by DM Sinclair
“Transfer,” Lowell said into the microphone.
Ryan fought to keep as much of himself as possible inside the scanner, but his particles kept spilling out. The ATM buzzed and the screen turned red. “Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” it said pleasantly. Ryan twisted and contorted, searching for a part of himself that would work.
The only cohesive part of Ryan left was the shirt. Nearly as well defined now as in the moment he had unwillingly formed it. He pushed his stomach into the scanner so the bottom of the Float Beer logo was directly within the scanner’s beam, and the main menu flashed back up. “Do it fast,” he said to Lowell.
“Are you sure?” Lowell asked. Apparently Margie had convinced him to feel guilty. He avoided Ryan’s gaze. Or perhaps he just couldn’t tell anymore where Ryan’s gaze was.
“You earned it,” Ryan said. He wasn’t sure it was clear enough to be understood, but Lowell apparently guessed from the tone. He fished around in his coat pocket and produced a slip on which he had written his account number.
“Transfer,” Lowell said into the microphone.
More options popped up on the display. But Ryan was distracted by his shirt. Even the letters on the logo were coming apart now. And the little illustration of a floating scoop of ice cream was swirling out of focus as though being sucked down a drain. Ryan started to slip backwards, and the ATM lost connection again. “Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner.”
“That’s it,” Margie said. She took two fast steps over and shoved Lowell backwards with both hands and all her weight. He stumbled, flailing his arms. “Get out of here!” Margie bellowed. “I’m taking him home.”
Lowell looked stunned. “But… it’ll just take…”
“Is this who you are?” Margie demanded, coming at him again. She was ready to knock him flat if she had to.
“Apparently!” Lowell said, annoyed. He held out the slip of paper with the account number on it.
Margie slapped it out of his hand. “Get out of here!”
Lowell snapped up the slip of paper and backed away. “I’ll leave this on your…” he started to say. But Margie charging him again cut him off. He spun and dashed straight through the farm hands, and stormed angrily across the street, glancing back frequently.
Margie turned back to Ryan. He had sunk to the ground, and struggled to focus on her as she came back to him. “Ryan? Can you describe what’s happening? Are you still…”
She froze, staring at the ATM.
After a moment of staring she swerved past Ryan and pressed in close to the ATM display. Something on it had caught her attention. She jabbed at the screen with her finger. “Look! Look!”
In the corner of the display was Ryan’s name next to a small thumbnail of his SES pattern. Ryan couldn’t tell why she was pointing at it.
Margie waited for him to clue in. Finally she spat it out. “It’s not a pirate!”
Ryan leaned in closer and struggled to focus on the SES thumbnail. She was right. The signature on the screen looked nothing like a pirate. He thought it more closely resembled some kind of crested lizard. He focused for a moment on remembering the name of the particular species, and completely forgot to figure out the significance of what Margie was saying.
Exasperated, she did it for him. She tapped on the lizard-shaped pattern. “That is you. The ATM just scanned you, so we know that’s you. That means—” She poked at her phone until Ryan’s Clinic file came up again. She held it up for him to see the SES record, and even pinched to zoom it in for him. It had the familiar pirate shape. “—this is not you! This scan was taken right before your ghost was extracted, but it’s not you!”
“Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” the ATM suggested unhelpfully.
“What does that mean?” Ryan’s mind was trying to reach understanding, but kept bumping hard into an invisible wall like a fly trying to find its way through a window.
Margie turned her phone towards her and studied it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Ryan was grateful to hear her say it. It wasn’t just him. “We have two scans on file for you.” She swiped back and forth a few times. “They’re both the same. Pirate.”
“When was the other one taken?”
She frowned, uncertain. “Just a few days earlier. Did you have another procedure done? An unhaunting? That makes no sense.”
Ryan’s mind fly found an opening in the window and bolted through. “That wasn’t me. I mean, I filled out the forms in my name. But it wasn’t me. That was Sye.”
Margie looked at him without seeing him. He could see a thousand mental calculations going on behind her eyes. Her jaw fell slowly open as the results of the calculations came in and added up to something. “So this… the SES in the Clinic file under your name is Sye’s. Not yours. That means…” More calculations began processing. Ryan could almost hear her mind clicking.
“Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” the ATM put in, for the first time with a hint of impatience.
Margie’s mind stopped clicking. She looked down at her phone once again. “When I scanned you before your extraction, I scanned you, but Sye’s SES came up.”
“But you scanned me,” Ryan said. “My ghost was still in my body.”
She looked at Ryan again, searching for where his eyes were and finally deciding on a spot. “Yes, it was.” Her face lit up with realization. “But Sye’s ghost must have been in there too!”
“How…?”
“When I unhaunted Sye’s chair, how close were you? Do you remember? Did you come in contact with Sye at all?”
Ryan scanned his memory of the procedure. It seemed so long ago, and even his recent memories had a haze around them now. One so distant felt like it might not have actually happened, like a far-fetched story he had been told. But there were pieces of it. Sye’s expression. Margie holding the paddles. The Box charging. The back of the chair coming loose.
The back of the chair coming loose.
