves on; triggers set to process whatever seemed off. Motion over here means a light comes on there, then something starts recording and a notification is sent. Very tidy. Very efficient, if planned intelligently, and certain to camouflage the vacancy within.

The scheduling amounted, in effect, to the duplication of his existence in a ghost-self’s life: his house was to appear from the outside precisely as if he were home. The entering of a room became something to be noted, a box checked in a quadrille pad and copied to a doc, and a pattern, once identified, mapped into an app. And then, out of these procedures came an unexpected third stage as the data began to reveal his routines. He discovered he almost always made coffee between 7:00 and 7:05 a.m. (he’d have guessed five minutes later) and he almost always used the bathroom between 7:15 and 7:20. It was mostly unconscious at first, a tendency to do today what the spreadsheet said he had done before, but as his awareness of the patterns grew, he began with intent to bend himself to them, and with mounting precision he commenced to strip all novelty from his days much as a hunter steps into his quarry’s footprints in the snow.

Three days before the onset of his self-willed exile he activated the program of alternating incandescences, and he gave himself over to it. (Though not “incandescences” as such, he corrected himself. They are LEDs. “Electroluminescences,” he pronounced, aloud, ashamed and victorious.) If anyone were to be watching on any given day – from across the street, for instance – they would be certain to conclude that at 7:15 pm he was in the bathroom taking a shower, and they’d think so whether it were the case or not. (For the next several days, it would be.) They’d see him, or so they’d think, in his study for the following one-point-five hours, as would indeed be the case until the voyage intervened; and on every second day, exercising for forty-five minutes in the spare room at the back of the house. (Muscles needing a rest day to repent for their weakness.) This observer would picture him preparing dinner when the kitchen glowed at nine-fifteen (or ten if it were a weights day); and at ten-past-midnight they would suppose him turning in for the night – and then getting up to use the bathroom every three hours thereafter. This was a creative addition to the program of which he was quietly proud. Sprocket didn’t like that his voyeur might think he had prostate issues, because he did not have prostate issues, but he was willing to pretend to have them if it would keep his house secure, as this clever fiction undoubtedly would. One actual upside to the trip commencing was that he’d no longer wake twice a night just because the house said that he was waking. But it was a small sacrifice to make for the sake of vigilance, and every time he woke up, he reminded himself that it was a reminder to be awake.

Cameras would confirm, whenever he chose, the status of every component. Their sensors would both alert him to and record any unusual motion. Which meant, of course, any motion at all. He even set a few cameras to keep watch over the others, but it turned out that their infrared emissions registered as movement, and when one was activated, it tripped the next, and he found himself flooded with security notifications as the system anxiously spasmed. He found other things to point them at instead: the plastic fern, the oven. The picture turned to the wall. One cannot predict everything. Anticipate the unexpected.

About halfway through he noticed a pod of dolphins following them. He’d looked up to wipe spray from his eye and through a sudden bright liquor of wet sunlight tendons rippled silver under azure skin, but it was just the salt, only dolphins, and he dipped his finger in seltzer to dab it out. Someone said they’d been there the whole time, but this seemed unlikely. He was considerably more observant than most people. How many others on the catamaran, after all, could say they had a live feed from twenty-seven home security cameras on their telephone.

And so, what he’d seen over his tiny and ineffective paper umbrella the night they stopped at Heavenly Paradise Island had distressed. One of the smart bulbs – the living room one which, being most prominent when viewed from outside, was his strongest defense – had lost – the thought crawled up his face – its Wi-Fi connection and gone into pairing mode. He realized with a terrible, sinking despair that without a connection the eager, moronic flashing couldn’t be shut off. Dumbfounded, he’d watched from the silk-cushioned egg chair on his oceanfront balcony as his well-made plans collapsed into demented ruin. He may as well, he realized, have put a giant neon sign on his roof saying, “Dear robbers: There’s no one home at all, come take everything.” No one, obviously, would put up with a light flashing in their house like that if they were there to do something about it.

