Got Framed for Murder in a Dementia Village | Part 6

Part 5 | Part 7

The three other viewers in the movie theater started screaming in absolute fear during a conversation scene in the same movie that is played every day in Morlden Village’s Movie Theater. They all shrieked at the same time, when nothing really terrifying happened on the screen. There wasn’t even any cue in the film that it was fear or something-happens-now time. It was like everyone who ever gotten to see this black and white couple drama have a very instinctive and precise instruction on where to yell.

Honestly, even I felt this supernatural urge from within to scream. I buried it under my sense of confusion as I turned to my right.

Luke, my friendly ghost, was sitting next to me and stared with the same confused look. Next to him, Mike, the mute phantom we were trying to help was nodding at us. I don’t know how, but while I was dealing with other things, Luke had figured out that Mike’s dead had something to do with this place.

“What was that?” I asked Luke through the earphone that he had learned to tap to and talk directly to me.

“Not sure.”

Behind Luke, Mike pointed towards the screen.

A metallic, shaking sound came out of the projection booth behind us. It was a faint, but distinguishable noise under the old analog projector that was louder than the sound equipment of the place.

“What was that?” I questioned myself out loud.

“Not a priority,” Luke responded.

I turned back at him. He looked towards where Mike was pointing. It wasn’t the screen, he was indicating the other three film spectators.

They, as patients of this dementia village, were old people that seemed practically unable to move and perpetually had their minds empty. They weren’t watching the screen anymore, but their blank and void eyes were fixed on me. Their boney bodies and ashy skin were clung over the fluffy chairs as chameleons ready to attack a flying bug.

I was the bug.

The three elders swirled over the seats towards me.

“Let’s go!”

I stood up and ran through my two immaterial friends that understandably weren’t as scared of their wellbeing as I was.

My arthritis hunters reached the lane where I was seated. With four limbs, they crawled towards me as if they were possessed by spiders.

The dry soda-soaked rug didn’t offer me that great friction. I slipped and my cheek smashed the never-cleaned-before ground.

An octogenary with just half his teeth jumped with unnatural force against me. He punched me directly in my nose with his almost exposed knuckles. Crack!

I kicked him away from me and against his two helpers that also wanted to get a piece of me. The body delayed them enough to grant me a couple of seconds to get up.

In my way out, I ignored the caregiver who looked after the movie theater. A very useless one if I may add, since he had done nothing when three crazy bastards shrieked as if they got stabbed.

My legs sprinted across the whole dementia village. I dodged old people walking, disregarded caregivers who wanted to know what the fuck was going on and damaged the perfect grass that covered all the parks. Behind me, the three animal-driven elders kept chasing me as if I was the juiciest treat of all time.

“Luke,” I said in between breathes, “do something!”

“Like what?!”

“Anything!”

“On it.”

Luke ectoplasmic form materialized at my side. I continued running as he directly faced the three hound grandpas. My specter aid tried standing in the middle of their way and use his limited abilities to affect the material world.

They went through him as the light distortion he is.

Thankfully, even possessed by the movie-induced killing spree, their bodies were still old. Their joints bloated, their bones and muscles stopped responding, and their lungs demanded air before producing extra lactic acid. (Who would imagine I learned something from the old medical books I read as entertainment in the Bachman Asylum?)

My chasers dropped their speed.

I didn’t. I left them behind.

***

As soon as I reached my room in residence building E, because I never got my promised room in the staff quarters, I pushed the night table against the door. I leaned all my weight against it as I collapsed exhausted. I hoped that, in the lack of any keys to lock the entrance, at least Elisa’s gremlin strategy would work as well on cinema-brainwashed old people.

Luke and Michael overcome the obstacle by phasing through the closed window of my dorm.

I closed the shades and flooded my bedroom with darkness.

“What the hell was that?” Luke asked.

Mike, without producing any sound, as he usually does, lifted his shoulders and gave us a confused face.

“We now know what killed him,” I proclaimed. “He didn’t scream while watching the movie.”

Irony is a bitch.

“My best theory,” I continued. “He came to visit a relative and got caught in the middle of this shit.”

