The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

by Lauren James

  A couple, spooning on a mattress, peered up at her.

  “Get out of here!” one of them scolded her. He shot what looked like clouds out of his finger, filling the room so she couldn’t see them.

  “Kids today have no sense of decorum,” she heard him say as she pulled herself back through the ceiling.

  “The – the –” she spluttered. “The ghost down there made a cloud! From his hand!”

  “Nice!” Rima said. “Was it a cumulonimbus? They’re his favourite.”

  Harriet was aghast. “What the hell?! He just grew it from his hand.”

  “It’s his power,” Felix said.

  “Power?” Her voice was fraying at the edges.

  Felix pushed up his sleeves, looking for all the world like a professor settling in to give a lecture. “All ghosts have a power of some sort or another. It’s something that happens when you’ve been around for a while.”

  “Felix can hypnotize people!” Rima added.

  He grimaced. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but sure.”

  This was impossible. They must be playing a prank on her. Harriet pulled an unconvinced face. “Oh my God.”

  “You’ve got a power, too. We’ll have to wait and see what it is when it manifests,” Felix said. “Everyone’s is different. I have a theory that this is why humans have loads of different myths about ghosts. Each culture invented their own stories about ghosts – poltergeists, bhoots, strigoi, dybbuk, baku, Antevorta – there are hundreds of legends, all giving them different powers. Because every ghost does something different.”

  He was serious, she realized. They weren’t messing with her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” This might be the answer to her problems. Was there a power that would let her talk to her gran, in a way that her gran would be able to hear? Or, even better – Harriet sat bolt upright – was there a power that would let her leave the building and go home?

  “What sort of powers are there?” Harriet asked.

  “Anything you can imagine,” Rima said, grinning. “There’s a girl who can transform clothes into different outfits! She made me this T-shirt. She owed me a favour.”

  Harriet stared at the glittery T-shirt. It didn’t look magical. It looked totally real and solid. These powers must be really strong, if they could do things like that. What if her own power was something useful? It was impossible to clamp down on her hope.

  “How long do they take to appear? I need to find out what my power is. Can we do that? Now?”

  “It’s early days,” Kasper reassured her, while lazily watching a delicate brown mouse steal the filling from an old armchair for its nest. “Mine took so long to appear that I thought I didn’t even have a power for ages.”

  “Can you even imagine,” Rima said, laughing, and did a little mock shiver. “No powers!”

  “Powers aren’t all that, Harriet,” Kasper said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Harriet really wanted a power. She wanted one right now. “But how do they work? Where does the magic – thing – power come from?” She hadn’t felt the slightest urge to cast magic spells yet.

  “Well, when you tried to leave the hall and started disintegrating, it was because your energy was weakening with distance, right?” Rima said. “Energy is what keeps us all here as ghosts. It’s what our powers run on.”

  Harriet’s head felt like it was going to explode. “What happens if you use it all up?”

  “Then your time’s up,” Rima said. “You disintegrate.”

  She remembered the feeling of her atoms dissolving when she’d left Mulcture Hall and shivered. “OK. This is a lot to take in. Are there any other hugely important things about the afterlife that you haven’t told me yet?”

  “Nah, mate. You’re good to go,” Kasper said.

  “Though I do have one question for you,” Felix added. “It’s something I’ve been dying to know. How much do Freddos cost now?”

  The rest of them don’t understand Harriet quite yet. But you don’t need to be able to see the future to predict what she’s going to do.

  Let’s go back to 1994. You haven’t been there yet, and it’s about time I looked back at it from this angle. It’s funny how you can see different things, each time you look. Like turning over an object to see it from different sides.

  So. Here’s Felix on the first day he met Rima and Kasper. He’s nervous. He’s unpacking his things in his room when his brother, Oscar, brings him a bin bag full of clothes that had been taken to the wrong room by accident. He’s brought a girl with him, someone who has a room near by. This is Rima. Felix has no idea that she’ll become one of his best friends.

  It’s strange to me, that when everyone else meets people for the first time, everything about them is completely new. Nobody has any idea of what is to come. How do you all know which stranger to remember? Which conversation to pursue?

