The action continues in chapter 22. The usual warnings apply, this is a rough draft with adult themes and language. Thanks for reading!
It was soon after nearly drowning that Stirling first began to see ghosts. To begin with, they were just flickers seen out of the corner of his eye, there then gone, easily explained away and forgotten. As the weeks went by though, the blurry shapes became more and more solid. As each day passed, it was like the focus ring on a camera was slowly twisting toward clarity. Soon, he began to recognize human features in the shapes. This focusing continued until one day, a little more than three months after first noticing them, he woke to find that the ghosts no longer flickered or faded. They were with him to stay.
As he grew used to life with ghosts, it struck him how many there were. The dead were everywhere; Idling their time away on roof tops, hanging out in libraries, and dangling their insubstantial feet over the edges of highway overpasses.
The ghosts utterly failed to live up to their Hollywood reputation as spooky engines of terror. Maybe there were evil ones out there, but if there were he didn’t see them. In fact, the scariest part about the floating dead was the sheer boredom of their existence. Their entire afterlife seemed to consist of wafting around with all the energy of a depressed fart.
That wasn’t to say that they couldn’t surprise him. Living with the dead required him to develop nerves of tempered steel. While he was almost sure he wasn’t crazy, he knew reacting to the ghosts would be a great way to get himself locked up and medicated. So, on the occasion a ghost floated listlessly through the blackboard of his English class or camped out next to a public urinal, he learned to hide his reactions and go on as though nothing was wrong.
Feeling a mixture of loneliness, curiosity, and pity, Stirling eventually decided to try and talk to one of them. It was soon enough after his swimming accident that he hadn’t yet become used to a solitary life, and dead company seemed better than no company at all.
He’d noticed the shade of a boy his own age loitering around a local park on a number of separate occasions. With a bit of mental rehearsal, he went to strike up a conversation.
To his delight, when he spoke to the ghost, it spoke back. True, its voice was an eerie-sounding three-part echo that made the hairs on his body stand up at near escape velocity, but it was still conversation.
As they chatted, Stirling discovered that the boy’s name was Adam. He also discovered that the ghost wasn’t all there in more than just the material sense. Either Adam hadn’t been the brightest bulb in life, or something about the process of becoming a ghost had been the equivalent of a metaphysical mule-kick to the head.
Attracted by the novelty of being able to reach across the veil and speak with a living person, a crowd of the dead slowly gathered in as the afternoon went by. Sadly, each of the ghosts he met that day had an intellect rivalled only by that of a potted fern. It wasn’t a comforting discovery. He didn’t like to think about the possibility that one day he’d shuffle off his mortal coil only to wander around in a mental state normally reserved for the cast of a reality TV show.
His conversation with Adam in the park that afternoon was like a rock dropping into a still pool, rippling out to stir up the entire ghostly community. The ghosts wanted news from their loved ones and kept asking if he knew Scott, Katie, Mark, and a slew of other unfamiliar names, as though he was on speaking terms with the entire population of Greater Vancouver.
They had banal messages to pass on, “Tell Yvonne to remember to check that her roti are gluten free. She’s a celiac, you know.” And, “Remind Carl that there’s a holiday coming up and the garbage pickup will be a day late. If he misses it, it will be two weeks before he can get pick up again.” The ghosts were so enthusiastic to talk to him, that Stirling felt that his opinion of their stupidity was a betrayal of what otherwise seemed to be very nice people.
The disaster came when Stirling was getting ready to leave. He extended his hand to shake with Adam, the first time he’d actually made any kind of physical contact with a ghost. It was a gesture full of the overblown teen sentimentality that anyone who had ever been made to sit through an ABC Afterschool Special would recognize on smell. Stirling didn’t know what to expect, he had the vague notion that his hand might pass through Adam’s own, or maybe their newfound friendship could mystically bridge the final barrier and he would feel cold, ghostly flesh on his own.