Mike, smiling, nodded effusively at us.

“See. Mystery solved,” I told Luke.

“So why is he still here?”

“That I don’t know, it’s someone else’s time to figure out the next step.”

Luke and I glared at our mute acquaintance expecting to get some clarity in our endeavor. He stood, or levitated a little, with a blank face. Suddenly, he started to mime.

He used his hands to illustrate a box in front of him.

“A box?”

Mike simulated two big circles over the box.

“I don’t think boxes have ears,” was Luke’s useless comment.

Mike continued her act while shaking his head. He pretended to grab something with her right hand and started moving it in circles. It was as if he was winding something manually.

“The projector!” Said Luke.

Mike pointed at him exuding happiness.

“We need to get to the projection booth,” I declared.

***

As soon as night arrived, Luke, Mike and I went back to the movie theatre. It was closed, no movie was being projected and, thankfully, also there wasn’t any caregiver I needed to get through. We entered.

We first reached the screen room. It was as dark, smelly and with gooey floors as always. It’s a creepy place, even at midday and with a movie running. Right now, it seemed like it had been abandoned for years, and dust had perpetually lived in the fluffy chairs and rug surfaces. My phone flashlight didn’t help to make this more welcoming.

Mike approached a seat in the middle of the auditorium. It looked darker and stiffer than the others. I touched it. It felt like something viscous had soaked the furry couch and dried on it.

“What’s that?” Luke asked.

“I believe it’s blood,” I replied containing my gag.

Mike dropped his sight.

“I think he was murdered here.”

Luke nodded at me and approached Mike.

I continued my way to the other side of the screening room, where the stairs to the projection booth were located. I climbed them.

The projection room door was a small wooden one, bright red and fixed into place. Not even my whole weight opened it. I ran from the other side of the minuscule hall and charged against the locked way, but it didn’t move. Hurt my arm, tough.

“Go inside,” I instructed Luke and Mike behind me.

They both made a face of disgust. Sucked it up. If they wanted to figure out what we needed, they would have to cooperate.

As soon as they arrived at the door, they both stopped.

“Just phase through it,” I commanded.

“I can’t,” Luke replied.

Mike turned back and shook his head, avoiding eye contact with me.

“What the fuck you mean you can’t? You’re a ghost.”

“There is another field preventing me from entering there.”

“Shit.”

This place is full of those and it’s starting to get under my nerve.

Luke glared at me fully aware of the shitty situation we were trapped in. Mike joined the staring contest by placing his finger on his lips, demanding silence.

Luke and I were already shut, but the signal made us more aware of our surroundings.

From inside the projection booth, a low and faint moaning came out.

“What the fuck is that?”

“I guess that’s a person. In pain and weak,” Luke pointed out.

Mike started to inspect thoroughly the door. Luke and I watched him intrigued. It was like he knew exactly what he was doing. His left hand approached the locked knob. Touched it carefully, almost lovingly. He turned it with his material-less limb.

Nothing happened. He just got back defeated.

Fuck!

“Is there a single door in this place that doesn’t have an anti-ghost field?” I asked too aloud for our own good.

“Not an important one.”

I recognized that voice. Paula, the bitchy caregiver that always hears and does Mrs. Rowen desires. He was in the screening room. I could hear two people walking towards the stairs leading our way.

“Shit.”

I ran down the hallway, away from the projection booth, and took cover inside the movie theater office. Its door was thankfully open. Luke and Mike followed me through it.

It was as you’ll expect a multiplex office. A desk, a couple of lockers and three chairs. The paint was in pristine condition, the dust was non-existent and it looked like it had never been used before, but was kept inside a magic bubble that froze the room into staying new (unlike the screening room.) On the other side, there was a second exit.

I repressed my amusement of the odd situations of the room, and turned to my phantom allies.

“What are they doing here?” Luke questioned.

“I assume Mrs. Rowen send them here after us.”

Beat.

“I don’t know why, okay?” I continued. “But they can’t find me in here. I’ll need your help with that.”

Luke and Mike gave me a thrilled-less glance. I smirked.

