#oc ghost

It shouldn’t have been weird that the bathroom door sometimes swelled whenever it rained, reluctant to close even when you pushed or pulled everything you had against it. It shouldn’t have concerned you when objects would roll off from tables because again, the floors weren’t exactly straight to begin with. It should have been something you could forget when the window panes shuddered as the wind crashed against them, because it had been a while since they were last maintained.

This was just an old, run-down apartment, right?

It shouldn’t have even been noteworthy. It shouldn’t have even stayed as a thought in your mind, and yet, there was something you couldn’t shake.

(That ended up shaking the belief of everything you once knew.)

~~~

So, during most nights, you kept to yourself. You’d slip on a pair of headphones and tuck your knees to your chest, your only company being the pale glow of your computer screen over the next many, many hours. Come the next day, your coworkers might tease you for the shadows blooming beneath your eyes, or maybe your parents might disapprove in the quiet, tutting way that parents often did—but hey—this was your life.

During this time, you blocked out the rest of the world, feeling safer as you basked in the only hours you had left, before the daytime responsibilities swept in and took you away again.

Perhaps the initial creep of paranoia was your own doing; your mind had been addled with caffeine that crashed into your psyche over time. Things like shadows passing by your curtained windows would sometimes catch your attention, or the walls settling were common enough. Sometimes you’d jump over something that you could have sworn you’d seen in the corner of your eye, but it never lingered long enough to settle into real fear.

What did, however, manage to unsettle you was your first interaction with him.

So picture this: once upon many nights ago, you were as tired as you usually were after sinking god knows how many hours into the dead of night, and somehow, it had all come down to that damned bathroom door refusing to close. It started off as a petty annoyance, something that you were familiar with by then.

At first, it just seemed like the usual problem you had encountered countless times before. That, oh maybe it had been raining, and so, perhaps it was the usual swell that came from the humidity that would sometimes creep into your home. Or it could have been that it was the fault of the rusty hinges that would sometimes dislocate. You didn’t give it any sort of special or accusing thought until you tried to close it—just like usual—that it resisted and felt as if… something pushed back.

It almost felt… deliberate?

Being a woman of rationality, however, you were only a little unsettled at first. It was late, after all, around three in the morning, and you had been curled at your desk for hours, hunched up and playing some game that had been burned into your mind since then. It would flash into the dark when you blinked and colours would brand into view. Your eyes were strained, and your body felt heavy now that the energy drink you chugged down hours ago had since worn off.

In short, the paranoia was an irrationality.

All of the correct factors for your mind to be a little on edge were right there, so it couldn’t have been anything sinister.

The problem was that it didn’t stop at that point, though.

If it had, then you would have gone to sleep that night and be done with it, but whatever it was that was in your home with you, for some reason, chose to react boldly after being dormant for however long it must have been.

So when you tried to pull the bathroom door shut again, of course, it caught again. A faint frown tugged on your lips as you read the numbers on the small, electronic hydrometer that lived perched on the ledge of the sink, the reading appearing to be quite low. Even without it, you could feel the air sharp in your lungs—dry enough to leave behind a sting when you exhaled—there was no reason for that door to be resisting so much. You had even oiled its hinges the week prior.

You found yourself muttering under your breath next, albeit more out of habit than resignation. “Fine. I’ll just shower with the door open, then. It’s not like anyone’s watching anyway…” though, as you trailed off, the words felt strange as they hung in the air, like they didn’t belong spoken out loud. Like they didn’t make sense to have ever been uttered in the first place.

Still, you carried on anyway, because what else could you do? You needed that nighttime shower, no matter what. It was just a part of your routine at this point, if nothing else. You’d rot at your desk for however long, and then you’d wash it all away, leaving it behind for a fresh start.

The bathroom light buzzed overhead, a little too harsh for your tired eyes. You squinted, curdling your lips into a slight grimace, turning down the setting into something more bearable, and that’s right about when you noticed it: not quite a shadow but a shift. It was as if the mirror had glitched and the sleek surface of it had rippled for the quickest second, like something out of a fun house. You brushed it off as a trick of exhaustion, because yes, you had been awake for far too fucking long, so maybe it was nothing at all.

But then the air changed as you stripped out of your clothes; a coolness that moved across your skin, so faint that it could almost be ignored if not for the tenderness it left behind. It wasn’t a draft that you felt for it had been much more direct than that, as if intentional. It crept along your shoulder, slow and careful, dragging in an almost organic way or, if you dared say, a movement that felt intelligent. As if something unseen was right there with you. Watching. Feeling. Touching.

…Invading(?)

