"Ghost," I called him and I think he liked the name.

If I’d known what he was at the beginning I’d’ve given him a less dramatic name, but I didn’t. The one I picked turns out to be good enough despite its’ drama and, until recently, we figured it to be mostly accurate besides. He doesn’t seem to mind what I call him, being a generally amiable sort once you get past his somewhat startling appearance. If you catch him in good light, which almost never happens, he looks more like a monk than anything else, and by that I mean he’s swathed in a sort of hooded or cowled cassock, loose fitting and pale brown and, if you get a really good look at it you see it’s not cloth but gently swirling folds of smoke, The smoky cassock has voluminous sleeves that were tucked one into the other, as though he was warming his hands. But there are no hands inside those sleeves, and no face inside the cowl, though in good light he’d never let you see that much. Most of the time he is a dweller in the shadows, a haunter of deep darknesses.

He neither hungers nor thirsts, tires nor sleeps, grows bored nor impatient. He is well=traveled, widely read and an astute observer of human nature and history. He can read minds, but doesn’t, mostly. He can transport himself from any one place on the face of the Earth to any other instantaneously. To listen to him, he’d been everywhere and seen everything and everybody. Until recently he had no idea who or what he was, nor so much as a hint as to from whence such as he might most likely hail.

With all that he is a skittish sort, prone to disappearing at the first glint of trouble, most of which he himself attracts by his inability to graciously accept any hypocrisy or dishonesty, no matter how small or useful to the wearer. And he can be vicious in responding to most people’s quite natural flabbergastation at confronting the very fact of the existence of the likes of him. His ungraciousness and viciousness are magnified by an odd ability he has to, well, see things in people, the truths and falsenesses and pretenses and facades as we might note hair or eye color, or the cut of one’s suit. And worst of all, these things he sees, these secrets , well, if he’s upset he sometimes can’t help but blurt them out in the act of disappearing, as a bird will evacuate its bowels as it takes to the air. The place where Ghost sat a moment before would suddenly be empty and only the echo of his sordid truth rang in his place, blueing the uneasy air.

Take, for instance, the time when he busted up my old friend Bob’s marriage and lost him his job. Ghost’d scoped Bob out for several years before he felt comfortable enough to let Bob in on the secret. We broke it to him gently and he took it well, considering. After they got relaxed with each other, which took a couple months, we got so we’d sit around my kitchen table and bat around this subject or that for hours. Sometimes the talk grew heated. One time Ghost and Bob got to arguing about I don’t know what and Ghost’s smoke started swirling faster and faster and before I could calm things down he blurts out to Bob that Bob’s boss is at that very moment diddling Bob’s wife and has been doing it for years, and then Ghost vanishes without a trace, leaving behind not even so much as a decent pop as a goodbye nor any indication as to how or why he came by this most unwelcome knowledge concerning Bob’s bride. Bob beat the living crap out of his boss, divorced his wife and hasn’t been back here since.

That’s a mild case, compared to some.

He doesn’t want to do it, to bare the secret, hidden parts of people’s lives, but is unable to stifle himself with any regularity or predictability when under stress, though I’d’ve thought a mostly insubstantial being such as he would be mostly unaffected by stress. That turns out not to be the case. That’s why he doesn’t put himself forward for comment very often. And yet he claims to enjoy the company of our kind, preferring our camaraderie to that of the dolphin on almost all occasions, deep diving and speed swimming being the exceptions. (How and why he swims is a mystery to me.)
He mostly aims his barbed insights at me. I’ve learned to accept them for what they are: tangible, playful proof of his discomfort, expressed in revelations about myself that, if it were up to me, I’d just as lief not know. He doesn’t mean anything by it, most of the time anyway, though he does have his moods and isn’t above being more considerate some times than others. These moods were so human that I took them as proof of the fact that, what ever he was, he’d once been human.

Let me back up.

