It was just Bea and I left.
I hurried over to my little sister, grabbing onto her shoulders and shaking her body. “Come on, Bea. You’re free now, come back to me. I need you.”
She blinked several times before my shaking had an impact and she shook her head. Her eyes changed, no longer dead but alive and alert. “Penny? What happened?”
“You were sleepwalking,” I lied. Trying to explain anything to her would be nearly impossible. I still didn’t really believe it and I had been a witness to the paranormal events.
She opened her mouth to ask more questions but was cut off by a loud bang on the front door. We exchanged a worried glance before I approached it.
“Who’s there?” I asked. Maybe the little girl hadn’t disappeared after all. If I opened the door, surely she could just walk back into my life and haunt me forever.
“Penny, it’s Mom. Open the door, honey.”
It sounded like her but the little girl had fooled me like that before. She always liked to play games with me, get inside my head and make me believe all kinds of things.
My hand went to the doorknob. It was warm now, the temperature it should have been and not the icy cold of the ghosts.
I could feel my heart beating in my chest as I twisted the knob. It opened freely, no longer locked and refusing to budge.
My parents were standing on the stoop. I fell into their arms, my tears finally able to sting my eyes and flow down my cheeks.
“Where were you?” I asked as Bea reached us, joining in the group hug we had going on.
“I don’t know,” Mom replied. She looked at my father for some answers. “I can’t remember anything. Can you?”
“Last I remember I was going to bed,” Dad said, equally as dumbfounded. “Then we were standing at the door a moment ago.”
They looked at me for answers. It was going to be a long story.
* * *
When I awoke the next day, it was like my life was only just beginning. My room was airy and bright, warmed naturally by the summer sun.
I no longer felt the sheer terror of the little girl lurking around every corner. She was no longer one blink away, always there with her coldness and evil.
My parents said they believed me when I told them everything that had happened the night before. I wasn’t sure if they really did but they were relieved anyway.
My hand clasped around my necklace as I left the house. It wasn’t burning anymore, but its weight reminded me that loved ones were always close by.
For the first time in my life, I could make a home here in Buttercup Bay. We weren’t going to be moving any time soon.
About Jamie Campbell
Jamie Campbell discovered her love for writing when her school ‘What I did on the Weekend’ stories contained monsters and princesses – because what went on in her imagination was always more fun than reality.
Primarily writing Young Adult Romances of all kinds, Jamie also delves into murder mysteries and ghost stories. Basically, whatever takes her fancy - she lets the characters decide.
Living on the Gold Coast in sunny Queensland, Australia, Jamie is constantly bossed around by her dog Sophie who is a very hard taskmaster and lives largely on sugar.
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The Ghost Below
Ariele Sieling
Step by step, she moved through the starboard side of the dark interior, touching cables, tightening their junctions, and listening to the hiss of the air system. The only thing separating her from the deep recesses of space was one metal wall. She loved how it made her feel—the thrill, the excitement, the constant reminder of her own mortality. The bowels of the ship were dark, warm, and comforting. The headlamp she wore provided enough light for her to do her work, and the soft glow of the fiber optic cables gave the space a warm, mysterious feel. She loved the ship.
Occasionally, she wiped dust off of the wires’ casings or bent down to listen to them. They sang to her in many voices, but if she heard the snapping of sparks, she marked it with a red flag made from a tiny LED with a magnet, and came back later to adjust it. Her routine looked something like this: rounds, minor repairs, rounds, minor repairs. If a major repair needed to happen, then everything else stopped. Sometimes she even thought time stopped, because whenever she finished fixing something, she felt her brain SNAP and everything was just like it had been before.
She stepped into the steam room, which, as usual, was filled with clouds of steam. The plumbers loved it in here—the steam operated certain parts of the machinery in the ships, and it wasn’t supposed to leak, but the plumbers left a few holes and used it like a sauna, where they would just hang out and relax. Her routine took her through here once a day, unless a major repair interfered.
“Hey, White Rabbit,” Logger said, doffing an imaginary hat. In her mind he was the king of the plumbers—and not a very good one, at that. He was the only one who talked to her. The others sat, lounging on crates with their shirts off, chattering about meaningless drivel that didn’t concern her. She preferred the plumbers that ignored her for a wide variety of reasons, starting with the fact that Logger was a creep.
“Hello,” she said, trying not to make eye contact. She skittered out the other side, following the long EM2156L cable which started in the Emergency Control room and spidered out all across the ship, and crossed her fingers that Logger wouldn’t follow her—again. She wanted to finish this whole run today, and she was pretty sure she could, although it might take a bit longer than her shift, particularly if she got stuck trying to avoid Logger for any period of time. She was the fastest of the runners and wore white, so they called her the White Rabbit. Plus, her white hair, in sharp contrast to her dark skin, often stuck up like the towers of the Great Rindal Palace and looked a bit like short rabbit ears.
