The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

by Lauren James

“It looks like—” Rima cut herself off. “You look like the Tricksters,” she said dully.

  She’d thought the Tricksters had white hair because they were ancient ghosts, losing their colour as they slowly drifted further away from their humanity. But Harriet had only been dead for a few days. Why was her hair so unnaturally white?

  “Huh.” Harriet brushed it back over her shoulders. “Weird. Maybe I’m their long-lost sister!” she joked.

  Rima tilted her head. “I did hear a rumour that they used to have a brother, actually. He was apparently the worst of them all.” Leah had said that he used to poison people, but Rima didn’t know whether she had just been teasing her for believing idle gossip.

  “Oh?” Harriet said, but she clearly wasn’t interested. She was inspecting a strand of her snow-white hair.

  “Are you OK?” Rima asked, concerned. Harriet was glowing almost golden with excess energy, pupils blown wide with the buzz. “You’re all – blurry. Energy is pouring off you.”

  Harriet looked down at herself, brushing her hands over her thighs like she was trying to wipe the energy away. “I found a dead rat in the hallway. No one had got to the spirit yet. No big deal.”

  “No, it’s something else…” Rima squinted at her. Her arm kept slipping in and out of vision. “Harriet! You found your power!”

  A look of surprise crossed Harriet’s face. When she saw that Rima was pointing at her arm, the excitement changed into something like disappointment. “Oh. Yeah.”

  Rima wanted to dance. It had been heartbreaking to watch Harriet’s panicked attempts to work out her power. “I’m so glad!”

  She grabbed Harriet’s arm, amazed that it was totally firm and yet completely invisible. “Can you do your whole body? Can you make other people invisible too? Do you still have a shadow? Do—”

  Harriet was looking past Rima, like she had somewhere important to be and couldn’t wait any longer. Rima cut herself off. Was Harriet only listening to her to be polite? “Are you…? Do you need to…?”

  Harriet’s eyes flicked back to hers. “No, sorry. I’m listening.”

  “Right. Anyway…” Rima swallowed. It was probably time. “I wanted to talk to you about something important.” She cleared her throat. Her mind had gone completely blank as a wave of heat washed over her. “About last night. It wasn’t fair to kiss Kasper in front of Felix like that.”

  Harriet’s forehead furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You knew that he liked him,” she said, annoyed at how small her voice came out. She rubbed her fingers over the ends of her sleeves, pulling them down over her knuckles. “Felix was really upset when you two went off together. He cried, Harriet.”

  Instead of apologizing, Harriet rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m stealing Kasper away from him. Hasn’t he ever heard of a one-night stand?”

  “One-night…?” Rima repeated, slightly squeakily. “You mean you don’t even like Kasper? And you did it in front of Felix? Harriet, that’s not how you treat your friends! That’s—”

  “Oh, bugger off, Rima. I literally could not care less about this petty playground gossip stuff. I’ve got more important things to worry about than some weirdo’s hurt feelings.”

  Rima flinched as if she’d been slapped, ice spreading through her stomach. She’d thought that Harriet liked them. But all this time she thought they were weirdos?

  “Right.” Rima looked down at the concrete steps. Her vision was blurry, and she blinked rapidly. She couldn’t cry, not in front of Harriet. “I should, er…”

  She was turning away, wiping her eyes, when she registered the sirens. There was an insistent electronic horn outside, getting louder and louder.

  Behind her, Harriet gasped. “They’ve found me.” The scorn had disappeared from her voice, replaced with pure, unfiltered excitement. “They’ve come for me!”

  Rima let out an exclamation of surprise, but Harriet was already running, crashing her way down three flights of stairs to the foyer.

  Rima swallowed down her hurt. There would be time for Harriet to apologize later. For now, her corpse was more important than a little fight, especially one that was probably a misunderstanding anyway. She had to wake up the others.

  Pushing her way through the bedroom door, Rima ran over to shake Kasper awake. He was sprawled over a rotten bare mattress in his boxer shorts.

