There may be life there, but could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy.

— Lisa Kaltenegger —

♦️

Thirteen days ago, Lulu and I decided, on Halloween Night, we'd explore the haunted house on Van Ness.

We knew Mom and Jason would be too busy trick-or-treating with their elementary-school-age sons to worry about their teenage daughters; and besides, we aren't Jason's kids, so our stepdad wouldn't worry about us, even without our half-brothers to dote on.

We told Mom we were spending the night at Shelby's, but we're actually unrolling our sleeping bags inside the haunted house.

Shelby dared us to stay there overnight, just to prove we don't believe in ghosts.

♦️

"But even if there are ghosts," Lulu says, "they won't mind if we sleep here tonight."

I dim our fully solar-charged lantern to a modest blue pool of light that I know will last overnight.

"Ghosts must get lonely," Lulu says. "If there are ghosts, we'll just keep 'em company..."

The lantern should also be good for our early-morning trek to Shelby's, where Mom is picking us all up at sunrise to drive us to school.

"What better day to keep 'em company than Halloween?" Lulu asks.

"There are no ghosts," I tell her.

Shelby's parents work overseas. Since she lives alone, we love slumber partying with her. And Mom loves picking us up early to check if we got tangled in trouble.

But Shelby didn't weave us into this web. She just dared us to do it. We're the ones who've always been obsessed with Van Ness' haunted house.

We'd be in big trouble if Mom found out we spent the night in here. So that's the ghost keeping me up tonight—the haunting fear of getting caught.

Or about waking up to an angry hobo telling us to get out of his den.

♦️

The first time we checked inside the haunted house was during Christmas Tree Lane, last year.

The haunted house on Van Ness is the only one that isn't required to glow with one hundred solar lights a month before Christmas.

While the rest of the homes on Van Ness light the night like the dawn, the haunted house remains stoic and dark, a shadow in our childhood landscape.

It was peculiar and enticing, the Christmas Tree Lane night we saw the bedroom window scintillating with vivid rainbow patterns, kaleidoscopic and pure-hued.

We snuck off from our buddies, then tried the haunted house's front door—no huge thing, just to see what the prismatic lights were all about—when the brass knob fell off.

We were a wee high—like most of the teens who wandered Christmas Tree Lane that night, or at least the ones we knew—so it was reasonable for us to feel spooked, paranoid by the dilapidated front door of the dark house in the twinkling night.

When we finally mustered the courage to head inside, things got weird.

In the living room, papers swirled in the center of a hardwood floor, drawn in by the undulating gravitational pull of a tiny, white-cloudy marble, about the size of a gum-ball.

That freaked us out enough to Uber home.

Yet it also intrigued us enough to come back.

♦️

So far though, we haven't found the little white marble. We haven't seen any papers swirling about, either.

Just empty, dusty rooms in a 1930s house with a brick chimney.

Lulu writes feverishly in her handmade, Etsy-bought journal while I heart the hell out of Instagram, whittling away fear.

"It was just paranoia," I mutter.

"Yeah," Lulu says. "Drugs got to our heads."

♦️

When the white marble rolls into the living room—seemingly moving with independent volition—I about knock the lantern over as I kick-and-scream my way free from my polka-dotted bedroll.

Lulu glances up at me with sleepy eyes, her glazed-over and nonplussed frown caught by the glow of the pooling blue lantern light.

She asks, "What's wrong?"

I point at the white marble coming to a gentle standstill on the dusty floor.

Lulu turns to the marble just as a translucent, powdery-looking apparition—with an iridescent sheen. like a pearl—emerges in a near-human size form, unhampered by the gum-ball-tiny sphere.

"Ghosts," Lulu rabbles, the rest of her paralyzed to stillness.

No, the apparition chimes, not a ghost.

Another powdery and iridescent being stretches out of the marble, speaking in higher tones than the first. We're ideas, it says. We're alive.

♦️

From then on, Lulu and I would head to the haunted house on holidays to talk to the singsong beings that call themselves ideas.