He hesitated now and stepped off the sofa, the replacement bulb in his hand. It was a good thing nothing had been taken. Perhaps the robber had just happened to have something else going on during the thirty-five hours it had taken him to get home. Seventeen of that had been daytime, of course, when the flashing wouldn’t have been noticed. But for eighteen hours he’d been completely exposed. Two whole nights that came to, and part of a third. Who knows what could have happened if he hadn’t aborted his revelry to come rein in the chaos.

Speaking of which (he said in his mind but possibly also in his face, as it was getting that way), and he went to check on his handgun, just to make sure it was still there, and I mean why wouldn’t it be, nothing else was taken (he said, almost certainly aloud), but still, it’s best practice to check from time to time. He wasn’t a gun person; there was something distasteful about them, as if they were something other people did, people who were not him; but still, he had this one, and there it was. And he couldn’t help feeling, as he looked to where it sat balanced in his palm, that there was something about it that said “regularity,” and “certainty,” and “SW1911.” He’d always kept the ammunition for it in a separate drawer. But it didn’t make much sense – did it? – not to have it all assembled. It was unruly. Only order can stand against chaos, and there was far too much chaos as it was.

From where he stood, which was on the sofa again with the bulb held over his head, the entire situation presented itself with direful clarity. Just think what could have gone wrong. He could have been robbed, certainly. But what if the robber had assumed there was no one at home, and there had in fact been someone at home? Unlikely, of course, what with all the flashing. But not inconceivable. The robber might have come in – through the spare room window at the back of the house, for example – only to have gotten himself shot by the owner who was there after all. It would be a tragedy were something like that to happen. Absolutely regrettable. It wouldn’t be the owner’s fault, of course. But still.

Gideon Unguish was not having a good day. He’d hardly slept the last two nights, what with the light from across the street cutting through the slats and flashing on his face where the blinds fell short. He’d tried taping the bottom to the windowsill, but the tension had eventually pulled the headrail out of the drywall and he’d woken to bed gravel and utter defenselessness. After half a night foxholed on the floor and a morning getting the blinds back up, he felt entirely sliced and shattered. And the blackout curtains he’d ordered at four a.m. wouldn’t arrive for another three days. The situation was pure chaos.

There mustn’t be anyone home, he realized. No one would put up with a light flashing in their house like that if they were there to do something about it. The first night he’d considered knocking, but it was very late when he’d thought to do it and past risking confrontation, and too cold out anyway, really, which was also unfair, and the second night he’d thought the duct tape would do it. But there mustn’t be anyone home, because no one would put up with that.

The absurdity of it, it occurred to him as he taped up the wet bathroom’s plastic curtain over the gap, was that all the flashing made it so obvious no one was home that they may as well have put a giant neon sign on their roof saying “Robbers Welcome.” Not that he’d want for anyone to have their house broken into. Which would be awful, of course. But still. If this idiot did end up with something missing – it wouldn’t have to be anything expensive, just something so he would notice – then that would be on him, wouldn’t it. It might teach him a lesson about social responsibility. Of course, if it did turn out that, somehow, there actually was someone home – Well, it would be the peak of recklessness to sit about in a house with a burglar-attracting light flashing in the window. You’d have to expect a burglar would come armed. With a revolver, for instance. And whose fault would that be.

Sprocket in falling grey canyons of childhood awoke dreaming he’d gone about it all wrong – that the immaculate regularity of his program had only made him predictable. Unguish woke up to a curtain rod finial in the eye.

Around three in the morning, a sliver of moonlight picked out through trees two things. One was the engraved edges of “SW1911” where it lay in a lap in a chair in the spare room at the back of a house while a different kind of light, this one powered by coal burning two hundred and seventy-three miles away, flashed along its wall. The other was the cold metal of a pry bar poised outside a window on the wall’s other side.

