Free Vintage: A Ghost Story by Steve Berman

long-dead men and women in the paintings along the wall, I let Trace lead me by the hand to the second floor. I worried I would catch their mouths moving, as if whispering to me.
“So we need to talk about this. We can figure it all out.” But I didn’t hear confidence in her voice.
We passed through an open doorway to a large reading room surrounded by shelves. After taking a step forward, I saw that old men filled every available seat in the library. I felt their yellowed eyes bore into me with spitefulness.
Trace took hold of my hand, her fingers interlacing my own. A small comfort as we took another hesitant step.
One fossil coughed, the sound of decades’ worth of phlegm dislodged, brought up, examined, and then swallowed.
I wanted desperately to be away from them. How many were real? Any might be ghosts. The entire floor sounded with their creaks and groans. As we reached the stacks, my heart pounded in my chest. I wondered when this had started. How long had I been seeing spirits without knowing the truth? People on the street, in stores that I’d passed by, could all be dead. That girl on the bus, the one no one else had heard but me?
“I’ve come in early in the morning and those old men are always here.” She shook her head slightly. “I think when they lock up and it’s dark, they don’t leave but sit there, waiting for something.”
“Don’t try and scare me.” I glanced back in their direction. “There’s no need.”
She rubbed my back. “Old men are the least of your problems.”
“Thanks.”
She stopped at one shelf full of books so old that their covers had peeled away or titles worn off. She stood up on her toes, scanning the topmost titles.
“So tell me what’s going on. When did I suddenly become the kid from The Sixth Sense ?”
“Ah,” she said and smiled, taking down a slender volume with brittle yellow pages. Behind the Scenes with the Mediums.
I held back a sneeze. “I’m surprised you haven’t swiped this.”
“I might today.” She clutched the book to her chest, obscuring the magic eight-ball T-shirt she wore. The cover left a faint block of dust on her chest.
Anxious for her to talk to me and make things right again, I waited a while as she read until I could not stand around doing nothing. I took the first book I saw off the nearest shelf and opened it at random.
    This story rather resembles the tale of a much more interesting ghost which inhabited an old manor-house in Somersetshire, and which succeeded for many years in keeping human beings out of the place. Time after time the house would be let, people always making light of its haunted reputation, or else determining to brave its terrors. But they never stayed more than a few weeks, when they invariably went away, declaring that one or more members of the household had seen an apparition on the main staircase
I stopped reading and remembered what Trace had said earlier about ghosts eternally trapped climbing stairs.
    The description—and rather horrible it was—was always the same. The figure of a woman would come gliding downstairs, carrying her head under her arm, and arriving at the foot of the stairs she invariably vanished.
    At last there came a tenant bolder than his predecessors, and gifted with an inquiring turn of mind. He said he liked the place and meant to stay there, and if possible evict the ghost. And he at once began to investigate. Beginning at the attics he tapped and sounded every wall and suspicious-looking board in the house, with no result in the way of discovery till he reached the principal staircase. This, being the ghost’s favorite haunt, received special attention, and working his way patiently down step by step, he found at length under the old flooring at the foot of the stairs, a hollow place of considerable size. And in this hole reposed, headless, a human skeleton (which subsequent examination proved to be that of a woman) with the severed head laying by its side. Then the