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| Drawing by Henry Lewis (2024) |
The Ginghee
by
James Lewis
1.
It must have been some ancient, deep-seeded defense mechanism that dragged Pamela up from the depths of sleep in the middle of the night. Nothing else could have pulled her out of the dream she had been enjoying. One moment, she was in the arms of Steve Mason, starting quarterback for Seton Hills Junior High School football team (and boyfriend of her best friend Emily Kowalski), and the next his baby blue eyes, his kissable lips, and tight butt were torn from her grasp. She came awake with the certainty that there was something — some thing — in her room.
Pamela picked up her phone from her bedside stand. It was 3:37 a.m. No one else was up in the entire house. There was no light coming into her room from beneath the door. The curtains on her windows were drawn tight, but there was no glow around the edges. There were no street lights in her neighborhood. A few neighbors, like old Mrs. Gagliardi, two doors down, left their porch lights on overnight, but that didn’t make a difference. In this part of town — the outskirts of the outskirts — when it was 3:37 a.m., it was dark.
Pamela sat up and surveyed her room. In the gloom, she could make out the general shapes of her desk, her dresser, the closet door, but she knew these more from memory than from perception. Which books were on her desk? Was one of the dresser drawers ajar and a shirt puffing out of the opening? These particulars she did not know. She reached out to turn on the lamp on the table next to her bed, but her hand froze in mid-air. She looked at her hand — or the shadowy shape that she took to be her hand — and wondered at its obstinacy.
...the Ginghee loves dark places...
The words returned to Pamela's conscious mind, unbidden. She tried to push them away, but, like her hand, they seemed to have their own agenda.
...the Ginghee loves dark places, inside closets and under beds, up in attics and down in basements. Sunlight is its enemy, but man-made light is like candy to it. Indeed, the Ginghee sups on lamplight the way the vampire sips blood from its victim’s neck. Turn on the light beside your bed and watch the Ginghee drink it all until it disappears, and it is dark again. Dark and cold and safe for the Ginghee to move freely about...
Pamela shook her head, hoping those words would disappear from her mind the way the words disappeared from the top sheet of the Magic Slate pads that her grandmother, to this day, always included in her Easter basket. Those words remained, however, just as the afterimage of whatever you drew on the Magic Slate’s opaque plastic top sheet remained carved into the soft wax underneath. There was no getting rid of them: they were her own words. They were exactly how she and her friends had described the Ginghee to her little sister Susan.
But the Ginghee isn’t real, she told herself, it was made up. The girls hadn’t really known what they were saying. Pamela only wanted Susan to go away. To stop making a nuisance of herself. To stop following them everywhere. The others — Emily, Rebecca, and Michelle — liked having Susan around, but in the way cats liked playing with a mouse.
Pamela knew what these girls were capable of when playtime was over and their claws came out. Hadn’t Pamela herself taken the place of one such mouse? Deirdre Lively had been one of the popular girls until recently. Then, for no apparent reason, Deirdre found herself savaged and thrown aside. There was talk of Deirdre moving to a new middle school, someplace where the rumors the girls had spread about her could not reach. Pamela did not dwell too long on Deirdre’s fate. It did not pay to think too hard or too long on such things.
Pamela had thought long and hard, however, on her sister’s fate. Susan was an annoying little brat, but she was Pamela’s sister, after all. Pamela knew she had to chase the six-year-old away before the other girls got any ideas.
It was then that the Ginghee had popped into Pamela’s mind.
It was just a nonsense word, one that Pamela had created out of thin air when she had been Susan’s age. Pamela used the word “Ginghee” the way an adult used any number of obscenities. When asked why she no longer played with Janice from down the street, Pamela would answer in her sweet, lisping tone: “I don’t like her anymore. She’s a ginghee.” When asked what she meant, what exactly was a “ginghee,” Pamela would shrug and say, “A ginghee’s a ginghee.”
Everyone thought it was cute. Even her parents got in on the act, referring to the driver who cut them off in traffic as “a real ginghee.” But like all childish things, it soon was put away. The word dropped from Pamela’s vocabulary just after she entered first grade, and none of them had given the term another thought.
