Submitted for the May 2024 prompt: Gothic Sci-Fi

We’d been sitting around his fancy apartment with all those tapestries and mirrors doing nothing when Doug announces that he’s learned something new about his ancestors. So we all groan because you know how he gets. I mean, what else could he have to prove? His people were officers in the French and Indian War AND in the Revolution, so he has his rank and we have ours. MY ancestors were farmers and fruit-sellers.

 

He says he's built some kind of homemade thing, like back when people made personal radios to catch frequencies in the air. He says it uses the same interstitial wave modification technology that MIT is trying to patent. If you send a message out to your ancestors, their energies will try to find you. You know Doug: always hoping someone will want him.

 

So anyway it’s midnight and I’m trying to get out of there because his place is too dark when it gets that late, but Doug says we all have to stay and I’m the most important person because I’m so sensitive.

 

“Doug, I have to work tomorrow. You can play with your ancestors without me.”

 

“No no — I need you! I need that mopey brooding you have.”

 

He stands between me and the door and shoos me back to the couch. By the way, if you ever get the chance, you should get some good friends who are of your own status. I mean, if he insists I can’t just say no to someone with such a high rank. Remember when Joyce flat-out refused that wedding proposal from that high-ranker in Groton? He reported her and she got sent away for like six months.

 

“Ok, fine. What do we have to do?”

 

His face lights up (you’ve seen it) and he runs off into some dark room in that huge place. When he comes back he’s got this contraption in his hands; it’s like a metal shoebox with wires and antenna things sticking out of it. Oh, and some high-grade duct tape, too.

 

We all try to touch it, but he bats our hands away.

 

“It’s just like those MIT labs. It can sense the interstitial waves that the dead give off, so that’s how we know they are out there. But the brilliant part is that it turns our emotions into similar waves, and that lets them find us.”

 

Doug is not impressed by our blank stares. Apparently it had not occurred to him that we might not want our dead ancestors to find us. Who knows what kind of grudges someone might hold after a few hundred years? Besides, an MIT lab sounds safer than Doug’s creepy apartment.

 

“I’ve been doing research, so I know who I’m trying to reach. It will channel the waves I have in common with them, but it’s stronger if there’s excess emotional energy in the room. That’s why I need YOU.” And he gives me that stare because of course.

 

He gestures for us all to sit around the table where he has put the box, and then he motions for us to be quiet.

 

Judy asks “Who are you reaching out to?”

 

Doug gives her a glare and then, almost under his breath, says “Josiah Atherton. Puritan.”

 

“He should be fun,” I suggest, and Doug shifts his glare to me. I try again: “So what am I supposed to do with all my excess emotional energy?”

 

“Last year in Stonington. You raved about it for weeks — the coast road, the ocean, the old cemeteries. I need you to focus on those memories. Give my ancestor a memory of a place to come back to.”

 

He was right. I had been there working for a high-ranker and had spent a lot of time sitting by the crumbling grave marker of one of my own forbears, a poor farmer who had died too young even for the time, the tiny plot of overgrown land long forgotten and abandoned.

 

Doug was reaching into the box, holding tight onto some handle-thing, and some lights were coming on, so I took the bait and closed my eyes and concentrated. I tried to leave out the modern conveniences and remember the land as it might have been: the deep forests and the smell of the sea. The complete black of the night. I tried to feel the breeze that came in from the coastline and I heard the soft thwack of the snap hook on a flag banging against a flagpole.

 

Slap. Slap.

 

But then I let reality back into my mind, and I realized that the sound wasn’t in my memory of the flagpole on the beach but was here somewhere. Distant. In the long hallway outside Doug’s apartment. Someone was knocking on the doors, one after the other, echoing like a faint hollow drum down the hall.

 

Getting closer.

 

I opened my eyes and saw Doug, gripping that machine but staring, open-mouthed, at the door. The knocking came closer again and then, on its own, the door swung open.

 

Josiah Atherton was there. He was blurry, watery, shifting. His gray-clouded eyes stared through us. They searched for something with a great sorrowful confusion, an uncertainty about where he was and why.

 

I felt Doug trying to muster his bravado but then in the doorway... someone else.

 

A slight, narrow man, poverty and misery shaping his form, stepped tentatively out from the dark hallway. I felt him seeing me and I knew how far he had come from that crumbling grave in Stonington, perhaps standing this close to someone like Josiah Atherton for the first time. I heard Doug began to say “Why is he there?” but then the weight of my ancestor’s poverty hit him and he released his grip on the machine.

 

The two blurry shapes melted away.

 

I got up and left that monstrous dark apartment, and Doug has had nothing to say to me ever since. If you see him, don’t mention me.