***

The plan was simple and almost worked. The spirits tied to this reality would go out and use their limited capacity to move material objects to distract Paula and the other person with her (surely Margaret.) On the other hand, I quietly and discretely sought for the projection booth keys and expected to be able to leave through the second exit door. We got to it.

In all the drawers, lockers and even in between the neatly organized paperwork on top of the desk weren’t any kind of keys at all.

I heard a squeaky chair from the screening room rocking violently, and the steps coming my way stopped. Paula mumbled something incomprehensible to Margaret.

Clank! Clank. Clank, clank.

A metallic, violent sound rumbled through the whole place and caused momentary damage to my eardrums.

“What was that?” Paula screamed from the other side of the door.

No answer.

I grabbed the closest chair.

Paula’s steps approached the door. I did the same on my side.

The knob turned slowly.

I swallowed as I approached.

The wooden plank that divided the hallway and my refugee opened an inch to the inside.

Creak…

I ran towards it. Slammed the door closed shut. Placed the chair under the knob and pierced the shiny floor with its back legs.

“Motherfucker!” Paula shrieked at the other side of the door.

I backed a little.

Blam!

A bullet pierced through the door.

I docked instinctively.

Paula started plumbing the entryway.

I raced to the other exit. Because God heard me for once, it was unlocked. And it even led directly to a stairway that promised to be the way out.

“Stop right there!”

Margaret’s weirdly imposing voice froze me in the bottom of the steps. She looked angry, decided and no-bullshit mode. It didn’t seem like her at all. The gun in her hands was the most out-of-character for her.

“How you did it?” Margaret demanded to know.

“Margaret, what you…?”

She interrupted my attempt at dialogue.

“How did you toss the popcorn machine from the second floor?”

The thumping on the office door metronomized our dialogue interaction.

“It’s hard to explain,” I started. “I don’t think you’ll believe me.”

“Try me.”

“Please, Margaret. Let me…”

Blam!

She shot towards the ceiling and pointed back at me again.

“Shit, okay,” I continued while getting straight. “I’ll tell you.”

“Everything’s all right?” Paula voice was barely audible. “I’m going there!”

Behind Margaret, Luke and Mike appeared.

“A ghost did it.”

The ghouls approached her.

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“Now!” I ordered to the phantoms whose existence was just doubted.

I didn’t know what was going to happen, but Luke and Mike seemed to have a plan. And they delivered. Each one of them poke one of their indexes inside Margarets ears. She dropped the gun and fell to the floor.

Before knowing what happened and Paula’s arrival, I escaped from the movie theater.

***

In the outside, in the middle of the cold night, Luke materialized to my side.

“What was that about?” I questioned him.

“Not exactly sure. But it turns out that being close to one another produces an electric charge.” Beat. “Where are we going?”

I kept running towards the other side of the Morlden Village.

“To the only place where they won’t think I’ll going. I need you to guide me.”

We reached the East side, where the staff quarters are located. All the buildings had the lights off.

I got closer through Mrs. Rowen’s office. My shinbone started to burn, not very intensely, but it couldn’t fail to its tradition of letting me know that I was close to that dark place.  Squatting, I crossed under the windows until I reached the main staff quarters entrance. I followed Luke inside.

No lights. Just a hallway with equal doors on both sides. A wooden floor with a couple of torn bits. The first door frame was also a bit chipped. It wouldn’t have been any noticeable at all if the rest of this dementia prison wasn’t so intact.

I desired to make Luke notice this, but I couldn’t allow myself to wake anyone up. I wasn’t strong enough.

“Luke,” I whispered.

My ghostly lead, who was not crawling through the floor as I was, turned around. His face was as neutral and expressionless as its torn-apart ectoplasmic flesh allows it. But, I have become good at reading him. He was letting me know that I was stupid.

In the small opening under the door to my left, light turned on. The little flicker that escaped from the room got blocked when something approached the entrance. Of course I had awakened a caregiver, those bastards were trained to be ready to whatever a cognitively held patient would ideate or need at the middle of the night.

I pressed myself against the wall next to the door, trying to merge with it. Luke stayed motionless in the middle of the corridor. I envied his invisibility so much at that time.