Twenty years ago I was new to the forest, new to the pace and timbre of life within the 64 square miles of woods that are, for all practical purposes, my back yard. I don’t own it all mind you, just 640 acres of it, but I know the people who own the rest and they let me wander whither I will, winter, summer, spring or fall. And I do. After my wife died and my kids were grown and on their own, I realized one day that I’d made as much money as I needed (more actually) and came here to get on with what I’d always liked most when I was a kid, which is wandering around the woods, occasionally living off the land, finding and making a home in the forest. My house is modest but suits my needs and is far back from the road. There’s a big old barn and a henhouse and the pressing shed where the Jacobi brothers, Tom and Angelo, who do most of the work around the place, blend the cider we make from my 160 acres of apple orchards. Six sorts. They make a big=city factory wage for farmwork and I skim enough off the top to buy a few creature comforts and pay Jeff down the lane for a winter’s worth of firewood. The Jacobi boys and their families live just across the street. I live alone. I had a dog when I moved here from the city, but he died and I never wanted to take on that grief again and I haven’t. There’s a cat hereabout who keeps the local rodents at bey, but he’s not rightly a pet. I hardly ever see him, really, only the residue of his work. He’s not a pet; hasn’t even got a name. He just lives nearby. There’s a fistful of Belgians and Percherons that keep the grass cropped and soil fertilized in several pastures, and from time to time I can be persuaded to part with one of them, but not often, not easily and not cheaply. It is by design a bucolic life I lead. All critics may expect the same single=fingered salute to any negativity.

That’s my part of the woods, There is a Greater Wood around it.

I range far and wide within the forest as I did as a boy. I’ve had twenty years of it this second time around and I couldn’t have made a better choice. It was a while before I could shake off all the ill effects of living so many years in big cities. The four seasons came and went before I learned my way around my new neighborhood. In five years I knew my way around well.

There are many wonderful places in these woods: lakes and swamps and creeks and thick and thin copses of more than seventy sorts of trees. There are the remains of no fewer than three abandoned settlements: a Hopewell mound, an Ottawa wintering ground and a played=out clutch of flatrock=and=rough=timber shacks that once were trading posts for pelt merchants and ramshackle distilleries for making liquor with which to ply the Indians.

My sister, a fun=loving Floridian dendrochronologist with mud in her blood, walked me through the process of "sampling" first my 240 acres of woods, then the Greater Wood. We started botanically and then moved on to the bugs and the birds and the beasties. I built several self=contained recording weather monitoring stations and placed them here and there in the woods. I started checking them regularly to collect the weather data and kept strict records of my "samplings" and after a few years my sister took my data and used her contacts to find out if it was scientifically significant, which it turned out to be. It still is.

At one point I wrote it all up as a how=to guide for folks with land from the size of city lots up to an acre or more and the yen to immerse themselves in the Zen of the Scientific Method. The book sold well and a couple big=time environmental concerns got behind the notion and endorsed the project. Eventually an Internet adjunct was set up to take the notion worldwide. Big Fun. And it grew out of my goal of getting a handle on what's going on in these woods from day to day and season to season.

That might not seem like much of a goal for a 50ish sort such as I was, but it was my goal to set and I set it thus and I have and am accomplishing it. I look on it as a language to be learned, and at the rate such forests are being eaten up by "development," I view it as a dying language soon to pass away forever from these parts. Over the years I’ve gained a sort of simple fluency and I’m grateful for it, knowing as I do that this isn’t a tongue in which so sorry a sensitive as I should hope to commit more than a babybabble. So I listen. I see. I smell and taste and touch. I am in tune. I try not to intrude. I contribute nothing more ham=handed than my good=natured, Hiesenbergian presence. I am content therewith.

There are long=unpeopled places where I go, special glades and dells and meadows and thickets and brooding greenwoods that are perfect places to bask or think or commune or mourn. There are places I go just because I like how they make me feel. They never fail me. I no longer wonder exactly how these places accomplish these remarkable feats, I just pray they keep doing it.

It was at one of these special places that Ghost made himself known to me. This was fifteen or so years ago.

I’d been sampling my way across the northern Red Oak forest for several days, following Fall from the marsh near Porcupine Lake to the cliffs overlooking the quarry. I’d been aware of something for several days, almost=unfelt flashes of a queasy uneasiness. It was like someone looking over my shoulder, or studying me from just inside the treeline. These were subtle sensitivities, grumbles at the rim of awareness, and not uncommon in the forest. I shook them off and focused on the work at hand.

