Chapter Text
“Alison! Alison! Alison!”
Alison sighed, giving up on trying to move the heavy cabinet, and leaning on it instead. Mike barged in, a big smile on his face.
“What? What? What?” countered Alison playfully.
“You’ll never believe- Hey, what are you doing? I thought we said we were going to throw that out?”
“Oh, I know,” Alison said, “Lady B wouldn’t let me. She insisted I put it back in its proper place.”
“Quite right! A family heirloom, that is!” Lady B said, but, of course, Mike couldn’t hear that. She huffed and phased through the wall, but still, Mike was none the wiser. Sometimes, Alison felt for her husband. He was missing so much. So much of the joy, so many jokes, so many annoyances, small grievances, big grievances… You know what, maybe it wasn’t all that bad.
“Need some help with that?” Mike asked, shaking her out of her thoughts.
“Yes! Thank you.”
Mike moved to one end of the cabinet, Alison to the other. “One, two, three,” Mike said, “and lift!”
Very slowly, and with regular stumbles, they managed to move it back to where it stood before, by the window.
“Phew,” Alison said, wiping the sweat of her brow. “Lady B will be pleased. But you wanted to show me something?”
Mike piped up at that. “Yes! Oh, you’re gonna love it! And a certain friend of yours will too! Wait here, I’ll get it!”
Cryptid, but okay. Alison actually didn’t have that many friends, unless you counted the… the ghosts. Surely, Mike wouldn’t...?
Mike came back with a small box in his hands. Alison had to bend over to see what it was. The white paint was chipping off, revealing the metal underneath. There was a cross on the lid.
“It’s a medical kit from the Second World War!” Mike said enthusiastically. “The lady in the shop said it was authentic! And most of the contents are still in it; some first aid dressings, bandages, scissors-“
The rest of the story fell on deaf ears.
There was a man behind Mike.
Alison’s breath hitched. The man was looking right at her. He seemed on edge too. His eyes were dark and sunken, and the left side of his face was mangled. His hair was done in a neat comb over, not a single tuft out of place. He wore a beige shirt, with his tie tucked into the space between the third and fourth button. His pants were a dark green, same as his tie.
All of it pointed to the same fact, that this was an army man. And if Mike couldn’t see him, that meant he was a ghost.
“– adsorbent lint, a tourniquet, and a whole lot of mysterious little bottles and pills,” Mike finished. “Don’t you think the Captain will love this?”
Alison shushed him frantically. “Hey,” she tried to say, but it came out all wrong. When she went to try again, the man was gone. Vanished.
Mike whirled around. “Is he here just now?” he asked. “Hey, Captain, look at this!”
“No, no, Mike,” Alison said, ushering him to turn back. “It was not the Captain. It was someone else. Someone new.”