The Little Ghost Girl ran around the perimeter of McCarren Pool screaming for help.
"Help! Help! ... Help!" Her pale arms waved in the July night.
"HELP!"
I was in the center of the drained expanse, sitting in lotus with my eyes closed. A tiny white candle flickered - sending wobbly shadows across the empty pool's walls.
"HELP! ... HELP!!!"
"SHUT UUUUUUPPPP! No one cares! I'm not here for you, anyways."
The ghost retaliated and showed me her death mask. Suddenly I was underwater. The little girl hung limply above me. A bubble escaped from her lips. Her eyes matched the color of the water, and her blond curls were a halo framing a peaceful, angelic face. Two more small bubbles. A lifeguard launched himself from his observation chair, and a blond mother in a corset style swimsuit shrieked.
"Help! HELP!"
...and I was back sitting crosslegged in the empty pool. The Little Ghost Girl of McCarren Pool dashed in the opposite direction around the massive (originally built to hold close to seven thousand swimmers) concrete bed. Her cries for help eventually faded away.
But she's not the only ghost that haunts McCarren Pool - just the most famous. Behind the rotting walls angry anonymous eyes glared from broken windows. In some places the grafitti moved - slinking together to form vaguely humans yet vaguely feral faces. The Greenpoint music venue simmers with indifference on weekends as area Hipsters cram skinny jean leg to skinny jean leg - and it absolutely burns with malevolence once the sun sets.
Ghosts HATE Hipsters.
Tonight (especially) the haunts were in a ruckus due to the morning discovery of a badly decomposed body in a nearby shed. With local imaginations dreaming up all sorts of spooky shit, The Void was sucking up the fear. And all the OD'd junkies, murdered vagrants and one little drowned girl were out in full force as a result.
I was there to reach through all the uproar and track down the soul of the dead male discovered in that shed. Unfortunately - I'm pretty sure any trace of the poor guy's soul was dragged into the abandoned building hiding what now felt like a particularly nasty spectre we call a Soul Eater.
Soul Eaters are when two or three particularly corrupt souls perish (usually via a death pact) and merge into one and then have to eat souls to maintain and grow. The more souls gobbled up means the bigger it gets. NOT a pretty sight after a few decades. The more I thought on it, the more certain I was that the many spirits I had originally felt were actually just One. Big. Pissed-off. Soul Eater.
And the soul I was searching for was in there too... poor thing.
I'd need to come back with some firepower. Good timing too, the NYPD showed up. I blew out my candle and discreetly left. Apparently, someone heard a little girl screaming for help.
So I'm heading back to McCarren Pool this weekend... Fun.
