“So where do I stay tonight?” the demon lover says. Again fights the impulse to touch Meggie’s face. There’s a strand of hair against her lip. Which is he? The pyromaniac or the masochist? In or Out? Well, he’s an actor, isn’t he? He can be anything she wants him to be.
“I’m sure you’ll find somewhere,” Meggie says, a glint in her eye. “Or someone. Pilar has told me more than once you’re the only man she’s ever wanted to fuck.”
“If I had a dollar,” the demon lover says. He still wants to touch her. Wants her to want him to touch her. He remembers now how this goes.
Meggie says, “If you had a dollar, seventy cents would go to your exes.”
Which is gospel truth. He says, “Fawn signed a prenup.”
“One of the thousand reasons you should go home and fix things,” Meggie says. “She’s a good person. There aren’t so many of those.”
“She’s better off without me,” the demon lover says, trying it out. He’s a little hurt when Meggie doesn’t disagree.
Irene the medium comes over with Pilar and the other videographer. The demon lover can tell Irene doesn’t like him. Sometimes women don’t like him. Rare enough that he always wonders why.
“Shall we get started?” Irene says. “Let’s see if any of our friends are up for a quick chat. Then I don’t know about you but I’m going to go put on something a little less comfortable.” Meggie addresses the video camera next. “This will be our final attempt,” she says, “our last chance to contact anyone who is still lingering here, who has unfinished business.”
“You’d think nudists wouldn’t be so shy,” Irene says.
Meggie says, “But even if we don’t reach anyone, today hasn’t been a total loss. All of us have taken a risk. Some of us are sunburned, some of us have bug bites in interesting places, all of us are a little more comfortable in our own skin. We’ve experienced openness and humanity in a way that these colonists imagined and hoped would lead to a better world. And maybe, for them, it did. We’ve had a good day. And even if the particular souls we came here in search of didn’t show up, someone else is here.”
The A2 nods at Will.
Pilar points the camera at him.
He’s been thinking about how to play this. “I’m Will Gald,” he says. “You probably recognize me from previous naked film roles such as the guy rolling around on a hotel room floor clutching his genitals and bleeding profusely.”
He smiles his most lovely smile. “I just happened to be in the area.”
“We persuaded him to stay for a bite,” Meggie says.
“They’ve hidden my clothes,” Will says. “Admittedly I haven’t been trying that hard to find them. I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen when you get naked on camera?”
Irene says, “Meggie, one of the things that’s been most important about Who’s There? right from the beginning is that we’ve all had something happen to us that we can’t explain away. We’re all believers. I’ve been meaning to ask, does Will here have a ghost story?”
“I don’t—” the demon lover says. Then pauses. Looks at Meggie.
“I do,” he says. “But surely Meggie’s already told it.”
“I have,” Meggie says. “But I’ve never heard you tell it.”
Oh, there are stories the demon lover could tell.
He says, “I’m here to please.”
“Fantastic,” Irene says. “As you know, every episode we make time for a ghost story or two. Tonight we even have a campfire.” She hesitates. “And of course as our viewers also know, we’re still waiting for Juliet Adeyemi to turn up. She left just before lunch to run errands. We’re not worried yet, but we’ll all be a lot happier when she’s with us again.”
Meggie says, “Juliet, if you’ve met a nice boy and gone off to ride the teacups at Disney World, so help me, I’m going to ask for all the details. Now. Shall we, Irene?”
All around them, people have been clearing away plates of half-eaten barbecue, assembling in a half circle around the campfire. Any minute now they’ll be singing “Kumbaya.” They sit on their little towels. Irene and Meggie take their place in front of the fire. They clasp hands.
The demon lover moves a little farther away, into darkness. He is not interested in séances or ghosts. Here is the line of the shore. Sharp things underfoot. Someone joins him. Ray. Of course.
It is worse, somehow, to be naked in the dark. The world is so big and he is not. Ray is young and he is not. He is pretty sure that the videographer Pilar will sleep with him; Meggie will not.
“I know you,” the demon lover says to Ray. “I’ve met you before. Well, not you, the previous you. Yous. You never last. We never last. She moves on. You disappear.”
Ray says nothing. Looks out at the lake.
“I was you,” the demon lover says.
Ray says, “And now? Who are you?”
“You charge by the hour?” the demon lover says. “Why follow me around? I don’t seem to have my wallet on me.”
“Meggie’s busy,” Ray says. “And I’m curious about you. What you think you’re doing here.”
“I came for Meggie,” the demon lover says. “We’re friends. An old friend can come to see an old friend. Some other time I’ll see her again and you won’t be around. I’ll always be around. But you, you’re just some guy who got lucky because you look like me.”
Ray says, “I love her.”
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” the demon lover says. He goes back to the fire and the naked people waiting for other naked people. Thinks about the story he is meant to tell.
The séance has not been a success. Irene the medium keeps saying that she senses something. Someone is trying to say something.
The dead are here, but also not here. They’re afraid. That’s why they won’t come. Something is keeping them away. There is something wrong here.
“Do you feel it?” she says to Meggie, to the others.
Meggie says, “I feel something. Something is here.”
The demon lover extends himself outward into the night. Lets himself believe for a moment that life goes on. Is something here? There is a smell, the metallic stink of muck farms. There is an oppressiveness to the air. Is there malice here? An ill wish?
Meggie says, “No one has ever solved the mystery of what happened here. But perhaps whatever happened to them is still present. Irene, could it have some hold on their spirits, whatever is left of them, even in death?”
Irene says, “I don’t know. Something is wrong here. Something is here. I don’t know.”
But Who’s There? picks up nothing of interest on their equipment, their air ion counter or their barometer, their EMF detector or EVP detector, their wind chimes or thermal imaging scopes. No one is there.
And so at last it’s time for ghost stories.
There’s one about the men’s room at a trendy Santa Monica restaurant. The demon lover has been there. Had the fries with truffle-oil mayonnaise. Never encountered the ghost. He’s not somebody who sees ghosts and he’s fine