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The floorboards are creaking.
They do that sometimes, the landlord said. It’s not that surprising. The house is over a century old, after all. What else would a person expect from a house that old? If not to do what old houses are wont to do, and settle? And this house settles often. It settles. It creaks. It whispers. Its long forgotten history seeps in through the shutters that rattle and bang at night when the wind picks up and sometimes when there’s no wind at all, memories clawing at the back of the floral stick-and-peel wallpaper that the landlord just put up to give the house a more modern feel, to hide the flaking paint.
It’s late at night, and the floorboards are creaking. One by one, up the hall to Apollo’s bedroom. Step by step by step.
The lights flicker sometimes, the landlord said. The electricity is fine, the house has been rewired, but sometimes the lights are faulty. Again, it’s an old house. The house’s insulation has been changed, of course, but sometimes the rooms go cold, even in the dead of summer when the temps creep up to ninety. The ghosts cut back on AC costs, the landlord joked. Perfect for a college student on a budget like Apollo.
The doorknob stutters, rattles, begins to turn. Apollo rolls to the side, squeezing his eyes shut. Go away, go away. He used to lock the door, but it never helped. Not now, not ever, not even when he was young. He learned early on that a door cannot protect him; those few inches of wood cannot keep him safe. He takes a deep, deep breath. Go. Away.
The door creaks open, of course (the hinges just need some oil, the landlord said), and the cold begins to roll in like fog across a still lake. The room fills with the faint, metallic smell of blood and gunpowder. The chill grows, approaching his back where Apollo lays in his bed. It creeps over the back of his neck, wringing around his limbs. He doesn’t dare move. It takes everything in him to remember to breathe, to not lie still and frozen like a corpse himself. It carries a weight to it, that cold. It tingles up and down Apollo’s spine like pins and needles. Mikeko growls slightly from where he’s curled up at the end of the bed.
Apollo feels it leaning over him, as if it’s checking to see if he’s awake. He lies perfectly still. Maybe if he pretends to be asleep, it will go away, slip back through the door and leave him be, though he knows (he knows) that this will not be the case. He’s never had that kind of luck. He counts each uneven beat of his heart as the ghost leans ever closer, the feeling of it like static electricity taken a frozen physical form.
The ghost mutters his name. “Apollo,” it says. “Apollo.”
Apollo keeps his breathing even. Pretend to be asleep. Don’t move. Don’t flinch. Go away.
The seconds tick by. Tick. Tick. Tick. There is silence, and for one great relief of a moment, Apollo thinks he’s in the clear. But then, a sensation rises like dry ice on bare skin, washing over his whole body like he’s been plunged into arctic waters. It’s so cold it burns, radiating from his cheek where the ghost is currently prodding him in the face with one incorporeal finger. The ghost’s voice rings loud in his ear. “Oi, Justice, are you dead or what? Wake the fuck up.”
Apollo shoots up so fast he almost knocks the ghost in the forehead. Almost, because even if he made contact, it wouldn’t really be contact, would it? “Okay, okay, Jesus,” he sputters, leaning back from the ghost. “I’m awake, stop touching me. You know I hate it when you do that.”
He turns on the little lamp sitting on his nightstand, and the small expanse of his bedroom floods with soft auburn light, revealing the ghost that’s been haunting Apollo for the past three months standing there at his bedside. If you ignore the way he has no shadow, the way light streams through his skin, and the faint, faded lines of his body, worn like the kind of old and blurry photographs you see in museums, the ghost looks nearly, nearly normal in the lamplight. So nearly normal, in fact, that when Apollo first met him a few days after he moved in, he thought some kind of delinquent had broken into his living room. And then he saw the blood, bright red and vicious in the afternoon light seeping through the white fabric of his button-up shirt, directly over his heart, and Apollo thought oh, oh, oh.
Who the fuck are you? The ghost had said, then, as the pool of blood he stood in soaked into the carpet that Apollo bought off a recent college graduate for fifteen bucks on Facebook Marketplace. It was a decent carpet. You got wack hair, dude. You make it look like that on purpose?
The landlord may have cut Apollo a great deal on the lease to compensate for all the peculiarities that came with an old house like this, but had neglected to mention that one of those peculiarities included dead gangster Wocky Kitaki.
