The Failed Exorcism of Jeffrey Donahue

Diana pauses in the doorway of the empty classroom, the white light of the hall backlighting her and faintly illuminating the corpse swinging three feet above the ground. She freezes in the spot, momentarily stunned, but lets out a chuckle uncharacteristic of fear. It was something teasingly apprehensive, a muted reaction meant only to further agitate the ghost dangling limply from the math room ceiling. In anger, trying to provoke a greater reaction, his fingers begin to twitch.

“Hello, Jeffrey Donahue!” Diana announces, flicking on her flashlight, knowing from victim recounts if she turns on the overhead light, his body will vanish “Happy Halloween, you zany motherfucker. Merry haunting to you! I bet you’re a bit surprised no one’s at school today, aren’t you? Well, that’s because of me.”

The twitching turns into convulsing as Diana pulls a chair out from a desk, and sits down very casually with the back of it pressing into her chest. The boy-ghost is nineteen, and she is nineteen. When Jeffrey Donahue was alive, on this very night fifteen years ago, he painted his face sheet white with red sockets around his eyes, and barged into school on Halloween with a knife and stabbed three people, and then hung himself from the second floor in the chaos, timed perfectly with the cops pulling into the school.

“We both know that’s not what you look like,” Diana continues, letting the flashlight travel the muscular, white skinned body of the spectral cadaver, which then goes up to his face, gaping crimson circles where his eyes should be, which begin to trickle blood as the spotlight lingers “You lying son of a gun. You were an awkward looking blond, not an eyeless Edward Cullen-wannabe.”

The mouth of the spectre opens, and blood begins to pour out of it. He has to satisfy himself with a scare. If she flinches, or looks away, he can disappear from the noose, and continue his haunting and killing around the building. And damn does he want to kill her after all this.

“My name is Diana. But you can call me Di or just Diane, you slimy son of a bitch. If I read your file correctly, you manifest every year and kill three people each time. So, when the school reached out for a ghost hunter, and was referred to me, I asked them why the fuck they hadn’t evacuated the school on Halloweens. They said they try, but then a trio of poor kiddos don’t wake up the next morning, stabbed to death in bed. So it’s my job to keep you from killing anyone this year. And banish you, goddammit. You are a nasty little dude.”

The flashlight beam stays on Jeffrey’s face, which is now rotting away to blackened meat. Diane sighs. She’s a very young, quite unattractive woman. She has a gaunt face with high cheekbones, and very probing hazel eyes that are somewhat obscured by foggy, completely rectangular, highly outdated glasses. Her coarse brown hair is always worn back in a ponytail, and two of her teeth are missing from fights. She’s incredibly muscular, but this is hidden in an oversized grey jacket, which also keeps from sight many scars from her dealings with the undead.

Jeff would love to tell she’s not so hot herself, even compared to him when he was alive. He realizes with a lot of annoyance that he won’t be able to scare Diane with gore. Now just a skull attaching to his neck, he begins to rot away the rest of his body. If it’s gone from sight, he’s free to move again.

“Oh no you don’t, Donahue,” Diane stands up, and throws the chair to the side.

She advances like a stalking cat across the room, and shocks the ghost by grabbing his decaying legs, and slamming him into the ground, snapping the noose and dealing Jeff the first pain he’s ever experienced since death. He yowls, stunned out of his magic, and lays across the ground in shock as Diane gets on top of him, and pins his barely intact arms above his head as she sits on his stomach. The hollow eyes of the skull stare up at her blankly, and the jawbone snaps as he tries to bite at the strands of hair falling down from her face.

“Calm down, bonehead,” what appalls Jeff is that Diane laughs at her pun, despite wrestling a slightly meaty skeleton into submission.

“How…” a raspy, growl of a voice emanates wispily from the corpse, the noose still tight around his neck “Are you touching…” he wheezes, all of Diane’s weight on the tender remains of his muscled midsection “Are you fucking touching me?”

“I’m a lot more qualified for this job than most ghost hunters,” Diane shifts both of Jeffrey’s wrist into one of her large hands, as the other sinks behind her head and coils tension, before lashing outwards, smashing Jeffrey’s skull against the floor, cracking the back and immediately flooding him out of consciousness.

Jeffrey, in the back of his mind, is still reeling that this woman can make him feel pain. Nothing has hurt him in just under fifteen years. Not a single thing. And now his body is aching, his head throbs, and he is faintly aware of something in the waking world tugging him around. He can faintly, very distantly hear talking, in Diane’s very rugged masculine voice, but is too tired and disoriented to try to interpret what she’s saying. God, he hates that bitch. She wasn’t scared of anything. It sure will be satisfying when he kills her, though. Jeff is suddenly aware of an unfamiliar tingling in his body, and is so worried about it he jerks into consciousness.

Diane’s left hand is over Jeffrey’s face, and her right is on his chest as she bends slightly above him. He shakes his head, and grunts, to which Diane seems delighted.

“How was your first time passing out in a while?” she asks, but the ghost doesn’t respond, still slowly coming to “I took some liberties restoring your body. I’m almost done. See, I didn’t want to talk to a skeleton, or your serial killer getup, so I spent some time disbanding your illusions. Took you back to the day that you died. I could go further back, restoring your old self from your memories, but I figured that would be unnecessary.”

Jeffrey Donahue suddenly realizes what the hunter means. He’s got his hands duct taped behind a chair, and he’s in his natural body he buried under magic.

“Hey!” he yelps, struggling against the tape, disgusting himself in how human the situation is.