Brunticker Wood was not having a good night. Vexed long and hard by the boxanimals’ incivilities, the tutelary spirit between the northward quartz and the trees named Halfgrim and Spolt had decided that this really was too much. There was never a problem with the rest of them. The ones that went on four, for instance, went parallel to ley lines under a gibbous Moon, but the stars never made much of a fuss if they didn’t; everyone just got on with their business, which was as much as anyone could ask. But the ones that went on two had put their silly fat box up without any thought at all for what it’d do to the magnetic fields, and the whole thing had played havoc with the dead, whose spirits had gone from tumbling through dirt to boiling and spitting up the roots of the trees, which of course messed with their frequencies and threw out everyone’s navigation. So now even the long ones that went on none were becoming disoriented and coiling up on the oomph nodes to reset their vibes. And naturally the spirits on either side were complaining about all the psychic reverberations. The last few nights had just become ridiculous, what with the box now pulsing at the same rate as the Moon. It was just chaos.

She wasn’t, she’d always said to herself, a dirt steward to hurt a being, but if the dead, who’d come right up through the trees and were spoiling for some gristle, happened to take it upon themselves to nudge those two over there right now, and something were to come of it –

Well, who’s fault would that be.

#

Oh, for fuck’s sake, said the sky mango.

Home



	Artwork: Slapping the Pavement by Will Jacques What Ghosts Are Before Graeme Wend-Walker Flagstaff Sprocket was not having a good day. Would you look at that, he said straight at what he did not want to see. A bee lit upon his celery, but his eye had gone over the salted brim and fallen into his living room. Out beyond it a mango, ripe and also unseen, slipped quietly over its own briny rim. His eye, both of them, all of his eyes landed between these seas of undifferentiated scale, fixed on this rectangle of firm terror where it sat cocked nonchalantly on its plastic stand as if the world weren’t now at risk of ending. His living room. His … living … room. He flicked the bee. He rose like a sun. He scudded on his flops. He was done. He checked out of the hotel, luminous and raging in seersucker, and returned home in the upright position. Between call-button jabs and demands for the promised Wi-Fi, he watched again with a blossoming seethe as the room flashed on and off like a closing down sale at a whorehouse. But these downloads were ghosts of a predicament, and as unsettling as they were to watch they were also a false comfort, an infuriatingly uneventful mask over an unspeakable possibility. Denied a view into his house as it was, his mind scoured instead the dark corners of his fear. It had been wise, he reminded himself, very obviously and most certainly wise, his strategy to disguise the looming vacancy, and his fist made the armrest understand this. Not just wise, but mature and responsible. Feeling in a very sensitive way, deep down in his parts, all the tremorous weakness that would certainly prevail in the absence of his tender care, he had devised and implemented a program that would maximate defensive attributes and exceptionalize protective flexions. These words were in no way from brochures; the order of them was his alone, and so too the plan he evolved from them. All of it was his. And the plan was brilliant. He would guard this vessel from afar without resort merely to bolts and locks. He would, of course, lock everything up. Extra deadbolts went without saying. But he would not rely on them, those perennial invitations to chastity-breaching scoundrels! No, his solution was as elegant in its simplicity as it was grounded in the incontrovertible: a habitation could not be made vulnerable by its emptiness if its emptiness were not discoverable. He would disguise all the emptiness. It was his master dream. Lighting was how you did it. Smart bulbs, electric eyes and routers, and a whispering between them. It came together in stages. Chairs, first, were to be ascended, bulbs replaced and brackets affixed. Cameras pointed and software installed, all of it responsive to his remote command. Second came the programming that held it all together, a schedule by which things would switch themselves on; triggers set to process whatever seemed off. Motion over here means a light comes on there, then something starts recording and a notification is sent. Very tidy. Very efficient, if planned intelligently, and certain to camouflage the vacancy within. The scheduling amounted, in effect, to the duplication of his existence in a ghost-self’s life: his house was to appear from the outside precisely as if he were home. The entering of a room became something to be noted, a box checked in a quadrille pad and copied to a doc, and a pattern, once identified, mapped into an app. And then, out of these procedures came an unexpected third stage as the data began to reveal his routines. He discovered he almost always made coffee between 7:00 and 7:05 a.m. (he’d have guessed five minutes later) and he almost always used the bathroom between 