Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

  Christ almighty, here it is. Scott ran several Google searches for Kate Collins paramedic. The first of these searches was on 1 May, exactly one month before we met for the first time in the Welsh woods.

  Rattle-rattle-rattle go the windows, challenged by a shrill, unhinged wind. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Mother Nature was laughing hard at my expense.

  My mind reels. Scott actually targeted me in Wales.

  Why, why, why?

  For reasons unknown.

  How did he even know I would be at the detox retreat? And how am I supposed to sleep now, having learnt this? I’m going to be so fucked in the morning. And to compound the glee, I need the bloody loo.

  Ooh, careful. That’ll mean going out into the pitch-black hallway.

  I can take Scott’s phone to use as a torch. Just in case I need it.

  Up I get, like a bleary-eyed child instructed to do something against her will. Approaching the archway, step by step, I hate the sense that the hall is practically daring me to set foot out there. Soon as I step through the arch, the whole corridor might come to life. Fast as the paper tongue of a party blower, it could wrap me up and gulp me down.

  Please leave for your safety.

  Ludicrous. Nevertheless, here I am, still hesitating, one step from the archway.

  I actually find myself muttering, “Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough.”

  Kate, major newsflash incoming: you’ve challenged a hallway to a fight. Calm down, go take a leak and then get some sleep, you absolute nutter.

  Here’s a fun observation: you haven’t pushed all your boxes up against the front door for safety, like you did on that first night. Scott could easily have snuck in while you searched his phone. The wind would have ensured you didn’t hear him enter. What if he’s lurking unseen, among all those hallway shadows, back to revel in the emotional ruins he left behind and reclaim his phone?

  A chill shimmers through me. Angry at this, I push back my shoulders and jut out my chest. My favourite life coach would be proud of the brave body language.

  The darkness won’t let you see Scott – not until you’re close enough for him to reach out and grab you. Or he might say, Hello, Kate and induce cardiac arrest.

  Without even having to look, I know there’s no one standing inside the front door. No one! Not Scott or anyone else. Fuck this.

  I stomp through the archway and submerge myself in the oil-slick black of the hall.

  Yes, that’s it: turn right, straight away. Don’t look behind you, towards the front door. Seriously dark here, isn’t it? You should use Scott’s phone torch. Are you too stubborn to even do that… or are you too afraid of what you might see?

  Dimly visible, the open bathroom door looks too far away for comfort. I pick up my pace… strictly because I really need this pee. No other reason whatsoever.

  Definitely not because the taste of copper has crept back into my mouth.

  Behind me, something bursts into existence and shoots light along the walls. My heart pinballs down between my knees, then ricochets all the way up to plug my throat.

  This light is neither the white of a normal ceiling bulb nor the yellow of the street lamps outside. No, this light is the same colour as that thing I saw in the corner of my eye.

  Up ahead, the bathroom’s sink mirror reflects my image. Right behind me, hovers a mass of flickering blue light.

  Are those… does it have eyes?

  It does.

  With a gasp, I break into a dash for the bathroom.

  In the mirror, the blue light melts into black, like a shark darting off into untold fathoms. And yet I can’t stop running.

  What am I doing? This is crazy.

  Ghosts don’t care whether you believe in them or not. They don’t need your permission to exist.

  Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m no fan of the unknown…

  … or darkness…

  … but what in the galloping fuck was that? Felt like some kind of…

  … go on, think it, there’s no harm in only thinking it…

  … some kind of entity. I mean, obviously not an entity, because that makes no sense. But…

  But what?

  Barrelling into the bathroom, I slam the door and yank the latch across.

  Can’t even see my hand in front of my face, but am I bothered? Hell no. This is fine. I am a dog in a burning room, okay with all the events that are unfolding currently.

  I’m bone-tired, that’s all. Stressed and still drunk. This flicker-thing must have been the result of the ceiling lights going haywire. Some kind of power surge, caused by the electricity briefly coming back on. That’s exactly what this was.

