Author: Miller Hagler
He sat up in bed in his jagged pajama pants, smoking apprehensively, silent. His wife was on her side next to him asleep, her shoulders rising and falling as she breathed the increasingly smoke saturated air. He dumped ash in the half-empty cigarette pack standing on the bedside table and scooted back further against the headboard, bloodshot eyes following trails of smoke illuminated by streetlights shining outside the window. He resisted the urge to turn on the lamp.
His eyes drifted to the swell of his wife’s hips beneath the bedcover. It had been a long time since he’d touched her. But this moment felt intimate to him; the lilac-scented softener she used on the sheets every week was seeping into his head, making him feel dizzy. No matter how much smoke he blew into the air he could never get rid of her smell. He reached out a hand towards her.
The clock she kept in the corner hit midnight, and stopped ticking. Marks hand ghosted over Elizabeth’s cheek. He thought she’d be warm. But she was freezing. There was someone else in the room.
They appeared in the corner by the clock, sitting in Marks reading chair. They took the form of a man this time, a Clark Gable look-alike complete with thin mustache and slick hair. He sat illuminated by a tall lamp that hadn’t been there before, one white-gloved hand resting on an end table holding a lit cigar and tumbler of brown liquid. He smiled at Mark, crossing one loafered foot over the other and adjusting his white bowtie.
“Well that’s different.” Mark said.
The Midnight Man smiled, shrugged. His fingers played with the trail of smoke rising off the cigar. “Thought I’d try something new.” He said. His smile suddenly grew toothy. “I was going for a dixie-mephistophilis look. Do you like it?”
“Like is a strong word. What prompted it?”
“Your wife is trying to write a new poem, a critique the antebellum southern aristocracy, jumping off her visit to Vicksburg a few years ago. I was inspired.”
“Is the poem any good?”
“Good is a strong word.”
Some people had Midnight Men. At least, that’s what Marks father had called them. Personally Mark thought that was an unnecessarily gendered term, especially since his Midnight Man more often than not came in the form of a woman. But then Mark had no idea if this was a trait unique to his or not. His father’s Midnight Man may very well have always taken a male form. Mark could in fact not definitively prove that he wasn’t the only person in the world with a Midnight Man. His Midnight Man and his father assured him there were others, but both of them were known to lie on occasion.
The only thing his father had ever explained about Midnight Men was that you didn’t talk about Midnight Men. Mark still had several scars on his scalp beneath his hair to remind him of that lesson. You were supposed to go through your entire life without ever knowing for certain if anyone else around you had a Midnight Man, if your wife or manager or the kid ringing up your groceries at the corner store were visited by potentially malicious spirits each night. If you breathed more than one word to anyone other than a direct blood relation, your Midnight Man would kill you. Mark often wondered how many unexplained deaths he saw on the news were people with Midnight Men crossing that boundary, or people unluckily enough to not have a father and a helpful Midnight Man to explain the boundary.
He often wondered whether his father’s heart attack was really just a heart attack.
“So, how have you been today?” the Midnight Man asked.
Mark’s gaze drifted again to Elizabeth. “I’ve been thinking about your offer.” He said.
“Skipping the pleasantries then?”
“If that’s alright. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“Oh I bet. My offer still stands, same as last night, same as night before. Her life, for your soul.”
It was times like this that Mark wished there was a Midnight Man support group. Or an anonymous phone-line he could call. Something. Anything to talk him out of doing something as stupid as what he was about to do.
The Midnight Man folded his hands together in his lap. “Have you come to a decision?”
“I have.”
+
The morning after Mark Hill sold his soul he woke up with a slight headache. Somebody across the street was cutting their grass. The scent of his wife’s coffee was drifting in from the kitchen. The clock read five till six. Five minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off.
He found Elizabeth sitting at the dining table in mismatched underwear, staring out past the French doors leading to their backyard. Snow had fallen over their house last night, at least three inches Mark thought, blanketing the lawn and smothering Elizabeth’s third attempt at gardening. The neighbor’s pecan tree peeked over the wooden fence.
“Enjoying the view?” Mark asked.
“It looks almost painful, doesn’t it?” she replied. “All that snow burning up under the summer sun not even a day after it’s fallen? Talk about ephemeral.”
“I though all beauty was ephemeral?”
“That’s a cliché.”
Mark just shrugged, opening the fridge and checking the date on the eggs. He tended to concede to Elizabeth when it came to defining the abstract; she was the award winning poet after all. His experience was limited to an aborted attempt to write a novel when he was eighteen and a few angry, violent sex scenes he wrote for a writing course he took in college.
"Scrambled eggs?” Mark asked.
