6 - Murdered

I figure that if, by some strange twist of fate, Sam was in fact a mere hallucination conjured up by a stressful move and a concussion, he would surely be gone by now, given the headache has stopped. But there he is, still. Slouched against the wall, he sends me an odd look caught somewhere between pity and frustration. A look that twists his features in a way vaguely reminiscent of eating something sour.

"Oh, so now you can see me again," he grumbles, crossing his arms. "You need to make up your mind."

I clear my throat and turn very pointedly back to my laptop, grappling with the impossibility that he's a ghost. And he's talking to me. And I can see him.

"And now you're ignoring me. Again. What is that?"

He appears over my shoulder once more, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as a wave of ice cascades over me. He reaches a vague hand over my shoulder and taps the screen.

Nothing happens, and he releases a disappointed sound.

I'm all too aware of my mum in the other room, and the plumber working beneath the stairs. Sound carries in this place, and if I start talking to thin air, they're going to think I need some serious help.

Maybe I do.

Unfortunately, Sam must take my silence as stoic ignorance, because he matches it with his own incessant stubbornness. It seems he's determined to see how close he can get before I snap and start talking to him.

My nerves are live wires at his close proximity; my mind is alight with mingling terror and pity that this isn't a hallucination, I haven't lost my mind, and I am in fact seeing the ghost of a dead boy. It's a lot to fathom.

So I switch my laptop on (Sam makes a little noise of surprise), open up a document, and type out: I can't talk to you when there's other people around, or they'll send me to a psych ward.

Then, very pointedly, I increase the size until it's a substantial banner, the glaring sort that cannot be ignored, and hold the laptop up to Sam's vague eye level.

As he reads, I look towards the archway, checking for witnesses to this strange conversation. Mum's busy cooking, lost to her own world, and I hope she doesn't turn around right now.

"Oh," Sam says, his voice soft. "Okay. Understood."

He must take this communication as an invitation, because he grins — which lights up his vague features — and he comes over to sit beside me, watching as I try to work on a thesis plan. It's impossible to focus, with his icy, insubstantial form pressed so close to mine, with his intrigue escaping in little 'ooh!'s and 'woah!'s when I change the font or make a passage bold.

When my mum calls me over, claiming dinner is ready, I all but leap from my seat, set the laptop down (I shut the lid in case Sam gets curious and deletes something, given I'm not sure whether he can manipulate the world around him but I am too paranoid to take chances), and escape into the kitchen.

Sam follows.

It's not a malicious sort of following, though. It's the sort that says 'I'm here, and I'm going to continue to be here until you acknowledge me'. Honestly, he reminds me a little of a starving dog, helplessly trailing after a person with food, hoping and begging for some attention. It's a little sad, to be honest, and I can't quite bring myself to look him in the eyes.

Not until I'm alone, at least (or not quite, I suppose).

For now, Sam has to stay smudgy and distant and vague and I have to chat with my mum as though there isn't a ghost trailing after me, lurking in my peripheral.

It's quite the feat. And my mum's unwavering focus tells me that at least she's not spontaneously seeing dead people.

When mum gets a call from work, I seize the chance to clear up all the dishes so Sam has no excuse to start talking.

He trails after me anyway; a second shadow.

"Emergency night shift again," mum says by way of explanation once she's finished. Her voice is heavy, seeped in regret, and she watches me carefully, as though expecting an argument. "I'm sorry, Theo, love. I'm on call—"

"No, that's okay. Honestly," I assure her, drying the plates and returning them to their cupboard. I have an eager ghost to acknowledge, and I'd rather not have an audience to my breakdown. I offer a smile and say, "I promise I won't knock myself out, this time."

Sam makes an uncertain noise at my side, and I fight the urge to send him a dark warning look. After all, if it wasn't for him and his creepy eye-to-eye staring match, last night, I wouldn't have panicked.

Mum's apprehension deflates, and she matches my smile. "Alright. If I don't see you in the morning, have a good day at the library."

She rushes off to get ready, and the plumber chooses that exact moment to emerge from his work. I'm pulled into following him as he tells me about the mechanics of the boiler and which pipes he's had to replace for the heating to work and the expected warranty on old appliances like these. I nod and try my best to look attentive if not overly intrigued, and once he's finished, I pay him and see him out.

