A Hundred Billion Ghosts Read online

  A Hundred Billion Ghosts

  by DM Sinclair

  Copyright © 2017 by DM Sinclair. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  CONTENTS

  Review

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  Also By DM Sinclair

  Before you go

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Remember to leave a review on Amazon! Reviews make authors happy.

  Book 1 of 100,000,000,000.

  “In my mind, if there was life after death and there were spirits who survived and could, in any way, communicate with us back here on Earth, it would be incredibly obvious. The afterlife would be as obvious as the existence of Canada. It wouldn’t be just some stories that are told between this person and that person. Everybody would see it all the time.”

  - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist

  ONE

  The room held its breath, and so did everyone in it.

  A hush spread through the party guests clustered in a horseshoe around the end of the kitchen counter.

  The host of the party held up a hand to keep them silent. They listened.

  There was a long moment of nothing. Silence and stillness.

  And then, faintly, a knock. It came from nowhere specific, had no visible cause. But it did not feel random. It was not a noise of the house.

  It felt intentional. Something had knocked.

  A woman shrieked, and it seemed to give others permission to laugh in disbelief, to whisper in awed tones to each other, to demand that the party host reveal how he was doing this, to insist that it was a trick. But the host shushed them all and denied in a whisper that it was him. Listen now. Listen.

  He asked another question into the air. “Are you standing next to me right now? One for yes and two for no.”

  The guests stood tense as another moment drew out long.

  Silence but for the soft white noise of the air conditioning. Nobody breathed.

  Knock.

  The room jumped, startled. More gasps and laughter.

  The host held up a hand again. Silence flooded the room.

  He closed his fists, and his eyes. This would be the big one. They could tell.

  “Did you die in this house?”

  They listened.

  The woman who had shrieked before bit her fist to keep from doing it again.

  Some scanned for any hint of movement, for any obvious source of the sound. Maybe to glimpse… something. What, they didn’t know.

  Listen.

  They listened.

  The silence pressed in, enveloping them.

  At this point, Ryan Matney stepped in from the other room and announced how much he had enjoyed the nachos, but he would have to leave early, and whoever was parked behind him could they come out and move their car?

  He wasn’t leaving early because of the disembodied knocks. He wasn’t leaving because the party wasn’t fun. And he wasn’t leaving because he didn’t like the people at it, most of whom were vague work acquaintances from the call center and the customer service department that he had no particular feelings about.

  He was leaving early because it was a work night. And was a couple more hours of party today worth a day spent slightly tired at work tomorrow? Of course it wasn’t. He had been slightly tired today, for example, and it had made the day very difficult. Or rather, he suspected it had. He didn’t remember much of how his day at work had gone, given how he had spent most of it thinking about coming to this party.

  About a half hour after the party started, he began watching for that golden opportunity to leave. There would surely be a lull where he could nab the host, his supervisor Dave, and say it had been great but unfortunately he had a thing and thank you and goodbye.

  When a woman that he recognized from order processing whose name he couldn’t remember admitted that she recognized him from the call center but didn’t know his name, he answered: “Ryan Matney. I will be leaving early.” He just thought it prudent to warn her in advance, in case they wound up talking for a long time.

  They didn’t.

  After that, Ryan was mostly thinking about what route he would take to get home. He just needed the perfect opening to say his thank-you’s and goodbyes without making a spectacle of his exit.

  It came just before ten o’clock.

  Dave, whose house this was, had just finished a conversation with a small cluster of people and was moving alone towards the kitchen.

  Now. Make your move.

  That’s when Dave stood up on a chair and announced to the room that this house was haunted, and he could prove it.

  Every part of Ryan that could clench, clenched. Now what was he supposed to do?

  Dave shut the music off and Ryan realized that he hadn’t noticed it was on. He couldn’t remember a single song that had played during the entire time he had been there.

  As the party flocked to the kitchen area, Ryan attempted to catch Dave’s eye with head movements and strong glances and throat clearing, which he regarded as the universal language of “I gotta go”. But Dave was busy nodding and assuring everyone he was serious about the haunting, slapping their backs and herding them into the kitchen. Ryan missed his chance.

  He hung back in the living room, thinking about how he would definitely be hitting the snooze button tomorrow from staying out too long, and how that had the potential to wreck the whole day.

  Things went dead silent in the kitchen for several minutes. Ryan could see people’s backs through the doorway, but he couldn’t see Dave in the crowd. There were occasional vague remarks and titters, and he thought he heard Dave’s voice but he couldn’t be sure.

  After several minutes of pretending to be checking his phone, he decided to just go. He got his coat from the bedroom and made one more attempt to see if Dave was reachable through the kitchen door. But he wasn’t. So Ryan smiled apologetically in case anyone was glancing his way and slipped out.

