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Shut up, Axel. You’re babbling.
I took a deep breath. If I was going to have any hope of getting out of here without further weirdness, I needed to know if I was free to go, or if I was the shy ghost’s prisoner. “We should probably start at the beginning, huh? My name is Axel. What’s yours?”
“Aaaack…suuuuul.” The voice that came out was deep and distorted. It sounded like someone gargling rocks was saying my name. In any other circumstance, that would’ve freaked me the hell out. That night, however, was an eleven out of ten on the what the fuck scale already, so maybe it wasn’t all that odd that I found it kind of cute, was it?
“Right,” I said slowly. “That’smyname. What can I call you?”
Silence. I thought maybe I’d scared him away by speaking to him directly until some leaves in front of me started to move.
I leaned over the movement, realizing an unseen hand was drawing something in the dirt. When I saw what he’d drawn, I chuckled. “Heh. Nice. Sixty-nine’s my favorite number.” I frowned and stared at the number again. “Wait. Is that like your age or like…What am I looking at?”
“Ack-sul,” the voice repeated, and there was a tap in the dirt.
“Sixty-Nine isn’t a name. It’s a number. A name is like Charlie or Robert or Bud…” I trailed off, eyes going wide.
Phoenix, my ex, had married a lizardman who went by Bud, but Bud wasn’t the lizardman’s real name. Before Phoenix named him Bud, he was One-Thirteen.
I had helped Bud and Phoenix escape, though not without a price. A bunch of military assholes raided my house one day, and I could’ve sworn one of them mentioned a Specimen Zero-Six-Nine being sighted nearby.
A chill went down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold air in the cave. What if the creature that just had his tongue inches from my balls wasn’t a ghost at all? What if the thing that’d been fucking up my generator and stealing my pizza rolls for the last year was amonster? Another one escaped from the base?
I swallowed. “Are you going to…eat me?”
There was a huff from the direction where I thought the monster was. He almost sounded…amused. I flinched when a ghostly replay of my own voice came from the direction of the ghost. “Save…. me…”
Now that wasfreaky.
“What the fuck?” I scooted a little further away and stared at the empty space where I thought he was. “Can you, like, record what people say and play it back?”
“Can you, like, record what people say and play it back?” a ghostly version of my own voice repeated.
“Wicked,” I said, impressed. It might’ve been freaky as hell, but it was also kind of cool. “So, you can turn invisible, breathe under water, repeat anything you hear…What else can you do?”
The monster didn’t answer, but I could hear him moving around in the space nearby. A few leaves kicked up into the wind and a branch shifted. Part of it broke off and floated into the fire.
Maybe he couldn’t answer me. I hadn’t gotten to see much of him, but he didn’t seem to have a jaw that’d be capable of human speech. Cupid, Charlie’s four-armed monster boyfriend, had communicated telepathically, so maybe other monsters could do that, too.
I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. I had a lot of questions, but they would have to wait. Even with the fire going, I was chilled to the bone, and the tarp wasn’t doing much to help.
“Hey, um, Ghost?” He’d said his name was sixty-nine, but I didn’t want to call him by a number. Ghost just felt more right.
The stomping around stopped, and I had the strangest sense he was looking at me, waiting for me to continue.
“I’m kind of cold,” I said, trying not to shiver too much.
Breath huffed over my face and another large tree limb broke off, landing in the fire. The flames surged higher, filling the little cave with light and warmth.
“Thanks,” I muttered, “but I’d really like my clothes back if that’s possible?”
There was a grunt, and several torn bits of clothing flew across the cave to land on the tarp.
I sighed. Not only were they torn to bits, but they were soaking wet, too, which made them useless. Since I wasn’t getting my clothes back, I set myself to ripping off a section of the tarp to fashion into a makeshift kilt, using a strip of my t-shirt to hold it all together.
Ghost snorted when I’d finished, almost as if he disapproved.
“Look, bro. Some of us don’t have scales or whatever,” I muttered. “It’s cold as balls out here, and I’m not big on letting my shriveled junk hang out for everyone to see.”
“Shriveled junk,” he repeated.
