Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a Saturday night, and I had just broken up with my girlfriend. I found myself alone and drinking a bottle of beer – calorie free, they claim – in a popular open bar in Pasadena. My friend Marco left earlier that night – his girlfriend was feeling horny, and her parents were out of town. I counted the empty bottles on the table (subtracting the ones finished by Marco and his girl), and was half-surprised to find that I was already halfway through my eight bottle. No wonder my head was pounding.

"I bet you can't drink another bottle," said a voice, silky and smooth, from the other table. She was sitting alone, dressed in a sexy black number that showed a hint of cleavage.

I raised my bottle, and grinned at her. I finished off the bottle in my hand and signaled the waiter to bring two more – one for me and one for her.

I motioned for her to join me, and she obliged, trailing an intoxicating smell of expensive perfume as she sat on the chair I offered. She smiled. I winked at her.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Chloe,” she said. “Yours?”

I told her my name. Our beers came. I ordered for more food, and for more beer. We talked. We danced. We touched. More beer came, more food. People started going home; it was starting to get cold.

“Come on, I’ll bring you home,” I offered. I had stopped drinking beer an hour ago to make me sober enough to drive. “Don’t say no. Please don’t.”

She smiled. “All right. My place’s nearby anyway.”

Her house was on a dark street. The neighborhood was already asleep, it seemed. The house itself was covered in a blanket of inactivity. Even the leaves were unmoving, afraid to cause the smallest disturbance to the peace.

“You live alone?” I asked, turning off the engine.

She took a moment to answer. “I… I live with my mother.” Her hesitation was pretty obvious.

The house was made partly of wood, partly of stone. One of those old houses constructed just before (or maybe after, I’m not sure) the Second World War. There was a pungent, unkempt smell when she opened the gate. I could distinctly smell urine when she opened the door.

Total darkness enveloped us when we entered the house. Outside, even crickets could not be heard. I could hear no air-conditioning or electric fans working, but the interior of the house was cold. There was a definite chill in the place. I folded my arms across my chest and followed her in the dark.

From the corner of my eye, I saw some movement at the top of the stairs, a barely discernible shift of shadow and darkness. “What was that?” I asked.

Chloe looked in the direction I was pointing. “Nothing,” she answered, unable to mask the nervousness in her voice.

She took my hand and guided me into a room. She turned on a lamp, and the room was filled with light, albeit insufficient. In the dim illumination, I was able to make out a tiny bed, a ratty dresser, and a few other personal belongings, all in disarray.

She surprised me by planting a kiss on my lips. I felt her tongue explore my mouth. I reciprocated. She pressed harder. Then she pulled back. “Stay here. I think I forgot to close the door.”

Alone and cold in her room, I made my way to her bed and sat. I took off my shoes and lay down.

Then I saw a shadow pass by the door.

“Chloe?” I called out.

There was no answer.

“Chloe?” I called out again.

I heard footsteps coming towards the door. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Geez, Chloe. You scared me. I thought…”

I froze in mid-sentence.

The figure standing in the doorway was not Chloe. It was an old woman, dressed in a long, flowing dress that was being blown by the gentle breeze inside the house. Her hair was in disarray/ Dirt was all over her face.

“I… I…”

She put one foot behind her and moved backwards, moving back into the dark. I heard her footsteps moving away from the room.

A short while later, Chloe returned with a glass of water. She smiled. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” she told me.

“I think I just did,” I answered, hoping to make light of the situation.

She toyed with my hair. “Shhh… that was just my mother. Don’t mind her. She’s been acting weird for months now. Treat her like she’s dead,” she said and giggled.

I kissed her nose. Then I moved to her mouth, tasting the aftertaste of the beer we had in the bar. I felt her kissing back.

Then I heard somebody crying.

“My mother,” Chloe whispered in my ear. “Don’t mind her,” she repeated.

But the crying kept getting louder. And louder. Until it felt like it was inside my head, resonating in my skull. Inside the room, as I felt her hands caressing the sensitive parts of my body, the temperature dropped. I started shivering. The crying turned to wailing. The room got so cold, I could see my breath.

I pulled back. “I’m sorry.” I told her. I put on my shoes, and made my way out of the room. “Let’s do this some other time.”

