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A new tenant had moved in, and Dan hated him immediately. This was inconvenient, because Dan had spent the better part of eleven years alone in this house and had never once minded it.
He minded it now. The man had a ridiculous fringe and an even more ridiculous habit of narrating his own life out loud, he'd hung a poster of a llama in the room that used to be Dan's, and, worst of all, he could not see Dan at all.
Dan had tried flickering the lights — nothing. He knocked a mug off the counter at 2am with a kind of dramatic flourish he'd been quite proud of, but the man — Phil, according to the post that kept arriving — simply picked it up in the morning, said "Must've not pushed it back far enough," and got on with his cereal.
It was, frankly, insulting.
"I died in this house," Dan told him one evening, standing directly in Phil's eyeline while Phil watched TV through him. "Does that not even get me a bit of a reaction? Even a scream. I'd take a scream."
Phil laughed at something on the screen and Dan sighed. It made him realise he's talking to himself, again, for the four hundredth time this month.
He tried to up his game, he really did. He wrote “WELCOME” in the dust on the windowsill, then thought better of it and changed it to “GET OUT”, then panicked and wiped it clean because for the first time he realized that he didn't actually want Phil to leave, he just wanted Phil to notice. There was a difference, an important one, and Dan was aware of how unhinged it sounded even to an audience of no one.
He tried the classics. Cold spots. A door creaking shut on its own. He hovered ominously at the top of the stairs one night doing his best impression of every ghost he'd seen in every film, and Phil had just walked straight through him on the way to the bathroom, shivered, and said, "Draughty old place," fondly, like it was a compliment.
"I’m right here," Dan said to the empty landing.
It went on like this for weeks. Against his better judgement, Dan started to follow Phil around — not to haunt him exactly, but just to be near him. Phil talked to the house a lot, it turned out, in the specific way of someone who lived alone and liked the sound of another voice even if it were just his own. He talked about work, his family, and once, quietly, at 1am with the lights off, about how he hoped this new place might actually feel like somewhere he belonged for once.
Dan sat beside him on the sofa for that one; he didn’t say anything, didn’t try anything. He just stayed.
The breakthrough, when it came, arrived in a Tesco bag.
Dan watched, mortified on Phil's behalf, as Phil unpacked a Ouija board onto the kitchen table with the focused seriousness of someone trying to defuse a bomb, muttering something about "Look, if this house is trying to talk to me, I'd rather do it properly than keep finding my socks in weird places."
"I do not use socks," Dan said, deeply offended, to the walls of the kitchen. "Do you think I’m some kind of amateur?"
Phil lit a candle. He'd clearly researched this. Cross-legged on the floor, fingers hovering over the planchette, all sincerity and no self-consciousness whatsoever, which was, Dan thought, an extremely Phil way to go about contacting the dead.
"Right," Phil said. "Is anyone there?"
Dan hesitated for a full ten seconds, weighing eleven years of being ignored against the very real possibility of scaring off the first person who'd ever bothered to ask, and then put everything he had into the planchette and dragged it, slow and deliberate, to YES.
Phil's breath caught. He didn't pull his hands away, which Dan would later decide was the single bravest thing he'd ever seen anyone do.
"Okay," Phil said, voice gone slightly unsteady. "Okay, hi. I'm Phil. Sorry about living in your old house… if that was a whole thing.”
It has been a whole thing, Dan thought, and spelled out, letter by aching letter, H-I.
They stayed like that for hours. Phil asked questions with a careful, patient rhythm, understanding this was going to take a while, and Dan answered as fast as the board would let him, learning the shape of Phil's questions and, quicker than he expected, the shape of Phil himself. He was earnest, a bit odd, and utterly unbothered by the fact he was spending his Friday night talking to a dead man on the kitchen floor.
“Are you lonely?” Phil asked near midnight, and Dan went very still over the board.
YES, he answered, because there didn't seem to be much point lying to someone who'd gone this far for him.
"Well," Phil said, setting the planchette down gently, "you've got company now. If you want it."
They ended up on the sofa after that, board abandoned on the kitchen table, candle still burning down to nothing in the next room. "For what it's worth," Phil said, addressing the ceiling like Dan might be up there, "I think I'd have liked you. When you were, y'know. Around."
Dan settled beside him properly this time, no pretence of haunting left in it at all.
"I think I'd have liked you too," he said, uselessly, unheard, and he meant it more than anything he'd said in the last eleven years. Somewhere in the small space between them, Phil smiled, like he'd heard it anyway.