The door opened to the outside. Weird, but fortunate to me, it covered me almost completely.

My breathing paused itself. My muscles strained themselves to keep the position, even when it will later cause me cramps.

Luke stared directly at a caregiver who rapidly and poorly “made sure no one was there,” before going back to bed.

The door closed, leaving me without cover. My normal physical functions returned. Luke gave me a deadly glare. I smiled and, without producing any sound, gesticulated a single word for him to read in my lips: “sorry.”

Snoring emerged from the caregiver’s room. Luke turned and continued walking…? Well, floating to the end of the corridor. I followed him as quietly as possible.

In the end, there were three doors. The one perpendicular to the hallway was transparent and connected it with Mrs. Rowen’s office, which caused the slightest pinch on my shin I had ever experienced. And two dorm doors were facing each other.

Luke flew through the left one. After making sure nobody was watching me and that the floor wouldn’t crack or squeak as I stood up, I got inside that room.

Now, this was a lived bedroom. The bed sheets were uneven, the small table wasn’t completely parallel to the wall, and the chair even had a shirt over it. Why or how do the caregiver’s rooms look so normal when the rest of the place looks like an old Nordic village theme park where everything is taken care of with Disney-level intensity?

I took my phone out of my pocket. I made sure the brightness was as low as possible and my typing wouldn’t have sounded.

“Margaret’s.” I showed the written message to Luke.

Luke nodded and pointed to the bed. I nodded back.

I lay on the floor next to the bed, doing the slowest, most careful and quietest pushup ever. Turned my mobile’s flashlight on, pointing it towards the floor, hoping to keep the light to a minimum. When I pointed it under the bed, I found what I was looking for.

I extended my free arm and blindly searched for it. The first thing my fingers felt was a hard and smooth surface. I tried grabbing it. My digits then encounter a hairy and oozy thing connected. I snatched the witch totem from under Margaret’s bed.

Then, Luke and I left the staff quarters. The same process, just in reverse and without waking anyone this time.

Outside, under the moonlight that shone over one park, Mike joined us. He was trying to communicate something to us, but got distracted while looking at the totem. Honestly, both Luke and I were already too mesmerized with it to be paying any attention to Mike’s warning. Big mistake.

The witch totem was this weird, amorphic structure made of animal bones, possibly human hair and a sticky substance that, if my knowledge about witches is correct, would have been a mixture of body fluids. A small rodent’s lower jaw functioned as the base of a demonic polygon.

“You think it will work?”

“We can just hope,” I replied to my ghost ally.

I threw the handicraft into the ground. In its sturdiness, it bounced a little but didn’t suffer any damage.

Containing my disappointment, I stepped on it.

Crack.

That faint sound of little bones breaking snapped us out of our trance completely.

Mike started pointing desperately towards the west side of the park. Luke abided.

I kicked the destroyed totem as hard as I could. The pieces, still tied together, flew a couple of yards. The thing fell in the one-foot-deep false river of the park. Hole in one.

“You may want to take a look at this,” Luke hijacked my attention.

From the west, the three elders that had viewed the film with me earlier that day swirled at full speed towards us. Their clear empty eyes were still latched on me.

“Give me a break,” I said to leave out the negative energy building inside me because of my luck.

I fled to the East, again.

***

I intruded into the village’s unlocked and tidy shed, and took cover in a shadowy corner.

The three crazy octogenarians busted into the place. Their weak bodies against the doors made the whole place shook a little. They separated to look for me.

I walked slowly through the interior perimeter of the building, hoping the scarce light would cover me enough to get to the other side and leave.

The three hunters, even with arthritis and damaged discs, were acting like hounds. They walked in four limbs, their noses flinched constantly trying to find some smell and their eyes were completely devoid of humanity behind them. It was like being stalked by demonic therians.

I managed to avoid them. Just a couple of feet more to the exit. Accidentally, I pushed over some metallic shovel or something.

Clank!

The three elders’ senses turned to me.

I grabbed the rope that was just in front of me.

They leaped towards me like furious wolves.

I tied the rope to a column.

One got on top of me. I fell.