  He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “Rima? What’s…?”

  “The police have come for Harriet’s body! Get up, get up, get up!”

  “Where is she?” His voice was thick.

  “I found her upstairs. She’s gone down to the foyer already. Her hair is white now, did you know? FELIX! GET UP!”

  Felix was curled up on the floor in Rima’s bedroom, his head resting on a pile of Chinese takeaway menus. Without opening his eyes, he groaned mulishly and pressed his face into the concrete.

  “The police are here! Can’t you hear the sirens?”

  Felix stretched, limbs splayed out like a starfish, and let out a lengthy, extravagant yawn. “I thought it was your terrible singing.”

  “We need to go,” Kasper said, pulling on his shirt. “Harriet needs me.”

  Felix’s expression dropped into pure despair. “Right. Harriet.”

  Rima looped her arm through Felix’s, as they followed Kasper downstairs. They left Leah asleep on the fire escape. This was nothing she hadn’t seen dozens of times before.

  “We have to talk later about Kasper,” she whispered in his ear.

  “Do we?” Felix replied, sounding like he wanted to stab something.

  Rima squeezed his arm. Unfortunately, they probably did. Before this love triangle business got even messier.

  Harriet’s hair went white for the same reason she’s starting to lose control. Her body can’t handle so much energy. It’s sending her nerves into overdrive. Every molecule of her body is vibrating at a frequency that’s much too high, trying to keep all that energy under control. The lightning-bright flow sent her hair white with the shock of the electric force.

  Even worse, it’s affecting her brain too. All those subconscious thoughts that we work so hard to keep hidden? Harriet won’t have the capacity to control them any more. They’re roaming free. Her darkest desires – the ones she’s ashamed even cross her mind – are coming to the forefront now. The energy is eating up her fear and guilt and empathy and spitting out anger and reckless determination in their place. She’s come a long way since her death.

  Rufus and Vini were quick enough to tell Harriet to steal powers, but they’d never do it themselves. They know that they’d go mad if they did. Instead, they stick with just the one power, and let their subordinates take the risks of gathering more.

  I think it’s time to look back at the moment Harriet died, now that the snippets of the future I’ve seen over the centuries have begun to reveal themselves. I can start planning and testing theories for how we’ll get from Point A to Point B.

  When I first saw her in the future, I tried to find the moment of her death. But it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Dipping in at random periods is no way to find answers. I usually saw snapshots of Kasper snoring in his bedroom, or Rima stroking Cody’s fur, or Felix wiping his glasses. Quiet, peaceful moments. No big conversations that revealed exactly the information I needed to know. No dramatic showdowns.

  But now I know when and where Harriet’s death happened, I can find it again. I can go back to the past and see those important seconds before Harriet cracked her skull open on the steel beam.

  Let’s replay it. Harriet is walking up the stairs to the top floor of Mulcture Hall. She’s taking photographs and listening to pop music. She’s getting a call from her grandmother.

  It’s about to happen. You’ve seen it before, so you know the score. This time, shall we look at it from another side? You might see something different.

  Harriet walks towards the edge of the stairwell. She doesn’t notice the barriers, pushed up against
the walls – or the dust-free places where the bright yellow warning signs used to stand. But we do, don’t we?

  Someone moved them. Those barriers were there to stop people from going too close to the broken edge of the floor, where it had collapsed. Now they’re stacked up against a wall, out of sight.

  There’s something else I didn’t see before. Right at the edge, before floor becomes air becomes a deadly fall, there’s a wire. Strung at ankle height, in the perfect place to make someone trip over the edge.

  There she goes now, past the barriers and warning signs, talking to her gran about Autumnwatch. And her shoe catches, as we knew it would, on the hair-thin tripwire.

  And then she’s nothing but blood and shards of bone and a very angry, very confused ghost.

  Someone made this happen. Harriet Stoker’s death wasn’t an accident.

  It was murder.