“I touched it,” Ryan said. “I touched the chair. While you were doing the thing, I touched it.”
“That’s it!” she said. She almost threw her phone in the air, but instead just punched at Ryan. Her fist went through his shoulder. “You must have come in contact with Sye when you did that. The procedure forced a possession. It detached him from the chair and attached him to you. He possessed you, and you didn’t even know it!”
“But I walked home with Sye! I could still see him!”
“Yes, but his ghost was attached to your body! It’s possible for a ghost to be attached to a body without being inside it. He’d be able to go into it at will. Do you remember having feelings you couldn’t identify the day after the procedure? Thoughts that weren’t yours? Confusion?”
“Now that you mention it, that was the day I decided to have myself extracted. I wasn’t totally sure why I wanted that.”
“Maybe you didn’t. But Sye did! He was hiding in your body, encouraging you to get out so he could take over!”
Ryan sank further onto the ground. His form was coming completely apart. He felt like a cloud, a fog, an assortment of wisps. Yet still he tried to force the wisps to piece together the implications of what Margie was saying. Thoughts evaded him, but he chased them. When he tried to speak he could manage only the faintest whisper, grass in a breeze. “So Roger didn’t give my body away.”
Margie shook her head. “He doesn’t know where it is either. Because right after your extraction, Sye just got up and walked away with it.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
They raced back to the house the same way they had gone to the ATM: on foot, because Lowell had insisted that his car was too full of other things. What other things, he didn’t specify.
Even with a renewed sense of purpose, Ryan could barely hold his form together. By now, he suspected that he was only a shirt ballooned up with vapor. Huge portions of his volume were leaking out through the holes in the fabric. He had to keep drawing them back to him l
ike re-inhaling smoke rings. But with his senses fading fast, it was getting harder to pay attention to all of himself at once.
Margie kept saying that there was still a chance. If they could figure out where Sye went, they could find Ryan’s body. And there was only one place they could think to look for any clues about where Sye might have gone.
The chair. The chair was all they had.
When they finally arrived at the house, Ryan drove the shadows back from his mind. He gathered up every part of himself and forced himself onward. It felt like rolling an enormous water balloon, but he kept moving. By the time he got upstairs, Margie was already turning the chair over, examining it from every angle.
It had no markings, no manufacturer labels, no hints at all as to where it came from.
“It was here when you moved in?” Margie demanded. She was moving fast, but not frantic. Spinning the chair in ninety-degree increments. Professional and analytical to the last.
Ryan nodded in reply. He could feel himself spreading like a cloud of gas. He was fairly certain he had no identifiable features anymore, not even the shirt.
Margie walked the perimeter of the apartment. She seemed to have divided it into sectors and was visually scanning each one. She stopped in front of each piece of furniture and each decoration to study it. “Was anything else here when you moved in? Any of this?”
Ryan didn’t think so, and didn’t know why it mattered.
While she was scanning, Margie walked right through him without seeing him. She didn’t react at all. No shiver, no chill. No indication that she had absorbed his emotion at all. It was like Ryan wasn’t even there. Which he was increasingly feeling that he wasn’t.
“Think think think think think,” Margie was saying as she circled the apartment.
Ryan let himself spill onto the couch, spreading over it like dry ice steam. He could see tendrils of himself going around and through it, but his consciousness seemed focused more or less on top. The shadows were pressing in around his vision again, and even sounds had become muted, senseless. He remembered sleep, and wanted it more than anything.
“There has to be something! Ryan! Ryan?” She couldn’t find him. He was dimly aware of her searching the couch for him. Looking behind it, under the cushions, scanning the room.
I’m not here anymore, Ryan thought. This is it.
Margie sat on the couch next to him. Next to him, and also partially mixed with him. He could feel her there, a warm patch. He focused on it, and it anchored him slightly.
She was saying something. He wrestled with consciousness, drew himself in. He concentrated on his chosen field of vision, centred right on her face, and shut off every part of his mind except the part interpreting the sound waves from her voice. They seemed miles underwater but he drew them to the surface.
“There’s still a chance,” she said. “You have to try. Remember anything.”
Ryan couldn’t remember why it was important. He wanted to try, but he didn’t understand what he was supposed to try to do.
“Anything,” she said. “Anything about Sye. Did he say where he was from? Did he ever say his last name?”
Ryan had nothing. He couldn’t form his own last name. He spread out more over the couch like a pat of butter on a hot pan.
“Were there any other ghosts here who might…” Margie didn’t finish her question. The look in her eyes said that she had already answered it for herself.
She sprang off the couch and to the fridge in a single step. “Was this fridge here when you moved in?”
It had been, but Ryan couldn’t form words to say so.
Margie threw her arms around the fridge, leaned her weight back and shimmied it out of its alcove. It came unplugged as she pulled and the light inside the open freezer door went dark. When she swiveled the whole thing to face the dining area, Ryan could see the Algonquian tribesman’s face glowing softly in the back of the freezer, casting a faint blue illumination over a frozen Salisbury steak dinner.
“That chair,” Margie said. “Do you know it?”
The man in the fridge looked at the chair. Then turned to Margie silently, surprised, like someone who hadn’t been meaningfully spoken to in three hundred years.