Until a week ago, when Susan would not leave Pamela and her friends alone. The four of them had been in Pamela’s room recording videos of themselves on their phones lip-syncing to music. Even though her mother forbade her doing so, Pamela had locked the door to her bedroom. That didn’t stop her little sister, however. Susan sat in the hallway, tapping on the door, twisting the knob, peering through the space between the bottom of the door and the hardwood floor, and begged to be let in. Texting her mother to tell Susan to go away hadn’t worked. Yelling into the network of heating and cooling ducts attached to the register grate on her bedroom floor hadn’t worked. Finally, Pamela had had enough. She would take care of the annoying little twerp herself. She pulled the door open, dragged Susan into the room, and then shut and locked the door again.
Pamela hadn’t been thinking of where the word came from or what it meant or why it seemed so appropriate. She only wanted the brat to go away. She knew that Susan was afraid of the dark — what child of six is not? — so Pamela played on that fear, stocking the pond of Susan’s imagination with a creature she was sure would drive her away.
“If you don’t get out of here,” Pamela said in a fit of frustration, “I’ll send the Ginghee after you!”
The child’s eyes popped wide. Pamela knew the bait had been taken. Susan believed. Immediately. Totally.
Too late, Pamela realized that the others knew it, too. The girls saw Susan’s utter belief, saw her fear, and then pounced with their claws exposed, if not fully, then just enough to draw a little blood. Just for funsies.
Each girl, in turn, took Susan by her slim shoulders and pulled her close. Each, in turn, built the Ginghee up from nothing. From a mere nonsense word, the Ginghee became fully fleshed and, for Susan, fully real.
“The Ginghee,” said Emily, “is ten feet tall, all black, and made of nothing but spider’s legs with a head on top.”
“The Ginghee,” said Rebecca, “has no face of its own, so it must wear the face of its previous victim.”
“The Ginghee,” said Michelle, “is always hungry and must always feed, especially on the flesh of bad little girls.”
“The Ginghee,” said Pamela, who’s desire to be one of the gang outweighed her familial obligations, “will never leave its victim alone. Until the very end.”
On and on it went, description on top of description, layer upon layer, rule after rule, until the sinister portrait was painted.
Susan fled. And that was that.
Until that night, when Susan woke up screaming.
Pamela had heard her sister in the middle of the night and immediately knew that she was in for it. Her mother and father would blame her and her friends for giving Susan nightmares. She’d have to sit for the usual parental nonsense about looking after your younger sister and the bad influence of older kids who may not be such wonderful friends and on and on and yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pamela knew that, between the two of them, she had to worry more about her mother than her father. Her mother worked full-time as a dental hygienist. A job that made Pamela nauseous every time she thought of it. Putting your fingers in someone else’s mouth? Gross! (Well...maybe not so gross if it was Steve Mason’s mouth and her fingers, she thought.) But her mother also held a second full-time job: being a parent. She read all the books and magazine articles, subscribed to all the websites, watched all the videos, went to all the PTA meetings. Her mother believed in a very hands-on approach to parenting. She took it all very seriously.
Her father, on the other hand, treated being a parent like he was observing a newly discovered tribe of aborigines. Like the good Associate Professor of Sociology he was, he stayed in the background, watching and not wanting to get involved. Every so often he would detach himself from the background to ask a question or to get clarification on some point. Then, he’d drift away again. She knew he loved her, knew he wanted the best for her, but she also knew he was pretty clueless when it came to what went on in the house. Pamela thought that her father found living with three women to be utterly confounding, and so he spent his days just trying to not be noticed.
And so it was her mother who was first on the scene to soothe Susan’s hysterics. And, boy, did the little brat have it bad. Pamela didn’t dare open her door to look down the hall. She stood with her ear pressed against the wood, listening to her mother tell Susan everything was going to be all right, it was only a nightmare, there wasn’t anything in her closet. A moment later — better late than never — Pamela heard her father’s sleepy shufflings as he passed her door, his grunted obscenities as he stepped on the myriad Legos strewn across Susan’s bedroom floor, the sound of Susan’s mattress groaning under his weight as he sat down. He said something just then. Something Pamela couldn’t quite make out. Her father spoke like he was still asleep and this was all one of his bad dreams. It sounded like “Whazza ma’er?”
“Guh-guh-ginghee!”
