The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

by Lauren James

  “Though he is very friendly!” Rima piped up.

  Kasper sighed.

  He was kind of cute, actually – in a dim-looking way.

  “I’m Felix Anekwe, in 4A.” The other boy held out a hand to her.

  “You’re neighbours?” She tried to remember whether she’d looked inside any of the rooms on the fourth floor when she’d been taking photographs. It was hard to imagine that the wrecked rooms were still homes for these people.

  “Unfortunately.” Kasper scrubbed a hand roughly over Felix’s scalp, who put up a token resistance but didn’t wriggle free.

  “Boys!” Rima said, in resigned impatience. “Harriet’s waiting for you to take her up to the top floor, Kasper.”

  He released Felix, looking sheepish. “Right. Come on, Harriet,” Kasper said with dignity, squaring his (already very square) jaw.

  “Don’t get lost, Kasper,” Felix drawled. “Just keep going upwards, OK?”

  “Talk to the hand, Felix.”

  “Talk to the hand?” Harriet repeated under her breath, bemused.

  FELIX

  Felix watched Harriet and Kasper walk away. Kasper’s hand was casually resting on Harriet’s lower back for some reason. He tried to ignore the ghost of Kasper’s touch prickling on his own skin.

  When Harriet turned, Felix saw for the first time that there was a fist-sized dent in the back of her skull, hidden under her hair. It was the only visible sign of how she had died.

  When the two of them had disappeared, the rest of them all started talking at once.

  “What was that?” Felix asked, as Rima said, “Kasper was flirting with her!” and Leah mumbled, “I did not miss this at all.”

  Felix sighed through his nose. “I cannot believe—”

  “I know.” Rima shook her head. “A suicide attempt, within the first five minutes! Unbelievable!”

  Guiding Harriet through her death was a bit of a shock to the system. Felix had forgotten how much there was to learn about the afterlife when you were newly dead. Everything must seem utterly confusing. Felix had been so busy obsessing over his own issues that he could barely remember what he’d done in the years after his death. Harriet was lucky she had them to help her out.

  A fly was buzzing tentatively around the congealing blood near Harriet’s right ear. Felix leant closer, thinking: Go away. The fly zoomed off to investigate a McDonald’s wrapper instead. Felix settled back, satisfied.

  “How long do you think the energy will last?” he asked. “Before we, you know … go to sleep again.”

  Leah, who was the most experienced among them, shrugged. “Could be anywhere from a few months to a year. It depends how much energy escaped and how much she kept for herself. She seems quite strong to me, so probably only a few months.”

  Felix swallowed. That didn’t seem nearly enough time to do all the things he wanted to do. He felt revitalized, born again. No matter how much he prepared, he was never ready to return to that dull, dreamless hibernation.

  “Well,” he said, lifting up the corners of his mouth in an attempt at a smile. “I suppose we’ll have to make the most of it while we can.”

  Just then, a small fox spirit appeared from the shadows and trotted up to them.

  “Cody!” Rima gasped. The fox leapt into her arms, wriggling furiously and twisting upside down to reveal a pure white belly. “I’ve missed you so much,” Rima said, burying her face in her ginger fur. The fox let out a short, squeaky sort of yowl.

  “I can’t believe she’s still here. I thought she’d have disintegrated by now.” Felix stretched out his hand, grinning. The fox tapped it with a black-tipped paw.

  “She’s a tough old thing, aren’t you?” Rima kissed Cody’s nose.

  Before they had all gone into hibernation mode, Rima had been training up the dead fox as a pet. The process had involved a lot of snarling and baring of teeth from both Rima and Cody, but in the end, she’d even got the fox doing tricks.

  Cody jumped to the ground, stretching out her front legs, back curving into a bow. She let out another hoarse yowl, then swiftly jumped across the room to chase a mouse into the wall.

