Endless Gray

Matthew McFarland

I don’t believe in ghosts, and never have. I know everybody and their mother has stories. I hear enough of them at summer camp and at parties. We all got high and talked about shit that we’d seen. I never had any stories at all, and I have to keep from scoffing when other folks started blathering on about their grandmother coming back and walking around upstairs or that “creepy feeling” they got when they walked past the Cultural Center…and then found out someone had gotten killed there a hundred years ago. I always wanted to say, “Someone’s probably been killed just about everywhere. You feel what you want to feel,” but when everyone’s got a nice buzz going, what the hell is the point?

I don’t believe in ghosts. It doesn’t make any sense. If they’re real, and they can talk to the living, why haven’t they talked to a president or a religious leader? (I don’t believe in God for many of the same reasons.) About the only thing that ever gave me pause was the once in a while, I’d hear a ghost story from someone like me, someone who didn’t have any time for this afterlife bullshit, but had seen it anyway. They always say variations on the same thing. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I know what I saw.”

So, OK. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I know what I saw.

* * *

I think it all could have been avoided if Eric hadn’t kept the coffin in his room.

I don’t even know where he got the damned thing. He had the smallest room in the house, and he used the coffin as a table and conversation piece. It was probably eight feet long and made of walnut or cherry or some other dark wood, and it weighed a freaking ton. I helped him carry it into his room when he moved in with Paul and I.

Funny that I didn’t notice anything then.

Eric was always nervous about people touching the coffin. He kept it covered most of the time, and he never left anyone alone in his room very long. I remember at the New Year’s party, a couple of months after he moved in, he caught a couple of my friends making out on it (don’t ask me. I have weird friends). He kicked them out of his room and then locked himself in there for three hours.

I think he probably knew.

The next day, Paul and I were staggering around the place cleaning up. Paul was cleaning up a fairly impressive pile of beer cans that had collected near Eric’s door, when he stopped and whispered for me to come over.

I wasn’t in any condition to walk any more than necessary. “What?”

He shushed me, and mouth something like “Eric’s got someone in there.”

Now, this is significant because Eric had not dated anyone during the five years I’d known him. He spent most of his free time practicing his guitar and writing his god-awful lyrics. A lot of our friends thought he was gay; I figured he just wasn’t interested. Paul insisted that Eric was straight but shy (Paul was also a bit of a homophobe, so it was probably much more palatable to him that way), and so the notion of Eric having hooked up at the party made Paul positively gleeful. I couldn’t have given a shit.

I kept walking around the living room, picking up cans, bottles, plates and trash that I did my best not to identify. Every so often I’d shoot a glance down the hall to Eric’s door. Paul stayed perched outside it, the garbage bag on the floor, his head up next to the door. About the third time I looked down that hall, though, I saw something was wrong.

Paul didn’t look like he was eavesdropping on sex or even morning-after talk. His mouth was hanging open and he had a clear sheen of sweat on his brow. His eyes were wide, but they weren’t focused on anything. They just looked empty.

I walked down the hall a little. I could see that he was breathing shallow and fast.

I touched him on the shoulder, and he screamed.

Ignore for a moment the effect someone screaming in close proximity will have when you’re badly hung over. Paul was white with fear, and I could feel the sweat through his shirt when I touched him. He recoiled from me, back into the corner, beer cans clanking and rolling as he tried to gain his footing. I crouched down next to him and tried to make eye contact, but his eyes were all over the place. Finally I reached out and slapped him.

It worked. He focused on me, confused, as if trying to figure out what he was doing on the floor. He put out a hand to steady himself to stand up. I moved to help him, and grabbed Eric’s doorknob to pull myself up.

It felt like grabbing a streetlamp pole in December. My hand froze to the doorknob for a second, and when I pulled away I felt a bit of skin tear free. I put my hands on the door. It was cold to the touch.

I knocked. “Eric?” Paul stood up and leaned on the wall. I kept my hand on the door, trying to figure it out. I imagined that Eric had left a window open or something; it was cold enough outside to do this, but that didn’t explain Paul’s little attack.

As soon as I knocked, the temperature started to change. The door grew warmer, but it really felt like the cold went away, if that makes any sense. Like whatever was chilling the door receded into the room.

Eric answered the door. He looked like hell (but all three of us did, really). There was no one else in the room, and the coffin was covered. Looking back on it now, I remember it was covered in the sheet from his bed, not the white sheet he usually covered it with. At the time, all I noticed was that something was different about the room.

