The Blue Hour

There was talk of murder in the old house when I bought it in the late summer of 1975. It seems decades earlier a woman had escaped from an institution and shot a man. Maybe a wife...or girlfriend.

And now...there was a ghost.

But the house was empty when I moved in except for an old army uniform hanging in an upstairs bedroom closet.

The house was Gothic Revival, and I taught music at a private college in North Carolina.

Lauren, my grad assistant moved in with me at the time, but didn't stay long. "Something in there," she later said, "was watching me."

I didn't notice anything.

Then one night while a frost creeped along the alleyway - I woke up. I looked at the clock. It was a quarter past two.

Music seeped in under the door and in the dim light, I saw snow drifting from the ceiling. It accumulated in the folds of my blanket.

Moments later it was morning.

It was just a dream I told myself the next day.

Later that evening, an intoxicating smell of burning leaves filled the air. I had papers to grade but stepped out onto the front porch first to smoke. The sun was setting and from my perch I saw the brick buildings down the hill in town silhouetted against the blue hour.

A woman sitting in the creases of the impending darkness on my porch swing startled me as I turned to go back in.

She began talking in mid-sentence, as though we had been briefly interrupted. I expected her to say she was a neighbor or student of mine, but she didn't. She referred to herself as Jean. She spoke about another conversation with a man from another town at a different time. I let her talk. She seemed to know me, and I didn't want to be rude. She loved music and after an hour or so I felt I had known Jean my whole life. 

There was an elementary school down the street, and we ran toward it. We played on the swings and slides like children. Under the clear cool moon Jean spun the merry-go-round and jumped on. In a burst of laughter, she yelled, "Come on!"

But I didn't move.

The merry-go-round spun faster and faster until I could no longer see her at all. I only heard her laughter. It echoed into the trees and for a single moment I was terrified.

When the spinning stopped, she looked at me with her enormous eyes and shivered.

We walked back toward my house, but it wasn't until I reached the steps that I noticed I was alone. A figure made its way down Second Street and I assumed she had gone home.

I put my papers away and watched the news. Later as I got into bed I thought about Jean.

Sleep didn't come easy.

At 2:30 I heard a gunshot. It left a ringing in my ears. I walked out into the hall and heard music drifting. Farther down I saw a light coming from a room I used as a study. I pushed the door open and saw Jean sitting on the couch.

"Didn't mean to scare you," she said, smoke curling around her black hair. She looked surreal in a pink sleeveless dress holding an unlit cigarette. Her thin milky arms were translucent in the low light as she draped one across the back of the couch.

I gathered my senses. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you."

I looked across the low light at her pale skin. Her dark eyes fell silent and in that moment I knew what she was.

She pulled a worn photograph from a crack in the wall. It was of soldiers from a war. Her translucent finger brushed across the paper stopping at one face.

"Here you are," she said.

I looked at the photograph. At the soldiers. The face she had pointed to wasn't me, and I told her so.

She laughed hysterically.

And then the room went silent.

From: The Blue Hour: Flash Fiction

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Photo: Pixabay