Vignette: Your Unfriendly Neighborhood Ghost Goat
#8 of Studies, Vignettes, & Scraps
I was having a hard time focusing at work, and a friend of mine suggested a story prompt to at least get me to do SOMETHING: a spoopy goat trying to trick-or-treat for the first time.
It got a little dark.
It had been seven years, almost to the day.
Michael leaned his shoulders and head back against a mostly-naked oak as he stared at the small house a hundred feet away. The tip of his left horn wedged itself uncomfortably and unexpectedly into the bark as he settled, but he didn't let his perturbation show; instead, he stopped chewing his cool-guy toothpick and pinned it between his top right incisor and canine. He slowly bit his teeth together until the wood could barely sustain the tension, and he held it there, thinking.
His head was a jumble. He had come here with specific intent, but hell if he could remember it now. He continued to stare at the small porchlight that faintly illuminated the red brick around the door. It was dark, and thus impossible to make out the color of the rest of the house, but somehow he knew that most of the remaining brick was mostly tan.
No, of course, he knew this house. It was important. He bent his knees to liberate his horn, then looked down at the lumpy white pillowcase in his hand. This had some relevance, he knew.
He relaxed his clenching teeth a little and reached up to grip the toothpick with his free hand, rolling it slowly against the surfaces of the teeth that ensconced it. He was remembering again. He was a spirit. Had been one for many years--seven, he thought? Most of that time was spent in incoherent pain and rage; those feelings remained yet, but the incoherence had given way to this spectral goat form and a searing but functioning mind.
The spirit had recovered his sapience slowly, starting with fragments of memories that gradually built into a partial history of a man named Michael. He'd grown to remember an imperfect but valuable life. He remembered language and politics and science. He remembered the concept of friendship, but only felt hollowness. Or enmity.
As a fire lit in his chest, he suddenly remembered why he was there. He yanked the toothpick from his mouth and flicked it on to the lawn of the house before him. He shook his head forcefully. He hated forgetting. The more memories he recovered, the more he grew to resent the shadow-existence that was left to him, including the forgetting. Memories of a past life regained were often lost; memories of his new life were fleeting; even his basic working memory was garbage.
Michael--or whatever he was--was consumed by a need to move on from this pathetic course. Today would be key to that; he was remembering. It was Halloween, and three children were walking up to the house, dressed like superheroes of one kind or another; probably from an adventure that was created after Michael was killed. It enraged him further to think it.
It was time to be made whole. He strode forward, hefting the pillowcase to create a little slack in the fabric, the sharp rocks within clicking together as he did so. With chilling smoothness, he whipped his hand in a circle as he walked across the lawn, wrapping the slack linen around his palm, giving himself a sturdier grip.
The superheroes were the only people around, excitedly chattering about the full-sized Snickers bars they just got as they retreated from the house, paying Michael no attention as he ascended the four steps to the front door and knocked.
The door opened halfway and a woman looked up, perplexed, at the specter's face.
"Trick or treat, Karen," he intoned menacingly, gripping her throat and forcing her back as he stepped through the threshold and lifted the pillowcase.