The other side of the steam room was always like a breath of fresh air, for a moment. But then she saw Logger, who just happened to be lounging at the next junction point. He was an expert at this move, and she couldn’t figure out why he kept trying. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to get rid of him, every single day. Then again, maybe her tactics weren’t as obvious as she thought.
“How’s the cable runnin’ going today, sweetie pie?” he asked. “If you’ve got time, I know a great little spot on deck 14 where we can have some… alone time.”
She smiled nicely and nodded, murmuring something unintelligible and trying not to meet his eyes. She did this deliberately, hoping he would think she just didn’t want to talk and that he would go away. But she did it every day, and it never worked—perhaps a new strategy was in order. She cleared her throat.
“Hi,” she said.
His face burst into a lascivious smile. She frowned. This tactic wasn’t working either. In fact, it seemed to be having the opposite of the desired effect. She wasn't good at thinking on her feet, but the third option she had come up with was by far the worst: telling him point blank to leave her alone. It might, however, be the only option she had left.
“Why don’t you ever talk to me?” he asked.
She gave him a blank look. She talked to him every day.
“I mean,” he amended, stepping closer to her, “you say ‘hello,’ but that’s all. You never ask me how I’m doing or what it’s like in the plumbing world.”
She shook her head and stepped back.
“It’s because I don’t care.” She turned back to her cables. "And I wish you would leave me alone."
There. She did it. A brief sense of elation filled her as she felt proud for standing up for herself, but was quickly replaced by fear. What would he do? What would he say? She hated this junction with every ounce of her being, and she knew that the feeling had nothing to do with the cables. Perhaps more accurately, she thought, she hated him.
“What do you mean you don’t care? And go away?” he asked, stepping closer to her. She could feel his breath on her neck, and
though she wasn’t looking at him, she imagined he had a frown of some sort on his face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving away from him and down the line. “I have to finish running these cables.”
Please go away, please go away, she thought desperately. She walked a little faster, hoping he would get the hint.
He made a growling sound in the back of his throat.
“Damn you, think you’re better’n me! You think you can tell me what to do?” he exclaimed, grabbing her arm so tightly she feared he might leave bruises. She cowered as he glared down at her.
“You can think that alright,” he continued, little bits of spittle flying from his lips, “but I'll show you! I hope the ghost gets you!” He released her arm with an angry thrust and then stomped down the hall away from her, back towards the steam room.
White Rabbit swallowed. That was the worst insult anyone on the ship could give, and although she wasn't afraid of the ghost itself, she was afraid of Logger and what he was planning to do.
***
It all happened the day the virus got loose. It ate up the systems of a thousand battle ships and left hundreds of thousands of people running out of oxygen, running out of food, and inevitably flying at great speeds towards the nearest star or planet without the ability to steer. No one knew where the virus had come from, but it was transmitted from ship to ship through wireless communications, and spread through each ship’s systems like virtual wildfire.
Her ship had just been lucky.
While the other ships were losing control, the Admiral of the Paka Fleet, where she lived, had been forced to shut down all of the fleet’s wireless capabilities in order to deal with some teenage vandals. They had written a program that made pop-ups of inappropriate content appear all over the place—private computers, public consoles, even on the computers that did the calculations for speed and jumping. Because it was interfering with the navigation and jump systems, the Admiral had ordered all ships in the fleet to shut down temporarily, while the computer technicians figured out the origin of the pop-ups.
The Admiral had been furious that day, but everyone was secretly glad: a little virus had saved them from a big one, had saved them from burning up in the heart of a white dwarf.
While the ship was down, the Admiral received a radio transmission begging for help from the nearest out-of-control fleet. There was nothing he could do, but he never turned the ship’s wireless communications systems back on again. That was when White Rabbit got promoted to a cable runner, tasked with making the ship run with wires, instead of without.
White Rabbit loved her work, but sometimes she got sick of wires. She followed them, she fixed them, she hid them in nooks and crannies and corners. When she got bored, she would sometimes bend and twist them into colourful sculptures or words. Then she’d untwist and coil them neatly the way they were supposed to go. After work, she would head back to her deck and find her room, where she would discover that her Dad had left on another business trip to some other ship in the fleet, and her two sisters wanted her to make dinner, because she was, as they said, “the best cook.”
So she would cook, but only because it was better than doing nothing. Then she would read for a while and head to bed, drifting softly to sleep to the sound of her sisters watching reruns of their favourite vid-decks.
The next morning, she would wake up to the sound of artificial birds, rouse her sisters, and head back to run more wires.
But that was tomorrow, and today was today. She still had to finish the emergency cables in the stern of the ship, around the drive units. Quite the opposite from the steam room, the stern was her favourite part of the ship.
In the stern she felt safe.
Everyone who knew this found it quite odd, because everyone else felt just the opposite.
"It's spooky down there!" they said.
"I wouldn't go down there for a hundred Euros!" they said.
"I think it's haunted!" they said. "I heard voices once!"
"That's where the ghost lives!" they said.
