Future Ghosts: A Novel in 82 Cantos

By JC Crooks

Tucked into the hidden folds of the American Midwest, there’s a town where the dead do not stay that way. On the third day after their deaths, for reasons that no one has yet to figure out, the souls of Great Salt Heron, Ohio return to the family home to live out eternity inside the prison of their daily routines. But when a series of disappearances begin pointing to a long-told legend coming to fruition, ten-year-old Milo is confronted with the a series of choices that could save his father from disappearing forever... as well as a series of betrayals that could upend all their lives—and afterlives—in terrible ways. Future Ghosts is a book about the power of hope, the power of story, and all the ways that our own shared history never lets us go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483566245

Book preview

ghosts.

CANTO 1

A VIEW OF OUR TOWN

(OR, HOW NOT TO GET FOUND)

Friday, July 10th

The first thing you notice when you’re dead is how different the world looks. All the shapes are the same, of course. Squares are still square. Circles still run forever. Dogs are still dog-shaped.

What’s different, though, is the color of things. The regular colors are still there. But after you die and come back as a ghost, it feels like your sixty-four pack of crayons has suddenly tripled.

It’s a weird feeling to look at, say, a wagon that you know is just plain old dark red, but now see that it’s not at all plain old dark red but another color entirely. One you don’t have a name for. One that’s impossible to describe to someone who’s not a ghost yet because, to be honest, there’s no good place to start. A couple of the older ghosts in the house have been working on a chart for the past century or so. They’ve even given the new colors names. But, again, when it comes to the living, you might as well toss a catfish off the roof and claim you’re teaching it to fly.

I bring this up because whenever I think back to that first morning, one week before everything around here changed forever, I always picture Milo’s eyes.

Back when I was just a perfectly healthy, perfectly alive twelve-year-old kid who always had to spell out his name every single solitary time anybody asked (F, A, W, K, E, S, no, not like the animal and yes, I’m sure) and who couldn’t quite keep his nose out of trouble, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to the color of some other boy’s eyes, even if he was a distant great-great grand nephew. But when you’re dead, your list of activities tends to get chopped into halves, then quarters, and boredom is one of those things I’ve never been able to abide. In fact, it’s probably third on the list, right behind cauliflower and starched shirts that make you itch so bad you spend most of Sunday morning trying to claw off your own skin. So, as an act of self-preservation, I’ve become a spy. And to be a good one, getting good at noticing things is essential.

Before that morning, Milo’s eyes were green. But that morning, standing in the second floor hallway of the family home looking so shocked that my mother’s warning about your face staying like that permanently rang in my ears, his eyes were no longer green. Instead, they were one of the nameless colors, something between the pale underside of a silver maple leaf and the way fire looks right where it meets the metal when you toss an aerosol can of hairspray into its center and wait for it to hiss away like a rocket.

The story, then, starts with that color. And it starts with Milo, because although all of us were different by the end of that next week, it’s his story first. He’s the one who risked the most. He’s also the one who had the most to lose. And if those two things aren’t enough to make you the hero of the story, then I’m not sure why any of us would ever bother to get out of bed ever again.

So, on that day, one week shy of turning eleven, Milo Prentiss was still alive.

Most places, that’s not something you really need to say. But, like I said, our town is not most places.

Great Salt Heron is just above and to the right of the middle of Ohio, right where its heart would be if the state was made of muscle and bone instead of dirt.

You’ve never been here. I’m sure of that. The townspeople are very careful about making sure outsiders stay that way. The town is fifty miles from any highway going anywhere even remotely useful.

It’s never been on a map. The best way to stay hidden, as Sal would say, is to never get found in the first place.

I don’t know the details, but there are committee meetings once a month at the courthouse to brainstorm new ways to discourage visitors. They call themselves the Unwelcome Wagon. Whatever they do, they’re experts at it by now.

You won’t ever see this, so I’ll describe it for you. (Secretive doesn’t have to mean impolite. After all, this is the Midwest.)