I knew her. She lived in my same residence building. It was Mrs. Welch.

Even with her new agility, she was still weak as an old woman who is used to having everything done for her. I pushed her chest to get her at arm’s length. Then, I snarled her neck with the lose end of the rope.

I pulled.

She got tossed away from me, having a hard time breathing.

As an old guy jumped at me. I rolled in the ground, managing to catch him inside the rope.

Mrs. Welch and my second attacker got pulled against the column.

The third attacker waited at some distance, evaluating the situation. That gave me time to make sure I was pulling the rope hard enough.

I ran towards the teethless remaining chaser. He assaulted me. I dodged it in the last second. Two uncut nails sharp as talons scratched my forehead. I screamed as I turned back. The cable pushed the bastard.

I slid under the rope directly tied to the pillar.

The crazy old man shrieked when the air of his lungs went out thanks to the cord on his diaphragm.

I yanked.

The lace tightened and the fucker joined his two companions in the building’s support.

I made sure to secure the end of the line before approaching.

Mrs. Welch and her two homicidal friends were uselessly still fighting, trying to free themselves from the thick industrial rope. (It’s surprising what you can find here.) They physically looked pretty much like themselves, or at least Mrs. Welch did, but none of them had any personality. They were creatures driven by pure bloodlust that kept on harming themselves when trying to get out.

“Mrs. Welch, can you hear me?” Was my communication attempt.

What once was Mrs. Welch grunted at me as she asphyxiated herself more with the cord around her neck. Another elder was almost collapsing his ribcage, and the third one surely had damaged some internal organ by now.

I backed a little. The first sunrays of the morning penetrated through the entrance. I placed my supernatural vibrating earphone in my ear.

“What’s up Luke?” I answered his call.

“You’ll want to go back to the theater.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

***

A couple of minutes later, I was back outside the movie theater which only movie turned cognitive damaged patients into crazy quadrupeds. Mike and Luke were by my side.

“So, you find a way to get in?” I asked them.

“Yes,” Margaret’s voice came from a bush nearby.

She revealed herself and walked towards me. I’m not sure if she can see the ghosts by my side, but if that was the case, she pretended to be uncapable of it very convincingly.

“Found the key,” Margaret continued.

“What…?”

“Was in Mrs. Rowen’s office,” she interrupted me. “I’m pretty sure it is the one for the projection booth.”

She handed me the key.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I just know something bad is happening here. Go, now. I’ll make sure to get Paula away.”

I held the keys in my hand as she walked away.

My two undead allies nodded at me. We three break into the fucking theater.

***

It was way too early still to have encountered a caregiver, so we managed to cross the screening auditorium and go up into the second story hallway without any obstacle. From outside of the projection booth, we could now hear clearly and louder the moaning again.

“Are you sure we want to do this?” I asked my companions with the last drop of sanity before doing something stupid and opening Pandora’s box.

Mike nodded firmly, but cautiously.

“Just do it,” Luke told me.

Shit. I approached the door. Got the keys into the locked doorknob and turned them. I pushed open the bright red wooden obstacle to discover the source of the moaning: A barely alive, malnourished guy was tied to a chair.

The man’s head was strapped into place, forcing him to keep staring out through the projection window into the screen. His eyes were forced open by some odd tweezers that were piercing his skull, which had caused his eyeballs to become some burned insect-like, popping-out protuberances. His nails were so long they twisted around themselves, having morphed from sharp spurs into frail and impractical keratin constructions. His mouth was hanging open, without muscles to keep it shut anymore. His almost transparent skin made him look like a fucking digestive system diagram in which you could see movement in real time. A thousand of inch-thick belts prohibited him from any movement, forcing him to stay in that seated position.

I almost vomited my last meal (from almost twenty hours ago.) Luke rejected the image and for once felt thankful regarding her simply torn-apart and barely recognizable ghost form. Mike’s reaction was the surprising one; he kept looking at the once-human creature with a mixture of cuteness and horror in equal parts. Then he proceeded to make some movement with his hands.

The monster tied up to the chair groaned to us.