  When Oscar introduces Felix, Rima grins at him, a little shy herself. Oscar suggests that they all go and grab lunch – he wants to help Felix make friends, so that he doesn’t spend all his time alone. But he also likes Rima. She never even noticed. I don’t think she knows about his crush, even now.

  As they’re walking down the stairs, talking about what A-levels they studied, whether they applied to Oxbridge and where their second choice of uni was, Felix bumps into a boy by accident. They both stumble, and an alarm clock falls out of a box he’s carrying. It smashes on the ground.

  The boy is Kasper, obviously. He sneers at Felix, annoyed. Embarrassed, Felix forgets to apologize and flees down the stairs. Kasper yells something sarcastic after him, looking at the broken clock in dismay. It was brand new – a gift from his dad for starting uni. He wanted to make sure that Kasper didn’t sleep in and miss his lectures (he’d nearly missed one of his exams last summer).

  Later, Kasper and Felix will both be mortified when they realize that they are neighbours and must share a bathroom for the next year. But that’s still to come. For now, Oscar tells Rima he’d better go after Felix and make sure he’s OK. That they’ll do lunch another day.

  Rima nods her understanding, then kneels to help Kasper pick up the pieces of smashed glass. They go their separate ways without even introducing themselves. (That would take another three weeks.)

  But do you see yet? How hard it is to stop yourself from caring, even when you know you shouldn’t? How much family matters?

  Oscar knew. Felix knew. Harriet doesn’t know yet. But she will.

  Chapter 5

  HARRIET

  Harriet’s power was locked up somewhere inside her where she couldn’t reach it. She tried to create clouds out of her fingers, imagining rain and thunder, but nothing happened. She needed to talk to this Qi person right now.

  While the others were cooing over Rima’s fox, she turned to Kasper, and pleaded, “Will you take me? To see – er, Chi?”

  “Qi, yeah,” Kasper confirmed. He squirmed and looked at Rima. “I don’t know, though. Qi is kind of busy.”

  Harriet remembered the way his eyes had been filled with longing when he looked at her earlier. Her gran had taught her when she was very young that if you wanted something from someone, you had to work out what they needed. If you could find a way to offer it to them, then you’d have them eating out of the palm of your hand.

  Kasper wanted love. Or the excitement of first lust, at least. That was the simplest thing in the world to give to him. She’d watched a lot of people flirting, especially in freshers’ week. There were girls who drew constant attention simply by tilting their head in a certain way, or rearranging their hair over their shoulders. She drew on those memories.

  “Please, Kasper,” she said, pitching her voice low and intimate, so quiet that the others didn’t hear her speak. She lifted one side of her mouth to make her cheek dimple. “Can’t you make an exception, as a favour to me?”

  Out of sight, she took his hand and rubbed his thumb with hers.

  Kasper looked down
at their entwined fingers. There was a moment when she thought he might be about to say no again, but then he mumbled, “I guess we can go and talk to Qi. It can’t hurt.”

  He stood up, pulling her to her feet. “Catch you guys later,” he said to Felix and Rima, who stared at them in bafflement.

  Harriet bit down on her victorious smile. That flirting thing had been a lot easier than she’d expected. Making friends was far tougher, but this, she was good at.

  “How are you dealing with everything?” Kasper asked as they walked to Room 4E, where the mysterious Qi apparently lived. “It’s a lot.”

  “It is, at that,” she said dourly. “I don’t know. I guess … I just thought it’d be different, you know? I didn’t believe in the afterlife when I was alive. I assumed once you died, then that was it, fade to black. But I always thought, if there was something after death…”

  Harriet picked at her fingernails, trying to work out what she wanted to say. “I thought it would be so incredibly amazing that I wouldn’t care about my old life any more. I wouldn’t want to return to real life, because it would be even better afterwards. Being stuck here, I feel kind of cheated. The afterlife should be less … dusty, I think.”

  She fell silent, aware that she had been talking for far too long. Kasper had stopped in his tracks and was staring at her, wide-eyed. He had long, pale eyelashes.

