‘Guide to Hauntings’ by Rose Keating

1. Inherit a house from your aunt Mary.

You were never close to her, but you didn’t dislike her. She powdered her face with talcum and shaved her eyebrows and wore bright red lipstick, no other makeup. Her lips were thin, and her slash of mouth looked like an open wound when she smiled. She watched, but rarely spoke.

You will not be surprised to inherit the house, because everyone else is dead.

You won’t need the house; you have an apartment of your own in the city. An apartment, roommates, a job. A life. You used to have friends as well, but you haven’t seen much of them since Will. They were more his friends.

You used to have a Will.

You don’t need the house but decide that you need a break. Pack quickly. Ring work and ask for time off. Put on the hoodie that he left behind and throw your bag into the backseat of the car.

Drive away. Drive faster than you normally would. You’ll want to play music, to turn the volume up so high that the bass turns your brains to jelly. You won’t do this because the only CD in the car is the mixtape he left in the slot.

Instead, open the windows wide and open your mouth wider. The air hitting the back of your throat like a punch, so hard you choke on it. Let it fill your lungs to bursting point. You would not be able to scream if you wanted to. Try to scream anyway.

When you get there, open the door and be surprised by the amount of dust. Evening sunlight pouring through the open windows of the hall, causing the dust particles to glow. Hovering in the air, like something solid, thick as honey. Breathe in heavy gold. Do not let it escape.

2. Unpack your things.

You won’t bring much, just a couple of bags which you drag up the stairs. The steps are a musical instrument, giving off creaks and squeaks and moans with every movement you make.

Place your bags down on the bed of your aunt’s room. There are many guest rooms upstairs and you could pick any; it’s a country house, large, 58 ROSE KEATING sprawling. But you want one already claimed. The room will be musty, cluttered with her things, smelling faintly of perfume. Put your things in empty drawers. Feel curious about the ones that are not empty.

Drag your hands across the surfaces, pick up the photo frames. Mary is alone in most of them, or with her sisters. Finger the knick-knacks. Post cards and porcelain dogs and jewelled boxes filled with rings and feathers and buttons. Open her drawers: starched blouses, beige bras, socks with holes in the sole. Find a dildo at the very back, hidden inside a sock. You will feel like a voyeur but that won’t make you stop.

Root around in her wardrobe. Slip on the black heels that you find, a size too big, sticking out over your tracksuit bottoms. Find a pile of paper at the back, thin and fragile as flower pressings. Letters. You won’t understand the handwriting; messy, slanted, hectic. You can make out words at random: purple, mine, lungs, sea, run. They are all signed off ‘Yours’. All from the same person, but you won’t be able to make out the name. You catch parts, but never the whole.

Take one of the letters to bed with you, running your fingers back and forth across the paper as your breathing slows. Fall asleep with the lights on, clutching something that does not belong to you.

3. Be woken by a loud noise in the middle of the night.

A deep heavy bang will jolt you from sleep; the shock of it feels like someone dropping your lungs into snow. Jolt upwards. The room will be black, although you won’t remember turning off the lights. Blink into the darkness, dense as molasses.

Slug your way through the treacle dark to the light switch. Flick it on. Jerk back.

Letters plaster the walls, the ceiling. Hundreds of them.

Ink running from most of them, leaking on to the walls. Spin in a circle. The clear words leaping out at you – purple, mine, lungs, sea, run.

Be unsure what to do. Feel scared, but uncertain. Should you gasp? Cry? Scream? Watch yourself from a distant cinema screen. Imagine yourself in a billowing white gown, fainting dramatically into the arms of a dark figure.

Do none of these things. Pick up a pillow, a blanket and your phone. Take them with you to the bathroom downstairs. Lock yourself in there. Double lock the door. Climb into the bathtub with your blanket and pillow and try to make yourself comfortable. Go on to Will’s Facebook page and scroll through the photos he has been tagged in.

Will, tanned, on the beach. Will at a party, a girl touching his arm, her face blurred. Will lying in the grass in a park, a sliver of stomach showing as he laughs in the direction of a woman with a pixie cut.

Click on her page next. Scroll through her tagged photos. Compare your heights, your waists, the size of her breasts and yours. Her eyes are very blue. Yours are not.

Keep clicking, until the sun comes up. You won’t fall back asleep until then.

4. Almost drown in the bathtub.

Roll over in your sleep, breathing in slow and deep. Take liquid into your lungs, wake up spluttering and thrashing.

The bathtub will be full of ink. Soaking through your clothes, into your skin. You will be bruise-blue, stained to the bone.

A figure standing at the foot of the bath, looking at you. The outline of a man plastered in paper.

‘Your breasts are about the same size as hers, really,’ he’ll say.

The outline of a man will disappear, letters floating to the floor in his place.

5. Research.

Drag yourself from the bathtub, sopping and heavy. Walk to the kitchen, leaving blue footprints in your wake. Open your laptop and google ‘ghost’.

Find definitions.

An apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear to the living, typically as a nebulous image.

A slight trace or vestige of something.

Vestige; a small trace of something that was once greater.

Did you know that the word ghost finds its origins in the Proto-IndoEuropean root ‘to rage’? That the old Latin word for ghost, ‘spiritus’, was a synonym for ‘breath’? That not all ghosts are dead?

Now you do. You click, click. Let the words swirl round in your stomach.

Image, spirit, breath.

Something that was once greater.

Parts, never the whole.

Rage.

