It’s been 5 years of this.
Groans of grief and screams of what seems to be jealousy-induced pain resonate within the room every time I try to enjoy a good meal, a movie night, a reading session – you name it… there will always be noises inside the walls of my house every time I try to feel good about anything I do. It’s also been 5 years since my ex-wife died. Contrary to popular belief – and by popular, I mean I’ve overheard my neighbors talk about it several times – I’m not a widow. I caught my ex-wife cheating on me. With one of her students. Professor? You wish. It was probably the worst combination of adultery and pedophilia anyone’s ever seen. The kid thought he had the best night of his life. No, you’re not, you absolute gimp! You’re too young to even consent to this.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the screeching noises in my house. They come from the haunting spirit of my dead ex-wife. It calls itself Dark Mathilda – most of the nicknames she gave herself were supervillain-ish – and for some reason it just doesn’t like to see me happy. It sits opposite to me when I eat and makes regurgitation noises so that I don’t feel like finishing my food. It wails like a siren when I’m trying to enjoy a movie or a book. Nothing stops this grumpy ghost.
Last night I reached my breaking point and decided I couldn’t take this anymore.
“Mathilda,” I shouted to the empty walls in the kitchen.
“Tread lightly, Sullivan,” Mathilda squealed like a cursed witch.
“No can do tonight, Mathilda,” I said sternly and calmly. “I’m very ticked off by your attitude tonight. If a change of tone is what you want, I’m going to call you by your real name. You do know it’s not Mathilda, right?”
“Fine,” Mathilda screeched further. “But as long as you’re bothered, whatever you call me is none of my concern.”
I felt then that I wasn’t going to get anything from reasoning with a wraith, but I had no other choice. None of my friends were exorcists… not that I know of, and I didn’t have the time to post a bulletin anywhere and get someone else – and maybe myself, too – in trouble. I decided to go head-to-head with a merciless beast.
“You say you want to see me bothered, right, Mathilda?”
“Yes! It is all I desire!” Mathilda squealed rather joyfully.
“Then I’d like to bargain,” I said, challengingly.
“You won’t get anything out of me, Sullivan! Envy consumes me, as it should do you. There is no escape from my wrath.”
“Okay, that’s two of the seven sins so far and you sound like a rather educated ghoul,” I said, trying to take my mind off how terrified I am from going this far into trying to exorcise a demon myself. “Look, I am a patient man, a very patient man. This could go on for years, decades, maybe till I’m dead! Imagine, Mathilda, the only joy you’ve seen – as the demon that haunts me – being my death. You don’t happen to have anyone else to haunt, do you?”
I said all of this rather confidently, but deep inside I knew this was going to be a rather difficult task.
“Well, well… Sullivan’s got jokes?” Mathilda said this in reference to something she said in an old fight we had back when her name was Debbie. “Tell me then, how do you wish to die?”
“Here’s how I wish to die,” I replied sarcastically, then gulped trying to hide my terror. “In the next 48 hours, one of us will either give up or be forced to.”
“Sweet!” Mathilda groaned excitedly. I realized I needed to be more specific or else this would not end how I hoped.
“Let me clarify: I have 48 hours to tolerate your behavior. If I don’t give up until the time is up, you shall leave me be till the end of time,” I said, and thought it sounded cool, like some sort of catchphrase.
“Good, but know this,” Mathilda sneered. “I will not restrain myself from crushing you, be it your body or your mind… and if I break you and you announce your defeat, you will die, tortured by the loudest and most terrifying screams I can possibly muster. This is unlikely of me, but I shall allow you 12 hours to prepare. Good luck.”
The horror of Mathilda’s words shook me so badly, I had no idea what to do. I had only 12 hours of perceived peace and unsettled tranquility before I could go on. It was 9:30 in the evening. Mathilda was gone for the next 12 hours, but I felt sleepless. I had to find someone to call before my life became on the line.
I scrolled through a list of all the contacts I know, but I did not have any close friends, and by that, I mean never in my life have I had what others would call a best friend. Then suddenly I felt my brain light up for a moment. A friendly acquaintance from work was well-read to a great extent, and I thought she could help me with my situation. I called her faster than you could say “I’m dialing Anne’s number now.” She picked up and I frantically explained my situation.
“Well, luckily enough for you, today’s a day off,” Anne laughed. She told me to meet her at some coffee shop and said it was going to take some time.
10:30 PM. I arrived at the place. Suddenly I see Anne charging at me with heaps of scriptures.
“W-what are these?” I asked nervously.
“Well,” said Anne, “you say you’re haunted by the ghost of your ex-wife, right? And she calls herself a German name, if I remember correctly it was Mathilda. Well, prepare for a shocker—”
“Already shocked, go on.”
“You’re not the first one to deal with an underworld creature of this kind,” said Anne with a confident grin.
“Wait, you too?!”
“No!” Anne laughed, “No, of course not! These are scriptures written by an old German author named Dietrich Kross. He went through a similar experience – frighteningly similar… Mathilda was his wife.”
“So, it’s always been Dark Mathilda? Debbie didn’t make up a supervillain moniker after her death then?”
“Precisely. If anything, it means the soul of your dead ex-wife was possessed by the same darkness that consumed Kross’s wife. Also do you know how lucky you are?”
“You sure lucky is the word? Try cursed!”
“You actually are very lucky, like a one-in-a-million kind of lucky. Coincidentally, Kross made the same bargain with Dark Mathilda when he faced off with her.”
“So that means… that means there’s already a way to exorcise this demon?”
“Yes. Now listen carefully.”