(Or the other ghost, for that matter, but Apollo hadn’t learned about her until much later.)
Wocky grins at him. “Sup.”
“What do you want,” Apollo grumbles.
“I’m bored.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“No it ain’t,” Wocky says, pointing at the clock on Apollo’s nightstand. “It’s three AM.”
“That’s not actually better?”
“Well, I’m still bored.”
“And I was sleeping,” Apollo says exasperatedly. “I told you to stop bugging me while I’m sleeping. Several times. I made a sign.”
Apollo points to the piece of printer paper he’d taped to his bedroom door just last week in his foolish attempt to get Wocky to actually let him rest. It reads, in large, blocky letters: DO NOT BOTHER ME WHILE I AM SLEEPING. WOCKY THIS MEANS YOU.
Wocky glances at the sign before turning back to Apollo. “What’s your point?”
“…You do know how to read, right?”
“Of course I know how to fuckin’ read,” Wocky snaps, crossing his arms over his fatal gunshot wound to the heart. “You think my ma wouldn’t skin me alive back to front with my own switchblade if I didn’t?”
Apollo sighs. Loudly. “So you just…ignored the sign, then.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Wocky’s grin grows wider. There’s a gap between his front teeth. “You got cotton in your ears or somethin’? I told you already. I was bored up to my tits, man.”
Apollo promptly throws a pillow at him. It passes harmlessly through Wocky’s torso and lands with a thump on the other side of the room.
“Shit,” Wocky mutters, putting a hand to his chest. His fingers dance over the bullet hole. Once, Apollo watched Wocky stick a pencil in there. Once, Wocky asked if Apollo wanted to stick a pencil in there. “That felt wack.”
“Good,” Apollo says, and then immediately feels bad for being so vindictive. He rubs the back of his neck, looking at Mikeko, who is absolutely glaring at Wocky with his ears back.
Mikeko hates Wocky. Apollo isn’t exactly sure why, because Mikeko typically isn’t bothered by ghosts. He doesn’t mind the second house in the ghost at all, but Wocky? Mikeko cannot stand Wocky. He’s tried to attack him before, and purposefully walks through Wocky’s legs all the time to make him shudder.
“Can you make your cat stop doing that?” Wocky asked Apollo, once, and Apollo told him in no uncertain terms that no one could ever tell Mikeko to do anything.
Wocky stuffs his hands into his tweed trouser pockets, eyeing Mikeko nervously. He’s handsome in the way of boys prone to get into trouble, with his crooked smile and slicked-back hair, one curl escaping to bounce at his forehead. He wears his suspenders loose, hanging at the hips of his high-waisted tweed trouser, and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Apollo hasn’t asked about the events that led up to Wocky Kitaki’s demise, but his knuckles are red and bruised, like he’d been in a fight. His collar is messy, the top two buttons of his shirt missing. There’s a cut on his cheek, too, and, of course, the gaping hole in his chest.
Apollo often wonders what a boy just nineteen years old did to get shot in the heart.
(He’s been resisting the urge to look it up. Wocky’s said a few times that his family, the Kitakis, meant something back in the day. He wonders whether, if he googled Wocky’s name, he would find out all the sordid details. He’s not sure if he wants to know.)
“So, Justice…you gonna turn the TV on for me or what?” Wocky says expectantly. Apollo, who has since dropped his face into his hands, eyes Wocky through the gaps in his fingers. Before he can say anything, Wocky makes a face that lies somewhere between confused and thoughtful. “Hey, anyone ever tell you got a super weird fuckin’ name? Like, Apollo Justice? What is that? Like, my name ain’t much better so it’s like…uh…what’s the saying? The one about the teapot bein’ black? Actually, you know what, why’s there so many sayings about like, cups and like, cooking shit? Glass half full and out of the frying pan and all that wack shit, y’know. Like, who was the first guy to be like, yo, man, your goose is cooked. I ain’t even had goose before. You ever think about that?” Wocky says this all in one great rush, and Apollo wonders if he was like this when he was alive and actually needed to breathe in between sentences or if this is just a ghostly development. “Oh. Right. TV?”
Apollo resists the urge to burrow under his blankets and scream. Wocky is staring at him with his big brown eyes, eyebrows raised. “If I turn the TV on for you, do you promise to let me sleep?”