6. Talk to the ghost.

Come prepared in battle armour. Spray yourself in your dead aunts’ perfume. Rim your lips with red. Put on a white slip from her wardrobe. It clings to you in the wrong places; she was a smaller woman than you.

Light candles in her bedroom, play her old vinyls that scratch and whine in the gloom. Close your eyes and think of the taste of the night sky.

‘I mean, you could have just said hello.’

Open your eyes. The figure of a man lined with letters at the foot of the bed.

‘Hello,’ you will say.

His head moving up and down, examining you. ‘You don’t look one bit like her, you know. Not one bit.’

Think about apologizing for this. Do not apologize. ‘Have you ever heard of a fetch?’ you will ask instead.

The ghost will scratch his head. ‘A fetch? It’s a ghost, the ghost of a person who is still alive, to the best of my knowledge.’

‘Are they real?’

‘As real as I am.’

‘Are you real?’

A smile. ‘Is the past ever very real?’

‘That’s a rubbish answer.’

He will stop smiling. ‘Yes, yes it is,’ he will say.

7. Summon it.

Summoning is a tricky business. It requires procedure, ingredients, intention. But the man lined with letters will give you the recipe when you ask.

Take the mixtape out of the car and play it so loud that you can’t hear yourself think.

Open a bottle of wine and drink it from a mug while crooning out the words of his favourite song.

Burn a lock of your hair. Takes the ashes, mix them with honey and the blood of a new born dove. Smear the paste across your lips, your eyelids. Take a picture of this and put it on your Snapchat story.

Go outside and strip, wearing nothing but his hoodie. Dance until your feet bleed. Let the moon lick your skin. Howl until the wolves come. Let them fuck you in the toilet of a nightclub while their friends take a video.

Crawl from the club to the forest on your hands and knees and rub yourself in the dirt. Eat every rock in the forest until your stomach splits open. Check his Facebook in the forest while lying in a pile of your own entrails.

Bury your entrails in the ground and wait until a crow claws its way out of the earth. There will be a piece of paper in the crow’s beak. A number that you deleted from your phone months ago on the paper. Dial the number.

‘Hello?’ the ghost will say.

‘Hey,’ you will reply. The ghost sighs.

‘Jane, please stop doing this. I asked you to stop contacting me. Just, just stop,’ he will say, and then hang up.

The man lined with paper leads you up to bed, puts the blanket over you.

‘Sorry,’ he’ll say,’ Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.’

8. Banish the ghost.

Gather up all the letters. The words that you can understand stick into you like blades.

Take all the parts that you understand and scribble them out with a pen until you can’t see them anymore.

Take the letters and place them in the bathtub. Go get the mixtape and snap it in half and throw it in there too. Piss on his hoodie and give it to the crow to eat. Slit the crows throat and drop it in the tub. Delete his messages. Block him on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram.

Get oil from the kitchen. Pour it over everything in the tub. Set the lot on fire. Watch the whole thing burn.

The man lined with letters watching you doing this, looking at you with something that could be pity, or something that could be tiredness.

‘Did you really think that would work?’

‘Not really,’ you will say.

9. Perform a cleansing ritual.

The man lined with letters won’t know how to do this and won’t be able to advise.

But you will know. You have always known how to do this, even if you weren’t always aware.

Go take a shower, not a bath. Turn the temperature so high it hurts. Scrub at your skin until all your blue bleeds away. Watch the ink wash away down the drain.

Put on an oversized t-shirt that is clean, and your softest socks.

Sweep away the ashes and bleach the bathtub until it gleams.

Pour salt around the boundaries of the house.

Throw out the milk that has gone mouldy in the fridge. Reply to the concerned texts from Susan from work.

Pack your aunt’s things into boxes.

Make tea brewed with holy water, mint and the memory of bright light on winter mornings.

Light a white candle in every room.

Let ice melt on your tongue.

Say the word ‘yes’ over and over until it is the only word the walls can remember.

Burn sage.

When it rains, open up all the windows so that the house can remember what the sky tastes like.

Cry until the house floods.

Fall asleep in laundered sheets that smell of fresh linen.

Breathe out.

10. Say goodbye to the ghost.

Meet the man lined with letters on the front porch, not in the bedroom of a dead person.

Do not smile at him but take his hand and hold it. Sit down on the porch together. He will put his paper arm around you while you email an estate agent about selling the house.

You will have avoided looking directly at the ghost for the entirety of this trip. You have looked at the outline of him. The shape of the ghost is all you know, because you don’t know if you can live through seeing the sum of him. But now is the time to be brave.

Look at the ghost. It will feel like thrusting your hand in a deep fat fryer. Keep your hand in the oil until the pain feels as clean and clear as a crescendo. Look at him for five hundred seconds. Or for five hundred years. However long it takes. However long you need.

Do not say goodbye to him in words. Kiss him on the cheek and rise. Walk away.

(Look back, if you need to. You will need to. That is okay.)

Put one foot in front of the other. Do it again. Do this over and over again for the rest of your life.

Climb into your car. Drive away, slower than the way you came.

Take your time coming home. You’ll get there, eventually.

From issue #8: spring/summer 2019

About the Author
Rose Keating is a writer from Waterford, Ireland. She received an MA in creative writing prose fiction at UEA, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize for best dissertation. She is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Sean Dunne Young Writers Award, and the Ted and Mary O’Regan Arts Bursary. She has been published in Apex Magazine, Hot Press, and Southword. Her debut short story collection, Oddbody, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.