A Haunting We Will Go "A Second Ghost Story"

"Oh my Yudda Yudda! Where do I start?" He said to himself as he stared out of the eyes of his best friend and buddy, Jemmie Stewart.

"Start from why you're trying to possess me."

The red being, with huge saucer eyes and brown antenna and lots of pink spots and candy stripes running up and down its ghost body, twitched uneasily. "Well, it's not exactly like that."

"Then what is it exactly like?" Jemmie asked, looking at himself in the mirror image of himself on the crashed flying saucer's highly polished metal...which also happened to be stretched across about ten acres of cow pasture, with cows mooing up a storm from the sudden flaming intrusion of this bizarre space alien.

"Yudda told us. Well he told our forefathers that we would never die as long as we had a second ghost."

"I'm not a ghost."

"No, but you're making it possible for me to be one. A second one."

"I don't get it." Jemmie snapped angrily.

"You come crashing down out of the sky like you're hell-bent for leather, scare the crap out of all my cows, which will probably not give me any milk for the next year now, and almost hit me on top of it. How's that make me anything but angry as hell?"

The Second Ghost shrank back in the mirror view and actually popped out of Jemmie's body to stand on the broken turf of the meadow. It trembled uneasily. "That better?"

"Yeah...but."

"But what?"

"If you're a ghost, how are you standing on anything?"

"It's complicated."

"Try me."

"It's like this, when the Great Yudda Yudda made the universe...."

"You mean God."

"No, I mean the Great Yudda Yudda. The One who eats us all and bears us as fruit of his labors."

"Now that sounds just strange." Jemmie barked at the Second Ghost, who shrank back even further, trembling even more.

"No need to get nasty about it. We can have our own Gods. Your people have a history of having many gods, so what's one more?"

Jemmie, tired of all the wrangling with the desperate alien ghost, picked up his shotgun, and turned to go home.

"Wait." The Second Ghost hollered and shot in front of him, blocking his way.

"I need you."

"No, you don't."

"You need me."

"Like since when the beginning of the earth?"

"No, since the date you have tonight."

Jemmie froze. "How'd you know that?"

"I can read your mind."

"All of it."

"Yes. And you humans have very bizarre mating rituals, I will tell you. Now when we want to go biodualistic, we..."

"Pardon?"

"Bio...it means making babies."

"Oh. You make babies?"

"Only on two days of the year, when the Great Yudda Yudda smiles on us, then we can have babies."

"Sounds boring to me."

"Not at all, it leaves the other five hundred and fifty two days free for us to go mushy mush."

"What's mushy..." Jemmie stopped. "Don't tell me, I don't want to know. I'm going home."

He hopped into his jeep, jammed the pedal to the medal, frightening his herd even further, but hurrying to get away from that strange alien. The army, navy, air force, black ops, somebody would be out soon to check out the crash, and he wanted to be as far away as possible when that happened.

He jammed the jeep around a hard curve, then shot onto the main road that paralleled his pasture, and hurtled at top speed for about three miles. He had a lot of land. Shot down the road, his hair blowing in the crisp night air, which was close to freezing now. He didn't slow until he saw the solar lights at his drive entrance, winking blue and green.

He slowed, braked, then swung onto his small patch of road and slung the jeep into a sharp ninety degree angle, slamming to a stop in front of his three bedroom two story house, that he had built himself. He was quite skilled with his hands, his father had told him, and his mind. Because inside the house he had a computer lab setup for his telescope he kept in the attic with the night sky revolving window, so he could watch Mars and Jupiter for signs of alien aircraft. 

That's what had gotten him into the crazy mess with the Second Ghost to begin with. Imagine that, he mused, the ghost of a ghost. It was just crazy, he thought to himself, wincing at the incredible irony of it. How could a ghost have a ghost? Must be short on bodies where the thing came from.

He slung his shotgun under his right arm, hopped from his jeep, then opened his front door with his left hand without slowing. He had done this so many times, that the door was like a greased monkey, it moved so quickly and effortlessly. Course he had greased it enough for that to happen. It also had  sensor which  pulled it quickly open on his touch of the front door knob.

Yeah. He was also an inventor of sorts.

He ate a quick can of pork n beans, chugged down a half quarter of milk. Ate an apple, and a Twinkie, then shoved away from his hand made kitchen table, tossed the wrappers and can into the garbage,  put away the rest of the milk, shut the lights, kicked off his shoes by the front door for ease of getting to them on the morrow, then headed up the spiral flight of stairs he had made. He had fixed the railing so it was wide enough for him to ride it down.

Like the little kid he was in some ways, he still tried to make up for those missing years of his childhood when he had been in a coma for about three years, his parents praying for him to get better, but looking like end times coming anyway.

On the day they pulled the plug, he'd popped out of his wherever he'd been and never been the same since. It was like he had been born twice, with a genius mind, some abilities that quite frankly astounded and scared the crap out of him, and the desire to grow up as fast as possible.

So once he had shifted from middle school to high, he crammed four years into one, then got a free ride to Cal Tech, where he put in some time working on his Doctorate in Quantum Mechanics. He had even got some coaching on the internet and in person from the great Steven Hawkins. Once he graduated, he'd put all his degrees in a milk bottle, shoved it into a trunk, then used his grant money he'd been saving to put a down payment on his farm.

His parents were sad to see him go, but they were getting older, and the farm quickly became a source of income for them and him, and they didn't mind so much, especially since he had built them a home about two acres away from him with a connecting road so they could visit whenever they chose.

He slipped his clothes off, and got into his shower, complete with Jacuzzi shower head and stripped the sweat and cow smell from him, as well as the grease and smoke from the saucer. It had been quite a mess when he found it.

As he dried off, he remembered finding the dead alien. It looked like one of his cows, but with huge saucer shaped eyes and lots of yellow spots. Later, after the Second Ghost had appeared and tried to take him over, he had learned that the ghosts of those aliens were actually more intelligent than the aliens themselves.

He slipped on his jammies, then went up the spiral ladder in the hallway to his attic lab. Yeah. He sure liked those spiral stair things

He turned on all his hand-made equipment and the room came to live with buzzes, hmms, and haws, humming, zpps, and slurrs and his telescope descended from the ceiling with the Captain Kirk Command Console Chair. He strapped in and allowed the chair to orbit him below the revolving attic telescope, where he could watch the heavens.

But tonight he wasn't into Jupiter or Mars, he wanted to know if any of those crazy Men in Black were creeping around the meadow yet. He looked into the eyepiece for his telescope and the Second Ghost was in there waving at him.

He freaked.

He slammed the console to the floor and hopped off as the Second Ghost zipped out of the lens, then made itself comfortable on his Captain Kirk Command Console. The Second Ghost sprouted a Grouch Marx mustache and hairdo, then lit one of its fingers. It had twenty to each hand, and then began sucking on another finger. It blew out pink spiraling smoke and smiled.

"I think it's gonna be a cold day in hell when  you get rid of me partner!"

"Quit haunting me!"

"I'm not haunting you, partner, I'm moving in."

The Second Ghost shot towards Jemmie so fast and flew into his body so hard, that he fell back across the room onto his butt. Jemmie sat there stunned. It was gone. He looked around. He couldn't see it anywhere. He smiled. Finally, he could relax.

He went to his bedroom below and tucked himself in, then he felt an urge to go to the bathroom. He stood in front of his toilet to go, and admired his reflection for a moment. "Ain't no such things as ghosts. And definitely not Second Ghosts.  I've just been working too hard."

"Yudda Yudda." The Second Ghost said as it smiled at him from his reflection. "You just go ahead and tell yourself that!"

Jemmie screamed!