  Felix stared up the stairs, after Kasper and Harriet. He wondered what they were talking about, and if his hand was still on her back. But most of all, he wondered how he could stop himself from caring.

  Chapter 3

  KASPER

  Kasper led Harriet up the stairs, weaving between the ghosts who were still watching her. They all closed their eyes as she passed, like they were breathing her in. A girl from the second floor – who used to do student radio when she was alive, and sometimes still put on shows for them all – even darted over to touch Harriet’s arm.

  Kasper couldn’t blame them. Harriet was glowing golden bright, even though she’d lost some energy while she was outside. Kasper had been so scared when she’d left Mulcture Hall. He wished desperately that he was as brave as Rima, who had gone after her without any hesitation at all. If only he could have played the role of rescuer to Harriet’s damsel in distress.

  “What do they want? It’s like they think I’m a snack or something,” Harriet said, brushing her hair flat nervously. It was woven up in some fancy twist. Her make-up was very fancy too. Had she been planning to go out to a party that night, if she had survived? There were probably loads of boys waiting for her to turn up right at that very moment.

  “You’re a novelty,” he replied. “Besides, your fall was kind of brutal. No one else has ever had such a good death, I don’t think. Well, I suppose Leah might have, but she’s never told us how she died, so that doesn’t count.”

  Having a good death was a gruesome badge of honour. Kasper always wished his own was more exciting.

  He summoned up all his courage and added, “Plus … you’re well fit. That makes you even more interesting.”

  Kasper waited with bated breath for her reply, nerves fluttering in his stomach. It had been a long time since he’d said anything like that to a girl.

  “Less fit now that I’m a rotting corpse,” Harriet muttered, and ran one hand over the back of her head again. There was a dip there, where her skull had caved in. Kasper and the others had been lucky – they had no wounds.

  “Oh, I dunno about that,” he said breezily. “You’ve raised the bar for rotting corpses everywhere.”

  “Thanks, um—” She paused, clearly trying to remember his name.

  “Kasper,” he said. He didn’t mind. She’d gone through a lot, very quickly.

  She smiled at him, her eyes lighting up so beautifully that it completely changed her face. “Thanks for coming with me to get my phone.”

  “No problem. There is something you can do in exchange, though.” He let a small smile pull up the side of his mouth in a way that he used to practise in front of the mirror during pre-drinks, back when he was alive and could go to clubs and flirt with all the girls he wanted.

  “What do you want?” Her voice was wary.

  He bit back a grin. “Well … you don’t happen to know how the Sky Blues are doing in the league tables this season, do you?”

  Harriet grinned. Something inside him lightened. He had been hoping for this.

  HARRIET

  As they walked up to the top floor, Harriet made awkward small talk with this boy, Kasper. He had apparently been a rower, not a rugby player; he had been studying Art History; and he’d been seventh in line for a peerage when he had died.

  When they reached the fifth floor, it was full of ghosts too. The ones up here seemed different somehow. They weren’t watching Harriet curiously, but just sat around, staring blankly into space. Some were slumped against walls or curled up on the ground. They were faint, too – dimly lit compared to the brighter ghosts she’d seen so far, who could almost pass for living people.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Harriet asked.

  “They’re still Shells,” Kasper said, sounding surprised to see them too.

  “Shells?” Harriet moved
closer to one, but he didn’t react – not even when she touched his arm. There was no sign of life on any of their faces.

  “Ghosts with low energy are called Shells. They’re like empty husks of ghosts, nearly gone.”

  “What?”

  Kasper shook his head. “Energy doesn’t last for ever. When we first die, we’re fresh and bright, like you. But after decades, you just sort of use it all up. You stop being able to move around, and eventually your energy runs out completely and you disintegrate. Until today, we were all like this too.”

  Harriet stared at him. “So what changed?”

  He gestured at her. “You arrived. Your death released energy that spread through the building. We absorbed it, and it was enough to wake us up again. We were all Shells until the moment you died. We’ve been Shells before, but we’ve always found more energy from somewhere or other before we disintegrated. This time, we came really close to it, I think.” A worried look crossed his face.

