The Haunted Man

 At last, as a skein of cloud like a ragged fishnet stocking enveloped the moon, Theo unveiled the newest version of the Haunted Man show.

            It was sudden and unadvertised; there was no fanfare to announce its beginning; it simply began. The Strong Man looked to the left, to the box standing next to him; he looked up at the sky and its scattered flock of clouds; he made some mental calculation understood only by himself and then, with a masterful flourish, he whipped off the sheet. A few people glanced over, drawn more by the dramatic largeness of his movement than by any interest in what he was revealing. Other than that, no one really noticed right at first. But then the erratic clouds broke; the moon pulled free, pointing its pale milky fingers down through the acrylic sheeting and touching the vague otherworldly shape within, lighting it momentarily with a silvery outline.

            “Hey. Hey,” one woman whispered, glancing over towards Theo. She jostled the arm of a friend. “Isn’t that –?” She pointed with her chin, and then with her hand, and her friend stopped dancing to look.

            “What? Shit. What –?”

            The dance dwindled like an electric fan that had been switched off. One after another the participants slowed and then stopped. The drum sounds, once so healthy and vibrant and energetic, became like the step of a halting cripple then faded away altogether.

            Wide-eyed and hesitant they stood, shuffling, murmuring, gazing in confusion, their drums forgotten in the sand. Then slowly, very slowly, a few of them began to approach Theo’s box, peering in awe at a man whose dance was more graceful than they could ever have dreamed of being. It was a small box, dizzyingly small, and the cruel pain-inflicting strips of fabric glued along its panels made it almost impossible for him to move at all. His shoulders were hunched up around his chin, and his elbows were clamped to his sides, and even at that his fingers moved, stroking lightly against the air. His movements were tight and cramped, compressed, and still, even at that, still impossibly graceful.

            Jackie was overwhelmed with a sympathetic claustrophobia. She took deep breaths as though it would help him, filling her lungs with difficulty. The others too were mesmerized, seeming to catch their breaths as one single organism. Even in the limited room of the tiny box the dead man swayed, fingers moving lightly as he turned and turned again. Theo stood calmly, authoritatively, next to the box, looking proud and confident as Mueller had done before him. He grinned and though, in the firelit darkness, his face was thrown into deep shadow, that much was plainly visible.

            “What the hell?” someone said. There was an uncomfortable pause, a silence filled up with the crackling of the flames and the slapping of the waves on the hard packed sand. Squinting, staring, only half-seeing it, half-convinced they were simply imagining something, they leaned forward. A woman raised her hand as though she would point, but the fingers remained fidgeting in the air, pointing at nothing. “It’s that ghost,” she said thinly. “Isn’t it? It’s that ghost they were talking about. Isn’t it? I heard it on TV.”