Chapter Text
Veritas could smell the rain before it fell. Slow, heavy drops that, in a few minutes, rushed nearly horizontally down the railway platform. If he deduced correctly, it - the spirit, ghost, or increasingly unlikely, a figment of his sleep-deprived mind - would appear again. He braced himself as he looked back, past the hollow between this platform and the next.
It was there.
The man didn’t look like a ghost. He wasn’t pale, and he didn’t float. If the rain didn’t fall through him, Veritas would say he was real, more so than the commuters huddled under the station canopies, each in their own orbit - looking down at their phones, or vaguely somewhere, or, with their eyes closed, not looking at all.
Still, the ghost was real in ways other people were not. With its arrival, Veritas felt a familiar numbness seeping through his body. The expressions of the commuters began to peel away, and the train announcements and the patter of thousands of raindrops flickered, then hushed - all signs the moment was coming. The moment only he experienced, when time slowed, and everything was suspended in that space between dreaming and waking. There was no movement, no sensation: his body merely a set of eyes that opened and looked. For the twenty years of his life, he was the sole observer of this false world. Alone, he had watched skies fold into paper-mache, watched scraps of leaves and debris deface platforms, sidewalks, bridges, roads, like pencil shavings left behind by some forgetful god.
Until the ghost looked back. Those eyes, rings of cyan and magenta, enveloped Veritas in their intimate glow.
Veritas wasn’t religious or superstitious. From the psychologists he had seen and the books he had consulted, this phenomenon was likely a symptom of his social isolation as a gifted child, a reaction to having no intellectual peers on a similar cognitive level with whom to interact. As he grew older, he was uninterested in socialising altogether, and the problem remained diagnosed but unresolved.
So, the first time the ghost appeared, Veritas thought he was just tired. It stood outside the glass panes of the cafe, untouched by the rain. He’d blinked. Once, then twice, the chatter of the café growing distant. Those eyes looked into his, close enough for him to notice the black slits of the ghost’s pupils, the shadows settling between the cheek and brow bones of his deep-set eyes. Then, the ghost had disappeared, and he’d jolted awake to the barista glaring at him for holding the line. Surely, he thought, this was a consequence of working late nights, when, more often now, he’d been woken by some dream he couldn’t remember and decided to work on his thesis until his eyes stung, and the figures on his screen blurred, swelling into one dark mass.
He had the work ethic of a penitent, his supervisor joked. With the appearance of this ghost for the fifth time, now at the station, perhaps he did have something to repent for. What his sin was, he didn’t know. He closed his eyes and searched through his memories. Flashes of the places he had occupied, the people he had known: the porch with the cushioned swings, the school library he’d tucked himself into every lunchtime; the garbled voices of his mother, father, teachers, peers, flitting in and out of his mind in varying frequencies – clearer for his parents, who had farewelled him with a light embrace and an understanding of their son’s desire for solitude.
Overall, a quiet, forgettable existence.
He opened his eyes, fixing them on the ghost again. The first sensation to return was his heart, pulsing with the rattling of the train as the steel carriages hurtled past, effacing the ghost from view. When his hands regained feeling, he pulled out his notebook. 5:28 pm, at the railway station, he recorded; its appearance lasted approximately 45 seconds and with it, came the rain. Movement within the moment detected, but the ghost bore no harm or malignance. There was little deviation from the previous four encounters, except –
The tightening of his chest, sudden and searing. An ache rolling through him in restless waves. The notebook fell from his hands as he clutched at his heart. Each wave left him panting, suffocating. Yet, he took his breaths as shallow as possible, for he knew something sharp, like a needle, was lodged inside his lungs. He had no words to describe what his body knew, knew in the same way his hands recoiled from the flames of the stove, or his feet anchored themselves behind the yellow line, retreating from the hollow between platforms. It was different from the moments of suspension - they had been numb and painless, as if he was a satellite in transit observing a distant world.