As Susan’s scream descended into a farrago of blubberings and mutterings, Pamela tiptoed back to bed. Best to be found sleeping, she told herself. Plausible deniability and all that. But a moment later, there was a knock at her door, and her father asked her to open up.
For a moment that seemed to stretch out like taffy, Pamela stood next to her bed, her blankets lifted like the flap of a tent in one hand, her right knee on her mattress, her left foot on the floor. She was frozen to the spot, knowing she could outlast her father, but wondering if she should. Her weight shifted slightly and a groan from one of the floorboards brought a fresh series of knockings and demands.
Pamela opened the door and did her best to act as though her father had just woken her.
“Wha’s goin’ on?” she asked as she peeped out through her partially opened bedroom door. She rubbed the meaty part of her right palm into her squinting blue eyes. She added a snuffle and cleared her throat. That’s good, she thought, very convincing. Hollywood, here I come.
“Nothing,” her father said. “Just a nightmare.”
“Oh,” Pamela said. She widened her eyes as if she were making a special effort to be awake for this. “M’kay.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about it?” her father asked. Was there an accusatory tone to his voice or was he just angry that he was awake, too?
“Why would I?” Pamela said. The sleepiness act fell from her eyes. She looked at him warily.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug as he picked the sand from the corner of her eye. “Just wondered. I know she’s been tagging around with you and your friends lately. Maybe you noticed something?”
“Did she say I had anything to do with it?”
“No. She said something strange is all, and I just thought maybe—”
“Maybe me and my friends poisoned the little angel?”
Pamela’s words fairly dripped with teenage cynicism, bitterness, and paranoia. She didn’t mean to come across so harshly. Sometimes it felt as though she wasn’t in control. It was like being a ventriloquist's dummy, and someone else was running her mouth.
“Do you know what a ‘ginghee’ is?” her father asked.
Pamela, who was about to slam her door shut, froze at the word. Don’t give it away, she told herself. Don’t react. Act cool.
“Is that what she said?”
“Yeah. It sounds familiar, but—”
“I don’t know,” Pamela said, and she shut the door.
She heard her mother tell her father to bring Susan a glass of water. Susan called out that she wanted it in her Disney Princesses cup. Her father’s single grunt said that he knew and he was getting it and he’d be right back.
Pamela hopped back into bed and pulled her covers overhead. Amazingly, she was in dreamland again before her father had returned with her sister’s water. Even knowledge of her impending doom at the hands of her mother come morning couldn’t hold back sleep and dreams of Steve Mason’s kissable lips.
That feeling of being watched by something — by some thing — crept over Pamela again and pulled her out of her memories of the week before. She sat at the head of her bed, crammed into the corner of her room. To her left, sitting above her desk in the middle of the wall, was her window. She and her friends often watched old movies from the 1980s. Horror movies, teen movies — all sorts of things. Pamela watched them and wished she could be like the girls in those movies and have a trellis next to her bedroom window or a pitched roof below it. Some way for a friend (or Steve Mason) to climb up and visit her after her parents were asleep. Now, in the middle of the night, with her eyes fixed upon the light blurry patch that was her closet door, she wished she had such things outside her window so she could climb down them.
Climb down them and run.
She shook her head. Why am I doing this to myself, she wondered. She looked at her phone again. It was now 3:46. Before she understood why she was doing it, she opened the weather app on her phone. She told herself she only wanted to see if it was going to be cool enough tomorrow night to wear her new jacket to the football game. What her eyes searched for and found, actually, was the time for sunrise.
Not until 7:15, she thought. Three-and-a-half hours. That’s so far from now. What am I going—
The hinges of her closet door creaked ever so slightly.
Without thinking, Pamela turned off her phone and threw the covers over her head. Her breathing ceased immediately. She lay there, her body trembling, from fear as much as from lack of oxygen, listening. There was no further sound from across the room. Her closet door remained closed.
Of course it did, she told herself as she began to breathe again. Closet doors don’t open by themselves. The house was probably just settling. That’s what it was. Just the wooden joints of the house. That was the answer, she was sure of it. But she didn’t pull the covers off her head. And she didn’t turn her phone back on.
There, under her blankets, with her breath hot and her sweat cold, the memories of last week returned to her.
