The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker Read online

  Sitting on the narrow metal staircase, she wrapped her arms around her knees. The sun had risen, turning the sky a pale blue. She’d been here all night. In the car park below, the spaces on either side of her car were filling up as people arrived for lectures. If she looked closely, she would probably see someone she recognized, on their way to their early morning Digital Photomedia class.

  She hadn’t managed to make many friends in her first few weeks of uni. Everyone in her lectures had started joking and messing around right on day one, but she could never find a good entry point into any conversations. Not that they were talking about anything interesting, anyway.

  She used to sit on her own before the professor arrived, researching new cameras and lenses online, or planning new videos to film. Photography was what she was there to do, after all. Making friends could wait until later, when she’d achieved everything she wanted to achieve.

  Lights glimmered on the horizon. Somewhere in the city, Harriet’s grandmother was wobbling across the kitchen in her ankle cast to make tea and porridge, carefully bending down to feed the cat, and probably calling BT to check whether her landline was connecting properly. She would settle down with her knitting, and it would be hours before she realized that Harriet’s call wasn’t just a phone malfunction.

  Disappointment boiled in her stomach, morphing into something dense and painful until she wasn’t sure whether she was sad or angry. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. This wasn’t who she was. She was going to graduate with a first-class Photography degree, and then move to New York or Paris and get a job as a photographer for Vogue. She was supposed to be happy and successful and beautiful, with a string of glamorous model lovers and a penthouse apartment.

  She wasn’t meant to die in a crumbling, undignified block of student housing, or abandon her grandmother just when she needed her most. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to people like her.

  I know, it’s painful to watch. She’s so desperate to get home.

  Everything always comes back to family in the end. To the ones you love, or the ones you hate – the people who are closest to you. To get revenge or get away or get back to them. Blood is blood is blood. This is going to be important later, so pay attention.

  Chapter 4

  FELIX

  To Felix’s surprise, Kasper returned to the foyer on his own, shaking his head in disappointment. “It didn’t work. Her gran couldn’t hear her, and she’s gone off somewhere. I think she wanted to be on her own.”

  Felix exhaled. He hadn’t expected it to work, but he’d thought the process of trying might settle Harriet’s anxiety a bit. Clearly not.

  There was something disappointed in Kasper’s expression, like he’d been hoping for more to come from his time with Harriet. Felix wished that Harriet hadn’t died, for his own sake as well as hers. He’d grown used to having Kasper’s attention to himself, however abrasive that attention might be.

  “It was a long shot, I guess,” Rima said.

  Leah wrinkled her nose. “I suppose we’ll just have to ignore the smell until someone finds her body on their own, then.”

  Claudia let out a burble, wriggling in her swaddling.

  Felix sniffed. The corpse hadn’t started to smell, not yet, after only one night. But there were other reasons to want it gone – it was safer all around if there was no chance of anyone getting their hands on it.

  Kasper dropped down to sprawl on the floor next to Felix, leaning against an old sponge sofa cushion. The university had emptied the building after they’d shut it down, but over the years, squatters had brought bits of cheap furniture in with them – beach chairs and patio furniture, rotting pillows stolen from skips. The squatters didn’t stay long, and they nearly always left this stuff behind when they moved on.

  “Her phone is so futuristic, guys,” Kasper said. “It can go on Usenet without a cable!”

  He lounged to drop his head onto Felix’s shoulder.

  Rima blinked. “The phone works without a modem?”

  “Without any cables at all!” Kasper confirmed. “No beeping!”

  “It was completely silent?” Felix looked flabbergasted, blowing Kasper’s hair out of his mouth. “I don’t believe you. I wonder if Harriet would mind if I went and had a look.”

  Felix had a lot of things he wanted to check online. He’d spent decades agonizing over all the new comic releases he’d missed out on since he died. Who even knew what had happened to Captain America since 1994? There might actually be a film out by now, though he wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle seeing Steve Rogers onscreen. His crush was bad enough as it was.

  He could go and look it up right now. Though, it was probably rude to use it while Harriet was hiding away somewhere crying. Rima would tell him off with wide, disappointed Disney-princess eyes, and it wasn’t worth the eyes. He could wait a bit longer. But he’d have to do it before anyone else found out there was a functioning phone up for grabs.

  Rima had an ongoing feud with several of the other ghosts in the building, because they didn’t have the same standards of moral behaviour as her. She disapproved strongly of inter-spirit theft, resource-hoarding and anti-social hauntings. The others did not.

  Because of that, Felix and his friends tended to keep themselves separate from the others. On more than one occasion, he’d had to hold Rima back from a fight with some random student. It was better this way, anyway – Felix got too shy to speak when he was in large groups, and Leah could barely stand the three of them, let alone anyone else. They were very happy as they were. There had been Lisa too once, but she had disintegrated years ago.

