The lights flickered in his office sometimes. It was an old building, and he'd never thought twice about it when it'd happened before. This time, though — this time was different. This weird creeping feeling of dread came with it; the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He very pointedly did not look up from the file he was poring over because— why, exactly' What did he think he was going to see"
Ben doesn't believe in ghosts — not the traditional kind, anyway, the supernatural kind. Things that went bump in the night, sure, and things that reached you from-beyond-the-grave" Every day, he was affected by that one.
But ghosts" He'd been a homicide detective. Death, dying, the dead themselves, usually didn't bother him. Even when he was young, for whatever reason, he hadn't had that fear.
Ben doesn't always live with both feet in the present. Sometimes — not often; oftener his consciousness is likely to skip town altogether, leave his body with somebody else in charge — but sometimes, he'll straddle that line, drift through real-life detached and half-there, while fuzzy, dust-covered, hypersaturated dream-memories play out in front of him. It's disorienting, and it's exhausting, and it's that whole "life feels like a copy of a copy of a copy," smudgy and only half-decipherable and maddening because you almost can make out what it's supposed to be, but not quite—
This isn't that, though. This isn't that at all.
Because he looks up from the paper he'd been staring down at, and his stepfather is standing there, in the middle of the room, just paces away. Roland has been dead for five years now — but there he was. Not quite see-through, the way you'd expect a proper ghost should be, but not quite there either — too-sharp, ultra-contrast, so unreal he had to be real.
Ben jumps up from his chair like the surface of it burns him; his eyes are wide and his mouth is agape, working around words that he can't seem to pull himself together enough to form. Finally, after what seems like forever, "No, it can't be you." The line uttered in every movie about ghosts. "You're dead. I watched you die—"
And there it is, just a blip — here and there, still standing in his office, somehow aware of his real surroundings, with the shadowy, too-real wisp of memory playing out in his vision at the same time, blurred and hi-def, muted, still turned up to eleven: Ben, kicking the door to the motel room open. A blip of fastforward— Roland, dropping the container of takeout Chinese, clutching at his chest. Blip, and Roland is clinging to Ben, begging for forgiveness, blip, and he's staggering backward, and Ben can hear his own voice in his ears, echo-y but clear, I hate you.
The memory vanishes in a slow-to-fade flash of white light, but the apparition doesn't. It's real. It's real, real-life-right-now real, and it drifts toward Ben, Ben-in-real-life-Ben, and the voice that wheezes out Ben's name is the exact same that he'd just heard in that memory, begging, begging, forgive me, Ben—
Ben takes two steps backward, but then his back is pressed against the wall, and there's nowhere else to go, and the very, very real figure of Roland keeps coming toward Ben, floats right through his desk, he's only a few feet away and he's still coming closer—
And it all goes black.
( x-posted in Sullivan and Associates! )