As I was falling asleep one night I heard an unnatural rustling that was swiftly swallowed by the dry clattering of autumn leaves tossed by a stray breeze. It was an eerie cloth=on=cloth rasping and lasted just a moment, but behind it lingered the barest breath of a curious presence. I was no longer alone. {This is in itself a not=at=all odd a feeling to have in the woods at night. Something, many somethings in fact, are always watching you in the woods, which is as it should be. If there’s a meat=eater out there bigger than me you can bet my eyes are going to be locked on it .) Snuggled in my bag, I naturally thought this faint prickling of the thumbs must arise from the gaze of some nightbound scurrier. A coon, maybe drawn to investigate the fire’s smoke and light.

The rustling came again, more clearly this time, without any obscuring leafclatter. I got a good earful, but I couldn’t exactly place the sound. It was a raglike rustling and within it was a persistent whispering that fell just below the level of perception. The sounds came and went, came and went. I drifted off to sleep wondering what they might be.

When I woke the next morning the sounds were gone or hidden within the gentle pattering of the rain. After I had my coffee and got going and woke up completely I found that the thumb=prickling feeling that I wasn’t alone remained. It grew more acute as the day wore on, moving from the rim of my awareness to the focus of my attention. By the time I got to Half Acre Green I was as jittery as a June bride. I made a fire and got the coffee going and was on my second cup when I caught sight of a glint at the edge of my vision. When I turned my head to look it danced away and was gone. The glint had been much like the bright spots you see if you happen to cough too hard or get bonked on the head and "see stars." There was just the single "star," though. I turned back to the green and my coffee and the glint came again, and this time it stayed. It looked like a dimple in the air, like the air had been pinched and then stayed puckered. It was an odd sight and I’m afraid I stared, open mouthed. "Agog" is the precise term; "agape" isn’t far behind.

"It’s impolite to stare," a voice said from the dimple, which wiggled a bit at the sound.

I dropped my cup.

"You dropped your cup," the voice said. It was a pleasant voice. "Bugs are going to fly right in there if you don’t shut your mouth."

"I don’t believe in ghosts," I said.

"Me either. But that doesn’t seem to count for very much, does it?"

"I guess not," I said. "Does that mean you are a ghost?"

"Good question." He chuckled. "Next question."

"You won’t answer?"

"If I had one I’d give it to you. Truth is, I wonder about this myself."

"And you’ve come to a conclusion?"

"Not even a tentative hypothesis. Do you know what you are?"

"I’m a man," I said. "A human being. H. Sapiens."

"Words. Are you a noun?"

"Well, Ghost," I said, "You don’t mind my calling you ‘Ghost?’"

"Not at all."

"Well then, Ghost, why don’t you sit right down and let’s talk about all this noun business."

The dimple jiggled and a little laugh leaked out.

"I thought you’d never ask," he said.

And we were off on the first of thousands of wild and wilder speculations.

I’ve learned a lot about Ghost in the intervening fifteen years, but I still don’t know exactly what he is. He’s mostly convinced me that I don’t know exactly what I am, either. I guess it evens out. In addition to all the fun, he’s caused me no end of trouble and embarrassment and physical pain, but still we are fast friends and spend much of our free time together.

Before you dismiss me as one of those cranks who hears voices or has an unseen spirit guide or just plain old everyday, garden=variety invisible friends, let me say that I’m not the only one who’s seen and talked with Ghost, and I’m not his only human friend. (I attach a list of as many of these people as I can recall and you may contact them on the condition that you do not publish their names or otherwise cause them to be identified with this narrative in any form or fashion. If you do I’ll hunt you down and kill you with my bare hands should I get to you first.)

Ghost has been studied by scientists and parapsychologists and questioned by reporters and government agents galore, not because they compelled him (utterly impossible!), but because we hoped it might be useful to him . He thinks that if he really is a ghost, and he’s the only one he’s ever come across so there no others of his kind for him to ask, he’ll somehow be able to alter his situation if he can find out just exactly of whom he is the Residue, as he sometimes refers to himself.