  “Wow. I prefer your version.”

  She let out a low laugh. “Me too.”

  His hand crept onto her lower back again. “Listen, I think you should be prepared for this to fail. Qi will try her best to help you, but it would be easier if you accepted that it’s not going to work.”

  She let out a noise of exasperation. “Never,” she said firmly. She was going to find a way to go home, with or without a power.

  With infinite care, he took her hand in his again. He did it in a way that made her suddenly regret ever initiating contact.

  “OK, then,” he said. “Let’s hope Qi knows what she’s doing.”

  Just then, Rima ran up behind them. “Wait, I’ll come with you! I haven’t seen Qi in ages.” She eyed their entwined hands, then added, “Unless I’m interrupting something?”

  “You’re good,” Harriet said, relieved, just as he replied, “Kinda.”

  Harriet turned to Kasper, who opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. When Rima choked on a laugh, he let go of her hand and strode on.

  Rima caught her by the elbow, holding Harriet back. “You know he’s flirting with you, right? Kind of blatantly.”

  Harriet couldn’t help the smile that twisted her lip. As if she could have missed that. “Oh, I know.”

  Rima hesitated, then said, “You should know that Kasper might act cocky, but he’s actually a lot more vulnerable than he seems. Be gentle, OK?”

  Harriet must have slightly overshot the mark on the seduction front, if she was already getting the “best friend” talk. “Is this the part where you tell me that if I hurt him, you’ll kill me? Because I think you’ve missed the boat there.”

  Rima laughed. “Sorry! I just wanted to let you know. I wasn’t trying to warn you off, or anything. I think that you could be good for him, because he and Felix have this really odd… Well, I think this whole place makes everything a bit toxic. We’re all cooped up together all the time, and it can get a bit much. So new blood is always a good thing. Go for it, is what I’m saying.”

  Harriet was drowning in other people’s problems. She was trying to get home, not catch up on decades’ worth of missed gossip.

  “Thank you for the intel,” she said at last. “Now watch and learn, baby.” She flipped her hair over one shoulder and walked after Kasper. He looked hunched over and embarrassed, and was busy pretending they didn’t exist.

  Rima called out, slightly out of breath, “I think you might be the coolest person I’ve ever met!”

  When they reached Room 4E, the back of Kasper’s neck was still pink. “Dr Pang?” he called.

  A soft voice replied, “Come in, Mr Jedynak.”

  Inside, a Chinese woman in her mid-twenties was sitting on the broken remains of a bed. She was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, and there was a glow around her. It was as if all the dim light in the room was pulled towards her.

  “This is her, then,” Qi said, holding out a hand to Harriet. “The source of all the –” she breathed in deeply “– fresh energy.”

  When Harriet took Qi’s hand, Harriet could have sworn that her own skin seemed to dim a little. She blinked down at it. Had she imagined the sensation of pins and needles that spread through her fingers?

  She quickly pulled away, clearing her throat. “It’s great to meet you. Kasper said you might be able to help us work out what my power is?”

  Qi leant forwards, inspecting Harriet carefully. “It’s very early for a power to manifest, if you’ve only been dead for a few hours. But I’ll try my best.”

  She touched one hand to Harriet’s forehead. Holding still, Harriet ignored the definite itch spreading across her scalp. She felt drained suddenly. Was Qi taking her energy, somehow?

  “Interesting,” Qi said, and licked the tips of her fingers with a thoughtful expression. “Rima, can you get me a rat?”

  Rima started. “Hang on a sec!” She ran from the room.

  There was a minute of silence, in which Kasper arranged himself in an artistic slouch against the windowsill and Qi stared unblinkingly at Harriet.

  She shifted awkwardly under her gaze. She tried to focus on the reason she was here – to find a way to get home. Any amount of discomfort was worth that.

  Then there was a noise at the door. Harriet turned, expecting it to be Rima, but instead an enormous tawny owl flew into the room, carefully holding a rat between its teeth. It dropped the rat at Harriet’s feet and put a claw on the rodent, looking up at Qi expectantly.