Wocky’s grin grows wider. “Yeah, yeah, whatever the wet blanket wants, man.”
Apollo groans, swinging his feet out of bed. He’s so sick of this. Vera never bothers him in the middle of the night asking for the TV to be turned on. She’s a fantastic ghost, really, because Apollo sometimes completely forgets she’s there. And then she appears, staring at Apollo from behind a cracked door because she’s honestly more afraid of Apollo than he is of her but she ends up scaring the ever-loving shit out of him anyway, but she doesn’t wake him up in the middle of the night every single night so really, Apollo prefers her specific brand of haunting over Wocky’s, who treats haunting more like a very intense, parasitic friendship.
Maybe Apollo’s just grumpy because he got woken up when he already stayed up late working on an essay. It could be any number of things, really.
Wocky follows him as he trudges down the hall to the living room, and this time, he doesn’t make any sound at all. Despite his general…personality, Apollo knows Wocky can be quiet when he wants to be. He just rarely actually wants to be quiet, and Apollo knows for a fact that Wocky only makes the floorboards creak to try and freak Apollo out because he thinks it’s funny.
It stopped working a few days in.
Once they reach the living room, Wocky drifts to the couch. He flips upside down, and his ghostly, ephemeral blood oozes out of the hole in his back to the couch. It’ll vanish in an hour or so. Apollo isn’t worried about it.
Apollo is no stranger to ghosts. He’s had the ghost sight since birth - every woman in his family has. His sister, his mother. There’s something special in their blood that lets them see what others can’t, something in their eyes that make them perceptive to the dead. Outside his family, only his best friend Clay knows (and believes) that Apollo can see ghosts. He prefers it that way. He’d rather not be labeled a freak on his first day of college. It’s typical of Apollo’s luck, really, that the house he moved into would be haunted.
Apollo picks up the remote from the coffee table. “Alright, what do you want?” he sighs, turning on the TV. “And don’t say-“
“The Godfather,” Wocky says instantly.
“I have to go back to sleep, Wocky. I am not listening to gunshots all night.”
“But I like The Godfather.”
“I can leave it on for you when I go to class tomorrow, okay?”
Apollo often leaves on a gangster movie or a YouTube deep dive for Wocky before he leaves for class. It reminds him a little bit of leaving videos of fish or birds on for your cat at home to keep them busy.
Wocky sighs dramatically. “Fine. Just don’t put on one of those nature docu-thingies. If I gotta hear about birds from fuckin’…Nicaruda or whatever I’ll die a second time, I swear it.”
“…Do you mean Nicaragua?”
Wocky makes a face. “I had that once when I was a kid.”
Apollo is considering an exorcist. He really is.
He sifts through Netflix for a while, trying to find something that falls between The Godfather and a nature documentary. He is not putting on Bake Off, though. He refuses to let a ghost get caught up on the latest season before he is.
“What’s that one where the people are like, talking to that weird blue wall in little rooms?” Wocky asks suddenly, flipping over to his stomach. He’s not actually on the couch, just hovering a few inches above it.
“…what?”
“Yeah, they ain’t allowed to see each other but they’re s’posed to like, fall in love or some shit like that.”
Apollo turns and stares at him. “Are you talking about Love is Blind?”
“Aw shit, yeah, that one.” Wocky points at the TV. “Put that one on.”
“Wocky, how do you know about Love is Blind?”
He shrugs. “Last guy that lived watched it all the time. That Shake dude? Fuckin’ nuts, man. I knew a guy like that, you know that? Ran with this fuckin’ bigshot shitshow of a gang down the block. I picked his dad’s ring right off his finger once in the middle of a fight. Clocked him in the jaw after.” Wocky grins. “He cried. But yeah, put Love is Blind on.”
Apollo is living in a house with a dead gangster who likes to watch Love is Blind.
What the fuck.
“…Okay. Sure. Whatever. But I’m keeping the volume on low.”
As he queues up the first episode of the latest season, he feels her. It’s a different kind of chill than Wocky’s, though he doesn’t know if he’d be able to put it into words. It’s something softer, less heavy. She’s lingering in the doorway to the kitchen, peering around the corner with her wide, dark eyes, and Apollo knows if he turns to look at her she’ll vanish. He’s only seen her on rare occasions: the tail end of her skirt around a corner, the flash of her long hair. He’s heard Wocky talking to her, but he’s never heard her speak himself. He doesn’t know if she can speak.
