No Room for Ghosts

More black and yellow tape zigzagged angrily across the cramped main room, guarding evidence with every warning sign ever employed by a poisonous animal. The tape marked off areas for preservation, so that the room couldn’t have been disturbed, but it wasn’t the way I remembered leaving it.

The kitchenette squashed into one corner was even messier than usual. Instead of the typical, orderly clutter of dishes, books, unpaid bills and other once neatly stacked items that didn’t fit on shelves, the place looked to have been ripped apart. It was a chaos of broken crockery, with cupboard doors ajar like mouths slack on their hinges, appalled. Whatever had happened here was a massacre of my normal way of life.

The state of the one bedroom was similar. Blankets had been dragged off the mattress and lynched across the floor, in a frantic search for something they might have been concealing. I didn’t remember this at all. An instant later, I found something that I thought explained why.

A note had been left, or possibly discarded, on the floor. I couldn’t tell who it was addressed to. In fact, I couldn’t tell much about anything. The thin, sloping handwriting was recognisably mine, but the words were not words. They were jargon, written in a nonsense language that not even I could decipher.

I couldn’t read them, and I had no memory of writing them, although I supposed I must have. Hadn’t I? I had my doubts about who I even meant when I referred to myself as an actor.
I had doubts about everything.

This wasn’t my home as I knew it. Its character had been changed by the cataclysmic event that had occurred here, and that my haunting had hidden from me, projecting in its place my flat as I had known it when I was alive. Logically, that meant that when I tore through here en route to my death, my life was already over. My fate was sealed, and that made it more like a cemetery than a living space. It was something the dead me wasn’t supposed to ever see.

That was the final stroke of my defeat. I didn’t care about my flight from the police or my paranoid delusions anymore. It didn’t matter if they caught me. The game was over. It wasn’t the kind of game that could be won.

I gave up.

I surrendered totally, not only as the object of the chase, but in respect of every goal I had been stupid enough to pursue. I was alone. I would always be alone, and it didn’t matter.

I surrendered to my guilt, which until then had been held at bay by adrenaline. I had stifled it until I could be sure of a place in which to release and digest it, and now that I was here, and nothing was a threat anymore, there was no stopping it.

It wasn’t even remorse that overcame me. It was an insurmountable, unrelenting disgust that permeated me like frost. It chilled and compressed my lungs, leaving no space for a breath of hope. With the weight of an avalanche, it smothered me.

Apologies could not budge it, and nothing could shield me from it. That complete acceptance of my abominable nature, without context or excuses, and nothing to redeem it, was the coldest thing I had ever experienced.

Pitifully, like a wounded animal, creeping tail-between-legs back to its den, I crawled into my nest-like bed and pulled the remaining, itchy blanket over my shoulders. Whimpering, I rolled myself like a cigar, until I was tightly wrapped. The pressure made me feel more at ease. It was like being inside a cocoon. Or a grave, another voice in my head supplied.

There were a million voices, all clamouring for my attention. I realised, as I lay in my blanket-grave, what my hell was to be. I had a head full of ghosts, insubstantial and thickly layered, like dust settling over my consciousness. They would whirl and eddy in the empty space, dulling every surface they coated, until, by slow entropy, I dissolved.

It was no use thinking about the things I would have done differently. If I had a choice, I would have crafted an entirely separate person to be. In the light of what I’d done, I couldn’t even feel sorry for myself, and so I did the only thing that my stubborn mind seemed capable of doing.

I imagined.

It was so easy, when I closed my eyes against the voices, to believe that the tightness of the blanket at my back was another person holding me. I thought of being hugged, and I think I might have cried, although I was fixed on pretending that I couldn’t be sure of anything real. In front of me, my arms formed a hollow just wide enough to scoop somebody into. I wrapped them around my chest, choking out my loneliness.

I was so heavily ensconced in grief that, at first, I couldn’t be sure I’d heard it. I went rigid, surfacing just enough to search for any sign that it had happened, but of course, I found no proof.

Then, the phone rang again.