  At first, Harriet thought the rat was stunned but unharmed. Then she realized it was a ghost.

  “Harriet, be ready to absorb the energy,” Qi instructed, and then gestured at the owl to continue.

  “Right, but what does that mean?” Harriet asked, as the rat’s spirit shuddered, seeming to collapse in on itself. A brightness – or something – peeled away from it into the air.

  “Quickly!” Qi said. “Before it dissipates! Take its energy.”

  Repulsed, Harriet jolted away from the rat. But as the cloud of energy drifted towards her, she found herself reacting on instinct. She pulled the energy towards herself. To her surprise, the rat blurred at the edges, shuddered in and out of focus once or twice, and then disappeared completely.

  Harriet swayed as a rush of giddy strength spread through her, like she’d done four shots of vodka in a row. It was a delicious rush that made her feel invincible.

  “How do you feel?” Qi asked, cradling Harriet’s head between her hands and gazing into her eyes. Harriet resisted the urge to push her away. She could see the veins pulsing in her eyeballs.

  “Powerful.” Harriet let out a stunned, delighted laugh. This was so much more fun than anything she’d done when she was alive. “I feel incredible!”

  “But she’s not doing anything,” Kasper said, from somewhere distant and unimportant.

  “Interesting,” Qi said again. “I think we need another.”

  “Yes!” Harriet gasped. “Please, another!” Nothing mattered but getting more energy, as soon as possible, so that she could feel like this for ever.

  The owl leapt upwards, its feathers disturbing the air as it flew out of the room, dust twisting into clouds. Harriet leant into the wind. She felt abruptly convinced that she could fly too if she had more energy.

  When the owl reappeared with another rat, Harriet couldn’t wait a second. She fell on the ghost, sucking down its energy until it was nothing but a wisp of dust. The feeling buzzed down her veins, and she let out an indecent, lengthy moan. Collapsing onto all fours, she rested her head on the ground and relished the rush of pure joy.

&
nbsp; “I need more,” she told Qi. “Make the owl get more.”

  Qi frowned at her, then looked at the bird. She shook her head. “No more.”

  “No! I have to! Please!” She had to experience that feeling again.

  “It’s no good,” Qi said. “There’s nothing there.”

  Harriet ground her teeth together. She wanted to scream at Qi, to force her to do it anyway. Who was she, to show Harriet this thrilling high and then tear it from her grasp? She wrestled with her anger, trying to push it down.

  The owl leapt into the air. It twisted on the spot, breaking up into a cloud of dust.

  Adrenaline gushed through Harriet. She braced herself, ready to suck up the bird’s energy too. Before she could pounce, Qi tugged her back with a sharp yank at her wrist.

  “Oh no, you don’t, missy,” she growled. There was a line of glowing light wrapped around Harriet’s arm like rope. Qi was holding the end of it, pulling Harriet away from the owl.

  Harriet shuddered, trying to escape the rope, but it grew thicker and thicker until she was unable to move at all.

  “Stop this!” Qi shouted, as Harriet fought her grip. “You’re stronger than this! Calm down!”

  Harriet snarled at her, eyes fixed on the owl. But the lightning rope was too powerful for her. Eventually, she ran out of strength and fell still, gasping for breath.

  “Look at me, Harriet.” Qi moved closer and held Harriet’s eye for a long moment, searching for something in her face. She must have found it, because she released Harriet, and the rope of light disappeared into Qi’s palm. Her outline throbbed strongly as she reabsorbed the lightning.

  Harriet fell back, exhausted. “What was that?” she gasped. “How did you do that?”

  Qi didn’t answer.

  “Harriet, that was mental,” Kasper yelled, elated. “You’re wild!”

  They both ignored him. Qi was still watching Harriet with dangerously rapt attention, assessing her, as though looking right inside her.

  Finally, finally, Qi looked away. The breath left Harriet’s chest in a rush. For a second, she’d been certain that Qi had seen something terrible inside her, something Harriet had always feared was there, lurking. Her gran looked at her in the same way sometimes, especially when Harriet was angry. Like she was waiting for her to do something.