I went through waves, at first.

In the weeks following my death, I did everything I could possibly think of to call attention to myself. Nothing ever worked, but I tried ceaselessly for months. There wasn’t a specific moment when I decided to give up. I merely decided that a break was necessary, and when it seemed like the break should be over - well. Going back to spending every day fruitlessly screaming myself hoarse sounded almost unbearable. I thought: maybe souls need time to truly dissipate and fade away. Maybe I haven’t been patient. I told myself that little by little, I would fade away until there was no more of me, and this purgatory would be over. All I had to do was wait.

But years passed.

Late in the 1840s, I saw a newspaper article about two sisters in New York who claimed to communicate with spirits. They had been able to reach a man who’d been slain in their family home. He answered their questions by making tapping and cracking sounds.

I decided that I would try to locate the Fox sisters. It would be a stunning walk - it would probably take me years. It didn’t matter. I had nothing but time on my hands. If the women couldn’t hear me, perhaps the ghost in their house could.

I set out to begin my journey and found it impossible to leave town. It was like being tethered to an invisible rope anchored in Ketterbridge - and it still is today. I hit a certain point and something just yanks me right back. The discovery made me feel trapped: a pacing animal penned in by some hidden overseer. It reignited my desperation to be seen or heard. Once again, I threw myself into my mission.

So it went. I would struggle as hard as I could to be seen, eventually giving up and sinking into deep bouts of melancholy. Then I’d think of something I hadn’t tried yet, and the whole cycle would begin anew. Endless waves of effort and despair.

Finally, I stopped trying altogether. Hope only made defeat all the more bitter.

I taught myself a lesson I’d refused to learn for lifetimes: that it was better to resign myself to this, not to battle it. I had fought for so long, and even though I can never be physically affected, the truth is, I was tired. Tired of finding hope and losing it immediately. Tired of screaming in the faces of strangers - for by that time, everyone I knew in life was long gone. I was tired of begging to be seen or heard or understood.

I wanted to accept the situation so that I could acknowledge the painful realities that lay before me, resign myself to them, and start the process of going numb to them. An eternity alone. An eternity tied to one minuscule town. Forced to be silent spectator and witness to life, but never to participate.

Yes, I stopped trying a long time ago. That first night that Kasey showed up in the graveyard, when I tried to get her attention - that was the first time in a very long time that I’d attempted such a thing. I hadn’t even stopped to think about it. The arrival of another ghost swiftly knocked everything else out of my mind. The idea that the invisible population of Ketterbridge had finally grown by one…

Thinking on it now, I can only pray that I’m not making a grave error, letting myself believe in the impossible again. There is a persistent, frightening notion haunting me: that in two hundred or four hundred more years, I’ll be looking back on this moment, thinking: I came so close. I almost got those people to see me. What were their names? What did they look like? I really thought it might work, that time.

However: this is the first time that I have ever tried to get anyone’s attention while they’re actually looking for me. The first time warmth has passed between my ghostly self and another being.

The laws and workings of this afterlife evade me. Will anyone ever see or hear me? Are Kasey and I the same? Will I exist in this invisible form forever? Is there an end to this second life, as there was to the first one I had? Why can’t I leave Ketterbridge?

Who or what did this to me in the first place, and why?

I’ve made no progress in pinning down answers to these questions. I know little about the rules of ghosts and the afterlife, but maybe this time will be different. They’re looking for me, specifically. They know who I am. We’ve made contact, of a sort. Hope, in this one instance, may not be completely foolish.

I start with Jamie. I go to the flower shop and remain there for the length of his shift. I watch him expertly weave together a stack of intricate flower crowns. He packages them up in white boxes stamped with the shop’s logo.

I try to rip the tissue out of the boxes he arranges. I try to pick up and destroy the flower crowns. I try to roll things off of his work table in the back room. I try to pull his headphones out of his ears. I try to move the loose flowers. I even try to take his hand and warm him in the way I can with Kasey, though it feels a little awkward, doing it to another bloke.

At the end of his shift, Jamie hands off the boxes to a woman, the two of them chatting merrily about the fairy princess birthday party she’s planning for her child. He processes the sale, wipes down the counters, and heads home, none the wiser. He has no clue that for about six hours he was the most haunted man in Ketterbridge.

Next up is Kasey. I spend our entire night on Benton Street doing everything I can think of: attempting to manipulate the streetlights, the cars that pass by, the trees that fringe the sidewalk. I test out shouting, then whispering, then trying to communicate using only my mind, which feels particularly ridiculous. Nothing.

