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“Hey Grandma,” Marci says and gives her grandma a peck on the cheek as she passes her into the house, “how are you?”
“Just fine, dear, thank you. How’s Columbia treating you?”
Marci drops her bag onto the couch. “Just great,” she says. Her grandma follows her into the kitchen, and Marci puts some water on to boil. “I’ve met a guy.”
Her grandma chuckles, “Of course you have, a fine young woman like you. Tell me about him.”
“It’s nothing exclusive yet, and I don’t want it to be,” she says, and her grandma hums as she opens the cupboard and examines the tea options. “Green or lemon and ginger?”
“Lemon and ginger.”
Marci takes out the box, puts it on the side, and then turns back to face her grandma. “But he is just my type. He’s smart, funny, confident; everybody loves him. And the sex is amazing,” she says, and her grandma laughs. “He insists on everybody calling him “Foggy”, but trust me, I would much rather call him Foggy than “Franklin”. Not many people know his real name, so you are sworn to secrecy on that one.”
“My lips are sealed.” The water boils, and Marci takes out a couple of mugs and starts to fill them. “Get out three, dear. I’m expecting someone.”
“I thought the place looked tidy,” Marci comments. “Who are you expecting?”
“Well,” she says, “you know how I was starting to get concerned about the presence of the spirit here? I found someone who has experience dealing with this kind of thing. He’s the best in the business and works by referral only; he agreed to come and check it out today.”
Marci nods and starts to stir in the tea bags. “That’s great, Grandma… but you’re sure he’s not just another conman?” Marci’s opinion on the spirit issue is divided. She’s going to be a lawyer, and for that, you need logic, and logic and science explain why ghosts and spirits don’t exist. However, she’s lived with her grandma since she was thirteen. Her mom raised her to believe in ghosts before that too. The only issue is that most people in the industry tend to be con artists, and Marci finds that more disrespectful than her inability to believe it or not.
“I can’t be completely sure,” she says, “but I have faith. Over the phone, he sounded honest, and he assured me that his methods don’t involve a Ouija board. He actually claimed to not need any communication devices.”
“What? No crystal ball or anything?”
“Marci, those are for predicting the future. And there is nothing wrong with having a crystal ball reading every once in a while.” Her grandma takes the cup of tea Marci offers her and takes a small sip. “But no. He said all he needs are candles.” Marci sips her tea just as there’s a knock at the door. “That must be him now.” Marci follows her grandma into the hallway but stands back, leaning against the living room doorframe.
Her grandma opens the door. “Hello, you must be Matthew.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. And Marci cannot believe her eyes. That’s Matthew Murdock, standing in her grandma’s doorway, with his terrible taste in khaki clothes and cheap rectangle glasses.
“Please, come in. My granddaughter is here as well; I hope that won’t be a problem?”
“No, not at all. So, uh, would you like me to take a look?” He tenses slightly. “No pun intended.” She chuckles and shuts the door behind him, and Marci knows she’s been quiet for too long.
She clears her throat. “I didn’t know you were in the ghost-busting business, Murdock.”
He stops walking and tilts his head to the side. “Stahl?”
“The one and only.” Murdock seems at a loss at what to do then. He clenches and unclenches his fists around his cane a couple of times, then just nods.
“You two know each other?”
“Yeah, we attend Columbia law together,” Marci says, and then she sighs. “OK, Murdock. I won’t tell anybody about this if you won’t.”
“Deal.”
“And do you want me to guide you, or…?” She lets the question trail off, and Murdock nods, so she steps forward to offer him her elbow like she’s seen Foggy do before. She guides him through to the kitchen. “Would you like any tea?”
Matt shakes his head, “no, thank you. Mrs Henderson, could I ask you a couple of questions about your spirit?”
“Of course.”
“OK, uh, if you are completely certain there is one here, how long has it been around that you know of? And since contacting me, have there been any behavioural changes?”
Marci really wants to call him out. She wants to laugh in his face because how can Murdock, of all people, believe in something as insane as ghosts? But he seems as sincere now as he does in debate, so she bites her tongue.
“I’ve noticed the presence since we moved here six years ago. It has never really been an issue, but we’ve had quite a selection of people come to take a look over the years. It always starts acting up around late winter, though. I told you about the travelling circus, and that one of my old friends paid a visit a couple of weeks ago and noticed it. That was how I got your contact information.”
He nods. “And since the last time we spoke?”
“I haven’t noticed so much from our spirit. It seems to have calmed down somewhat.”