“Please,” Margie implored. “Where did the chair come from?”
The man in the fridge looked at the chair again for a moment.
Then his eyes drifted around the room, searching for something. Something that he didn’t find.
He looked at Margie again. He lifted one of his hands from the fridge below and held up two fingers next to his face.
“There were two chairs? Like that one?” Margie asked.
The man in the fridge nodded once.
“Where’s the other one?” Margie asked.
The man in the fridge looked down. He let his hand extend out of the fridge and pointed straight down at the floor with his index finger. He nodded at Margie with wide eyes, insisting silently that she should understand exactly what he meant. He jabbed his finger downward.
Ryan was used to random noises in the apartment. So much so that he hardly heard them anymore. But now that he paid attention to it, he was surprised by how loud and insistent the banging of the water heater in the basement was. Louder than a water heater should be. Now that he focused on it, he couldn’t imagine any water heater ever sounding like that.
Ryan didn’t wait for Margie. He didn’t bother with the door, or the stairs, or most of the laws of physics.
His form was so nebulous now that he could just let himself drool through the spaces between atoms in the floor. He poured into the second floor apartment and pooled on the floor there for a moment, spreading. And then, ignoring the firm tug of the snow globe from above, he dribbled through the second floor atoms and down to Gabriel’s apartment on the first floor. This one had dense ceramic tiles, but he found the gaps and sifted through them. And then he was in the basement.
And there it was.
Seeing his own body in the third person had been seriously disconcerting the first time. But this time turned out to be significantly more so. Because his body was doing things without him, and every wisp of human instinct left in him told him that they’re not supposed to do that. He felt slightly betrayed.
It was at the top of the short flight of wooden stairs, beneath a dangling bare light bulb. It lay sprawled, like one who had just crawled out of the desert. Its face was haggard, unshaven for days at least. Its eyes were rimmed with red, the skin under them dark and sagging with exhaustion. And it was wearily pounding with a balled-up fist on the basement door against which its upper body was leaning. The basement door that had once trapped Ryan down here for a whole afternoon might have this time kept his body down here for days.
And it was still, he noted with dismay, wearing the shirt.
“Sye?” Ryan said. It emerged as a faint, dry whisper. But in the cool stillness of the basement, it carried. And Sye heard him.
The body—Ryan’s body—stopped pounding and twisted its head unsteadily, blearily, to look at him. And Ryan recognized on his own face Sye’s usual frown. The eyes fell on Ryan, searched for a focus point. Finally they locked. Sye could see him, and knew who he was. He didn’t say anything, or betray any new expression, but there was definite recognition.
After silently acknowledging Ryan, Sye’s eyes shifted to look past him. Ryan swung his own vision around to see what he was looking at.
Across the basement, half hidden in the shadows behind an ancient furnace, was another chair virtually identical to Sye’s. It was the same wood, the same mismatched varnish, the same lashes of stripped bark and the same rusted bolts only barely holding it all together. The same blunt ugliness that dared you to point it out and make a big deal about it.
And in the other chair was the ghost of a woman.
She was likely within a decade of Sye’s age, and wearing a plain, long dress that was, like Sye’s outfit, probably from the 1940’s or 50’s. Her hair, though it was dif
ficult to tell for sure given its translucency, seemed to have retained most of its dark color well into her senior years, and it was styled long with curls in a way that made her seem younger than she was. The years that weren’t in her hair were all in her face. But in a graceful way, each one adding layers of perfectly balanced expression and character. She projected good nature just from her posture and the angle of her head and her faint, sweet smile.
Ryan fought to piece together a narrative that made sense of this. The woman was on a chair like Sye’s. His wife? She had to be. Had Sye made the chairs for them? Maybe. It didn’t matter. The chairs belonged to them. And then somehow, in years past, the chairs must have been separated. One of them put aside here in the basement. Perhaps before the Blackout, when nobody knew there was a ghost haunting it. No wonder Sye wanted out of his chair so badly. No wonder he had borrowed Ryan’s body.
The shadows that had for so long ringed Ryan’s vision tightened around him like pythons, and he felt himself crumble. The last bonds holding him together broke completely, and he couldn’t pull them back together.
The last thing he heard was footsteps approaching outside, and someone trying to break down the basement door. Dust showered from all corners of the ceiling as somebody on the other side pounded again and again. “It’s stuck!” he heard Margie yelling. “Gabriel, get your key! Hurry!”
He felt his mind separating, breaking, shutting down.
He drifted, not into dark, but into nothing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Ryan slammed back into consciousness like a cop beating down a door: shoulder-first, bull force, and roaring. His eyes blasted open and the world surged through them and flooded his head.
He was so stunned by the shock wave of sensation that for a moment the reality of how he was sensing did not occur to him.
He had eyes.
He was in a body. And it felt familiar. It felt like his body. It had to be.
He could feel all eleven pounds of his head pressed down hard by gravity. He had forgotten what gravity felt like. In this case, it hurt because his head had a chunk of cold metal beneath it. He could feel the pressure of long metal legs, a claw gripping his skull from the back.