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Blockhead

Evelyn Eeny's Favorite Species of Ghosts

By F. Simon GrantPublished 7 years ago 18 min read
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Blockhead :oR: Leaps Away

“The Blockheads that haunt this apartment complex will kill you the worst way, worse than any other ghost,” said Sister Mary Michael (whom Eve Eeny called “Sister Mary Michael Jackson”). “But don’t worry. They’re easy to spot and leave alone.”

Eve Eeny had been in therapy for “anorexia brought on by fear of sexual assault by ghosts,” as the doctors called. She’d gotten so bad about this fixation she bolted from all court imposed therapy and all enclosed spaces and lived unhauntably out of grocery carts containing only a small number of objects she needed to live:

  1. A safe full of bullets and ballet money (she still worked and showered at the city’s best ballet, and she was a very, very good dancer, so she would never lose her job, but she bought nothing but onions and bullets and batteries);
  2. Onions (she’d only eaten ghost-frightening onions and garlic for years (her physical condition was more like classic malnutrition than anorexia, but doctors only called it anorexia out of ballerina stereotypes));
  3. Batteries;
  4. A battery-operated record player (to play her Michael Jackson records, from Off the Wall to Dangerous, because what else does anybody need?);
  5. Plenty of other bauble charms she had for ages to keep the ghosts away (a particular metal might ward off a scratch ghost or there was an incense for sheet specters or any kind of charm for any kind of ghost ever, but it felt like it did little good because the closer she got to living in any walled building, the closer she felt to being hauntable).

That’s when Eve Eeny’s friend Sister Mary Michael Jackson found her chronically losing as a street person and saved her. At least that’s what Sister Mary called it to anybody else who’d listen: “I saved her from a street life, suffering and miserable,” and so on.

That’s all it took to go from constant fear of everything to give a fearless existence a chance: one person caring. It had been so long. Eve had this uncanny feeling in her gut. Could it be happiness or self-respect? It was tiny and deep, deep down below the diaphragm, so she could hardly even get access and explore it, but it was there. Sure, there was the dancing that everybody loved, mostly because Eve was very, very good at it, but this was something Jesus blessed her with and she destroyed her body over, and still most people only considered it a gift object from Jesus delivered to their eyeballs with Eve only as the conduit.

But then there was Sister Mary caring for no reason at all, and it made all the difference. “I’ll get a house if you want me to,” Eve said, “but only because you want me to.”

“I know great realtors,” Sister Mary said. “I know way more about real estate than a nun ever should.”

“Is real estate something inherently sinful?”

“Well… it can be.”

But then Eve, whose natural inclination was to doubt/escape/hate/fear/that sort of thing, said, “I doubt realtors would listen on the ghost assault phobia.”

“Well... we’ll see.” Sister Mary may be a nun, but she was an honest nun.

Later, they went together on tours of possible apartments, and Sister Mary, with her honesty and delicacy, would be the buffer between the normals and Eve’s particular issues.

The realtor might say, “This next apartment is the former waiting room of a family doctor.”

And Eve would say, “Any evil doctor ghosts?”

The realtor stumbled, attempting to avoid rudeness and not shatter the poor delicate crazy lady’s hope of getting a home: “It… depends… on your definition of ‘evil.’”

Sister Mary saved them both: “Sweetheart, houses at this budget are historically inclined to be haunted. I can find you a house with a nice ghost like a Blockhead. A Blockhead is known to be very slow and very rarely ever attack. He just shows up and hangs out. More a light bother.”

“Why is he called a Blockhead?” Eve wondered aloud.

“His head is kind of block shape.”

“That name makes a lot of sense then.”

It was only later, after Eve had chosen an officially Blockhead-haunted apartment, that Sister Mary said, “The Blockheads that haunt this apartment complex will kill you the worst way, worse than any other ghost. I just have to warn you about that. But don’t worry. They’re easy to spot and leave alone. Just do your little ballet leaps away from them, and you should be fine.”

She was inclined to do her little ballet leaps away from all of this, and this Blockhead business sounded far more terrifying than anything Sister Mary could understand, but for no dramatic reason other than Sister Mary asking and her sickness at the sameness of her homeless existence, Eve broke her long history of ghost avoidance, Eve agreed to live there. She didn’t back away out of the door and run down the open sidewalk screaming in her brain. This gave a sort of bravery she’d never known, a forgetting, a sort of bravery where anything untoward went to dark out-of-view places, and her dealings were with waking pleasantries. It was like peeling away black clouds to find out a sun existed when you assumed suns were only myth.