What he didn’t expect was Adam’s entire non-corporeal body to violently explode on contact with his hand into a cloud of glowing, red, mist. Sadly, it was precisely what happened. On seeing one of their own exploded, the other ghosts shrieked and scattered in panic.
After that, word got around and the ghosts kept their distance. The few he did see only hung around long enough to shout abuse at him before leaving quickly with an obscene gesture or two flashed in his direction. Whatever else they lost from their old life, a ghost always remembered how to swear, swear well, and swear often.
It was with these memories in mind that Stirling reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wireless earbuds. He queued up a Billy Holiday cover of Gloomy Sunday on his phone. As the clarinets began to play their intro in a minor key, he felt the cold weight of the song settle into him. He began advancing steadily on the small group of battered invaders.
“Sunday is gloomy, My hours are slumberless…”
Despite their horrific injuries, the corpses, because at this point they could be nothing else, were still stepping up smartly to get their asses handed to them by the petite woman in torn jeans. She hadn’t slowed down a fraction, and a fine red mist of blood now covered her nearly from head to toe. There was a look of sickened determination on her face, but she kept up the astonishing flurry of open handed slaps and haymakers. The woman must have an insane cardio regime to be able to keep up the tempo.
“Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless…”
Cold flowed down his right arm like meltwater down a drain spout. He focused on the mental state he needed to allow him to braid the coldness into a whisper-thin whip. A black whipcord barely thicker than butcher’s twine uncoiled from his fingers. White mist of sublimated ice fog flowed faintly down the thin line. With a little jerk of his wrist, he flicked the cable out to lash at the nearest ghost.
As the filament snapped through the air sound became muted, the air chilled, and the light in the room washed out. The braided cord licked the ghost’s shoulder and a bass thrum that travelled up Stirling’s arm and down throught the soles of his boots into the floor. The mangled ghost simply dissolved away with a sigh into red smoke. Its physical body stood still for only a moment before collapsing to the floor.
“Little white flowers will never awaken you…”
People looked around uneasily, there wasn’t much he could do about it other than try and look as confused as everyone else. It wasn’t easy with a charcoal bag on his head, but he did his very best to telegraph ‘confused’ with his body language. His grade twelve drama teacher would have been proud—if it had been anyone else but him.
“Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you…”
Stirling felt a hand grab his upper arm. He turned his head as best he could to see Dimitri staring at him with wide eyes. From the expression on his face, he’d just asked him a question. With a bag on his head and Lady Day singing in his ears Stirling was pretty much deaf to the outside world. Not that he really needed to hear. The look on Dimitri’s face might as well have been shouting, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!”
Stirling shook his besacked head at him in reply. “It’s my mess, I’ll see it gets cleaned up.”
“Angels have no thought of ever returning you…”
He turned to face the woman who now stood to face one fewer opponent. “Good hit!” Stirling shouted loudly through his bag while giving her a double thumbs-up. She had time to shoot him an incredulous look before being rushed by another one of the silent attackers. He wasn’t sure if the look was due to his unconventional headgear, or because she knew exactly how full of shit he was. In the end, it didn’t matter because oddly enough, his ruse worked. People all around him picked up the call and the lone combatant was soon receiving cheers of encouragement from the crowd.
He freed his arm from Dimitri’s grip and moved around the edge of the room to position himself for another strike.
“Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?…”
She hit another of the bodies with an echoing crack, and timing it with her strike as best he could, Stirling flicked his wrist in as subtle a motion he could manage. Again, sound and light dimmed, the thread snapped into the ghost centre mass, and like the one before it, it evaporated out of existence with the same red mist and the same deep bass note.
“Gloomy Sunday…”
“Did you see that!?” he asked a man next to him. “She’s kicking ass!”
The man smiled uncertainly and backed away a few steps, his face visibly paling as he went. Stirling saw others beginning to edge away from him. That was alright, this was taking too long anyway. He’d felt three more people die since he’d emerged from the employees only area not half a minute ago. It was time to bring his A-game.
No comments:
Post a Comment