by Shaye Easton
“What do you want from me?” I ask, my temper flaring.
He frowns and begins shaking his head. “Nothing. I don’t want anything from you. I just thought I’d—”
“Try to scare me? Mock me? I mean, seriously—spirits? That’s the best you could come up with?”
“I didn’t come up with anything. It’s the truth.”
“Like hell!”
In the next second, he’s crossed the space between us and place his hands on my shoulders. I want to jerk away, but instead, I go dead still as I stare up into his black eyes. They open up like twin voids, and I feel a tug forward as though I’m about to fall right into their inky depths.
“They’re not hallucinations, Melissa,” he tells me, and once again, the act is gone. This is the real Caden Coleridge: serious, compelling, and slightly unsettling like a dark afternoon that could at any moment throw up a storm. “There is so much more to this world than you know.”
“Like what?” I snap. And in that moment, I hate the sound of my voice: how it grates compared to his low, dangerously calm tone.
Without a word, he releases me and starts backing up. It’s sprinkling, and the drops splash in his hair, become dark spots on the shoulders of his school jumper. It’s the unequal dissemination of information all over again: Caden, up above, with all the answers; me, down below, begging for the crumbs.
“Like what?” I repeat to his retreating figure.
The gloomy afternoon throws down rain—a sudden torrent of water that acts as a dividing curtain. Caden steps through, melting into the water like he himself is composed of it. And the curtain swings shut, like the whole thing was a dream.
Chapter Three
A couple of days later, I feel it again.
I’m in Mum’s silver Corolla on the way to school. It’s a rainy morning again, so she outright forbade me to walk. As we drive, I stare out the window despite being unable to see much through the rain and fog. The air spewing out of the aircon and circling around the car makes me feel as though I’m breathing in bubble gum: heavy, sticky and way too sweet. Soon I find I can’t deal with it, so I roll down the window. I stick my hand outside, delighting in the fresh air and the feeling of the rain against my skin.
As soon as I do, Mum glances in the rearview mirror and our eyes meet for a moment. “Enough with the rain, Melissa,” she says and turns her gaze back on the road. “You’re letting in all the cold air.”
But it’s easier to see with the window down, and it feels good to watch the world passes in a blur of grey, all of it meaningless and indistinct. That is until I notice the goose bumps on my arm, the hair standing on end, and time slows: trees freezing in their wild swaying, rain hanging suspended in mid-air, the world transitioning from a blur to sharp, distinct lines. And I realise I’m cold. Again.
In someone’s front garden, blurred by the heavy rain, the grey man stands. His empty grey eyes following me as I go past. It’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence: somehow, in some way, he’s able to make me feel the cold again, just by being around.
It should be a good thing—my sudden ability to feel what I haven’t in years. But the cold feels unnatural and wrong, as though it’s not the cold of the wintry air, but something else—another type of feeling altogether.
He fades into the gloom as we leave him behind. Time speeds up again, renewing its normal pace, but now my eyes are spinning over our passing surroundings, paranoid he’ll pop up again.
“Melissa! Are you listening to me?”
My eyes snap to the front seat. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, would you please roll up the window?”
Mum doesn’t have to ask again. I crank it all the way up and lean back as far as I can, my heart beating fast. And I pray to god that he’s a hallucination, even as I know, deep down, that he’s not.
***
I haven’t seen Caden since he approached me under the tree several days ago, and while I can’t say it’s particularly upsetting, I’m not thrilled about it either. Although I try to listen in his friends’ conversations, sitting near them in class—even daring to move into the school hall at lunchtime to see if I can catch his name amongst their chatter; there’s no mention or explanation for his absence. One day here, the next gone, and no one bats an eye.
I come to school the next week with high hopes, but he’s still not around when I sit down for class on Monday. It shouldn’t bother me so much—people miss school all the time—but something about it rubs me the wrong way. I think of when I first took notice of him, how everyone he spoke with acted as though he had been here for years, and yet I could’ve sworn I’d never seen him before. It’s almost as if everyone had been, and still is, cast under a spell.
In third period, I realise his name wasn’t called in roll call. I’m almost positive that it wasn’t called before last week either. The revelation fills me with unease, to the point where, at the start of recess, I work up the courage to talk to one of his friends—a light-haired boy with a friendly, generic sort of face.
“Drew, right?” I ask, catching up to him in the hall.
He turns his brown gaze on me. “Yeah, that’s me. What’s up?”
“I was just wondering if you knew where Caden is. I haven’t seen him around for a while.”
“Who?”
“Caden Coleridge. Your friend?”
He laughs. “I’m sorry. You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t know anyone by that name.”
I stop moving, my heart suddenly loud in my ears.
Drew looks back at me, concern drawing his eyebrows together. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” I say shakily. “Yeah, sorry. You’re right. Now that I think about it, it was probably someone else.”
He just stares at me.
But it wasn’t someone else. It was Drew and his friends. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life.
“I–I’ve got to go.”
