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Edwin Payne didn’t plan to stay long. Although it’s been seventy years, he couldn’t help but reminisce about his time at St. Hilarion’s Boarding School for Boys. Unfortunately, his time at school was cut short due to a group of boys causally offering his soul to a demon in Hell.
Anyways . . . he doesn't plan to stay for long. The hallways feel longer than he remembers; they look worn down and dull, like it hasn’t been updated in decades (seven decades to be exact). At the far end of the school, he finds a bathroom boarded up and untouched. The same bathroom he found himself in the most at the boarding school.
It wasn’t easy being a boy. Edwin’s relationship with his parents went sour after cutting his hair with a pair of scissors in the kitchen, and it already wasn’t the best when he refused to wear dresses and make friends with the other neighbouring kids. In order to get away from his family, he left. He ran away to St. Hilarion’s Boarding School for Boys and started a new life as Edwin Payne.
This was a big secret to keep from everyone. His chest was wrapped in bandages at every hour for every day, showered at ungodly hours to avoid the other boys in the bathroom, and spent most of his time alone in the library. Edwin didn’t mind the loneliness. He often preferred it. Some of the boys in his class were truly awful, he wanted nothing to do with them (and look where that got him).
He finds himself exploring the room that housed the boys’ beds and storage chests, which has been walled up and turned into much smaller rooms with only four beds, but with much larger closets and storage spaces. This wasn’t the only addition to the boarding school, a new gymnasium, as if the original one wasn’t in excellent condition since it was renovated as well. As for the rest of the school, it looks the exact same and smells heavily of mildew.
The smell gets worse closer to the attic. Edwin didn’t know what he expected to find, as it was forbidden to go inside while attending the school in 1913, but it wasn’t a boy like himself.
“Who’s there?” A frail voice pipes up from a dark corner of the room. Edwin didn’t see him at first, swiftly moving his lantern towards the voice and finding a head of curls poking out from under a blanket.
“You can see me?” He responds, taking in both of their confusion. Edwin knew the living shouldn’t see ghosts, unless they’ve nearly escaped death or have a psychic power, and if he had to guess . . . “I thought this lantern would help. You can extinguish it if anybody comes up here.”
Carefully, he sets the lantern down in front of the boy and watches him reach out from under the blanket to grab it. In that moment, Edwin notices the unusual garment the boy wore across his chest that looks similar to his own. As quickly as the boy reached out to grab the lantern, he wrapped himself back up in the blanket and stared up at Edwin’s tall figure. “Cheers, mate. I’m freezing; I’ve never been this cold in my life.”
The two boys went back to staring at each other again. Confusion appears on Edwin’s face again, whether it’s from the tightly wound fabric on his chest or the events leading up to shivering in the school’s attic. At this moment, the boy speaks up again, “It didn’t seem right. Letting that kid get beat on ‘cause he’s from Pakistan. I’m half Indian, why am I so different?”
Edwin considers this new information. “That’s a fair point. I went to school here a long time ago, and I had bullies too.” The boy lifts his head up from the ground with a small smile on his face, making Edwin feel a bit warm (not physically, as that isn’t possible for him anymore). “You know,” he says in a teasing voice, “Pakistan and India were the same country back when I was alive.”
The boy looks away, shaking his head and coughing, “right.” It takes him a second to fully register Edwin’s words, which sends him into a deeper coughing fit. “Wait, what?” Edwin helplessly shrugs and sits himself down at the nearby table, not wanting to risk scaring the boy with everything he is about to tell him.
It doesn’t take long for the boy to shuffle his way over to Edwin at the table, wrapped up in the comforter and holding the lantern until his knuckles turn white. He carefully tightens his hold around the fabric, glancing suspiciously up at Edwin, whose face remains neutral and expressionless. There’s a moment the shivering boy looks to say something, but promptly closes his mouth and stares down at the orange glow of the lantern.
“Edwin. Edwin Payne. You might’ve heard the name.”
“That doesn’t ring a bell, mate.”
A frown forms on Edwin’s face. He wasn’t popular at St. Hilarion, but one would think that if he and five other boys disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1916, they would document the tragedy in their record book. Maybe this boy wouldn’t know, but don’t rumours spread? It was quite a terrible accident for the students to not talk about over the past seven decades.
“When did you go to school here?” the boy asks Edwin. “That could jumpstart my memory a bit.” He looks like he has more to say, but is cut off with more coughing. It sounds painful.
“Are you all right?”
He takes a long wheezing breath, nodding his head. “I’m fine. Just answer my question.”
