Dead Men Scare Me Stupid Read Online Free PDF Page B

calling them any kind of saps would be a good
idea right now. So I didn’t say any more. I just waited for them to say
something.
    That’s when they
told me the truth. They said they hadn’t come here to help me at all. Their
plan had been to pretend to be helping me, but in doing so to screw up my life
horribly. By now, they said, the cops should have arrested me on dozens of
charges, from intimidation to murder. My friends should have abandoned me for
acting so haunted all the time (I had fooled them there. I have no friends),
and my business should have folded for the same reason. They didn’t know what
had gone wrong. Maybe their plan had failed because it was too clever. (That’s
why my plans fail too!) Anyway, they were through being clever, they told me.
Their new plan was to just wreck my life as quickly as possible and get the
heck out of here.
    I couldn’t fathom
any of this. It didn’t make sense to me.
    “But why are you
doing this? What have I ever done to you?”
    “Well, you killed
us,” said Fred.
    “And I
apologized, didn’t I? And you said… well, I forget exactly what you said… but
I’m pretty sure you accepted my apology. Besides, you said you liked being
dead.”
    “We don’t,” said
Fred. “It stinks.”
    “But the ice
skating…”
    “It stinks, I
tell you. Never mind about the ice skating. That’s not important.”
    “Because of you, we’re
doomed to wander the Earth as ghosts for the next thirty years,” said Ed.
    “I don’t
understand,” I said.
    They made some
cheap cracks about me not understanding anything – the usual stuff. I get it
all the time. It doesn’t even bother me anymore – then they gave me a short
course in how the afterlife works.
    They said that
ghosts are people who aren’t supposed to be dead yet. Their time isn’t up. So
there’s no place for them in the afterlife yet. Their clouds aren’t ready –
they have to be painted or fumigated or something. I wasn’t clear on that
point. Anyway they’re not ready. So people who die earlier than scheduled have
to hang around here and wait. Ed and Fred said they were going to be stuck here
until 2038, with nothing to do. That’s why they were so steamed at me.
    I was stunned. I
didn’t know what to say. I handed them another scrapbook and told them to get
pasting. They refused. They said they weren’t my little helpers anymore. They
were my enemies now.
    I tried to smooth
things over. I made a little speech. I said that whatever our differences had
been in the past, no matter who killed who, I was confident that… hey, where
did they go?
    I looked out in
the corridor to see if maybe they were out there spit-shining my door, like I
had told them to do earlier that day. They weren’t. Then I checked the elevator
to see if maybe they were in there installing that shower I wanted. They
weren’t there either. I started to get the feeling that my little speech hadn’t
smoothed things over as well as I’d hoped.
    It hadn’t.
    From that moment
forward, Ed and Fred did everything they could to get me in as much trouble as
possible. Every time I walked past a policeman, for example, I would hear him
say: “Hey, who kicked me in the ass?” And then two voices, neither one of them
mine, would say: “I did it. Me. Frank Burly”. This always doubly pissed off the
cops. Not only was I not showing proper respect for a police officer, I wasn’t
even bothering to sync up my words with my mouth. There’s no law about that, of
course, but the police don’t like it.
    And every time I
walked past a building it suddenly caught fire. When the fire department
arrived, my arms were always full of gas cans, political manifestos, and
suicide notes. And the only explanation I could think of to give them was a
weak laugh – a laugh that got weaker the longer they looked at me. Each of
these fires was deemed “suspicious”. And so was I.
    Dead bodies began
appearing all around me: all over my property, in my bed,