Chuck Schading

This story was the 1st Honorable Mention in the third-round of NYC Midnight’s 2024 Short Story contest. The prompts were ghost story (genre) / paramedic (character) and off-the-grid (setting).

It started not long after Missy Tennison was found at the bottom of her family’s half-filled, long-neglected pool.

When we got the call from a scared neighborhood kid who was home alone but smart enough to call 911, we just assumed it had been minutes and I was the first to strip off my gear and jump in. The putrid green water wasn’t deep, but it was plenty deep for a three-year-old. As soon as I touched her slipping skin, I could tell she’d been under the water for a good long while. But it wasn’t until forensics got involved that we learned it had been more than a week. 

Her single father, a notorious drunk, had failed to notice that she never returned to the house after an evening playing outside. When he awoke the next afternoon and couldn’t find her, he convinced himself that his ex-wife must have picked her up while he was passed out. He was wrong. 

He may have forgotten her, but I couldn’t. You don’t get to forget what it’s like to carry a dead little girl, bloated and limp and robbed of a future. 

You just keep carrying her.

********

The thing with living in a small town is, you know almost everyone you’re called to help or stuff into a body bag. But even so, up until Missy Tennison I thought I was tough and could handle whatever the job threw at me. Car accidents, heart attacks, kids with peanut allergies. Whatever. But I couldn’t handle her. And then over the next few months I started covering up the near daily tragedies with daily doses of pilfered oxy, morphine and fentanyl. It wasn’t a lot at first. Just enough so that it wouldn’t be noticed.

I was able to hold it together for a while. Kept doing the job. But eventually I couldn’t look at anyone without wondering if they’d be the next one I’d be standing over with the coroner. Before long I couldn’t handle the calls. Not from dispatch. Not from my relatives. Not from anyone. I avoided everyone and everything.

That’s how I ended up at Gem Lake.

Back when my grandfather built the cabin up there no one cared about signal strength or even electricity. They just headed up into the mountains with their buddies toting guns and fishing poles and coolers full of Utica Club. I didn’t care about bagging bucks and trout though. I just wanted to get blind drunk where no one could reach me and then finish myself off with the fistful of opioids I lifted from the pharmaceutical locker the day they fired me. 

But I underestimated how much it would take. First I ran out of booze. Then I ran out of needles and vials. Then I ran out of pills. Then I just curled up in the corner and waited for what came next. It didn’t take long for the insomnia to start. Then the sweats and cramps. Then the endless vomiting. The hallucinations and tremors came last. 

One night, about a week into the DTs, I heard crying in the woods. I thought it was a cat at first, or an injured animal. But as with every sound I heard with my brain on fire, nothing sounded normal. 

I ignored it for the better part of an hour, but then I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just wanted it quiet. I heaved into the bucket I kept next to my sweat-soaked cot, steadied myself on the wall and fumbled around in the dark for my flashlight. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold it, and I might as well have been walking through a fun house bathed in strobe lights as I stumbled through the cabin and out into the yard. 

I aimed the flashlight toward the water and saw nothing but fog. Then into the woods behind me. It was like seeing everything and also nothing. I saw wolves and bears and dark figures darting in and out of the trees, each one shrouded in mist. But then again I’d been seeing faces in the floorboards and devils on the ceiling for more than a week.

Then from out behind a big old pine stepped a figure, a man missing an arm below the elbow. 

“What the fuck?!” I shouted. “What are you …”

Then another appeared behind him, limping and holding his ribcage. 

“What are you guys doing out here?” I asked, my heart and mind racing. “Are you okay? How did you ..”

Two more emerged after that, a woman with a rope around her neck and an elderly man with a cane.

All of them ethereal. Almost unseeable. 

But they weren’t unknowable. I knew them. 

One was Mr. Haskins, my neighbor on Bleeker Street who bled to death after he cut off his own arm with a chainsaw while trying to trim his wife’s beloved flowering cherry. Another was my buddy Scorch Reynolds, looking like he did when I found him inside what was left of his Mustang, limbs askew and scalp peeled back. Then there was my ex-wife’s best friend Pam Dabner, who had called 911 and then hung herself for the EMTs to find before her husband got home with the kids. The guy with the cane was my old gym teacher, Mr. Ramirez, with his trademark handlebar mustache, whose wife of fifty years accidentally ran over him in their driveway. 

Every single one of them died in my arms, even Pam, who took her last breath just two minutes after we cut her down.

With every passing moment, more and more of the dead emerged from the woods. My hands were shaking so violently I could no longer hold the flashlight and dropped it, its beam extinguished in the dirt and weeds. But I didn’t need it now anyway, as each of the spirits came with a faint, flickering glow. 

As they drew closer, the tremor in my hands took over my body. I fell to my knees and shook relentlessly, tears streaming down my face.

They were all there. The ones who were already dead when I arrived. The ones I tried to save but couldn’t. And the ones who died because I made mistakes, especially toward the end. 

Now they all surrounded me. Maybe a hundred or more.

I kept trying to make myself vomit. Slapped myself in the face. Tried to make the visions go away. But they would not. 

They made no sound, and nor did anything else. 

No crickets or cicadas. No crying animals. No rustling of branches or leaves in the wind. I couldn’t even hear the lapping of the water against the shore. 

Everything was completely still. 

Even the tremors.

I closed my eyes and drank in the moment of peace. 

Was I dead? Had I finally done it?

It’s not your fault, a voice sounded from the fog.

“I could have done more,” I answered, my voice fragile and shaking. 

No, the voice said. You could not have.

The circle of spirits parted as Missy Tennison emerged from the shroud of mist along the lake. Unlike the others, she did not look like she did in the moment of death, a lifeless and neglected little girl who had just been pulled from a neglected swimming pool. Instead she wore a polka-dot dress and carried a stuffed penguin, the same one we found next to her in the pool. 

Though she appeared as a child, she spoke with a woman’s voice, melodious and soothing. Her lips did not move.

You were there for us, she said. So we are here for you.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you all,” I said, choking on my words as they somehow escaped my quivering lips.

I was sure now that they were there to escort me into the afterlife. 

As the spirits began closing in around me, one by one they lost their deathly visages and took on the appearance of their best selves, in the prime of life and the best of health. Mr. Haskins and Mr. Ramirez. Scorch and Pam. All the others too. Their flickering lights now glowed brightly, bathing the woods and shore in brilliance. Then one by one they approached and placed a gossamer hand upon my shoulder.

Cardiac patients. Burn victims. Teenagers who got behind the wheel when they shouldn’t have. Old men and women who simply fell and never got up.

Then they disappeared into the night.

Only Missy remained. 

“You deserved so much more,” I said, overwhelmed by a sudden sense of calm and purpose. “I’m sorry no one cared about you.”

That’s not true, she said. You did. 

I woke up the next morning on the beach down by the shore, the warm summer sun on my face and the water gently lapping at my feet. 

I stayed there for a long, long time. 

And then I went home and lived.