The morning after Susan’s nightmares, Pamela was sure that the little brat would turn tattletale and spill everything that Pamela and her friends had told her. At the breakfast table, however, Susan maintained that she did not remember being told about the Ginghee. In fact, Susan was more concerned about there not being any bacon to go with her pancakes than being told that she had woken up yelling her head off the night before. Where’s the bacon, she whined through mouthfuls of pancakes. Why isn’t there any bacon? Didn’t you buy bacon?
Finally, their mother slammed her hands on the table and said, yes, she bought bacon, but the teenaged check-out clerk at the grocery store must have forgotten to put it in the bag because he was on his phone the whole time. Their mother did her best to get the conversation back on track. She asked Susan to tell her what she remembered happening in the middle of the night. Steadfastly, however, Susan kept to the story that she did not recall. She said nothing about Pamela and her friends filling her head with dark images of ten-foot-tall, meat-eating, spider monsters. Susan acted as though she really did not remember. She was completely convincing.
While her father sleepily drank his coffee at the head of the dining room table and kept what he thought or didn’t think about the previous night to himself, her mother made it known that even though Susan wouldn’t admit it, she had immediately sussed out the truth of what Pamela and her friends had planted in her fertile little mind. Didn’t they know, she asked, that Susan had an overactive imagination and that everything they said became real to her? She told Pamela that she had to write an apology letter and read it to her sister. Luckily, she added, Pamela had all the time in the world to do just that, because she was grounded for the rest of the day.
Afterwards, when their parents had sent the girls away from the breakfast table, when they had finished rebuking Pamela and urging her to think about what she’d done (eyeroll!), Pamela cornered Susan in the upstairs hallway. The older girl grabbed the younger one by the upper arm, jerking her up until she stood on her tip-toes. Pamela pushed Susan against the wall hard enough for the pictures hanging there to jump and come to rest again with a dull thump.
“What are you playing at, you little...turd?”
Pamela fumbled over the word “turd.” She was going to say the other word, the “S” word, like Emily, who could say the “S” word and the “F” word all day long, but the obscenity stuck in Pamela’s throat.
“Ow!” Susan squeaked. “Lemme ‘lone!”
“Quit fooling,” Pamela said in a harsh whisper.
“Ima tell on you!”
“Why are you faking?” Pamela asked.
“I’m not!”
“You are! You remember exactly what we told you about—”
“I’m not I’m not I’m not!”
“Hey!” their mother called up the stairs. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” the two girls said as one, which only made it seem as though something was definitely going on.
Susan pulled away from Pamela’s grasp and ran to her room. She slammed the door. The pictures leapt from the walls of the hallway again.
“Hey!” their mother yelled again.
Pamela skulked to her own bedroom and slammed the door. She heard the muffled voice of her mother from below.
That little brat, she thought. She’s up to something. Pamela didn’t know what, but she’d figure it out.
But, it seemed, Susan wasn’t up to anything. She kept to herself and left Pamela and her friends alone. The Ginghee was forgotten by them all. It was a week of peace and quiet.
Until tonight.
Just before she crawled into bed, Pamela received a weird text from Emily. It wasn’t in the group chat either. Though it rarely happened, whenever she had a one-on-one text from Emily, Pamela felt a strange feeling in her belly. It was like a block of ice sitting in a pool of boiling water. Hot and cold, all at the same time. She felt seen, she felt included, she felt special. At the same time, however, she felt like an escaping prisoner caught in the overbright glare of a searchlight. At those times, Pamela heard her mother’s voice, admonishing her about girls like Emily. At those times, she wondered if her mother had a point.
Emily’s texts were weird because she asked Pamela if she’d felt watched lately. Being part of Emily’s group meant that all eyes at school were on them, on her, watching. Emily said that wasn’t what she blanking meant. Only she had used the F-word. All in caps.
I mean watched!!!
I’ve felt it all day
But especially tonight
Especially now
Watched
Like someone spying on you?
Like through your window?
Then, a photo showed up in her feed. It was a picture of a corner of Emily’s bedroom taken from her bed. It wasn’t well lit. Against one wall was her desk with her fancy gaming computer (something Pamela knew her parents would never buy her) sitting atop it; in the other wall was her closet. Its two sliding, folding doors were nearly, but not quite closed.
Do you see anything in my closet??
Pamela zoomed into the photo, but the low light just made everything fuzzy.
