Wilfred struggled to sleep soundly that night, yet after much contemplation and avidly repeating 'ghosts don't exist!' in his mind, he managed to slip into a rather uncomfortable slumber.
Uncomfortable in the sense that he had a rather unnerving nightmare of a goblin hunched over in the corner of his room, it's mouth twisted upwards and then downwards as if it were presented with two options whilst being indecisive. The creature then whipped it's head to the direction of Wilfred, who was frozen in place at the centre of his bedroom, and it bore it's beady, hollow eyes into Wilfred.
Desperately, he wanted to screech and wail for help, but found his mouth shut.
Not shut, no, that would be too kind for this nightmarish fiend.
His mouth was sewn shut, an agonizing tearing sound ripping through the silence, but to no avail. He could rip the stitches all he wants, but that resulted in an intolerably painful sound that he couldn't handle.
How could he scream for help?
"Oh."
A voice.
A distant yet unnervingly close voice.
"How lovely."
He recognised the mocking tone from somewhere.
Yet the tone drilled a sense of unmeasurable fear into Wilfred, making his sewn mouth let out a soft whimper and his spine to straighten.
"I see you don't believe me, do you?"
Wilfred shut his eyes, pressing them tightly together as to succumb to some sort of peace.
But then, he felt hands snake around his neck, immediately disrupting his calm state of mind for a panicked one. It squeezed his neck to the extent that he couldn't even force a whimper out.
"You'll believe me soon."
And he woke up.
Slow, ragged breathing echoed throughout the tranquil apartment, which would be quite normal since Wilfred grew accustomed to hearing his own breathing in his empty room.
Yet he didn't have time to worry about that traumatic nightmare, in which he still felt out of breath from attempting to scream. This was because he heard heavy panting.
But it concerned him since he held his breath in fear the minute he roused himself from the nightmare – so who was breathing?
It didn't even sound entirely like breathing, more like a croaky and monstrous groan coming from directly in front of him.
His eyes shot open and slowly adjusted to the slight darkness of the room despite it being six o'clock, in which he was grateful his blinds were slanted shut in a way that prevented the blinding light from the rising sun to invite itself in. As they adjusted, he realized he didn't need his glasses to see that something was in front of him, due to the fact that a face was mere centimetres near his own, so much so that if he moved a little closer, he might possibly feel it's breathing on his face.
Due to its close proximity, his widened eyes tried to make sense of what's in front of him since his body was paralyzed in fear and utter confusion.
Beady, wide eyes were staring intently at his face, almost like a dot in a white pool, not blinking.
How could it blink?
It had no eyelids. It just bore its empty eyes into his face.
It's face, oh my god, it's face.
It scarcely had any flesh, almost like a walking skeleton with just enough skin to indicate that it was a human, yet its mouth was slightly agape which hinted to the ragged groaning. Wilfred's eyeballs rolled upwards to spot that the thing in front of him was basically bald, strands of dark threads sticking out of its light grey head.
Every part of its face seemed to be grey – or perhaps it was just the lighting?
Wilfred didn't dare look down, possible due to the fact that he didn't want to take his eyes off the thing in case it reached out it's (possibly) sharp and bony hand and strangled him. He couldn't call it a human, of course, because that thing would have to look alive for him to even categorize him as one.
And by 'not alive', Wilfred didn't mean a sleep deprived, depressed teen who was basically balanced between death and life - he meant that the thing looked like an embodiment of a skeleton. It looks a decent amount of grotesque melded with demented.
It looked eerily similar to the goblin hunched in the corner of Wilfred's nightmare room.
Finally, after a gruelling ten seconds of staring lovingly into each other's cold, dead eyes, Wilfred's senses were regained.
So, he screeched, loud enough to be heard next door but not loud enough for it to be heard three floors down. He rolled off his mattress and a loud 'thump' was heard as he slammed his body onto the wooden floor beside it.
"Woah, I expected screaming, but that sounded like…" A voice trailed off and then after a snap of fingers, they continued eagerly, "A damsel in distress!"
The laughter that followed was similar to the echoing he heard constantly in his head, banging around his skull and leaving perceivable scars. He scrambled for his glasses that lay strewn about on the wooden floor, in hopes that his vision would enable him to make sense of the situation.
Somehow, it panicked him further.
If the reality of a situation seemed more far-fetched than the illusion, doesn't that mean there is little chance for sanity?