From out of his mouth, as if that nature’s mistake was vomiting, ectoplasmic-looking spheres came flying out of his mouth. Those light blue balls danced a little in the air, before being shot to the East by some paranormal force.

“Shit,” was Luke’s reaction to that gross thing we just witnessed.

“Help… please,” was the barely audible words that came out of the immobilized man.

The ancient projector to the left of this old man started rumbling. A faint light came out of it and started becoming more intense with every twinkle.

I entered the small room. Mike and Luke followed me.

They tried to contact the poor trapped bastard, while I failed to knock down the hot machine that was rolling twenty-four frames per second. It was a very heavy piece of machinery that felt like welded to the ground below.

Whispers and mumblings came from outside, in the screening room. Old patients from this place were taken their seats on the auditorium chairs. Two voices were clearer and louder than the others, Paula and Margaret.

“Told you it was here,” Paula recriminated her companion.

“I swear I thought I heard him say he planned to Mrs. Rowen’s office,” Margaret defended herself.

I kept pushing my whole weight with the small momentum I could get in the miniscule projection booth against the noisy analog device. It wasn’t even rocking lightly. A bright light was shot from the projector, flew through the window and took the form of a giant couple in the screen.

“That’s the scene!” Luke commented in an almost rhetorical manner.

“I know! Can you help me with this?”

“He’s upstairs!” Paula yelled to Margaret from the main room.

“Stop,” Margaret indicated her. “I cannot keep doing this. And I can’t let you.

I stopped pushing the projector that was not going to move everywhere. Sought through the small booth for anything that could even help me to break the lenses. Mike was voguing with his hands in front of the imprisoned man attempting to tell him something in sign language.

From the screening room, the yells of Paula and Margaret became more intense. I took a small glimpse from the projection window.

They were fighting physically in front of the screen. Punches and kicks were marking the rhythm of their verbal and argumentative battle.

“I told our master since the beginning that you were weak,” was Paula’s attack to her friend.

“Empathy and selflessness aren’t weakness.”

“It is in this line of job.”

“I never signed for this.”

Then I recognized the moment in the scene of the film. There was a subtle monologue, so hidden that I can’t be sure it wasn’t a product of my imagination. It sounded like a prayer. In case it was, it was in a language I didn’t recognize. The voice was very similar to that of Mrs. Rowen.

“Luke, take the sound down!” I ordered my spirit friend.

“How?”

“Any way you can!”

Luke flew out of the projection booth. Mike kept moving his arms, but the man trapped in front of him wasn’t paying him any attention, his mouth started opening wide. Having failed to find anything to bust the projector, I did what I could to block the light: I placed myself in front of the scorching light.

I saw the screening room below. My body covered most of the image.

“He’s there,” Paula yelled at Margaret while pointing at me.

My back began to burn. It felt like my clothes were bursting into flames and merging with my skin.

Sound kept rolling.

Paula ran towards the stairs that led to where I was. Margaret snatched her hair.

All the elders downstairs yelled like possessed.

I contained my urge to scream.

The pain from Paula’s yanked hair made her shriek.

Fuck.

Out of every elder and Paula’s mouths, a small floating orb of translucent blue light elevated high. An invisible force pulled them towards me.

I got out of the way, letting the projector continue its job and giving my back a break. (Hope Carly has some ridiculously strong ointment.)

The mystic balls shoved themselves into the trapped man’s mouth. With the tiny amount of air his atrophied lungs were able to contain and expel, he yelled.

“What’s happening?” Luke asked the moment he came inside.

“I don’t fucking know,” I replied.

I walked towards the projection booth door and closed it.

“Why’s that for?”

“I’m pretty sure those irrational bastards are going to come for us.”

As if I had invoked it, the elders from the screening room and Paula, all without life behind their eyes and fueled purely on animalistic instinct, crawled up the stairs to our fort.

“Margaret, buy us some time,” I screamed to my new ally from the projection window.

“How?” She yelled back at me.

I let her figure that out on her own. I’m tired of having to do everything.

“Okay, how we stop this screaming fucker?” I asked Luke and Mike hoping at least anyone had an answer.

