The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

by Lauren James

  “You fell from the top floor,” the girl said to Harriet, squaring her shoulders and looking determined. She was wearing a pyjama top that said HERE FOR THE DRAMA! in pink glitter cursive writing.

  “But how did I survive? I would have died.” Harriet folded over into a lazy forward bend, testing herself for injuries. She wasn’t hurt. At all.

  The girl looked embarrassed. “Yeah. Yeah, you would have.”

  “So … did something catch me?” Harriet stretched her back, running through a few other yoga poses as she tried to decide whether it was possible that she was in so much pain she couldn’t feel any of it.

  The blond boy grimaced. “You died. You’re dead. Sorry, mate.”

  “I’m…?” She must have misheard him. There was a lot going on – it was to be expected.

  “You’re dead; we’re all dead,” he said.

  Clearly, they were members of a Role-Playing Society or something. What other kind of students hung out in an old abandoned building during their spare time?

  “Right. OK. Well, I’m just going to leave, so you can all get back to … whatever—”

  “You can just take a look at your body if you don’t believe us,” Felix said, gesturing behind Harriet and then quickly rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s a bit gory.”

  Harriet sighed. She supposed she could play along, if it would get rid of them more quickly. She turned around. When she swallowed, the dusty lump was back in her throat.

  Lying on the floor in a puddle of congealing blood was her body.

  Harriet fought a surreal sense of dissociation. The world rolled around her as she tried to resolve what she was seeing with everything she knew to be true about the universe.

  She was here. She was there.

  She was dead.

  Chapter 2

  HARRIET

  “Where are you going?” the girl called, as Harriet pushed her way towards the exit. Harriet didn’t stop. There might still be time to fix this. Clearly concussion was causing her to hallucinate her own dead body. But if she could just get to a doctor, it would be fine. She was going to be fine.

  She tamped down her panic. This would all be treated, and the worst outcome of her whole misadventure would be that she would have to submit her photography coursework a day late. There was nothing for her to worry about. So why did she feel like her life was over?

  She forced the feeling away, climbing out of the window. She had lost her phone in the fall, but someone on campus would call an ambulance for her.

  “Wait!” the girl shouted, as Harriet breathed in the clean, fresh air. She already felt better now that she was out of that musty wreck.

  Three steps away from the property fence, she stopped in her tracks. She ached all over. Swaying on the spot, she tried to push away the pain vibrating through her bones.

  The further she moved, the worse she felt. The feeling was an ocean, pulling her in. She was suddenly convinced that it would kill her to take even another step forwards. She wanted to lie down and become part of the world. It would be so peaceful to give up control and just become a mass of atoms, free to move as they pleased.

  Harriet closed her eyes, unable to stop the concept from overwhelming her. She could feel her particles sliding free of each other, peeling away and drifting off into the atmosphere.

  “HEY! HEY, GIRL!”

  The yelling came from somewhere very far away. She ignored it. She just needed to let herself become part of the air and ground and sky.

  RIMA

  She was leaving! The girl had only just died, and she was already going to make herself disintegrate. Rima hadn’t even had a chance to find out her name. It was such a waste too – the new girl seemed so young and pretty. Though her university experience was probably very different to Rima’s. She looked like she got invited to all of the best parties. Rima had only ever been invited to a private Usenet server.

  “We have to do something! Felix, come on!” Kasper hissed. His eyes were wide with panic, his hand tight on Felix’s forearm as the three of them leant out of the window to watch Harriet’s progress. Decades-worth of energy was falling away into the wind, precious golden strands disappearing into nothing.

  “What do you want me to do?” Felix asked, the words turned up high at the end.

  “I don’t know – something more than gawp at her!”

  Rima rolled her eyes. She nudged them out of the way and hoisted herself over the windowsill.

  “You can’t!” Kasper said.

  “I thought you wanted me to do something?” she said and twisted into a form that was easier to control. If she flew, she could get to Harriet without losing as much energy.

  HARRIET

  A hand grabbed her shoulder, pinching into the muscle and shaking hard. Harriet opened her eyes.

  “What?” she asked, swooning slightly, struggling to remember how words and speech and vocal cords worked.

  “Stop! Wake up!” a voice said. “You’ve got to come with me. Now, or you’re gone.”

  A hand tugged her backwards, and the movement made Harriet stumble. As she walked, she remembered that she had limbs, and muscles, and as she focused, they made a human body and she could move again.

  At the entrance to the hall, she remembered what being Harriet Stoker felt like and recovered her shape completely. It was only then that she recognized the girl standing beside her, who was looking at Harriet as if she was searching her face for some sign of life.

  The blond boy helped her down from the sill as she climbed back inside.

  “What was that?” Harriet asked. It had felt impossible and horrifying and incredible, like Harriet was so much more than just one person. She had felt connected to everything; every atom and particle on the entire planet.

  “You were disintegrating,” the girl said. “You can’t leave. You’ll be gone for ever if you do.”

  “Dis—? Gone?” Her brain was fuzzy and tired, but it felt surreal and primitive to have a brain at all, running a consciousness using neurons and muscles. “Who are you? What is happening to me?”