He can't get away quick enough, and he doesn't look back as he gets into his car and speeds off, sending dust clouds flying up in his haste. The car darts down the shadowy lane, and the rumbling engine is lost in the symphony of howling wind and rustling leaves and hooting owls and wailing houses.

Alright, just the one house is wailing.

I lean against the door frame with crossed arms, watching him go.

"Did you get any of that?" Sam asks over my shoulder.

A shudder runs down my back as a cool breeze ruffles my hair. "Not at all."

He laughs; a bright but distant sound. "Me, neither."

"What did he say?" mum asks as she comes downstairs shrugging on her bag. She's always been a comforting person, but when she's in her nurse's uniform, she looks particularly like the sort to give great hugs. It's no wonder the hospital wants her back in for an emergency; she's like a candle in a dark room, my mum.

I pull a face, trying to put all the logistics and mechanics together in a way that makes sense. "I think he fixed it."

"Well, if you're certain," she drawls sardonically, pulling me into a hug. "Don't fall over until I'm back."

"I won't," I promise.

As she bustles off to her car and follows in the hasty wake of the plumber (who, in his rush to get away from the place, left the gate open), I watch her go and wave as she disappears round the bend in the lane.

Over my shoulder, Sam buzzes like an elastic band ready to snap. His excitement is palpable, and I can tell he's thrilled I've decided to acknowledge his existence— even if they were only mere words on a screen.

"Wait a second," I tell him, hardly able to fathom how my life has changed in such a short amount of time. I'm talking to a ghost, right now. An actual ghost.

I head out into the dark to close the gate. Gravel crunches beneath my feet, knee-high grass swishes and sways in the cool breeze and, overhead, an owl hoots forlornly into the night.

With a resounding shriek, I close the gate and turn towards the house.

Sam hasn't followed me this time. He waits in the open doorway, absently rubbing at his temples. He's a mere silhouette cast against the dim glow of the hallway light, but as I approach, and as his features slide towards clarity, I see he's beaming at me.

"Finally!" he exclaims as I close the door behind me. "I thought they'd never leave. Hello."

"Hi," I return uneasily, watching him squirm with a wary, unsure look. "Look, if you— if you're a... I don't know, a blood clot in my brain, or something, can you just tell me?"

Sam pulls a face, torn between disgust and disbelief. "Is that a thing? That's awful. And I'm not a blood clot, I'm a ghost. For the millionth time. You saw me before the bump to your head, genius. Explain that with a blood clot."

"Well, why can I see you and no one else can?" I demand, retreating into the lounge to pack away my laptop. I won't be getting any more work done tonight.

He follows. "I don't know. You're the first person to see me in... in forever. You're not exactly given an instruction manual when you die — 'how to be a ghost one-oh-one' — I'm as clueless as you are."

I pause, glancing at him over my shoulder. He's smudgy and vague, like a particularly anthropomorphic stain on my glasses. "I am?"

"What, clueless? Definitely."

I scoff. "The first person to see you," I correct, striding past him and upstairs to my room.

He keeps pace with me, like he doesn't want to be left behind. "Yeah," he admits, his voice heavy and echoing with sadness; a mournful melody.

"And... you're all alone here? No ghostly friends?" I forge on, wrestling with the door handle. I manage it, and Sam lopes past me into my room.

"Nope." He falls onto my bed with a dramatic flair, but the sheets stay perfectly still.

"Not..." I clear my throat and put my laptop away, but soon enough, my gaze lifts to him. The impossibility of him is striking. It's as though the two sides of my brain — sense and nonsense — are fighting for my focus. One of them is fighting dirty, but I'm not sure which one it is. "Not even my gran?"

He props himself up on his elbows, features pinching.

"No," he says forlornly, as though that's a terrible tragedy. "She didn't die here. She kept muttering something about not feeling right, and she called the doctor, then she left and never came back." Something about his expression goes shadowy, and he blinks and seems to startle back to himself. He offers me a wince. "Sorry. That got dark. I haven't exactly had many two-way conversations, y'know."

Despite the bone-deep, chilly sensation of grief, I manage a little smile. "No, I guess not." I look around the room, trying to think of what to do. My routine is all muddled, and I feel as though I've got a friend staying over and have forgotten how to act normal. Though, I muse, I'm having a conversation with a ghost right now. We're so far past normal.

