A Ghost to Let

By E. E. M. Dahlen

Ginny didn’t know how or when, but she knew her end would come soon, for she now actively sought it. Returning to ‘the real world’ from active duty, and plagued by PTSD, Arthur could see no purpose in life. A Ghost to Let is an adventure in history, alchemy, ghosts, myth, place, dream, and time…. It is about finding one’s place in the Universe, finding self, finding oneness, and finding love, either in this life or in the next.

Their eyes see only the other.
Their hearts sink to one beat.
They draw ever closer, magnets unwavering,
each no longer solo,
two halves now a whole.
Weakness cannot part them.
Through the chemical wedding, one love is born.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716787553

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DAHLEN

Copyright © 2020 E. E. M. Dahlen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-7167-8756-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7167-8757-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7167-8755-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020912704

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/06/2020

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May everyone find their place.

Good and evil have been compelled to coexist since before the dawn of time. The two are symbiotic twins—one is not able to exist without the other. The universe has thus had to manage a delicate balancing act between the polar opposites to keep evil’s influence at bay. But the pendulum usually has favored evil, as her greatest weapon against man has always been close at hand as she exploits his natural tendency toward laziness and self-absorption.

Evil was again gathering her forces, raising a great army from the lots of history’s putrid graves.

Loneliness is soul crushing. She digs a pit that even the greatest of heroes cannot hope to climb out of on their own. She and her equally ugly stepsister, evil, have worked tirelessly to claim their place and rule over the land.

Prologue

Ginny didn’t know how or when, but she knew her end would come soon, for she now actively sought it.

Only three options immediately came to mind. She could purposely expire at work, the place she had come to loathe more than anyplace else in the world during her mind-numbingly endless decade of hard work and so-called service, thus sticking it to the man. She could check herself into the hospital, a cold behemoth of an industry. There she would be hooked up to a bunch of invasive, noisy, blinking machines; be poked at, prodded, drugged up, and humiliated; have the bejesus scared out of her; be even more miserable than she already was; and still die anyway. Or, she could die alone at her house, the four-walled structure she had once called home. Her body would be left to rot and become carrion, undiscovered until the bank came to repossess it, perhaps five to ten years down the pike. There, her ghost would be left to wander in the structure’s echoing bleakness, alone for all of eternity, or until the place was torn down.

There was the slightest possibility of a fourth option, however. This fourth option, if indeed doable, would allow her to find the perfect time and place to expire under her own terms and finish out eternity as a ghost, thus hopefully finally finding her overall place in the grand scheme of things. In finding that place, maybe, just maybe, she would find herself a modicum of peace and happiness in the end.

Having been neither really good nor really bad in life, she was pretty sure that she’d be going neither up nor down upon exhaling her last breath. Instead, she expected she would likely remain firmly planted in place for the remainder of eternity, or at least until what some called the Rapture. She thus figured she had better hurry up and find that eternal place on earth now before it was too late to choose, or be doomed forever to this.

Can I even choose? Ginny wondered. She figured, though, that it couldn’t hurt to see what else she might come up with. The here and now offered her nothing but sorrow. Perhaps either the yesteryear or the morrow would hold the answer. She was sure she could be an asset to any other place or time if given a second chance. She had failed miserably in the now. Hopefully, she had learned some life lessons that would help her out the next time around.

She could be a ghost to let.

Her most frequent recurring nightmare, even in the midst of her happiest moments in life, had been the perplexing thought of possibly spending eternity in the windowless whitewashed cinder-block basement filing room of her longtime workplace. It almost seemed fated to her as she had been stuck down in the dungeon for so many years already in that singular room. The filing room was stacked eight wobbly boxes high with archive box upon archive box of handwritten ledgers and computer-generated outputs that would never again see the light of day or meet their retention end dates. The boxes seemed to collect only to tower over her, threatening to fall on her and defeat her, or to become fire tinder. Not a single real treasure could be found among them.

Work, for her, was only about a paycheck and an expensive, rarely used health insurance policy. Hers was an everyman’s job. Most everyone there was either middle-aged or ancient, and it showed. Boredom eating and a lack of exercise or even getting up from one’s desk during the long workday had begun to show on all of them. As a ghost at work, she might now and again get a few good old-fashioned shits and giggles by pulling pranks on the other idiots who were unfortunate enough to work there. But that didn’t seem worth sticking around for.

