It Was Christmas

         Evan Derry was a quiet man right up to his death. His soul hasn’t been too quiet since.
         He had few friends. Ever single, he lived alone with just a cat and an aquarium. He worked at Subway.
         Throughout his life he’d felt rage and anger at a world full of injustice. He wasn’t one to stand out with short brown hair, brown eyes, and average height. Until that night.
         It should have been a good night. A trip to the movie store, takeout from Mexico, and home. It was the usual Sunday night routine but his friends wanted to go out. They’d heard a story.
         An insane asylum once, now a decrepit old building. It’s only patients were said to be young children. It was overcrowded and understaffed one Christmas and there was a fire. Even though across from the asylum was a river, the building was severely damaged.          Only some of the staff survived but scared. Found to be arson, the case was never solved.
         Supposedly there was a Satanic German church—with Nazi symbols inside—nearby.
         Evan’s boys thought it’d be cool to go check it out, smoke up, and just chill—at night of course. That was the plan.
         A couple of guys saw something and ran to the car. The doors were unlocked but wouldn’t open.
         One buddy had an expensive photography camera. There’s a special lens that words at night and his just randomly broke.
         They got out of there when a pair of headlights came out of the woods behind the asylum. There wasn’t a road or a path over there. The headlights followed them to the end of the road. There it just disappeared. No turns before the highway, the one road surrounded by river and woods.
         At a brightly lit gas station they saw it.
         On the rear end of the red car were kid’s footprints and the words ‘Help Me’ and ‘Be Ware.’ The prints looked like mud but wouldn’t come off.
         Five days later, on Christmas, Evan Derry lay dead in a pool of blood and no visible wounds. That case also went unsolved.
         Sometime later he was suddenly back on earth. A spirit, he now floated through walls. He was himself in every way but he wasn’t real. No one saw him and he could speak to no one.
         He was alone in a world full of living, breathing people.
         For a couple of years he haunted only the places he knew, just watching life. Then one day a man walked right through the walls covered with liquor bottles.
         “You. When you kick it?” he asked Evan as he hovered inches about a breather’s gin.
         “You know me?” Evan asked, surprised he even had a voice.
         “You used to sit on Old Man Mike’s stool,” the man said as he crossed his arms impatiently.
         He looked like he was in his seventies when he died. Balding and round, he wasn’t a tall spirit.
         “Few years now I think.”
         “Yeah, times like that now. I’ve been dead 85 years now,” he said a tad proudly.
         His name was Marty and he built the bar. Having been dead so long—from a heart attack—Marty had a lot to share and taught Evan all he knew.
         Evan and Marty talked long after the bar was closed.
         His last piece of advice was to find a purpose. After that, he tipped his invisible top hat and wafted away through a far wall.
         The next day when the bar opened, Evan was still pondering his purpose.
         He watched the bartender, a woman, as she started opening the bar. She was smaller than he expected a bartender to be.
         She had short blonde hair done in pigtails and was wearing red and black plaid pants. She wore black square glasses and too many bracelets.
         When she wasn’t making stiff ones, she sat on the end of the bar, her legs tucked under her, and read.
         Evan didn’t remember her from his drinking days. He also noticed a younger crowd seemed to be the clientele.
         The décor had changed. Still a small one room bar. A pool table, a handful of tables and chairs and the bar. Two flat screens and a digital jukebox hung on the walls.
         “I said calm down sir,” the bartender’s voice rang loudly.
         Evan turned his attention to the man at the bar. A biker who drank one to many was trying to reach other the bar. She pushed him away and he grabbed her tiny chest.
         Mad now, Evan floated closer and saw a knife in the man’s belt.
         Marty told him all he had to do to make things happen was concentrate hard. He had to want it. Well right now he wanted to take the knife away.
         The biker now had a hold of her tiny wrist, his hands so big they swallowed hers up.
         Evan reached for the knife and his hand went right through.
         The biker now had her on the bar. Why wasn’t anyone helping her?
         “I need that knife now,” Evan said as authoritatively as he could and held his hand out.
         Suddenly, pulled like a magnet, the knife was in his hand. The biker was none the wiser.
         In shock, Evan held the knife as he watched the girl kick the biker repeatedly. Finally, still in shock, he just reached over and stabbed the guy in the thigh.
         Immediately the biker dropped the bartender’s wrists and she scrambled away, back over the bar. The biker looked down and saw his knife. Shaking his head, he pulled his knife from his thigh and turned to go.
         “This keeps happening,” he said with a sigh.
         It wasn’t hard to believe this big guy had stabbed himself before.
         Evan followed the biker outside. There was no bike, while dripping blood he walked over to a black Camaro. He tried the handle but the door was locked. As he moved to break the driver’s window with his elbow, Evan intervened.
         He reached out and squeezed the first thing he felt in his hand. When all was said and done, the biker without a bike lay on the ground in a pool of blood.
         Evan held his heart. He’d found his purpose.
         It was Christmas.