A Hundred Billion Ghosts Page 2

  Sye was really only a problem at breakfast.

  While it has been asserted that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, Ryan took the concept and ran with it in entirely new directions. It had nothing to do with nutrition. In fact, he specifically avoided nutrition as a factor by selecting only the most honey-coated, multi-colored, vitamin-and-mineral-devoid brands of puffed chemical nonsense on the market. Some had special meaning from his childhood. But he had never stopped discovering new ones, even as he crossed into his 30’s. He had become a connoisseur of them, a sommelier of cereals. He was able to assign exactly the right sugar-frosted puffed-corn-and-marshmallow delicacy to each day based on the time of year, the weather, what he had on his agenda, and how long his present supply of milk had been in the fridge. When he got it exactly right, it could set him up for a day of productivity and success. But when he got it wrong or, worse, when he ran out of milk and had to eat his cereal dry, it could put him in a dark frame of mind that made normal functioning nearly impossible.

  Ryan rarely ate dinner at the table. He liked to watch TV at dinner time and it was hard to see the TV from the kitchen. But he liked to eat breakfast at the kitchen table, because it afforded him a view of the cupboards so that while he ate he could plan what he was going to eat the following day and determine if he needed to pick up anything for it. And in the spring the sunrise aligned with the little kitchen window, providing a bit of light in the morning.

  But Sye’s chair was between Ryan and the window. His vaporous form was dense enough that, while technically Ryan could see the sunrise through him, Sye diffused all the morning brilliance right out of it. It made Ryan resent Sye even more in the spring.

  Plus Ryan couldn’t take Sye staring at him. Sye never spoke, and had one look: an accusing one. Ryan guessed that Sye was mad at him for moving into what Sye probably still considered his home. But Ryan wasn’t moving out over an angry old man, dead for nearly a century. He also wasn’t about to move the chair, since that would likely only make Sye angrier.

  So for a while Ryan regularly took his cereal bowl to the sofa and ate breakfast in front of the TV even though he didn’t want to. And Sye would stay where he was, staring at Ryan’s empty chair as though furious at how Ryan wasn’t in it to be stared at.

  Those were dark days. Holding his bowl in his lap inevitably meant drops of milk falling onto the cushions and soaking in, and sometimes bits of cereal would tumble out into recesses of the sofa where they could never be recovered except by vacuum. Sometimes his mood was so dark that he wouldn’t even finish.

  After a few weeks of that, Ryan decided he was giving Sye too much power. He was going to eat at the table and pretend Sye wasn’t there. That’s what people did post-Blackout: carry on like the ghosts weren’t there. It felt rude at first but constant interaction with them just wasn’t possible. There were too many of them.

  Besides which, Ryan reasoned, this was his place now. Maybe Sye had lived there in the distant past. But his time was done. Just because he was physically constrained to this place forever by some cosmic rule didn’t mean he paid rent. If one of the two of them was an intruder or a squatter, it wasn’t Ryan.

  Emboldened by that, and also by the sour milk smell the couch was taking on, Ryan embarked on a show of territorial strength.

  He started eating breakfast at the table. He half-expected Sye to protest, to angrily overturn the table and demand that Ryan leave. But Sye didn’t react at all. He just stared at Ryan with that seething soup of hate behind his vaporous eyes. Ryan ate in silence and pretended Sye wasn’t there, feeling the old man’s semi-translucent anger directed at him the whole time.

  He kept it up for nearly two years. Eating his breakfast quietly at the table, thinking about tomorrow’s breakfast, glancing up occasionally at Sye and looking quickly away. Neither of them saying anything.

  Two years. And then Sye’s chair fell over, and everything changed.