“OK,” he says, then nods again. “OK, that’s good.” Murdock folds up his cane and leans it against the kitchen counter. He takes a couple of deep breaths and tilts his head to the side. Murdock doesn’t say anything for three long minutes, and Marci just shares occasional looks with her grandma as they drink their tea. Suddenly, he shivers. “Yeah, OK, there’s a ghost here.”
“Wait, really?” Marci asks.
“It’s upstairs, uh, over there.” He points diagonally up to the room above the living room. He picks up his cane. “I don’t want to invade anybody’s privacy, but…”
“We’ll show you up, Matthew,” her grandmother says.
“Thank you, Mrs Henderson.”
So, Marci lets Murdock take her elbow once more, and they all go upstairs. Murdock pauses outside of a doorway and points to it. “In there,” he says. “When we go in, I’m going to light a candle. It’s not going to do anything to help me or signify that the ghost is still here or left or whatever anyone has told you before. All I am going to use it for is to hopefully prove that someone is here and that I’m not crazy.”
Marci snorts, “like anybody would believe that.” Murdock laughs a little, and Marci’s about to say something else, but under her grandma’s stern look, she guides him into the room. They shut the door behind them.
“Are the windows closed?” he asks as he shivers again. They are, but Marci double-checks anyway. She can’t feel any draft coming through them.
“Yeah,” she says. Murdock taps his cane gentler than usual as he checks the room’s layout. He leans forwards when his stick finds the bed and puts his hand on it before sitting down.
Marci stands back against the wall next to her grandma silently as Murdock takes out a candle and matchbox and lights it. He holds it in his hands carefully and pulls his legs up onto the bed so that he’s sitting cross-legged. He does nothing for a moment, and then suddenly, he starts jolting. His head starts twitching in every direction – small, jerky movements which Marci faintly remembers watching him do once before. Then suddenly, he stops.
“Late winter’s a hard time, isn’t it?” he asks, and Marci knows he isn’t talking to them. He suddenly turns to face the corner of the room. Marci knows he’s blind, but she gets the eery feeling that he’s watching something. “Yeah, I know you’re there. Now, I can’t see them, but I get the feeling you can see those two nice women standing by the door. All they want is to help you, and they’ve asked me to do that for you. I can help you.”
Murdock uncrosses his legs, putting them down on the ground. He’s quiet for a while, listening to something. “We can play if that’s what you want.” Marci looks at her grandma, and she seems just as confused as she is. Murdock scratches the back of his neck. “I don’t actually know that many games. I had to look after my dad, you know.” He’s quiet, then shakes his head. “No, he wasn’t ill like yours. He, uh, he just got injured a lot, and I had to take care of him.” Another pause of Murdock listening, then he hums, nods his head, and is quiet for a moment longer. “Your dad sounds wonderful, and your mom too. Instead of letting me choose the game, why don’t you tell me what you dreamed of playing with them?” He gasps dramatically and puts a hand on his heart. “I may not be able to see, but that will not stop me from playing with you, missy. Just you watch.”
Marci can’t help but smile a little at that. It’s kind of bittersweet, learning that their ghost is only a little girl and watching Murdock act all carefree with her like this.
“OK, hide and seek. I’m sure Mrs Henderson and Miss Stahl would love to play with us?”
“Of course,” Marci’s grandma says quickly.
“How would we play?” Marci asks.
Matt’s attention is suddenly snapped from Marci and her grandma back to the corner. “Hey! No, it’s OK. It is possible, trust me. I’ve grown up with kids with all sorts of disabilities; accessibility is kind of my thing. You see this candle I’m holding? You probably remember your parents telling you not to play with fire because it’ll burn you. But it’s not. See, I have these childproof matches which don’t hurt when you touch them.” He’s quiet for a minute. “Yeah, they’re incredible. Look, I can wave my hand right through it like this, and it doesn’t hurt.” He demonstrates, and Marci silently acknowledges that that was kind of a smart move. “If you come over here and pinch it, it’ll go straight out. Why don’t you give it a go?”
Murdock stops talking, and nothing happens for a moment. Then suddenly, the candle goes out. Marci’s heart skips a beat. That was proof. That was the confirmation she needed; ghosts are real, and they have been living with one for six years. The reality of it scares her in a way she didn’t think it would.
“Of course, it’s cool! Did you really think that the edgy blind guy wouldn’t bring something cool?” He scoffs. “There is nothing wrong with my clothes.”
“Well,” Marci says. Her grandma elbows her in the side.
“OK, so hide and seek. I can light three magic candles, one for each of us. We’ll all hide with our candles, and that way, when you find us, you can put them out so that we know we’ve been found.” He pauses. “Yeah, telling me might be better. But you’ll have to count really slowly because Miss Stahl is going to have to find two hiding places.”
“What?” Marci asks. “Why?”
