Read Giving Up the Ghost for Free Online

calling out was a few years ago at my parents’ lake house.
    A few days before I arrived, a bunch of kids had decided to go on a late-night boat ride for some moonlit waterskiing. Except there was no moon. And the boat didn’t have any lights on it. And the first dude on the skis didn’t even know how to swim. And both he and the boat driver were drunk.
    I’m sure I don’t need to give too many details, but the boat hadn’t even made a single loop around the lake before the boaters realized that the drunken novice skier wasn’t there anymore. They circled around to pick him up.
    No sign.
    They kept looking for hours and didn’t bother to call the cops until the morning.
    The police searched and searched.
    Nothing.
    When I arrived at the lake and found out what all the activity was about, I started making light of the apparent Darwinism at play. I stopped joking when I noticed the boy’s father sitting in a picnic shelter near the shore every day watching the increasingly desperate search effort for his son. He just sat there, day in and day out, waiting.
    They started out with divers and quickly moved on to large hooks. After a few days they took cadaver-sniffing dogs out in rowboats. Then came additional divers with more-expensive-looking equipment. There was even talk of using explosive charges.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, especially at night when the searchers went away and the moon reflected off the still lake, with the boy’s body hidden somewhere underneath.
    At bedtime on the first night I was there, an image came into my head, an image of a dead boy, dripping wet, standing outside the patio door. I imagined his jellied, waterlogged white skin, his dilated eyes. His face stuck somewhere between desperation and anger. In my mind, I saw him just standing there, shaking. Every night before I lay down in bed to not sleep, I’d see the image in my mind. I’d just lie there or toss and turn all night, waiting for the drowned drunk nonswimmer to show up. I eventually was so freaked out and tired that on the last night I was there, I got up and walked out onto the patio at 3 A.M . and called him out.
    I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.
    Nothing.
    I went back inside and fell asleep.
    After three weeks, long after my visit had ended, they found the boy, almost directly across from my parents’ house, tangled in some sunken branches deep under the surface.
    I stand there at the head of that trail near the Clinton Road reservoir, in the dark, listening to Curry and Joe fade away into the distance.
    I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.
    When I open my eyes, all I can see through the darkness is the bridge itself.
    The only thing I can really see is the graffiti on the Jersey barriers mounted on top of the bridge. According to stories, the ghost boy’s name is written on the bridge’s guardrails. Iconclude that unless the dead kid’s name is Alice or I Love Weed, we can immediately write off this part of the story. One of the few legible things written on top of one of the barriers is “All the fairytales of Clinton Road … never prove true.”
    Curry and Joe’s voices are getting louder; they’re heading back up the trail toward me. They tell me that they’d made it about forty yards before Joe thought he heard and saw a pack of approaching bears, then announced he would go no farther and headed back to the road. After reuniting, we line up along the guardrail.
    There is a part of the reservoir bridge legend that is Clinton Road’s best-known ghost story. It says that if you stand on this bridge and throw a coin into the water, the dead boy will throw it back to you. This is the story that most drew me to Clinton Road in the first place. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry legend. Either the coin comes back, or it doesn’t. Sometimes the coin hits you, sometimes you see it land