Now caught up to Thursday night, hehe....

“Fine,” said Anthony.  “Let’s make a list.”
“I can write,” said Samantha, opening her notebook to a fresh page.  On the top, she wrote What We Know About Ghosts.  “Okay, so…number 1…”
“You do not have to see ghosts in order to feel their presence,” said Mr. Rhodes.
“Number 2: So far, the presence of ghosts have been felt in areas associated with that ghost’s death.  For example, the person’s grave, or the place in which they died.”
     Gali leaned forward and looked at Perry.  “But how do we know that the ghost that Anthony felt is the one on whose grave he was standing?”
     “Yeah, I guess you’re right.  We don’t.  Can we write There’s a strong possibility or something in front of it?”
     “Yeah, got it,” said Samantha.
     “Number 3,” said Anthony, “The visitation of the spectral presence ends with death, in the case of a bodily takeover, or with the physical contact of another human being.  Possibly, the contact must be made by a female.  Or by Samantha, specifically.”
     “Me?” asked Samantha.  “Why would it just be me?”
     “It probably isn’t,” said Gali, “But we can only write down what we know for sure, along with some possibilities.”
     “Right.  Number 4,” said Mr. Rhodes, “They can either take over your body completely – sensory perception and all, or they can assault your mind.  Possibly your very soul?  We don’t really know what in Anthony it attacked – just that he could still sense his surroundings.  We know that he heard us.  His feelings were of despair were so strong that they caused physical reactions.”
     “Number 4 is pretty huge,” said Perry.
     “Yes, but they are all things that should stay bound together,” said Mr. Rhodes.  “We can always move things around later.  When we learn more about what is going on.”
     “Okay,” said Gali, “So we’ve got this list now.  Halloween is a couple days, too… Do we want to do anything for that?”
     “I think we’re all a little… shell-shocked,” said Anthony.  “If you think of something, call us and we’ll be there.  Maybe we should just forget about it for a while and get some more homework done.”
     “I think that’s a good idea,” said Samantha.  Gali remained silent, taking the paper from Samantha.  She studied Mr. Rhodes, who was finishing off his second cookie.  Could someone really be expected to be perfectly fine no less than twenty minutes after such an ordeal?  Anthony was still hostile and upset when it came to ghosts and what happened to him in the cemetery, but Mr. Rhodes seemed to be acting exactly the way he had before his incident in the attic.  Did he want to shield himself from everyone else, being the only adult?  Was he truly not affected?  Surely there should be some kind of hysterical reaction.
     Despite whatever should have happened, the rest of the Saturday afternoon and early evening continued quite normally.  Everybody was gone by dinner, and Adrian Rhodes was left alone on his porch, waving goodbye.  There was a healthy breeze blowing through the autumn air.  He could feel the hairs on the backs of his hands being blown the wrong way.  Still smiling, he turned and went back into his house, which now smelled strongly of freshly baked cookies.  His smile evaporated when he crossed the threshold into his home.  He closed the door and slouched against it, scratching the side of his head.
     “Sonofabitch….”  He hadn’t wanted to lose it in front of the kids, or made it seem like they needed to be concerned about him.  The only one who would understand him was Anthony anyway.  He did not have the time to be worried about himself – they needed to figure out what was happening so that they could stop it from happening again.  From happening to everyone.  But if finding out means that Samantha, Gali, and Perry need to do this, too?  If you stop looking, then won’t they stop invading you?  It never happens until you look…  Yes, it was true that there were no ghost encounters until they were all looking for them, and indeed, had made their intentions known to God.  How often did it happen, though, that a group of mostly (except for the intelligence of the children) normal people get to experience the supernatural?  This was something that had never happened to anybody else before – or if it had, it had never been able to bring themselves to speak of it.
     He got himself another cookie from the dining room and sat in the armchair, turning on the television.  The kids had had it on some music video channel, and he started channel surfing.  Cooking, World War II documentary, three channels’ worth of home shopping for gaudy jewelry.  He propped his arms up on the sides of the chair, slouching in the seat just like him, this is exactly how he sat in this chair, when he was watching TV, when he was sitting here closing his eyes hoping to God she wouldn’t come in and pretend to love him, pretending she wanted to make him dinner, to want to touch him, wanted to kiss him
     That’s enough.  Adrian turned off the television and got up from the chair.  The chair was his own, and was not the one that Jack Owens used to sit in.  Still, though, the room was arranged closely enough to the way that it used to be that he now had goosebumps spreading down his legs.  Okay, we’ll change rooms.  Time to grade some papers.  He opened his leather messenger bag and sat the stack on the table, sitting down in front of them.  He pulled a glass of milk towards himself and picked up his red pen, ready to offer valuable criticism to his students.