I’m back to feeling low and defeated by the time I get to Aiden. I drag my feet the whole walk to City Hall, doing my best to mentally prepare myself for another day of disappointment. I certainly don’t expect to find him with Jamie and Kasey, headed to a subterranean room beneath City Hall’s polished main floor. Despite everything, I perk up a little, following them breathlessly down the stairs. Maybe, with all three of my friends in one place…?

The room they open up is filled with austere grey cabinets and dim lights. I take a lap, considering where to start, but get immediately distracted as the three of them uncover page after page of information from the years marking my lifespan.

I find myself staring down at a photograph that makes my stomach curdle.

“You,” I hiss, leaning closer to the image. What sort of unhumorous joke is this? The first time in so long that I’ve seen someone from my living existence, and it’s Richard Newman. Of all people.

I only recall his name so clearly because if I had never met him, I might have had a normal life and died happily at an old age. I blame myself for my death - he didn’t force me to do anything - but Newman should carry some of that, as well. He was directly involved. To see his face, after all these years, after I’d entirely forgotten what it looked like - it knocks the wind out of me. I stand there in a complete haze, staring down at the photograph as the rest of the team sifts through piles of old documents and papers.

Everyone else has been talking for a few minutes. I haven’t been listening. Seeing Newman’s face is startling and strange, some deep memory unlocked that I thought I’d lost forever ago. But then Kasey says something that makes me look up.

I knew already about her intelligence and level of historical education. That doesn’t make it any less astonishing to hear her crunch all of this information and take a guess at what happened to me that is very, very close to being correct.

“You know what I would do, if I was a shady 1800s-era creep desperate to buy land from people who wouldn’t sell? I’d round up my biggest, burliest guys, throw them some extra cash, and send them over there at night to send a message to the landowners.”

“Dear lord,” I stammer, amazed. “Yes. Yes! That’s what happened!”

“It makes sense,” Aiden puts in. “The beat crew guys, they would have been used to dangerous situations…”

I don’t even hear the rest of what he says, because my mind is reeling. It seems impossible that they could have figured all this out. I have to force myself to focus, and when I tune back in, Jamie is saying:

“Something must have gone wrong, and William ended up in the river. We assumed the incident report was correct about him getting crushed and drowned, but if they lied about everything else… maybe he was like, killed in the scuffle, and the rest of the beat crew guys tossed his body in the river to make it look like they hadn’t been…?”

“No,” I manage, talking over Aiden as he answers. “No, that part’s not right. Jamie!” I make a useless snatch at his arm. “That part isn’t right!”

“I suspect we’re right about what William was doing, and why his death was covered up,” Kasey says.

“You are!” I answer, bouncing on my feet, clasping my hands together - but her expression changes.

“Is this the kind of guy that William was?” she asks. The warm swirl of colors that always swathes her seems to dim. “Sneaking around at night to threaten and scare innocent people off their land so that some corporation could gobble it up and deforest it?”

“No!” Damnation. They’re so close to understanding, and I am right here with the truth, but no way to speak it. “No, Kasey, no, I never actually-”

Useless. I cut myself off and whip around, frantic. I try to upend the table they’re working at. I try to smash the light. I try to throw all of the papers on the floor, knock over a cabinet - anything that might work. Nothing happens.

I turn back to the table and find Aiden setting my gold pocket watch down on its surface.

“How is this possible?” I breathe, unheard. I am frozen, staring at it, trying hard to keep up.

The watch my father gave me before everything between us disintegrated and fell apart. The only vestige of my family’s wealth that I took with me when I decided to permanently sever ties. The watch that sank with me to the bottom of the river. I had stood on the banks the next morning, watching as they recovered my body. The watch wasn’t with it, I know that for a fact.

Aiden was saying something I didn’t hear, but the answer it draws from Kasey is:

“I would feel really stupid and… so disappointed if I turned out to be so totally wrong about who he is.”

My heart doesn’t beat, so how can it be breaking right now?

Never in my existence have I wanted so badly to talk to someone, and I’ve been wanting that for two hundred years. I want to take her in my arms and tell her everything: that I was stupid and reckless and young and trying to do right by the woman I loved. That I paid dearly for my mistake.

“Kasey,” I whisper.

Something happens. The heat that I normally send to her redirects somewhere else. I try to harness it up, everything I’m feeling, and shove it at Kasey.

It’s such an effort that it knocks my legs out from under me, driving me to my knees, but - the watch moves. Barely an inch. For me, that's the equivalent of a leap from Earth to the moon.

I could scream or cry or laugh or all three at once, but before I can, the world tips beneath me, and blackness rises up around the corners of my vision. I’m disappearing again.

I don’t care. I moved something. I changed something.

“William?” Kasey asks, her eyes wide, and I fall back into nothingness, reaching for her until it all goes dark.