“Alright,” he says, a little weirded out. I turn away and he murmurs, “Freak,” under his breath. But I couldn’t care less right now. I stumble down the halls, the world spinning, and crash into the nearest female bathroom. There, I splash water on my face, blinking furiously.
“Get yourself together, Melissa,” I mutter, drying myself off with a paper towel. There has to be a reasonable explanation. Maybe Caden told me a fake name—that could work, right? But it doesn’t feel like the answer. Why would he lie about his name?
A worse thought occurs to me: what if I’d hallucinated the entire incident? Caden, our conversation, everything. An involuntary shiver runs down my spine, shaking my bones.
Suddenly, Southlake High, a place of such mundanity and boredom, has turned into a house of horrors. As I walk the halls, I swear I catch lights flicker. People smirking at me from their lockers, grey shapes slipping past in the corners of my eyes. Nothing feels the same anymore. It all feels wrong, wrong, wrong; like the dream version of a place you know really well, familiar for the most parts, but altered ever so slightly so that it’s suddenly entirely bizarre.
How could he just vanished, as if he never existed?
On Tuesday, there’s still no sign of him. I’m starting to lean towards the hallucination explanation. Sure, I’ve never hallucinated anything bigger than a floating light before, but maybe my disease is progressing, maybe it’s unravelling my mind.
That idea proves to be more than I can handle, and I decide it’s better if I don’t think about it. If I try to forget. I don’t have much more than my pride and sanity, and if I continue this way, I risk losing both.
Wednesday comes and goes. I still see the grey man around, watching me from afar. I’ve almost come to expect him, popping up once a day but at random times, much like my heat surges.
But on Friday morning, I know something’s different the moment I open my eyes. It’s a change in the air, a feeling of significance in the brightening light. When I get to school, Caden’s already t
here, standing at the top of the front steps, waiting for me with his signature dark-eyed stare.
So he is real.
All of a sudden, I don’t know why I cared so much about his absence. His same, unsettling aura washes over me and my steps falter. Why did I want this? It’s like taking walks when I’m afraid the grey man will materialise: ridiculous and fucking dumb.
I stop at the bottom of the steps and look up. “You were gone.”
He cocks his head slightly to one side and frowns. “Was I?”
“I’m not doing this,” I reply sourly, taking the steps two at a time and pushing past him.
Caden follows me into the school. “Not doing what?”
“This,” I repeat, waving a hand in his general vicinity. “You. Your games. I’m not playing.”
“Neither am I.”
I round on him. “You were gone a week. You just vanished and no one noticed. No one even remembered you. Doesn’t that strike you as a little strange?”
“A little upsetting, maybe,” he deadpans.
I’m stunned into silence. Unbelievable! He’s cracking jokes?
I start walking again. He follows. “Have you given any more thought to the lights?”
“You mean my hallucinations? Of course not, why would I?”
“I thought we both agreed they weren’t hallucinations.”
“Oh right, I forgot! We’re calling them spirits now, aren’t we? Because that makes sense.” There’s still half hour until school starts and the halls are mostly empty. Still, a couple stray students send quizzical looks my way. Whoops. Too loud.
“This isn’t a joke,” Caden says, voice low and stern.
“What is it, then?” I whisper back. “Because you haven’t given me a single reason to take anything you say seriously.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s a test.”
I blink. “A test?”
“Yes.”
“And what, pray tell, are you testing?
“Your response to truths beyond explanation.”
“Am I doing well?”
This time, he misses several beats. I watch them skip away. “Sure.”
“So no.”
“Quite terribly, actually.”
“Have you considered testing someone else?”
“There’s no one else to test.”
“Well, sure, there is! There’s a number of gullible people in this school. You needn’t worry. All is not lost.”
He sighs. “You’re mocking me.”
“You certainly don’t make it difficult for me to do so.” We round the corner into the hallway where my locker is. He’s walking ahead of me now, leading the way. I try not to overthink how he knew which way to go.
“Melissa, stop.”
“What? Truth too much for you?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then wha—” the cold rolls over me. And I see him: the grey man standing at the end of the hallway. He looks different under the artificial lights. The stark light cuts through his body, making him paler than usual. Except that’s not quite right—he’s not paler; the colour’s just thinner, less opaque and more translucent. Like a mirage. Like a ghost.
It hits me.
“Melissa, turn around and go back. Now!” Caden’s voice rolls like thunder. The hair on my arms bristles and stands straight.
“Who is he?”
“Go!”
“Not until you tell me who he is.”
I already know, and Caden knows I know, and I don’t know why I keep saying who when what I really mean is what. But I need to hear him say it. I need him to tell me I’m not crazy.
He looks back at me, black eyes burning. “He’s a ghost, alright? Now get off here!”
He’s a ghost.
I don’t believe him. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But once again, Caden’s become the dark and unsettling version of himself—the one I ran into on the street, the one that grabbed me by the shoulders and told me my hallucinations were more than just hallucinations. Only this time, he’s wilder, fiercer; he’s not the afternoon waiting for a storm—he is the storm. And in that moment, I don’t know what I find more terrifying: the grey-man-turned-ghost or the boy supposedly protecting me.