Eric looked at me like he was trying to be mad, but couldn’t quite muster the emotion. His eyes were wide, like Paul’s had been, but they were slightly more focused. “What?”

I couldn’t really think of anything to say. Finally I just asked him to come out and help us clean up. Eric did so, and we didn’t say a word for several hours.

Paul moved out a month later. He did it when Eric and I had gone out of town to visit a friend. We got back and his stuff was gone, his keys were in the mailbox, and he hadn’t left a note or anything.

He shot himself three weeks after that.

* * *

Paul’s funeral was weird. I hadn’t really spoken to him since he’d moved out. I’d had an argument with his father over his share of the rent and the electric bill, but I’d gotten a check in the mail and that had been it. I had guessed that something had happened to him, and I was smart enough to figure that it might have started on New Year’s day, but I didn’t know it had become that serious. Everybody at the funeral, though, seemed to know.

I know a little bit about funerals. I’ve been to a hell of a lot of them in my life, from relatives to friends to girlfriends’ relatives and friends. I’ve had to see both of my parents and my brother buried, as well as all four of my grandparents and their brothers and sisters. And I’ll tell you that when it’s an older person who dies, when the family was expecting the death, it changes the dynamics of the ceremony. It doesn’t always make it easier, but at least you’ve got time to come to grips. When it’s a younger person, though, and when they die suddenly, everybody in the place is in shock. Paul was barely 25. He had been planning a trip to Europe the next summer and he’d just received a raise. His suicide should have been a surprise, and a lot of the people there were acting like it.

But his family was behaving like he’d been dying for months.

His father cornered me before I could get out of there. He looked haggard, like he hadn’t been sleeping, but he didn’t have the shocked look that he should have. He looked like a man who had just buried an ailing parent, not his healthy young son. “Jon,” he said, “what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know.” It was true. At the time, I didn’t know.

“You must know something.” He cleared his throat. “Paul didn’t leave a letter. He gave us no indication of this, but…” he stared past my eyes, and he started to tear up. “But we knew.” He looked at me straight on again. “When he moved out of that house with you and Eric, he wasn’t the same. He couldn’t sleep. If we left him alone for any length of time, he’d start shaking and his skin would get freezing cold.”

I was clenching my fists so hard my hands were cramping. I hate this kind of talk. I hate hearing about people dying. I have heard enough about it for one life.

“He stopped talking about anything but death, Jon. And it wasn’t that he was depressed. He was terrified.”

I took a step back. I was two seconds from running out of there.

“The night he shot himself, I found him staring out our living room window, watching the snow. He was talking to himself. You know what he said?” I shook my head. “He said, ‘at least if I go to Hell, it’ll be warm.’ He just said that, over and over.” He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Jon, what the hell happened to my son?”

“I don’t know.” My voice broke. “I don’t know, Mr. Benedict.”

It wasn’t a lie. If I had known, I would have moved out when Paul did.

* * *

The house seemed emptier than before when I got home. It had seemed that way ever since Paul had left, of course, but that day it was worse. Eric’s car was there when I pulled into the driveway, but when I went inside, the place was silent and cold. I called out for Eric and got no answer. Weird, I thought. It was too cold to go running.

I didn’t think too much about it. I went to my room and crashed out in my recliner, cranked up my stereo and stared at the wall. I turned on the space heater and was amazed at how little it helped. I could just about see my breath.

That got me thinking about New Year’s, of course. I thought about Paul and how he’d looked, crouched on the floor, listening to whatever was going on in Eric’s room. I thought about his eyes when I’d tried to talk to him. I knew what his father meant; he’d looked scared out of his mind.

He’d looked haunted.

I cringed just thinking that. I don’t believe in ghosts. At the time, I’d attended close to thirty funerals, and I had never had one paranormal experience, not one. I believed — I still believe — that when you die you disappear, and all the grief in the world can’t pull you back. I don’t believe in ghosts…

…but I know what I saw.

I stood up and turned down the stereo. I left my room and knocked on Eric’s door. I heard someone answer. It didn’t sound like Eric’s voice. It sounded like a woman, but it was a rich, full sound, like a bunch of people speaking in unison. I couldn’t understand what the voice said, but I reached down to turn the doorknob.

The door was locked, and that door was cold as ice. Again.

About that time, I heard the front door open. I walked out into the living room and saw Eric walking in. “Where were you?”

Eric held up a cup from the gas station. “Went to get coffee.”