I don't see anything.
What do you see?
Black eyes that don't shine in the light
Black eyes in which you can't see your own reflection
Confusion washed over Pamela. Was that from a song? Or a poem? And when had Emily Kowalski become interested in poetry? The girl was flunking Mr. Whyle’s English class.
Then, she recalled where she’d heard it before. Those weren’t lines from a song or a poem. They were some of Emily’s own contributions to the Ginghee legend.
She started and stopped and deleted her next text several times. She couldn’t get the phrasing or the feeling just right. Couldn’t find the words that didn’t sound derisive or patronizing. Before she could come right out and ask Emily if she thought the Ginghee was real — like really real — Emily texted her saying that she had to get ready.
Steve is coming over to keep me company
He'll be here any minute
Forget it
I'm being stupid
See you tom?
Pamela said that yes, Emily would see her tom. They were all going to the football game tom.
Now, at 3:55 in the morning, a feeling of not being alone, of being watched in her own bedroom, washed over Pamela like an inky ocean wave. She, too, could feel eyes upon her. Black eyes that did not shine in the light. Black eyes in which one could not see one’s own reflection.
Pamela looked to her right, to her bedroom door. It was six, short feet away. She could do them in three long steps. Maybe less if she leaped from her bed.
Why was she thinking of escape? Of running? There was nothing here in her room. Nothing here in the dark.
The closet door creaked on its hinges.
Pamela’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, but even so, she could not make out the other side of the room. She only knew that the closet door had opened again. A bit? A lot? She didn’t know.
A soft shuffling sound emanated from the closet, as if the clothes hanging inside it were being moved aside. The door creaked again.
Pamela reached for her phone. From the home screen dashboard, she thumbed its flashlight on. The light, bright and harsh, pierced the dark like a stiletto.
Just as the light began to fade — slowly, methodically, as though something lapped it from the very air — Pamela caught sight of movement in the sliver of darkness between her closet door and the jamb. Four long, thin legs slipped around the edges of the door, two over the very top, and two near the bottom. Another two legs, equally long, equally thin, gripped the edge of the side jamb. Each leg was covered in long, black, wiry hair that twitched in the dying light of Pamela’s phone.
Then, from the space above the open door, a dark mass emerged. It passed through the doorway at an angle, as if it had to stoop to exit the closet. It was a great, black, hairy head. Once clear of Pamela’s closet, it rose up until the top of its dark, furry head brushed the ceiling. Even then, Pamela could see that it was not at its full height. As tall as it was, it still seemed to crouch there in the corner of her room.
In the fading light, Pamela noticed that the Ginghee’s head was not completely dark. There was a light patch on what she assumed was its face. It hung there like a mask. A mask that was ragged around the edges, as if it had been torn free from its source. The mask looked just like Steve Mason, whose kissable lips hung loosely from his gaping mute mouth. The holes that once held his blue eyes were black, soulless patches that did not shine in the light and in which Pamela could not see her reflection.
As the light finally failed, and the soft padding of eight hairy feet crossed her room, Pamela screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
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| Drawing by Henry Lewis (2024) |
2.
Mommy was crying. Susan sat in the middle of her bed, combing her doll’s hair. She could hear Mommy and Daddy through the wall of her bedroom. Mommy was crying because she was sad. Sad about Pamela. Daddy was sad, too. But he wasn’t crying. It’s okay, Daddy told Mommy. She’s going to be okay, Daddy said. But Mommy did not believe him. She kept crying.
It had been a week since Pamela got hurt. Pamela was still in the hospital. The doctors said she was okay — “stay bull” was what the doctors had told Mommy and Daddy. Pamela was stay bull. She had lost a lot of blood. And skin. But they’d been able to help her in time. Her operation — the first of many, the doctors said as Mommy cried and cried — was a success. The doctor said that Pamela would need more operations. For her arms. For her chest. For her face. Pamela needed a skin giraffe for her face. Whatever that was. The doctor said he would take skin from other parts of Pamela’s body and put it on her face. We could take skin from her buttocks, the doctor said. It sounded to Susan like the doctor said “butt talks,” and she began to get the giggles. She giggled more and more at the thought of calling Pamela “Buttface.” Mommy started to cry. A nurse came and took Susan out of the doctor’s office.
