In Their Wheelhouse
The strange thumping started when she first moved into the house. Andrea thought it was the neighbors at first, until she remembered that she didn’t live in an apartment anymore—finally, she breathed with relief every time she remembered—and that there was no neighbor on the other side of the wall to be making noise.
Which begged the question: What, or who, was doing the thumping?
It was just Andrea and her birds out there. After Randall died, she’d done what they’d always said they’d do: She bought a house in the country, planted a garden, and commenced a quiet life of playing music. When she wasn’t telecommuting into the firm, that is.
She just had never really planned to do it alone. She had planned for Randall to be there too, playing cello while she played violin, taking care of the birds while she tended the garden, decorating the house while she baked.
Instead, the violin echoed pitifully without him, the birds squawked indignantly when she didn’t feed them on time, and she’d forgotten to decorate for Christmas. Pastries went stale because she kept forgetting to halve recipes, and the garden, it turned out, wasn’t that fun in the winter.
As the weeks went by, the thumping increased. Andrea had always been a no-nonsense sort of gal—growing up at the height of the Cold War had done it to her, she thought—so a ghost was nowhere near the top of her list for sources of the thumping. Bad plumbing? Mice in the walls? Those were in her wheelhouse.
But as expert after expert confirmed that the plumbing was in perfect condition and there were no animals, mice or otherwise, in her walls, she started to think: Well, it could be a ghost. If there were no other explanations on this plane of existence. Randall would have liked that.
Andrea really started to believe, however, when she was playing something contemporary and the thumping chimed in... in time.
She paused, and the thumping paused as well. She played, and the thumping picked up again, acting as a bass note to her melody.
Again—she paused, it paused. She played, it played.
“Hello?” She finally asked. Her voice was rough after not having spoken out loud for a few days.
A thumping came back—two quick hits, like the two syllables of ‘hello.’
She swallowed, her mind racing. “Are you a ghost? Once for yes, two for no.”
A single thump. It seemed to resonate through the house, and echoed in her thoughts. It was just possible she’d finally cracked under the grief of losing Randall. It was equally possible, she thought, that he was finally being proven right: There was more in this universe than she could see with her eyes and touch with her hands.
“Are you going to hurt me?” She asked.
Quickly it responded with two thumps, like it couldn’t get them out fast enough.
Andrea let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding. “Okay. Okay, then. “Do you want to keep playing?”
One quick thump, so Andrea picked up her bow and began playing again. When she finished the song, she held her breath. The silence felt expectant, like the pause between performance and applause. So she slipped into another, then another. The thumping—the ghost—kept up with each piece. She switched to Debussy, then Tchaikovsky. She tested out Philip Glass, then moved back into contemporary pop. The ghost kept up at every turn. By the time she was done, darkness had fallen hours before, and she’d never bothered to turn on a light.
Months passed that way. At first, she and the ghost largely ignored each other when they weren’t playing music. But Andrea came to think of it as having a roommate, and would sometimes say things out loud to it.
“Sorry about the lights,” she muttered once when she got out of bed late one night.
The rapid thumping that echoed along the stairway’s wall sounded a little like laughter.
“Right, time probably doesn’t work for you the same way,” she’d said, then yawned and went back to bed.
Eventually, Andrea grew curious and began asking more questions.
“Did you die here?” It wasn’t the first question she asked, and she wasn’t altogether sure she wanted an answer, but she wanted to knock down a wall and if she was messing with someone’s final resting place she thought she should at least be aware.
But two thumps came through, so Andrea knocked down the wall separating kitchen from living room and felt okay about it.
“Did you live here?” She asked.
Two more thumps.
“So why are you here?” She asked.
But there was no answer, so Andrea started to research hauntings. At first she thought the ghost had come in on a piece of furniture she’d gotten at an estate sale. She’d read that that could happen, but the ghost denied it.
One day, while checking on the tomatoes, it occurred to Andrea to devise a way to use an alphabet with it. Then she could ask more questions. For a second, and no longer, she considered trying a ouija board, but wasn’t sure if she believed it was a toy or if it would accidentally open her up to demons. Either way, it seemed like a bad idea. The thumping was working for the two of them so far, so she’d stick with it.
She had an idea: Randall had known Morse code from his time in the Navy. When they’d first started dating, he’d tapped out ‘I love you’ on her hand before he’d said it out loud. So she asked the ghost, “Do you know Morse code?”
One thump, which seemed to boom throughout the house. If volume denoted excitement, then…
She looked up a key again, trying to memorize the series of dots and dashes that would fill in for letters and words. When she thought she had it reasonably down, she started thinking of questions to ask. She waited until midnight, though she couldn’t fathom why she did, since the thumping had never seemed any stronger or weaker at any time of day.
“Why are you here?” She asked first.
The series of thumps came so fast she couldn’t keep up.
“Sorry, could you do it slower?”
Again came the series, and she recognized enough of it to put it together: For you.
Irrationally, her brain flashed back to Grey’s Anatomy, and to Denny Duquette telling Izzie Stevens he was there for her. A brain tumor would explain a lot, she supposed.
For a moment, she considered panicking. It had said at the beginning it wasn’t there to hurt her, but…
Two thumps. No?
Then came a series of thumps she couldn’t have forgotten if she tried.
Two dots. A dot, a dash, two dots. A dash, a dot, two dashes.
Repeated: Two dots. A dot, a dash, two dots. A dash, a dot, two dashes. Two dots. A dot, a dash, two dots. A dash, a dot, two dashes.
ILY. ILY. ILY.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
“Randy,” she breathed.
One thump, then back to the repetition: Two dots. A dot, a dash, two dots. A dash, a dot, two dashes. ILY. I love you.
Andrea wept. Randall kept repeating the sequence.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she wiped her tears. She went into the attic and opened a box, pulling out sheet music she swore she’d never play again after she buried Randall. It was all music Randall had composed himself, music that hardly anyone else had ever heard.
Gently, Andrea placed the pages on the stand. After a deep breath, she started playing the violin’s part, and soon Randall chimed in with the cello’s. They played until sunrise.
Notes:
The “something contemporary” I imagine Andrea was playing when she first noticed him is this one. Sorry kids, I’m a sucker for instrumental covers of pop music.
I don’t know if people enlisted in the Navy still learn Morse code or if they ever did, but whatever. I’m not going that deep into research, sorry.
In Grey’s Anatomy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Denny Duquette, who is engaged to Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl). He dies before they get married, of course, and then in season five she begins seeing him everywhere. At first she thinks it’s a manifestation of her guilt because she’s moved on, then she thinks he’s a ghost coming to visit her (and have wild sex with her, because that’s what ghosts do, obviously). She asks several times why he’s there, and he always says, “For you.” Eventually she realizes that he doesn't mean it as a comfort—he’s not there for her, he’s there for her, to come get her, to take her to wherever people go when they die. Because she has a brain tumor. Of course. For some reason, this really stuck with me and now any time someone says, “For you,” as a full sentence, it sounds very ominous to me. Incidentally, this is when I gave up on Grey’s Anatomy.
Prompt
You can use this prompt to write your own story, draw something, sing a song, whatever you like! I will (probably) use it for the next story!
Cinderella went to the ball to kill the prince.
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Stay safe and healthy wherever you are,
Valorie