Haunted

"Sonny..."

I looked up from my fetal position to the clouds above me. I groaned, and looked around me. I was now in an office lying on the tiled floor. There was a wooden desk in front of me and two leather chairs on either side of me. Bookshelves lined the walls, but they were half empty.

"Sonny, I am not going to ask you again."

The voice was a woman's. She sounded to be in her early fifties. I stood up, and brushed myself off and tried to look decent, even though being dead wasn't the best state of looks I had been in. My skin my a deadly pale color. My wounds were dried and I could only imagine what my hair and face looked like. I knew my hair felt dry, gross almost. I sighed, and shifted my eyes to a breathing woman. Her skin was ivory, and her eyes were blue. Her brown hair was lined with white and she wore a black blazer with a blue top underneath. Her lips were lined with red lipstick. She smiled at me, showing her laugh lines.

"Ah, pleasure to meet you. Take a seat, dear. You're going to be in here a while."

I sat down on the leather seat nearest me and sighed. I looked at the name plate on the desk: Agatha James, life taker. My eyes widened as I read her position. She was the life taker, which meant, in the nicest way possible, I was sitting face to face with the Grim Reaper. Just. My. Dead. Luck.

"How are you, Sonny?"

I looked back at Agatha, shrugging. "I dunno. I mean, being dead doesn't really give you a nice line of emotion to choose from."

Agatha laughed, nodding and flipping through the papers on her desk. "I am Agatha James, the life taker, which means I take care of your afterlife. I help you transition from the living to the dead. The only way you can transition through the two is if you weren't ready to die."

"I was not ready. I was murdered."

Agatha nodded her head. "Yes, I see. Let me find your... Ah! Got it." Agatha pulled a stack of papers from the middle of the papers on her desk and looked at them through the bifocals sitting on her nose. She nodded more while occasionally making weird, sympathetic sounds.

"I want revenge, Miss James. I can't be dead, I'm only-"

"Seventeen. You're only seventeen."

I nodded. Agatha's eyes widened, and her face looked like she might cry. "Why did you go so young?"

I shrugged. I wanted to know that myself. I wanted to know why it was my life that had been taken and not Jackson's.

"Sonny, who murdered you?"

My eyes shot up to Agatha's. I sat there for a second before my mouth said, "Jackson Wesley."

Agatha wrote something down on my (I assumed) papers. She looked at me and smiled a devious smile. "Do you seek revenge?"

There wasn't a minute since I had died that I didn't think about getting revenge on Jackson. I wanted to kill him, scar him, hurt him. I wanted him to be like me: dead, and Agatha might just be the key to unlock my hidden desires. "Of course."

"Good."

I waited patiently, but Agatha didn't say anything after that. She just wrote stuff on my paper and occasionally typed something on the calculator beside her. She leaned back for something and I noticed her neck was stitched in the middle, which meant Agatha was also dead. From the looks of it, it looked like she had been decapitated. She leaned herself straight again with a leather book in her hands. It looked like it was thousands of pages long. Agatha didn't hesitate, however, and went straight to finding a certain page. I notice the page was blank. She grabbed her pen and wrote my name at the tape and taped my papers to it. She closed the book and put it back where it belonged on the bookshelf behind her.

"The book of the dead and afterlife residencies. There's an open room in Deep South Manchester."

"Huh?"

Agatha shook her and smiled, standing up and walking to a door behind her. She turned me. "You only have one afterlife, Sonny. We must get you there."

I nodded, picking myself up from the leather chair and walking to Agatha's said. She opened the door to a long staircase leading down into a darkness. I hesitated, but when Agatha's hair became almost impossible to see, I started descending along with her.

"Why is it called Deep South Manchester?"

"We're under England, dear. The open afterlife for you is beneath South Manchester, properly naming your afterlife Deep South Manchester."

Agatha stopped in front of a mohogany door and knocked three times. "What's the password?" A deep voice said from behind the door. Agatha turned to me, smiling.

"Roast crickets."

The door opened and there stood a good looking man with skin the same color as mine. He had blond hair and green eyes. His arms were bruised and a hole surrounded with dried blood was dead center on his chest. I gasped when he winked at me and slammed the door behind us.

"Who's this?" The man asked.

"This is Sonny, recently dead of... four days, six hours, seventeen minutes, and forty-eight seconds."

My mouth was agape. "How do you know that?"

"I told you. I'm the life taker. I keep every record of your from the minute you've taken your last breath."

The man beside me nodded. "She does."

"Yes, well, thank you, Jacob. Good night," Agatha said before taking my hand in hers and walking down the hallway we were in. There were doors everywhere on either side. I looked around and read the names on the doors. South Dead Lane, Greenwood, Bloody Hell... there were so many.

"Ah, here we go!"

Agatha stopped in front of a purple door on the left side of the hallway. The words 'Deep South Manchester' were on a gold sign above the door. There were two slots on the door. The top one had the word 'Wilson' on it. Agatha took a marker from her pocket and looked at me. "Last name?"

"Er.. Raley."

Agatha wrote the name in neat letters before turning the gold door knob. The door opened to the front of a two-story house surrounded by sunflowers. There were other houses around it, like a neighborhood.

Agatha looked to me. "Don't be shy. Jacob Wilson is very sweet, handsome, and the perfect love."

"Jacob Wilson? The.."

"Not the doorman."

I sighed in relief in followed Agatha to the house. She opened the door and revealed a neat den with two sofas and a flat screen television hanging over the fireplace. "Jacob, your housemate is here!"

I heard footsteps on the stairs to the right of me as I closed the door and stepped further into the home. I felt something soft between my toes and looked down to a perfectly clean white carpet. I wiggled my toes as the boy properly named Jacob smiled at me. He didn't have any woods on him. He looked like he was still alive, besides the black bags under his eyes and the pale skin.

"I'm Jacob," he said while wrapping his muscular arms around me. I quickly hugged him back. I knew I didn't know him, but I needed that hug. I had been confused since the day I had died. I hadn't been hugged in a long time, or that's what it felt like.

"I'm Sonny," I said into his chest as we still embraced. Agatha cleared her throat and Jacob's arms were no longer around me. I almost cried, but I was living with Jacob now. That meant hugs every day.

"Sonny, I am pleased to see that Jacob has hugged you. Here, if you hug someone, you automatically like them. So, I will let you to mingle and go help the new arrival. Welcome, Sonny." Agatha walked out of the door and I looked up at Jacob.

"Shower?" He suggested. I nodded and followed him upstairs to the bathroom. The bathroom was nice. It was like being alive, but then again not. There was a mirror on the left wall next to the shower. I quickly ran to it, gasping in disbelief at my reflection. My hair dark hair was tangled. My blue eyes were lined with black bags. My skin was pale. I lifted my shirt and saw my wounds. Twenty-seven stab wounds were scattered over my chest and torso. I almost cried. Why, Jackson?

"Here ya go," Jacob walked into the bathroom with a towel and a fresh pair of clothes in his hand. I wanted to question, but I didn't. I figured every house was set up for a boy and a girl. I gratefully took the clothes and started the shower. I stripped of my clothes and stepped in. I started getting myself washed up for my new life: my afterlife.