     His eyes kept wandering to the kitchen, where he knew she must have labored over thousands of dinners, prepping the mashed potatoes with butter and salt and pepper, making sure everything was the perfect temperature when she handed him the food, hoping that maybe that day, he would look at her the way he used to look at her during the first couple years after they had gotten married.
     All right, to hell with this.  He drained his milk into his throat and finished tidying up the kitchen.  The kids had done a pretty good job of this already: all he had to do was wipe the crumbs off of the counter.  He walked to the living room and pulled his black coat out of the closet, wrapping his mother’s scarf around his neck before putting it on.  He patted his pocket with his hand, making sure his wallet was inside.  Locking the front door after himself, he strode across his leaf-strewn lawn, making for the street.  Night had finally fallen by this time.
     There was no way he was going to spend the entire evening in that house by himself.  At least, definitely not while he was sober.  There was nowhere to hang around in the town of Finbell Winters, unless he wanted to loiter at the gas station.  Except, of course, the town’s bar.  
The owner of the bar was a good man, equally interested in learning about the lives of his patrons as he was in getting their money.  Most nights, he would give the regulars a free beer or two.  In addition to the food one could order, there was always stale popcorn sitting out at the bar.  Some nights, there were salty peanuts.  There was a dartboard up on one of the walls, a pool table in a corner that Adrian had yet to see anybody utilize, and a TV that was used for sports-viewing whenever a good game was on.  The small tables usually had bowls of mild salsa in their centers, with baskets of chips out of bags.
It was cold out tonight, and Adrian was looking forward to ordering whatever the soup of the day might be, in addition to the chips and salsa.  There were few streetlights between his house and the bar, but he wasn’t very worried about finding his way home, even if he did happen to get particularly drunk that night.  It was a small enough town that he probably didn’t need to worry very much about driving drunk.  He never got so drunk that he couldn’t handle a car, but just the same, he still preferred not to do it at all costs.
Apparently, not everyone had the same sentiments that he did.  There were quite a few cars pulled up in the makeshift gravel parking lot next to the building.  He opened the door, welcome by the smell of beer and smoke, and the sounds of college football.  He sat at the bar, ordering a beer and a bowl of soup.  He plundered the chips and salsa from the table behind him and sat them on the counter in front of him.
“Hey, sonny!” wheezed the old man sitting next to him.  White hair stuck out from underneath a dirty cap.
“H’lo,” said Adrian.  “Would you like some chips?”
“Ho, would I!”  The old man leaned unnecessarily close, grabbing a handful and then easing back on to his stool.  Adrian had to keep his face a mask of stoicism – the man reeked of mothballs.  
“Haven’t seen you before, nossir, I haven’t.  And I know just about everbody who lives here in this town, I shore do, ‘ceptin’ those kids at that school, of course.  You live here long?  ‘Course not, no, when didjya move in?  Where are you livin’ at?”
Adrian smiled, sucking a bit of salsa off of the back of a finger.  “Well, I just moved here in September.  I’m teaching English at High Glen.  And I’m living in the house that used to belong to Jack and Evelyn Owens.  Well, it still does, I guess.  I’m renting it from their son, who happens to be a friend of mine.”
“Ah, shore, shore, I get it.  I knew ‘em, o’ course.  Evelyn, she went batshit towards the end there, after he offed hisself.  You knew, that right?  He shore did, up in his attic.  Weren’t always like that, those two.  He was in the Lions Club with me!  And Evelyn, she spent about as much time at church as she did in that house o’theirs.  She was always readin from the Bible up in front of everbody at church, or helping with their food drives, or whatever else it is those women do in that church.  They really were the nicest people you’d ever meet, always smiling.  Well, she smiled.  Jack, he wasn’ much of a smiler, not like me!  Hawhaw!” his grin was ecstatically gleeful.  “Evelyn, though, she always had a smile up on her face.  But she kept on smilin more ‘n’ more, right up until he offed hisself, and then she went off the deep end.  It’s a sad tale, yessir, it is.”  He leaned forward, helping himself to another handful of chips.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” offered Adrian.  He had hoped he would have been able to leave this story at his house, and used his trip to the bar to escape from it.  Alas, there seemed to be no such luck for him.
“It shore is,” said the old man, nodding jerkily.  “I dunno how you do it, livin in that house.  If it was me, I dunno if I could do it.