7:15 and 7:20. It was mostly unconscious at first, a tendency to do today what the spreadsheet said he had done before, but as his awareness of the patterns grew, he began with intent to bend himself to them, and with mounting precision he commenced to strip all novelty from his days much as a hunter steps into his quarry’s footprints in the snow. Three days before the onset of his self-willed exile he activated the program of alternating incandescences, and he gave himself over to it. (Though not “incandescences” as such, he corrected himself. They are LEDs. “Electroluminescences,” he pronounced, aloud, ashamed and victorious.) If anyone were to be watching on any given day – from across the street, for instance – they would be certain to conclude that at 7:15 pm he was in the bathroom taking a shower, and they’d think so whether it were the case or not. (For the next several days, it would be.) They’d see him, or so they’d think, in his study for the following one-point-five hours, as would indeed be the case until the voyage intervened; and on every second day, exercising for forty-five minutes in the spare room at the back of the house. (Muscles needing a rest day to repent for their weakness.) This observer would picture him preparing dinner when the kitchen glowed at nine-fifteen (or ten if it were a weights day); and at ten-past-midnight they would suppose him turning in for the night – and then getting up to use the bathroom every three hours thereafter. This was a creative addition to the program of which he was quietly proud. Sprocket didn’t like that his voyeur might think he had prostate issues, because he did not have prostate issues, but he was willing to pretend to have them if it would keep his house secure, as this clever fiction undoubtedly would. One actual upside to the trip commencing was that he’d no longer wake twice a night just because the house said that he was waking. But it was a small sacrifice to make for the sake of vigilance, and every time he woke up, he reminded himself that it was a reminder to be awake. Cameras would confirm, whenever he chose, the status of every component. Their sensors would both alert him to and record any unusual motion. Which meant, of course, any motion at all. He even set a few cameras to keep watch over the others, but it turned out that their infrared emissions registered as movement, and when one was activated, it tripped the next, and he found himself flooded with security notifications as the system anxiously spasmed. He found other things to point them at instead: the plastic fern, the oven. The picture turned to the wall. One cannot predict everything. Anticipate the unexpected. About halfway through he noticed a pod of dolphins following them. He’d looked up to wipe spray from his eye and through a sudden bright liquor of wet sunlight tendons rippled silver under azure skin, but it was just the salt, only dolphins, and he dipped his finger in seltzer to dab it out. Someone said they’d been there the whole time, but this seemed unlikely. He was considerably more observant than most people. How many others on the catamaran, after all, could say they had a live feed from twenty-seven home security cameras on their telephone. And so, what he’d seen over his tiny and ineffective paper umbrella the night they stopped at Heavenly Paradise Island had distressed. One of the smart bulbs – the living room one which, being most prominent when viewed from outside, was his strongest defense – had lost – the thought crawled up his face – its Wi-Fi connection and gone into pairing mode. He realized with a terrible, sinking despair that without a connection the eager, moronic flashing couldn’t be shut off. Dumbfounded, he’d watched from the silk-cushioned egg chair on his oceanfront balcony as his well-made plans collapsed into demented ruin. He may as well, he realized, have put a giant neon sign on his roof saying, “Dear robbers: There’s no one home at all, come take everything.” No one, obviously, would put up with a light flashing in their house like that if they were there to do something about it. He hesitated now and stepped off the sofa, the replacement bulb in his hand. It was a good thing nothing had been taken. Perhaps the robber had just happened to have something else going on during the thirty-five hours it had taken him to get home. Seventeen of that had been daytime, of course, when the flashing wouldn’t have been noticed. But for eighteen hours he’d been completely exposed. Two whole nights that came to, and part of a third. Who knows what could have happened if he hadn’t aborted his revelry to come rein in the chaos. Speaking of which (he said in his mind but possibly also in his face, as it was getting that way), and he went to check on his handgun, just to make sure it was still there, and I mean why wouldn’t it be, nothing else was taken (he said, almost certainly aloud), but still, it’s best practice to check from time to time. He wasn’t a gun person; there was something distasteful about them, as if they were something other people did, people who were not him; but still, he had this one, and there it was. And he couldn’t help feeling, as he looked to where it sat balanced in his palm, that there was something