“Are we out?” I knew very well that we weren’t.

“Guess so.” He took off his shoes, walked right by me, and went into his room. I heard his door close and lock.

I went over to the front door and looked down at his shoes. Something didn’t look right. They were wet, but not stained with salt. If he’d walked down to the gas station and back (which was a not-inconsiderable trek, and it was below freezing out) they’d have been streaked it with.

I pulled my coat on and walked outside. Eric had left footprints in the snow, but not toward the sidewalk. They went around to the back of the house and stopped just below his bedroom window. He had been home, but had apparently climbed out of his window, walked around to the front of the house, and let himself in so that I wouldn’t know he’d been there. It occurred to me, as I walked back toward the front door, that his coffee cup hadn’t been steaming. He must have picked it up off his floor or out of the trashcan on his way to the front door.

I couldn’t think of any explanation then. I don’t have a good explanation now.

* * *

Eric stopped talking to me shortly after that. We lived in the same house, yeah, but we didn’t interact. The place had felt empty before, but now it felt dead.

But that’s not right, either, because as empty as it was, I knew I wasn’t alone.

I turned the heat up as far as it would go, and I still couldn’t get the place warm. My room was OK, but only because I bought a second space heater. I started going out with coworkers as often as I could, but that just meant I had to go home later. It’s not like I have family to stay with.

I’d get home after having dinner, and the place would be completely dark. Driving up to the house, I could see Eric’s window, but there was never any light there, either. I’d walk in, and honest to God it was colder inside than out. I turned on all the lights in the place, but that just made the walls look like dried bone. I turned on the TV, but the sound seemed to echo and distort.

I started making as much noise as possible, just to annoy Eric. He didn’t come out of his room, didn’t make a sound. I moved the TV to my room, figuring he’d get annoyed and come find me if he couldn’t watch the History channel. Nothing. I asked a couple of friends over after work one night, figuring we’d get drunk or get high or something and Eric would come join us. We sat in the living room for less than thirty minutes when they all decided they’d rather go to a bar. I couldn’t blame them. The house was eerie.

I went with them and we sat around and drank beer and threw darts. We talked about which of our female coworkers we’d most like to nail and which we already had. One of the guys, when he was suitably drunk, told me that I’d “never get laid in that creepy-ass house.”

He was right, of course, but that was the last thing on my mind.

I went home that night still buzzed. The alcohol made the cold seem a bit more tolerable, and I slept about the mostly soundly I had since Paul’s funeral.

I wasn’t really all that drunk, which was probably why I was so grumpy when I woke up the next morning with a skull-banging hangover. I stalked around the house, shivering and muttering to myself, trying to decide whether to go into work. I looked at the calendar and realized that Eric hadn’t written his work schedule on it for the month, nor had he left me a check for his rent.

I might have let it go if I hadn’t already felt like shit. But when you’re hung over, it’s hard to be scared of your roommate’s bedroom door. I went to Eric’s room and banged on the door loud enough to cause my head to start throbbing again.

I didn’t get an answer, not from Eric, at least. I heard those voices again. There were definitely more this time.

Frustrated, I knocked louder. The voices intensified. I didn’t even hear movement from inside the room, just this slow, constant murmur of voices. It reminded me of Mass. I’d only been to a Catholic Mass once in my life, but it freaked me out. The priest says “The Lord be with you,” and the people respond “And also with you.” I remember thinking that they all sounded hypnotized, their tones were all identical. That’s what the voices in Eric’s room were like.

This should have scared the crap out of me, but I was tired and frustrated. I think if I had listened more carefully to the voices, I might have walked away, or ended up like Paul. But I didn’t listen. I put my hand in my shirt and grabbed the doorknob. The door was locked, of course, but I could feel the chill from the doorknob through my shirt.

I took a step back and kicked in the door, and stepped into Eric’s room for the first time in three months.

My boss has a hot tub about thirty yards from his back door. He had a Christmas party there one year and some folks (myself included) were crazy enough to get in for a soak. Getting out of that tub, out of that wonderful hot water, and stepping into the winter air was almost painful.

That’s what stepping into Eric’s room felt like. The difference in temperature was sudden enough to take my breath away, and remember that the rest of the house was cold, too.

All of Eric’s furniture was gone except for the coffin. The white sheet was balled up in the corner. The room was completely bare — Eric’s books, his violin, his phone, his computer, it was all gone.

