When Ghosts Call Us Home

by Katya de Becerra

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?” —Marisha Pessl, Night Film

Ghosts are memories; we carry them in our blood.

in the end of the Path

I catch a glimpse of the ocean through the glass. It looks cold, vast, unknowable.

The past, returning. In disguise.

Was that her wish?

to disappear?

It reminds me of Rie Inō, a Kabuki student who played Sadako, the terrifying ghost in Ringu. To get the footage of Sadako crawling out of the well,Rie Inō was filmed walking backward, moving her limbs in the signature jerky Kabuki motions which are traditionally used to portray powerful emotions. When the footage was run in reverse, the effect was unnatural, blood-chilling.

I imagine there’s a red, glimmering string that connects me to him, like we’re forever linked.

Sleep you will, gentle spirit, night itself cradling you on its feathered wing.

Being here is like an extreme version of immersion therapy, and it’s working a little bit too well.

It is not death I fear but what’s leading up to it, the act of dying.

A part of me, the part that’s tired and desperate, kind of wishes I could just black out. Cut to black.

“You have to fight it. She can’t win,” Layla cries out, and then she’s dragged backward by an unseen force into the tight space, into the blind spot.

There’s that moment early on in the fall, before I see the ground approach, when I think I’m actually flying, but that moment doesn’t last. The ending comes. It always does.

She’s the reason I’m on the Path.

“Welcome to Shadow House, Sophia. You are mine.”

I hover over my broken body, watching with cold detachment as Layla cries over me, as she begs the darkness for another chance, for a life. In her moment of despair, my sister doesn’t care who listens, who answers her prayer. She spills her blood and makes a pact, seals it with an incantation from the Book of Ka’schor that she finds in the house. When I return, made whole again, all but my injured ankle and a bracelet of half-moon scars around my wrist, my rebirth comes with strings attached. Vermillion is a part of me. But she wants more—all of me. She wants to live again, to feel again. To leave this house that became her prison.

Find me in the dark.

Even when we begin to forget, we remember.

Some V-heads say such a sighting is the first Sign of the new Path that will lead seekers to a world beyond this one, if only they are brave enough.