  “Wow.” Harriet was a bit miffed. Kasper had taken some of her energy? Surely that should have gone to her. It was Harriet’s death, after all. “So why didn’t the Shells up here wake up when I died?”

  “Hmm. Well, you probably died when you hit the ground floor, right? The energy would have radiated through the building, so the ghosts on the lower floors got the most. By the time it reached this far, it was too weak for the tiny bit of fresh energy to make any difference to the ghosts here. So they stayed like this.”

  No wonder the ghosts in the building were all watching Harriet. They were waiting for more energy. Well, she wasn’t going to give it to them. If losing energy meant turning into a Shell, then she was going to keep as much as she could for herself. When she got out of here, she needed to have enough energy to spend years watching over her gran with the ghosts of her parents.

  The night they died was a horrible, panicked blur of fear and misery in Harriet’s memory. Her parents had eaten contaminated meat that had given them food poisoning. At first they’d just been sick, but after a few hours neither of them could breathe properly. Harriet had called an ambulance while her gran panicked and dithered, but her mum and dad had both died before the paramedics arrived.

  Her whole life had been taken away from her in one moment. They’d been about to move to America for Harriet’s mum’s new job; they’d sold their house and were only supposed to be staying with her gran until their visas came through. Before the documents ever arrived, they were both gone. Everything Harriet had loved was lost, just like that – her family, her home, her life. Harriet was left with nothing except her grandmother.

  The ache in her heart for her parents had never disappeared. Their deaths had been a terrible mistake. But now, more time with them was tantalizingly out of reach. Just.

  Harriet and Kasper crossed the hallway, stopping once or twice to let a vacuous shell of a ghost drift past, blown wherever the wind took them. Finally, they reached the place where Harriet had tripped and fallen.

  Peering over the edge of the floor, Harriet could see rust-coloured splatters of blood staining a steel beam that jutted out from the floor below. She must have hit her head on the way down.

  Harriet realized she was rubbing at the hole in the back of her head and forced her hand down by her side. The quicker they found her phone and got away from here, the better.

  “How big’s your pager?” Kasper asked, crouching down and searching the floor for any sign of it.

  “Pager? What is this, Seinfeld? It’s a mobile.”

  Kasper looked confused, so Harriet said, exasperated, “A mobile phone?”

  “A car phone? One of those big bricks?” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I was never really that bothered about technology when I was alive.”

  “No, it’s like –” she gestured the size of a small rectangle. “It’s silver.” It blew her mind that he didn’t know what an iPhone was. She kept forgetting that although the other ghosts looked like they were eighteen, too, they were a lot older. There was a whole vacuum between their life experiences.

  She started searching too. There were bright yellow hazard signs leaning up against the wall, warning that there was a dangerous, unstable edge. Why hadn’t she noticed them before? No wonder she’d had an accident, if they were hidden out of sight like that.

  Harriet caught sight of a flash of metal hidden behind a fern. “Oh, there it is!”

  When she attempted to pick it up, her hand went straight through the phone. Of course. Disappointed, she said, “Well, I should be able to make a call using voice control.”

  “How does it work?” Kasper asked. His eyes were bright with excitement. At least someone was happy. “Where are the buttons?”

  “You just touch the screen,” Harriet said, already dreading having to give a tutorial in twenty-first-century technology.

  “How does touching it do anything?” He leant in for a closer look, his hair brushing against hers.

  Harriet had no idea how it worked, but she wasn’t going to admit to that.

  “We don’t have time for me to explain. Computer stuff is very complicated. Unlock,” she said to the phone, before he could ask any more questions.

  Something in her chest loosened when the phone registered her voice. She could call her gran before she started worrying. The battery was still on ninety per cent, too.

  Kasper gasped. “There’s writing on the screen!”

