Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (best time to read books txt) 📕

Other tombstone junkies, they'd rub chalk on a tombstone, coloring the whole surface so the faint, engraved epitaph would stand out as darker. This chalk dust was plaster of Paris or gypsum, and rubbing it worked the dust into the invisible cracks and fissures of the tombstone. The next time it rained . . . the gypsum dust would soak up water and swell to twice its original size. The same way ancient Egyptians used wood wedges to split stone blocks for the pyramids, the swollen chalk dust would slowly explode the whole front off a tombstone.

All that stuff about stearic acid and gypsum and the Egyptian pyramids, it proves my dad wasn't an idiot.

He'd tell me, all these well-meaning cemetery folks, all they did was destroy what they claimed to love.

Still, it was nice, that last, best day with my dad on that hillside that used to be New Keegan, Montana. The hot sunshine baking the dead grass. The kind of brown lizards that would leave their squirming tail behind if you caught one.

If we could've read the headstones, we'd see how almost the entire town had died in one month. The first cluster of what doctors would call the Keegan virus. Rapid-onset viral brain tumors.

My dad sold that load of angels and lambs to a garden store in Denver. Driving home, he was already chewing aspirin and swerving the pickup truck all over the road. Him and my mom were both dead in the hospital before my grandma arrived.

After that, life calmed down for ten years. Until Miss Frasure and her brain tumor the size of a lemon. Until my viral load built up to make me infectious.

These days, the government can't kill me and they can't cure me. All they can do is damage control.

That new boy, with the dick, he's going to feel how I did when I first arrived: His family dead. Maybe half his school dead, if he was popular. Sitting alone in his room every day, he'll be scared, but full of hope for the cure the navy promised.

I can show him the ropes. Calm him down. Help him adjust to life here at The Orphanage.

That last good day of my life, my dad drove his pickup all the way from Montana to Denver, Colorado, where he knew a store that sold antique garden shit. Cast-iron deer and concrete birdbaths crusted with moss. Most of this stuff was stolen. This store guy gave him cash, and helped unload the angels off the truck. The store guy had a kid, a little boy who came out the back door of the store and stood in the alley to watch the work.

Talking to Shirlee over the intercom, I would press the button and ask if this new resident . . . did he have curly red hair and brown eyes?

Was he about my age? I'd ask if he was from Denver, and did his dead folks use to run a garden-antique store?

23

The ghost light is our only campfire left. Our last chance. The glaring-bare bulb on a tall stand, center stage. The safety valve made to keep old gaslight theaters from exploding, or the light always left on inside a new theater to keep any ghost from calling the place home.

We're sitting around the light, the circle of people still here, sitting on the stage, from where you can see only the gold-paint outline of each auditorium chair, the brass rail snaking along the front edge of each balcony, the cobweb clouds that hover across the dead electric-night sky.

In the dark rooms behind rooms, the Matchmaker and the Missing Link are dead in the Italian Renaissance lounge. In the subbasement below the basement, Mr. Whittier and Comrade Snarky and Lady Baglady and the Duke of Vandals are rotting-dead. In their dressing rooms, backstage, are Miss America and Mrs. Clark. All of their cells digesting each other into runny yellow protein. The bacteria in their guts and lungs going wild with bloat.

This leaving just eleven of us, sitting in our circle of light.

Our world of only humans, a world without humanity.

Agent Tattletale has been tiptoeing around, breaking lightbulbs. So have the Countess Foresight and Director Denial.

Each of us, we were sure, the only one at work. Each of us wanting to make our world just a little more dark. None of us aware we all had this same plan. Victims of our low threshold for boredom. Victims of ourselves. Maybe it's our being so hungry, some form of delusion, but here's all we have left.

This one lightbulb. The ghost light.

Here is light without heat, so we're bundled in pea coats and furs and bathrobes, our heads sagging under piled-up wigs and door-wide hats. All of us, ready.

When that alley door opens, we'll be famous. When we hear the lock turn, then the sliding rollers squeal, then the click-click and click-click of someone trying the light switch, then we'll have our story ready to sell. Our death-camp cheekbones ready for our best-profile close-up.

We'll say how Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark fooled us into coming here. They trapped us and held us hostage. They bullied us to write books, poems, screenplays. And when we wouldn't, they tortured us. They starved us.

Sitting cross-legged in our circle on the wood boards of the stage, we can't move in the layers of velvet and quilted tweed keeping us warm. It takes all our energy to repeat our story to each other: How Mrs. Clark ripped the unborn baby from Miss America and stewed it in front of its dying mother. How Mr. Whittier wrestled the Matchmaker to the floor and hacked off his penis. Then how Whittier stabbed Mrs. Clark and choked down so much of her thigh he split open. Us, we're practicing the word peritonitis. Under our breath, we practice inguinal hernia. We say cheveu-cut potatoes.

That's how both villains died, leaving us behind to starve.

It's been a lot of marks on the wall with Saint Gut-Free's pencil. Those hash