The only sound was the grunts from outside and the piercing high-pitch cry of the bastard.

“Here goes nothing,” I let my friends from beyond the grave know.

I punched the motherfucker directly in the face. A little blood spilled out. The yell was still coming out of his damaged throat.

“What was that?!” Luke finally intervened.

“Do you had any better ideas?”

Mike flapped his hands.

“Empathy,” Luke translated.

I didn’t stop to question how he knew what that meant. I got caught in the middle of an idea. I positioned myself to the right of the strapped man. I did my best to get my head and eyes to the same height as his, and stared at what he was forced to watch permanently.

There was something. I recognized it. In the reflection of the glass window of the projection room, I distinguished Mrs. Rowen staring directly at us (well, mainly at the trapped guy), while holding a knife and smiling in a threatful way.

“Fuck,” got out of me as a powerful blow knocked on the door.

I crawled on the floor and let my weight fall against the red wood, hoping it would be enough to keep a couple of possessed octogenarians outside.

“In the projection window,” I informed my allies trapped in the living’s world. “There is a reflection of Mrs. Rowen.”

Mike stared at me with his brains spinning a thousand revolutions per second.

“He has to watch that all the time,” Luke continued my idea.

“Probably she was the one who got him here.”

“He’s scared,” Luke concluded.

A blasting force pushed the door behind me. My burnt back threw a throbbing pain through all my nerves.

Mike approached the poor bastard.

I kept holding the door.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it now!” I indicated both ghosts.

Mike lifted his index finger and placed it over the immobilized man’s lips, signaling silence.

His deteriorated, and surprisingly still-working, vocal cords kept the shriek coming out.

Luke approached, touched the guy’s shoulder and talked to him in a very peaceful voice that I don’t know where he got it from.

“Calm down. She has no longer control over you.”

The protuberances that once were eyes lowered just enough to focus on Mike in front of him.

Mike smirked at him with a ridiculously empathetic smile for the situation.

“She no longer has control over me,” the tied guy whispered in a way I could only heard half his words.

He gaged and all the spheres of light were expelled from him. They floated a little in front of us, before going through the door I was holding shut.

The blowing from the other side stopped. No more pushing nor yanking. Confused elders’ voice was the only thing on the other side.

The projector cranked a little before its light exploded in an energy overcharge. It stopped rolling.

The poor motherfucker that had been strapped to the chair for decades (my educated guess,) disintegrated into dust like if Thanos had snapped his fingers. On his place, just an ectoplasmic body remained.

The newly born ghost finally stood up and stretched his muscle-less legs. He grabbed Mike’s immaterial hand and shook it a little. He gave at look at me, still suffering on the floor, and nodded in a thankful manner. Then he turned towards Luke and did the same. My old friend and I nodded at him in return.

The freshly out of his body specter looked back at Mike, and signed as he whispered the meaning.

“Thank you, son. Let’s go.”

Our mute ghost friend that we named Mike and the surprisingly sane-enough-for-communication trapped bastard disappeared peacefully into light.

Luke and I kept staring at each other.

“How’s your back?”

“I’d like to be death now,” I replied to him still on the floor.

“Don’t be such a pussy.”

I smiled at my supernatural sidekick.

In between the incoherent mumbles of the elders outside, I noticed someone knocking on the door. It was too strong to have been one of them.

“Are you still in there?” Margaret’s voice came from the other side.

I opened the door for her while I caressed my hurt back.

“Kind of…”

Her mouth and eyes wide signaled trouble. It was serious.

“Paula didn’t wake up.”

“What you mean? All the blue balls were released,” Luke pointed out.

Still don’t know if Margaret recognized my undead pal. I’m inclined to believe she doesn’t.

“Her soul past pass her body and went out,” Margaret clarified.

“So those things don’t go back to their bodies?” I asked her.

“The others did. But she knows how to control her body-free soul.”

“Why does she know how to do that?” Luke questioned.

“Where can a missing soul go?” Was my attempt at a more sensible interrogation.

Margaret was about to answer when a sound from the outside interrupted our dialogue. A deep, unhinged roar rumbled our hideout.

“Fuck.”