I run.
***
I see Caden again in fourth period, acting like nothing ever happened. He smiles and chats with his friends—notably with Drew, who just a few days ago denied having ever known him. With Caden here, present and smiling, it’s hard to believe that had ever happened. His presence fits so well, like a missing cog slotting back into position. Suddenly the days without him seem like the hallucination—blurry, indistinct and somewhat unreal. It’s like a film rolling down over my memories, highlighting some parts, but blocking out the core truth.
He’s always been at this school, hasn’t he?
I shake my head, shocked at myself. What am I thinking?
Caden chats for a while and then surprises me by heading in my direction. I stare, open-mouthed, as he takes a seat next to me in the back row.
I swallow. “So ghosts, huh.”
It’s not until the smile falls off his face that I realise his friendly, carefree act is really just that: an act. There’s a landslide of false emotions; it crumbles away, revealing the hidden darkness. As he slips between personas, the world transforms along with him: it’s bright and ordinary when he plays the typical high-schooler, and dark and chilling when he doesn’t.
The room grows dimmer now, like Caden’s drawn out some of the light. I shiver in an imagined wave of cold air, washing over the world. He doesn’t look at me; he stares straight ahead, eyes unseeing but not unfocused.
“Ghosts,” he agrees. “Spirits. Souls.”
“Aren’t they all the same?”
“Not in this world.”
“Arguably.”
He flicks a look at me. “A soul is what you would call a spirit that’s still alive, meaning it’s still inside its human form like us. Spirits are deceased souls, and they only pass through the living realm on their way to the otherworld. Ghosts, however, are stuck here. They have to stay until they fulfill whatever it is that’s keeping them here.”
I become aware of my face, which I’m positive is displaying my emotions like a PowerPoint presentation—skepticism, amusement, disbelief and dread. He’s crazy. Did he just say that? He’s crazy.
I quickly rearrange my features back into a neutral expression. “This is all…really interesting.”
Caden releases a breath and looks down at his desk. “You don’t believe me.”
“No, I believe you! Completely.”
“I’m not sure how much more proof you need, Melissa. You’ve seen a ghost now, in broad daylight, with your own eyes.”
“Sure.” I nod, because you’re meant to go along with crazy ones right? At least until you get the opportunity to run away. “Or maybe—and just hear me out, okay? Maybe he wasn’t one.”
Caden lifts his head to stare at me, and I get the feeling that I’m being dissected. “Do you really believe he could have been anything else?”
“There’s always a reasonable explanation.”
“Alright, fine. Can you explain why a girl, who never feels the cold, is suddenly freezing whenever she sees this same man?”
My eyes narrow. “How do you know about that?”
“Because I feel it too. It’s not about you. It’s about the ghost.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow. At all.”
“Souls, spirits and ghosts aren’t technically of this plane, so they can’t harness any warmth. The outcome is that they’re freezing cold. Ghosts, especially, radiate this cold. If you get close enough to one, you can feel it.”
I blink. I can’t believe I’m listening to this. “Okay, fine, let’s say you’re right. That still doesn’t explain why I can feel it or why we can and nobody else.”
“Easy. Ghosts are metaphysical beings and feeling cold is a physical experience. One can’t
create the other because they exist on two different planes. But what ghosts can create is a metaphysical experience of the cold. One felt by your metaphysical soul.”
I give my head a little shake, trying to wrap my mind around all the big words. “Wait, so, the reason I can feel that particular cold is because I’m not actually feeling it?”
He nods. “Your body doesn’t allow you to feel temperatures, but your soul does.”
I laugh. “This is crazy.”
“You’re only saying that because it makes sense.”
“Nothing makes sense. And you still haven’t answered my second question. Why can we, in particular, feel it and no one else?”
Now he turns his dark gaze away. “I missed that on purpose,” he admits quietly.
“What? Why?”
“Because you won’t be getting an answer. Not today.”
“Haven’t managed to invent one yet?”
His forehead creases. The outer corners of his eyes droop. I’ve insulted him. Or, wait—is that…guilt? “There are some things,” he says slowly, teeth-gritted like he hates himself for even saying it, “that you just aren’t ready to know.”
I sigh. Whatever. “Can you at least explain why I’ve been seeing the grey ma—uh, ghost?”
“My movements must have tipped him off.”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to explain that one, too.”
“Most ghosts mean no harm but being stranded in this realm can take a toll on their sanity. The longer they’re here, the more troubled and crazy they become. Many lose sight of what they need to do to move on and so they resort to…other methods. Other solutions.”
“Those being?”
“There are people out there who take advantage of ghosts. They give the ghost a purpose—a task to fulfill. Usually, it’s something nefarious, but it can also be simple: keeping an eye on someone, spying.”
“What do they get in return?”
“A way back in. At least from what I’ve heard, these people can essentially give them a second chance at life. The whole process is a big mystery but we believe it involves the extraction of a human soul from their body and the insertion of the ghost.”