  “We’re ghosts,” Felix said. “We’re all ghosts. And now, so are you.”

  Starting from the beginning – or, rather, this beginning at least, which I think is probably the one that will be the most useful – there are signs of it all. You can see it in her behaviour. It’s just like his.

  When Rima first realized that she was a ghost, she closed off completely. She said later that she wasn’t angry or panicked or sad, but guilty, like she’d wasted what little time she’d had. She could have done so much more, if she’d known that those eighteen years were going to be all that she’d get. She didn’t cry or shout or try to leave the building. She just sat down and wished and wished that things were different.

  It’s always fascinating, watching someone when they think they’re alone. They sink inside their own heads and perform intricate little rituals that make sense only to them, that they’d never even dream of showing another person.

  It says a lot about Harriet that she didn’t pause to grieve like Rima. She started looking for a solution to the problem instead. If only she wasn’t so good at finding them.

  HARRIET

  “I’m a ghost. I’m dead. I’m … dead.” Harriet held up her hand and looked at it, trying to work out how it could possibly be the hand of a ghost. It looked just like anyone else’s hand, but somehow it wasn’t made of flesh and bone any more. Experimentally, she tried to pick up a lump of brick from the floor. Her hand passed straight through it.

  It was impossible. How could she be dead and feel so alive at the same time?

  She was only eighteen. She couldn’t be stuck here for ever, with no way to return to her old life. She’d had so many plans for her degree and career … her life. She’d only just started gaining followers on her YouTube channel. She’d been diligently posting make-up tutorials every other Monday. The hard work had finally started to pay off, and now all that effort had been wasted.<
br />
  “I barely did anything with my life,” Harriet said. “I’ve never even left the country. Oh God, I only had sex once. I wasted so much time in freshers’ week!”

  The blond boy stepped forward and patted her consolingly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re here for you. I’m Kasper, and this is Rima and Felix.”

  “What do I even do now?” she said, ignoring him. “Who are you all? Are you the welcoming committee or something? Please say you aren’t angels.”

  He shook his head. “We died here, too. A long time ago, now. You don’t have to go through this alone. There’s loads of us here.”

  “Loads. Of ghosts?”

  He grinned and pointed upwards with both forefingers to where dozens of figures were standing motionlessly on the floors above, peering over the balcony at her.

  “No. Freaking. Way.” Harriet squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she opened them again, the people were still there. They were all staring intently at her. None of them were moving. None of them were speaking.

  It was too much. Harriet turned back to her body.

  “Is there a way we can close my eyes?” she asked. It hit her all over again how awful it looked, a lifeless corpse lying there in a pool of blood and cracked bone. “I keep making eye contact with myself, and that is not something I ever imagined doing.”

  “There’s no way to move your body,” Rima said, as another girl appeared. This one was carrying a baby and looked very young and very tired. All the ghosts here seemed to be teenagers, around the same age as she was.

  Had this new girl been a student parent when she was alive? In some of the halls there were special rooms with kitchens and en-suite bathrooms for parents.

  “Leah!” Rima and Felix said together, looking delighted.

  “Where have you been?” Rima asked. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I was sleeping, like the rest of you.” Leah let Rima hug her, and then said to Harriet, not unkindly, “Congratulations, new kid. Welcome to the afterlife.”

  Trying to hide the dart of pain that rippled through her at the words, Harriet made lazy jazz hands at her. “Thanks! I’m hyped that I never have to pay off my student loans now.”

  Leah shrugged at that.

  “I’m Leah. This is Claudia.” She peeled a curl of blanket away from her baby’s face. The girl’s blue eyes slid over to focus on Harriet.

  Leah was standing right under a drip of water, which kept falling through her left shoulder in a way that made Harriet feel dizzy. It was like watching an optical illusion. Her body looked completely solid right up until the moment the water droplets touched her and then her shoulder went kind of … fuzzy. That – combined with her deathly pale skin, cream linen dress and slightly lanky hair – was the most obvious indication that she was dead. The rest of them looked alive, if you didn’t pay close attention.

  “Do you know how to leave the building?” she asked Leah. “They’re saying I can’t get out, but I have to go home.”

  Her gran couldn’t drive with her broken ankle. She would be trapped at home if Harriet wasn’t there to take her around. She wouldn’t even be able to go food shopping until Harriet got back. And they were nearly out of milk.

  “You might as well quit now. You can’t leave the place where you died,” Leah said. “Trust me, I’ve tried. Our souls are connected to the land or building or something.”

  “But I have to go home. My gran is all on her own. She’ll worry about me if I don’t turn up.”

  “Even if you went home, your gran wouldn’t be able to see you anyway,” Kasper said.

  “You can’t know that for sure,” Harriet said. “My gran could be a psychic or something. Are those even real? I hope they are.”

  She was very aware that she was pretending to be upbeat and calm about this whole thing. If she stopped smiling, she would break down, and that wasn’t something she could do in front of strangers. She’d always been taught never to show anyone a sign of weakness, because someone would try to use it against her.

  “You can’t go home. Forget about it, kid,” Leah said, a little more harshly.

