Weekly Drabble #269: Spooktacular (Patreon)

This week's drabble prompts are 'dead girl/spectral protector' from stratomunchkin and 'give up the ghost' from Knightress, with a return to Drabble #172 and a very dead girl indeed. Enjoy!

~

Spooktacular

Malcolm had always been a light sleeper, so it wasn’t any surprise that the sounds coming form the attic woke him up while Mae was still blissfully asleep. At first, he thought Gemma had been stirring, but their baby was still in her crib, drooling in her sleep. He smiled down at his daughter, adjusting her blankets. He started to think that he’d imagined everything but then, he heard it again. Scrape, scrape, scrape. The sounds of something being dragged across an old wooden floor. The attic was right above the master bedroom, so whatever was happening was happening right above his head.

The young man sat down on the edge of the bed, looking from his drowsing wife to his daughter and back. It all seemed so insane to live in a haunted house – and a haunted house less than half a century old, at that! At least the stories of the place down the street made sense; the place was double the age of this building and the woman who people insisted haunted it had killed three people and then herself, but this was a modern home.

Mae wasn’t convinced; she still half-believed that Malcolm was playing around, or that his brother was up to something. Harv was a notorious prankster, but his jokes were always funny and well thought-out. He wasn’t the kind of funnyman that had to say something like ‘it was just a joke, bro!’ to cover up assholery. He’d never do something like this. The first few months had been steadily more unnerving, even terrifying to the point that Mal and Mae had been looking to move again. That wasn’t Harv’s style. Mae knew that, but she’d prefer thinking that her husband or brother-in-law were messing with them than actually confront the fact that there was something very, very odd about this place.

Malcolm would have said ‘very wrong’ up until a few weeks ago. Now things were less alarming... but still very much quite beyond the usual. He looked up at the ceiling. There was a heavy thump and then softer shuffling. Part of him wanted to go up there and see what was happening. Part of him didn’t want to do that. Part of him was saying it was just an owl or raccoon that had gotten into the attic and was knocking things over and he should just climb back into bed, pull the covers back over himself and pretend that’s what it was.

Instead, he found himself reaching for the heavy flashlight he kept close at hand these days, slid his feet into slippers and quietly left the room, approaching the dark stairway that led to the attic and... whatever was making the noise.

~

Why can’t ghosts be dapper?

Like any teenage girl, Gillian had always been style-conscious, mindful of what was in and hot, and what was not. She’d begged and wheedled her parents for new clothes whenever the local fashions changed, sulking whenever she didn’t get a new wardrobe on demand. All the clothes she’d been proud of were gone, donated to charity with only a few of her favourite outfits kept by her family. What she wore these days was the same outfit that she’d died in. That seemed to be one of the unwritten rules of the afterlife. You wore what you died in. If you were lucky, you didn’t end up with any ‘embellishments’.

Beth had blue lips from her suicide by asphyxiation. Lonely John was still wandering around with the hammer that the pimp that had killed him with embedded in the back of his head. Patrick wore the red shirt he’d been gunned down in, but it lacked the bullet holes and stains. Gillian didn’t know what made the difference in how you appeared in your afterlife, but was just glad she didn’t have tire treads across her torso.

Halloween was coming up. In the last few years before her encounter with a daytime drunk driver, she’d hated the holiday. She’d been too grown-up for it; it was something for little kids and she was way too mature for all of that. Now she’d give anything to have a chance to go trick-or-treating with her family again, but she knew she never would. She’d scared them too badly and they’d fled. She didn’t even know where they’d gone, even if she could leave this place. She didn’t think she could. She could travel far as she liked during the night but come the setting of the next day’s sun, she’d awaken? arise? manifest? back here. That seemed to be another law of the afterlife. Ghosts were tied to a certain place; they could only move permanently through means currently unknown to Gillian.

Lonely John walked the seedy red-light districts that he’d spent so much time in as a person, Beth stayed in her house, the building soaked in the old woman’s malice. Patrick haunted the subway rails and stations that he’d been chased through before his life had ended in one of the tunnels. All of them were bound to those places, just like Gillian was to the home she’d grown up in.

Which means I can’t spend my days stalking Whoopi Goldberg like Patrick Swayze did. Not that there were any mediums she could actually talk to. She’d tried that for weeks and months, wandering streets and poking into occult shops and visiting psychics. All of them had been disappointments. No one could hear her and the only way she had to communicate was through what she could do in the physical world, and manipulating that required a lot of exertion.

Gillian wasn’t sure how that worked; she wasn’t breathing air. She didn’t have muscles, didn’t need to stretch or strain any ligaments and yet...  Another metaphysical law: it wasn’t easy for the dead to affect the world of the living, but you could do it. She hadn’t had a Vincent Schiavelli to teach her that; she’d learned it during the time she’d been fragmented and wreaking havoc on her own family, but she had a lot to learn about being a ghost.

I suppose that’s a good thing about being dead – you’ve got a lot of time to kill.

Not that she knew what she should be doing with it. She thought the comments about ghosts being created when a soul had ‘unfinished business’ still applied. She did wish she could have told her mother and father how sorry she was. Not just for what she’d done when she’d been scattered and the parts of her had been clumping back together, but before then. She’d been kind of – no, no ‘kind of’ about it, I was– a bitch to them, even more than a teenage girl normally could be. She wanted to take all the mean things she’d said back, to tell them that she loved them one more time... Maybe that was what she had to do. If so, she could be waiting for a very, very long time.

