Ghost Eaters

by Clay McLeod Chapman

But sometimes the best kind of help a friend can offer is to just stop helping.

Here’s the straw, here’s the camel’s back. Listen to it snap like a goddamn bone.

But this is a ghost story. A ghost is someone caught in a loop, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again. So who’s the real ghost here? Who’s haunting who?

Silas is long gone now. He’s no longer the Silas we all knew. What’s left of our friend is nothing more than a shadow of his former self. A phantom. Silas was a ghost long before he passed away.

Even at twelve, I sensed my parents were destined for divorce—or should be. They could’ve put our family out of its collective misery just by separating, but instead, they’ve gone through the motions of marriage with ghoulish devotion.

“They’re lost souls. Spirits with no house to haunt.”

“What do you think happens if you die outside? Your ghost wanders. Imagine all those homeless ghosts out there, roving the streets, just looking for something, anything, to call home.”

That’s all spirits want, apparently. To be invited in; a place to lay down their roots. Not much different than the living, I guess. Isn’t that what we’re all after? A home to call our own?

If the drug allows us a glimpse into the realm of the dead, Ghost allows the dead to glimpse back into the realm of the living…and it turns out they’re just as hungry for it as people are. Silas needed a safe house, a clean house, so he reached out to Tobias for help.

I’m trapped. I can’t escape this house—and even if I could, I’m so addicted to my ghosts, I don’t know if I could stay away forever. Isn’t that what haunting a house is, after all? You can never leave. I need to accept that this is where I live now. Where I haunt. Home sweet home.

Home’s calling me back. There’s no escaping your own haunted house. It reels you in whenever you try to run.

Along with a bevy of antibiotics and antifungal drugs, the doctors try to handle my “hallucinations” with Haloperidol. Keep me sedate with Lorazepam. Benzodiazepine. But the ghosts never go away. Drugs won’t stop them—I know this already. The dead are always in the room. So I look away. It’s all I can do. I try to pretend they’re not there, staring back. Reaching out for me. Touching me. This forced detox feels like an exorcism. They keep me bound to my bed and all I want is to break free, but they won’t let me go until I’m clean.

“You’ve still got some Ghost rattling around your bloodstream right now. I can hear the chains from all the way over here. That shit never leaves your body.”

“Your ghosts are never through with you, Erin. They never leave. You’ll always be haunted, whether you dose or not. I thought you would’ve figured that out by now.”

What is a ghost? Is it a shadow of our past clinging to our present? I believe it’s our addictions. The habits we form that end up consuming us if we allow them to take over.