Edwin takes a second to think. “1913 to 1916. That sounds about right.”
He lets out a long winded laugh. “Bullshit. When did you go here for reels?”
A smile threatens to appear on Edwin’s face, but he remains stoic. “1913 to 1916. I am dead.” The winded breaths come to a halt and the smile slips off his face. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything, I was merely walking through halls one last time before figuring out how I want to spend my afterlife.”
The silence is loud for the next minute. Edwin continues to stare at the boy, who stares blankly back at him, and it's mildly uncomfortable to the point that he’s looking away and adjusting his striped jacket.
Just as Edwin was about to give up on speaking to the boy, he found his voice to start their conversations again. “It’s Charles. My name,” he takes a deep breath to avoid coughing, “is Charles Rowland.”
“You don’t sound confident with your name, Charles.”
“Piss off, mate,” he grumbles, rolling his body further onto the table in front of them.
Edwin knew what he was doing, pushing Charles in a direction that made him uneasy. It’s the same uneasiness Edwin felt when choosing his own name: Walter, Alexander, and even Edward (it just didn’t sound right).
“I wasn’t always confident in my name when I started at St. Hilarion.” Edwin starts, earning a small glance from Charles. “I ran away from home, started a new life, and presented myself as Edwin Payne. It took a couple months for me to get used to saying it out loud.”
His eyes narrowed at Edwin, studying him in a new way that left Edwin feeling very unnerving. “What? Your name was Edward and you changed it so your family couldn’t track you down at a measly boarding school?” Charles’s question has bite, but it’s nothing Edwin can’t handle. He’s getting defensive, a common charade Edwin used during his time at school and knows all too well.
“We are the same, Charles.”
There’s no reason for Edwin to continue binding his chest with bandages. The moment he escaped Hell, wearing ragged clothes that’s far too big for his frame, his body reset itself in a way he couldn’t imagine. The payne grey suit was an added bonus, but it was the lack of breasts and perfectly cropped hair that stunned him the most. The bandages remain wrapped around his torso as a form of comfort. A weighing pressure that helps ground him.
Very carefully, to not scare Charles away (for the third time in the last ten minutes), Edwin pushes his jacket aside, lifts his vest, and unbuttons his undershirt to reveal the compressed bandages. It takes Charles a moment to understand. His eyes widen, and a list of questions begins to form on the tip of his tongue, only for another coughing fit to erupt deep in his chest.
Edwin stands up quickly, walking right into the table in front of them, and crosses to stand next to Charles. His body slumps forward, which Edwin’s catches, as Charles attempts to breathe normally to catch his breath and stop the rumbling in his chest.
“It would help if you took it off,” Edwin offers, glancing down at his chest.
The coughing continues as Charles shakes his head. “I’m fine. Besides, there’s no way it’s coming off. I practically sewed myself into it.”
“That sounds unsafe.”
Charles turns back to look at Edwin with a raised eyebrow. “Says the boy who’s strangled himself with bandage wraps.”
“Very funny,” Edwin says with an unamused expression on his face. As gently as possible, Edwin nudges Charles to stand up and cross towards the window, sitting him gently against the wall to let his lungs breathe as much as possible. Once his breathing returns to normal, Edwin sits down beside him with the lantern, replicating the same posture.
“Cheers, mate,” Charles says quietly, taking a couple more breaths to make certain his body won’t give up on him. “Did you . . .” he starts, thinking about his words carefully. “Did you walk through the table to catch me?”
Finally, Edwin allows himself to smile. “I suppose I did.”
“Can all ghosts move through solid items like that? Is that how you came into the attic without me noticing?” With Charles’s excitement, his blanket slips off his shoulder a bit. Edwin takes it upon himself to reach over and fix the blanket over his body, ensuring Charles keeps as much body heat as possible under the thin cloth.
Edwin’s hand recoils back once Charles notices. “Actually,” Edwin says to draw attention away from the comforter, “you can move around any space you like, including through tables and walls. It is not that you cannot touch things, but you cannot feel them.” He clears his throat, pretending to not think about walking through the table, touching Charles, grabbing the blanket, or picking up the lantern.
“It’s stupid, but . . .” Charles laughs to himself, shaking his head. “I think I’d miss kissing. Do you miss kissing?”
The subject of kissing catches Edwin off guard. He’s never thought about kissing anybody, let alone kissing it as a ghost. It doesn’t help that he’s never kissed anybody to begin with, but that’s besides the point.
To respond to his question, Edwin shakes his head and hums at him. “I don’t miss a lot. Just the physicality of feeling things.”
