It’s Not Condensation, Erik

Let me start by clearing something up, because it’s important to me and nobody ever gets it right. I was not murdered in this house. I did not die tragically in 1887 after falling down the stairs while carrying a candle. I did not have a broken heart. I was not a lonely sea captain waiting for a ship that never came home. Every person who has ever lived in this house has invented a sad backstory for me, and every single one of them was wrong.

I was born a poltergeist. My mother was a poltergeist. My father was a poltergeist. My grandmother was a poltergeist who once threw an entire dinner service at a bishop, and we still talk about it at family gatherings. I came into this world, or rather this attic, on a stormy Tuesday, and the first thing I ever did was knock a jar of pickles off a shelf. My mother cried with pride.

So when people say, “Why are you doing this? What do you want from us?” I want to say: I don’t want anything. This is just what I am. You don’t ask a cat why it pushes cups off tables. You don’t ask a rooster why it shouts at five in the morning. But a poltergeist moves one chair three centimetres to the left, and suddenly everyone wants to have a deep emotional conversation about my unfinished business. I have no unfinished business. I have finished all my business. My business is chairs. My name, by the way, is Gustav. Nobody has ever asked. Now, here’s the part people really don’t understand. Being a poltergeist is not just a way of life. It’s a job. There are rules. There is paperwork. There is, and I wish I was joking about this, a quota.

Every month, the Regional Office of Hauntings sends me a letter. It arrives through the wall at midnight, glowing a bit green, smelling slightly of old libraries and burnt toast. The letter always says the same thing:

Dear Gustav,

This is a reminder that your monthly scare quota is ONE (1) confirmed scream, gasp, or dropped object by a living person. Please submit evidence by the end of the month. Failure to meet the quota may result in reassignment.

Kind regards,

Department of Disturbances

Reassignment. You know where they reassign poltergeists who fail their quota? Garden sheds. I have a cousin, Leopold, who got sent to a garden shed in 1974. He has been haunting a lawnmower for fifty years. He sends me postcards. They are very sad postcards. So I take the quota seriously. One scream a month. That’s all. People think that’s easy. People think a poltergeist just floats around, slams a few doors, and everyone runs out into the street in their pajamas. Oh, how I wish. The real problem, the problem that keeps me up at night (I don’t sleep, but you understand), is choosing who to scare.

Let me introduce the current residents of my house.

First, there is Mr. Pettersson, who lives on the ground floor. He is eighty-four years old and almost completely deaf. In my first month, I put a lot of work into Mr. Pettersson. I slammed his kitchen door so hard the plates rattled. Nothing. I made his rocking chair rock by itself all night. In the morning he sat in it and said, “Ah, it’s already warmed up. Lovely.” I knocked a picture frame off his wall. He picked it up, looked at it, said, “Hello, Margit,” kissed the photo of his late wife, and hung it back up.

And then he said, out loud, to the empty room, “Thank you for visiting, dear.”

He thinks I’m his wife. What am I supposed to do with that? I can’t scare him now. I’d feel terrible. Sometimes I rock his chair a bit in the evening, just gently, and he smiles and tells me about his day. I know more about his knee problems than his doctor does. This is not haunting. This is volunteer work.

Mr. Pettersson: not an option. Second floor: the Lindqvist family. Mother, father, two children, and a cat.

You’d think a family would be perfect. Four people means four chances for a scream. But you’d be wrong, because the father, Erik, is what we in the profession call a Rational Explainer.

Every time I do anything, Erik explains it. I make the lights flicker? “Old wiring.” I open a cupboard by itself? “The house is settling.” I write LEAVE on the steamy bathroom mirror? He looked at it, nodded, and said, “Condensation does funny things.” CONDENSATION, ERIK. Condensation does not have handwriting. Condensation did not go to school. I spent twenty minutes on that L.

The mother, Sara, is worse in a different way. She’s into “energy.” When I knocked over a vase, she said I was a “lost soul seeking light” and burned some sage at me. Do you know what sage smells like to a poltergeist? It’s like someone opening a bag of old socks right in your face. Then she sat on the floor and told me, “You are safe here. You are loved. You can move on now.”

I don’t want to move on! I was born here! This is my home! I’m not lost, I know exactly where I am! I’m in the hallway, next to the coat rack, where I’ve been since 1952!

And then the children. Oh, the children.

The little one, Maja, is six. Maja is not scared of me. Maja thinks I’m her best friend. She has named me “Mister Wobbly” because I once made her bedroom lamp wobble. She leaves me drawings. She leaves me biscuits. Last week she made me a little paper crown and put it on the windowsill with a note that said, FOR MISTER WOBBLY, KING OF THE HOUSE.

I have kept the crown. I am not ashamed. The older one, Oscar, is fourteen. Oscar wants to be scared. Desperately. He’s been trying to film me for months for his video channel. He sits in the dark with three cameras and a little device that beeps, whispering, “If there’s a spirit here, give me a sign.” And the thing is, if I scare Oscar, I meet my quota, but I also become content. I will be on the internet. People in other countries will watch me in slow motion and argue in the comments about whether I’m fake. Someone will say, “Obviously just a string lol.” I have my pride. I am not a string.

And the cat? The cat isn’t scared of anything. The cat looks directly at me, all the time, with total disappointment. As if I owe it money. The Lindqvists: complicated.