  When I first saw that demonic face on the balcony window, the seed of uncertainty planted itself in a part of my head where rational thought holds no sway. This seed wants me to believe that there’s something wrong with this flat. Something… off… with the very bones of this place.

  What does it even mean for a flat to be haunted? Makes no sense. Flats are essentially boxes made out of wood, stone and glass. How can a box possibly be out to get you?

  You’re going to love it here.

  I Am Possessed.

  A real wild one.

  Lovin’ life.

  This flat is not haunted. And so I’m going to sit here and take a piss in the dark, like any normal individual would during the night. I desperately need to shrug off the silly fright I’ve had and sleep.

  Come on, admit it, you’re seriously creeped out. Why don’t you turn on your phone torch, or that mirror light? No one will ever know you caved.

  Look, this was a power surge. At a push, it was a stronger hallucination than I experienced last night. That’s all! Either way, the case is closed. Now, if you’ll excuse me…

  Fine, stay in the dark. But next time you’re watching a scary movie, you’re officially no longer allowed to yell, Just turn the fucking lights on! at the characters.

  I can live with that. Now, while we search around for the toilet seat, let’s think about nice things instead, such as a bright future. Let’s picture ourselves in love with the man of our dreams. A man who lives in the same town as us, has no secrets worth shouting about and doesn’t perform a vanishing act worthy of Keyser Söze.

  While we lift the lid, briefly wondering if we might need to throw up, let’s note that it will have taken us a while to trust this man. Because, oh sweet Christ, do we ever have raging trust issues thanks to Scott Palmer. But several years into this glorious relationship, we know Mr Perfect would never abandon us for a laugh, or secretly film us, or make us think we’re special when in fact we’re only a fraction of his grubby Tinder harem.

  And as we grace the porcelain throne, let’s picture sitting beside Mr Perfect on a blanket in a field. Our child shrieks with laughter as he or she plays with our cute dog. A lovely little terrier with berry eyes, scampering about.

  Hey… why does Mr Perfect have Scott’s face? We’ve very much moved on from him – haven’t we, heart? I’d certainly fucking hope so, given that we now know Scott targeted us from the start.

  Yes. And for some reason, he’s lured you to this haunted flat.

  Shut. Up.

  Having erased Scott’s stupid enigmatic wolf face, let’s be lazy and go with some nice, generic square-jawed guy, straight out of a TV advert. Feels better, doesn’t it? Yes. So we’ll stay perched on this all-too-cold toilet seat and we’ll do our business. We’ll wind down, so that when we return to our super-deluxe duvet on the living room floor we can roll directly into sleep’s sweet embrace.

  Christ, it’s so dark. Truly, if I’d gone blind, I wouldn’t know the difference till I went back to the living room. But hooray: my business is concluded here. Time for some much-needed sl—

  Oh my God, oh my God, the fucking bathroom door.

  Two flickering, corpse-blue hands push effortlessly in through the solid wood. The fingers are rigor mortis claws.

  I blink
and blink again, desperate to kill the hallucination, but no, this is actually happening. This thing really is floating in through the closed fucking door, right across the room from where I sit.

  Every hair on my body stands up. Copper fills my mouth and my teeth feel raw, like they’ve been wrapped in foil. Must have dropped Scott’s phone, because it clatters on the floor and skims away.

  Between these grasping, spectral hands, a face begins to form. The nose and the chin make their entrance first, followed by the eyes and mouth.

  The eyes are twin black holes punched into blue cloth.

  The mouth, fixed into the deranged grin of a hunter spotting prey.

  This thing… this thing, it moves like a crudely animated drawing in a child’s flip-book – one with half the pages missing. The further it emerges from the door, the more its strobe dominates the room. Within its shimmering body rages what might be a turbulent electrical storm. Narrow, pulsating forks of white light dart out from its core to illuminate the fingers, the mouth, the dead eyes.