“So, you didn’t feel yourself going through the table?”
“I suppose I did not.”
Charles glances back at the table, swiftly turns back to Edwin, then back to the table. With a playful eye roll, Edwin stands from the floor and walks into the table for entertainment purposes. Charles laughs, wrinkling his nose and closing his eyes to contain himself and not alarm anybody that he’s hiding in the attic.
Edwin concentrates lifting his legs above the table to sit cross legged on top of it, rather than being inside the table. Once he’s set on not falling through the table, Edwin looks up to find Charles staring up at him, his big brown eyes as wide as they can be.
“Shut up, mate. You were just in the table, why don’t you fall through?” he asks, tugging the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
Edwin thinks for a second. “There are many, many so-called ghost rules. Many I don’t know about, but I shan’t waste your time on them.” He pulls his crossed legs out from under him and stretches them over the edge of the table. Charles hasn’t stopped staring, making Edwin nervous, feeling like he’s going to fall through the table at any moment.
“Only asked about falling through the table.”
A huff of frustration blows through Edwin’s nose. “Because I choose not to fall through the table. Happy?” He moves to climb off the table, not realising his mistake with thinking about falling through the table, as he falls through the table and lands on the floor in front of Charles.
Before Edwin realises what happened, he hears Charles cackling at his slip through the table, covering his face with both of his hands to muffle his cries of laughter. Edwin can’t help but chuckle too.
—
“How did you know you were a boy?”
Edwin’s reading of Max Carrados, the Blind Detective comes to an abrupt stop at Charles’s question. The question should’ve been expected, but the two boys have gone hours without mentioning anything since Edwin showed his own chest binds.
The book is folded gently between his fingers, stalling as long as possible to think about his words. “It was never a question to me.” Edwin starts, taking a deep breath before continuing. “I hated dresses, wearing makeup, and spent all my time at the library. I never spent time with the other kids in class. It bothered my parents.”
Charles blinks back at Edwin silently, letting him carry on when he was ready. “It wasn’t until I cut my hair with a pair of scissors did they snap. They told me to start acting like the girl I was born to be, threatened to send me to an all girls school, and started planning how they were going to find a man to marry their mentally ill daughter. That was it for me. I ran away.
“As I had nowhere to go, I found St. Hilarion’s Boarding School for Boys, decided on a name for myself, and told them I was an orphan. Nobody at school questioned it. Not until the rumours started. You can imagine the difficulty of going through puberty with a bunch of boys and having different effects.”
“I’m sorry.”
Edwin glances down at Charles, who’s sitting up on his elbows. He’s a bit wobbly, his strength to sit up worsening. His breath is worsening, too, and Edwin doesn’t want to think about it. It makes him a bit sad.
Whether from his personal story or Charles’s living state, Edwin brushes the back of his free hand against his eyes. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. That was seventy years ago.”
Charles shakes his head, falling back softly against the pillow Edwin found in the far corner of the attic. “I’m sorry for saying that rude stuff. I’m not usually like that to people like us.”
People like us.
A smile ghosts over Edwin’s lips at his apology. He merely forgot about that comment Charles made about his name being Edward and not taking his situation seriously. (He officially hates the name Edward.)
“I don’t know how you did it.” Charles continues, a shiver running through his body. “My Mother sent me to this school to get away from my Father, and while the teachers don’t know about me being trans, the other boys found out and they’ve been a nightmare ever since last year.”
“Trans?”
The boy’s head whips back to face Edwin. “Yeah, trans? Transgender?” A wave of coughs rattle through his body, probably due to his fast movement.
“Please take it easy.” Edwin says softly, adjusting his legs to sit crossed on top of the wooden box. “I don’t know what that word means. Mind you, I’ve been dead for-”
“-seventy years in Hell.” Charles and Edwin finish together. A grin passes over Charles’s mouth as he continues coughing while Edwin raises his eyebrow questionably.
The coughing finally stops, a chill runs over his spin, and Charles picks up where he left off. “Transgender is a word people use for people like us. Our gender transitioned from female to male. It’s a much nicer word than what others have used for me.”
It’s strange to have a word for it now, but it’s also nice. Edwin never imagined there would be other boys like him in the world. Other boys like Charles.
Speaking of Charles, he awkwardly clears his throat, which sounds different to his coughing, and waits until he’s gathered Edwin’s attention to begin speaking. “Can you . . . can you go back to reading?” He asks quietly, shuffling under the blanket to get into a comfortable position. “I like listening to your voice,” Charles mutters quietly once he’s settled on the floor.