So exactly why, you may well ask, is it that you have never heard of Ghost? How has he managed to elude the public eye when such as Elvis is now cannot? A fair question. I think it’s because nobody learned anything they could use, including Ghost. The newspaper guys wouldn’t or couldn’t believe their own eyes, and so were left with trying to get somebody else to talk about their time with Ghost, but almost nobody wanted to. Those that did talk always seemed to do so in such a way as to demonstrate the veracity of Lincoln’s bromide about it being better to keep your mouth and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

The scientists and parapsychologists were screened by Ghost himself, using what I call his Bullshit Detector with the sensitivity cranked up high. He picked ‘em, and I went to see them to feel them out and help them make the transition from belief and non=belief, helped them recognize a new fact as it’s resident before their very eyes. I took it very well, Ghost said. Not everyone goes gently into this new knowing. Hell, some can’t or won’t go at all. Some have jumped to their feet and run madcap from their own offices and were replaced minutes later by burly security officers with a single notion in their minds == to get me out of that guy’s office. I’ve been branded every sort of charlatan, hypnotist and devil, but privately, only. Ghost inspires a deep fear in some folks. None have denounced me in public. There’ve been no sermons preached against me, no National Enquirer articles, no learned editorials calling for my censure.

Now here’s the unfortunate thing: among those staunch souls made more of curiosity than of fear, nobody == not one of them == learned anything beyond what I’ve already written here. That’s odd, don’t you think? I know there were some things Ghost didn’t want everyone to know, but if there’s something he doesn’t want anyone to know he hasn’t confided it in me, which makes a certain sort of sense, I guess. There have been theories by the bushel basket, but at the end of the day they were only words, just nouns. Descriptive, but no more. The words, the theories == no matter how studied or logical == didn’t do anything for anybody, least of all Ghost. We gave it up after a while.

The only exception came from an unexpected source: the United States Government. Conspiracy theories are so much fun that it’s hard to think of our government as being a source of reliable information, but this one bureaucrat offered the single suggestion that turned out to carry any weight with Ghost. Oddly, he worked for the Department of Defense. He suggested that Ghost experiment systematically and attempt to locate the extremities of his abilities, to see how far he could take them. Just how rapidly could he move from place to place? Were there distance limitations? How deeply could he see into the human mind? What did he see? Could he sway individual human behavior without the knowledge or consent of the individual? How much control over his appearance did he have? He could be a pinch of air or a monk shrouded in smoke or anything in between. And did it require an expenditure of energy to change from one state to another, or to maintain a state once attained?

And so on.

We followed up on his suggestion and learned this, some of which Ghost already knew: he could visit many more places than he could count in the interval between one moment and the next; he couldn’t leave the Earth, but he could get high enough above it to look in on the cosmonauts in Mir and astronauts aboard the shuttle, perhaps indicating that proximity to humans is a factor; he could see farther into a human mind than he cared to, and found it very difficult and distasteful to describe what he’d seen; he couldn’t make anybody do anything against their will and didn’t want to; changing his appearance required no expenditure of energy that he could detect, and he couldn’t seem to make himself into anything but a dimple in the air or a monk shrouded in smoke or something in between. He couldn’t turn himself into a platypus or Norma Jean Baker, damn it. With me he was mostly a shadow, a shade, the barest outline of his monkish shape. And, it seems, he can speak all languages with equal ease.

Not much to go on.

Ghost had no memories of anything before his present incarnation which, he thinks, began quite a long time before he noticed that time could and was passing. The first event in human history that he recalls is a sea battle in the eastern Mediterranean somewhere toward the latter half of the third century B.C. He says it was as if he had awakened from a dream. It was, as you might imagine, several centuries before any sighted human would have anything to do with him. In the intervening years he’s made himself known to only a fistful of folks, and five years after our meeting, which is to say ten years ago, he told me there were about a dozen such as I scattered around the globe. These days that number has dwindled down to five. It’s possible, he’s told me, to be with all five of us virtually at once, by cycling through our locations too rapidly for us to know the difference. Somehow he can keep it all straight == and is so good at it that none of us could notice even after he’d told us he could do it. He does that quite often, he says, at quiet times. He watches over us while we sleep, sometimes. Other times he’ll stay with one or the other of us for days or weeks or months without visiting the others for more than mere minutes at a time.