Scared, I almost ran towards the door. I yanked it open and hurried to my car. It was already 3 in the morning.

An elderly woman, dressed in a ratty duster and house slipper, was smoking a cigarette in front of my car. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry,” she half-apologetically smiled at me. “Are you a nephew of her?”

I looked at her quizzically. “Of whom? Oh, I’m sorry. I was just… ah…”

“Of the old woman who lives there. Are you a nephew of hers?”

“Oh , no, ma’am. I’m just… ah… a friend of her daughter.”

She nodded. She walked towards me and squeezed my arm. “It’s so nice to know that young people like you care enough for the elderly. My husband and I used to be good friends with Mrs. Reyes – the woman who lives there. Such a pity what happened to her. You know, she used to watch our kids when my husband and I would be at work. That was back when everything was good for her, and she still hadn’t lost her mind. Tsk, tsk. Such a pity.”

She took a pull from her cigarette, and glanced at the house. “Isn’t it a bit late to visit? No offense, but people usually visit Mrs. Reyes in the daytime.

“Oh, no, ma’am, I wasn’t visiting her,” I said and grinned. “Her daughter invited me in.”

The woman stopped smiling and her eyes widened. She threw her cigarette to the ground and stomped on it. She wrapped her arms around her. She waled away from me and from the house.

“Ma’am?”

She looked at me with fear in her eyes. “Her only daughter died a month ago. Mrs. Reyes lost her mind and has been living along ever since.”

Chris and Julie were walking down the bayside road that night. It was really dark and the first vehicle to pass was a taxi. Chris waved for it to stop. The taxi stopped a few meters ahead of them. Chris approached it to talk to the driver. As he leaned down to look inside, he was horrified to find the taxi empty.

“Is it okay with the driver, Chris?” Julie called out.

Chris looked at his girlfriend. He turned back to the taxi and got even more terrified. The taxi was full of people, their eyes staring fiercely at him. Chris couldn’t bare it anymore and ran back to his girlfriend.

Another vehicle stopped near them. When they saw it was Gary, Chris immediately went inside and pulled his girlfriend in with him.

“I told you guys to wait for me at the beach party. It’s not good to be walking along this road,” Gary scolded the couple.

Suspecting that Gary knew about the weird taxi, Chris asked his friend, “Gary, what do you know about the taxi back there?”

BEEP! Gary honked the horn before answering. “Two years ago, the Malaya Taxi Company’s car number 45 had a terrible accident on this very road,” said Gary.

BEEP!

“The driver died, along with his five passengers.”

BEEP!

“After the accident, rumors ran rampant that taxi #45 was seen traveling this road.”

BEEP!

“The Malaya Taxi Company denied that they produced another taxi unit with the same number,” Gary continued.

BEEP!

“How do you know all this?” Chris asked Gary.

“I’m a Journalism student, remember? I covered this story once,” Gary replied.

Gary dropped the couple at Chris’ house and said, “There’s more. Some say that taxi #45 crosses the path of vehicles that travel the bayside road.”

“Is that also true?” Julie asked.

“They said that if taxi #45 passes by, you honk once,” Gary answered.

Chris said, “Hey! Didn’t you honk many times while we were on the bayside road?”

“Yes! The taxi passed us five times tonight, and each time the taxi passed, one of them disappeared,” Gary said.

“One of them?” the couple asked.

“While we were on the bayside road, the five dead passengers appeared,” Gary said in a whisper.

“What? You mean you save the five passengers on the road?”

“No, in my car!” Gary said.

Billy and his younger brother Derrick have been hearing quite a number of spooky stories from their mother that seemed to indicate that there was a ghost copycat or “doppelganger” inside their house. Billy was aching to prove if it was true, and so one day he decided to challenge the alleged ghost to appear before him or at least show a believable sign of paranormal activity.

One morning, over a cup of coffee, Billy suggested, “I have had enough of Mom telling us about her ghostly apparitions. I dare whoever that ghost is to prove he’s real by doing us a favor.”

“What favor?” Derrick inquired.

Billy drained his coffee before proceeding. “This mug will be the key. I’ll leave this mug right here and see if the ghost is real enough to move it. Of course, we’ll both go out and won’t be back until later this evening.”