  Harriet picked at her nails, miffed. “Why do you keep calling me ‘kid’? You’re, like, seventeen.”

  “What part of ‘ghosts’ don’t you understand? We’ve all been here for years. Long before you were even born. You are a kid to me.”

  “How did you die?”

  Leah sighed heavily and looked down at her baby. Apparently, Harriet had just made a severe breach of etiquette.

  “Oh, dude, you’ll never get how Leah died out of her,” Rima replied. “She and Claudia had already been here for ages when we all died. Even I don’t know how she got here, and we’ve been best friends for dozens of years.”

  “We’re not best friends,” Leah muttered.

  “Sure. Tell that to your half of our Best Friends Forever necklace.” Rima tapped a pink locket hanging around her own neck.

  “I told you – I’m not wearing that thing,” Leah said, glaring at the jewellery.

  Harriet ignored their bickering. Her brain was too full to find room to care about whatever kind of fight was going on there. If it wasn’t about her death or her gran, she wasn’t interested.

  “Anyway, never mind how Leah died,” Rima said. “It was probably something like carbon monoxide or gas that did the rest of us in, though. We think.”

  Harriet blinked. “What, like a gas leak?”

  “Yep.” She popped the “p”, acting remarkably cheerful about it. “Everyone in the building died on the same night in our sleep, so a pipe must have come loose or something. That’s our best guess, anyway. We have no way of knowing for sure.”

  Harriet had heard that some students had died in Mulcture Hall, but she’d thought it was just another one of the uni myths, exaggerated for optimum scandal. Knowing it was true suddenly put a new perspective on the destroyed rooms, rotting mattresses and collapsing furniture. People her age had lived and died right here. And the current students just saw the building as a spooky story.

  “I’m sorry, that’s awful,” Harriet said, though it was hard to feel sorry for someone as lively as this girl.

  “I know, right? We’d only just got a modem here too,” Rima said, pouting. She was playing with the folds of her hijab, adjusting the material so that it fell more neatly over her shoulders. “Such wasted potential.”

  “Modem,” Harriet repeated in bemusement. “Should I know what that is?”

  “What?!” Felix said, and then clamped his mouth shut, looking embarrassed.

  “Please don’t start talking about computers again,” Kasper told him, and draped an arm over Felix’s shoulder to slouch lazily against him.

  “Does everyone become a ghost when they die? Like, everyone ever?” Harriet asked, changing the subject to something she was more interested in. She tried to be casual, like the answer didn’t matter desperately.

  Harriet’s parents were dead. Were they ghosts, too? Maybe they had been watching from the afterlife for the past eight years, unable to speak to her. They’d died at her gran’s house – were they there, right now?

  “Most people become ghosts,” Rima said. “But some don’t stick around for long.”

  “‘Stick around’? Where do they go?”

  Rima shrugged. “We don’t know what happens to ghosts who disintegrate. It’s one of life’s unanswered questions. Tell us about you, anyway. What’s your name?” She patted Harriet’s arm gently.

  “Harriet Stoker.” She looked down at the hand on her arm. It would be rude to ask her to remove it. These people all seemed to be very relaxed around each other – they touched each other constantly, lolling around like a litter of puppies. There was something unnerving about it.

  Harriet couldn’t remember ever touching any of her friends, except for maybe an awkward hug on the last day of term.

  “Great! Nice to meet you, Harriet,” Rima said, looking genuinely thrilled. “You should
stay with me! I’m in Room 2B.”

  “Thanks,” Harriet said, taken aback by the offer. She hadn’t even thought about where she was going to stay. Did ghosts sleep? Would she need somewhere to live? There was so much she hadn’t considered. “I really just want to get home, though. My gran…” She trailed off.

  Rima worried her lip between her teeth. “Well, maybe someone will come looking for you and they can tell your gran what happened. Did anyone know you were coming here?”

  Harriet shook her head. “I was trespassing. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  Rima’s shoulders slumped. “That’s a bummer.”

  “I was on the phone with Gran before I died, though,” Harriet said. Excited now, she realized what that meant. “Could I use it to call someone?”

  “We’re ghosts,” said Leah. “We can’t touch stuff.”

  “It’s voice-activated,” Harriet said. It might work. It was worth a try.

  Rima smiled kindly at her. “Where is it, in your pocket?”

  “I think I dropped it on the top floor,” Harriet said.

  “I’ll help you find it!” Kasper said, standing up straight and releasing Felix. He suggested, “The others can stay here and keep an eye on the corp— Er, I mean—”

  His eyes went wide with panic. Rima mouthed at him, “Harriet.”

  “Harriet,” he corrected. His Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed. “They’ll watch your body, Harriet. Sorry.”

  “Great. So glad that someone else is on corpse-watch,” Harriet said. She desperately didn’t want to think about her body just yet, but the idea of someone keeping watch over it was reassuring. “Er, what’s your name again?”

  “Kasper Jedynak,” the blond boy said, preening slightly. “4B.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair, which was surprisingly fluffy.

  “Casper? Like the friendly ghost?”

  A much-beleaguered look crossed his face. “Bad coincidence. Don’t bother with the jokes, I’ve heard them all before.”