Edwin pretends to not hear the comment about his voice, opening the book from where his thumb rested between the pages and beginning to read where he left off.
The book he’s reading to Charles is about Max Carrados, a blind detective, working with Mr. Carlyle, a private investigator, and the many mysteries they solve. There were only a couple books published before Edwin died, so he was excited to find so many new titles when rummaging around the attic. Before he knew it, Edwin was flipping through the pages and reading paragraph after paragraph when Charles asked about the book. Apparently, Charles has never heard of Max Carrados, which was unacceptable to Edwin, so he began reading the book out loud to him.
“‘Do you believe in ghosts, Max?’ inquired Mr. Carlyle.” Edwin reads, enjoying every second of every sentence between the two detectives. “‘Only as ghosts,’ replied Detective Carrados with a decision. When they begin to interfere in business matters, depreciate property . . .”
Charles doesn’t hear the end of the sentence. His mind wanders elsewhere. He thinks about the heaviness that weighs him down turning into something light, the constant chill down his spine disappearing off his back, and he wonders if this will be the last time he watches the sunrise.
“. . . I cease to believe.” Edwin finishes the sentence he’s reading, noticing that Charles has stood in front of the window to watch the sunrise. It’s really quite remarkable. He can’t remember the last time he wanted to sunrise. “Not enjoying this one? Carrados, the Blind Detective, was becoming quite popular in my day.” He breathes out an embarrassed laugh, because it’s okay if Charles didn’t like the books, Edwin still loved them after all these years. He will have to enjoy them in his own time.
His embarrassed laugh is cut short the moment he turns to look at the body shaped figure under the blanket. Charles turns around the moment he hears the hitch in Edwin’s throat, not expecting to see his body laying perfectly still on the attic floor.
“When you could see me,” Edwin says quietly, “I knew it was too late. But I simply . . . I did not want to scare you.” He finally closes the book and sets it down on the box beside him.
“Well,” Charles says quietly back, “I’m glad you didn’t say anything.” He takes a big breath, feeling his lungs fully expand without the feeling of harsh coughing or cold chill threatening to run down his spine. The breath slowly releases from his lungs, taking everything around him. “Doesn’t feel like I imagined. Being dead.”
“I’m afraid not.” Edwin stands up and crosses to room to Charles, walking through the table to hopefully uplift the mood a bit. “Feels okay, doesn’t it?” he nods down towards Charles’s chest, motioning for him to discover the way his body reset itself when moving on to the afterlife.
Charles looked at Edward quizzically, slowly bringing up his left hand to run down the front of his binding garment. Edwin sees the moment Charles feels the flatness of his chest. The garment is ripped off his body in a flourish, revealing two ghostly lines under his pecs. Charles runs his fingers along the scars, sighing happily.
“I am delighted for you, truly I am, and I wish we could’ve been friends longer.” Edwin steps back Charles, turning towards the wall he floated through the previous night. “Death will come for you now. Go with her when she arrives.”
He hears Charles step behind him, “Well, I’m not ready, am I? I don’t wanna go somewhere else yet. Besides, these scars are sick and my voice dropped?” He laughs loudly, it makes Edwin hesitate for a second, but he keeps walking towards the wall, shaking his head. “What if I stay here a bit with you instead?”
Edwin stops walking. “Then you will always be running from her,” he replies calmly. “Also, I’m not good with other people, as I’ve shared with you. And I just came back to this school after escaping Hell.” He finally turns to look at Charles, which was a mistake. His eyes look so sad, but this is how the afterlife works. “When the blue light comes, you stay and I go.”
“Well,” Charles says loudly, “I’m aces with other people.” A single eyebrow raise follows after his comment to Edwin, which does nothing to convince him. “I’m pretty chuffed you got out of Hell, mate. That sounds hard. Nice job.” His smile spreads across his face, it might be taking Charles a couple tries to get under Edwin’s skin, but it’s definitely working in his favour.
He huffs in frustration. “That is not how you make decisions, based on whatever you feel in the moment.”
Charles shrugs, “It’s how I’ve lived my life. Doesn’t seem all that different now.” With a loud eyeroll, Edwin reluctantly agrees, motioning Charles to follow. “Looks like you're stuck with me.”
Edwin doesn’t look back as he phases through the wall, leaving Charles in the attic alone. A low buzzing sound emits from behind him. Charles doesn’t have any idea what Death looks like, and he isn’t going to find out now. He takes one last look at the attic, grabs the Max Carrados book, and follows behind his new friend.