This story is by Sarah Cummins, an editor here at Sentenced, originally released in Sentenced To Death Issue One. We are putting this story out because her debut novella “You Are Cursed” is out with Organ Bank Press. 

Thank you.

Michael jumped up and down and the whole plane rattled. Did some lines in the bathroom. The kids were running around. He put on a Gene Kelly movie. No, actually, turned it off. Put on a Liz Taylor movie. It was so sad to watch because of how they didn’t talk anymore, and he cried, and Blanket started crying too. Aboo aboo aboo aboo boo boo. Aboo boo aboo boo boo— aboo boo boo. Aboo, aboo.

Boo boo boo boo boo. Aboo boo boo boo boo. Boo boo boo boo boo boo boo. The kids wouldn’t stop screaming. He wanted to hit them, but that’s something you should never, ever do— never violence, only love, always always. That’s one thing you can’t ever do, is violence against a child, and before he would do violence, he would slit his wrists instead. If a child is hurt, then you slit your wrists. Boo boo boo boo boo. Aboo. He drank the “soda.” He kept winking and the world was spinning. “Oh, it’s so amazing, Bill.” Bill nodded.

And then they were in Ireland, wow! They got off the plane, the kids ran around, and took an SUV to drive out to the castle, which took a while, they went up and around some hills. Michael took another pill, and soon after the castle came into view. The castle had a moat. Wow. Just like a real castle! They parked in the courtyard and the kids ran around. The Lord came up to Mike and shook his hand. “It’s good to see you again,” he said. “Oh, haha, yeah,” Mike said.

Michael walked all around the first-floor hallways, the second-floor hallways, the library, all of the things like that— shown a crazy statue room, shown little suits of armor, all of the little things like that. “Oh, wow, super,” he said.

On the third floor there was a chessboard pattern on the ground, which reminded Mike of how he used to always play chess with the kids and they’d cheat, and he’d call them an applehead— but he couldn’t play chess with them now, they were all living in America without him. The Lord showed him a big bed and a big desk and a big painting.

“This was my great-great grandfather,” the Lord said.

“Ah, wow,” Mike said. “That’s amazing.”

“Let’s set you up here.”

“Oh, um, right across from your great-great grandfather’s scary eyes?”

“Right here, yes. I’ll be just down the hall. Get settled.” The Lord left, so Mike was free to go around and do whatever he wanted to do, even though he didn’t know what it was he wanted to do at all because everything was laid-back. And he was mostly pretty tired. It was only six, but he had been up for fifteen hours or something, or maybe more because of time zones. He called for the aide, but the aide didn’t come— lazy, lazy applehead, didn’t even have his luggage.

But then the aide carried his bags up, so it was fine, and then he went back down and grabbed all of the kids and carried them up with Bill so everyone was in the same room with the great-great grandfather, and it was like one big happy family. “This is so amazing,” Mike said. He turned to Blanket. “Isn’t this just the luckiest ever?” Blanket stared and Mike pouted. “Okay, be that way, doo-doo-head.” He threw the blanket over his head and wept.

Blanket tried to console Mike, but he pushed him away— lightly, not in a harsh way because he would never hurt the child except for if he was gonna slit his wrists after— and kept crying under the blanket. He wanted a blanket over him, not just the blanket but a blanket. Put a blanket over it. Needed a blanket more than anything. Oh, my-my, and the darkness swept in. That was fine, that was fine. It was finally sleep. Even if he was seizing with fear because everything was about to get into the dream-zone where everything was scary, he was going to be okay. He had a blanket.

He woke up again at one. Six hours of sleep— that was a new record! Four hours, forty-five minutes, anyways. Wow. Forty-five and six are at one at the bottom, at least according to the grandfather clock that was across the room, and ticked with each second, and had a bird come out of it every hour, wow, and seventy-five minutes was like only a little over an hour! Numbers are so very interesting! He felt so good, but then he saw the great-great grandfather’s eyes, and that was scary and he actually jumped up and shrieked.

Bill came into the room and asked if he was okay, which he was, of course, it was just that the great-great grandfather’s portrait had such a realistic look. It was an oil painting, and he swore he saw the eyes moving, which would have been scary if it was true that it was happening, which it might have been. Bill went back to his room, wow.

He looked very closely and saw a white shimmer run across it that jumped out at him as being unsafe, so he shot up and ran back to the opposite wall, and from a distance it seemed to get even whiter and whiter. The painting started to shake from side to side until it fell to the ground with a thud, and the great-great-grandfather’s face fell on the floor. Michael ran out of the room screaming, and yelling for his aide, who was nowhere to be found— as usual. He ran downstairs and screamed more, but no one even came out of their room, not even Bill, who was supposed to protect him in theory‚ I mean, that was the whole point of Bill being around, so it was odd that he wasn’t there. He ran all the way to the other side of the castle until he found the Lord’s room. The door creaked open, and Michael shivered because it was really scary and ominous, wow. He entered the room and it was completely dark inside, and oh my gosh was it so dark, and he saw the same thing he had seen, the white shimmering, on the other side of the room. Michael shrieked and ran all the way back to his room, where he jumped under the covers and cried, and then the shining white smoke emerged from the painting again, so Michael ran towards the door again— but he tripped on the way over because he was shaky from not eating for thirty-six hours, and when he turned around to make sure the ghost wasn’t gonna stab him in the back, the ghost was hanging in the air. It congealed into what a human body looked like. A ghost! Mike was shaking. He screamed. “What’s happening!?”