  Having left the door behind, the intruder displays nothing but blurred, fizzing mist where its feet should be. The arms and legs move as if independent of the body, performing wild contortions that would cripple any living person.

  With a series of angry, spasmodic jerks, this thing wrenches itself through the darkness towards me, as if crossing an ocean bed.

  I try to scream, but I’m all seized up inside. I’m dry as dust and copper-mouthed. What good would screaming do anyway? Primal mechanisms take over and I hold my hands out in front of me, but that’s just the kind of pointless thing people do before getting splattered across a motorway.

  There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

  As this thing moves closer, her savage smile becomes all too clear. All too recognisable.

  The deathless hands of Gwyneth Cooper reach out for me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  20 August

  Right up until Scott asks me his random question about ghosts, he and I are doing that thing we do. The thing that nauseates everyone around us.

  Slouched on deck chairs halfway along the pier, we hold hands in silence. All but ignoring the magnificent view of the sea and the hazy white cliffs to the east, we’re lost in each other’s eyes. I’ve never experienced a closeness like this before. For onlookers, the whole spectacle must be truly appalling, but guess how many fucks I give?

  Go on, guess.

  Every once in a while, the bare-naked romance of these intimate silences becomes so acute that we burst out laughing and talk again, only to lapse back into all the staring. Feels as though we actually enter each other’s minds and wander around our shared labyrinth together. In terms of the film Labyrinth, which we watched on Blu-ray last night, I am Jennifer Connelly to Scott’s David Bowie. Mind you, Bowie’s character was pretty evil, so that doesn’t work.

  This time, Scott’s the one who breaks our silence. “Where do you stand on the existence of ghosts? Yay or nay?”

  A chuckle rumbles in my chest. “If I’d had to compile a top thousand list of things you might have said next, this question wouldn’t have been among them.”

  He smiles back at me, but says nothing. Looks like he might actually want an answer. I realise that we’ve never discussed our spiritual or religious beliefs, or lack thereof. For all I know, Scott could be a big old Satanist.

  “Spooks get a big no from me,” I say. “Seen too many dead people, I’m afraid.”

  “Same here,” he says, before jumping back in to explain himself. “Oh! I don’t mean I’ve seen too many dead people. I just mean, I don’t believe in spooks either.”

  As he gazes somewhere off into the middle distance, I want his eyes back on me. Sometimes the potency of this love drug feels disturbing. “And now,” I say, “I can’t resist asking what prompted that question…”

  His faint shrug snowballs into a laugh. “I honestly have no idea. Maybe the ghost train?”

  I take a quick look up along the pier. From this position, we can’t actually see the Hell Hotel ride. Guess he must have seen it while we strolled up here. Every moment of every day, the mind takes in so much more than we consciously acknowledge.

  I open my mouth to ask how many dead people Scott’s actually seen, but he squeezes my hand, leans forward in his chair and lays that look on me.

  “I’m thinking candyfloss. Yeah?”

  As he stands, an alarming noise blasts out of his jeans pocket. The sound is truly bizarre, like some kind of baying, primal animal chorus.

  Scott whips out his phone, then quickly presses a button on the side of the case.

  The noise stops dead. When he doesn’t immediately offer an explanation, my curiosity boils over. “What the bloody hell was that?”

  Having stowed the device back away, he laughs. “God knows! Phones have minds of their own. Now, candyfloss? Candyfloss.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  5 October

  Here in the belly of darkness, on this fucking toilet seat, I’ve somehow adopted the aeroplane brace position while waiting for something godawful to happen.

  Could I open my eyes?

  Yeah, sure, I could open them. But dare I?

  Fuck no. I dare not.

  What if the flicker-thing still hangs right in front of my face, biding its sweet blue time?

  What if I open my eyes and see the tip of Gwyneth’s Wicked Witch Of The West nose one inch away from my own? I might gaze into her eyes and see something that undoes me forever.

  Are ghosts really a thing or have I lost my bloody mind?