The night of Pamela’s accident had been — what was the word Daddy had used? oh, yes — heck tick. Pamela’s screams woke up the whole house in the middle of the night. Mommy and Daddy ran to Pamela’s bedroom. They couldn’t get in. Pamela’s screams became louder, thinner, sharper, like the screech of an eagle. There were other sounds, too. Thumps and bumps. Crashes and bashes. Like her bedroom turned upside-down and all the furniture fell from the floor to the walls to the ceiling.
Mommy was yelling and crying, telling Pamela to unlock her bedroom door. You know the rules, Mommy said. You aren’t supposed to lock your door, she said. Daddy pounded on the door — first with his fist, then with his shoulder. While he tried to open Pamela’s bedroom door, he told Mommy to call the police. There’s someone in there with Pamela, Daddy said.
Susan was in the hallway when Mommy ran past her. Daddy moved back a step or two, raised his foot and brought it down on Pamela’s bedroom door. The door crashed inward, half on and half off its hinges. Daddy turned on the light. Then, Daddy screamed.
Susan sat cross-legged on her bed, combing her doll’s hair with long, deliberate strokes. She still remembered Daddy’s scream. It was like Pamela’s. He wasn’t so tough. Daddy screamed just like a little baby. Susan giggled at that.
Something stirred beneath Susan’s bed. The light from her pink Disney princess lamp faded ever so slightly. It dulled for a second, then came back again.
Susan put her doll and the hairbrush aside. She jumped from the bed and crossed the room to her dresser. From the bottom drawer, she pulled a package wrapped in white butcher’s paper. With Pamela in the hospital, it was easier for her to take things from the refrigerator. She knew that her parents had other, more important things on their minds. Which was too bad, the little girl thought. It was fun watching Mommy yell at the manager at the grocery store about missing items from her grocery bags.
The package Susan removed from her dresser was the size of a roll of toilet paper. This made Susan think of calling Pamela “Buttface” again, which made her start giggling all over again. Which made the something under her bed stir again. The lamplight faded, then came back. Faded, then came back. Susan returned to her bed, package in hand.
Daddy told the police that what made him scream when he kicked down Pamela’s bedroom door was the blood. It was everywhere. The floor, the walls, the bed, and even the ceiling. So much blood. Daddy even told Mommy that the blood was why he screamed. He said it over and over again. It was the blood, Daddy said.
But Susan knew better.
Earlier tonight, the nice policeman who visited Mommy and Daddy asked Daddy if he was sure he hadn’t seen something else when he kicked down the door to Pamela’s bedroom. The policeman asked Daddy this because the same night that Pamela had her accident, classmates of Pamela’s had had a similar accident. Only these classmates — Emily Kowalski and Steve Mason — had been killed. And last night, another young girl, Rebecca Myers, had a similar accident and had been killed in her bedroom, too. He told Mommy and Daddy that each of these kids had been found in the same condition. The skin from their heads had been scraped completely from their skulls. It was all very neat, he said.
Susan, who had been sent upstairs to play when the nice policeman came for his visit, could hear everything through the floor register grate in her bedroom. She agreed with the policeman. It would be very neat to see that.
Are you sure, the nice policeman asked Daddy, you saw nothing else?
There was a long, drawn-out silence. Susan knew Daddy was thinking and thinking about what he’d really seen when he kicked down the door to Pamela’s bedroom.
No, Daddy said, I only saw the blood.
But Susan knew better.
Sitting on her bed, Susan unwrapped the package from her dresser. After flattening the butcher’s paper without getting any of the ground meat inside it on her hands, Susan lowered the offering to the floor.
The sounds under her bed, soft and shuffling, became slightly agitated with excitement.
Susan reached over and turned off the lamp on her bedside table. Moonlight drifted through the slats of the window blinds giving the darkened bedroom a soft illumination.
Sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed, Susan looked into the mirror on the back of her closet door. From her position, she could see herself, her bed, and the meat on the floor.
A moment later, two long, black, hairy legs emerged hesitantly from beneath the bed. They touched the paper and the meat, then, convinced that all was right, pulled the food under the bed. The sounds of paper rustling and meat being slurped up ensued.