They'd tell us stories about their water world, and we'd use what we learned to ease the effects of climate change.

They'd elucidate the meaning of life, and we'd work towards peace between our religions.

They'd guide us as we developed our space elevator and starships, fully knowing they'd get nothing from the exchange except a chance to interact with us.

And ideas were desperate for attention.

When we told our college freshmen friends about the haunted house, they came to harass its spirits. They wanted answers about the afterlife and immortality. So did their friends. Friends of friends of friends.

No one was interested in listening to what the ideas wanted to talk about. The visitors only demanded answers of the otherworldly beings—politically correct answers.

♦️

Because our friends became insufferable, the white marble appeared less and less.

One year after college, when we came to the haunted house for our usual holiday conversation, we had to beg for ideas to come out and talk to us.

Ideas learned they weren't people we thought we ought to know.

Ideas were just celebrities representing the image we wanted to see from them.

Ideas hated our popularity contest world.

A good idea, the high tone told me once, is solitary, so by extension, it feels lonely. It doesn't need much company to shine; just one intelligent ear, open enough to only listen.

♦️

On my thirtieth Halloween, I went to the haunted house on Van Ness without Lulu. She wasn't able to come; climate changes were making everyone ill.

I prayed ideas would come to me—maybe, even glow through me—so I could save my sister.

Yet their silence draped on me as a shroud. I may be too dark or far-gone for them.

They say we lose our imagination in adulthood. They—the adults who already lost them.

♦️

As an artist working in a gallery in Merced, I can safely say I live far enough from the ideas to no longer rely on them.

Still, on rainy days, I wonder if the ideas travel far enough to inhabit me despite distance, despite independence—despite moving on?

Lulu and I became too enraptured in the ideas we met in the haunted house; we were possessed by Muses who needed our bodies to make their messages manifest.

Then she was sick.

Then she was gone.

Why didn't the ideas come to me when I needed them?

Why weren't the ideas capable of saving her?

I prefer working safely away from the haunted house, where ideas won't arrive from alien worlds to convince me of their thoughts; to feed me their feelings.

I like painting the Merced farmlands without any thoughts or feelings at all.

Ideas used to keep me up at night until I completed the contracts I made with them. Write this book. Carve this woodblock. Now I am free.

♦️

Still, many ideas travel to Earth through the wormhole.

Into the black hole near their water world—then out the white hole in the haunted house on Van Ness—they wait for a teenager who's too curious or stoned to know better, to wander into their dilapidated living room.

Ideas slip into the body like a lover in bedsheets, but only after we come to them. They never travel far on their own. Waiting, yearning; seeking vessels. In this way, perhaps, they are just like ghosts.

♦️

First draft: October 18

Word count: 1600

Inspiration: Contest #19 from @mystery, "A Daring Halloween."

https://www.wattpad.com/639192736-contests-writing-prompts-contest-19-a-daring

Process:

Occasionally I like to track my process on my blog, Kourtnie.net. Today I wanted to track the process of a short story, but within the Wattpad publication, rather than on an external blog...

PROMPT (quoted from contest)

"While young children are out trick-or-treating, you've made your way to the one house people always skip. It's the abandoned mansion, rumoured to be haunted.

"Dared by your friends to spend a night in the haunted house, will you survive the night, or will you uncover the truth behind the rumours?"

PRE-WRITE

I want to write about the haunted world of ideas. What if the haunted house has a white hole inside of it?

What Goldilocks zone planet could be the home of ideas, and where will the black hole be located that lets them travel from their star system to ours?—through the haunted house, of course.

ONE-SENTENCE SYNOPSIS

Ideas inhabit the Ocean of Dreaming that sweeps across Kepler-62f. Occasionally, ideas ride their space elevator to their interfiefdom station, where they travel on Starship through the Black Hole of the West to appear through the white hole in the 1940s haunted house on Van Ness that's always skipped during Halloween and Christmas Tree Lane.