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It took Ford less time than he’d expected to clean up the mess. To his delight, the computer appeared to be undamaged despite being unexpectedly doused with coffee; the company that designed it had certainly known what they were doing.
Once it was all cleaned up, he frantically went to the same site he’d been visiting and looked up that same news story from earlier, and then sped through it and paused it over the part that had caused him to spit coffee in the first place.
He told himself that he was probably seeing things.
That the slightly blurred face on his computer screen was just a manifestation of his own guilty conscience or something, making him see what he wanted to see.
But no matter how much he tried to tell himself that, no matter how many times he blinked or pinched himself or rubbed his eyes, the pale face staring back at him continued to bring back viscerally painful memories.
Even before he got home, it had been the worst day of Ford’s young life.
All at once, his chance of getting out of this stupid narrow-minded town, to go to school with people who would hopefully understand-and even better, accept-him for who he was, and have a chance to really be challenged academically for once in his life-it had all gone up in smoke, just like the smoke rising from the shattered remains of his perpetual motion machine.
That would have been bad enough, but then the feeling of betrayal from finding out that Stan , of all people, had been responsible?
It had at least allowed him to feel angry instead of just sad and hurt...but even when he watched him get thrown out by Pa, it hadn’t felt better . Instead it felt like a big, ugly monster had reached into his chest and started squeezing his heart.
It had been all he could do not to cave when he saw the sad, pleading look in Stan’s eyes from the street-but he’d thought about how he’d ruined his chances without so much as an ounce of remorse, and that had given him the strength to step away and pretend not to hear his twin angrily yelling that he didn’t need anyone.
And then he’d heard the screeching of tires, followed by a crash of crunching, twisting metal, and rushed back to the window in time to see Stan’s car burst into flames at the end of their road.
...Honestly, he couldn’t remember much about the rest of that night.
He vaguely remembered running out of the shop into the street, and someone-possibly Ma-having to hold him back from rushing to the wreckage.
He remembered, in a blurry kind of way, seeing the firetruck come screeching down the road, and seeing the firefighters search the inside after extinguishing it for some trace of Stanley.
They hadn’t been able to find a body, but there were no signs of anyone exiting the car before the crash, either, and it had been such a big wreck...it was possible there just wasn’t enough of him left to salvage.
The report that he had apparently driven headfirst into the lamppost did not help matters.
Everything else had passed in kind of a blur, until very early the next morning when Ma had done something he hadn’t been expecting; something that was practically taboo in those days.
She told Ford to pack his things, and then, once he had done so, she had taken him and her grandson and left, with only a note for Pa left on the kitchen table.
Ford hadn’t seen the contents, but the mascara trails down either side of his mother’s face spoke volumes for what they probably were.
They’d ended up staying with Shermie and his family, where Ma re-established her phone psychic business, and did housekeeping and babysitting in her spare time to help “earn their keep.”
Pa had called twice once he figured out where they were, apparently trying to persuade Ma to “stop being ridiculous and come home already.” The first time she had told him several phrases, in a mixture of Yiddish and English, that Ford had never thought she would dare to say to him, and then hung up. The second time Shermie told her Pa was on the line and wanted to talk to her, she had accepted the receiver and hung up without speaking.
He hadn’t called again.
Most of that time had passed in a grayish haze for Ford. He couldn’t eat or sleep very much-not with the sounds of screeching and crashing echoing in his ears all the time-and he talked even less, even with Shermie and Ma trying to tell him that they were there if he needed to talk, and that what had happened wasn’t his fault.
He didn’t believe it.
He hadn’t even bothered to go back to school until Ma forced him to, after enrolling him in one of the local high schools.
Ford didn’t remember much of that, either; all he knew was that he’d gone through those final months in the same kind of miserable haze, losing himself in his studies and befriending no one, and not bothered going to his own graduation ceremony.
Nothing seemed to matter anymore, when his entire world had been ripped to shreds right in front of him and then set on fire.
He’d finally broken one evening when he was heading for his and his mother’s room, and saw the picture hanging on the wall.
It was the photo Ma had taken of him and Stan the day they’d found the Stan O’War . They were both grinning proudly at the camera, shirtless and sunburned, without a care in the world except for fixing up this cool boat and taking it to get out of Glass Shard Beach and sail the seas, in search of adventure…
Ma had found him curled up on his mattress, clutching the photo and sobbing heartbrokenly.
It was the first time he’d allowed her to really hold him and try to comfort him about everything. Then Shermie had heard the ruckus and come to investigate, and both of them had held Ford, until he finally fell asleep in their arms.
After finally breaking down and grieving, he’d recovered somewhat; enough to apply for, and then go to, the first college that would accept him, over in a spot known colloquially as the Tri-State Area, and somehow he’d just...never left.
He’d gotten his first PhD in less than four years, and then accepted a teaching position at that very school that would allow him to continue his studies at the same time.
Primarily he was in charge of the Greek and Roman Mythology class, but he also occasionally taught several other types of mythology, in addition to physics, cryptozoology, parapsychology, and similar soft sciences. And from what he heard in the rumor mill, he was that teacher that students either really loved or really, really hated to get.
It wasn’t exactly a happy life...but it was good enough for who it was for.
He kept in contact with Shermie and his family, and helped plan their mother’s funeral when she finally died (neither of them attended their father’s), and doted on Shermie’s adorable twin grandbabies when they were born, and tried not to think about a smiling face similar to his own holding out a hand to offer him a high-six.
And now all those old memories had, possibly quite literally, come back to haunt him.
According to the rest of the video, most people suspected that this was some kind of evidence of extraterrestrial activity.
Ford knew better.
The pale face that had disappeared as quickly as it had come, along with the white clothes and the fact that it had somehow destroyed half of the illustrious West Coast Tech?
He suspected that this was the work of a vengeful ghost.
He didn’t know why he had waited so long to come back and take his revenge, or why he hadn’t come for Ford first (idly he entertained the notion that maybe Pa’s final moments hadn’t been due to bad cholesterol after all), or why there was another spirit of an unusually ugly man there with him.
But the fact that it had been so strong in the level of its destruction indicated that if it was the ghost he thought it was, he had been angry for a long, long time.
As frightening as the idea was, Ford decided to finally take all that saved-up vacation time, and take a little trip to California.
He had some investigating to do.