Whatever direction you take to get here, your first view will be from above. We’re in a valley. I’ve been told that all the high and low places were carved out by glaciers flowing south from the nearest great lake two million years ago. It’s an interesting fact, something I’m glad to know. But it’s definitely not something I’d ever want to sit and watch happen.

So, you’re on a hill, let’s say, in a cool, bright spot. The first thing you’ll notice are the roofs of the houses poking up through the trees that were there long before the first settlers stopped here on their journey west for reasons they apparently didn’t find important enough to write down.

The trees are mostly ash, fed by streams cutting from river to lake, and tall.

From this distance, it might look like just any old town.

But give it a few minutes and you’ll notice that something feels off, that the height of the houses are out of whack with the way we expect things to look. Moving closer, it won’t take long to see that our town is unlike any others you’ll ever see.

For reasons that no one has ever figured out, the dead of Great Salt Heron, Ohio don’t stay that way. Around here, when you die you come back the day after your funeral to live in one of the rooms in the family home.

Most of the houses are now more than ten stories high.

On top of that, the dead are almost identical to the living: there are no hauntings, no white sheets, no electromagnetic disturbances, no rattling chains—unless, of course, someone happens to be winching a rotten stump from the lawn with an old Chevy pickup.

Whatever differences we ghosts have from the living are small enough not to have much effect at all on the daily life of the town. Death in Great Salt Heron is as solid and straightforward as a hand-hewn kitchen table.

No one knows why things work the way they do here. Everyone has a theory, a story to build upon like the houses that keep inching up toward the clouds. But no one knows for sure.

Outside of this one little bit of oddness, Great Salt Heron is just like all the other small towns in this corner of the world. Like my mother used to say, it doesn’t matter how many people live here; Great Salt Heron follows the one rule of thumb that makes a small town a small town. Which is: Nothing strange ever happens—until, of course, it does.

CANTO 2

HOME IS WHERE THE HAUNT IS

(OR, THAT’S THE SPIRIT)

Our house is one of the oldest in town. It starts out as a Victorian, but after about six levels the architecture swaps styles every couple stories until it ends in something called neo-colonial on seventeen.

The house was built around a sycamore. The trunk runs up through the dining room on the ground floor and spreads up and out, branches spreading out whichever way they please. Above the roof, leaves flash like white hands waving in the sunlight.

At eleven, Milo was sure he would spend eternity in that house. And why wouldn’t he be? Before that week there was no reason to think otherwise.

Milo spent most of his time with the ghosts. His mom Kate worked nights and his dad Brian had been in a coma for the last few years after an accident at work.

The floors are full. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, second cousins come, go, stay, shift. It’s a hive of a place.

By that age, Milo knew most of them. Not all, but most. Some are friendly. Some aren’t. Some are by their very nature unknowable.

Being alone was never an option. Even locked inside his bedroom, the house made sure he knew real solitude is an illusion.

Loneliness, though: there’s no escaping that. Both of us know that song by heart.

I guess you could complain that the natural order of things (or whatever) is all out of whack around here, and maybe you’d be right.

But normal is a strange animal. Like my mother also used to say: You can get used to a lot given long enough.

And if there’s one thing we have here, it’s time.

CANTO 3

SLEUTH BE TOLD

(OR, DEAD MEN TELL MORE TALES)

For the last few summers, Milo’s great-great-great Uncle Sal had let him help with his private eye business.

By that point, Sal had been dead for seventy-six years. But back in life Sal was a world-renowned mapmaker. According to him, in fact, he was better than just great. He was history’s greatest cartographer.

Sal has always been the type who can’t sit still for very long. He started the gumshoe business, I suspect, to keep his sanity.

I always got the idea the rest of the family was glad for anything to keep him occupied. Sal has always been a fire that needs to be fed. If you aren’t careful, whole countries can go up in flames.

Mapmaking requires travel, and while that’s possible for a ghost, it’s not terribly practical. Most of us don’t leave the house, let alone the town. The farthest anyone might routinely travel would be to the Chipotle in Larsonia fifty miles away, but that’s only when the craving gets to be too much for some people. Apart from that one exception, I think we’ve spent so much time hiding from the rest of the world, that somehow we’ve gotten the idea that there’s nothing beyond the city limits.

