Finally, without any further interruption …
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the frosted glass pane to let in a little more light, as well as the clean, cold but dry night air, which would keep the fogged over bathroom mirror clear.
As I was just starting to scrape the razor against my face in the bathroom, I heard the ghostly footsteps walking one way down the hall .. away from me. Then I heard the preternatural footfalls coming back the other way. Slowly, deliberately, the steps grew closer and closer until they paused right by the bathroom door.
I was just about to open the door and see what the heck was out there, when suddenly a sound came from just outside the bathroom window. With my attention abruptly drawn to this new sound, and I turned, rather startled, just in time to see a giant furry cat drop from the roof onto a nearby ledge. Leaping, she came in through the bathroom window and landed directly on the bathroom sink, and without an introduction of any kind, proceeded to insisted that I pet her.
Which I did. And after a minute of this, she became bored and leaped out of the window onto a ledge, and back on to the roof of the building. And there, she walked to the other end of the roof over the guest quarter’s hallway, and my observation of her doing this allowed me to understand the nature of the ghost that had haunted us all these days and, indeed, driven the Norwegians to alternative quarters.
The roof was metal. There were joints in the metal roof. As the cat pitter-pattered along the roof in it’s cat-like fashion, she would come to a certain point along the roof, in relation to these joints, and the joint would creak or ping. This was just like walking along a creaking floor, which will occasionally let out a sound depending on where you step, but much more regularly. Like footfalls. Like ghostly, preternatural, disembodied footfalls.
So, the ghost was a cat walking back and forth on the roof one or a couple of times a night almost every night. Looking for an opening. And finally, I gave her one. And then she …
Well, for the rest of the day, I couldn’t get that song out of my head.
The End.
The Footnotes are HERE
Interested in some Anthropologically Inspired fiction? Have a look at Sungudogo by Greg Laden.
Footnotes will be found at the end of the last post in the series.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
I just spent over half an hour reading a history lesson and putting off my physics homework. Touche Mr. Geologist, Touche.
This happened to me about 15 years ago, about two weeks before Halloween. A young doctor who lived two or three doors down the street from me was discovered one day in his living room in a pool of blood. Apparently he had fallen out of his loft sometime during the the night, and split his head open on a glass table. Since the loft had a three-foot-high wall around it, there was speculation that someone helped him over it, but there were no arrests.
12 months later, about four or five o’clock in the morning, BAM, BAM, BAM! Someone is frantically pounding on my front door. So I grab my hammer and run downstairs and open the door. There is noone there, so I go back to bed, a little bit uneasy.
A year later, again just before Halloween at about the same time, BAM, BAM, BAM! I woke right up, but I was thinking about the doctor this time, so I did not want to open the door. I went out on my balcony and looked down at the door and the general area. Again, there was noone there, and the street was silent.
In the day, I talked to my neighbor, and kinda casually asked him if he sorta remembered what day of the month the doctor had died. He didn’t remember that, but he remembered the smear of blood on the second floor. The smear of blood that could not have got there “Unless you think this guy could walk up the stairs and back down after he was dead. Haw, haw, haw.” I was thinking the doctor could move around quite a bit after he was dead, but I didn’t say anything.
I made a note of the date, but had forgot about it by the next year. I happened to be awake early though. BAM, BAM, BAM! I have a skylight in the hall outside my bedroom, with a big sweetgum tree overhanging it. It has these big, hard seed pods kinda like spiky organic ball-bearings, and they were being jolted loose by squirrels or a gust of wind. Or maybe by a restless spirit. I dunno.