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The ghoul was watching Wylan as he worked. It was a boy, barely, a half-formed thing of shadows and rags, a face that vanished when you turned to look at it properly. Wylan knew instinctively that it meant no harm, it was just curious. Ghosts were like that, he thought. Just like the living people they once were, with capacity for good and bad and everything in between. Even so, he didn’t acknowledge the wisp of a soul in the corner of his boarding house room. It never helped to encourage them, especially the children. He’d learnt when he was a boy himself that encouraging them meant they would cling on, fight for an abstracted form they weren’t supposed to take, fail to vanish into the shadows when they were meant to. He had regrets about the souls he’d kept here longer than necessary, the ones he’d clung onto himself for a myriad of selfish reasons.
He'd been able to see them since before he could talk. They started as shadows, wisps of darkness, flashes of bone or papery flesh, eyes in the dark of his Geldstraat bedroom that constantly, silently watched him. Because they had always been there, he never learned to fear them. His mother had whispered stories to him about the people who once walked the halls of their house, and over the years he pieced them together with the timorous figures he saw in the hallways. The woman with dark curtains of hair, shadowed eyes ringed red with tears. The young brothers, still running through the garden, plague boils peeking from their shirtsleeves and collars. The elderly man, ever present in the worn velvet chair of the oft-abandoned library, peering out of the window like he was waiting for someone to return home.
He knew without asking that nobody else could see what he saw, and he learnt over many years that it was better (safer, easier, less painful) if he kept silent about it. Them. His madness (as he had come to call it, never truly sure if what he saw was real or not), like his inability to read and write, was a defect his father had tried hard rid him of. He was kept out of ordinary public schools, Jan Van Eck terrified that somebody would realise his son was a lunatic, a born fool who hallucinated nonsense, who was touched in the head. This, in turn, drove Wylan to the ghosts for company, and in his youth, he could frequently be found explaining his drawings to an empty space, or racing through the grass laughing at nothing. Each time he was found, each time he tried to explain, his punishments became more extreme, more violent, more cruelly creative. By the time he turned eleven, he only spoke to the shadows in passing whispers, murmurs under his breath or furtive glances when they hovered in his vision. By the time he turned fifteen, he had taught himself not to acknowledge them at all, keeping his expression blissfully, infinitely blank. Even surrounded, he was alone.
Only the newer spirits spoke, Wylan now knew. The ones who had recently passed were the loudest, the most desperate for comfort or guidance or company. They spoke in odd, disjointed sighs, as though he could only hear them through thick glass or walls of water. The boy in the corner of his room didn’t speak, his soul already discorporate, half there, half brick and mortar of the damp wall behind him. The curiosity rolled from him in waves, and Wylan found himself unconsciously tilting his sketchpad to make it visible. It was a rough design, composite parts of a bomb with a delayed timer.
Some ghosts haunted places. Not always the places they died, Wylan had realised, but the places that mattered to them the most (sometimes they were the same place, in the end). The Barrel was full of them. Translucent, papery hands reaching from alleyways, whimpering shadows peering from filthy windows, skeletal, piteous forms curled on street corners. Souls that had nowhere important to go, so remained where their bodies fell long after the reaper’s barge had collected them up. There were so many new each day that Wylan sometimes struggled to tell them apart from the living, had to focus on their faces when he passed them on the street, had to look for the milky white eyes that told him he wasn’t stepping aside for a living, breathing person, but the shade of one.
***
Kaz Brekker had a ghost. Some ghosts haunted places, yes, but some haunted people. Followed them around like children clutching at coattails, fingers dancing around their shoulders as if to grasp at the living, slipping through fabric and skin and flesh and bone without being noticed. If Wylan could choose, when he died he wanted to haunt a place. He didn’t think he could bear to be trapped with one person, someone who never knew you were there, watching their life go on, watching them blossom and wither and eventually join you. The ghost that followed Kaz was already half gone, only visible in the shimmering of light, like the flashing silver scales of a fish below water. The eye that Wylan had seen was as dark as Kaz’s, set in blanched, bloated skin. Wylan had fought to keep his focus on Kaz as he’d spoken, blocking out the mottled blue lips, the blackened, rotting boils, the roiling anger that seemed to burn from both the ghost and the living boy in front of him. It was the living boy who had approached Wylan as he trudged his way back from the tannery, asking with the confidence of somebody who knew the answer if Wylan needed money, if Wylan could make what he was looking for. Wylan had always sworn he wouldn’t create more ghosts, but hunger curled in his stomach and ached in his bones, and he’d promised to try.