White Rabbit didn’t care what everyone else said. The small spaces made her calm because she always knew where she was and where she needed to go. In the darkness, no one else could see her, and she could always hear when someone else was approaching far before they heard her. The voices that people heard… she heard them too, but she talked back. And the hazy figures people saw, she saw them too. Plus, it wasn't voices and figures—it was just one voice, and just one figure.
"Hello?" she said softly. "I'm back."
"White Rabbit." The voice emanated from the blackness. Bits of light flickered in and out of her peripheral vision. The Ghost was trying to become visible. He often tried, and some days all she heard was his voice, while other days his entire blue form became visible.
The Ghost, she had learned, though the sound of his voice tended to hiss in and out like a bad comm, liked beaches. She herself had never been to a beach, as she was born and raised aboard this ship, but it sounded nice. The voice also liked pie and listening to music. Better yet, the voice liked to read, and could talk at length about many of the ancient texts White Rabbit had found in the library.
Perhaps her favourite thing about the Ghost was that it so terrified anyone that came near. Whenever Logger came to visit while she was working near the voice, the voice would say, "those eyes that burn… and if he has to kill a thousand men, then he will kill and kill again!" and then laugh. White Rabbit knew they were just lyrics from a very, very old Earth opera, but Logger didn't read.
She still cherished the memory of Logger's wide eyes and terrified grunts as he had fled from the dark tunnels towards the lighted and warm interior of the ship.
"How are you today?" she asked.
"It…. very cold… good," he said.
She translated that as, "It is very cold in here, but I am good," based on things he had said to her in the past and the length of time that came between words. She often had to translate, as many of his words didn't come through very clearly.
"I'm sorry you are cold," she replied.
"What… working… ing today?" he asked.
"I am doing the same thing I do every day," she said. "Just checking the wires, and then checking more wires and more wires. I love wires, and I hate them. They are so unchanging, but so comforting."
"I feel the same… memory foam…"
White Rabbit had looked this one up last time he said this. Memory foam was a type of malleable mattress that conformed to the body, used several centuries ago.
"I looked that one up," she said. "It is a type of mattress used a very long time ago. How old are you anyway?"
"I… year 2321 to Achieng and Otieno… Kenya."
"Wow!" White Rabbit was stunned. "You are over 500 years old!" She shook her head, and then realized she had stopped working. She quickly bent over and began examining the wires once more.
"...not old… trapped." The voice was fading more.
"You're fading again," White Rabbit said. "I'll talk to you when you get back."
"...back…" the voice seemed to echo, and White Rabbit finished her rounds in silence.
***
The next morning, White Rabbit rolled out of bed, sleepy but satisfied. She had stayed up far too late reading a modern translation of an old text from the nineteenth century, but she hardly even thought about it as she rushed to get ready. Today was a red-wire day. That meant they were live and any screw-ups could cost time, money, and possibly lives.
Her sister, Ann, waved at her as she went out the door. “Say hello to Logger for me!” she called.
White Rabbit scowled at her. Ann knew that White Rabbit hated Logger, but for the love of the fleet, couldn’t understand why. “He’s so charming!” she had said one day. “And handsome! You should feel lucky that he’s interested in a shy thing like you! You silly girl.”
White Rabbit had stormed into her room and refused to talk to Ann about it after that. What was the point, afte
r all? Everyone loved Logger. Except her.
She stood in a line with the other ten cable runners, her white uniform starched to perfection. Mac, their boss, was giving them a lecture on speed, safety, and accuracy.
“Daph!” he called.
“Sir!” Daph yelled back.
"What's the number one rule?"
"The number one rule, sir: DON'T TOUCH THE WIRES."
"GOT THAT EVERYBODY?" Mac was shouting now. "WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME SOMEBODY TOUCHED A WIRE?"
"PADDY GOT SICCED!" everyone shouted in unison. "PADDY GOT SICCED."
White Rabbit always whispered instead of shouted. She was afraid that if she shouted at that wrong time, everyone would hear her and notice her. Particularly when they were shouting about Paddy. Paddy was a wire runner who got fried when he put his hand across an entire strip of hot wires. There was no consensus about whether or not it was suicide, sabotage, or an accident, but all three were viable options.
"Now go!" Mac shouted, and the wire runners took off into their respective directions. "Except you." He turned and pointed at White Rabbit. She froze, one foot in the air.
As soon as the room had cleared out, he crossed his arms and frowned at her. "I have been getting complaints about you being rude to some of the plumbers—one in particular. Logger. Know him?"
A terrified look crossed her face.
"Yeah, I thought so."
White Rabbit gulped. How was she supposed to say that it wasn't her being rude, but him? It wasn't her fault! He was the creep! He was the one that always followed her around and tried to get her to talk to him. It wasn't fair.
"I…" she tried to say, but Mac talked right over her.
"Logger is a very respectable plumber and highly regarded across all departments, though it shouldn’t matter—you shouldn’t be treating anyone that way! Do you understand me? Now, because I can't have you causing problems with other departments, I'm taking you off the red wires. Daphne will take your place. Instead you will be striking ghost lines."
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