The Haunted Traveler Vol. 1 Issue 1

“He was a bit of rouge,” she said, hardly moving her lips.
I laughed again. “Almost thrown overboard, I understand,
for thievery. That certainly makes him more than just a ‘bit
of rouge.’”
Raising his eyebrows Bruce looked at Annette, as if he
were saying, I didn’t know that.
To add a bit more color to her cheeks, I said, “I looked it
up. It’s in the ship’s log. Now that must be a haunting fact,
mustn’t it?” Of course, I didn’t look it up. I heard about it
from someone who had, and who felt the antipathy toward
Annette than I did, but for different reasons.
More color didn’t fire into Annette’s face. The fire that
was there, however small, was quenched. She blanched and
looked at me with a malevolence that gave me joy. I cut deep
and she bled . . . It gave me pleasure to see her bleed.
“Certainly, that’s a kind of haunting,” I said in the most
innocent tone I could muster.
Annette quickly countered with, “I’m sure not in the sense
that Bruce meant.”
I let her acidulous response fly past without making one
of my own. I knew exactly what Bruce wanted to hear. But
while he played his head game, I played mine and would
soon escalate the stakes. Intellectual, of course.
Kay’s long-fingered hands fluttered like two disconnected
wings over her plate as she said, “Dreaming is a kind of
haunting, isn’t? I mean we often see specific people and specific
places.”
Bruce nodded. “I suppose you might call it a form of haunting.
But what I really meant was haunting associated with
the occult.”
Again, playing my game not his, I asked, “You mean like
actually encountering ectoplasmic matter and hearing it
speak? Or to put it another way, encountering someone, as
is often euphemistically referred to as ‘from the other side?’”
Bruce’s face brightened. His brown eyes actually glittered.
“Yes. That’s it. Meeting someone from the other side.”
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