Julia

  I place a press light down on the desk in front of me and retrieve a journal from my backpack. My technique is going to be embarrassingly slapdash, and I doubt that my research design would pass approval from the university’s ethics review board, but I am at least going to write everything down—starting with the title: Interview with Lester Briggs – Ghost. And then the date and room number.

  “Are you ready?” I ask, looking up out of my small circle of harsh, white light.

  There comes a hiss like a breath drawn through clenched teeth all throughout the still-shadowed room. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do this.”

  I nod my head. “Okay. Um…Sight. Let’s start there. How do you go about seeing things?”

  “I, um—” Lester breaks off. “I’m not sure. I just…do. But it’s weird. Sorry. It’s kind of hard to describe.”

  “Take your time,” I reply, flashing what I hope is an encouraging smile. In the notebook, I write Weird. Hard to describe.

  “Okay,” comes Lester. “So…I can make out light and darkness, and colour, and everything, but there’s no unified perspective. Like—I’m used to seeing with my eyes, with a point of view attached to my head. But now, when I see you...it’s from all sides at once. It took me a while before I even knew what I was seeing.”

  The response piques my interest as I write it down. “You mean—as if you’re looking at me from a higher-dimensional perspective? Like how an observer in three-dimensional space can see all sides of a rectangle at once while an observer in the same two-dimensional plane would see only a line?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lester replies after a moment. “Like, I can’t even see outside of this room. It’s more like...I have a million cameras wired to every surface and they’re all feeding telemetry to my brai—to my mind—all at once.”

  “Every surface?” I ask. “Including me? My skin? My clothes?” The thought makes me uncomfortable.

  “…No, actually. Not you, not your bag, and not on anything you brought in with you either.”

  “Only things physically present when you—umm...”

  “Died?”

  “...Yes,” I say awkwardly. “Everything present when you died.”

  There’s an uncomfortable pause, during which my brain admonishes me for my complete lack of tact. I tap my pencil nervously, groping for a way to save face.

  “Are we going to do this?” asks Lester.

  “Yes. Sorry. So...” I try to organize the information into some coherent system in my mind. “What you’re describing...it sounds almost like your consciousness is somehow attached to the matter in the room itself; would that be a fair description?”

  “I...suppose so,” Lester replies. “At least as far as sight goes.”

  “What about hearing?”

  “I think so. Probably. Yeah. Though it’s a bit harder to localize where it’s coming from, I guess.”

  “And smell?”

  “…I can’t smell a damn thing.”

  “Probably for the best,” I mutter. “I’ve—well, there hasn’t exactly been a lot of...running water to be had. If you know what I mean. Uh…I’m going to assume no sense of taste either, then?”

  “No.” Lester says softly. A thought seems to occur to him. “I’m never going to taste anything…ever again.”

  I breathe out an icy breath, not sure what I can say to him.

  “…I’m going to be like this forever, aren’t I?”

  “W-we don’t know that,” I say, trying honesty. “It...might wear off at some point. Maybe.”

  “You mean I could just fade away.”

  I find myself caught like a deer in the headlights, desperately wanting to say something reassuring, but strongly suspecting that I’ll just make it worse. Unfortunately, saying nothing has a similar effect.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? Oh God. I’m just an echo. You hear the sound, you hear its echo, and then—that’s it. It dies too—”

  “Well…” I protest. “We don’t really know how this works—”

  “But you don’t understand,” he carries on. “This isn’t even like being a prisoner or whatever, where I’m just locked in a room. It’s like being nowhere at all! I don’t even have a sense of position anymore! Or orientation! Or—oh God—feeling in my body. That slab of frozen meat was me, wasn’t it? And I—I’m going to be trapped here until I wink-out completely...”

  An odd, rhythmic hum oscillates from every object in the room and, after a moment, I realize he’s crying. “Oh God,” he says again. “It was supposed to be like going to sleep! Not like this!”

  “Hey!” I exclaim. “You know, I’m not a…a priest or whatever, and, well, a few weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have really entertained a notion like...God, or Heaven, or whatever, but, well—I really can’t rule it out anymore either. Maybe...you’ll end up there?”

  “Suicides don’t go to Heaven.”

  “Yeah, well.” I shift about uncomfortably, silently cursing whatever Sunday school teacher he’d had as a child. “Maybe there are other...less stuck-up Heavens you could go to?”

  Perhaps I imagine it, but I can swear there’s a faint note of laughter amongst the sobbing.

  “…What about touch?” I ask gently. “Can you feel that?”

  “Yeah,” says Lester, barely above a whisper. “I can feel touch.”

  I rise to my feet and wrap my arms as tenderly as I can around one of the room’s support pillars. “Can you feel this?”

