Dog Days - (Episode 4 of 4) - "Cooler"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost. Scary Stories. This is Dog Days, Episode 4. Cooler. The storm came in off the water a little after midnight. And it came the way mercy never does all at once, with no warning and no gentleness. Like something that had been held back too long and finally got loose. I heard it before I felt it, a sound I'd forgotten existed, a green roar building out over the black city. And then the first drops hitting the windows like thrown gravel, and then all of it, a wall of water falling on a place that had been a desert for a month. The wind got under the curtain I'd shut so carefully and tore it back, both panels, wide. And the rain came sideways through the open window and across the room, and the air. I

1:13 have to tell you about the air. The air changed. For four weeks, the air in that apartment had been a thing you wore, a wet heavy coat you couldn't take off, and in the space of a minute it thinned and cooled and moved. And I stood in the middle of it with my arms out and my face up and I gasped like I'd come up out of deep water, because I had, in a way, I'd been under for a month. The cool came into my lungs and into my skin and into my head, all the rooms of me that the heat had filled, and it began, very quietly, to turn the lights back on. And then the lights came back on, the real ones, somewhere down in the grid, a switch caught and held, and the lamp by Edith's chair, the lamp I'd left switched on

2:00 weeks ago, when there was still power. I'd kept the room dark so long, I'd shut the curtain against the slipping afternoons. I'd done all of it to keep the honest light off her, and now the cool had blown the curtain wide and the grid had lit the lamp. The two things I most needed kept away come into the room together in the same minute and there was nowhere left to look that wasn't lit. I turned around, I'd turned around a hundred times in that month and found my person in the chair and been saved by it.

2:35 I turned around. I'm not going to describe it to you. I've held to that the whole way through, and I'll hold to it now, at the end, when it would be easiest to break. You have eyes. You've had them this whole time. I could feel you using them, getting there before me, being kinder to yourself than I was able to be to myself. So you already know what the lamp showed me, what a month of heat does, what was in the chair by the window under the blanket I'd tucked up so it wouldn't catch a chill.

3:09 I won't make you look at it. I'll only tell you that I looked at it. Fully. With the cool air on my face and the rain coming in and the lamp not letting me go, I looked at what I had been keeping company and pouring water for and waving the flies off of and telling about a Christmas. and I knew it the way the living know the dead, with my whole body at once, no doubt left anywhere in me to hide behind. I want to say I screamed.

3:40 People expect a scream. There wasn't one. I'd used up screaming weeks before, on the small things, the heat, the man, the dark. For the big thing there was only a kind of quiet, and me on my knees on the wet floor in the lamplight, and the truth standing in the room like a fourth wall that had always been there, and that I'd been very carefully not walking into. She'd been gone since the night the man came. You worked that out, I think. Three days, four I lost the count, the heat ate the count. She'd been gone since I pulled the blanket up to her chin, and every single thing I'd done after that I had done for no one.

4:21 The water poured out by an empty chair. the conversations where I said both parts, the relief, the terrible nightly relief of turning from the dead black window and finding I wasn't the last one alive, finding it in a thing that was no more alive than the window. I had not been keeping her company. There was no her to keep. I had been keeping my own company and dressing it in her so I wouldn't have to know I was alone. And here is the worst thing. the thing I've been walking you toward this whole time, the thing the heat almost let me get away with not saying.

4:59 I want you to be sitting down for it, the way I wasn't. I knew. Not at the end. At the end the cool forced it and I couldn't not know, and there's no sin in that. The grid did that. The rain did that. I mean before. I mean the afternoon. The curtain slipped and the light fell on the chair, and for the length of one breath, I saw her the way you would have seen her. I told you about that. I told you. It nearly came apart. What I didn't tell you, what I've been saving because I'm a coward and I wanted you to like me a little longer, is what I did with that breath. I had the truth in my hands, clear, whole, undeniable, handed to me by the honest light, and I got up off the floor, and I crossed the room, and I

5:50 pulled the curtain shut. and I chose her anyway I chose the dead woman over the empty city I looked at the truth and I decided I'd rather be mad with company than sane and alone and I shut the light out and I went back to my chair by the chair and I told her about Christmas that's the horror I've been carrying not that I lost my mind in the heat people lose their minds in the heat that's just weather happening to a person the horror is that there was a door and the door was open, and on the other side of it was the truth and being the last light in the world, and I looked through that door, and I closed it, on purpose.