about it that said “regularity,” and “certainty,” and “SW1911.” He’d always kept the ammunition for it in a separate drawer. But it didn’t make much sense – did it? – not to have it all assembled. It was unruly. Only order can stand against chaos, and there was far too much chaos as it was. From where he stood, which was on the sofa again with the bulb held over his head, the entire situation presented itself with direful clarity. Just think what could have gone wrong. He could have been robbed, certainly. But what if the robber had assumed there was no one at home, and there had in fact been someone at home? Unlikely, of course, what with all the flashing. But not inconceivable. The robber might have come in – through the spare room window at the back of the house, for example – only to have gotten himself shot by the owner who was there after all. It would be a tragedy were something like that to happen. Absolutely regrettable. It wouldn’t be the owner’s fault, of course. But still. # Gideon Unguish was not having a good day. He’d hardly slept the last two nights, what with the light from across the street cutting through the slats and flashing on his face where the blinds fell short. He’d tried taping the bottom to the windowsill, but the tension had eventually pulled the headrail out of the drywall and he’d woken to bed gravel and utter defenselessness. After half a night foxholed on the floor and a morning getting the blinds back up, he felt entirely sliced and shattered. And the blackout curtains he’d ordered at four a.m. wouldn’t arrive for another three days. The situation was pure chaos. There mustn’t be anyone home, he realized. No one would put up with a light flashing in their house like that if they were there to do something about it. The first night he’d considered knocking, but it was very late when he’d thought to do it and past risking confrontation, and too cold out anyway, really, which was also unfair, and the second night he’d thought the duct tape would do it. But there mustn’t be anyone home, because no one would put up with that. The absurdity of it, it occurred to him as he taped up the wet bathroom’s plastic curtain over the gap, was that all the flashing made it so obvious no one was home that they may as well have put a giant neon sign on their roof saying “Robbers Welcome.” Not that he’d want for anyone to have their house broken into. Which would be awful, of course. But still. If this idiot did end up with something missing – it wouldn’t have to be anything expensive, just something so he would notice – then that would be on him, wouldn’t it. It might teach him a lesson about social responsibility. Of course, if it did turn out that, somehow, there actually was someone home – Well, it would be the peak of recklessness to sit about in a house with a burglar-attracting light flashing in the window. You’d have to expect a burglar would come armed. With a revolver, for instance. And whose fault would that be. # Sprocket in falling grey canyons of childhood awoke dreaming he’d gone about it all wrong – that the immaculate regularity of his program had only made him predictable. Unguish woke up to a curtain rod finial in the eye. # Around three in the morning, a sliver of moonlight picked out through trees two things. One was the engraved edges of “SW1911” where it lay in a lap in a chair in the spare room at the back of a house while a different kind of light, this one powered by coal burning two hundred and seventy-three miles away, flashed along its wall. The other was the cold metal of a pry bar poised outside a window on the wall’s other side. # Brunticker Wood was not having a good night. Vexed long and hard by the boxanimals’ incivilities, the tutelary spirit between the northward quartz and the trees named Halfgrim and Spolt had decided that this really was too much. There was never a problem with the rest of them. The ones that went on four, for instance, went parallel to ley lines under a gibbous Moon, but the stars never made much of a fuss if they didn’t; everyone just got on with their business, which was as much as anyone could ask. But the ones that went on two had put their silly fat box up without any thought at all for what it’d do to the magnetic fields, and the whole thing had played havoc with the dead, whose spirits had gone from tumbling through dirt to boiling and spitting up the roots of the trees, which of course messed with their frequencies and threw out everyone’s navigation. So now even the long ones that went on none were becoming disoriented and coiling up on the oomph nodes to reset their vibes. And naturally the spirits on either side were complaining about all the psychic reverberations. The last few nights had just become ridiculous, what with the box now pulsing at the same rate as the Moon. It was just chaos. She wasn’t, she’d always said to herself, a dirt steward to hurt a being, but if the dead, who’d come right up through the trees and were spoiling for some gristle, happened to take it upon themselves to nudge those two over there right now, and something were to come of it – Well, who’s fault would that be. # Oh, for fuck’s sake, said the sky mango. Home Contents
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