  “Yeah,” he answers. “Thank you.”

  I maintain the hug until the crying dies down.

  “Dr. Chen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to ask me more questions?”

  “Do...you want me to?”

  “...If you want.”

  “Um…” I click my tongue. “I mean…all of my questions will be about your…status. Is that alright?”

  A pause. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do this. Come on.”

  “Alright.” I draw in a breath, wondering how the hell I can possibly phrase this delicately. “So…may I ask what the transition was like?”

  “…Transition?”

  “Well, your um…your consciousness. It was centred on your person, and now it’s distributed somehow. Basically, what I’m wondering is…how did it feel to go from the one state to the other?”

  “How did it feel to die, you mean?”

  I pull back my lips nervously. “That’s about the size of it.”

  There’s a pause. “I don’t remember.”

  “I see.” I make a note in my journal.

  “Funny. Most important thing ever to happen to me. And I forgot.”

  “But you mentioned the…circumstances leading up to it earlier,” I say carefully.

  “Yeah,” he agrees (and if he had breath, I would say that he sighed wistfully). “I remember all that. Standing on that fucking chair. Kind of…shifting my weight. You know, it’s…it’s not easy. Knowing that a single step will end it. And—well. I guess it shifted enough, because…suddenly I was falling—” His voice trails off.

  I lay a hand against the desk in what I hope is a comforting fashion. “You don’t have to keep this up if you don’t want to.”

  “No,” he replies. “No. It’s weird. It’s like…something I saw on TV. I mean, I know it happened. To me. But…hm.” He falls silent for a moment. “No, there’s nothing to tell. I fell. And then I was here. With you.”

  “So, you have no memory of the time between your death and my arrival here.”

  “Nothing ’til you dropped me on the floor,” he replies.

  I smile faintly. “Sorry about that.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  I take a few seconds to write out his replies and then look up. “It’s interesting, though,” I muse. “That you only came to after your body hit the ground. It makes it sound almost like a discharge of consciousness. Like static electricity grounding itself.”

  “Yeah…” Lester agrees vacantly. Suddenly, he sounds almost intrigued: “Wait. Are you saying consciousness is like…a physical quantity now?”

  I sit up, surprised to hear it put so plainly. “Well, it kind of has to be, doesn’t it?” I say, thinking out loud. “I mean, that’s what CERN was talking about: ‘psychologically interacting elementary-particle physics’. There must be something that the particles are interacting with, surely!”

  “Could it be conserved, then? Like…It was in my body and then spread to the room?”

  I consider this; I even imagine particles of consciousness, each carrying a little piece of it like charge on an electron. But then why wasn’t Lester conscious in his own dead body? Why did he only wake up when I dropped him?

  “It’s possible,” I allow.

  “But you don’t want to speculate.”

  “‘Speculate’ is about all that I can do right now.” I sigh. For a long minute, I rest my cheek against my knuckles, watching the puffs of my breaths ascend into the dark.

  “You could always ask your ‘Rumpelstiltskin’,” says Lester after a moment.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “And if it doesn’t work out, hey, maybe we can be roommates.” I realize how unkind my words are as soon as they’re out of my mouth, so I hastily append a “Sorry.”

  “…It’s alright,” he says, though I have the feeling he doesn’t really mean it.

  I scowl into the darkness. Five knocks on the counter in room 1L03, and I can’t bring myself to do it. I wonder if this is how Lester felt when he was balanced on that chair…

  “May I give you some advice? As an experimentalist?”

  I look up. “Of course.”

  “You’re thinking too big. What you need right now—or, at least, what I figure—is some data. A nice simple experiment you can do on your own. And then learn enough that way to even know how to approach the big questions.”

  I pause. It’s good advice, but: “I really don’t know much about experimental design,” I admit.

  “I do,” says Lester.

  *

  Experiment One, I write on a fresh sheet of paper. A Test of the Limits of Ghostly Perception. Based on my interview with subject Lester Briggs, I hypothesize that his consciousness, as a ghost, is attached to the matter present in his office when he died. Procedure: I will carry a piece of material out of this room and into the hallway, and ask the subject to comment upon any changes in perception.

  “Are you ready, Lester?” I ask, looking up out of reflex.

  “Yes,” he replies.

  “Right.” I prop the door open wide with my backpack. In one hand, I hold my flashlight; in the other, a piece of chalk taken from the blackboard. “First of all,” I ask, “now that I’ve opened the door, can you see into the hallway?”

  “A bit. I mean, when you shine your flashlight through the door, I can see the bits of the hall that are visible from the office.”