***
The Wraith, or Inej, Wylan later found, was haunted in a different way, but haunted, nonetheless. She was very much alive, but her movements, her comfort in the shadows, her fondness for silence all reminded him of the ghosts he lived with. He imagined that when she finally died (not that he could imagine anyone defeating her, not even Death himself) her body wouldn’t fall, it would simply melt into the black night like it had always belonged there. For a while, Wylan had thought Inej could see them too. He’d watched her stare into the space over people’s shoulders, turn or flinch at the rustle of fabric or sounds that she shouldn’t have heard. He’d considered, in the dark murkiness of the Crow Club, asking her what she saw. He never worked up the courage, and as they spent more time together, as they slowly, painstakingly carved out a family for themselves on ships and in tanks and in tombs, he came to learn that she wasn’t seeing the ghosts he saw. Instead, she was feeling the ghosts of her past, protecting herself from their hands, their bodies, even now.
***
Nina Zenik controlled life with her hands. She could slow people’s hearts, send their blood rushing through their veins, or cut the movement off in the blink of an eye. Ghosts avoided her, he noticed, as if they were fearful that she would sense their lack of a heartbeat, their lack of life, the way they walked the thin barrier between worlds. After jurda parem, after it became apparent that Nina’s powers had changed, had been perverted somehow, Wylan watched her. The ghosts stopped avoiding her. Instead, they followed her, a constant blurring crowd of fragmented, displaced limbs and features, whispering and whimpering in her wake. The first time she raised the dead, Wylan felt a fear he hadn’t felt in years. He had never feared the ghosts, but they had never been able to touch him before. They had never been real, though he knew that ‘real’ was a slippery, shifting thing, like ink dropped into water. When the fear passed, he sought her out, confided in her. Words tumbled from his lips, truths and fears he had never shared, stories of displaced souls he’d helped, hindered, or ignored. A voice, suspiciously like his father’s, hissed at him that she would know he was mad, that he had given himself up, walked himself to the asylum. She held his hand tightly, interlocking their fingers with her cold hand, and believed him.
***
The ghost that followed Matthias Helvar was a child. It was a ghoul that Wylan worked hard to ignore, a girl who barely reached the Fjerdan’s waist, a girl of two halves. One half icy blonde features and pale, snow-like skin, a delicate blue eye framed in white-gold lashes. The other half charred and still smoking, the skin that was still visible bubbling and blistered, hair singed to the sticky remnants of her scalp. She hid herself behind Matthias’s arm, peering out at Wylan like a spooked fawn with the hollow socket of her scorched face. Wylan could feel the fear she had felt as she died, and he could feel the intensity of her love for her brother. He couldn’t tell which feeling kept her here. They were all supposed to make it, but they didn’t. A few days after Nina had curled herself around Matthias’s body on the reaper’s barge, Wylan saw him again, hovering at the edge of the canal. He stood tall and proud, with that same small frown of disapproval Wylan had grown used to. They held each other’s gazes, and Wylan watched understanding bloom in once-blue eyes. Matthias was holding his sister’s hand as Wylan walked away.
***
Jesper Fahey was the most living person Wylan had ever met. He breathed life into every room he entered, practically thrummed with it, shone with it. Wylan was addicted the first time they met, hooked on it despite jibes and digs and insults. The ghost that followed Jesper was barely a ghost, more of a light. A golden, warm, glowing light that suffused his very existence, that radiated hope and pride and protectiveness. It was a light that felt like love, a love that Wylan had no choice but to feel too, in the end. When they moved into Wylan’s childhood home, a house haunted by much more than just ghosts, Wylan confessed everything like a prayer. Jesper knew about one defect, and Wylan needed to know they could survive the other. Jesper grinned, spun Wylan around in a maddening embrace, and insisted that Wylan introduce him to all of their new housemates (despite explaining that it did not work that way, Wylan gave in to the hilarity of showing Jesper all of the ghosts in the home, and for the first time in years, laughter filled the halls). In the quiet of the night, Jesper falteringly, helplessly asked about his mother. The golden light surged, filled the room, and faded. Wylan kissed him gently and told him she was proud.