6:33 Because the truth was lonelier than the lie, and I have always, my whole life, been more afraid of being alone than of being wrong. I told you at the very start, the first night, that somebody had to stay I said it like it was about her. Somebody had to stay. I've been saying it for years, in one form or another, to every person who ever needed me, that I was the one who showed up. The one who didn't leave. The good one. The girl. The man who broke in held a sentence in front of his face to keep it from falling apart. I'm an honest man.

7:15 I'm an honest man. And I watched him do it. And I was so frightened. Because I knew the trick. I had a sentence of my own. Somebody had to stay. I stayed because the staying was the only thing that made me somebody. And when she died and stopped being able to need me, I would not let her stop. Because if she stopped, I was no one, alone, nine floors up in a dead city, just a woman the heat hadn't gotten to yet. She did me the last kindness of her body. She let me go on being needed after there was nothing left of her to need me, and I called that love, and I called it staying, and I let you call it that too, right up until now. They came for us two days after the rain.

8:04 A crew, in the cleared streets, going building to building, floor by floor, the way I'd gone down the stairwell that first night, a circle of light moving through the dark looking for whoever was left. I heard them in the stairwell calling out and I did something I'm not proud of and not ashamed of. I'm past both of those now. Mostly I straightened the blanket and I smoothed her hair and I made the chair look like what I needed it to look like and then I opened the door to them as the woman who had stayed.

8:38 And oh, they were kind to me. That's the part I can't. They were so kind. A young one, a paramedic, took my hands and called me a hero. said it just like that, said most people ran, and I'd stayed with an old woman who couldn't run, stayed the whole month, never left her, and that they didn't see that, hardly ever, and that I should be proud. He had a kind, tired, sunburned face, and somewhere out in that broken city I wondered if he'd already met a big ruined man who kept saying he was honest, and been gentle with him too, and written down whatever needed writing down, and moved on to the next door. We were all telling our sentences to the people with the clipboards. Maybe that's all a city is, after the worst of it, everyone holding a

9:29 sentence in front of their face, and a few kind, exhausted strangers agreeing not to look behind it. They wrote it down as the heat, heat stroke, an 83-year-old woman. The first week of the failure, which is true, every word of it true. The truest thing in this whole account, the heat killed Edith Adler. Not me. I never raised a hand. I gave her the better water. I kept the flies off her feet. face there's nothing to charge me with there's no law against what I did they carried her out under a clean sheet with their faces soft and they wrapped me in foil like something precious and the young one kept his hand on my shoulder the whole way down the nine flights And at the bottom, the light was so ordinary I could have wept. And

10:23 everyone I met for weeks after looked at me the way you look at someone good. The local paper ran my name. The woman who wouldn't leave. My sister, who I hadn't spoken to in years, called me crying, proud of me. And I let her be. I have let everyone be. That's my sentence. Not prison. Worse, everyone alive thinks I'm the woman who stayed. I get to keep that.

10:51 I get to wear it the rest of my life. The good neighbor story. True on the outside. Hollow all the way through. And there is no one anywhere who knows what's inside it. Except you. Now. That's why I've told you. Somebody had to know the real version. Or I really would be the last light in the world. And I've already shown you what I'm willing to do to keep from being that. It's three summers on now.

11:19 I live somewhere else, lower floor this time. And the radio said this morning that there's a system stalling out over the region, a ridge of high pressure, a heat advisory through the weekend, vulnerable populations urged to check on elderly neighbours. And I caught myself. I want to be honest with you. It's the only thing I have left to give this. I caught myself thinking about the woman, three doors down. She's older. She lives alone. I've seen her on the stairs, one at a time, both hands on the rail. And the thought I had, sitting here with the radio going and the first real heat of the year coming up through the floor, the thought I had was not, I should make sure she's alright. The thought I had was that if it happens again, I

12:07 won't be the one left alone. I'm telling you so that someone knows to watch me. I'm telling you because I don't think I'm going to knock on her door to save her. I think I'm going to knock on her door, so I'm not by myself when the lights go out. And the heat is coming. You can feel it. It's always coming. There's my girl.