Billy fixed the table and put the mug in a spot he’d surely remember. Derrick just laughed at Billy’s scheme. “I doubt that would do. The ghost would rather scare you while you’re sleeping in your room.”

“Oh, really,” Billy replied mockingly. “Well, it’s like this. I actually don’t believe there’s a ghost in here. We’ve been residing in this house for ten years now and none of us have seen a ghost the way mommy has lately claimed.

Derrick looked straight into his big brother, “are you saying that Mommy’s just making up stories?”

“Not really. But who knows? Mommy’s been in a fit of depression ever since she discovered that Dad had a mistress. That would explain why she had been experiencing ghostly apparitions allegedly done my 'doppelgangers'. It's all just an eerie manifestation resulting from her discovery of Daddy's inappropriate affair with another woman."

“Stop that, Billy. Let’s not make this morning bad by talking about dad’s dark side. Let’s pack up and leave and see later if your mug proves that a ghost is in our midst.”

Billy and Derrick’s parents were out of town together, so the brothers were sure that no one would clean the table or pick up the mug.

“What time will you be home tonight, Derrick?” Billy asked.

Derrick thought for a second, “Probably around 11. I’ll be at a friend’s birthday party but I don’t feel like staying up too late, so expect me to be home at around that time.”

“Okay, see you then.”

Billy went to see his girlfriend and during their date they had the chance to talk about his mom’s dose of scary tales.

“You know, my mom’s telling us creepy stories lately. A few weeks back, she claimed to have seen my dad rushing to the bathroom, only to realize that daddy wasn’t coming home that night.

“Not only that. Just last week, she said she saw me go upstairs. But when she went up to my room, I wasn’t around. I was actually at a neighbor’s party.

“She also heard someone whisper in her ear while she was half-awake and felt my dad caress her head one night, despite the fact that Daddy had sworn he was sound asleep the whole time.”

Being a believer of the ‘third eye phenomenon’ herself, Billy’s girlfriend was quite convinced about the stories of Billy’s mom. Billy, however, insisted on his own perception about such a string of out-of-this-world occurrences.

“Well, I may bee too cynic about this whole thing but I think it’s all about Mom going through a kind of depression, which you already know why,” he said, referring to his dad’s philandering act. His girlfriend could only shrug.

It was around 10 p.m. when Billy arrived home that Saturday night. He entered the house using his duplicate key and went straight to the bathroom to clean up. While washing his face, he suddenly remembered about the ‘mug dare.’ He immediately went to the dining room to check if it had moved. Much as he expected, it did not. The mug was still there in the very spot where he had left it that morning.

A few minutes later, he saw his brother Derrick enter the house and sit on the sofa, exhausted or drunk from the party. Derrick would usually do that, coming in without saying a word or smiling at anyone.

Billy smiled at seeing his brother sit lazily on the sofa. He could see the back of Derrick’s head slouched upon the upholstery. He broke the ice and started a conversation, “I told you, Derrick, there isn’t a ghost here. Look at the mug. It didn’t move a bit from where I left it. The ghost had all the time to move that or even break it if he was real. Mommy’s just feeling terribly bad about dad, which led her to hallucinate about ghosts.”

Just to make sure that the mug hadn’t moved, Billy went closer to the table and picked up the mug. He suddenly felt goose bumps the moment he touched it. The mug was half-filled with coffee! Billy distinctly remembered finishing his coffee that morning.

“Oh my God, Derrick, you won’t believe this!” Billy exclaimed. His hand was quivering. Why, the black coffee was even hot! How could that be? Who had poured hot coffee in the mug?

He hurriedly put the mug down and stepped back in fright as his mobile phone rang. Even though his heartbeat was running fast, he managed to pick up his phone and saw that the caller wasn’t listed in his phonebook. “Hello?” he answered.

“Yo, Billy, my phone’s battery’s empty. I’m here at George’s place, we’re drinking heavily and I don’t think I can come home tonight. Say hi to the ghost for me!”

That last line, even though it sounded like a joke from a drunkard, was unbearable for Billy. He recognized the voice.

It was his brother Derrick’s.