She could imagine Mr. Johnson, her immediate supervisor—a monotone-voiced, balding, ten-key-finger-crippled, dreamless, sour, wrinkled older man who lived his life guzzling diet sodas and wearing only tan high-water pants and extrawide 1970s neckties—pooping himself if she, say, popped out of a file drawer or archive box when he came downstairs for the rare document. She knew, however, that consigning herself to her workplace for the rest of eternity or the afterlife would ultimately be worse than a fate in hell. Work was where she had first met Loneliness and gotten to know her well—too well. Loneliness was a bitch! But she was always there, always lurking, just like her coworkers.

No one there was close or even pretended to passively like one another. At work, she kept her nose clean and her head down. Loneliness was the only one there she had come to know well, though she wished she hadn’t. She was a wallflower, just one of the masses, a drone with big dreams and few means of attaining them. Monday through Friday, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, she went to work and slogged it out, repeating the same routine over and over again. During her many years of service, she had early on begun to feel herself becoming dead inside. Only her daughter had kept her soul alive and present.

Her second option, the hospital, seemed to her to be an even scarier and more depressing option than spending forever at her workplace. She could never purposely check herself into such a place. She would have to be unconscious and half dead already and be carried in strapped to a stretcher in order for that to wind up as her end.

Home. Ginny now thought about that place. She had no home. There was no one left she could call close family, especially after her daughter’s death and the recent hospital incident with her sister and the rest of them. At that moment, the prospect of dying at home and spending an eternity there by herself with all the house’s memories to haunt her instead of her haunting them was a very real possibility. Remaining there would be demoralizing and lonely at the least.

In every iteration of any forever she could immediately imagine for herself, she felt the weight of the world like a cement cinder block holding her down and crushing her chest where a beating heart had once been. Her brain now sat in its vessel, numb and filled with mush, and she was but a helpless zombie, of neither the living nor the dead.

There had to be something else out there—something she didn’t yet know of or hadn’t yet considered. She was desperate but determined to find out the where, when, how, why, and what of that something.

With a particular urgency to find a final resolution, first thing the next morning, she made a hasty call in to work, coughing and feigning sickness. She knew she was overdoing things, having just gotten back from taking more than a month off for funeral leave. The call was sure to further aggravate Mr. Johnson and her coworkers, who would have to pick up her slack yet again. She could almost hear Mr. Johnson’s eyes roll over the phone when he answered and found it was her on the line - again. But she made a convincing case for illness as she purposely hacked up a lung, and she quickly hung up on their conversation to go about doing what needed to get done.

She proceeded to the bank to be first in line when the doors opened for the day for business. At 9:00 a.m., when the doors clicked unlocked, she walked through the glass front doors, stoic and determined to do whatever she needed to in order to retrieve all of her available cash. Though it was technically her money she would be withdrawing, she knew the bank would not be happy at the prospect of turning over the large sum she had in mind. It was a business, after all. If she really wanted it and really meant it, she would need to remain strong and steadfast in her demand for every single red cent.

She was right about the bank. When the first available customer service representative called her over to his tiny, austere gray cubicle and invited her to have a seat, he immediately set upon her with a set of standard Don’t you dare make this withdrawal type questions. Was she sure she wanted to withdraw such a large amount of cash? How much money did she really need? What was the money for? Was she in trouble? Was someone putting her up to withdrawing the money against her will? Was she in danger? Was someone else in danger?

She pushed all of these questions aside though, filled out the requisite paperwork, and demanded that her withdrawal request be honored without further delay. And quietly she proceeded to take out her entire life savings, a whopping $9,000; withdrew what she had stashed in her daughter’s college fund, $27,000 to date; and withdrew her two Roth IRAs, opting not to have the normally requisite taxes withheld at the time of withdrawal to avoid the later crushing tax bill.

Ultimately, Ginny walked out the front doors of the bank less than an hour later with a massive grand sum of $203,000 in cold, hard cash in hand. The cash, even dispensed as one-hundred-dollar bills, was surprisingly bulky and heavy. The wads had to be so tightly rolled and packed into her purse that when she closed it, the zipper snagged and barely managed to hold. The bank’s branch manager insisted on walking her to the front doors as he spouted off various bank investment opportunities that he said she would be wise to consider. Finally, disappointed that he couldn’t persuade her to leave at least some of the funds behind, he had a security guard escort her the rest of the way to her car, presumably to make sure no one was threatening her.

