Page 8 of The House on Haven Way

And my brother is dead? Has to be Nicky. The youngest.

I don’t make myself known to the monsters and humans that live in this town. I don’t think they know about me, either. Didn’t even know there were any freaks like monsters until I was a ghost, and then I realized that the plumber up the road here was a big, gray non-human guy, and over the years there have been all kinds of non-humans in the cemetery—not like zombies roaming around, like Orcs with flowers and vampires giving beautiful eulogies to the human friends that are leaving them behind.

Did I mention they buried me in the cemetery next to my house? I have a unique situation. I can go all the way down the road and back, between my physical body and my house, AKA prison.

Over the last seventy years, the place has been empty most of the time. For a long time after I died, I couldn’t seem to get the hang of this “not living but existing” thing, and I was just a mess, not really “here.” I was a vague presence, a painful feeling, confusion.

And then my brothers came back. With their wives. Their kids. They’d paid off the house with the life insurance policy I had when I left the Army, the one that made Ma the beneficiary.

I got to hear “Uncle Johnny” stories about what a swell guy I was. Watch my brother drink beers in my honor. See the girls they picked out. See my little namesake, Joe’s first kid. Named after me, can you believe it?

For a couple of weeks a year, I was happy, and being happy made me more connected to this world, to myself, too. And they left things behind. Radio, the kind with batteries. Transistor. Joe, the college boy, married a nice college girl. She left books. There were tools. That was my younger brother, Nicky, the one who became a carpenter. He was always wearing a toolbelt around the apartment, even when we were kids, and said he wanted to be the super when he grew up, which pissed Dad off no end.

Doesn’t matter now.

My nephews couldn’t keep this place in the family? They fucking sold it to some bank?

After all the time I spent taking care of it for ‘em, too...

Little shits.

And those “little shits” are old men now. In their sixties and seventies, maybe.

I’m frozen here in my twenties, finding fewer songs I know on the radio, re-reading the same books over and over, a couple new ones left behind every year or so to keep me going until I can steal some out of suitcases the next time.

Damn it, I’ve been a good ghost. An uncle and a brother you never see. A ghostly caretaker in the house where I was murdered! Do I go around banging doors and wailing in the night?

No.

Hell, I was the one who turned off the coffee pot Nicky left on one summer. Saved the whole place from burning down.

And what does that get me?

Some stranger living in my house, and a centaur and a troll or ogre or something moving in furniture I don’t even recognize.

Not. Fair.

And I’m not putting up with it.

I can move around now, pick things up, control things like the tiny little particles of energy in the air.

I slowly slide out of the closet in the back bedroom. I know most people can’t see me—my brothers and their families never managed it—but the second I saw the moving truck arrive and that centaur step out, I knew he’d spot me if I didn’t hide. Takes one to know one, as they say.

The truck left.

The woman is still sitting huddled over a little round table, head in her hands.

On her phone. I’ve seen those things shrink from something the size of a shoebox down to a wallet over the last couple of decades.

Or has it been longer?

Doesn’t matter. I’m out of hiding. I’m still the boss in this house, and I want it back. Maybe if I scare off every new buyer, one of my great-nephews or nieces will want it. Maybe one would even move in.

But maybe not. They got their money. They couldn’t agree on who would own it, couldn’t share it, so they just sold it when it was theirs for the taking. I doubt they’ll pull together to get enough money to buy it back.

More strangers will come.

I’ll just keep scaring them off.