"Are you okay...?"

I blow out a heavy sigh and start rifling through the mess of clothes I still need to pack away for cosy clothes to act as pyjamas. "Listen, this is all new to me, alright? I just... I need some time to know I haven't lost it. Can you— I—" My voice shudders and I stop, not trusting myself with words.

"I know," he says, his voice gentle and patient. "Believe me, I know. I'm sorry, I never thought... If you want me to leave you alone, I... I can."

I shake my head and look up at him. He's sitting up now, posture as rigid as stone, watching me carefully. A ghost is sat on my bed. And I thought this move was stressful enough without an apparition following me around.

"I don't want you to leave me alone. I just want to work on my thesis, and read a book, and go to sleep without feeling like I'm going crazy."

"I'll just sit quietly, then. I can do that," Sam says with a little shrug. "I've been doing it long enough. What year is it?"

"Oh my God," I groan, sliding an exasperated hand down my face. "I'm gonna change in the bathroom. Please leave me alone for that bit."

He falls back onto the bed once more, this time with a cackling laugh. "Oh, please. I'm not that creepy, am I? Hold on—" He sits up, intrigued, and wiggles his vague brows— "what do I look like to you? Scary?"

I make a noise of uncertainty. "Smudgy."

He pulls a face, obviously having expected something more.

I leave him to stew in that knowledge and when I return, after switching off all the lights and drawing the curtains and checking the doors are locked in the rest of the house (I've got enough on my hands with a ghostly intruder and I can't manage another one), I find him humming an old song and tapping his knee to the beat.

I recognise it from the radio mum wouldn't let me change when we first arrived, so I pull out my phone, find the album, and play it softly as background noise.

Sam is enchanted. I take a seat, resting against the ornate headboard with my book for the thesis, and answer all his questions. I tell him what year it is, how my phone is making that noise, where all the music is coming from (he doesn't believe me when I say it's in the cloud, and he watches the sky as though expecting musical notes to fall like raindrops).

Since he's lost to his thoughts and his admiration, I open the book and begin to read. It's a peaceful evening— or at least as peaceful as one can get when you've got a ghost for a roommate.

Crooked House is a very apt name for a book, given I'm reading it in one myself. I lose myself to the story, and I hardly notice when Sam settles at my side and reads over my shoulder. His close presence sends a chill through me even despite my thick jumper.

"What do they say?" he asks softly.

"Hmm?"

"The people in town."

I'm lost to the novel, right at the cusp of discovery, and I speak without thinking. "That it's a shame— what happened to you."

"And..." His voice goes a little cold, a little empty. "What do they think happened to me?"

I glance up, but Sam is staring down at the page, brows pinched, eyes like glass, expression fogged. Though the overhead light is on, it doesn't quite reach him, and shadows sharpen his features.

Maybe, I consider, he can't remember what happened.

"They say you fell down the stairs," I tell him, turning off the music on my phone.

He goes stiff as cold stone, and his features balance on the knife's edge between grief and fury.

The light starts to flicker. Sam, abruptly, disappears from my side. The bed frame — to my alarm — starts shaking beneath me.

Chaos descends with surprising swiftness.

Drawers snap out their confines, clothes are flung across the room. The dresser tilts and shudders and topples over with a resounding, fatal crash. The door shakes and groans in its frame, as though someone is trying to force it open. That particular impossibility sends hysteria tightening in my chest, choking the breath from my lungs. My muscles strain to run, to hide, to escape.

My first thought is earthquake. And then I realise, on the other end of the heartbeat, that we don't get earthquakes. Not here. Not like this.

I lurch away from the precarious headboard, not wanting it to fall and crush me, and I cover my ears as the house wails and screeches. The light bulb cracks and explodes, and the room plunges into darkness.

Desperately, with fear thudding through my veins like a stampede, I cover my head and exclaim, "Sam, stop it! Stop, please!"

When at last the shaking subsides, leaving behind a silence so thick it feels charged, I risk a peek out at my dark room. I can't see much, so I grab my phone with shaking hands and switch on the torch.

My room is a complete mess. Bits of glass from the bulb scattered across the hardwood, clothes strewn about the place, curtains waving wildly, concealing open windows. An icy gust of wind swirls through the room, sending goosebumps rising on my skin.