  “But it’s not like you’re seeing it from an external perspective? Like you have your ‘cameras’ on anything outside?”

  “No.”

  “Alright.” I take a tiny step into the hall, chalk still in hand. “How about now?”

  “I’m definitely noticing a change,” Lester reports, the chalk buzzing at my fingertips.

  I slowly proceed farther outside.

  “Yeah, my perspective is changing. My field of view is extending and—”

  “Lester?”

  There’s no response.

  “Lester?” I ask again, somewhat worried.

  “I’m here. Or...well...somewhere. Holy shit, that’s weird!”

  “What is it?”

  “Well—” he begins. “I can see the hallway—through the chalk I mean. But I can still see the room. Except—there’s nothing between. It’s not differentiated. I guess it’s sort of like if one of your eyeballs were in one room and the other were in another, so your brain tries to reconstruct it into some sort of coherent image, but—but damn, it’s confusing!”

  “I can imagine,” I say. “You’re alright, Lester?”

  “Yeah, it’s just good to know that I can look at something besides that damn office for eternit—”

  Suddenly, there comes a sound to make my blood run cold. Not because it’s loud (though it is loud), nor because it’s unexpected (though it’s certainly that too), but because of where it’s coming from: the storage closet down the hall. The one where I stashed Lester’s corpse. And the sound now issuing from it a deafening THUMP!

  “What was that?”

  The voice issues from the chalk. Lester’s voice…or so I had assumed. But I look at the chalk now with new eyes. If this is Lester, here in my hand and in the office, then who is moving around in the closet?

  THUMP!

  My back arches sharply, muscles tensing. But he had been dead! He had been very definitely dead—

  Am I sure of that, though? Am I sure of anything?

  “Professor, what the hell is going on?” comes the voice in the chalk.

  THUMP!

  This last blow is so forceful that the door seems almost to rattle on its hinges, and it’s all I can do not to leap backwards. Lester had looked dead, but can I be certain that he was? The office had looked empty, and yet I had been chatting with someone for over an hour. Could he be alive, then? Was it possible? Might it all have been some kind of illusion? Some kind of…magic glamour?

  I draw a deep breath and try, as best I can, to omit fear from my voice. “Lester,” I say carefully to the chalk. “Are you sure that you don’t have any feeling left in your body?”

  “What? Yeah! Of course I’m—”

  THUMP!

  I flinch but manage to hold my ground. Whatever entity exists in the chalk suddenly seems to recognize the implication of my question. “Oh. Oh God. That’s me in there, isn’t it?”

  I make no reply. This apparently does nothing to soothe its nerves. “Dr. Chen, I swear to you—”

  THUMP!

  “Oh shit, oh shit, shit, shit, shit, this can’t be happening—”

  “Lester,” I say, as steadily as I can. “You, uh. You say you don’t actually remember dying…”

  “It’s me, Dr. Chen! You know me!”

  Not really.

  THUMP!

  I glance over my shoulder at the still-lighted office and then back down the hall to the closet. If Lester is still alive in there, then I can’t just leave him, can I? But what will the ghost do if I try to free him? And if the ghost is Lester…then what will I be setting free?

  “Right,” I say, my voice echoing down the cold concrete hallway. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to set you down—”

  “Professor, you can’t—”

  “—I’m going to grab my axe from the office. And then I’m going to open that door. And then we’ll get this all sorted out.”

  “Professor, are you insane! I’m Lester! I swear! Whatever that is—”

  THUMP!

  “Jesus Christ, professor! It’s not even talking!”

  That is a point. But on the other hand, I don’t know what magic allows. Maybe the entity somehow stole Lester’s speech. Maybe he was suffering from brain damage. Maybe—

  I kneel on the cold floor and set down the chalk. Then, as quickly as I dare, I duck back into the office, grab my axe off of the desk, and move back out into the hallway.

  “Professor, that’s not me! Professor—”

  THUMP!

  My keys rattle audibly as I fish them out of my pocket and slide one into the lock in the closet door, even as I still hold my flashlight. With my one free hand, I raise the axe behind my head, poised to strike.

  “Professor!”

  “Whoever you are in there,” I say loudly, “I’m about to open the door! Please don’t make any sudden movements!”

  “Don’t! For God’s sake—”

  I turn the key and push open the door with a creak.

  For a moment, my flashlight finds nothing. And then, with a nightmarish slowness, something lurches out of the dark.

  Its face is still discoloured and the wire noose is wrapped tightly about its mangled neck. A faint cloud of steam seems to be wafting from its skin in the cold air, but none issues from its mouth or broken nose to indicate breath.