I’ve met one of our number, a pretty, shapely, copper=curled little lass from Inverness, Scotland. The other three live in China, Iran and Kenya, and as such don’t get out much. But we’re all on=line and chat back and forth regularly == even though it’s dangerous for some of them to do so. It was tricky getting the hardware to them behind their respective national firewalls, but after a few false starts we managed it. So long as nobody spots their parabolics, we’re gold. All interesting folks, let me say. Even though I’ve not seen three of them in the flesh, I take Ghost’s word that one of the things we have in common other than him is that we all "have our own faces." Another thing is that we all took the Fact of Ghost in the same manner, he says, as though we were expecting him.

We settled into a comfortable routine that lasted nine years. And now that you know that, you’re ready to know this: a year ago Ghost got to fooling around and found something .

What I mean by that is not merely some thing , but something of his ilk. This thing he found was an ethereal thing, a thing he didn’t so much see as sense. And when he sensed it, it wasn’t just a presence he sensed, but a presence that came with a certain maniac malevolence involved, an active ill will directed, it seemed to Ghost, against Ghost himself.

It started out, he said, as a niggling sort of feeling, distant and faint, an itch that came and went at odd times, usually when he was alone. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I hadn’t been aware that Ghost spent any time alone. He had places he went, he said, places he was drawn to, places unlike other places in that they were all stark and lonely places, places seldom visited by life in any form. It was in those places he first felt the presence.

At first, he said, it was a pure pleasure for him to feel anything new. His feelings up ‘till then encompassed curiosity and interest, concern for his friends, skittishness and an undeniable urge to flee from the lake of lies that seethes under the forced calm of the false facade. Of fear, however, he was utterly innocent. What had he ever had to fear? When he’d come to consciousness all those centuries ago he’d been absent fear, absent trepidation, absent any concern for his own welfare whatsoever. Now fear fell over him and I think he liked it. He sought the source of his fear, getting a little closer to it by degrees but never quite bringing himself to catch up to it.

This presence circled him at a distance, like a predator sizing up his prey, darting a bit closer when Ghost’s back was turned. This alone was a novelty to Ghost, who until that time had been unaware he even possessed a backside. This indicated to Ghost that there were gaps in his awareness, places he couldn’t see. I believe this fascinated him more than it frustrated, and Ghost then allowed the presence to close in on him by simply locating the ill will, turning his back on it and standing his ground.

Even with all these new sensations, Ghost was unprepared for the next newness, which was a searing pain. One of his utterly stark places was the middle of the great desert in China, the Taklamakan, and it was there that he turned his back on the beast experimentally. It rushed him from behind and raked him with something metaphysically sharp and Ghost felt an agony roar through him and tear him and leave him weakened in a fashion he couldn’t describe. His instinct was to bolt and the place he ran to was here in the woods, where he arrived at my side with a wail of fear and pain on whatever passed for his lips.

It was an earsplitting shriek that chilled me and set me shivering and gasping for breath. I dropped to the ground and curled up into a ball and crammed my hands over my ears but it didn’t do any good, didn’t do anything to quiet the horrific wail gushing from Ghost. I began to wail myself but my cries were smothered by layers of Ghost’s agony, unheard as if unuttered. I learned after that Ghost was also with the others, and they were as denuded of sensibility as was I. An unguessed time later the furor subsided. Ghost was gone and I was hoarse and weak and dehydrated, cramped up with hundreds of tiny charlie=horses screeching through every muscle of my body. At that time our Iranian comrade was under restraints, being prayed over by a team of mullahs; our Chinese comrade was also under restraints, under observation in a state=run hospital. No praying going on there. Obako in Kenya was having an exorcism done on him and little Mary Stuart had her flock of stoic relatives worrying about her bedside. I was in the middle of the woods, six miles from home and barely able to walk. It took most of the day to get home and I collapsed at least a hundred times before I collapsed onto the couch on my porch and slept for an entire day. When I woke I was two days without food and only barely hungry. I drank glass after glass of water, though, to quench a painful and wicked thirst.

