CW: Murder, self-harm.

The first and last time Calvin asks me about ghosts is on our fourth date. He wears green because I told him it was my favorite color. His hair is freshly cut, and his jaw still bleeding from a hurried shave. I smile at these small things he’s placing before me as an offering. As if the simple ritual of dressing, of shaving, can serve as an incantation worthy of not quite love but something on the path to it.

“So you believe, then? In ghosts?”

“I do. But they don’t believe in me. Can smell the desperation,” I say, worrying that the bottle of red we ordered has stained my mouth.

He laughs, and I don’t know how to tell him there is lettuce in his teeth.

“I used to pray. Every night. My dad sitting beside me to make sure I was keeping right with the Lord. You know. Thank you for our blessings. Please watch over us as we go through our days. The whole song and dance.” I pause and take another sip of wine anyway. Stains be damned. “But after he left, after the house was quiet, and there was no more sound, I’d pray again. Ask for a haunting.”

He laughs again, and this time the lettuce is gone. Small favors.

His teeth are small. Rounded instead of sharp the way I like. When I look at him, I think of milk instead of blood. I wonder if this is something that could keep me from falling in love with him. But I don’t need to love him. In the end, I hadn’t needed to love any of them. Not even my father.

I don’t tell him about the little knife I kept under my pillow. How I would open myself in small places and bleed into the dark, unknowable spaces. Wondering if that would be the key to unlock my haunting. Jesus had asked for blood to spill. All those sacrifices made in His name. It only seemed right that I do the same if I was asking him to raise the dead.

But there had never been any ghosts. I had not been so blessed.

“You would really want that?” he asks, and I nod. He shivers, and there’s only part of it that’s exaggerated. Beneath it, there’s the little boy he once was. All dark eyes and curls cropped close and fear so big it makes him seem smaller. I can see him there, hiding. I’m glad I met him now, as an adult. If I’d met him when we were children, I would have destroyed him.

“What were you afraid of? When you were little?” I ask. He thinks I don’t see his mouth turn down at the corners, but I do. He doesn’t like the turn of this conversation, but he was the one who asked about ghosts. About belief. He was the one to set his own trap.

“There was this store down the street from my school. Passed it every day on the bus. Had one of those big picture windows out front. And every Halloween, they’d put out this mask. Just a black backdrop and this fucking thing floating in the middle of it. And the mask . . .” He pauses, something going momentarily dark behind his eyes. I want to scoop them out and lick them clean just to taste that darkness. “It was like someone had shed their skin. Peeled themselves open and left their face hanging there.”

He pours himself more wine. Sips when I can tell he wants to drain the glass.

“I dreamed about it for years. Knew that when I opened my eyes, I would see it floating there at the end of my bed.”

I breathe in this thing he’s given me. His fear. His desire. Because so much of being afraid is an act of wanting. And what is wanting but an act of love?

“Do you still dream about it? Even now?” I ask.

“No. I dream about other things.” He smiles. Winks. It’s nothing at all like a wolf. Nothing at all like what he thinks it looks like.

We have finished our food. There is no pretense of dessert. No need for another bottle of wine. I eye my knife, the serrated edge of it, and think of tucking it into my purse, but I keep my hands folded on my lap. Good, sweet girls don’t think of knives. Or of ghosts. And we are still on our date.

Instead, I think about what it would be like to fuck Calvin.

Because that’s what he’s assuming will happen tonight. Even as we split the bill and finish the wine, he’s thinking it’s our fourth date. That I’ve worn a dress tight enough to push my tits to my chin. The sort of dress that lets him know exactly what I’m asking for.

He’s been such a gentleman. A nice guy. Buying me dinners and wine and once, after a walk through a local flea market, a tiny ceramic octopus. He has been so good. So patient. It’s what he deserves.

“I have more wine. At my place. If you like,” I say.

He is earnest. His eyes on mine so I know he’s saying all the right things. “Only if you want me to.”