The coffin lay in the center of the room, and I had to force myself to take a step inside. Eric was lying in the coffin, hands folded against his chest, staring up at the ceiling. The blinds were closed, and the light from the hallway seemed to dim as I walked toward the coffin.

Eric didn’t even blink as I walked over to him. I could see him breathing, but at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at his funeral, and that his death shouldn’t have surprised me. I stood over him, looking down, and I found myself thinking “goodbye,” just like I always do at funerals.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He should have been shivering, but he didn’t even have goose bumps. I was reaching down to shake him when I heard the voices again, but this time, they were right behind me, and I could make out individuals.

“Don’t bother.” It actually took me a minute to place my mother’s voice, but then, I hadn’t heard it in five years.

“He’s gone,” said another. My granduncle. Dead seven years.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, cold enough to make my whole body numb. “This isn’t his fault,” said my father. Dead four years.

I tried to ask what was happening, how could this be possible, what was it about that coffin that had done this. I couldn’t. All I could do was stare down at Eric, and watch as his eyes closed.

“Is he dead?” I whispered.

“Soon,” said Paul’s voice.

I started to turn around then. I felt my feet turning, even though my brain was screaming at me to stay the hell put. I raised my eyes, started to turn my head. As soon as I did that, the room changed. It had felt empty before, even with the voices and the touch on my shoulder. But when I started to turn, I felt exactly what emptiness was.

Staring up into the night sky when it’s snowing, you get a sense of what I felt. An infinitesimally small sense, but it’s the best I can do. I knew, no matter what I believed before or what I believe now, in that moment I knew exactly how big and empty the world really was. Looking down, I saw into the space between Eric’s body and the bottom of the coffin, and I didn’t see wood. I saw into infinity.

I almost fell over. I think my legs actually gave out, but they held me up. I felt my entire body go numb and I heard their voices again, all saying something different. It was like listening to the ocean, a quiet, gray wash of sound, filled with syllables I should have known and names I should have remembered. But I couldn’t identify any of it, because I was still alive. I looked down into that space between, and I saw that I was right.

There is nothing when you die. But nothing doesn’t really mean the same thing when you’re dead. We — the living — we can’t understand eternity, although we talk a great game. But the people I had seen buried over the years, they’d had eternity every day of my life to wait.

I don’t know what they were waiting for. I never asked. Hell, I don’t even believe any of this shit, but I know what I saw.

I steadied myself and I stood there, stock still, looking at Eric. I tried to think of something to say, but all that was in my head was that he was already in a coffin, so he’d be easy to bury.

The ghosts — did I really just say that? — behind me didn’t say anything for a long time. That room was so quiet that I could hear Eric’s heartbeat slow…and then stop.

He exhaled once, and it seemed to go on forever. It was a sharp, cold, dry sound, like wind across pavement when it’s too cold for the snow to melt. He didn’t relax one bit as his died, just lay there, stiff and cold, waiting for something.

As I watched, the space between him and the coffin grew. I have no good way to describe this. Nothing about the room changed, but I felt the distance contained in that half-inch of space grow until you could have dropped the whole house into it. And then I felt the people behind him walk into it. One by one, they walked around me, over me, through me, into that endless half-inch, into eternity.

I never saw any of them. I never saw any ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts.

When the last of them was gone, the lid to the coffin picked itself up from the floor and locked itself into place. After that, I get a little hazy.

* * *

The police found needle marks on Eric’s arms. They said he’d been using amphetamines for months, that he’d moved from pills to shooting, and that his paranoia was a typical side effect of doing that much speed. They said he’d sold his stuff to pay for his habit, and that he’d quit his job around the same time Paul died. They said that he’d probably crashed out for days at a time, and then gone on a run and been awake for a week. They guessed he’d been avoiding me because he was ashamed or afraid I’d turn him in or something.

I have no reason to disbelieve any of that.

They buried him in that coffin. I didn’t go to the funeral. I figured I’d already gone, once.

I sold the house right after Eric died. A nice young couple with a yellow lab puppy bought it. They called me a month later to ask if the spare bedroom had always been so cold. I told them that it had been like that the last few months. The last time I drove by the house, there was a “for sale” sign in the yard.

It’s not haunted. Even if I believed in ghosts — which I don’t — the coffin is gone. I think what’s left in that house is just leftovers, and it will pass into that gray, endless, half-inch sooner or later.

Eventually, we’ll all end up there. If you believe in that kind of thing.

And I don’t.

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