It was a month before any of us saw Ghost again, and of us I was the only one who was alone and so it was to me that he elected to reappear before and unburden himself onto.

Ghost had suffered a change in that month. I’d thought him skittish before, but now he couldn’t stay still for more than a couple seconds without popping off to somewhere else. Then he’d be back a heartbeat later and take up where he’d left off without missing a beat. It took him a day to slow down enough to make sense.

He’d run scared, he said, made mindless by the sudden onslaught of pain. He’d flown madly to every place he’d ever been, hoping for a place that would take the pain away. He was so consumed with the sensations of fear and pain that he couldn’t be sure where he went or what he did while there. The news for that month included scattered outbreaks of hysteria in many of the major cities of the world, and in several places people lost their lives or their sanity as the unacknowledged psychological plague circled the globe.

"The Thing is after me," he whispered and his voice was hoarse and frantic and tentative, which are all qualities of which I had not known Ghost capable. "It comes at me and comes at me and it . . ." and he was gone ". . . won’t leave me alone! Won’t give me any peace! Won’t . . ." and he was gone ". . . stop stalking me! Won’t stop tearing at me!" and he was gone.

It went like that for a about a week, after which he calmed down some and could give a more cogent account of himself. I’ll summarize. He said when he came to see the Thing accurately it was a dark, cold nothingness that kept coming on and noticed Ghost but didn’t care anythingt seek Ghost out to do him hurt, it merely warped the "space" Ghost lives in just by passing through it, and it was the warping and the disfigurement of his "space" that so hurt and damaged Ghost. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t even business. It just was .

His ability to detect the Thing improved over time, and from it gradually grew the skill to flee and elude it. Ghost’s absences arising from flights of fear by degrees became less frequent and, though it seemed odd to me, of longer duration. What I mean to say is we weren’t seeing so much of each other.

Then one day he came to me as I was lolling in the shade and fishing on Grandmother Lake. He said he’d come up with a Plan. He was going to deal with the monster. He had worked it all out.

"I’ll seek it out," he said. His voice was firm and confident. "I know its methods. I’ll find it and I’ll confront it. I’ll force myself to stand my ground against its attack. I’ll take everything its got."

"Didn’t you already try that?" I asked.

"I’m smarter now."

"What if ‘everything its got’ is enough to . . ."

"Finish me off? Kill me?"

"Exactly."

"You forget what I am, Nash," he said gently.

"And that’s what again?"

"Uh . . . good point," he admitted.

"But you think you can take it?" I asked.

"Hell yes! I’ll make the f**ker notice me. I’ll kill his disregard."

"And this is a good thing?" I asked.

"I’ll go back to the Taklamakan. I’ll take all its got to give."

"And then . . . what?"

"Then I give some of my own back. I’ll warp a little space of my own, I’ll bend it to my purpose."

"You can do this?" I asked but he was listening only to himself.

"I’ll go back to the Taklamakan. I’ll sing the old war song and I’ll undergo the Death, if that’s what’s called for. And if I die, at least I’ll die with something approaching a human spine."

"This is mighty ballsy talk, Ghost," I said after a moment.

"Nah," he said. "Not really. I’m pretty sure I’ve got this character’s number."

I let that sink in for a moment. Before I could come up with a good reason for him not to do this thing, he let a happy chuckle ripple through the smoke of his substance.

"I’ve come to take my leave of you," he said, "and to urge you to stay in contact with the others. I’m telling them this same thing right now, even though it’s freaking out Obako’s family. I’m being brief over there."

"So this is, what? A good-bye?" I asked in a hollow voice.

"Might be," Ghost said. "But I don’t think so."

"Well, I . . . I’m lost for words," I said.

Ghost made himself go more solid than I’d ever seen him, and he brushed my cheek with a smoky sleeve, and I felt the touch of him as the lightest of kisses.

