There was nowhere Harriet could go without being watched by curious eyes. All the students seemed to be enjoying their reawakening, shouting and calling out to each other. A couple of them were even playing hide-and-seek on the stairs, jumping through the walls and dangling from the floor into the rooms below.
She barged past them. When she reached the third floor, she found a scrawny boy with white-guy dreadlocks resting his ear against the wall and listening carefully.
He bared his teeth at Harriet when she passed. “Back off. Get your own rat! This one’s mine.”
Startled, she glanced back at him. “I, er, I don’t—”
“You’re not coming in at the last minute and taking my spirit. Piss off.”
Harriet opened her mouth to reply, but she had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t really care to find out.
On the second floor, she closed her eyes and walked through the door to the fire escape which zigzagged down the side of the building.
Sitting on the narrow metal staircase, she wrapped her arms around her knees. The sun had risen, turning the sky a pale blue. She’d been here all night. In the car park below, the spaces on either side of her car were filling up as people arrived for lectures. If she looked closely, she would probably see someone she recognized, on their way to their early morning Digital Photomedia class.
She hadn’t managed to make many friends in her first few weeks of uni. Everyone in her lectures had started joking and messing around right on day one, but she could never find a good entry point into any conversations. Not that they were talking about anything interesting, anyway.
She used to sit on her own before the professor arrived, researching new cameras and lenses online, or planning new videos to film. Photography was what she was there to do, after all. Making friends could wait until later, when she’d achieved everything she wanted to achieve.
Lights glimmered on the horizon. Somewhere in the city, Harriet’s grandmother was wobbling across the kitchen in her ankle cast to make tea and porridge, carefully bending down to feed the cat, and probably calling BT to check whether her landline was connecting properly. She would settle down with her knitting, and it would be hours before she realized that Harriet’s call wasn’t just a phone malfunction.
Disappointment boiled in her stomach, morphing into something dense and painful until she wasn’t sure whether she was sad or angry. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. This wasn’t who she was. She was going to graduate with a first-class Photography degree, and then move to New York or Paris and get a job as a photographer for Vogue. She was supposed to be happy and successful and beautiful, with a string of glamorous model lovers and a penthouse apartment.
She wasn’t meant to die in a crumbling, undignified block of student housing, or abandon her grandmother just when she needed her most. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to people like her.
I know, it’s painful to watch. She’s so desperate to get home.
Everything always comes back to family in the end. To the ones you love, or the ones you hate – the people who are closest to you. To get revenge or get away or get back to them. Blood is blood is blood. This is going to be important later, so pay attention.
Chapter 4
FELIX
To Felix’s surprise, Kasper returned to the foyer on his own, shaking his head in disappointment. “It didn’t work. Her gran couldn’t hear her, and she’s gone off somewhere. I think she wanted to be on her own.”
Felix exhaled. He hadn’t expected it to work, but he’d thought the process of trying might settle Harriet’s anxiety a bit. Clearly not.
There was something disappointed in Kasper’s expression, like he’d been hoping for more to come from his time with Harriet. Felix wished that Harriet hadn’t died, for his own sake as well as hers. He’d grown used to having Kasper’s attention to himself, however abrasive that attention might be.
“It was a long shot, I guess,” Rima said.
Leah wrinkled her nose. “I suppose we’ll just have to ignore the smell until someone finds her body on their own, then.”
Claudia let out a burble, wriggling in her swaddling.
Felix sniffed. The corpse hadn’t started to smell, not yet, after only one night. But there were other reasons to want it gone – it was safer all around if there was no chance of anyone getting their hands on it.
Kasper dropped down to sprawl on the floor next to Felix, leaning against an old sponge sofa cushion. The university had emptied the building after they’d shut it down, but over the years, squatters had brought bits of cheap furniture in with them – beach chairs and patio furniture, rotting pillows stolen from skips. The squatters didn’t stay long, and they nearly always left this stuff behind when they moved on.
“Her phone is so futuristic, guys,” Kasper said. “It can go on Usenet without a cable!”
He lounged to drop his head onto Felix’s shoulder.
Rima blinked. “The phone works without a modem?”
“Without any cables at all!” Kasper confirmed. “No beeping!”
“It was completely silent?” Felix looked flabbergasted, blowing Kasper’s hair out of his mouth. “I don’t believe you. I wonder if Harriet would mind if I went and had a look.”
Felix had a lot of things he wanted to check online. He’d spent decades agonizing over all the new comic releases he’d missed out on since he died. Who even knew what had happened to Captain America since 1994? There might actually be a film out by now, though he wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle seeing Steve Rogers onscreen. His crush was bad enough as it was.
He could go and look it up right now. Though, it was probably rude to use it while Harriet was hiding away somewhere crying. Rima would tell him off with wide, disappointed Disney-princess eyes, and it wasn’t worth the eyes. He could wait a bit longer. But he’d have to do it before anyone else found out there was a functioning phone up for grabs.
Rima had an ongoing feud with several of the other ghosts in the building, because they didn’t have the same standards of moral behaviour as her. She disapproved strongly of inter-spirit theft, resource-hoarding and anti-social hauntings. The others did not.
Because of that, Felix and his friends tended to keep themselves separate from the others. On more than one occasion, he’d had to hold Rima back from a fight with some random student. It was better this way, anyway – Felix got too shy to speak when he was in large groups, and Leah could barely stand the three of them, let alone anyone else. They were very happy as they were. There had been Lisa too once, but she had disintegrated years ago.
“Harriet reminds me of Lisa,” Felix said, realizing for the first time why she seemed so familiar.
He regretted it when Kasper flinched at her name, his muscles going tense where they rested against Felix’s side.
Before she had disintegrated, Lisa had been just as nonchalantly cool as Harriet seemed to be. Harriet’s aloofness came across as effortless and charismatic, but Felix thought she was probably just nervous.
“I hated Lisa,” Leah said. “She was too loud.”
“You hate everyone,” Kasper said.
“I hate most people, not everyone,” Leah said. “But Lisa was especially irritating. It’s no wonder she passed on so quickly; she used up all her energy chatting bubbles.”