Winter Oranges by Marie Sexton Read Free Book Online Page A

When Jason hazarded a glance at the garage window later that night, nobody was there.
    Good. Maybe the ghost had left.
    Or maybe he’d never been there at all. Maybe Jason had imagined the entire thing. Maybe he’d dreamed it or . . .
    Maybe he really had lost his mind.
    Of those three options, the dream was by far the most comforting. Unfortunately, it was also the least likely. The one thing in the whole mess Jason was sure of was that he hadn’t been asleep.
    Either his garage was haunted, or he’d just experienced a serious psychotic break from reality.
    He slept fitfully. Ben drifted in and out of his dreams, sometimes simply watching him, sometimes begging for help. Once, he morphed into Dylan, who told him he needed to relax. Maybe have a drink or take a Valium. Another time, Ben turned into Sheriff Ross in old-west sheriff attire, complete with Stetson and spurs. She told him to “Get along, lil’ doggy, ’cause we don’t need any Hollywood trouble ’round these here parts.” He woke up feeling like he’d barely slept at all.
    He didn’t look out his window to see if Ben had reappeared. He took a long, hot shower instead, mulling it over. It was time to deal with his haunted garage in the most logical way he could. So after getting dressed, he settled down on the couch with his laptop and a cup of coffee and started to search.
    First, he searched “psychotic break.” The results varied from mildly alarming to horrifying. Delusions could be a symptom of any number of disorders, including schizophrenia. They could also be the result of a medical condition, like epilepsy or an electrolyte imbalance, or they could be substance-induced. The latter was the one option he felt comfortable ruling out immediately. Despite what the tabloids reported, his drug-using days were well behind him. The strongest thing he’d had in years was a glass of well-aged, single-malt whiskey.
    Still, that left plenty of scary options. But as he read, he found himself dismissing one possibility after another. The more frightening mental disorders didn’t generally appear out of the blue. A person didn’t wake up fine one day, and then start talking to imaginary people the next. It was usually more of a descent into delusions than a sudden fall. The exceptions were people who suffered a severe injury or traumatic event, but that certainly didn’t apply to him. He had no history of seizures, and his research into the other suggested medical causes led him to lists of symptoms he knew he wasn’t having. No dizziness, muscle cramps, numbness, abdominal pain, or blood in his urine. Most sources of course concluded that only a doctor could make the final diagnosis.
    Should he try to find a doctor in Coeur d’Alene or Spokane? Should he make an appointment and ask to be tested for everything from high blood pressure to sudden-onset psychosis?
    Definitely not.
    He turned to his other option: Ben must be a ghost. But where to begin?
    He typed “Can a snow globe be haunted?” into Google. He found several accounts of people whose snow globes suddenly started playing music by themselves, which was generally attributed to ghosts or spirits in the house, but nothing like what he was experiencing.
    Next, he tried “Can an item be haunted?” This time, he found link after link telling him that yes, it was possible. He began hopefully searching through the answers. In most cases, people reported strange events happening after a specific object was brought into their house—lights going on and off, doors opening and closing, things being moved about, strange smells or noises. Sometimes people felt an aura of evil, or inexplicable cold patches in otherwise warm rooms. A couple reported seeing specters, but none of them reported an interactive, full-body apparition like Jason had witnessed.
    That wasn’t all. The most obvious and telling difference between these people’s accounts and Jason’s experience boiled down to a single word: