Cradled in her arms, Claudia blew an idle bubble of her own, spittle forming on her lower lip.
“You know Lisa disintegrated because of the Tricksters,” Rima said. “It was hardly her fault.”
Rima always jumped to everyone’s defence. She was utterly incapable of seeing anything but the good in people. If she wasn’t so lovely, it would have been incredibly annoying.
Felix stared down one of the first-floorers, who was drifting closer and closer to Harriet’s corpse, trying to act casually. She met Felix’s gaze and abruptly turned and left. Felix grinned in satisfaction.
The general population of the halls were scared enough of Felix to stay away from his things, even the overwhelming temptation of a corpse. Felix had seen terrible, zombie-adjacent activities done to animal bodies in the past. Harriet didn’t deserve that. But no one would come anywhere near this one, not now it was clear Felix had claimed it. He’d worked hard to make himself scary by spreading rumours, even if it only worked on people who didn’t know him.
“I like Harriet, anyway,” Kasper said. He scratched at his shoulder, hand tugging down the neck of his shirt to reveal the line of his collarbone.
Felix pushed down a wave of annoyance. “No surprise there.”
Kasper always loved pretty girls.
He sneered at Felix. “At least I’m not planning to take advantage of a newbie to use their phone. You know the Internet isn’t a substitute for real human friendship, right?”
Kasper had always been uninterested in the Internet. He had never used it when he was alive, and he refused to accept that it was mainstream now. Even when it was obvious from all the students who walked past the building with mobiles and laptops that technology wasn’t just for nerds any more.
Felix scrambled for a retort, flustered. “Well, your, er – your friendships—”
Kasper lifted a brow, waiting patiently. Felix broke eye contact with him, flushing, trying to summon up a comeback from the depths of his banter resources.
Rima stepped in to save him. “Kasper, when Harriet’s ghost appeared, you literally yelled, ‘Dibs!’ because you thought she was hot. I think that’s a bit worse than Felix wanting to use her phone.”
“Besides,” Felix said, finally coming up with a retort, “it’s not like you’re the essence of cool. Remember that time some girl offered you a cigarette and you lit the wrong end?”
“That was in my first week of uni,” Kasper hissed. “How long are you going to keep bringing that up? Or are you planning to post about it on the Internet?”
“Anyway, Kasper,” Rima said, “there’s nothing wrong with computers. I liked them too. There’s that X-Files forum I used to go on. I can’t wait to see what happened to the other netters.”
“You’re not a nerd like Felix, though,” Kasper said, looking stung. Rima’s reprimands tended to have that effect. “He’s into lame comics and games and everything.”
“At least I can read,” Felix retorted. “You were doing a degree in looking at pretty pictures.”
Kasper hated when he made fun of his Art History degree. He poked Felix’s side, which tickled enough that Felix laughed, against his will.
“I should probably go after her, right?” Rima interrupted, gesturing upstairs. “She’s been gone ages.”
“Nah, leave her alone for a bit,” Kasper said. “We don’t wanna overwhelm her.”
“But—”
“You can’t mother everyone, all the time,” Leah told her. “Sit down and stop pouting.”
“I wasn’t pout—”
“Harriet!” Kasper said, too brightly, looking at something over Felix’s shoulder. A huge weight left Felix’s back as Kasper sat upright. “You OK?”
Harriet was standing on the stairs, twisting a strand of dark hair between her fingers.
“Hi,” she said, and bit her lip. Kasper’s gaze was fixed unwaveringly on it, Felix noticed with a bristle of annoyance. There were plenty of other people in the building who had lips. It wasn’t like Harriet’s were particularly special.
Felix sat up, rearranging his wrinkled clothing. He suddenly felt self-conscious. How long had Harriet been watching them loll around together?
The four of them had some strange habits, after so many years alone together. They were a co-dependent group, with odd rituals and games and in-jokes that had developed over the decades like mutating bacteria cultures. He didn’t want Harriet to judge them and decide that they were freaks. Even if it was true.
You should probably know that I had been waiting for Rima, Harriet and the others for nearly four hundred years before they finally died.
They kept appearing in brief, barely comprehensible flashes of the future. The laughing girl with her hair in a wrap, hugging the bespectacled boy who was always staring at the fluffy one. And Harriet, always on the outskirts, watching and waiting.
Everything comes out of order for me. The past and future are all mixed together in a scramble of little moments. But even without context, I could tell that these people were going to be important.
Once I knew what was coming, it was like everything went on hold, waiting for the people in the visions to arrive. Waiting for them to die. When they finally did, all on the same mysterious night, only the girl with the hole in the back of her head was missing.
HARRIET
“What are modern phones like?” Felix asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. They had all come up to Kasper’s bedroom on the fourth floor so that Harriet didn’t have to stare at her own corpse. Clearly, they had all decided she’d had long enough to recover from the trauma of her own death, because they’d started grilling her about various aspects of modern life.
Harriet didn’t really mind. She was getting to spill a lot of gossip about Hugh Grant, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson and the Kardashians. Rima straight up refused to believe that Princess Diana had died, let alone that Charles had married Camilla.
Harriet shrugged at Felix’s question. “Phones are pretty good, I guess. Especially since Instagram updated their filters so you can put bunny ears on your selfies.”
They all stared at her, wide-eyed – except Leah, who was dozing in a corner with her baby. She had got bored when they’d started talking about celebrities.
“You guys didn’t understand a single word in that sentence, did you?” Harriet asked.
Felix said, “Not one. But the phone works without you touching it? That’s amazing.”
“You can have a go on it, if you want,” she offered. “I don’t think I’ll be needing it again.”
Felix looked thrilled, even as Kasper rolled his eyes.
Harriet had considered using her phone to send a text to the police, letting them know where her body was. But then they would realize that someone had been using her phone anonymously after she had died, and that would only create more problems.
It might lead to an investigation to find her murderer, and her gran would be caught up in the middle of it, unable to mourn Harriet’s death for the accident it had really been.
In the end, she’d decided to just wait for the police to find her body on their own. Surely it wouldn’t take long? Her car was parked right outside. They’d find it immediately if they started looking for her.