The Ghost didn’t respond, but the torso started to flatten out so the legs were right up against the shoulders. That wasn’t how a person looked, but it opened up so many opportunities for crazy dances, because the limbs were so close together, which meant that the hands could move up to the crotch area at a different angle and that’d shed some new light on the way that all of the hand positions looked. He had to cast that out of his mind, because the thing was actually right there in front of him and it started talking. He shrieked.

“Blood… blood…” it said. “Blood…” Michael crawled backwards towards the wall and slammed his back against the door, which hurt oh so very much. It continued: “You will die… you will die… you will die, Michael…”

Michael screamed— it had said his name. This was a targeted attack— which he had dealt with before from living people, members of the press and the state and federal government, but never from a ghost. He was shaking and the ghost’s head got bigger and then its eyes started to disappear. In a whisper: “Blood…”

It seemed like blood was the only thing the ghost cared about, and maybe that was because it wanted blood or because it was thinking about blood, and Mike could relate because he had thought a lot about blood— like, for example, he thought a lot about the blood of murder victims, specifically child murder victims, because he wasn’t able to be there to protect him like he would have wanted to, and because they were super super similar to him, what he was going through— and the ghost just faded away, and Michael was scared and he was shaking and the Lord himself came in and shook him by the shoulders.

“Michael, what’s wrong?” he said sternly.

“There was a ghost and he was soooo scary…”

The Lord looked at the ground and hmmed. “Michael… I’ve a secret to tell you. This castle of mine, it’s… haunted.”

“What?!” Mike yelled. “But I don’t want it to be a haunted castle!”

“I don’t either, but that’s the lot we’ve drawn.”

“Wow, okay,” Michael said. He was scared, but he went back to his room for some lines, and then he woke up and it had been six days and it was the middle of the night  again and he was screaming, running around screaming and looking for Bill. He ran downstairs and grabbed his kids and put a blanket over all of them so they could hide under the blanket. “What’s going on?” he asked them. They were screaming and crying, no help at all, and he started on aboo boo boo aboo aboo boo boo. Boooo boo boo aboo.

The Ghost pulled the blanket off, all white and scary, and Michael scrambled back, yelling. “What do you want from me?!” Michael yelled.

“Blood,” it whispered.

“Don’t hurt the kids, no, please, I’d slit my wrists before that happened, please just take me, take my blood if you want to— but don’t kill me please, I don’t want to die, not ever, just take my blood and leave me alive, I don’t ever want to die. Please, ghost, please.”

“You will die, Michael,” the Ghost said. “This is judgment…”

Michael leapt at the Ghost, trying to tackle him because he saw Scooby Doo and he knew the score— all ghosts are fake if they’re in a scary castle— but the Ghost was actually not fake, it was real, and Mike dove through it and screamed and yelped. “Oh my gosh, are you gonna kill me?” Mike asked.

“You will die…”

Mike ran away, running all around the courtyard screaming, and then he went upstairs and then he went downstairs, and then he went up two flights of stairs and down two flights of stairs and back up and all around until he just couldn’t keep running anymore and he fell to the ground and was unconscious, and he woke up again and he was screaming, and the kids were crying. “Where’s the Ghost?” He yelled. “Where is he?” He put his dukes up. “Come on! I can take ya!”

The Ghost materialized in front of him and said: “Michael, you are totally innocent, and for that I must kill you…”

“Ahh!” Michael was on his back again, like a poor little turtle who was on its back, and he scrambled away, but he wasn’t fast enough. “Ahh! Ahh!”

He woke up and jumped out of bed. Oh, gosh, what a relief! He wasn’t in a scary castle at all— he was at the rental house in LA, and he was just asleep and went to the scary dream-zone. What a relief. It was the afternoon and the kids were asleep in the other room. It was all normal, now. He thought about waking them up, but then he thought better. The oldest was getting pretty old now, something like ten or eleven, so she was too old to wake up in the middle of the night and make run around. They stopped being interesting a while back.

He threw on a Gene Kelly movie, did a few lines, watched that and it was super. Thirty minutes passed and then he got a sharp pain in his back and all, so he leapt up and rubbed where it was— but it was a sharp pain, so rubbing the area didn’t do anything. He stretched, but it didn’t go away. He had stopped dancing a while back, so there was no reason for something like this to happen— oh, but then again he had danced all day because of it was… Ah, man. He didn’t have any KFC, which was all he really wanted. He called for his aide, and the aide took his sweet time getting there because he was lazy. He used to have a few aides, but then the legal problems, running out of money, all of that, so now he had only an applehead who took forty-five minutes to get there if it was night-time and then another two hours to come back with KFC. It was laziness. That’s what it was. He ate the KFC, but it wasn’t very good and he vomited when he first smelled it, and when he looked in the vomit there was blood!

He leapt up and ran, and he ran downstairs, and he screamed for the doctor, and when the doctor came out they right back up and the doctor sat him in his chair and prepared the sedative, and then he pushed it in, and Michael went to sleep— wow, a dreamless sleep, where there were no ghosts and no KFC and no yucky vomit and no Gene Kelly and no pains and no ages, and no need to slit your wrists if a child was hurt, and no stupid Elvis stinking up your number one records, and no Emirs who were gonna kick you out, and no deals you had to hold your end up on, and no animals, and no dying, no, never, not ever, not ever, never not ever, aboo, aboo, aboo boo boo boo boo.