“*shhhh*—ou know what it is, just an afternoon with my wife!”
The roar of canned laughter floods the living room before giving way to harsh hissing once more. Above it, the black-and-white image of a talk show grows blurry as static devours it, erasing whatever meaning it still had. A few moments later, the broadcast fights back, pushing through the noise and distortion, yearning to be seen for just one more moment.
But nobody is watching.
The television’s pale glow pierces the muffled darkness of the living room, brought on by the thick blinds obscuring every window in sight. All one needs to bring the space back to life is to stand up and walk these few feet, to grasp the grimy cords.
But it is too late.
In front of the TV set rests a well-worn armchair, its once blue fabric covered with stains the color of dirt, blood and pus. On it, a mound of cloth and sludge, a pile of regret and decay, what was once a person wrapped tight in what was once a blanket. Around it, empty plastic wrappers and glass bottles, their contents long forgotten and devoured—first by their owner, then by microorganisms decomposing them.
What remains of the human’s head keeps staring at the device before it, the receiver’s light illuminating the many shades of decay covering the skin. Sometimes, it twitches just a bit as another patch of sinew holding it together turns into mush. Aside from that, there is no motion in the room, no change.
Not in days.
Not in years.
*knock knock knock*
The muffled sound eclipses the TV static despite being so much quieter, stirring flakes of dust from the garbage strewn across every flat surface. For the first time in weeks, there is a shift in the putrid air, beyond the miasma of death and waste growing ever more intense. Tension rises in the motionless space, begging for the external influence to leave it be, to let it decay into nothingness evermore.
But it won’t.
*knock knock knock*
Another three strikes against the front door, its mechanism long since half-devoured by corrosion. Soon after, a pair of muffled voices outside, chatting with each other, and a low, animalistic growl, their intricacies falling on the abandoned house’s deaf ears. The world demands presence, the pile of decomposing flesh demands closure.
At last, motion.
A grayish hand phases through the stained, crusty blanket enveloping the corpse, and another one follows moments later. After it comes one leg, then the other, with only the inanimate TV set to witness their appearance. The half-formed, immaterial entity shudders and stops; it wants to go no further. No thoughts grace it, no memories—only the emotions that used to comprise them.
Hatred.
Guilt.
Regret.
*knock knock knock*
And yet, What Is must continue its crawl, to depart the cocoon of What Was and What Will Never Be. The quietest of metallic jingles fill the air as its head pushes through, freeing the rest of itself from the once-body that once held it. It falls from the armchair onto the trash-covered floor; the digging of shards of plastic and glass into its woven skin overlooked in the horror of steadily building consciousness.
And then; it opens its eyes.
Their dim, pink glow sweeps the room, taking in hundreds of objects it used to know but doesn’t. It stares but does not see, the decomposing environment around it reduced to naught but visual noise and an incomprehensible blur of shapes, all bathed in shadows.
At last, it turns to look up at the seat it had just crawled out of, at what remained of what it once was, of what he once was.
He feels nothing. Not yet.
*knock knock knock,* “~Mr. Armstrong?~”
The muffled sounds come together into words, understood and yet incoherent. Name he recognizes or not, someone’s still knocking on the door. The ghost’s body turns towards the house’s front door and takes the first step of many, driven by subconscious impulses long erased. Each little movement disturbs the mounds of trash and grime, sending clouds of dust floating into the air.
He’s too focused to notice, too stunned by his own sudden existence.
One step, another, finally out of arm’s reach of the padded seat. To his left, a book sprawled open on top of the mound of junk, its contents all but forgotten to his conscious mind despite the title on the cover remaining legible. Something about an encyclopedia, something about spirits.
The sight to his right takes too much of his attention for him to even try thinking about it.
A chair lying on the floor bent and discarded. Beside it, a small desk, its surface covered with envelopes. A few still sealed, many opened and disemboweled. Some of their contents lie in a heap behind the desk, crumpled and torn. Some in a pile off to the side, sodden with tears and blood.
And in the center, the letters never sent, the words forever unsaid.
*knock knock knock,* “~Mr. Armstrong, this is the Mistralton Police Department. Are you there?~”
At last, the sound distracts the ghost away from the piles of letters. He resumes his journey through the dead building, taking in the sights one after another. On the wall to his right, political paraphernalia for the last few elections, their bold slogans ringing hollow amidst the decay. An unending chant with a different refrain each time, a different group to blame for the woes of the world and the economy. Unionists, immigrants, queers, pagans, women, racial minorities.
Who it was, it mattered not—as long as there was someone to hate, to channel one’s anger towards.
Beneath each slogan, a photo of the associated candidate, drilling into him with their hollow smiles. Into his eyes, into his mind, uncovering the half-digested flashes of him walking along with them, of offering them his unconditional faith and support, the power of all the resentment his weary body could fit.
And then; came consequences.
His spectral legs keep wading through trash, each step easier and easier once he finally turns the corner into the atrium. Fewer wrappers and discarded food here, more boxes and heaps of unopened letters. In the distance, his destination. He can’t make out much from behind the frosted glass, just a couple of dark blobs against the light gray background. They shift from side to side, turn to each other, sometimes even walk away for a moment or two, before inevitably approaching the front again.
*knock knock knock,* “~Mr. Armstrong, your daughter called us to perform a wellness check. Are you there, Mr. Armstrong?~”
The words freeze him in place, one of them in particular. His eyes unfocus as he stares at the mound of envelopes in front of the door, the awareness of what some of them are desperately trying to claw at his mind. He keeps it at bay, just barely, and pushes on.
His body needs no air, and yet his breaths deepen with every step. The reality of where and what he is starts creeping up on him, made terrifying by the little he knows, and especially by everything he doesn’t, not anymore. With utmost focus, he resists looking just to the right, to the wall covered with rectangular patches of discoloration, and to the one photo that still hangs there.
A picture of a woman rests askew in its frame. Hastily put together after being torn, enveloped in a web of creases, in damage from being first crumpled and tossed and then dug up in panic from a trash bin. Behind it, obscured, is a photo of a boy, once displayed as a matter of fact, then out of hateful spite.
Nobody else is left.
Nobody.
Nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody He stands before the door, up to his waist in letters. Too short to reach the peephole, but he does so anyway. Before he knows it, his pink eye is level with it, trying desperately to focus on the bright image. Two men in police uniforms looking around bored and checking the time, and an Absol behind them.
Suddenly, the latter turns to stare straight at him, and catches the humans’ attention. They sigh in relief and turn to face him, offering weary, uncertain smiles and as professional a voice as they still can.
“~Mr. Armstrong, there you are! This is the Mistralton Police Department. Your daughter called us to perform a wellness check—could you open the door, Mr. Armstrong?~”
His arm reaches down without even thinking as his head pounds to the rhythm of a long-dead heart. He hurts, it hurts; what is he; where is he; why is he here—
The rusted metal attached to the handle creaks, and the door skews open, carrying with it the reek trapped within. One breath later, it hits the two men outside, sending them dry heaving as they back off; eyes bulge as they look up into the house.
Inside, a feral Banette.
The Absol knows what they have to do, pushing past their humans and their disgust alike as their horn flickers with pitch-black energy. The ghost’s terrified wail fills the decrepit building as they turn to run away—through the trash, through the walls, through the miles of suburbia.
And then, many hours later, he stops. Around him, darkness. Of the woods, of the night.
Of a world that is no longer his home.