  I. Dare. Not. Open. My. Eyes.

  Tears, welling up. So many factors. There’s the dread, obviously. The pure dread that makes my stomach feel raw and hollow. I’m rocked by the sense that the train of my life has switched rails and I can never get back on track. There’s also no escaping the fact that being scrunched up in this foetal position has dug up memories I prefer to leave buried.

  As I retreat inside myself, a single teardrop reaches the end of my nose and then explodes on my bare forearm.

  The first time I ever felt alone, I was tucked away inside my mother’s womb.

  Two different psychotherapists have suggested that I’ve retro-engineered this memory, based on the way Mum would later treat me. Technically, I know they’re right, but in my head this has become real. We paramedics often catastrophise. I don’t know exactly why, but we do. Our rampant hypochondria, for instance, has become a running in-joke.

  I’ve certainly never told a soul about this, in case they mistakenly thought I was trying to make some kind of deranged “pro-life” point. But I swear I recall being inside my mother’s warm velveteen black womb, and feeling alone. Feeling abandoned.

  My mother’s heart thumped like a sonic boom, but out of sync with mine. Mum was alive, but she wasn’t really there. Nobody was home.

  Of course, it wasn’t Carrie Collins’ fault she was in a coma when she gave birth to me. Neither was it her fault that they had to bring her slightly out of the coma, so that her body could enter the labour process all by itself. And how could it possibly be her fault that she wasn’t at liberty to be the first, second, third or even twenty-seventh person to hold me?

  None of this was my mum’s fault. Instead, we can blame the hod carrier who somehow managed to drop two bricks off a ladder on Tottenham Court Road.

  Mum was both unlucky and incredibly fortunate. The first brick missed her entirely. The second, falling from a height of more than twenty feet, could have landed square on her head, pulped her brain and killed us both outright. Instead, this nine-pound fused block of clay and shale clipped the back of her head and rendered her unconscious.

  If those awesome paramedics hadn’t battled their way through the streets to her in time, she could so easily have died right there on the pavement, with my seven-month-old self inside her. And if those doctors and specialists hadn’t known how to induce labour, that would also have been the end of me.
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br />   The way my life began robbed my mother and me of any meaningful connection. Had she been able to remember the first three months of my life, she might have developed warmth towards me. It also might have helped if she hadn’t been on the way to an ultrasound growth scan when one stray brick changed our lives forever.

  Plenty of old photos depict Mum as the life and soul of any party. After the accident, though, her facial expression was mostly blank. Again, not her fault. But on the rare occasion that my own mother looked me directly in the eye, something cold would lurk behind her gaze. I felt convinced she wanted to say, Kate Collins, this is all your fault. If I hadn’t had you, I might still have all of me.

  Soon as I hit sixteen years old, Mum clearly felt she’d done her time by raising me. She jetted off to live in New Zealand with her boyfriend she’d met while on holiday.

  I don’t want to be back here, inside the coma. I cannot stay in this hellhole space.

  I run my tongue around my teeth. Has this copper taste faded? I think so, but can’t be sure.

  I open my left eye first, because it’s my weakest and so won’t see Gwyneth so vividly. Fear knows no logic.

  There’s not a single trace of heart-stopping blue in the room. Only the lush normality of black.

  My face and my arms tingle. I’ve allowed myself to become a human freeze-frame and forgotten to breathe. Like a diver coming up for air way too fast, risking the bends, I suck down all the oxygen I can. I breathe until I feel more level, and yet my panic simmers on.

  Could I just stay here all night? If I sit here in the dark, nice and still, then everything will be fine. This, too, shall pass.

  It’s always darkest before the dawn, right? Florence + The Machine wisdom, don’t fail me now.

  Only… only, no. Even if I sit here for hours until the sun rises, all that glorious natural light outside will barely infiltrate this dead space. A thin sliver of weak gold under the door, if I’m lucky.

  Still seated, I lean forward to feel around on the floor. If I find Scott’s phone, I can switch on the torch. But of course, the damn thing eludes my fingers.