The receiver was rattling on its stand, which I discovered lying in the fluff between the mattress and the wall. Hesitantly, I picked it up.

‘H-hello?’

‘Harvey, it’s me. Who did you think it would be?’

She only sounded slightly irritable, not furious, like I would have expected if I thought that she would ever speak to me again. This gave her voice an underwater quality. Each syllable was slightly garbled as it filtered through my perception.

‘Leanna?’ I still wasn’t sure that I wasn’t deluding myself. ‘Why are you talking to me? How did you even know I would be here?’

‘I thought I’d try your home phone. Where else could you have been? You don’t have a mobile.’

‘No,’ I said, but most of what I wanted to say was caught up in the silence that followed. If this was real, then did she hate me? How could she not? ‘Why are you calling me?’ I asked again. ‘You’re dead because of me.’

‘I know.’ There was a pause, as though she was distracted, or maybe being overhead. Or perhaps she was just trying to phrase her thoughts. ‘Your apartment’s trashed,’ she said, already convinced. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘My apartment’s always trashed,’ I replied.

‘But it’s changed. It wasn’t how you left it.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘The cops have been here. It looks like a crime scene. It probably is a crime scene,’ I thought aloud.

‘Exactly. My place is weird, too. All my stuff is gone. Listen, I think I know what this is about. It’s like Randolph said, about our haunting. It’s up now, because we know we’re dead, and that means that the places that were safe for us are vanishing, and–’

‘People can’t see us anymore,’ I finished, letting an echo of that small disappointment hit me like an aftershock. My previous, liberated perspective on being a ghost was forgotten completely. ‘I know, but why are you telling me this?’

‘Because, Harvey, if we don’t get out, we’re going to vanish.’ The words rang hollow, dying in transmission. There was a moment of quiet mourning while I let them sink in. The receiver fumbled in my hands, and the static echoed in our connection. ‘Randolph told me,’ she continued. ‘We have to find a haven. That’s kind of like a refuge place where lots of ghosts can stay.’

‘What do you mean, “we”?’ I asked, acerbically.

‘Harvey,’ she pleaded, so that it was only then clear to me how hard she must have been fighting to keep her composure. ‘Please just come. I can’t go without you!’

This made me angrier than I could articulate. I threw off the edge of blanket still tangled around me, feeling the relative coolness of the phone as the rest of me heated up. The only thing that could possibly be worse than my killing Leanna was her being so unaffected by it. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be affected, because that would mean her suffering, but she couldn’t be okay with it. Even I wasn’t okay with it.

‘I killed you!’ I tried to shock her into understanding.

Her reply was infuriatingly calm. ‘I know.’

‘I killed you! I stalked you. I hunted you. I watched you for weeks, and then I took a gun to the bus station and I shot you!’ I was panting. I didn’t know what else I could say to convince her, and so I was nearly sick when she finally answered.

‘I don’t care.’

That she didn’t think it mattered was the greatest insult. Leanna needed to hate me. She needed to look out for herself, because there was nobody else here to do it for her. If she didn’t care, then that also meant that the monstrous part of me had won.

‘I’m bad person.’ I was resolute. ‘I killed you because I wanted somebody else to be like me. It was selfish. I took you like a thing I could possess. You can’t stay with me.’

She was sobbing now. That only twisted my guilt in deeper, so that I writhed like a fish on a hook.

‘I don’t care,’ she repeated.

‘I deprived you of everything!’ I must have been red, I was so livid. There was salt on my cheeks, too. I could taste it.

‘You didn’t take anything from me, Harvey. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t want anything! I just wanted to die, too.’

‘No!’ I refused to believe it. I refused to let her believe it. ‘You’re wrong. This is all my fault. You need to hate me, for your own good. You need to stay away from me!’

‘I won’t.’ She was defiant. I could have hung up then and there, but I didn’t. I was a coward. ‘Before you snap at me, it’s not just because I like you. It’s more important than that.’

‘What could possibly be more important,’ I hissed, ‘than hating me right now?

‘Abigail,’ she said, and the sad, almost whispered tone of her voice told me at once who that was. ‘We have to set her free.’