She lived alone, an out loud “I can do this” filling all the silent moments the first day and Michael Jackson records filling the rest. She only planned one weekly visit from Sister Mary on a Thursday noon, giving her four days of nobody but ghost potentials and Michael Jackson and her own echoes of “I can do this.”

“Are you sure?” said Sister Mary.

“I can do this.”

“Repeating something doesn’t make it true,” said Sister Mary with her damned honesty.

“…I can do this,” Eve said because other phrases seemed beyond her at the moment.

The truth was Eve could do this. Delighted by the new sensations of bravery, she embraced all the things that being homeless and ghostphobic robbed her of. Like dishwashing and grocery shopping. That’s about it, really, but that was huge. Eve used her surplus ballet money to buy a pot and a pan and stopped because that was overwhelming enough, but she spent a lot of time staring at her pot and pan and washing them though she hadn’t cooked anything yet. She still mostly only bought onions and garlic to eat, but now she had a place to put them. Then she decided to go wild and buy some bacon, lots and lots of bacon.

Then she saw a Blockhead.

The first time (and, honestly, there would only ever be two times) Eve saw a Blockhead, it didn’t seem exceptionally good at murdering.

It sort of hung there in the hall like any normal ghost. Both she and the Blockhead froze midmotion a long time. Both seemed to own this frozenness as a natural position.

Eve was only going out to get her mail. It was only junk mail. Nobody would be writing her. Junk mail was utterly fascinating to someone who had never received it. But then the Blockhead blocked the hall. Eve’s heart beat hard seeing it suspended there. This was the only sound, this heart beating. Once motion was finally possible again, she ducked back in her new place and slammed the door, but this door slamming hardly made more noise than her heart in her ears thumpthumping.

But wait a minute, she thought (or at least the new Eve forced this thought into the real Eve’s brain): she was strong and independent now. She had to be reasonable about the danger of some silent and still unmoved ghost. She opened the door for one more peek. Besides, she needed to get her mail someday, maybe a couple days from now.

When she opened the door in her forced bravery, the Blackhead was gone, frightened off by the smell of her courage and the whoosh of her door, like ghosts were secretly made of a smoke that would be blown away that easily.

But her courage went in the wrong direction, not bolstered by this first victory. Instead, it seemed like luck was a commodity she used up totally her first brave ghost encounter, and death in their second meeting was more certain. Soon the Blockhead haunted her dreams but only that brief uncertain glimpse hovering just in the distance, assaulting her just as she always feared but remaining impossibly always at the original distance. Soon it was all she could think about. She couldn’t walk down halls anywhere without assuming Blockheads would be waiting.

Only a few days after she moved in, she decided leaving her new home and entering that horrible hall was no longer worth it. Who needed mail? Or the world?

But then the junk mail called her. What if a furniture store had a sale she might one day, years from now, need to know about?

When she opened the door again to the Blockhead hallway, after only a day of dithering, there was the Blockhead. Of course. It was her fault really for wanting to check her mail. Why this obsession with mail? Damn you, Eve. What foolishness.

Then a strange feeling filled her up. A different resignation she hadn’t known before. The inevitability of this second meeting and oncoming death only a few minutes away allowed her to leave the door open a few extra minutes to get a good look at him.

The scariest thing was his stillness and his silence. Like a creature born from nothingness to take others into the nothingness must resist movement or speaking or any other form of certainty.

Also, his head was a giant block. This was certain. The name Blockhead was literal. A block shaped like but bigger than the cardboard box Sister Mary lent her to move her stuff in (a box she hardly filled with onions and records and a record player). Except the head of the Blockhead was covered in brown puppet felt and wide enough to nearly hit both walls of the hall. His body was long and droopy like proper ghosts, but he wore the boring brown suit of 70s insurance salesmen. What an odd and awkward and terrifying and not-so-terrifying ghost.

She slammed the door and made wind that scattered apartment renting paperwork and junk mail all about, cut her finger locking the lock too hard, got blood all over the paper. All this renter info she’d likely be making irrelevant soon as she’d likely be leaping away at the first opportunity.

She stuck her bloody finger in her mouth and sucked (a blood she seemed to need to drink in her poorly nourished condition), and she hoped the Blockhead wasn’t the sort of ghost who smelled blood. Like a halfshark halfghost. (She imagined the breeding process of sharks and ghosts, laughed half a second, then kept her mind on the business at hand.)

