It was starting to rain through the broken roof, in cold, heavy drops that ran straight down the nape of her neck. Shivering, she suddenly missed her overly warm room at home. She could picture her gran sitting under a blanket on the sofa, with the electric fire roaring and the cat stretched out on the hearth.
Twisting to watch the flight path of a plane as it passed overhead, her foot caught on something. Harriet tripped over the edge of the stairwell, with nothing below her but five storeys of open air and the concrete floor of the foyer. She dropped her phone, throwing her hands out to grab on to something.
Her heart thundered. Her camera fell first, unhooking from around her neck and crashing to the ground into a thousand shards. Then Harriet followed.
It happened too fast for her to scream anywhere except inside her own mind. Her head bounced off a jutting steel beam, spraying blood as she twisted over once, twice before she landed with an audible crack of bones on the floor.
A pool of blood dripped from the split in her skull, gathering on the lurid green moss. Everything went black.
There it is. The death that started it all. It’s interesting, seeing it from this angle. I’ve only ever seen it from the past before. It would have been easy to stop it happening. Just a little bit of pressure here and there – a nudge to take her down the stairs instead of walking up them. And nothing would have happened the way it did.
Father was always doing things like that when he was here. And later, when he…
Sorry, sorry, you don’t know about that yet, do you? I suppose I should go in chronological order. Everything just makes more sense if you look at it backwards.
For now, let’s go back to where Harriet Stoker is lying in her own blood. She’s undeniably, irrevocably, dead. Below her, a fern is being slowly crushed. Above her, the shadows are gathering to watch.
FELIX
Felix flung open his eyes, gasping. A golden burst of energy spread through him, shocking him awake. He jumped up, shuddering like he’d just had a shot of caffeine.
What had…?
The intruder. The one with the music. Something must have happened to them. He hadn’t felt fresh energy like this in decades. He hadn’t expected to ever feel it again.
Felix ran through into Kasper’s bedroom. To his relief, he was awake too. Felix couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the only one to wake up.
“What year is it?” Kasper asked, opening one eye to squint at Felix. He was shirtless, stretching his arm over his head. The muscles all along his torso lengthened and contracted. There was a shock of blond hair in his armpit.
Felix exhaled. “Last I remember was 2009. You?”
“2011 – a cat died in here. You were sleeping.”
Felix was disappointed he’d missed a cat ghost – and then felt promptly sick at the rush of emotion. His feelings kept changing so fast, and he wasn’t used to it. He’d spent so long suspended in sleep, feeling nothing. When he was low on energy, he barely even dreamed.
The world was a lot to process again after all that time. Had the fresh air blowing through the window always smelt so rich? Had Kasper always smiled so widely? Felix almost couldn’t bear to look at him.
Rima flew in through the open window, glowing with energy too. “Someone new has arrived!” she yelped. “Get dressed, get dressed!”
“What year is it?” Felix asked her. It couldn’t have been that long since the cat. He had a brief memory of snow, fluttering in through his window. Winter had been and gone while they slept. Maybe it was already 2012.
“I have absolutely no idea! Have you seen Leah? Where has that girl got to? Let’s go! I need to find Cody!” She twirled, jumping into the air and running through the door.
Kasper looked at Felix, raising an eyebrow. “Business as usual with Rima, then.”
“I think we could be here for an eternity and she wouldn’t change,” Felix said. He took a deep breath, trying to control the deep wave of love that rolled over him. He’d missed them all – Kasper and Rima, Leah and Claudia. After so long starved of them, listening to their voices was like drinking rich cream.
While Kasper pulled on his shirt, Felix turned to examine himself in the mirror by the bedroom door. The glass had a crack down the centre. That hadn’t been there the last time he had been awake. Then, the vines on the windows had only been tendrils, creeping up the bottom of the glass pane. Now they covered the room in green foliage, flooding over the carpet.
Perhaps it had been longer than he’d thought. They could have been dreaming for decades, sleeping through the days as empty shells of their old selves. It was hard to tell when he still looked the same. He’d always be eighteen, just like the day he’d died.
Felix folded his crinkled collar back into place, then took off his glasses, rubbing them clean with the hem of his plaid shirt. He wasn’t entirely sure how they managed to get so many smudges, considering he was incorporeal. It was one of the eternal mysteries of ghosts – and glasses.
Kasper nudged up against Felix’s back and rested his chin on Felix’s shoulder as he rearranged his hair in the mirror. He licked a thumb and smoothed his eyebrows flat. “Ready, loser?”
Felix folded his hands over his cuffs. It was starting, then. The peace between them never lasted long. “If you’re done primping.”
He let himself look at Kasper, feeling that deep ache in the centre of his chest. Had he really had these kinds of emotions constantly, before he fell asleep? Surely not. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
Kasper walked through the door. “Let’s go see who brought us back from the brink, then.”
HARRIET
When Harriet woke up, the headphones around her neck were still blasting Janelle Monáe. She lay still for a moment, replaying the darkening sky, the sudden loss of balance as she tripped over something unseen, the flash of brightness as she fell, and then nothing.
She could hear voices. She was surrounded by people, talking quickly. Arguing.
She must be in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. The voices were paramedics discussing her injuries. It was likely she was seriously hurt. She might have broken her leg, or worse. She couldn’t feel anything, which had to be a bad sign.
She tuned in to their conversation, trying very hard not to panic.
“…can’t just leave her lying—”
“You would say that! You always think that—”
“Oh, because what you think is so much more—”
“Would you two just shut the hell up. It’s not—”
“Are we actually fighting about this right now? She’s not even cold yet!”
There were so many voices she couldn’t keep track of them; they were all talking over each other. She opened her eyes. For a moment, everything was blurry. She blinked, and her vision cleared. She was staring at a mouldy breeze-block wall. The voices around her went silent.
“H-heyyy…” someone said.
Harriet flicked her gaze around until she found the speaker – a short girl wearing a hijab and a nervous expression. There were three people huddled around her, none of whom were paramedics – in fact, they looked like students. They must have heard her fall and come to investigate. She relaxed. Maybe she wasn’t badly hurt, after all.