He didn’t know how long the pain lasted. When it was over, his notebook had been trampled by the hundreds of commuters pressing into the train, which had already come and left. The rain had stopped, draining into pools of darkness. He sighed, slid the crumpled lumps of paper into the bin, and collapsed into the bench, free now that the station had been emptied of its inhabitants.
***
Little by little, his world began to unravel.
He found he couldn’t climb the stairs to the third floor of his apartment, an exercise he usually welcomed, without grasping the railings. He couldn’t walk through the living room without stubbing his toe on the chaise lounge, or tripping over papers that had fallen because he couldn’t bring himself to organise his desk. Sometimes, he kicked the lounge in frustration. He would stare at the swelling red on his foot afterwards, horrified by how his calm had become undone by something so small, so mundane.
The ghost came and left as quickly as before, and when it disappeared, the same waves of agony surged through Veritas’s body. They had completely replaced that feeling of numbness which had accompanied Veritas for the twenty years of his life.
Had he somehow disturbed the eternal rest of the dead? The research he began to conduct – paranormal sightings, mythologies, stories, testimonies – told of the vengeance, or at least the acknowledgement sought by ghosts towards their living perpetrators. Fragments of memory scattered and lodged themselves in the people who had witnessed, then forgotten their lives. Their legacy condemned to the past, they appeared in imprints, in traces, beginning with barely perceptible sounds and visions until the space seethed with their presence. Sometimes, they were inherited through family lines, and they became mindless hauntings to those who did not understand the grief, trauma, and guilt which suddenly displaced them. Veritas called home, but he could find nothing about some family trauma or crime.
Or, the ghost could be a hallucination, and Veritas needed serious psychiatric help. For some reason, this was the last option he considered, and he considered this option only fleetingly. Something was real about this ghost, something lost which was gradually coming back.
He was poring over the books in his apartment when he heard the rain falling again. He scanned the rooms, expecting the ghost to appear at any moment. Nothing in his living room, or bedroom. Nothing on the balcony either. He could only wait, alone and uncertain, feeling the pulsing of the rain as if it were a presence.
A knock at the door, then the sound of footsteps receding - his groceries. The fact he was having his groceries delivered alerted him to the extent of his impairment; it was impossible for him to haul his groceries up the three flights of stairs. He unlocked the door and stepped out, startling when he met those eyes of cyan and magenta. The ghost also seemed to flinch in surprise. Had he been standing here, outside the door, for the 32 minutes since the rain had began falling, like a guest that had arrived early and was afraid to trouble the host? The ghost looked somewhat… miserable. Though, he bore the same neutral expression: lips thinned into a thin curve that reminded Veritas of the sanitised expressions of company photos. And Veritas didn’t know if the ghost had feelings.
They stared each other down for a few, awkward moments, before Veritas cleared his throat. “Would you like to come in?” he suddenly said, surprising even himself. The ghost slowly nodded. Those eyes seemed to quiver, but it could’ve been the bolt of lightning slashing through the sky.
Inside his apartment, attempting to converse with the ghost sitting on the chaise lounge –apparently, the ghost was material enough to leave an indent in the fabric - Veritas made two discoveries:
- The ghost didn’t desire to or couldn’t speak. Open questions were met with a blank stare, and the ghost could only nod or shake its head.
- For some closed questions, the ghost didn’t respond. “Do we know each other?” Veritas asked. He was met with an uneasy silence.
“Look,” Veritas sighed. There was little information one could glean from closed questions alone, and the questions that were significant were left unanswered. “I’m on my last legs. Won’t you provide me a clue?
The ghost nodded. It stood from lounge and lingered in the doorway, pointing its index finger outside.
“Would you like me to follow you?” A nod. Perhaps, the ghost would lead him to a significant place, one profound to its life and death. What couldn’t be shared with a mere nod or shake of the head could perhaps be seen. Whether that be in the physical world, or in some other space, deep and searing - a space Veritas was becoming more and more attuned to, could feel it in his body. He fetched his umbrella from the stand.
“Lead the way.”