Sister Mary said the Blockhead murdered worse than any ghost, and Eve now had to imagine what that meant. It had to involve eating. Eve (hungry now in the weirdest way possible) cooked herself some bacon and onions, all of her bacon and all of her onions, but had to cut it all tiny with her one tiny knife and eat it one tiny piece at a time because she was weird about pretty much everything in her life. Eve hoped the Blockhead wasn’t the sort of ghost attracted to bacon smell who’d come into your house to murder you and eat all your bacon. This was no way to survive, to eat the last of one’s bacon as a murderous ghost lingered outside. She’d be without all food as soon as she wolfed this all down in her slow, slow way. The desperation to now remain inside could overpower any animal need including eating, drinking, sleeping, company.

Eve decided after a few bites, screw this, and she step out into the hall to stare at the Blockhead. She’d never get this opportunity to stare at, contemplate, study, understand, appreciate, and love the worst thing possible while it was immobile.

Then an old neighbor lady came out of the door and saw Eve staring (she must’ve seemed crazy). “Do you need help?” said the old lady staring in her scrunch-eyed way at Eve.

There was no good/non-crazy answer to what she was doing: “I’m looking at this ghost to be less afraid of it”? That wouldn’t be good.

Then the Blockhead moved. It reached out a hand with its long skinny finger and touched the old lady. She folded in half at the middle. She folded the worst way to be folded: at the waist and backwards. The terribleness of this murder lived up to the hype. There’s no defense against a touch that folds you in half backwards at the waist.

“Holy crap, that was terrifying,” Eve said out loud and laughed.

Then somebody exploded out of the old lady’s apartment, looked at Eve, looked at the Blockhead. “Why didn’t you say there was a Blockhead out here, crazy bitch!” This must’ve been the lady’s son. He had an axe in his hands for hacking. “You just killed my mom!” he screamed to Eve perhaps but mostly to the Blockhead but maybe mostly to Eve. Who knows? But the fact that the axe-hacking son had an axe so easily accessible for hacking a Blockhead to pieces at a moment’s notice and that seeing his mom split in half backward had an obvious Blockhead cause indicated to Eve that this was a familiar experience. People in this apartment must’ve just known what living with a Blockhead was all about. The axe-hacking son ran screaming at the Blockhead but one touch, a surprisingly quick and graceful touch, and the son split in half backward too. The axe and the rage did little good to save him and did little good for anything at all.

“Hmm, that was horrific,” Eve said in an understatement that surprised her, considering the two split corpses in the hallway. She laughed again. A little, tiny laugh. It was entirely inappropriate and senseless to laugh in this situation, and the Blockhead likely realized she was being kind of horrible right now, so Eve ducked back in. Out of embarrassment at her laughter as much as fear at this point.

Eve assumed she should call a doctor. Maybe not the police because she never heard of arresting a ghost. Then again what could a doctor do for two people so thoroughly dead? Still, she had to do something.

Eve called 911: “I sort of have some dead people in my hall. A ghost killed them. I’m not sure who needs to know.”

“911 does not officially acknowledge the existence of ghosts,” said the operator. She sounded a little like Sister Mary, kind and honest, and this was comforting. “If this is a prank, I must remind you of the legal implications.”

“Sure. Great. Regardless, I’ve still got dead people in my hall?” She inadvertently turned this into a question as if that would be a polite way to communicate with a 911 operator.

The 911 operator said in a definite and officious tone, “Let me finish: officially 911 does not acknowledge the existence of ghosts; unofficially, can you let me know what kind of ghost you’re dealing with?”

“A Blockhead.”

“I see. Thank you. We can handle this. I’m going to get you to do a few things, and you have to do what I say as quickly and quietly as possible, and you should be safe. First, answer this question: Are the walls in your building wood, plaster, concrete, or other?”

“Other. Oh wait, wood. I think.”

“Wooden buildings increase the danger of Blockhead hauntings. Your realtor should have informed you of this. Has the wood gotten hotter?”

Eve put her hand against a near wall. “Yes. Weird. I mean… relatively.”

“There is a possibility that you will be trapped soon. This may last an hour or several days. If you are trapped, extraction teams are available though the official status and duration of extraction process must remain, by necessity uncertain. Do you have enough food?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Just stay there in your apartment. Waiting is the safest option.”

“The ghost won’t come through the wall?”

“The Blockhead doesn’t go through walls. It warps walls to trap victims, but he does so only in cases of vendetta and/or family history. This is important to remember: in most cases, a Blockhead is perfectly harmless. In other words, avoid a family history of ghost murders, and avoid pissing the Blockhead off, and you should be fine. I repeat: the best way to avoid a Blockhead is to avoid vendetta and/or family history.”