  A search result was still open in her browser. She had been looking up information about the building just before she’d entered, but hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now, she paused and read the first link.

  SEARCH RESULTS FOR ‘MULCTURE HALL’

  22 OF THE WEIRDEST UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES

  17. The 23 students who died overnight in a UK university dorm.

  Back in 1994, twenty-three students died during a single night at Mulcture Hall, on the University of Warwick campus outside Coventry. The alarm was raised early one morning when a student from another hall found their friend dead in their bed. Police arrived at the scene and discovered that every student who had been in the building that night had died some time after midnight.

  It was initially declared that the deaths were due to a gas leak within the building, and a press release was issued by the university to that effect, including promises to run immediate health-and-safety checks on all of the halls of residence on the campus.

  However, the mystery deepened when autopsies found none of the signs usually associated with carbon monoxide poisoning or oxygen starvation due to a gas leak. To this day, the case remains open with the West Midlands Police, who declared the deaths suspicious after a long investigation.

  The case has been discussed online ever since, and possible explanations have varied from a simple blood-sampling error at the post-mortem, to wilder theories such as alien abduction. However, it seems unlikely the true explanation will ever be found.

  The deceased were mainly first-year students aged eighteen or nineteen, as well as four international post-graduate students in their mid-twenties.

  Harriet frowned. That was weird. What could have killed them all, then? Had the police seriously never found anything in all this time?

  Before Kasper could read it and get distracted, she said, “Call ‘Home’.”

  When the phone started ringing, Harriet found that for some reason she couldn’t breathe. Finally, the line clicked on.

  “Hello?”

  Harriet exhaled in a gust and said, “Gran. Hey.”

  She spoke over her. “Have you been studying in the library all night again? You should come home, it’s not good for you.”

  “I’ve had an accident, Gran,” she said, a lump in her throat. Her gran always assumed the best of her. As if she’d ever been really studying, all those nights she’d stayed out late. She’d been messing around with mascara and eyeshadow in the empty stacks of the library’s Economics section.

  “Hello?” her gran repeated. “Harriet? I can’t hear you. I�
��m going to call you back. I think the line’s bad.”

  “I’m here, Gran!”

  Her gran hung up. Harriet looked at Kasper, who was watching her with a soft, gentle frown. There was a tickling suspicion making itself known in the back of her brain.

  The phone rang again.

  “Harriet, hello?” Her gran’s voice sent ice-cold shards running through Harriet.

  “Hey, Gran. I’m here, Gran. I’m so – I love you. I love you so much.”

  “I think you pocket-dialled me. Come home, will you? I need you to turn the heating on. I can’t reach with my ankle.” With that, she hung up again.

  Harriet really, really wished that she was the kind of person who cried. Her mum and dad felt further away than ever. “She doesn’t even know that I’m missing. If I had to die, why couldn’t it be where my parents are?”

  Kasper didn’t reply. She wanted to shake him – and shake all those ghosts downstairs who’d been watching her every move. This was her life. Not a TV show.

  Furious, she abandoned the phone and marched down the stairs. The Shells let out a collective, mournful sigh as she left. Kasper didn’t follow.

  There was nowhere Harriet could go without being watched by curious eyes. All the students seemed to be enjoying their reawakening, shouting and calling out to each other. A couple of them were even playing hide-and-seek on the stairs, jumping through the walls and dangling from the floor into the rooms below.

  She barged past them. When she reached the third floor, she found a scrawny boy with white-guy dreadlocks resting his ear against the wall and listening carefully.

  He bared his teeth at Harriet when she passed. “Back off. Get your own rat! This one’s mine.”

  Startled, she glanced back at him. “I, er, I don’t—”

  “You’re not coming in at the last minute and taking my spirit. Piss off.”

  Harriet opened her mouth to reply, but she had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t really care to find out.

  On the second floor, she closed her eyes and walked through the door to the fire escape which zigzagged down the side of the building.