  A few minutes later he slipped back in because someone was parked behind his car in the driveway.

  Everyone was still in the kitchen. People laughed and gasped, and he thought he heard somebody shriek. Everyone’s attention was elsewhere, and their backs formed an impenetrable wall across the doorway. This would be tricky. Possibly even impossible. Ryan had never been someone who could stride into the middle of a party, demand everyone’s attention, and make an announcement. Nor did he wish to be.

  But something had to be done. An entire day of
not-being-slightly-tired depended on it.

  So he strode into the middle of the party, demanded everyone’s attention, and made an announcement.

  “I gotta take off! Dave, sorry, I really gotta go. Thanks for everything, it was great. And great to see all of you again! Whoever brought those nachos, wow, those were great! I think I ate, like, half of them. Anyway… oh, who’s got the beige Prius? Do you think you could back out for a second so I can get out? Anyone? Beige Prius?”

  As soon as he had finished talking, the lights went out.

  It was immediately clear that this was not a light bulb popping. Nor was it all the house lights being switched off, or a fuse blowing. Even stray light from the city outside vanished. The house slipped into darkness like a dying ship sinking into an abyss, cold black pressing in on the windows hard enough that they seemed about to crack.

  Ryan couldn’t help but feel upstaged.

  Gasps rippled through the guests and everyone jostled. Ryan backed off but couldn’t escape the press of unseen people in the dark.

  Dave was saying something like “It’s okay, everyone, just give it a minute.” His voice drowned in the murmur of other people voicing theories, reassurances, and fears. Some cracked jokes. “Great party, Dave!”, and “Are you trying to get rid of us?”

  A few people turned on their cellphone displays and swung them around like hazy floodlights, giving Ryan a vague sense of where everyone was. He navigated through the flickering crowd to a space in the dining area attached to the kitchen. Pushing past a table, he squeezed himself into a corner where there was a patio door looking out over the backyard into the street.

  He pulled out his own cellphone to check the time and try to predict what impact this would have on tomorrow. But when the display lit up, it wasn’t the time he fixated on.

  It was the “No Service” warning in the corner.

  He reset the phone, but the warning stayed lit. He had not seen that warning since he bought the phone, and it alarmed him. He looked out the window at the black city.

  “Hey,” he asked whoever was closest to him, trying to be heard above the general hubbub. “Do you have service?” He waggled his phone.

  “Does anybody have service?” whoever was next to him asked the whole party a moment later.

  He saw faces light up as cellphone displays were checked. The responses came back.

  “No.”

  “No service.”

  “Nothing.”

  Brisk footsteps crossed the kitchen, and somebody fumbled with something plastic. Dave’s voice: “Landline is dead too.”

  The joking stopped. The realization permeated the crowd that this was serious.

  Ryan wanted to get home. Doubly now, because not only was some global disaster apparently happening, but he was also now sure that tomorrow morning at work would be a total wash.

  He looked out into the street again, hoping to see street lamps coming on. There must be emergency generators or something, he told himself. They have ways of dealing with stuff like this.

  He was surprised to find that the street was not dark anymore. But the light was not street lamps.

  It was people.

  Human forms bathed in soft white light, moving. At first he thought it was people out using their cellphones as flashlights to find their way home. But there were too many of them. They were filling the street, and meandering. Not headed anywhere. And he couldn’t see them holding any phones or lights at all. Yet their shapes were getting brighter, more distinct by the second, like fluorescent bulbs just switched on and warming up.

  In the faint, diffuse light, the people looked almost translucent.

  No. They were translucent.

  Ryan pressed his hands to the glass, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Some other party people noticed and squeezed in around him. Fresh mutterings of “what is that?” and “do you see that?” circled the kitchen.

  Whoever had shrieked before shrieked again from somewhere in the kitchen. And so did somebody else.

  Ryan spun around and his breath caught in his throat as he saw what the others had already seen.

  There was a semi-transparent, shimmering form of a man standing next to Dave in the kitchen. He was slight, almost skeletal, and a little hunched. And he was dressed in flannel pajamas, what color Ryan couldn’t tell because of his transparency.

  The man—no, the ghost—appeared surprised, even fearful, to be seen. He let his eyes wander across all the faces. Nobody moved. He looked like a stage actor who had just forgotten his lines.

  As they watched, he stretched out a bony arm with trembling trepidation, closed his fist, and knocked on the counter. It took three tries, his fist disappearing into the substance of the counter on each try. But on the third, he made a faint, soft tap.

  Everyone screamed again. Including the ghost himself, although he appeared to do so just because he wanted to fit in.

  The lights blinked startlingly alive, illuminating the screaming faces. And while the light greatly reduced the generally scary atmosphere of the moment, the ghost was still there. So nobody stopped screaming.