“One for me.”
“Right,” she says. That makes sense. Murdock’s blind, and funnily enough, he’s never been to her house before. “How long have we got?”
“A count of thirty?” he asks, then snorts. “Not that fast; we won’t even get out of the room. OK, let me light the candles.” Murdock pulls out two more candles from his pocket and stands up with his cane, walking back over to the door. He lights the three candles, and Marci and her grandma take one. “OK, are you ready, Julia?” He pauses. “She’s started counting. We need to hide.”
Marci offers Murdock her elbow, and when her grandma goes to hide in the upstairs bathroom, Marci takes Matt back downstairs. “How old is she?”
“Five.”
“What happened?”
“Later,” he says, and Marci nods. She opens the cupboard under the stairs.
“Hide in here.” She then finds her own hiding spot behind the dining room door. It’s never shut, and she would hide there from her cousins when they would visit. She stands there for about three minutes before her candle goes out. “Damn, you got me!” she calls playfully and steps out from her hiding place. “You found Murdock yet?” Her hand suddenly goes very, very cold. As cold as ice. It starts going numb like it’s trapped in some sort of vice.
The ghost – Julia’s holding her hand.
Marci puts the pieces together quickly. The girl wants her to go with her, so Marci deals with the pain and does not scream. “Let’s go find him.” Marci guesses which direction she’s being led and heads back towards the stairs. Julia has apparently already found her grandma, who’s sitting on the couch in the living room.
She stops walking when the cold clamp around her hand vanishes as they pass the cupboard under the stairs. “I win?” Murdock asks, then laughs. “Remember Marci told me to hide here.” The door opens, and Matt steps out. “I think that we should just agree that you won with those incredible hunting skills. Especially if this is your first time playing.”
Matt stops talking then and just stands there with his head tilted to the side, a sad smile on his face. “I’ll make you a deal,” he says, “I know you’re too tired to keep on playing. You won’t stop yawning. So how about I tuck you in bed for a nap, and I will light one more candle for you to put out.” His smile vanishes for a split second, but it’s back just as Marci blinks. “When you wake up, you can play as much hide and seek as you want. Come on, let’s get you to bed, missy.”
Marci and her grandma follow Murdock upstairs, and he fumbles for the bed again, pulling the quilt back. It falls flat to the bed when he puts it back instead of revealing a body shape. Matt pats it down anyway and sits on the side of the bed, lighting his candle for the third time. “A lullaby?” he asks. “I can do that, ah, what do you want?” He nods. “One that your parents didn’t sing. OK.” Then he starts to sing; it’s soft and gentle and Russian. Marci raises her eyebrows but says nothing. “Hey,” he whispers, “do you want to put the candle out?” It doesn’t go out, but Matt goes back to singing in Russian.
The next time he stops, he stands up and blows the candle out himself. “She’s gone,” Marci’s grandma says.
“Yeah,” he says, “she’s gone.”
“I don’t know whether to feel grateful or not,” Marci says, “actually, I don’t know what to feel in general. Murdock, what the hell just happened?”
“Marci dear,” her grandma says, “don’t hassle Matthew like that. Let’s make some coffee, and there is some cake in the cupboard. And let me get my purse.”
So, they go back downstairs. Marci makes coffee; they sit at the kitchen table with coffee and cake. “Julia used to live here with her parents before you moved in,” Matt says quietly, picking at the crumbs of his cake. “I can tell you her reasoning for being here if you want, but it’s not… it’s not good.”
“I would like to know,” Marci’s grandma says, “no matter how bad, it would put me at ease. Especially now that she has moved on.”
“OK,” Matt says, and he nods to himself before talking. “Her dad was very ill with cancer, and her mom spent all of her time working and looking after him. Julia’s version of the story is that she started turning invisible because her parents didn’t notice her. She thought that her parents moved out without her.”
Marci nods, “that’s so sad.”
Matt shakes his head. “I think that her parents were so busy dealing with her dad’s cancer that they didn’t notice Julia getting sick. Being so young, Julia had a harder time battling cancer and passed in the late winter, before her dad.” Matt picks at the cake for longer. “And her parents didn’t leave; I think that they died here too.”
“Go on,” her grandma says gently and reaches out and puts a hand on Matt’s
“Her dad of cancer, and her mom of unknown causes to Julia soon after.” Marci’s breath hitches. “Her parents both moved on, but Julia… she didn’t have the chance to be a kid. She never got to experience playing with her parents and hardly ever with other kids because of her family situation. She never played hide and seek.”
“And to move on, she had to experience that,” her grandma says.