You froze, your mind racing for any rational explanation to present itself, but such a comforting thought never surfaced. Ideally, you wanted something to laugh about in the morning, but the silence had grown too long now in a way that left you second-guessing.

Forcing yourself to move, you tried to reach for the door again, finding that it could suddenly close easily again, swinging shut with no resistance at all. That should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t.

You began to ask yourself if this was truly just paranoia or if it could have been something else. If all those thoughts you pushed aside as irrational or unreal altogether were, in fact, hints to an introduction to something that, in your mind, shouldn’t have existed.

No. It couldn’t have been.

Unless…?

No.

Moving on, the shower itself felt ordinary. The hot water ran steadily, spraying from the cabled head that you guided over your form. Hot steam curled and clung to the glass until the tiled wall within it looked as if painted by tiny bleeding droplets—just as it always did—a sight that was oddly grounding in the dead of night. You scrubbed at your skin, lathered and then rinsed away all of the piled-up worries, all of the anxiety that you had let fester, watching as, along with the soapy suds, it washed away down and into the drain.

It was just a faulty door, you kept telling yourself.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

And yet, halfway between rinsing off the shampoo from your scalp and conditioning the ends of your hair, something in your peripheral vision had shifted. Maybe it was the way that the water settled on the shower window and obscured your view, but you could have sworn that the door opened slightly, not too much, but just far enough outwards to allow whatever lurked in the dark to peer inside. You blinked hard, disbelieving what you were seeing, only to find that the door was in fact closed when you looked again. The handle, however, sat pressed a little lower than how you had remembered it.

An embarrassed sigh left your lips, the logical side of your mind working hard to dispel anything out of the ordinary. You reminded yourself that you were overworked and living on a shitty salary, that you were tired, that your diet wasn’t the greatest as of late.

And so, forcing yourself to move on yet again, you unlocked the door and pushed it open slightly, thinking that it was odd that the lights in the hallway were on. You then reached for a towel and wiped away the fogging blur of the mirror, taking in the absence of the pulse you witnessed earlier, but then a different sort of cold drifted inside the room… just like before. This time it felt more like a passing breeze though, as if cautious, and not quite lingering like the previous time, and just as you were about to brush it off—it coiled, like fingers wrapping around your throat—feeling like the press of a hand, curling purposefully over your skin.

And then—something else pressed against you—as if leaning, as if breathing you in, low and hot that time—against your neck.

Your body reacted before your mind could catch up, and you spun so fast that your feet nearly lost their balance on the slippery tiles. The bathroom was empty. It had to be. It couldn’t have been someone; you were high up enough that any potential intruder would lose interest, and you did not live in a building that had balconies fitted on the outside for someone to climb their way into. Besides that, there had been no sign of anything else in your home—no dirty footprints, no sign of breaking and entering—just the small, ordinary apartment that you called home—or tried to.

God though, that sensation you had felt just seconds prior remained rooted in your gut either way; a feeling that presented itself as real and not just the side effect of an exhausted mind. It had weight and shape. Your instinct won, perhaps protecting you from something potentially dangerous in that moment, and now here you were, heaving panicked breaths in your bedroom. Not too long after, you flipped on the lights, plunging the space into a bright glow, not quite caring anymore about how you looked and more so how you felt.

You kept telling yourself that you were a rational woman; that you were a whole adult, that such fears were impractical. That you knew better than to have your life controlled by such ignorant fears that should have stayed behind when you left adolescence. Things like being afraid of the dark or what goes bump in the night were no longer matters that you should have cared about, but… if that much the case… then what was it that you felt earlier?

(You couldn’t have felt watched. That couldn’t have been it…)

You paced around the room barefoot, circling on the same creaking boards over and over. Your heart was racing, your thoughts were clouded with fear, but after a while, it all started to feel a little bit silly. Of course, you were freaking out—that’s just what happened to you when you gave in to overthinking—so stop doing that. Stop. Stop. Stop. You halted in your tracks, closing your eyes for a moment. What was your plan here anyway? You couldn’t hide in your bedroom forever; you had work in the morning, and your boss wasn’t forgiving when you were late, let alone absent entirely. You couldn’t call for your parents either, knowing they’d laugh at you on the spot or tell you to grow up altogether. No, maybe you had to give in to the ridiculousness of it for now to steady yourself. Maybe that was the only way.

You glanced around for something—anything at all —before your eyes landed on a pair of discarded jeans, or rather the belt dangling from the hoop. You pulled it free and wound it awkwardly around your fist, the buckle swinging around like some sort of sorry attempt of a flailing mace.

Leaving the self-assigned haven of the bedroom was another matter, something that you had to mentally talk yourself into doing. When you did, however, the flat felt deadly quiet. So quiet that it made you flinch as you heard yourself walk.