I guess secrets held that long rear their heads in strange ways sometimes.

The assistant job didn’t pay, but to be fair, Sal wasn’t in dire need of Milo’s help.

Mostly, Milo was just glad for something to do.

After school let out, it took only a few days for the two of them to settle into a routine. Sal woke the boy for an early breakfast. They’d read the paper together, talk through the finer points of active cases, and spend the rest of the morning in the library down at the bottom of Claremont.

After lunch, legwork: Visiting clients, interviewing suspects, examining possible scenes for any number of possible crimes. Wherever the mystery took them, they went—past abandoned warehouses, along rusty miles of rail and weedy pastures, and through green-gold patches of forest.

Business was good. In a town where no one has the option of taking his darkest secrets to the grave, the well doesn’t have a chance to run dry. For every ghost, a grudge. For every grudge, a mystery. For every mystery, a mere $45 per hour to work on untying the knots.

Already that summer they’d nabbed one woman responsible for sabotaging her neighbor’s blue ribbon asparagus patch, two cat burglars stealing jewels, and one regular burglar stealing cats. They’d even fingered the particular raccoon tearing out Mrs. Holzer’s azaleas.

The night before the morning when our lives would be changed forever, They’d tied a bow around a mystery concerning a purebred Cocker Spaniel’s litter of less-than-purebred pups. When they gave the (AKC district and regional champion) spaniel’s owners the photos of the culprit—a drooling, cross-eyed Doberman—they broke down in tears.

They let themselves out when it became apparent the waterworks weren’t going to stop anytime soon. Sal left the bill by their house keys.

I mention that night for two reasons.

First, on the way home Sal gave Milo a wink for a job well done, and kept his arm around his shoulders all the way home. One look at Milo’s face was all you needed to understand how important that gesture was to him.

The second: Right before the pair stepped through the front door, I remember looking past them for a moment. I thought I could see something moving along the horizon, just below the bulk of an orange moon. Shaped like a sail and only a half shade darker than the surrounding night, it made a wide arc before dropping like the point of a knife through a Hefty bag. It was closing in, moving quickly, as if it had wings.

I wouldn’t think of it again until a few days later, and I don’t think either Milo or Sal saw it. But that night, somewhere in the back of my mind, I must’ve sensed it: a change was coming. I’m not so full of myself, though, to claim that I had any idea just how big, how totally earth shattering, that change would be.

CANTO 4

A CAVEAT

(OR, SHADES ARE SHADY)

A note, before I get too far ahead of myself.

As I mentioned before, there’s not a whole lot of difference between ghosts and the living (or, as I usually refer to them, pre-ghosts). But there are a couple exceptions to the rule that I should probably clear up before we get any farther.

No one knows why, but some ghosts came back with the ability to, for lack of better words, read minds.

Mostly, this applies to the really old ghosts, the ones from the first couple batches, back when the town was still trying to decide if it really wanted to be a town. But occasionally, it’ll happen with the ones who lived and died and returned in the decades after. And, for whatever reason, I’m in that group.

Trouble is, though, I seem to have a wire loose somewhere. The ability, for me, kind of comes and goes. It’ll flicker to life and stay on for days, even weeks at a time. Other times, though, it shorts out altogether and I’m stuck trying to read lips or listening from behind corners and inside the heat vents.

If I could get it fixed, I would. But there doesn’t seem to be enough of a demand for it to be included in any certificate programs that I’m aware of, mail-order or otherwise. (I check the local classifieds every so often, but so far, no dice.)

So, I promise to describe events as honestly and accurately as I’m able. For most of that week everything was working. But there are a couple stretches, I’ll warn you up front, where the whole operation went dark.

Also, it probably needs to be said that while you’ll always get the truth from me, some of the other ghosts in the house have a slightly less, well, straightforward relationship with the truth, at least as far as most of us understand it.

So. Consider yourself warned.