An innate gift everyone was born with, unique for every person, and Charlie felt like he lost the lottery by getting the ability to see and talk to spirits.

Nobody else really paid mind to his gift. For some, they accepted that for some reason ghosts were real and Charlie could talk to them. Others said he was lying about what his gift was. How could he lie? He had the registration form with all his other documents. He could point at the decade old scrawl that said “can commune with spirits” on the second page. Blue ink.

The dead around here weren't particularly different. It was the first time he'd been in a sea of American ghosts, though.They were… louder.

It might’ve been Charlie’s imagination, since every breath out here turned instantly to fog and the air vibrated with truck traffic, but he felt haunted in a more frantic, humid way on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe it was the big sky, maybe it was the way Americans never shut up, even after death. The British ghosts Charlie sometimes glimpsed back home were calm. They might play pranks, or mutter to themselves, but these guys? These guys wanted an audience, and if they couldn’t get one, they’d swirl around until one showed up.

He passed a headstone the color of old teeth, and a form coalesced next to it: a woman in a blue windsuit, chest spattered with blood and gore, decorating her own grave with imaginary pansies. “Hi, Jeremy!” she said, and then “Don’t you look handsome,” even though Charlie was certain she wasn’t talking to him. He kept his head down, but the next ghost—massive and chilly—stumbled toward him waving a translucent donut. “You’re the new guy, huh? Welcome to hell!” The voice buzzed between his ears. He ducked his head, adjusting his hoodie, and just kept walking.

The heaviness of the day wasn’t going to get any better now that he was a walking reception desk for the afterlife. He cut toward the far edge of the plot, keeping his eyes on the ground. He kept thinking about the last time he’d seen Frank alive, at some Christmas party years ago, and how it had been mostly an endless loop of jokes about “the Queen’s hat” and long, prying questions about Charlie’s “specialty.” He wondered what type of unfinished business spat out a guy like Frank as a ghost. Probably a Powerpoint deck. Or an unpaid bar tab.

Charlie picked up speed, boots scraping frost off the asphalt footpath, and found himself at the margin of the cemetery, facing a line of maple trees splintering sharp along the horizon. A part of him wanted to keep going, into the sawgrass and scrabble, out where maybe the ghosts shut up for a while.

He leaned against the cemetery fence, plastic chain—link, clamped his hands under his armpits and stared at nothing. The cold here was a hinge; every breath pumped it deeper, bracing then hollow. He hated funerals, hated the unskilled performance, hated that he'd be stuck in Christopher's fishbowl of a house while his real family tried to paper over everything with platitudes and old casseroles.

He sighed.

He wished he could be at home.

Charlie felt the familiar chill of being stared at by a spirit, and looked up to see who was looking. 

The ghost had a wispier form, seemingly barely even clinging to the spirit realm. He’d been shot through the head twice, apparent by all the blood now clinging to his skin and clothes.

Fuck. This is what Charlie was fearing. It was his uncle Frank.

The ghost stared down at Charlie, seemingly devoid of the regular mannerisms of the other ghosts in the cemetery. Charlie thought for a bit, before thinking that… maybe he wasn’t looking at his ghost. Rather, a fragment, a small bundle of memories that somehow separated from the rest of him. It made sense, considering how he was staring so blankly, and not talking about how sad Charlie looked. Charlie exhaled, long and slow, and his breath steamed straight through the shape of his dead uncle. The apparition flickered, bloodless and grayer than the sky.

A second ago, it had shock and anger in its posture, the hunch of a guy who’d just been ambushed, but now it just stared at him, hollow, zero recognition. Charlie wondered if ghosts all started that way: blank and meek, not yet pissed off enough to say anything.

He realized he was staring, arms still pitifully crossed, and probably looked like a lunatic if any relatives happened to glance out the windows just now. His American family already thought that being British meant you were at least half vampire.

“Did you, uh. Need something?” Charlie said, keeping his voice as low as possible, not sure what else to do when you met your dead relative for the first time.

Frank still didn't give him recognition. Charlie tried to walk away, but the ghost shifted with him, flickering once and then lodging in place, like it was magnetized to some part of Charlie he couldn’t shake. It didn’t speak. Didn’t even blink. Just watched, like it was waiting for Charlie to do something, perform some move that would let it either snap fully into existence or fade out forever.

So he stood there in the wind, both of them caught in some unplanned, reluctant standoff. 

Charlie shivered, hands jammed so deep in his pockets he could hardly feel his fingers. He’d seen a lot of ghosts since puberty. Kids who drowned, old women with oxygen tubes, once a German soldier stomping through King’s Cross. But this one was different: not just because it was his uncle, but because of the way it seemed to… need him? 

Charlie thought… What if he was lost? Should he take him to his grave? It seemed idiotic, but the idea got stuck. Charlie stepped away from the fence, pausing every few paces to check over his shoulder. The ghost trailed him, never more than six feet behind. He tried not to let it spook him. Plenty of dead, none had ever actually tried to hurt him. Still, he’d never been followed this avidly, even by the boy who haunted his primary school’s stairwell or the old lady in the retirement home lobby who hissed at young skin.

He wove through the colorless gravestones, cutting a path toward the freshly piled earth of Frank’s plot. The rest of the mourners had gone inside; no one left to see a teenager stumping along with a blood-damp poltergeist in tow. His breath smoked out ahead, and his nerves sparked with every step.

He stopped at the grave. The ground bulged, uneven and still scarred from where the artificial green carpeting had been rolled up and the sod was tossed aside. Charlie hissed and pressed his thumb hard into a sharp edge of his palm, grounding himself. The ghost stopped a few feet away, hunched, flickering harder in the thin light as if crossing the grave’s edge required more energy than it had.

