#ghostdrabbles

He's not sure how he died, but considering the aura he has wrapped around him, it was vicious and violent. And while you're no stranger to helping the dead cross over when they need it, but he can't. Or won't. Everything you try doesn't work, and he soon decides that he's fine with that.

Prefers, instead, to follow you around. And at first, it's fine. He explores the world around him—intangible, untouchable—and asks snarky questions about why you're the only the one who can see him. How this came to be. But then he grows bored. Restless. Shifts into bad jokes. Taunts.

Finds the most amusement, though, in muttering in your ear about all the filthy things he'd do to you if he had his body back—in broad daylight, no less. All explicit, ugly things about testing your flexibility. Bending your knees to your ears. Getting that pretty little mouth on his cock—

Watches you shower. Drawls about having you put on a show for him. Slides into the bed with you when he can manipulate and solidify his form better. Icycold hands against your breasts. Squeezing your ass.

Most ghosts continue with their routine. Go on with their lives. Cogs in the machine. But he spends his time messing with you.

The problem, however, is that ghosts can only do much to interact with the physical world. Knocking things over. Stomping their feet down the halls. Saying a word. A name. A whisper. Cold air. Static. A slamming door.

But Simon's pinches hurt. His hand sometimes feels warm when he cups your beasts, or curls his palm over the nape of your neck, pulling you toward his groin only to huff when your face slips through it.

"not there yet, are we?" he drawls, but holds you there anyway just because he can.

Sometimes you have to remind yourself he's a ghost. A spectre. He can't really hurt you.

But when he nuzzles his face into your neck, and bites down so hard it burns, you find yourself unable to explain the raw, bloodied imprint of his teeth there the next morning. Or how warm, how solid, his body feels when he pulls you against his chest, hands groping at you as he stares at the mark he left with something primal twisting across his once pellucid face. Darkening with malintent. Desire.

one day you start posting about being the only hiker on this lonely stretch of the AT after deciding to thruhike the trail. cell service is bad (it's the 2010s, and you're posting on a Dell laptop that's five inches thick from local coffee shops along the way) so you can only upload a few posts at a time and answer some questions. but you slowly amass a very small following. readers give you the trail name Bambi after you find two dead does outside of your tent, and it seems like a small clutch of forest critters keep following you on your hike because you can hear them wandering around your (bear proof) containers at night.

but for the most part, it's all just a normal hike (with some minor hiccups—sometimes you feel like you're being watched (but you're alone in the mountains and this is pretty common feeling whenever you hike overnight, they assure you); and strange noises keep echoing in the forest around you (it's the AT, though, so no one is really too worried). you have a pretty good rapport with the readers who click on your posts each time a new one drops so they're all pretty quick to give you (delayed) answers to your questions, and give helpful advice. you become a minor celebrity in on this lonely hiking forum, and you even meet up with a few of your fans in the towns that the AT cuts through. when you're not posting, they're still active. trading stories, theorising on where you are.

but when your next post drops (after a brief hiatus as you walk through Fontana Dam), it's obvious that something is wrong.

but as your readers scroll through gorgeous pictures attached to your post of the Smokies, the national park, endless shots of wildlife, and the deep, lush green forest with it's jagged peaks, towering cliffs, and intersecting streams, awe shifts into disbelief as a murky, dark figure emerges in the background of some of shots. looming like spectre in dark camo until someone realises that it's getting closer.

all they can do is stare in horror as your next series of photos show a big, ominous looking man in a black balaclava with a skull printed over the knitted cables closing in on you until it ends with a selfie, him behind you, reaching out.

it ends with a picture of you sitting on a bed in a dingy hotel room (that could literally be anywhere in the Appalachians considering almost all hotels and inns and motels have the exact same bed with it's brown, quilted blanket and crisp white sheets beside an end table with a bible; dark wood panelled walls, faded yellow recliner, writing desk with a lamp, and grey carpet). you're smiling tearfully at the camera. reflected in a picture on the wall, they can see a large, dark figure looming over you. the same man that snuck up on you on the trail.