  “Harriet reminds me of Lisa,” Felix said, realizing for the first time why she seemed so familiar.

  He regretted it when Kasper flinched at her name, his muscles going tense where they rested against Felix’s side.

  Before she had disintegrated, Lisa had been just as nonchalantly cool as Harriet seemed to be. Harriet’s aloofness came across as effortless and charismatic, but Felix thought she was probably just nervous.

  “I hated Lisa,” Leah said. “She was too loud.”

  “You hate everyone,” Kasper said.

  “I hate most people, not everyone,” Leah said. “But Lisa was especially irritating. It’s no wonder she passed on so quickly; she used up all her energy chatting bubbles.”

  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.

  She was half hoping to see police cars through the window now, but the car park was quiet.

  Felix cleared his throat. He seemed to be debating whether to say something. “Listen, I can relate to wanting to leave. I have people on the outside too. My twin brother … he was out clubbing on the night of our deaths, and he survived. Oscar’s in his forties now.”

  Harriet had forgotten again how old the ghosts all were. Forty was ancient.

  “That must be weird,” she said, trying to work out what to say. Rima, who was lying on the floor cuddling a fox spirit, tapped her foot against Felix’s back in sympathy. Harriet couldn’t offer that to Felix. She barely knew him – and besides, showing affection had never come easily to her.

  Felix sighed. “He’s had this whole life that I’m not a part of. He’s lived longer without me than he did with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Harriet said. “You must miss him a lot.”

  “He comes to visit sometimes. To Mulcture Hall, I mean.” Felix rubbed his thumb over his lower lip.

  A fizz of excitement spread up her spine. “Can he see you?”

  “What?” He looked at her, surprised. “No, of course not. He – he just comes and sits in my bedroom. On the anniversary.”

  “Don’t you ever want to talk to him?”

  “I do,” Felix said. “I tell him everything, even though he can’t hear me. He just cries.”

  Rima shuffled around to hug him, while Kasper patted Felix’s shoulder. Harriet’s nails bit into her palms. Watching them interact was giving her a lot to think about. She almost wanted to take notes, to try to work out what they meant by everything they said to each other. Her curiosity was mixed with a deep-seated envy.

  “He knows you love him,” Rima said. “That’s all that matters.”

  Harriet didn’t understand how his brother could have visited for all these years and it had never even occurred to Felix to find a way to communicate with him. “But if you tried, if we just searched for a way to talk to him—”

  “Harriet, there isn’t a way. I know you want to talk to your gran, but it’s impossible, just like leaving the building.”

  Harriet curled her lips around her teeth, restraining herself from shouting at him. They had all just given up. They were stagnant. They probably didn’t know anything about how being a ghost even worked.

  She took
a deep breath, calming herself down. She couldn’t yell at him. She still needed to get more answers out of them.

  “I just want to understand the physics of how it all works,” she explained. “Why can my phone recognize my voice, but my gran couldn’t? I can’t pick things up, but I don’t fall through the floor. And I can push my way through doors, but lean against them, too. This ghost logic doesn’t make any sense.”

  “We don’t really know how these things work, either,” Felix said. “Personally, I’ve got some theories, but we have no way of proving anything.”

  “You should talk to Qi, though,” Rima added. “She’s done all kinds of cool experiments on it.”

  “Experiments?” Harriet was surprised. What kind of experiments did a ghost do?

  “Yeah, she was doing a Chemistry PhD when she was alive. She wants to work out what happens to ghosts after they disintegrate by doing tests on animal spirits and stuff.”

  “Like that fox?” Harriet gestured to the fox spirit that was lying next to Rima.

  Rima looked horrified. “No! I meant rats and mice, or insects. Cody is a friend.”

  “How do you tame a fox, anyway?” Harriet asked Rima, trying to keep the disgust out of her voice. Cody gave her the phantom itch of fleas. She could see its ribs through its patchy fur. It looked like it had rabies.

  “Don’t even go there,” Kasper warned. “If you get her started, she’ll never shut up.”

  Rima said, gruffly offended, “Hey.” She winked at Harriet. “I’ll show you later.”

  Sighing, Harriet touched the concrete floor to test the limits of her incorporeality. She couldn’t move physical objects, but she could make contact when she focused on them. Or was she just imagining what it would feel like?

  Her body was operating as if she was still human, because she expected it to. She would probably bleed if her skin was cut too, just because she expected to bleed. She projected her memories of being human on her spirit.

  When she lay down, her head popped through the ceiling of the floor below.