  Chapter 11

  HARRIET

  Harriet crashed into the foyer, taking the stairs three at a time, just as the police officers in bulletproof vests piled out of their cars. She stood by her corpse, waiting with clenched fists. Her hands were slipping in and out of visibility, but she couldn’t focus enough to control it.

  She pressed a hand to her forehead. Her temples burned. Her brain was melting. Everything ached. Had she made a mistake, going back up to the Shells?

  After Kasper had fallen asleep the night before, she’d slipped away to the fifth floor to claim the powers of another Shell. The excess energy made her ignore everything except getting another fix.

  She felt guilty, but her hunger outweighed everything else. It no longer mattered if the Shell disintegrated. That concern felt blurry and far away. She couldn’t even remember why she’d been so worried about it. Getting powers was more important.

  When she reached the top floor, the Shells had all skittered in a panic. She had chased them from room to room, finally pinning them in the corner of the building, up against an outer wall where they couldn’t escape.

  Choosing a boy at random, she had tugged him forwards, ignoring the petrified shrieks that burst from his mouth. This one struggled more than the last, and it had taken all her strength to hold it long enough to suck it clean of energy. It screamed the whole time.

  It didn’t last long enough, but her body had still cried out for more energy. Mindless, she had lunged at another Shell. They were all wailing now.

  The second Shell disintegrated in her grasp, which was frustrating – and quite clever, for a Shell. To her horror, the others all followed suit, collapsing into the ashy remnants of their molecules before she had a chance to take them in.

  Harriet had been furious, screaming up at the early morning pink of the sky, and feeling her rage unravel. She’d tried to push it back inside, like she usually did when she felt this way, but the fresh energy had made that impossible. She’d screamed until the feeling subsided.

  Her skin had started glowing with a fluorescent, hyper-bright colour. Energy oozed from her pores, harsh and electric. It ached in the roots of her teeth, a bone-deep throbbing richness. It would keep her going for a while, even without any more Shells.

  The energy was still thrumming through her veins, but the buzz had calmed down enough that Harriet was aware of what she was doing again. It was like she was watching her actions from a great distance. Even as Harriet had shouted at Rima, she had known that she shouldn’t be doing it – that it wasn’t fair or rational. But though Rima had looked hurt and sad, hunching her shoulders inwards and avoiding Harriet’s gaze, she couldn’t stop herself.

  The energy was twisting everything in Harriet’s head.

  In one night, she’d messed up all her progress – sleeping with Kasper, upsetting Felix, shouting at Rima. It was going to be hard to convince them that she would be a good friend now.

  Plus, Rima might still be helpful. Harriet had put a lot of work into staying on her good side.

  The entrance hall was crowded with so many ghosts that Harriet couldn’t even see her corpse. Qi and Greg were there, along with most of the other ghosts she’d met during the last few days. Presumably, they were waiting to see if Harriet had a catastrophic emotional breakdown when the police moved her body.

  The police officers shone torches around the foyer, illuminating spiderwebs, broken glass; and then stiff, yellowing skin; the black congealed blood surrounding Harriet’s head.

  An officer let out a gasp, her hand rising involuntarily to her throat. “Jesus Christ.”

  Harriet couldn’t control her breathing – she gulped air down uselessly, faster and faster. She could feel the eyes of all the ghosts on her, waiting for a reaction. She wasn’t going to give them one.

  Don’t show weakness. Don’t give them anything they can use against you. Her gran’s words comforted her. She stood straighter.

  There was a long moment of silence – among both the living and the dead – and then it was all action. Radios began crackling with static, and the room filled with more police. When Harriet still didn’t start wailing, several of the ghosts drifted away, disinterested.

  Kasper appeared at her side. He silently tugged her towards him, fingers sliding up her wrists to smooth warm lines down her veins.

  “This is good, right?” he said, trying to read her expression.

  Harriet was too tired and numb to care what her face was telling him.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to reply. She was so sick of the feelings that her death had forced on her. In the last few days, she had needed to acknowledge more of her own emotions than she had since her parents had died.