"Y-you!" He stammered out, frantically pointing a finger to the light grey girl hunched beside his bed, squatting as if she were peering at some insignificant little animal.
She grinned further, yet the slits of light through the blinds made her seem less intimidating and somewhat… childish.
Wilfred assumed she was a child, yet her persona the previous night was almost a mockery on a child's attitude. Could a child really strike fear into Wilfred like she did?
"Y-yes." She stammered back with a shit-eating grin, "It's m-me."
Wilfred glowered for a moment before realizing that a strange goblin was still laying down on the mattress, yet it's bulging eyes followed Wilfred's eyes, which was particularly mortifying.
"W… what the fuck?" He murmured harshly under his breath, eyes narrowing on the goblin which he could now see in HD rather than his preferable blurriness whilst looking at something that repulsive.
The crouched girl followed his eyes to the goblin and made a noise of acknowledgement.
"Oh! Are you worried he's going to… harm you?"
Wilfred hesitated before nodding.
He feared that she might motion for it to strange Wilfred, unsure if she had bad intentions.
"Oh, he's harmless." She laughed, waving a hand in dismissal at the idea that such a horrifying creature could commit horrifying ordeals. He scrunched his nose, eyes wide beneath the rims of his rectangular glasses and he began wringing his hands together as a way to squeeze all the sweat out.
There's no way it's harmless.
That's the equivalent of someone motioning to their six foot tall Great Dane, who's probably slobbering and salivating from the mouth at the mere prospect of gobbling a human alive, and saying that it's just 'a little excited to see you, it won't harm you.'
"How the hell is… that thing harmless?!" Wilfred whispered in her direction, fearing that the creature would lunge at him and clobber him to death.
"Hey! That thing has a name!"
Wilfred narrowed his eyes.
"Okay fine, I don't know his name, but have some shred of respect." She retorted, eyebrows furrowed but then eventually returning to its perked position of inevitable curiosity.
"Can… can you tell it to leave?"
She shrugged.
"I can't talk to him, I doubt anyone can." She motioned for him to leave, yet he continued to lay there and gawk vacantly at Wilfred, "See?"
Silence ensued for a moment before she leant back and clapped loudly, standing up with ease.
"Well, now that I've conducted that experiment, I can proceed with my plan."
Wilfred tilted his head in puzzlement, mainly intimidation at the idea of a child proposing an experiment and a 'plan'. Especially since her face had darkened with a sinister grin.
"I bet you're curious about the experiment."
Spot on, but Wilfred was too preoccupied in his thoughts and unable to form words at the moment.
He just nodded.
"You can see me." She then turned, allowing her mouth to curl upwards at the sight of Wilfred unmoving on the floor, "I wanted to check if you could see everyone else."
"E… everyone else?" Wilfred enquired, uncertainty filling his being to the brim, "T… there's more?"
"More?" She began laughing hysterically, "Is that a joke? You think there'd only be a select few ghosts roaming around? Of course there's more, you dimwit."
"How many more?" He urgently questioned, leaning forward and feeling a searing pain in his backside from being seated at the same place for a while, "Four? Five?"
"Well, there's five."
Wilfred let out a small breath of relief.
Five wasn't so bad!
"… In this apartment, excluding me."
He tensed up.
Then, without another thought, he scrambled to his feet with a rush of adrenaline, practically tripping over the spare shirts strewn lazily across his room to clarify her statement.
His rush of curiosity prevented him from thinking ahead, almost bombarding into the girl who didn't seem fazed by the man rushing right into her.
Wilfred closed his eyes to prepare for impact, instead, feeling the floor ahead of him rather than another human. Goosebumps trickled across his skin, painting it like he was an empty canvas. Glancing back, he saw her standing there with a lazy grin, hollow eyes evoking a cloying sense of horror in Wilfred.
He didn't want to believe that she was a ghost.
But he just walked right through her.
As soon as his hand snaked around the icy cold doorknob, he yanked the door open and scrambled out, jaw dropping.
Another one.
It wasn't as grotesque as the goblin, it looked a little more human.