Susan reflected as she listened to the Ginghee feed. That first night had been the worst. After Pamela and her friends had told her about the Ginghee, Susan ran to her room and slammed the door shut. She crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head. She lay there shivering and waiting for the sun to set and for the Ginghee to emerge from her closet. She knew it was coming for her. She just knew it.
But then Susan remembered something that Mommy and Daddy always said. It was about knowing the rules. It was important to know the rules. Whether you were playing a game or visiting a friend’s house, if you knew the rules, and kept to the rules, then everything would be just fine. And if there weren’t any rules, then you had to make some.
Pamela and her friends thought they were, oh, so smart. But they didn’t know everything. Pamela and her friends didn’t know all the rules. They didn’t know that if you wanted to control the Ginghee, then you had to say its name ten times while looking into a mirror in a dark room. They didn’t know that so long as you kept the Ginghee fed, it would never hurt you. And they certainly didn’t know that you could never talk about the Ginghee. To anyone. Ever. Doing that was just inviting trouble. Like leaving the lids off the garbage cans was just inviting raccoons to make a mess.
Even knowing the rules as she did, seeing the Ginghee that first night was so, so scary. It had taken all her strength to say its name ten times. She’d tried several times before finally following that rule to its end in the middle of the night. And when the closet opened, and the Ginghee’s black, blank face peered around the door at her, Susan couldn’t help but scream and scream and scream. She half-expected to see the Ginghee eat Mommy and Daddy alive when they came rushing into her bedroom to see what was the matter. But the Ginghee stayed in the closet, hiding, waiting for Susan to tell it what to do. Susan had certainly learned her lesson that night: so long as she followed the rules, the Ginghee would never hurt her.
Pamela, Susan thought, had learned her lesson, too. Pamela would never again chase Susan away or tell her to leave her alone. There were some other things Susan wanted: a new doll, for instance, and ballet lessons. Susan felt that Daddy could convince Mommy that she deserved those things. If not, maybe Mommy would be visited by the Ginghee in the middle of the night. Maybe when Daddy was staying with Pamela at the hospital. When there was no one else in the house except Mommy, Susan, and...
From beneath Susan’s bed, the sounds of feeding had ceased. The butcher’s paper, balled up neatly, came rolling out. Susan smiled. So hungry, Susan whispered. You were so hungry. Why, even eating your fill earlier in the night hadn’t ruined your appetite.
In the mirror, the dull, dead face of Michelle Thompson looked back at Susan from under the bed. And though the ragged mask it wore was unable to express emotions, Susan thought the Ginghee looked happy and content as it drifted off to sleep.
The End
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| Drawing by Henry Lewis (2024) |
I have been sitting on this story for a quite a few years now. It is the only short story I have written in a single sitting. The story was just there in my head, and all I had to do was write it down. So I did.
That first draft was completed in one go, but it was much too long and had too many points-of-view to survive in that form. (Originally, I'd given each member of the family -- father, mother, Pamela, and Susan -- their own section.) It took me a while to figure out that the story worked best when its action was seen through the eyes of the two sisters, and only their eyes.
"Ginghee" is a word that one of my sisters, like Pamela in the story, made up when she was very young. It was a pejorative she tossed around when talking about other kids in the neighborhood or at school. Another word she created that served the same purpose was "blarb." Sometimes they were combined; someone could be a "ginghee blarb" or a "blarb ginghee." My parents and I thought these words were very useful, and we started using them, as well. We still use them from time to time.
The illustrations included with "The Ginghee" are by my son. I think they are very apropos. Strangely, however, he never read this story in any of its iterations. I do not think I ever talked to him about it. Yet, somehow, he captured the essence of my creature in his sketches. I hope that, no matter what he chooses to do career-wise, he does not give up drawing multi-eyed, multi-mouthed, and multi-tentacled monsters. The world could always use a few more.
I've sent "The Ginghee" out in various forms to a few online magazines over the years, but had no takers. C'est la guerre. It probably is not up to snuff for proper publication, but I still think it is a pretty good story and deserves to have a life outside of a hard drive that sits in my desk drawer. For some time now, I have been threatening to post my fiction output here at LARPing Real Life. I am not going to promise you that I will post my stories on a regular basis, but there may be some more coming down the pike in the future.
So...if you have no interest in fiction and only come here to hear me bloviate about movies and tv on an annual basis...
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