Charlie fumbled for something to say. “Do you… want me to pray?” That’s what you did at funerals, right? Even if the guy never went to church? Even if he’d likely choked on the concept of ‘heaven’?

He started, hesitating on the Lord’s Prayer, half remembered, half mangled in his head. The words tasted weird, like borrowed clothes.

The ghost twitched. Not closer, not further, just a faint shudder. In the bony silence between gusts of November wind, its mouth moved, soundless, until the lips finally caught. For a split second, Charlie heard a tonguey, wet click behind the words. A burbling, phlegmy noise, as if his uncle’s entire throat had turned to spit with the trauma of dying. 

Charlie winced, surprised. He’d expected a static echo, a garbled TV transmission or maybe one of those algorithm-generated voice clones. But this… 

“Are you… okay?” Charlie tried. Ridiculous. But ridiculous was the only thing left.

The ghost’s head lolled to the side, mouth hanging in a loose, lazy zero. Its eyes flicked, once, not toward Charlie but past him, like something stood just behind his left shoulder.

Charlie knew better than to look.

He kept his gaze forward, graveward, shoes planted on either side of Frank’s name. For a breath, he thought it was over, a small mercy. But then the wind changed, and the ghost let out another soggy syllable.

“Too-ff… too r-”

“Too rough?” Charlie said, rolling the words around, trying to mimic his uncle’s accent, his exact cadence, feeling awkward, as if his own tongue had to contort mid sentence just to make the ghost feel heard. “Too… what? Too… real? Too late?” 

Frank’s apparition, if it was even that, gave a low, desolate click. A bubble of red swelled briefly from the bullet hole above his temple, then vanished before it could drip. His mouth sagged and closed, eyes fixed somewhere into the soil.       

Charlie felt as if he’d just failed a test. He crouched anyway, heels digging into the dirt, and picked at the waxy grass beside the headstone. “It’s okay, man,” he muttered. “You’re dead. You can… just, like, let go.” The words felt stupid, but he hoped something would stick.

The air twitched. Frank’s mouth opened, shut, opened. “T-t-told… y-y…”

Charlie looked at him confused, ”Told you- told me what?“

The last vestiges of the fragment sputtered, ”Run.“ With that, it faded in the wind, lost to time with the rest of the damned.

Run…? Charlie thought, and then heard a creak behind him.

Demons feed off of emotions, off of strong desire, how could he be so stupid to think one wasn’t trampling around a fucking funeral?

The odor curled into Charlie’s nose before he even heard the sound. Not the sharp chemical tang of an open grave or the sweet, half—baked rot from the lilies—this was burnt plastic and old dog hair, the stench of melted bin bags and the brackish skin underneath. A wet, wooly panic gripped the base of his neck, and he tensed so hard that his knees nearly smacked together. 

He did not turn at once. Instead, he kept his eyes on the grave, only shifting them by the smallest fraction towards the sound behind him. The creaking wasn’t like any human footstep; it was too loose, too elastic, like someone rolling a length of garden hose over dead grass. Some slick fragments of his brain skimmed the headlines for “gutted teenager found in Nebraska cemetery,” but the rest of him remained locked solid, waiting for the thing to finish growing out of its own shadow.

A black sliver slipped into his peripherals, and that was all he needed to run. Immediately, full sprint towards the other side of the cemetery, hoping whatever demon had trudged over would go back and ignore him. Unfortunately, the demon seemingly had decided to give chase.

Charlie had run into a mausoleum, hitting the stone casket full force and knocking him back. He looked up in horror to see a grotesque figure before him. Its eyes were too large, its limbs too wide, the whole body wrong. Like a mockery of what a human should look like.

The demon didn't speak. It stepped ever closer to Charlie, and the teen was too terrified to attempt another run. It grabbed his head, fingers positioned to stab through Charlie's eyes, and it brought their faces together.

Charlie's face burned, his eyes welling up something thick and hot, feeling more like blood than tears. He could feel the demon trying to take hold of him. It was going to use him as a puppet- 

“Vade, retro-" A crack lit through the mausoleum, and a blade bore through the demon's head, narrowly touching Charlie's forehead. With a loud cry, the demon dissipated, leaving any hold it had on Charlie gone.

Charlie lurched forward, suddenly nauseous from the terror and the running. After a decent puke, he looked up-

“Risto!” Christopher sheathed his knife, tucking it back inside his coat. He did not look pleased.

Christopher did a quick scan of the shadows with his eyes, then gripped Charlie’s shoulder just firmly enough to be annoying. “What. The hell. Was that?” His hand, less priest and more cop.

Charlie stammered, “It- it grabbed me, I think it was trying to-” The puked-up bile in his nose made each word a nasal, stinging whine. The world wobbled off-kilter at the edges, like a camera lens battered by the wind.

Christopher inhaled, slow and through his nose, and then, without so much as a comforting pat, hauled Charlie upright by the armpits. “You didn’t answer my question, Charles.” Not Charlie. Charles, full volume, like a teacher with their last nerve frayed to wire.

“I don’t know!” Charlie wiped his face on his sleeve, smearing something wet across his cheekbone. The inside of the mausoleum was freezing, and the outside light came in softer.

Christopher looked back, hearing talking, and grabbed Charlie's wrist. “You're coming with me.” He yanked Charlie off balance, dragging him from the mausoleum all the way to his car. The passing ghosts gave Charlie a look of pity.

 

[cont. next page. tapas limit. fml.]