  In the midst of all this, Ryan thought if he could find the owner of the Prius, he might still leave early and save tomorrow. The ghosts would probably be gone by then, so he’d have to be ready for a normal day.

  He was wrong, though. They weren’t gone. By that standard of “normal”, the world’s normal days were pretty much over.

  TWO

  Four years later.

  When Ryan first moved into his apartment in Cambridge near Harvard Square, there were three ghosts haunting it.

  Which was, obviously, far fewer than he expected. Normally for the kind of rent this place was asking, he would have expected to be stuck with a dozen at least.

  So he signed a two-year lease even though, aside from the ghosts, the place was a horror show.

  It was the third floor of a century-old three-story house. It had creaky floors and low ceilings and walls that slanted and bent alarmingly. The windows were small and narrow, and seemed to allow in only what scant light passed a pat-down and rigorous background check. Its location seemed precisely calculated for maximum inconvenience in commuting anywhere on the T. Everything in it rattled, or creaked, or dripped. The radiator did all three, and yet the heat from it never permeated beyond the three-foot bubble immediately surrounding it. There were frequent other noises from above, below, and all other sides that he variously wrote off as squirrels, water heaters, or “settling”. On one occasion he went down to the basement to see if he could make one of the noises stop, and had gotten trapped down there by a sticky door for an entire night. Which was fine, because the rank basement was actually far more comfortable and quiet than his apartment. That had been his best night’s sleep in the house so far.

  Ryan didn’t plan to be there forever. He saw it as a temporary stepping stone on his way to buying a property, perhaps even in two years when his lease was up. Three at most. Then he’d forget that these few years of cold, creaking, and commuting had ever happened. That he was presently forced to live through them was something he put out of his mind.

  But only three ghosts was nice. Practically solitude. And solitude was in short supply since the Blackout. In the weeks following that event, most people thought that the solar flare—or whatever it was—had brought all the ghosts back from some other place. But the truth was that they had never actually left. Whatever freakish charge the flare blasted into the Earth’s atmosphere, it just made the ghosts of everyone who had ever died much more apparent. And there were, by conservative estimates, about a hundred billion of them. So it was tough afterwards to find a solitary place anywhere in the world, given that ghosts tended to occupy all the spaces people used to have solitude in. And all the other spaces too.

  Ghost number one in Ryan’s apartment was Benny, killed by heart attack in 1983 at the physical age of thirty-eight and the mental age of about twelve. He had busied himself since his death by
scaring people: making things move on shelves, writing threatening messages in dust, and so forth. Before the Blackout, when ghosts were still invisible, he would have been called a “poltergeist”. And indeed the movie of that name had come out shortly before his death, and he cited it as inspiration for his post-death hobby. Benny still kept up his old habits even after the Blackout, not bothered by the fact that he could now be seen doing them. What might once have seemed like the machinations of a terrifying trickster spirit, now seemed like a fat guy in a tracksuit being a bit of a jerk. Ryan had one morning caught him on the kitchen counter, trying and failing to open all the cupboard doors. And every time someone knocked at the front door, Benny would bolt for it first with a cry of “I’ll get it!”. Yet in the years Ryan had been there Benny had never once managed to get it open. These tricks were an annoyance, but Benny was otherwise friendly enough. And he spent a lot of his time out of the apartment, “scaring” people elsewhere. So Ryan didn’t mind him.

  The second ghost was a man whom Ryan took to be an Algonquian tribesman, likely dead since long before the Europeans had even arrived. He wasn’t inclined towards communication, so Ryan didn’t know his name or anything about him. He spent nearly all of his time fairly unobtrusively in the fridge. If you opened the fridge door you could see his body up to the neck, and if you opened the freezer door above it you could see his face staring at you in astonishment over a bag of frozen Lima beans. Ryan so rarely saw him that he didn’t mind him at all. Ryan would say the occasional hello when he needed to get ice cubes, and the ghost might, on a good day, grunt in reply. But that was about the extent of their interaction.

  The third, of course, was Sye. Sye was the problem.

  Sye looked to be in his 80’s, and although he never spoke, Ryan guessed from his clothes that he had died sometime in the 1940’s or perhaps 50’s. He never moved from the kitchen chair that had been in the apartment already when Ryan moved in. It was an objectively hideous chair made of some unidentifiable yellowish wood that was somehow developing fresh new knots on top of its old knots as it aged, and it appeared to be lashed together with strips of varnished bark. Ryan kept it when he moved in, partly because he needed another chair, but mostly because he was waiting for Sye to vacate it so that he could remove it discreetly. But Sye never, ever left it. Ryan had to guess that the chair had special meaning for Sye. Maybe he had built it himself. It was old enough. But it didn’t seem like an achievement to be proud of, or attached to.