“When a ghost has done what they need to do, they often suddenly feel drained. I don’t think it is tiredness exactly, but when someone ready to move on goes to sleep…” Matt trails off.
“She was never going to wake up,” Marci says. “You said that she could play as much hide and seek as she wanted, Murdock!”
Matt nods. “And I believe that she can. I believe in the afterlife and that Julia will get to rejoice with her parents in heaven and get to experience everything she deserves. She wasn’t happy here, and we helped her to move on.”
“But she liked you. You could have helped her live a great life here.”
“Marci,” her grandma says, “the girl was suffering. She was sad and lonely, and even if she took to Matthew, he wouldn’t be able to spend his life babysitting an unaging five-year-old.” Marci deflates a little because, really, she knows that her grandma is right. Julia would never grow older and go to college, meet somebody, get a job, or have her own family. She wouldn’t get that. She would be stuck here for eternity, invisible to everybody but Murdock.
She sighs, “you’re right.”
Murdock gives her an awkwardly comforting smile. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Thanks for helping her move on. And for cleansing our house.” He nods. “Before my grandma pays you, and you leave, and we never mention this ever again…”
“Yeah?”
“Well, what’s the deal with Ouija boards? We’ve had at least three people come in with them before. All you did was come in and start talking.”
Murdock drinks his coffee for a moment before answering. “You’re not going to tell Foggy that I know this, right?”
“I’m not going to tell Foggy that you were here. Ever.”
Murdock nods as her grandma laughs. “Ouija boards aren’t a way of communicating with ghosts. They rely on the ideomotor effect, which is basically the phenomenon of somebody moving unconsciously. The person using the board spells out an answer from their own subconscious in response to the question. Because it is an unconscious movement, people believe it’s a spirit communicating.
“The only way for a Ouija board to successfully communicate with a ghost is if the deceased is a telepath and projecting its thoughts to the player. Even if the board could work, there is no way of ensuring you would be able to use that limited information to help the ghost in any way.”
Marci raises her eyebrows at Murdock incredulously. “That’s very helpful, thank you,” her grandma says, “I’ll have to tell some of the ladies to stop recommending Ouija professionals.” She picks up her purse and counts out one hundred dollars in cash.
“You’re only charging a hundred dollars?” Marci asks, and Murdock shrugs. “We’ve had people cost far more and do nothing.”
“I’d do it for free if I could afford to.”
Marci scoffs, “of course you would, Saint Matthew.”
“Marci,” her grandmother scolds.
Matt chuckles. “Thank you for the coffee and cake-”
“You’ve barely touched it; let me wrap it up for you.” Marci groans, but Murdock smiles, and suddenly Marci is reminded of everything Murdock told the little girl about himself. He grew up helping his dad and other kids with disabilities. In Hell’s Kitchen, too; that much she knows from Foggy. She wonders how often he’s had cake, but the thought passes as he stands up, taking the money and cake from her grandma.
He clears his throat, “anyways, if you know anybody in need of a medium, give them my contact information.
“Of course, we will,” Marci’s grandma says, “and thank you for doing such a great job. Marci, will you show Matthew out?”
She nods, “sure.” This time, Murdock doesn’t take her arm; instead, he walks a step behind her. She opens the door for him, and he steps out. “Nobody hears about this.”
“Nobody,” he agrees, and she nods.
“Right; I’m nodding. I’ll see you in torts on Monday.”
He smirks. “Wish I could say the same.”
“I don’t know what Foggy sees in you,” she says and then shuts the door in his face. She sighs and goes back into the kitchen to join her grandma. “Well, since our tea went cold, we might as well finish the coffee.”
Her grandma laughs, “so, how do you know Matthew? You didn’t seem to like him much.”
Marci snorts, “please,” she says, “Murdock is a self-righteous prick.”
“So, kind of like you.”
Marci laughs at that and nods; their similarities haven’t completely escaped her notice. She thinks that’s why they clash so often. “He’s also Foggy’s roommate, and he’s in most of my classes. Unfortunately, he’s got a higher GPA than me, so it’s my personal mission to try and beat him in every debate and mock trial.”
“Ah,” her grandma says and sips her coffee, “you have an archnemesis.”
“I suppose so.”
“You know, I used to have an archnemesis and school, and your mom did in college too. Our bloodline carries an unfortunate competitive trait,” she says, “but on the plus side, you’ll at least have one constant in your life, dear. You know Abigail?”
“Who you meet for brunch on alternate Sundays?”
“That’s the one.” She sips her coffee. “We’ve been enemies since childhood.”
“You’re saying that Murdock’s bound to end up in my life, even though I don’t like him.” Her grandma shrugs and Marci just groans into her coffee. “I never should have come home this weekend.”