at the bottom of the picture is the caption: little Bambi, home at last.

he has three outfits. MAXIMUM. and all of them have some sort of suspicious stain and several holes. no sheets on his mattress. doesn't need 'em when he keeps kicking them off at night anyway. his couch was probably snatched up from a landfill. his fridge makes a very loud humming noise constantly and is the same cigarette-stained yellow as his cupboards. it was bought at a yard sale. original owners purchased new in 1986.

if he isn't living in a shitty, single storey house, then it's a trailer. no mortgage—he paid cash. don't ask him where he got it.

he's a one pack of cigarettes a day kinda guy, running on shitty Tim's double doubles 3x a day, all-in-one for everything—shampoo is also body wash and conditioner and a face wash (when he finally learns what that is), and if it isn't head and shoulders or mane and tail, then it's honestly probably just dawn dish soap.

his truck is obnoxiously loud. it comes with a built-in ash tray. he has a flip phone. and don't ask him what twitter is or anything about current pop culture—he doesn't know. he doesn't care.

will blow smoke in your face. will spit on the ground for no reason at all. you never see him get into any fights but he always, suspiciously, has bloody knuckles. owns two pairs of boots—one for work, one for everyday use. they're exactly the same. his nails are dirty. the bottle of dawn dish soap he uses to wash his hands looks untouched and you're 50/50 on whether or not he even runs them under hot water.

he still shoves his fingers into your mouth anyway.

he doesn't wipe up after, either. if he comes home for a quickie or fucks you before work, he just tucks himself into his jeans and leaves. it's the same if he does down on you or fingers you. the bare minimum you'll get is him swiping his forearm over his chin or wiping his fingers on his shirt. he just likes the smell of you, he says (and you consider just how far you'd really get if you ran for it one day). he always smells like gasoline or smoke.

and of course it keeps you up all night wondering what he means by that. is it a threat? why is a dead deer in the woods making him think of you? why does he keep giving you little figures whittled into what is obviously bone (and a piece of a gravestone that's been chiselled into the lumpy shape of a heart).

this is crazy. he's insane. you should call someone. immediately.

he's bad news. and he tries to woo you by feeding you meat from the animals he butchered (getting angry whenever you buy cuts from someone else), and won't go away even when you tell him to leave you alone. you've heard the rumours. read the news articles. nothing about this man is any good—

"never met 'er?" he pries, eyes locked on the sight of you posing so pretty for the camera.

"no," he says, and Simon feels the snap when he shuts the locket like a punch to his gut, winding and painful, and has to remember how to breathe around the burn of it for a few moments after. dizzied, almost, by the loss of not being able to see your face. "never. but if i can make it back to America in one piece, we'll be married."

marriage to someone like you for a poor kid who grew up in the damp, soot-stained streets of Manchester with no real direction or means of making money beyond fighting for someone else's cause, or stealing it outright, is as much of a dream as waking up in a soft bed in a warm house instead of a muddied trench somewhere in France. an impossibility, really. but between heavy rainfall, agonised screams, and blistering burn of shrapnel slicing into his skin when mine goes off a little too close to where he's standing, he does dream.

he dreams of you.

and in those dreams, a plan forms. or rather—

metastasizes. rots. a single, devouring spore multiplying in mud and ash and shrapnel; becoming a hideous, aching thing in the pit of his stomach—the feeling kin to those long, ghoulish nights when he'd stand by sewers, watching the baker throw out unsold bread with one hand pressed against the glass of a shop he isn't allowed inside, and the other against his stomach as his body eats itself to survive. making food from nothing raw flesh.

and it's easy, too easy, for that dream to become a reality, to pocket his red-hot pistol, and switch the newly minted identification discs out with no one batting at eye when the field medics stumble onto a dead man named Simon Riley and your still breathing fiancé.