“What about axe attack? There was this guy who tried to get the Blockhead with an axe while I was watching.” Eve laughed a little. “And I laughed a little at him dying. In my defense, I am fully aware that this was inappropriate, but I think the Blockhead saw me. Do you think this pissed the Blockhead off?”

The 911 operator didn’t reply. This silence was unsettling.

“Hello?”

“Listen to me carefully,” the operator finally said. “This Blockhead may be very pissed and may be coming through your wall soon. Try not to be afraid. It feeds on fear. Remain low to the ground. That is the Blockhead’s blindspot. This is your only option. Don’t let it touch you, or you will die. Repeat: if the Blockhead touches you, you will die.”

“That’s terrifying.”

“That’s the point. But, you know, I’m sure you’ll be fine. So…yeah…good luck.” Then the 911 operator hung up.

Eve wondered if that really was Sister Mary on the phone. So typical.

But the room didn’t change. Everything was silent. “This is not so bad,” she said out loud. But of course the room really did start to change shape. Eve noticed it first when she tried to open the window to escape because Eve Eeny loved escaping and wasn’t an idiot. But the window seemed sealed shut, and soon there wasn’t a window at all. Then the wall opened. Like the weird brainwarping of the horrible medicines she’d known too long, but this was real as all this tactile stimulation told her, all the heat and splinter grain of the windows wood as it soon ceased to be a window. The whole room seemed to shift into a dozen possibilities of rooms, and soon it was only one hall, no apartments, all the apartment’s innocent residents tumbled together as the walls narrowed. It’s like the Blockhead and the building together were a single being made for consuming. Like a pitcher plant. Like the building funneled in the prey and the Blockhead delivered the killing touch, blood and flesh absorbing into wood.

The Blockhead picked off the floor’s residents one by one, a touch and split in half along the waist. Every last one. There was nothing they could do.

Eve, in her immobility and alien calm, was the most readied for survival of a ghost like this.

The calm in Eve now, the calm of realizing there was nothing left: either split in half or calm. She knew well what resignation to rockbottom felt like but always the ghost fear remained: rockbottom or this. Now she saw the Blockhead, the worst possible manifestation of ghost fear, and it was like all the fears shorted one another out. She fell to the floor, not as a surrender as she might once have done but in a pure knowledge of the Blockhead, the way it moved down the hall like she and the wood and the Blockhead were all one now. Ballet had made her movement so delicate, the living building trap and the Blockhead couldn’t see her as any separate living being. Homeless starvation had made her so thin the Blockhead would pass over without touching. Any part of him might split her, even a toe touch, but Eve was too thin for this.

Still, she had to hold her breath as he passed over. He stopped. I’m dead, she thought. Only a moment of her old self creeping in, but she was okay with dying now.

But then the Blockhead kept moving.

He’s nothing but a pitcher plant she thought, just responding to stimuli. Nothing but a creature made by evolution to eat fear and split bodies. That’s all he was. That’s all this was. I can do this.

Once he finally passed, Eve stood and tiptoed through gore. She tried to pick up the axe, but the same starvation that saved her kept her from lifting it. Hate might help. Hate might give her power. But the same realization that took away fear robbed her of hate. She cried about not caring. She cried at the loss of her old self.

This somehow unlocked a dark box inside her containing all those wasted years living on the street. For what? For a pitcher plant with a stupid looking block for a head. She couldn’t hate it, but she could hate herself. Before she realized, the axe was through the Blockhead’s right arm and ribcage.

But now the axe was stuck. She couldn’t dislodge it. The Blockhead started to turn around, finally recognizing her presence, but the axe handle caught the wall, pushed the axe head all the way through his torso, so his whole bottom half fell off. He seemed to look down though his lack of eyes and stupid block for a head made it hard to tell if he was looking anywhere.

She laughed. “You dumb ass.” Eve was easily able to duck him now. She grabbed the axe, lifted it with greater ease, and considered finishing him, splitting the remaining bits of his body to pieces. But he was floating to the ground, sinking like a wrecked ship. It was a very pathetic death. Very silent. Very slow. Eve felt sorry for him. Briefly. He was cute with his brown fuzzy face.

She used the axe to open a bottle of wine from somebody’s apartment and drank it as the Blockhead slowly died. She finished the bottle as first responders broke the wall with their own axes.

If they denied the existence of the Blockhead, what must they think of this skinny little ballet dancer holding an axe, surrounded by a dozen split-in-half corpses?

She had a good laugh, the best and biggest laugh of her life.

fantasy
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About the Creator

F. Simon Grant

I'm a fiction writer and a collage artist.

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