It took 3 hours for Anne to train and prepare me for what’s to come. The coffee shop owners were tolerant enough to stay open with only us sitting there. When it was all done, I gratefully thanked Anne for being there, and went back home to get my needed 6 hours of sleep.
9:30 AM. It began. The unsettling groans were getting wilder, but I was prepared. I tried my best to enjoy my time. She would throw demeaning comments implying that I was a bad husband, but I didn’t care. She’d sit next to me and whisper dispiriting remarks about my insecurities.
“You wanted to see me bothered, right Mathilda? Try and get that out of me!”
I spoke too soon.
3:30 PM. The groans were now accompanied with Mathilda making horrifying deformed faces, right in time for lunch. It was much harder for me to eat anything now. Dark Mathilda was slowly becoming to me what a monster under the bed is to a paranoid kid.
“Mathilda, you know I’m going to win this anyway.” I used whatever number of confident remarks and the acting skills I got from acting classes in an attempt to dishearten Mathilda.
“If you need a break, Sullivan, the door is open.” Mathilda screeched treacherously, and I did not go out that door; Kross tried to do that and was almost killed by Mathilda.
9:30 PM. Deafening silence. Not the tranquil, calming sort of silence. It’s the kind of silence that makes my heartbeats sound louder than an earthquake. Mathilda has muted everything around me. All I hear is my blood pumping, and the demon sneering.
“You know very well you cannot defeat me, Sullivan. Your eyes say it all.”
“Not physically, no. But I will make you give up.”
“Is that so? Well then, remember when…”
And it began: a list of embarrassing moments from childhood that Debbie knows irk me. They were so many, it got boring at some point and I stopped twitching. Not because I’ve heard these before, but because I looked out the window. Our neighbor Henry was mowing his lawn. Henry couldn’t see Mathilda, but he looked at me, smiled, then nodded, as to say “I know what you’ve been through, but everything’s going to be alright.” It’s essentially all I needed to keep going - my neighbor’s genuine, heartwarming smile. I couldn’t smile back because I didn’t want Mathilda to push up the ante for me, but Henry didn’t care, and smiled until he was out of sight from where I stood. I felt supported, not standing on weak legs anymore.
3:30 AM. That’s when the list of my childhood embarrassments was done being read like the cringiest audiobook one could ever listen to. All of a sudden, I hear a loud screech, a banshee scream that almost deafened me. The house trembled. My furniture morphed into demonic shapes. There was no light in the house. At that point, Dark Mathilda was giving it her all. She did not relent. The screams did not stop.
“I hate you, Sullivan! I loathe you with every part of my dark blackened heart! I will make you suffer!” cried Mathilda with all of her energy.
I knew I should wait, for the time to act was not then. I had to endure a long streak of terrifying screams before I was to make a move.
“Kneel before me and despair, Sullivan! Or I will make you tremble myself!”
I held back the tears and stopped myself from breaking down with the last drop of my energy. I had to hold the loud screams back for 5 hours and several minutes. I tried to think of my neighbor’s smile, of how happy I was after the divorce… I was helpless. Dark Mathilda was about to break me.
It was then time to make a move. But it wasn’t me making the move. Among the dark figures and Mathilda’s terrifying face screaming at me there was a figure of light. It walked towards me, greeted me, and then hugged me tight. The world was finally silent.
“What… what did you do, Sullivan?” Mathilda sorrowfully moaned.
“Well, I had to remind you, Debbie,” I said, with confidence that was mixed with exhaustion, “I’m happier without you… and yet as you overstayed your welcome in these walls, I still listened to you, tolerated your existence. And it shows, because I did that just a few minutes ago. I’m making it clear that you are not welcome in my walls anymore.”
Mathilda was infuriated, and as the demon was about to let out one final scream to break me once and for all, I signaled to Anne, and she pulled me to herself and kissed me. It was all part of the plan. Mathilda wept, then trembled to the ground, then disappeared. After that, I remember nothing.
I woke up expecting to find myself in a hospital. I was in bed, and on a chair next to me was Anne.
“Just so you know, that kiss wasn’t—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said with a laugh. “Didn’t we already plan for that to happen anyway?”
“Yeah… yeah, you’re right. Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you this before you had to go through all of the hassle with Debbie but I felt it too cheesy to mention…”
“Go ahead, Anne. I’m all ears.”
“We haven’t been talking a lot. We work on the same floor, we’re acquaintances, and somehow you’re not a manager—”
“What’s that?”
“I mean… I just really, really admire how you’ve been holding up since you found out about your wife. You stay happy through the thickest of plots. You’ve seen your wife cheat on you, with a—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, go on.”
“And yet you spread positivity and happiness everywhere you go. Even when you came to me for help, you didn’t look desperate, you didn’t look afraid—”
“Except that I was afraid—”
I was immediately slapped on the face.
“Can you let me finish, Sullivan?”
“Yes, yes, go on, I won’t interrupt.”
“Anyway, to sum up, the words you said to Mathilda made me admire and respect you even more. You stood in front of a beast, a literal poltergeist! You’ve done something even exorcists are afraid to do. And for that I salute you, Sullivan! And sorry for the slap.”
“Apology accepted.” I look at the time. “Wanna go out and get some burgers?”
“Seeing how you look battered; I think a big steak’ll do.”
“I’m not sure—”
“It’s on me, get up and let’s get going.”
That steak felt well-deserved. I defeated a monster, kept my cool during a storm of screams, and now… now I earned my first close friend. And we’re hanging out, after the biggest boss battle of my entire life.
My days at work since then were never the same.