  After a few minutes, the radio dispatcher said, “Can someone tell the grandmother?”

  Harriet’s heart stuttered. Her gran was going to be told she was dead, that her only surviving family member had died. She was the last one left, having lost her husband, her son and his wife, and now her granddaughter.

  Harriet wanted to cry. No, she wanted to hit something.

  The forensics team were taking samples from the bloody concrete around her corpse, filling evidence bags with tiny fragments of her skull. Harriet’s hand rubbed at the hole in the back of her head, hidden under her hair. If she pressed hard enough, she could feel the sharp edges of bone. She shivered, pulling her fingers away even though it didn’t hurt at all.

  Qi came over and said, “My condolences, Miss Stoker. I do hope you’ll feel more settled, now that this inconvenience is out of the way. You’ll be able to move on.”

  Harriet tried to accept this kindly. Her body was more than an inconvenience to her, even if that’s all it was to Qi. But she wasn’t going to snap at Qi like she had at Rima.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “You’re looking very bright today. The new hair is pretty. You must be getting on well?”

  Heat rushed through her in an odd mixture of guilt and dread. Was it that obvious that she’d absorbed so much energy? Harriet couldn’t meet Qi’s eye in case she worked out what she’d done to the Shells. To explain why she was glowing so much, she said, “I’ve been very well, thank you. Everyone has been generous. I’ve been given lots of rodents.”

  Qi said, bemused, “How unusual. I’ve clearly underestimated the kindness of the Mulcture Hall residents. This was a gesture of goodwill, was it?”

  “Something like that,” Harriet replied. She could barely manage to make the words audible. After everything, Qi still scared her. The memory of her lightning bonds skittered over Harriet’s forearms. She wrapped her arms around her torso.

  “What else have you been doing?” Qi asked. “Apart from charming everyone into giving you spirits, of course.”

  Harriet swallowed. Why was she asking these questions? Did she want something from her? “Nothing much. Getting to know everyone, you know! Idle chit-chat. Nothing too exciting.”

  “I hear you’ve explored the lower floors, too. Someone saw you going down to the basement earlier.”

  Harriet blanched. “The basement? Huh. No, I don’t
think that was me.”

  Qi eyed her. “Hmm. Let me know if you need any advice. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, in case you … get into any trouble.” She stared hard at Harriet for the length of three heartbeats – long enough for Harriet to start planning her escape route if Qi attacked.

  Qi smiled and clapped her hands together. “Well! I hope the police finish up quickly. I can never get to sleep when there are humans in the building. Everyone gets far too overexcited.”

  Harriet relaxed a little. Maybe she’d imagined Qi’s suspicion? She couldn’t find the words to say goodbye, so she just dipped her head.

  “Bye, Qi!” Kasper said, apparently oblivious to the undertones of their conversation.

  “Have a good one, Kasper. Now, I’ll be off. I’m in the middle of the most interesting experiment with a woodlouse spirit.”

  Harriet hoped that the woodlouse disintegrated on her. “Have fun!” she said brightly.

  Qi didn’t die on the same night as the other students. They all died together in a sudden, inexplicable accident which baffled the police.

  But Qi wasn’t part of that. She died ten years earlier in her sleep from an early-onset heart failure. In 1994, she was here to greet everyone. Qi was the one to explain how to be a ghost to Felix, Rima and Kasper. She put up with their tears and denials and anger, until she got too absorbed in her research.

  She was even there the first time Felix came out. Rima had told him how much she’d liked his cute brother Oscar, who had survived the mysterious incident. She’d then smiled shyly at Felix as if she liked him too.

  He’d blurted it out immediately – “I’m gay, sorry!” Then, “Oh. That’s the first time I’ve ever said that.”

  Qi had been the one to say into the surprised silence, “Congratulations!” Then she’d glared at the others until they’d rushed to agree.

  For all this time, she’s been studying the physics of ghost powers, hypnotism, shapeshifting and possession. She’s learnt a lot, but despite all her time and effort, it won’t be enough to make a difference.