Instead of responding, I lick my lips, and it’s all the answer he needs. Funny how desperation makes a yes out of even the smallest, most insignificant movements.

Through the Uber ride back to my place, Calvin is careful not to touch me too much. His hand on the small of my back when he opens my door. His fingers laced through mine as the driver asks how our night is going. He doesn’t want to risk spooking me. It would be easy at this point to change my mind. To invite him in and then claim a headache or an early morning and leave him with a chaste kiss goodnight and fighting the fairy tale that is blue balls.

“You can drop us off here,” I tell the driver when we reach the top of my driveway. I rented the house for its isolation. The long, dirt road that leads to the tiny ranch with its sagging front porch and no neighbors for at least three miles.

“Never pictured you as a country mouse,” Calvin says.

“I prefer the quiet. And it’s nice to see the stars.”

He hums in agreement, and I lead him up the stairs.

Inside, he examines the small pieces of my life. The photos I found at thrift shops. Approximations of a family I want him to think are mine. I don’t bother cleaning a glass and pour his wine into one that’s been in the sink for who knows how long.

“Is this your mom?” He points to a photo of a brunette woman with her arms around a younger girl. The camera has caught them mid-laugh, and I bought it, hoping their happiness might infect me as well. I nod. Sure. My mom. Why not?

He takes a slug of the wine. Fights off a grimace. It’s nothing like the expensive bottle he bought at dinner. Cheap and from a box. That’s the only reason it tastes somewhat rancid. Metallic. It has nothing at all to do with the Rohypnol I dumped inside. I want him disoriented but awake. At least for a bit. The confusion and fear are such necessary components.

“You look like her,” he says.

It’s easy to look like anyone when you’ve never belonged anywhere. I was only my father’s daughter. Made in his image. Worthy of little more than a position on my knees. A supplicant who prayed to the wrong god. Madonna. Whore. Same diff. If God turned his face from me, I wanted to see what existed beyond him. Calvin drinks again, and the glass is almost empty. Good boy.

“Can I show you something?” Now that he’s here, I am impatient. Tired of the small talk that will only lead to the inevitable.

“I was hoping you would.”

His hand is sweat-slick, but I hold it as I lead him out behind the house. Outside, everything is damp. The grass itches at my ankles as I open my mouth to the dark. Let it curl over my tongue like smoke.

“Have you lived here long?” Calvin asks.

“Not long. There wasn’t much left for me after my father died. This was a fresh start.”

He squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s better this way. He’d been suffering for a long time.”

Once, I’d thought that was the key. His suffering. My father on the floor of the room where he’d forced me to pray, his hands twisted into something that resembled a curse if only he’d had a mouth to voice it. I’d long since stitched it shut. Before I cut him open for the first time. Before I began my blood offerings, stupidly thinking it would be enough to call forth what slept between worlds. A ghost of my own making.

By the time we reach the back of the house, I’m panting. The air itself is like a baptism. I gulp against it, and Calvin watches my hitching breath. Imagines it as lust. But already, he is stumbling, his body wilting toward the earth as if it would be so easy to return to it. To just lie down and sleep. But nothing is so easy.

“Here,” I say and point at the little door that leads to the crawlspace. The lock swings open on its hasp. The key in its hiding place. I’ve already prepared. Have been ready for him since our second date.

“What’s . . .” his words slur over the question he wants to ask, and he passes a hand over his face. Stares at his fingers and then flexes his hand as if he doesn’t understand how one guides the other.

“You look pale.” I put a hand under his arm to steady him. “Let me help you,” I say, and swing open the little door. Something with many legs skitters away.

I don’t have a mask I can wear, but there is already a mattress on the dirt floor. A sheet. I know how to improvise. I can make do.

“The fuck’s this?” Calvin asks, but he’s dropped most of the vowels, his voice a sibilant tumble.