"I felt you," I said.

"Yah," he said. "I felt you too."

And then he was gone and I was alone. It’d all happened so fast I hadn’t had time to tell him anything, anything at all about how much I enjoyed his company. By this time I’d come to set considerable store by my relations with Ghost. I felt a mourning mindset droop down and drape its heavy self over me. The colors began to seep from the world and left only greys behind. I shrugged mightily and repeatedly to shake off the shroud but it didn’t work.

I don’t know what happened out there in the Chinese desert. Neither do any of the others. All we knew was Ghost was gone for good, or so it seemed for a full year. A couple months ago, as I was wondering and worrying over his nature and his fate, Ghost popped up before my eyes, smoky and solid.

"Guess what I can do," he said without preliminary.

"What?" I said. "Where have you been? What happened in the desert?"

"Never mind all that," he said excitedly. "Guess what I can do. Come on , guess!"

"I . . . I’m stunned, Ghost, and delighted," I said. "I’m glad you’re not dead."

"I missed you too," he said. "Now guess what I can do!"

"I . . . I can’t. I haven’t the slightest idea."

"I can travel through space," he said with pride. "Outer space."

"You . . . what?"

"I’ve been to the stars, Nash," he said in a whisper. "I’ve been to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I’ve been inside the black hole in the middle of the galaxy and I came out! That’s right: out! Out the other side! Then I came back through just to see if I could do it."

"That’s . . . that’s impossible," I said, plainly lacking anything sensible to contribute to the conversation on account of being flabbergasted by this taking so many of the ‘laws’ of physics and standing them on their ears.

"Not for me," he said. "And I’ve been . . . other places."

"Yeah?"

"Places you people wouldn’t believe."

"Like whataya mean?"

"I . . . I don’t have the words. I can’t describe it to you, not yet. I’ve got to think about it for a while."

"Sure, Ghost," I said. "I get it. So, uh . . . tell me: what does go on inside a black hole?"

"More than you’d think," he said with a throaty chuckle. "And all at once. And I mean Holy-Mackerel-All-At-Once."

"So everything is everything? Primal matter?"

"Yes," he said. "And no. It’s more like everything was everything."

"And now it’s . . . what?" I asked.

"Something else," Ghost answered and his smokey form shrugged. "What? I don’t know."

"This is going to really mess with the minds of Phil and his chums in Chile," I said after a moment.

"Yah," Ghost said. If he’d been human I’d say he stretched and yawned. "You know, Nash," he said, "it’s good to be home."

"Good to have you back," I said.

"So get a fire going, will you? We’ve got a few things to talk over."

----- ----- ----- So here’s the rest of the story, which I’ll summarize:

When Ghost stood up to the Thing it started ripping and tearing at him and pulling him into pieces. He took it as long as he could, then prudence overtook his decision to stand his ground and pain and fear finally overran him and with all he had in him he pushed himself away but the Thing followed and followed and followed, tearing and slashing as it came. Finally, after what could’ve been days or weeks or months, Ghost used his last drop of will and pushed himself father away than ever before, maybe hard enough for the Thing to notice him at last. And in that instant it was done.

When he roused from the pain of his effort he found himself weak and weary in the caldera of Olympus Mons and in possession of this new spacefaring ability. He immediately set out on an eclectic tramp throughout the galaxy. When he worked his way back to Earth he discovered the Thing was gone. Further deponent sayeth not. Case closed on the Thing. Wish I had a better ending but I don’t.

Ghost’s conclusion now is that he is in fact not a ghost, human or otherwise, but something else. He says he doesn’t much care about what he is because he gets to zoom all over the universe in the blink of an eye and sightsee where the sights are really worth seeing. He’s seen aliens. Real ones.

I can’t tell if Ghost is bullshitting me, and he could be (though I’ve found him to be scrupulously honest up ‘till now), but bullshit or not it’s made the campfire conversations much, much more interesting. Things have quieted down generally and are almost back to normal with Ghost, except that it seems we’re very popular in astrophysical and xenopological circles, in a quiet sort of way. Science fiction writers seem to dote on us, too.