Page 37 of After Life
And waited.
And... got very bored and annoyed.
“Look,” I sighed. “There’s a hurricane, which is not something I’m used to. I understand wishing to be dramatic, but might I ask you to be aware some of us do not have all of eternity?”
The voices were rushing then, a rapid-fire whispered conversation next to me. A few words were clear: Now, best possible, storm. Time for it. Tell her.
Well. That wasn’t concerning at all.
I tapped the pen on the blotter page. From the corridor came the sounds of Julian hitting something with his cane and I hoped it was a spider and not an intruder. The heavy thuds of Ray-Don working the shutters in place thumped like a monster’s pulse against the growing sounds of the storm. But the whispering voices were louder than all of that, rushing like an incoming tide right beside my ear.
“You may not need help,” I said, “but if you would like to convey a message to anyone, I’m able to do it for you.”
A cold prickle shot down my hand, like a larger one covering my own. My arm jerked and, after a moment’s instinctual panic, I relaxed into the movement. The ghost holding my hand moved the pen across the blotter page, tightening their grasp when the ink did not come at first, jerking my hand up and down to make the ballpoint roll. The whispers were quiet again, and the ghost using me to write did not try to do anything other than move my hand. I was tense, braced for something worse, for some attempt to take more from me, but after less than a minute, they were done. Sensation returned to my cold fingers and the ghosts retreated. I laid the pen on the blotter. “Thank you,” I muttered. “I have no idea where you were keeping that but here you go.”
The pen gave a little wobble, but it didn’t vanish into thin air or levitate away to some ghost’s pencil case in the ether.
“What’re you doing?” Julian asked from the doorway. A dusty cobweb decorated his hair, and his shirt looked a bit worse for wear. “Were you, ah, talking to someone?”
I shook my head, then nodded. “Maybe?” I glanced down at the blotter and frowned. “Julian, where’s that book?”
The ghost hadn’t written a message in words. Instead, it was an image, one that I was fairly certain I’d seen in the Rites and Rituals book.
Julian moved closer to peer at the sigil and frowned. “That doesn’t look good.”
A curving line over three triangles, interspersed with an X between each triangle and the next, with a twisting symbol in the middle that looked unlike any language I’d seen or heard was in the center of the page. Gingerly, Julian worked the blotter page loose, tearing one of the aged corners with a wince. “Are they still here?” he asked.
“I can’t feel them. Or hear them.” I paused, stretching my awareness further. “We’re not alone in the house but this room is... it’s empty, but it’s somewhere they stay often. It feels like there’s a residue, if that makes sense?”
“Like ectoplasm?”
“Nothing tangible. More like... Hm.” I shook my head again. “Have you ever come into a room immediately after an argument or gone somewhere that usually holds a lot of people but it’s empty when you’re there? That strange feeling you get that you just missed something big?”
“I think so,” he said slowly. “Maybe?”
“Well. That’s how it feels when a space is haunted but ghosts aren’t currently in residence. As if they’ve left traces of their energy all over the place.”
Julian nodded thoughtfully. “This room is ‘theirs’ then?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I just know I followed the whispers here while you were checking the supplies—are we good there, by the way?”
He nodded. “Whoever set up the boxes did a great job. I want to make sure the rain barrels are good to go but other than that...” He trailed off. “We’re alright.”
Ray-Don’s banging stopped, and, for a moment, we stared at one another, waiting for it to resume. When it didn’t, Julian held up one finger and hurried into the corridor, leaving me to follow.
For a man with a still-healing broken pelvis, he was fast.
I caught up to him at the front door, where he was hanging half-out into the dark evening, staring at the ladder Ray-Don had left propped against the porch rail. “He’s gone?” I asked.
Julian nodded. “Looks like he left in a hurry, too. Ladder, toolbox...” He stepped out, motioning for me to stay back. “I’m going to see if he’s fallen or something.”
“His truck’s gone,” I pointed out, raising my voice to be heard over the snapping wind. “Maybe he had an emergency at the store?”
Julian made a reluctantly agreeable noise in his throat. “Maybe. Let’s check the upstairs windows to make sure they’re secured too.”
I made him stay back this time, going upstairs to verify the shutters were in place over all the windows I could find. The familiar sensation of being followed as I walked down the corridor made me roll my eyes and sigh. “I’m going to look up that symbol,” I promised. “I’ll figure out what it means, alright?”
“I already know.”