Patrick didn’t talk much about what led to his death. Lonely John... that was easy. He still wasn’t all back together, not really. He was looking for Lucita, the girl he’d tried to rescue and gotten his head bashed in for. Beth... Gillian knew exactly why the old woman’s soul was here and not where it should be. ‘I missed one,’ she’d once told Gillian ‘The little whore had another spawn, some mewling little girl-child. That slut ruined my family and I promised I’d get rid of hers in return. Until I do, I’m not leaving.’

Even though she was one of the things that went bump in the night, Beth still made Gillian’s non-existent skin crawl. With Halloween approaching, the veil between the spirit world and that of the living was growing weaker. Until All Hallows’ Eve passed, the dead could do more with less effort. For some of them, that was a very bad thing. For others...

...we might get a chance to do something we should have done before. Instead of sulking in her room, listening to music and pretending she was too cool for Halloween, Gillian was going to go out. She couldn’t exactly bob for apples or attend dances like she had before, but she could celebrate in her own way. She could keep an eye on Malcolm, Mae and Gemma and maybe give some frights – purely in the name of the holiday.

She couldn’t go out in costume, but it was fun to try dress-up all the same. The new occupants of the home had stashed several chests of old clothes in the attic. There was a full-length mirror up here, and an uncovered window. One more rule for how ghosts worked: they only appeared at night or in very dark moments, but could only be fully seen – including being able to view their own reflections – in moonlight. The half-moon was bright tonight, filling the attic and giving Gillian a rare chance to see herself.

It took no small amount of effort to drag one of the chests across the room and dig through it. Luckily, someone had forgotten to lock it like they had the others. Gillian had been exploring what it had to offer, bits and pieces of various outfits and costumes, letting her pretend that she could have a normal Halloween again.

It is the season, though...

The teenager’s ghost froze as she heard cautious footsteps coming up the stairs and she quickly tossed the clothes back into the chest and closed it up, melting back into the shadows just as the attic door creaked open and a pale white beam of light swept through the room. She stayed well away from the patches of moonlight, withdrawing into the darkest corners of the attic.

She didn’t want to be seen. She wasn’t ready for it. She didn’t even know what they would see. She’d heard from Patrick that the living didn’t always see what ghosts saw of themselves. Gillian didn’t want whoever this was to see what she’d looked like dying under the drunk’s crashed vehicle as the man climbed out and ran away, her phone buzzing and buzzing with texts and calls from her parents, just out of reach... just those thoughts made all the fear and anger come bubbling back up. She knew her flesh was turning cold and clammy, like it had as she’d bled out, her eyes turning glazed and blind as she’d died alone and afraid, when her family, people just like these, had ignored her, left her to bleed out all alone....

No! That wasn’t what happened. Her parents had been calling, but they hadn’t known where she’d gone. Her father had been driving everywhere, looking for her. He’d found the site of accident, police cars gathered around the wrecked truck with their blue lights flashing and paramedics solemnly loading Gillian’s sheet-covered body into the back of the ambulance as he’d recognized the bracelet she’d been wearing and burst out of the car...

It was hard, some days. Dying like that had broken her, scattered parts of her all over and she still wondered if, like Lonely John, not all of her had come back or if she’d coalesced wrong. She’d raised that question to Beth once. The older woman’s ghost had just tut-tutted as if it were ridiculous to even ask.

The light passed over her, then froze and swept back. Gillian knew she’d been partially seen, but as it continued back and forth, she realized Malcolm had only caught a brief glimpse of her and couldn’t see her again. His heart was racing even as he tried to tell himself that it had been a trick of the light, the dead girl standing there was just the coats and clothes hanging from stands and the glint of white eyes had been the metal of the coathooks and the flashlight’s reflection off of buttons.

The young man looked at the chest sitting in the middle of the floor, crouching next to it and examining the dragmarks its feet had left in the wood. He didn’t remember moving this, and Mae hadn’t said anything about going up into the attic...

He opened it. The clothes once so carefully folded were now all a-kilter and haphazardly stuffed inside. He raised his head to look through the room again. It paused at the same spot he thought he’d seen something, but there was nothing there. Just coats and buttons. He paused as his flashlight swept over the uncovered mirror. The last time he’d been up here that had been under a blanket. Maybe Mae had come up here to look for Halloween ideas. Maybe.

Malcolm lifted the padlock dangling from the chest’s latch, but instead of locking the chest and putting it back with the others, he flipped the top open and backed his way to the open attic door. He glanced about one final time. “Have fun,” he whispered, his voice cracking just a little as he exited, closing the door behind him, his footsteps receding down the creaky stairs.

Gillian didn’t come out until she heard the faint creak of her parents’ bedroom door opening and closing before she approached the open clothing chest, picking up a top hat. “I will,” she answered, lifting it up and doing her best to keep it on a head that didn’t really exist as she looked at herself in the moonlit mirror and smiled. It wasn’t really fashionable, but she’d stopped caring about that a long, long time ago.

No, I don’t see any reason why a ghost can’t be dapper.