I shrugged off my hoodie and looked around for the cleanest part of the room to put it before settling for the shattered mirror. For a moment, I frowned back at my distorted reflection before wondering who had broken it, which then led me to wonder who had lived here before. It was obvious someone had, though it was clear it had been some time since then.
‘Finn,’ Mum said before a light tap on the door startled me as I imagined an old, lonely man having died and left to rot.
‘Is everything ok?’ she said walking into the room with both hands full of cleaning products. My little sister, Maia followed behind her.
‘We thought you might need some of these.’ She smiled carefully as she placed down the several bottles and rags onto the floor.
‘And this,’ Maia said, as she handed me a roll of rubbish bags.
I reached down for the bags and gave her a smile. ‘Thanks, Maia.’ She had that sleepy look that she always had whenever she had just woken up. She brushed away her auburn hair in messy plaits from her face before shoving her hands into her pink hoodie. Her eyes kept flickering over to the mirror I had just been staring into.
‘I wanted to apologise for earlier,’ Mum said as I turned back to face her. She sighed. ‘It’s just that you’re not making this any easier with your constant protests.’
I shifted my eyes over to Maia who was smiling at something in the corner, just above the mirror.
‘Maia, what are you smiling at?’ Mum said matching my curious look as Maia dropped her smile.
‘Nothing,’ she said quickly, placing her hand into Mum’s and gently tugging. ‘Can we go to my room now?’
Mum nodded before giving me a weak smile, one that said, ‘Please, Finn, stop having an opinion on the decisions I make about your life.’
She and Maia left the room as I sat on the edge of the bed frame only for it to give way and collapse under me. I hit the floor with a thud.
‘Stupid house.’
3
Ab
I couldn’t believe it. Was it really possible that the little kid had seen me? She had smiled, the boy and his mum confirmed it. She smiled at me. No one had ever seen me before, well, not since I was alive. I had felt a small rush of energy too. It wasn’t much but more than enough to keep me going for a book or two. The most interesting thing was, I hadn’t sensed fear. That’s how I thought it worked. I’d scare someone and feel their fear charge through me like a battery, but the kid was definitely not scared. She smiled with a toothy grin, albeit missing one of her front teeth, but it was a smile and at me.
‘Can you see me?’ I had whispered to her before her mum had interrupted us with a look of concern.
It had been so long since I had shared eye contact with someone that I felt it impossible to look away, but she didn’t give me a choice. Her smile had gone, and she was holding onto her mum’s hand, wanting to leave. I was so angry at her mum for interrupting that I could have thrown something at her, but now wasn’t the time for any of that. That would come later.
It had been a while since I had been around so many people that I had become completely distracted by the fact that this family had moved into my house. They were touching my things and painting over the walls that I had become so accustomed to as though I didn’t exist. Ok, so physically I didn’t exist but still, this was my house. They had no right to be here. The house had been abandoned since…well, since that day…my last day...and the owners hadn’t been back since. Why did they want to sell it now? And why did this family want it? I was full of questions that no one was able to answer.
I needed a plan. I needed to get them out, and now that I had a possible source of energy from Maia, things could be a little easier. The problem was, I was useless in the daylight, especially with them all banging around making noise for themselves, but tonight I was going to terrify them. I just had to make sure I didn’t use up any of the strength I had gotten from the kid—no matter how tempted I was to throw away the hideous butterfly figurines Cait, their mum, had placed on the freshly painted fireplace. I also needed to figure out if Maia had really seen me.
It had been several hours since they had come in and taken over the place, and in fairness, the house already looked much bigger and cleaner. Fortunately, they hadn’t yet made their way past the second floor so my library was safe for now. The plan for that evening had been to scare them each individually until they were spooked enough to leave, and to do that I needed to make sure I knew their weak spots. I didn’t have time to waste. I spent those passing hours watching each of them, running little tests to see how they reacted. Cait was by far the jumpiest. A single tap on a piece of wood, and she would spend a few minutes examining the room like a detective looking for evidence. Finn was cautious, he’d react to noises with a flicker of an eye before dismissing it, and Theo was far too busy catching glimpses of himself in anything shiny to notice anything other than himself.
I’d start tonight with Cait who would pass on her fear to her husband, Jack, and then I would move on to Finn and Theo. With four people’s fear, surely, I would be powerful enough and if I couldn’t scare them, then frankly they deserved the house.
As the sun settled with the disturbed dust around the house, Cait and Maia were in the kitchen cooking something that I had wished I could smell. From the steam rising from the cooking pots and the occasional taste test Cait would take from the wooden spoon, I could tell it must have smelled amazing. It made me think of Gran’s pies. My gran’s pies were the best. It didn’t matter what was inside them—sweet or savoury—you could bet they would be amazing.
Jack’s car had just arrived in front of the house after leaving a few hours before when Maia yelled in a pitch so high it would have shattered my human eardrums.
‘Mitzi!’
Not another person, please. I silently wished, I was already up against five of them.
As the door opened, in came a golden coloured dog full of fur and possibly the same size as a Shetland pony with its tongue flopping from left to right. It ran into the open arms of Maia, jumped up to lick her face until it looked in my direction and completely froze for a few seconds.
‘Oh great, a dog. Just what I need.’ I rolled my eyes remembering the pre-ghost me that had loved animals. In fact, for a year after finishing school, I had walked my neighbour’s dog every Saturday for a little pocket money. That had all changed, though, and now they hated me.
My first experience was a few years after I had been dead. Two men had discovered the house during a nighttime dog walk, and instead of scaring them for energy, I became excited by the dog. As I ran towards it, the dog had growled and frantically barked at me in the same way Mitzi was currently doing. I realised then that dogs were able to see me but not in the lovely, ‘oh she’s a hooman’ kind of way and more in the ‘kill, attack, kill’ kind of way.
This was far from ideal. I didn’t need a dog barking at me all the time.
‘What the hell has got into Mitzi?’ Cait said speeding into the hallway with a tea cloth in her hands.
‘Perhaps she’s disoriented by the move,’ Jack said as he followed Mitzi’s gaze right through me.