“I’m fine with just my coffee.” She took a long sip to prove the point. “The burn will sustain me.”
Mark cracked open a couple of eggs and plopped their innards onto a skillet, curious half-formed eyes rolling around in wonder at their first taste of the outside world. He turned the eye on and began stirring them up. When the eye turned red Mark put the skillet on it and waited for the screams. That was how you made the best eggs now, according to a cooking show he saw on Netflix last week anyway. Wait for faint screams. The screams flavored it.
Unfortunately all Mark heard was sizzling and silence. He left the eggs on the eye for as long as he dared before taking them off, afraid of burning them. Frowning, he reached for the cupboard and began searching for the pepper. He must have gotten some bad eggs. The price you paid for buying organic instead of processed.
After breakfast he showered and dressed for work, hesitating as he passed through the kitchen on his way to the front door. Elizabeth was still sitting at the table, staring out the doors and clutching a cold cup of coffee. “We need bread and eggs. Anything else you want me to pick up at the store?” Mark asked.
“No.”
“Coffee, chips?”
“I’m good.”
“Tea?”
“No.”
“Bottled waters?”
“…no.”
“Writing utensils?”
“Actually yeah, if you could pick up some pens that’d be great hon.”
“Kay. Imma head on. Have a nice day. Love you.”
“…you too.”
+
Mark walked into the Super-Mart nine hours later dead on his feet. He worked, ironically, in a distribution center supplying that very same Super-Mart, a chain store operating all throughout the southeast, and he noticed ruefully that the teenaged greeter had a censor dangling from one disinterested wrist. Mark perfectly understood the necessity of exorcising buildings customers were supposed to go in, but he had a hard time believing the price of incense was so steep they couldn’t afford to stock the distribution centers with it too.
The land the Super-Mart was built on, as well as the distribution center and most everything else built in and around Birmingham city limits, was incredibly haunted. It was particularly an issue in industrial parks and the residential areas south of the railroad tracks, owing to the city councils refusal to fund the street department properly for the last decade. An extension to the freeway connecting the downtown area to the suburbs on the other end of the mountain was of far greater concern at budget meetings, and most of the money that would have gone into spirit suppression or exorcism was dumped or diverted into that. Although the reason the extension was taking so long to build was that, funny enough, most of the plots the new sections of the freeway passed over were haunted.
Mark could appreciate how well off he was where he worked though; the Super-Mart didn’t have censors burning in front of each aisle just to pacify the produce. By Birmingham standards the Super-Mart distribution center was relatively well located, hugged right up against the edge of the city limits. Only three spirits inhabited that plot: a civil rights worker from the sixties tortured and killed by police, a policeman from the seventies killed over the course of an undercover narcotics operation, and the young heir of a coal miner-turned-plantation owner killed by malaria. There was also a fourth spirit inhabiting a good chunk of the parking lot, but that one preferred to remain anonymous and was mostly benign.
The three inhabiting the building itself however would have been a nightmare combination had Mark not come up with the bright idea of keeping their existences a secret from each other. Maintaining that ruse was a full time job in and of itself, but it kept the trucks rolling on schedule and saved the company the time and money it would take to relocate somewhere less saturated with bad mojo. It was because he had to deal with those three all day that Mark wandered the aisles wide eyed and a little jittery, and why he felt justified in screaming at the stocker checking barcodes in the school supply aisle when he told Mark they were out of the pens his wife liked.
+
He came home to the sound of Frank Sinatra singing out of a record player Elizabeth found on one of her wanderings. She did that sometimes, just took off without warning, sometimes in the car and sometimes on foot. She’d just be gone for a while, showing back up in hours or days or weeks with knick-knacks from Gods knew where and the occasional story or two. Mark had long since learned to find the quirk endearing. He assumed she was in large part gathering material for her poems. He certainly didn’t think she could find much inspiration in the quiet little slice of whitebread suburbia he’d settled down in, and refused to move from.
That day, however, she’d apparently wandered into a grocery store. Mark quietly checked the cupboards, his concern evaporating when he realized she’d neglected to get any of the things he’d put on the list. It seemed everything she got was arrayed on the countertop, mostly tied up produce and a couple of frozen steaks. Two pots were boiling on the stove, one of some unidentifiable red sauce that smelled of marigolds and one of boiling water. A triplet of bound parsnips were watching the water with wary eyes. She said “hey babe” in a quiet voice when he came into the kitchen, her eyes never leaving the cookbook spread out in front of her.
Mark hung up his tie on the refrigerator handle and pulled a single-serve frozen pizza from the freezer. “How’d things go at the doctor?” He asked, not taking his eyes off the pizza he was unwrapping. It stared balefully back at him as it slowly regained consciousness. Elizabeth did not respond. He assumed she didn’t hear him over the bubbling pots.