It was a little bit taller than Wilfred, wearing a simple jacket that seemed like an Elvis Presley type, the type of jacket his mum used to fashion him in as an 8 year old for the school talent show as he embarrassed himself on stage singing, no, screaming 'can't help falling in love with you' to little Mary Jacobs with ginger pigtails. He recalled she had her legs crossed in the front of the assembly, shaking her head whilst her cheeks turned a shade of tomato, more out of remorse, which in turn, resulted in the first of many heartbreaks in Wilfred's life. He recoiled a little remembering how his mum tried to fit him into the jacket after that without him throwing a hissy fit, yelling that the jacket wasn't cool enough for little Mary.
Yeah, that jacket.
This thing seemed to be a lighter shade of grey on the face, wearing shades to cover its eyes and a combed-back gelled dark hair. He had a huge hole on his forehead, the type that looked like a bullet-hole in those crime scene videos he had seen in college from a criminologist friend. Wilfred panicked, attempting to walk around but slipped and ended up falling directly into the Elvis Presley-looking grey figure. His leg shot out as an instant reflex to catch himself, bracing for impact as he fell into the figure, but he never felt it.
A cold shudder danced down his spine.
Once again, Wilfred opened his eyes and spotted half of his body passing directly through the figure, and out the other side. Stunned, he regained his balance and pivoted on his heel to face the figure again, who cocked its head slightly to the right and clicked its tongue, shaking its head. Wilfred stuck his hand out to touch the thing's jacket, but his hand passed directly through it and lay emptily in the middle of a grey pool of nothingness. His hand felt immensely cold.
"Rude." The figure stated in a low gravelly voice, in which Wilfred could hint a thick accent – was that a New-York accent? He couldn't tell. His hand still lay frozen in its position, feeling too paranoid and overwhelmed with emotion to retract it back.
The figure shook its head, strolling down his corridor until he disappeared through the wall that led to the corridor of other apartments. That's right, disappeared.
"I told you." The girl laughed, stepping out of Wilfred's bedroom with a triumphant grin.
Wilfred's breathing grew more erratic.
"It can't be… H… how are you not a figment of my imagination? This has to be a hologram."
Her grin melted into a scowl.
"A hologram?" She scoffed lightly, "How is it you still don't believe me?"
"I mean, I mean," Wilfred began, breathing unnaturally fast, "The hologram assumption is a little… I admit, far-fetched, but I'd rather settled with that rather than…"
Rather than saying 'oh my god I woke up one day and I could see ghosts!' See? If he said that, people would think it was some crappy joke and give him an awkward laugh for the sake of the atmosphere, a pat on the back and saunter away with the thought that he should get himself checked out at a clinic. Especially by the occult club he mocked throughout high school!
But he had to catch his breath, therefore, couldn't finish his sentence.
He pushed open the door to the small living room, sitting down on the only piece of furniture he owned, a mustard coloured sofa (courtesy of the landlord who found it too ugly of a colour to keep but too good in condition to throw), and began to heave in and out.
"You alright there?"
Wilfred looked up from his position of resting his elbows on his knees and attempting to cover his face as much as possible to control his nausea, only to feel all the more nauseous when glancing at his living room.
His last concern was the fact that the floor was littered with boxes labelled 'plates' or 'cutlery' which it completely slipped his mind to place in the actual kitchen. It was a disgrace to all clean-freaks.
But he had better things to focus on – like the fact that there were two figures seated on the wooden floor in between all the towers of cardboard.
One seemed to be dressed like a civil-war soldier he always gaped at in the history books while he'd intently explain to his friend (singular, not plural) that he was going to join the army the first chance he got, sparkling eyes hidden behind his circular glasses (Harry Potter phase – obviously). Oh, the thought of joining the war slipped through the gaps of his brain when he realized he would be risking his life for a government that wouldn't care and use it as a way of feeding their alter ego (that's an obvious excuse, he didn't join since he had absolutely no body strength and would die almost instantly).
Putting that aside, he stared at the man on his wooden floor, who wore a strange hat that he had seen from those civil-war films, coloured in various shades of a faded grey and facing another man. This man was clad in a white shirt and slightly darker grey shorts, with the white shirt stained in dark splotches and a hole through his chest.
He glanced urgently at the figure beside the soldier, feeling relief at the fact that he seemed more modern, slightly hippie, with a wild afro and a stylish white shirt splattered with a dark grey liquid and darker grey shorts.
Yet what scarred Wilfred was the fact that something seemed off about both of them.
The civil war soldier was missing a leg.
The man with the afro had a literal slash across his chest.