  Ryan did not kick it on purpose, or at least not completely on purpose. But it was an early morning and Ryan was off to a bad start after trying to get through a bowl of Frosted Flakes without taking notice of Sye’s simmering rage. He had planned Frosted Flakes for this morning because A) it was autumn, B) the forecast called for rain, and C) he had to get up while it was still dark out if he was going to walk to the bus in time. Golden flakes of corn lovingly factory-drenched in sugar could have eased him gently into a miserable day like that. But because of Sye and his relentless eye-hate, the day now promised to be cold and wet and hopeless. When he left the table to get dressed, he passed too close to Sye’s chair and caught the leg with one foot. Almost sort of not on purpose.

  But he completely forgot that Sye had no weight, so he was essentially kicking an empty chair. He had almost sort of not intended to shift it an inch at most, but instead it pivoted a half turn, caught on a protruding floorboard, and tipped. Reflexively, Ryan grabbed the back of the chair to keep it from falling, and his hand passed inadvertently into the substance of Sye’s back.

  Ryan felt a surge of electricity flow upwards through his hand. The hairs on his arm stood on end.

  He had passed through ghosts before, felt that tingle and experienced flashes of foreign emotions and thoughts as their being passed through his. Everyone had. Since the Blackout, it was impossible to walk a block without passing through a dozen of them. People had been doing it even before the ghosts were obvious, only without realizing it.

  This was vastly more powerful. He was blasted by a jolt of sadness-contentment-love-loneliness-joy-humanity-frustration-anger-longing. Ryan thought that it might be everything Sye had ever felt in his entire existence, all compressed into one moment. Its intensity stunned Ryan, and the sheer volume of emotions was staggering, especially given that he had always thought Sye’s emotional range went from rage to smoldering disdain, and nowhere else.

  Ryan jerked his hand back. The chair followed it and toppled backwards, hitting the hardwood with a loud crack as the backrest snapped in half down a jagged diagonal line.

  Sye hadn’t moved. He was still sitting in the chair in stubborn defiance of physics, lying on his back on the floor and aiming his resentment at the ceiling. He seemed to have no awareness that his vertical alignment had changed so radically.

  Still reeling from the rush of emotions that weren’t his, Ryan delicately lifted the chair onto its legs, holding the two halves of the back, each dangling by a single rusted screw, so they wouldn’t come off. He slid the chair back to its spot at the table, and Sye moved with it like he was an immutable, massless part of the chair’s construction. The two disconnected halves of the chair back wouldn’t take any weight, but Sye had no weight and didn’t seem to notice.

  Forgetting the time, Ryan sat across from Sye and studied him for the first time ever. Really looked at him. Sye’s expression hadn’t changed. He looked like he would dive across the table and choke Ryan if he could.

  But Ryan understood now. He had felt Sye’s entire emotional life in fast-forward and first-person, and he knew Sye’s anger had a specific focus. It wasn’t directed at Ryan at all. He had been wrong this whole time.

  It was the chair. Sye wanted out of the chair.

  The chair, wherever it had come from, was his prison. He was doomed to haunt it forever, and it was keeping him from doing… something.

  Despite ruined Frosted Flakes, Ryan’s day was looking up. Because he now understood that he and Sye had something in common.

  They both wanted Sye gone from the breakfast table.

  THREE

  The day after Ryan kicked over Sye’s chair, he arrived home from work to find Benny the Poltergeist trying to push a nearly empty water glass off the kitchen counter. It sat right on the edge, and Benny kept sweeping his hand through it like he was trying to waft away a foul odor, but the glass was refusing to move. Despite the possibility of having to clean up broken glass later, Ryan was glad to find Benny at home because he had spent the entire day at work thinking
about asking him a question. He couldn’t even remember having done any actual work, though there must have been some in there somewhere.

  “Benny, can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Why? Are you scared?” Benny dropped his voice a few octaves and dragged out the word “scared” like a taunt. “Things moving on their own? Noises in the night? Things going missing without explanation?”

  “Are you saying you hid something?”

  “No.”

  “What did you hide?”

  “Nothing. Would you be scared if this glass fell off the counter all by itself?” He swept his hand through it again, evidently hoping that it would finally topple with impeccable dramatic timing. It didn’t. He sagged.

  “I’ll let you keep trying to do that if you answer a question for me.”