“How was the doctor’s?” He asked again, louder.
“I didn’t go.”
Mark turned to face the back of her bushy blonde head. “Why not?” He asked. She didn’t answer for a minute, having to struggle with the flailing parsnips to get them into the boiling water. Eventually she got them down, and covered the pot with a lid to block out their cries. She did not turn to face him.
“I was working.”
She grabbed hold of a steak knife and began eviscerating some variety of potato on the cutting board.
“New poem?”
“Mhm.”
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Think it’ll be any good?”
“We’ll see.”
Mark turned back to his pizza. “Did you reschedule?” He asked as he covered the now wide awake eyes with a couple of errant pepperonis and stuck it in the microwave.
“Mhm. First thing in the morning.”
That was the third time in a row she’d put off that appointment.
+
Later that night Mark sat up in bed with his Midnight Man, or Midnight Woman in this case. Elizabeth disappeared after a silent, awkward dinner, and the specter had taken up her spot on the bed. She’d come in the guise of a dark-skinned, dark-haired woman with golden eyes that shone in the dark of the bedroom, dressed in black pajamas covered in luminescent stars. Her feet were propped up on the headboard, and she took periodic nips from a bottle of Gentleman Jack she’d jammed between Marks shins. They went back and forth with a pack of cigarettes scattered across the bed between them.
“Satisfied?” She asked.
“Not yet.” He replied. She handed him the currently lit cigarette, which he took a drag from before continuing. “I won’t be satisfied until I hear that the doctor himself told her the cancer is gone.”
“I thought she had an appointment this afternoon?”
“She’s putting it off.”
“Hm. What’s wrong? Do you not trust me?”
Mark passed the cigarette pack to her. “You spent the first six years of my life pretending to be a monster in my closet. “
She held it behind her head and shook the ash off onto the carpet, her glowing eyes flicking over to Mark. “And I’m so happy we’ve moved past that stage in our relationship.” She kept the cigarette still, letting its thin trail of smoke rise up to thread around the ceiling fan.
Her eyes turned back to the wall ahead of her. “I really was not expecting you to sell your soul away so quickly, you know? I thought modern media and high school sex ed. had gotten everyone way too paranoid about that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t watch much television. And that sort of thing wasn’t really a concern back when I was in school.”
“But for her?”
“Why not for her?”
“Do you love her?”
Mark watched as the Midnight Woman’s fingers slid up the neck of the bottle and pulled it out from between Marks legs. She took a quick sip from it and offered it to Mark, who shook his head. She nestled it back into place.
“I’ve known her for eight years. I’ve been married to her for four. I know just about everything that can make her happy, angry, depressed. I know what her favorite color will be on which day. I don’t know her life’s story, but I know several of the pertinent formative bits. I know her parents were emotionally abusive, and that their spirits are still a problem for her sometimes. I know about the waterfall that convinced her to become a poet.”
“But do you love her? Physically, I mean. When was the last time you touched each other?
“We’ve never been a very tactile…”
“When was the last time you had a real conversation with each other?”
“…she’s been depressed. She thinks she’s dying.”
“And what have you done about that?”
“Cured her cancer?”
“Not that. The depression.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
The Midnight Woman flicked her wrist dismissively, taking a drag off Marks cigarette before getting to the point. “I don’t think you really believe in love.” She said. Mark stared level at her. “I do not think you believe in souls either. I bet that is why you were so quick to sell yours away.”
“What do you mean don’t believe souls? I work with spirits every day.”
She passed him the cigarette, her feet crisscrossing next to his head. “Spirits and souls are two different things. One is an accumulation of psychic waste given an imitation of life. A curse to ensure that the living can never escape one another. A soul is a literal continuation of a beings consciousness.”
She let that little chunk of forbidden knowledge hang in the air between them before adding, “They are also a myth.”
“So, what? You just cured my wife’s cancer for free?”
“Au contraire.”
Suddenly she was a he, right side up on the bed and pressing himself up against Mark.
“You did not know souls did not exist until just now. You may have not believed, but you did not know. The term soul, at the time of our contract, to you, was subjective. So I get the next best thing.”
His hand traveled down the front of Marks bare chest. He leaned in close, his breath icy on Marks exposed neck. “I get whatever it was you thought you were giving up!”
Fingers sunk knuckle deep into Marks chest without breaking skin, gripped, and pulled.
Mark looked up and saw his spirit standing at the foot of the bed.
+
The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the local news mentioned that husband of nationally acclaimed poet Elizabeth Hill died in his sleep several nights before due to a heart attack. The widowed poet could not be reached for comment.