Third floor: the attic flat, which is rented by a young woman named Elin.

Elin is, by every possible measure, the perfect target. She lives alone. She is easily startled. She screams when the toaster pops up. One time a moth flew into her face and she made a sound I had only previously heard from a kettle. One scream from Elin and my month is done. Easy. Professional. In and out.

So, last month, I prepared. I waited until midnight. I floated up the stairs. I got into position behind her kitchen door, ready to open it very, very slowly, with that long horror-film creak that took me twenty years to perfect.

And then I heard her crying.

She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold, reading an email on her laptop. I could see it over her shoulder. She’d been rejected from a job. The fourth one this month. And then her phone buzzed, and it was her mother asking if she’d “found anything yet,” and Elin put her face on the table and said, very quietly, “I’m trying, Mum.”

I stayed behind the door for a long time.

I’m a monster. I know I’m a monster. I was born one. But there are some things you just do not do, and scaring a crying woman at midnight after her fourth job rejection is one of them. That’s not haunting. That’s bullying.

So instead I moved her cold tea into the microwave and pressed thirty seconds.

Ding.

She looked up. She looked at the microwave. She took the tea out, now warm, and stared at it.

“Huh,” she said.

She didn’t scream. She just drank it. Then she said, “Thanks, house,” and went to bed.

Quota: not met. Morale: oddly high.

So that’s my situation. One deaf man who thinks I’m his dead wife. A father who thinks I’m plumbing. A mother who thinks I’m a sad cloud. A little girl who thinks I’m royalty. A teenager who wants to make me famous. A cat who thinks I’m in debt. And a lovely, unlucky young woman I simply cannot bring myself to frighten.

And every month, the green letter comes through the wall.

People think monsters choose victims easily. They think we look at a house full of humans and rub our hands together and laugh. No. I make lists. I write pros and cons. I’ve considered the postman, but he only stays for eleven seconds, and I’m not fast. I considered the man who comes to read the electricity meter, but he wears big headphones and dances while he works, and honestly I don’t want to ruin that for him. It’s the best part of my week.

Do you know what it’s like? To be one thing by birth and have everyone around you decide you’re something else? To try to do your job, honestly, and have it be called condensation? I’m not asking for much. Just one scream. From someone who deserves it, or at least someone who won’t be emotionally damaged by it.

And then, on the last night of the month, with three hours to spare, help arrived. Or rather, trouble arrived. Which, for a poltergeist, is the same thing. At 9 p.m. there was a cold breeze in the hallway, which was strange, because that’s usually my job. A tall grey figure floated through the front door. Long coat. Clipboard. Tiny glasses on the end of a long nose.

An inspector from the Department of Disturbances.

“Gustav,” he said, in a voice like a door that hasn’t been oiled since the war. “We’ve had concerns.”

“Concerns?” I said.

“Six months. Zero screams.” He tapped his clipboard. “We have reports that you’ve been… reheating beverages.”

“Only once!”

“Twelve times.”

“…Twelve times.”

“And rocking an elderly gentleman to sleep.”

“He has bad knees!”

The inspector sighed, a long, dusty sigh. “Gustav. You’re a poltergeist. A born poltergeist. Your grandmother threw a dinner service at a bishop. Do you know how that makes the family look?”

And this is where I lost my temper.

I’m not proud of it. But six months of being misunderstood had built up inside me like steam in a pressure cooker. Everyone deciding who I was. Everyone explaining me. Burning sage at me. Calling me Margit. Calling me plumbing. And now this grey man with his little clipboard, telling me I wasn’t monster enough?

“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!” I shouted. “NOBODY UNDERSTANDS!”

And the whole house shook. Every door slammed. Every light flickered. Every picture frame turned upside down. The cat flew up to the top of the bookcase. Somewhere, a spoon fell into a sink with a sound like a church bell. The inspector, standing in the middle of the hallway, let out the highest, loudest, longest scream I have ever heard in my two hundred years of existence. He screamed like a teapot. He screamed like an opera singer stepping on a Lego. He dropped his clipboard. His tiny glasses fell off his long nose. Then he floated very quickly backwards out through the wall and was gone.

Silence.

Then, from upstairs, Maja’s little voice: “Mister Wobbly? Are you okay?”

And from the second floor, Erik: “Wow. That’s some wind.”

And from the ground floor, Mr. Pettersson, who had heard nothing at all, peacefully snoring.

The green letter came the next morning.

Dear Gustav,

Congratulations. Your monthly quota has been met (one scream, one dropped object, confirmed by Department staff). Please note that a complaint has been filed against you by Inspector Wendell for “excessive emotional disturbance.”

Kind regards,

Department of Disturbances

So that’s where I am. I met my quota by scaring my own boss. I’m under investigation. And next month, I’ll have to do the whole thing all over again.

But I’m not worried. Because I’ve learned something. I don’t need to scare the people who are kind to me, or the people who are struggling, or the people who just want a warm chair and someone to talk to about their knees.

Every month, the Department will send someone to check on me. And every month, I’ll be ready.

Elin got the job, by the way. She left a biscuit on the microwave for me on her first day. Maja’s paper crown is still on the windowsill. And Erik is now convinced the house needs new pipes, which is costing him a fortune, and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a little bit satisfying.

I’m a monster. I was born one.

But I get to choose who I’m a monster to.