  Benny shrugged. “Fair enough.” He hoisted himself onto the counter to listen. Ryan wondered at the contradiction of Benny sitting like that. One minute he could sweep his hand through a glass like it wasn’t there, and the next he could sit on the counter like he was still made of something. How did that work?

  “I’ve seen you leave the apartment,” Ryan said. “You can come and go all you want, right?”

  “Yep. I’m a free spirit! Literally.”

  “How did you get to be that? I heard ghosts have to stay pretty much in one place.”

  “Not all. Some people get lucky. Like me.”

  “How does that work?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about strong emotional attachments at the moment you die. I heard it on a talk show. I guess I didn’t love anyplace when my ticker exploded.”

  “But you’re here most of the time. Did you die here?”

  “Pfft, no. I never even lived here.”

  “So… why are you…” Ryan decided halfway through his question that asking it might lead down a whole tangential road. Benny’s history wasn’t why he had entered this conversation. “What about Sye?”

  Benny looked over at Sye, who was in his broken chair staring indignantly across the table at nothing. “That guy? He’s always been here. Never leaves the chair.”

  “So he’s haunting the chair.”

  “Probably. Poor guy. Can you imagine that? Having to sit forever in a chair from, like, Gilligan’s Island?”

  “Is there any way to break them up? Let him go? Like, can I exorcise the chair or something?”

  Benny snorted derisively. “I’ve been exorcised like five times and it never did anything to me. I mean, I did leave the place after, but only because I wanted to. When a priest tells you to go to Hell, he means it literally. I gotta tell you, it makes you feel pretty unwelcome.” He hopped off the counter and turned his attention back to the water glass. “But if you really want to help him, you could try the Clinic. They do that kind of thing.”

  “What Clinic?”

  “The Post-Mortal Services Clinic. Been open about a year and a half, someplace here in Cambridge I think. Ghosts go there when they need stuff done. If they're haunting something they don't want to be haunting, the Clinic can take care of that. I have this buddy, died of a stroke at a McDonald’s and got stuck haunting a Filet-o-Fish. He must’ve really liked Filet-o-Fish, I guess. Anyway, after a couple of years the thing was really starting to stink. He got his brother to carry it to the Clinic. Pow, no more Filet. He still hangs around that McDonald’s a lot, but I think that’s by choice.”

  Ryan nodded. He had never heard of a Post-Mortal Services Clinic, or known that any such place might exist, but it sounded perfect. He searched around for his tablet to look up the address. “Thanks, Benny. I’ll look into that.”

  “No problem. Now prepare to be terrified.” Benny went back to trying to shove the water glass off the counter. “The secret is, you don’t move the glass. You move the air around the glass.”

  “And that works?”

  “Almost never.”

  A few minutes later when Ryan was dialing the Clinic, he heard the sharp crack of the glass shattering on the floor behind him. And he had to admit that it scared him a little.

  The Post-Mortal Services Clinic turned out to be only a ten-minute walk from Ryan’s apartment, on a drab and busy section of Massachusetts Avenue near Davis Square otherwise populated by banks, convenience stores, and bland four-story apartment boxes.

  Ryan managed to get an appointment on a Saturday morning, early enough that the streets and sidewalks were still quiet. He walked the whole distance with Sye’s chair slung over his shoulder, Sye himself glued resolutely to it and apparently oblivious to the rocking motion of Ryan’s walk. Ryan had refused to consider a later appointment. Every city in the world was thick with ghosts since the Blackout, but the older a city was, the worse they had it. On Saturday afternoons, Boston’s streets were typically bustling with a million or so living people out doing their weekend things. But their numbers were dwarfed by the billion or more ghosts crammed onto every sidewalk and meandering the streets as far as their hauntings would allow them. There was barely a square inch of space in the city not occupied by numerous roaming ghosts. If they weren’t immaterial it would have been impossible for the still-living to move.