Disappointed it seemed, the guard soon found out for himself that no one was forcing her to take out the cash. No excitement was to be had that day, and the bank took a small but real loss.

Sitting in the bank’s parking lot for the longest time, she locked all the doors and double-checked to make sure all the windows were rolled up. The multiple wads of cash on her person made her feel rich, scared, and guilty all in one fell swoop. She was suddenly rich. She had never seen so much cash in all her life. This scared her. Any greedy person who saw her with so much money might forcibly try to take it from her. She felt guilty, as she, for some reason, didn’t believe she deserved so much cash. What had she really done to earn all of this and to now just have it? She was determined, though, to live it up in her last remaining weeks as she found her place in purgatory, the astral plane between heaven and hell. As she no longer had a place in this life, the afterlife held much more promise. Having felt not at all successful in this life, she felt the urgent need to hurry up and look for her place in the afterlife—and make it work this time.

Starting up her car, she finally pulled out of the bank’s lot and returned to her too big, too empty, too lonely, too dark house. At the threshold, she stood, halfway between outside and in, paralyzed, as she reviewed in her mind’s eye all the happy memories that had happened there not so long ago. It all had been ripped away from her so suddenly.

She’d had no hobbies or any life beyond her child. When Sam was born, Ginny’s prior life had stopped, and her life had become only about her. Monday through Friday, she would get up; scurry about, doing a bit of housework; and then hand her sleeping child over to her mother as she rushed off to work for nine hours. After work, she would make dinner, bathe Sam, read to her for hours, play with her until bed, and then go to bed herself. On Saturdays, Sam had had a swim class thrown into the mix, but that had been it. That life had been more than enough for Ginny, though. It had been everything.

A sound— a chirping bird, a croaking toad, or cicadas calling to mate—eventually got her going again, and she entered the sterile structure. All the drapes had been drawn for weeks, and the house already smelled musty and had an air of looking unkempt, perhaps already abandoned even.

She still needed to do a few things there, though. Not wanting to be there any longer than necessary, she grabbed her heavyweight canvas work bag from the entryway and emptied it of its contents: an old, moldy, wet brown bag still half full of something no longer recognizable from her lunch on her last day at work before Sam died; a long-overdue library book ruined by her dripping lunch; and some miscellaneous work stuff. Gagging at the smell, she dispensed several puffs of Febreze into the bag and wiped it out with a paper towel. She proceeded to thrown in a few pairs of underwear, a couple T-shirts, socks, and an extra pair of jeans. She gathered up her purse, found her passport in her sock drawer, and grabbed her laptop. Finally, lovingly, she took up her daughter’s ashes, the last of her precious child’s mortal remains, which resided in a small heart-shaped porcelain urn.

She now walked out the front door of the house, forever leaving it behind. It was no longer her home sweet home, and she felt no remorse in leaving it. It was now only a lonely vessel filled with useless furniture, dead houseplants, and memories left behind to torment her.

Without looking back, she quickly hopped back into her metallic blue Toyota Corolla and set off for the airport, her destination yet unknown. The drive was a quick blur. After passing the solemn Fort Snelling National Cemetery and all of its important memorials, she soon found herself at the airport, circling up, up, up inside one of the seemingly endless, confusing modern cement labyrinths filled with ramps. Half an hour after entering, she parked and left her car unlocked, with her keys left on the passenger seat, in a level-seven parking space amid a sea of similar-looking vehicles somewhere out in the boondocks, in the middle of everything but nothing—a gift for any poor sap to claim should someone ever find it. All that person would need to do was pay the parking fee and exit.

Stepping foot inside the glass-and-steel structure of the Lindbergh Terminal, Terminal A, she slung her bag over her shoulder and purposefully trudged up to one of the almost room-filling digital information boards to see what was available. Where to go? Where to go? Where to go? she pondered, rocking back and forth, toe to heel, toe to heel, toe to heel, as she scanned the outbound boards. The boards listed all the airline names alphabetically: Aer Lingus, American, British Airways, Delta, Iceland Air, JetBlue, Southwest, Sun Country, and Qantas; and listed out all of the cities that the carriers flew in to: Boston, New York, Chicago, Reykjavik, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo, Dublin, London, and more. Each listing was several screens long, varied, and in very small print.

The answer came to her almost instantly. London! she quietly told herself, brightening and getting excited. She felt instantly sure of her choice, without any other city’s name jumping out at her or luring her to question her decision or change her mind.

Despite other airport-goers’ luggage seeming to purposely