  I stand rooted in place by grotesque fascination, only dimly aware of a rhythmic sobbing from the chalk: “No, no, no…” The weight of the axe in my hand feels like something from another plane of existence entirely.

  “…Lester?” I ask.

  The corpse charges toward me—an awkward, herky-jerky, marionette-like motion on its stiffened limbs. I leap backwards on reflex, my bravado and surroundings both immediately forgotten, and grunt as my back collides with the far wall. There’s barely even time to register the sound of my axe and flashlight clattering to the floor before a set of icy, dead fingers clamps around my throat.

  “Lester,” I wheeze. “Stop! It’s me! It’s Dr. Chen!”

  “It’s not me!” exclaims the chalk uselessly. “Oh God! Oh God, please!”

  The grip around my throat does not lessen in the slightest but rather pulls me upwards. I hear no breathing, no groaning, no sounds of exertion on its part, yet I know I must be mere centimetres away from its face. I find its fingers in the darkness, try and fail to pry them away from my neck—

  “Help me!” I gasp as my world seems to implode. “Lester! Help!”

  “This is not happening! Oh God, oh God—”

  I kick at the corpse with my feet and pummel it feebly with my fists, my lungs screaming for oxygen. When this fails, I plunge my hands into the pockets of my parka, desperate for something—anything—I can use as a weapon. My fingers close around the plastic form of my barbecue lighter. Good enough! I pull it out and try to flick it on. The world seems to shrink around me. Finally, on my third attempt, a tiny flame lights at the tip, and I shove it directly into where the creature’s face should be.

  This has the desired effect. The corpse emits a putrid howl and loosens its grip, sending me sprawling to the ground and gasping for air.

  I have no time to catch my breath. Already the creature is on me again, and it’s all I can do to lie prone on my back, swinging my lighter like a switchblade and groping blindly along the floor with my free hand for my one, real hope of salvation—

  My axe!

  I grab hold of its rubbery handle just as a grip as cold and hard as iron closes over the wrist of my lighter-hand. For an instant—just an instant—I meet the gaze of the corpse in the firelight, its sclerae ruptured by the expansion of the frozen juices in its eyeballs. It is the worst thing I have ever seen.

  And then I bring down the axe on its fucking head.

  Instantly its hold loosens. But I’m not taking any chances—I come up into a sitting position and swing again, feeling a surge of satisfaction as the axe-head embeds itself in the creature’s bulk. I grab hold of its wrist and swing again, this time hitting somewhere around its shoulder. Again, and I hit its back! Again and again and again until I have stopped screaming and my assailant has long since given up any indication of movement.

  And then, at last, I fall panting against the wall, letting my axe slide from my hand. After a minute or so, I summon the willpower to pick up my flashlight.

  A stifled cry issues from the chalk. For my part, I’m mostly surprised that there’s almost no blood—frozen solid, I suppose. But if the corpse wasn’t dead before, it is certainly (touch wood) dead now.

  I bring up the flashlight, my hands trembling slightly. Down the hall, I can still hear the ghost—Lester—faintly whimpering. I’ve never killed anything before—nothing larger than a house centipede. I don’t know if this counts. But it is a lousy thing to do to a human body, even so.

  “Sorry,” I blurt. “I, um. I should have listened to you.”

  Lester makes no reply. I think I can hear him muttering under what would be his breath.

  “I’m going to propose that we put our experiments on hold for now,” I say blankly. “I’ll return you—the piece—th-the chalk—to your office. Okay? I’ll…clean this up.”

  It’s only once I’ve picked up the chalk that I can hear the words “Oh God, Oh God, why me?” repeated over and over again through my fingertips.

  *

  I shut the door to the storage closet for what I hope will be the last time and then, just to be on the safe side, write “WARNING: Garbage bags in this closet contain zombie parts!! Possibly animate!!” on it in pencil. If horror movies have taught me one thing, it’s the danger of nonspecific signage. Of course, if they’ve taught me two things, the other is “Don’t open that door!” and I seem to have already blown that one…

  I sigh a white breath into the cold air. Genius one day, idiot the next.

  The gold filigree of “Rumpelstiltskin’s” business card glints in the stream of my flashlight as I withdraw it from my pocket. “Knock Five Times on the Counter in Room 1L03 to Ask About My Very Low Rates!”

  I realize now that I’ve been operating under a false dichotomy: believing that I could be either ignorant and safe, or risk my life to obtain knowledge. But in truth, I might as well be a toddler sticking her fingers in electrical sockets, for how safe I am.

  It is perfectly possible to die ignorant. And I don’t want to.

  And so, I make my way up to the radiation lab, 1L03. After so much hesitation, it’s surprisingly easy to bring my knuckles down five times against the counter at the front of the room.