“Shh. Lie down,” I say, and he does as he’s told. Somewhere in the dim, reptilian parts of his brain he still thinks this is going to end in sex. That maybe this is my kink. That I’ve got a thing for enclosed spaces. That maybe I’ll want him to choke me. He grins even as his head lolls against the mattress. When I tie his hands and feet, he doesn’t fight me. Silk scarves instead of rope, so he’ll relax. This is all a game. Cat and country mouse. No reason to worry.

I close the door, and what little light there was vanishes. In here, under the house, there is only dark. Only the hitching sounds of breath and the sudden sensation that the very skin of the earth has slipped itself inside out. A shadowed leviathan set loose among a world that has long forgotten it.

But these are all still dim hopes. I’ve only brushed against it. The veil that separates worlds. Drawn it over my face as I waited for a final communion that has not yet been granted. After all, when you are a child, you speak and understand as a child. But I have not been a child for some time, and I have put away those girlhood things like prayer and belief in anything that claims benevolence while asking for blind devotion.

“Where’d you go?” Calvin mumbles.

“Be still. Let me,” I say, and kneel before him. Lift the sheet and drape it over my face. Pull it tight so it outlines the contours of my face and open mouth. A mask. A ghost. A boy’s fear.

“Calvin,” I whisper. “Look.”

I can’t see anything through the sheet, but there is the sharp intake of his breath. The slight hitch that carries the weight of his boyish nightmares as he tries not to cry out. To whimper. Because he is confused. Everything is strange. He knows he came here with me, but that woman is gone. Instead, there is only this terrible floating thing. An ancient nightmare made manifest.

He whimpers, and I move closer. Stare down at him with unseeing eyes even as my fingers find that same knife I used to keep under my pillow when I was a girl. The same one I’ve used since then to draw blood that wasn’t my own. To call forth a haunting.

I listen as Calvin bucks against the mattress, yanks at the ties on his wrists, but I learned long ago to make them tight. Tight enough to hurt. Tight enough to hold them. First my father and then the other men. I’ve since forgotten their names. Keeping still was the first lesson my father taught me, and I’ve kept it well.

When I cut Calvin the first time, the air inside the crawlspace shifts. We moan together. Through the sheet, I lick at his tears. Salt and sweat and panic and blood. For so long, I’ve thought those are the only things necessary to call forth the creatures that sleep between worlds. But they’ve only ever shown me the door. Spilling blood, no matter how the men scream when I cut them, isn’t enough to open it.

No. A ghost requires something more primal.

Calvin couldn’t know what a gift he’d given me when he told me his dream. That featureless mask floating amidst the void. How the memory of it stayed with him. Turned his world into something other. How the nightmare of it had marked him. Food for a ghost. The key I needed to draw it forth. His fear will be what unlocks the door. I’m certain of it.

It’s when I cut him the second time that Calvin screams for his mother. That single, holy syllable. The one I was never able to say because in my house there was only Father. Both the heavenly and the earthly. And they’d both forsaken me. One with violence and the other with blindness.

In the corner, something shifts. I dare not turn to look. Not yet. After all these years, all that blood, Calvin will be my deliverance.

He screams and screams, and my knife twists inside his guts, and I don’t know if it’s pain or fear calling forth that sound, but it’s a lovely, melancholic chorus. Grief for something he never understood but is losing.

In the end, I think I might love him. For this gift he’s providing. For his blind following. So willing. So eager. Asking for it.

I put my hands inside the warm slick of him. Draw my fingers over the sheet covering my face. Wonder if he’d ever dreamed of his mask doing the same. The past and present converging in a final communion.

It is only when I hear a sigh that I let myself turn. Slowly. Slowly. The sheet still covering my face.

I don’t see the hand that reaches out. That grasps the edge of the sheet and pulls it away so I might look. So I might know. Behind me, Calvin has gone silent.

“Oh, Calvin.” My breath, my words, catch in my throat. “Look.”