Apollo sets the remote back where it belongs (the left side of the coffee table, perpendicular to the wood grain). It would be simultaneously much easier and also way worse if Wocky could just control the remote himself, but ghosts don’t work like that. Wocky could turn the TV on himself without the remote at all, but it would take a lot of effort. Even maintaining enough semi-corporealism to sit on Apollo’s couch requires a little bit of energy, though Wocky’s an old hand at that kind of thing. He’s been dead for a hundred years, after all. It’s a wonder he hasn’t faded away by now.
“I’m going back to bed, now,” Apollo informs Wocky, who just waves an indifferent hand. He’s barely paying attention anymore, staring wide-eyed at the array of dramatic straight people chatting onscreen. “Please do not wake me up again.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Apollo starts to trudge back down the hall, but pauses in the doorway. He turns to look at Wocky on the couch. The blood on his shirt is stark in the TV’s flickering light. “You know, my housemate is supposed to get here tomorrow. I can’t leave the TV on for you all the time once he’s here.”
Wocky shrugs. He’s taken his switchblade out, a pretty thing with his initials engraved on the handle, and is spinning it between his fingers. The girl has materialized behind the arm of the couch, right behind Wocky’s head, and Apollo can just catch the faintest glimpse of her eerie, glowing fingernails, the lilac bandana in her hair as she peers out at Apollo. Allegedly her teeth glow, too, but he’s never seen it.
“Hi, Vera,” Apollo says, and she ducks out of sight. Wocky twists slightly to try and catch a glimpse of her, his cheeks tinging pink.
(Apollo only knows her name because he’d asked Wocky about her. When he’d asked, Wocky’s face had gone bright red like there was blood still left in him to flood his cheeks. “O-oh, you’re talkin’ about Vera,” he’d stammered. “Yeah. She…she lives here - well, not lives here but you know what I mean. She’s here, too. With me. Not with me with me but…she…fuckin’ hell,” he’d muttered, and then promptly vanished.)
“Can’t you just tell him you got ghost sight so you don’t gotta pretend like we don’t exist?” Wocky asks, flipping the switchblade open and closed. “That’s gonna get, like, real boring.”
“No, Wocky. We’ve talked about this. I would like my college life to be normal, and a really good way to make it not normal is to tell my roommate that I can see ghosts and also that there’s at least two of them in the house he just moved into.”
Wocky rolls his eyes. Vera has lifted her head from behind the couch again. “’S gonna get real boring around her again if you gotta pretend to be normal,” he mutters. “What’s the guy’s name, anyway?”
private message: Clay Terran
7:20 PM Clay: hey ur roommate moved in today right
7:22 PM Clay: did u meet him
7:22 PM Clay: ur alive roommate to be specific
7:23 PM Clay: not the dead ones
7:26 PM Apollo: Yes
7:26 PM Clay: and???
7:27 PM Clay: whats he like
7:28 PM Clay: and also do u think he would want to watch 2001 space odyssey with us and listen to my Theories
7:35 PM Clay: polls?? u there??
7:41 PM Apollo: Do you think this is karma for that time I accidentally ran over a frog with my bike when I was eight
7:42 PM Clay: uh
7:42 PM Clay: what
7:43 PM Apollo: [attachment: 1 image]
7:44 PM Clay: HAHAHAHBAHA
7:44 PM Clay: OH UR FUCKED DUDE
7:45 PM Clay: its like someone google image searched ur type and copy pasted him into ur house
7:45 PM Apollo: He’s a music major
7:46 PM Apollo: He’s lead singer and guitarist of an indie rock band that’s apparently pretty popular?
7:46 PM Apollo: He’s singing right now while making dinner
7:47 PM Clay: ohhhh man
7:47 PM Clay: ur in deep already arent u buddy
7:48 PM Apollo: I’m moving to Nicaragua
private message: Athena Cykes
7:50 PM Athena: We’re placing bets on how long it takes you to fall in love with your roommate
7:50 PM Athena: I’m just letting you know that my personal bet is one day ;)
private message: The Best Sister on Earth
7:55 PM Trucy: YOUR ROOMMATE IS KLAVIER GAVIN???