You shook your head again.

You must have been really losing it, huh?

A grown woman, indeed, creeping around her own place with a belt in her hand, ready to fight against what was likely just a caffeine crash and a draft passing through.

Sighing deeply, you figured that maybe some tea might help. Something soothing like chamomile or whatever it was that made people relax. You had an unfinished box of the stuff in one of your cupboards, probably lacking its potency by now because you had bought it once on a whim and had it once and then never again.

Walking into the kitchen, you plugged in the electric kettle after filling it with a portion of water, leaving it to boil over the windowsill. It hummed as it started, slowly, steadily and normally. Grounding indeed, that much was better. This was what you needed. Something familiar to guide you through back into sanity.

You even made an effort to reach for your favourite mug, standing on your tiptoes to feel along the upper shelf. Just when you thought it was out of reach, however, it slid forward and into your palm as if it had been pushed there.

You froze once more, and for a moment, you did not dare breathe, but then you accepted the cup, giving it all that you had to brush it off as it beingn caught on the corner or something, telling yourself that it must have curved into your hands.

But then the drawer at your hip propped open, revealing the contents inside. That much could have been the uneven floors, right? Even if they only leaned sideways, not forwards. As for your favourite spoon sitting atop the mess of other cutlery, however, presenting itself like an offering… that’s when it started to truly feel… targeted.

You finished making the tea carefully as if you were indeed being watched. You measured the sugar slowly, you stirred it into the piping hot water without as much uttering a single clink.

The vapour rose from the cup, warm as it hit your face, and you found yourself wrapping your hands around the base of the mug, pulling it closer to further secure you.

It was then that the air shifted once more, not sharply, but just enough to fill you with a sense of unease and a now undeniable suspicion that something had slipped into the room with you.

The same thing from before.

You didn’t turn around right away, inviting whatever it was to explore, confident that with all of your grounding and steadying and whatever else you could call it, that it would push the belief of what this must have been away.

That it would fade into the back of your mind.

That it would leave you alone.

This time, though, it didn’t feel cold like before which was took you off guard; no, it felt closer to something harbouring warmth, almost welcoming, as if testing if you would allow it to stay, and for some reason, for a cause you couldn’t rationalise—a part of you wanted to believe and that part had leaned into it.

It didn’t make sense, but facts were proven with testing the matters, not ignoring them entirely.

After all, drafts from faulty windows shouldn’t feel like touches. Objects shouldn’t leap into your hands as if deliberately pushed, so all you were attempting to do here was to disprove what you had witnessed.

Your mind, so tired and restless, started to invite impossibility instead. It started to let all of those irrational thoughts that you had pushed away before to creep in and make themselves at home.

The invisible sensation of being held—of being caressed—wrapped around you again, but it had changed into something more intimate. It coiled around your shape, settling along your frame, familiar and insistent and almost reverent, like a hug.

Your body trembled as you allowed yourself to give in to the fear. It felt natural somehow to let whatever was next to you in, but you also knew that deep down, you couldn’t trust it. That it was a danger to you. That letting it in would be a mistake.

Finally, to suspend the last of your disbelief, you surrendered and asked out loud:

“Is there someone there?”

The silence stretched on and on, and then you started to feel silly again. Just as you were about to step away and call it for the night, however, something pushed you back firmly against the counter and you felt its form in full.

A male voice then responded, low and intimate, but without a doubt, utterly clear:

“Yes.”

Your whole body stiffened, and the mug in your hands was thrown—jolted into the air from an instinctive reflex—tea sloshed and dripped on the sides onto the counter, but somehow it didn’t spill entirely. You watched with wide eyes as it corrected itself, flattening against the stainless steel surface. You watched again—transfixed, as the press of invisible fingertips seared into it—as the impossible caress drifted from the table and to your hands, through your palms, stabilising you.

“I’m here,” the voice said again, the tone boasting much more confidence than before, as if testing the air. “Always there,” it added. “Always here. Always with you.”

The pressure lifted as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving you reeling, bent over the countertop as you struggled to regain your long-gone composure. Your chest ached with tension, but strangely enough, not with fear, perhaps disbelief. You stood in the kitchen, blinking rapidly, pinching yourself to make sure that it wasn’t a dream.

Only to find that you were, yes, in fact, awake.

Your mind drifted back to those words again, and then a certain chill returned, not from the thing that haunted your home, but the gripping realisation of genuine, actual dread.

Something told you that it was always there, always here, and most terrifyingly of all, that it was…

Always with you.

Which begged another question: