Page 19 of Ghost in the Cupboard

“A ghost?” Danny asked. “In the cupboard?”

Picking at the nub in the lower right-hand corner below the door Danny had smashed with his fist, I desperately peel away the newer paint.

“Yes.”

“Someone…trapped a ghost in a cupboard and now the ghost is loose in your house?” Danny asked, incredulous.

“Don’t give me that nonbeliever stuff,” I grumbled as I picked at the paint furiously. “I saw your face. You felt it.”

Danny began babbling incoherently behind me as my fingernail finally found purchase and peeled back the layer of bumpy green paint. I palmed the sliver of paint and squatted down to look at the nub of metal it had been covering.

The shiny silver piece flickered in the overhead living room light and my stomach dropped. I glanced at the other corners of the doors and drawers and knew there was no point in investigating those nubs. They were all surely silver. The ghost that was now God knows where in my house had been trapped in the cupboard. And now it was my problem.

Sighing, I rose to a standing position.

“All I felt was cold air, Si!” Danny demanded. “I didn’t see any ghost. This is ridiculous. If you want to prove to me that you can communicate with ghosts, this is—”

“Get out,” I said softly.

“Wha-what?”

“Go home, Danny,” I said as I turned to him. “Get out. I have bigger problems right now than your doubts.”

“I…I mean…we…this is…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, pushing him towards the door. “I don’t care. Go home. I can’t deal with you and this right now. Get.”

Danny stammered protestations that ranged from angry to confused to scared as I hustled him out of the house. He was still blathering when I slammed and locked the front door in his face. I leaned back against the door, listening to him stammer his thoughts out on the front porch through the door for several minutes before he finally stopped. A few moments later, I heard footsteps on the porch, crunching in the yard, and then the sound of his truck door.

A moment later, I heard the truck start up and drive off. I turned and stood on tiptoes to look out at the yard. His truck was headed off down the driveway. When my eyes shifted over to my car, Chester was standing by the hood. He smiled, black ooze dripping from the corner of his mouth, as he waved excitedly at me. I did my best to return his smile before giving him a quick wave and pushing away from the door.

Standing in the middle of the living room, I opened my hand and looked down at the piece of paint it held. Green and bumpy, like the walls of my house, I could immediately tell it had been infused with sage ash. Why I hadn’t noticed it when Max had brought the cupboard to the house, I had no idea. However, it quickly dawned on me that I had been distracted when Max arrived with the cupboard.

Danny.

I had been so focused on not making a fuss about him while Max was around—for fear that Max would figure out what was going on between us. Furthermore, I hadn’t wanted Danny to say anything about me being a fraud around Max. Also, it had been dark out on the front porch. I hadn’t gotten a good look at it, not really, before the guys had brought it in the house. Once inside, I wasn’t really worried about the cupboard anymore because Danny had distracted me once again.

If he had left before smashing the cupboard, and I’d had time to look it over before opening it, I would have known better. I would have pushed it right back out on the porch before attempting to pry it open to reveal the secrets within. The ghost would have been let out in the yard instead of my home. Now…I had decisions to make. Decisions I rarely had to make anymore that I never enjoyed.

Of course, there was one other glaring problem that should have been my first thought. Who had trapped a ghost in a cupboard? Not only that, how had they known how to trap a ghost at all? It wasn’t everyday knowledge at all that ghosts existed, that they could be trapped, or how they could be trapped. Your average human has no reason to even be concerned with ghosts, let alone how to deal with them.

Obviously, if you ask around, you’ll find at least a handful of people who claim they’ve had a ghostly encounter. An old house they lived in where they felt cold chills or heard odd noises in the night. People who woke up to weird shadows or a sinking feeling in the bed next to them. People who briefly saw an apparition floating down the hall or watching them from the foot of their bed. Their knowledge rarely went beyond these sightings.

People move house and the hauntings stop. They have a priest bless a house and the ghost might move on, not wanting to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of a blessed house. Victims of a haunting may convince themselves they’re simply making things up and mentally block the ghosts without knowing they’re actively doing it.

More esoteric knowledge—the silver and sage, how to effectively deal with a haunting—is not common. Whoever had painted the cupboard, trapped the ghost, and then set the cupboard outside Max’s shop, had more than a base level working knowledge of ghosts. In a town like Sage Grove, I knew of only one person.

Silas Erie.

Me.

And I hadn’t trapped a ghost or painted a cupboard. I certainly hadn’t put forth the effort of lugging a heavy piece of furniture over to Max’s shop and left it on his front door. So, contemplating how the ghost had ended up in the cupboard, and how the cupboard ended up in my possession, and the ghost ended up in my house was pointless. Dealing with the immediate problem was the only action that seemed reasonable.

Shaking my head clear of all the pointless theories and conspiracies, I marched away from the cupboard and into the kitchen. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen and let my eyes pan over its contents. Nothing seemed out of place, no cabinet doors slightly ajar, nothing knocked over. I certainly didn’t find a ghost hiding under the table, cowering with fear, when I walked over and squatted down to check.

So, I moved to the hallway. The hall bathroom. The bedrooms. Back to the living room.

No ghost was found hiding behind the shower curtain. Or a closet. Under the beds. Hiding in a different cupboard or hidey-hole. It had simply disappeared. However, the gnawing at my gut was only growing.