  But Ryan was out early, and it was sunny. The living were still asleep, and the ghosts were hard to see. On cloudy days they were practically solid, like the city was submerged in a thick fog with faces. But on a bright day like this their shimmering outlines had no detail, like he was walking through a sea of human-sized soap bubbles. He much preferred these days. It gave the illusion that the street was emptier than it really was. And seeing the details on unfamiliar ghosts was frequently disturbing. Many times he had made accidental eye contact with someone only to realize a second too late that they must have been flattened by a dump truck or fallen off of something high. A semi-translucent gaping head wound is still a gaping head wound. And flat is never a good look, alive or dead.

  The Clinic itself was a monolithic slab of dark brown brick. It was a decade old at most but sported white columns framing the front door in an attempt at classical austerity. It possessed all the “I should whisper when I’m here” somberness of an old church without the stained-glass holiness.

  Ryan couldn’t think why he recognized the building. It wasn’t until he stepped through the front entrance that he figured it out. He’d been here once before, in pre-Blackout days. For a funeral.

  The funeral business had been one of the hardest hit by the effects of the Blackout. With the dead never actually going anywhere, there didn’t seem much point in having a funeral anymore. If you wanted to have a gathering to tell affectionate stories about someone after they died, you were likely to invite them along to join in. So funerals were rare, and funeral homes went out of business almost literally overnight.

  So it wasn’t surprising that the building had been re-purposed. Ryan just felt like they could have tried harder. The inside of the building, though it had clearly been remodeled quite recently, still retained a lot of the same funereal atmosphere it had needed before the Blackout. Except that the waiting room with piped-in classic pop and inspirational fitness magazines would have seemed inappropriate to anyone waiting to put a loved one to rest. Dancing Queen isn’t funeral music.

  If funeral homes had any advantage over other common buildings, it was that they tended not to be overly haunted. While lots of dead people passed through funeral homes, very few of them stayed there. So the waiting room had only current clients in it, one alive and one dead. The ghost was an ancient woman in a hospital gown. She looked old-lady-sweet, almost pixie-ish, except for the wide gash on her abdomen. From his one quick glance Ryan had already surmised that the wound was oozing. It confused him. What could a ghost possibly have inside it that could ooze? He guessed that she must have died in surgery, but that did little to explain the ghostly seepage. The other one waiting was not a ghost but a living man, very slight and balding, with a prodigious mustache. He fidgeted the whole time he waited. Ryan wondered idly what he was there for.
Perhaps he had brought a ghost relative in to have something done, and was waiting for them to come out. He was eventually called in by name, leaving Ryan alone with Sye and the ghostly surgery victim.

  Sye sat in his chair, staring straight ahead exactly as he had always done at home. Ryan had positioned Sye’s chair slightly offset from his so they wouldn’t be staring at each other for the entire wait.

  There was a simple form to fill out for the visit, but Ryan was tripped up by several of the necessary fields. He had no idea what Sye’s last name was, or whether he was a citizen, or his marital status, or indeed anything at all about him. He wasn’t even completely convinced that his first name was Sye. But he didn’t want to risk delaying the appointment, so he just filled it all in with his own name and stats, and hoped nobody would ask. Then he leaned so Sye could see him.

  “Sye, you know why we’re here, right?”

  Sye stared ahead, looking as choleric as ever. Ryan had never received even the slightest hint that Sye comprehended anything. Perhaps he didn’t speak English. Perhaps he couldn’t hear. There was no way to tell.

  Ryan pressed on anyway. “I’m going to get you out of that chair so you can go do… whatever it is you want to do. Forever. Do you understand? No more breakfasts.”

  Still nothing. They sat in silence. Ryan skimmed a pamphlet of the Clinic's services that he found mixed in with the magazines. "Unhaunting" seemed to be the most prominent one, and the one he had brought Sye in for. But there were others he would never have thought of. Ghosts could have their density adjusted to be more visible, or more invisible. If they were trapped in an infinite loop of repetitive action, they could have the loop broken. Other services he had to read about twice and still couldn't understand what they meant.