Wilfred gulped.
The soldier turned sideways to glance at Wilfred, sending him a dirty look before turning to the girl, who was standing by the doorway, and motioning towards the nervous man.
"Why the hell is he looking at me like that?"
The girl grinned.
"Why don't you answer him, hm?" She enquired calmly, looking at whatever remaining colour left on Wilfred's face drain out.
"A-ah… um… sorry, I uh-" He paused to gulp again, since his voice came out as a nasally croak which made him seem like the weakest man in the room. The two men paused from their tiny murmurs between each other, one man turning his head around, almost abnormally like an owl, to face him with the other just tilting his head upwards.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
They're looking at him.
What does he say?
He took a sharp breath in.
How does he speak again?
If what she said was correct, everyone he just encountered is dead, so what the hell should he ask?
Why can I see you?
How do I stop seeing you because it's genuinely traumatic?
Did you die from the injuries I could see on your body?
His racing mind revved, recalling all the horror movies he had watched as a kid, hunching between the pillars of stairs at ten when his parents had thought they tucked him in. He was so adamant it wouldn't scare him, but given the fact that he spent so many sleepless nights prior to those movies and couldn't watch any television programs – even the regularly programmed sesame street – without fearing that a pale girl would stick her icy hand out of the static of television, her wiry black hair falling in front of her face as a way of mercy to those who bore witness to her horror, her white dress stained with a familiar metallic scent – but whose blood? He'd think. He'd dream. No, not dream, it was a nightmare.
Maybe these things were just like that.
"What? Speak up, boy!" The civil war man growled; a deep, thick British accent obvious between his words as he narrowed his slanted, circular eyes at Wilfred.
Wilfred stepped backwards, gulping again and feeling the sweat build up.
Oh fuck. He was so fucked. He's probably going to get murdered in his sleep.
"Ay, calm down brother." The other man chuckled, his slanted, empty eyes seemingly filled with gratitude since his eyebrows were perked upwards, obviously in anticipation since an actual living person was talking to him.
The man then turned to Wilfred with a sheepish grin, obviously confused but somewhat comforting. He waved his hands which had a bunch of cards. Playing cards! Wilfred noticed the familiar pattern.
"Sorry 'bout this chrome-dome, haven't talked to a living person in ages, so he's not exactly laid back, catch me?"
Wilfred didn't fully understand, but nodded, nonetheless. The man continued.
"His death was a bummer, man, one leg ripped off and blood loss? Unreal. Ah, right, I'm stoked to be talking to you! How can I help you?"
"Make it quick, we have a game to get back to, playin' jacks." The civil war soldier piped up; his voice still harsh enough to make Wilfred twitch but a little bit calmer than before. Wilfred then shuddered.
He had so many questions, but his whole 'people-pleaser' persona was acting up again, making him constantly worried. He couldn't possibly ask these people all the questions that lay hunched on the tip of his tongue. How could he make use of his limited questions?
"A… are you guys de.. dead?" He murmured.
He was fully presented with the facts that these were ghosts, yet he still couldn't shake off the scepticism he had throughout his youth.
"Is that a joke?" The civil war soldier growled.
Wilfred winced.
'Definitely dead.'
"How… how do you know that you're dead?"
They paused, shared a look and then laughed.
"Because we died!"
Wilfred frowned.
"You aren't going to get any answers out of them." She stated simply with a shake of her head and a long sigh, "They died ages back and don't understand the grand scheme of things, thus, they idle their days by playing cards."
To prove her point, Wilfred looked back to see them indulging in a game of what he assumed was 'jacks'.
Dejectedly, Wilfred ran a hand through his sweat-infested hair and sighed.
"But-" The girl motioned to herself with a malevolent smirk, "-I can help you get your answers."
Wilfred looked up at her expectantly, his thoughts racing. If what she said was true, it was better to get help from someone who was experienced in the 'ghost world' whilst also being intelligent enough to aid him whilst he tried to make sense of it. She seemed to be quite modern, given her attire, calm demeanour and modern slang, yet she was a child.
As well as that, she seemed too… sinister.
Clearly she had ulterior motives for helping someone else, there's no way she would help out of the goodwill of her heart.
"What do you want from me?" Wilfred attempted to confidently ask her, yet his voice came out quivering, making him seem like the prey whilst she was the apex predator.
The predator grinned.
"I need your help."