The windows are the sort you pull up and latch to open and, as I watch, they drop with a resounding thud that shakes the frames. The noise makes me flinch.

I'm suddenly glad my mum is out working another night shift, if only so I don't have to explain all this to her.

I find Sam stood in the middle of all the chaos, nothing more than a flickering echo. Vague shoulders rising and falling with laboured breaths, features hidden behind static. He appears like a swirling fog; if I focus on one part of him, the rest falls away.

So I force myself to stare at his face until I can make out the fury and terror lit behind his indistinct eyes. Until I can see the blurred lines of tears like cracks splitting down his face. He's hazy — all shadows and fog — and, honestly, a little terrifying. Definitely not a hallucination.

I swallow a lump in my throat, take a deep, shuddering breath, and ask, "Did you just do that, Sam?"

I use his name to humanise him a bit, because right now he looks strikingly inhuman, but it also seems to grab hold of his wandering thoughts and drag him home.

He flickers and backs up half a step, hands raised, eyes wide with dawning understanding mingled with horror.

"It's okay, it's okay," I rush out, tugging a shaking hand through my hair and trying my best to seem nonchalant. "You're alright."

Calming someone down after a violent outburst is something of a morbid speciality of mine.

Some echo of past trauma surfaces; I wipe at my face and find it wet with tears, and my nerves are knife edges. But I'm not hurt — emotionally scarred, definitely, and potentially on the edge of a panic attack, but otherwise uninjured — and I take a few breaths to regain my scattered focus.

You're safe, you're safe, you're safe, I chant in my mind, staring at the door. It's still, now, and without the thundering impacts, I can convince myself that my dad is not here. He doesn't know where I am. He can't reach me here.

Sam, at least, seems genuinely remorseful. He sinks to his blurred knees, covers his face, and shudders.

Some part of me wants to go to him, to throw my arms around him and assure him everything's alright. I've obviously upset him, somehow, and he's had an outburst that has startled us both. But the floor is littered with little glass shards, a painful confetti, and I'm a prisoner on my bed.

He glances up at me, looking forlorn and miserable, opens his mouth, and speaks.

His voice isn't a voice. Nor is it any sound at all. It's the mere impression of a sound. Like listening to the music of your favourite song and waiting for the lyrics to kick in, but they do not come. It's the expectation of words, followed by an impenetrable quiet so thick it feels charged.

"I don't— I can't—" I manage, shaking my head.

Abruptly melancholy, Sam's shoulders fall and he seems to shrink in on himself. Fading.

I get the sudden, vague image of a candle at the end of its wick. A car running on fumes and shuddering to a stop.

If all those shows of paranormal investigators got something right, perhaps it's that ghosts need energy to do things. To stay present. To make themselves known. Perhaps Sam is all out of energy after the outburst, and he has barely enough to stay visible, let alone for words.

"Do you remember what happened to you?" I ask, going to great effort to keep the tremor from my voice.

Sam makes a small motion with his head— something vaguely resembling a nod or a shake or both blurred together. He stands up, hunched and slight and looking immensely guilty, and makes his slow way towards the bed.

He watches me closely. I feel the heat of his gaze even if I can't quite focus on his face.

Ever so carefully, he settles at my side, leaving space between us. A barrier. He points at the book, lying sprawled open between us.

Gingerly, I pick it up. "This?" I ask.

His features tighten with a raw, immense pain, and he jabs a finger against the page again and again and again. His touch is incorporeal, a memory of an action, but I follow where he's gesturing.

His finger lands, again and again, on one word.

Murdered.

"Oh," I let out, feeling suddenly cold. "You... I mean, they say it was an accident, that you tripped and fell and hit your head."

Furiously, he shakes his head. Jabs the word once more. Says something I can't quite catch.

I take a deep breath, hold his vague gaze, and ask, "Did... did someone push you?"

He nods fervently, and with such force I wonder if ghosts can get whiplash.

Something strange happens, then. More strange than seeing ghosts, that is. My vision goes blurry for an instant, losing focus even despite the glasses. When it clears, Sam is gone, and my room is quiet and empty and still.

I slump, tracing my finger over the word Sam was so desperate for me to see. He was killed in this house, and the whole town thinks it was just an accident. A tragedy, and nothing more.

Which means, somewhere out there, someone has gotten away with his murder.