It felt like I walked for a long time that day, but I really can’t say for sure, even now. There was no way to gauge time, because nothing ever changed. The ground was an unblemished grey that seemed to blend with the fog; the sun, if there was one, didn’t seem to move in the sky, and it never got lighter or darker. Most curiously, the walking seemed to have no effect on me, either. It took a while, but in time I noticed that I simply wasn’t getting tired. I tried walking faster, but it didn’t change anything. I never got hungry, or thirsty, or needed to rest. I just walked. It could have been for hours or for days, for all the difference it made. Eventually, I decided that wandering without a destination was getting me nowhere. I needed to try something else. But what were dead people supposed to do, anyway? That thought finally reminded me that I still didn’t even know why I was dead. That seemed like a good place to start. Could I figure out how I died, and why? Maybe that would resolve my… unfinished business and let me move on? That was how it worked in the movies. I figured that was as good a guide as any, because really, I had no reason to believe Finn, did I? I didn’t even know him. Why should I take his word that I was simply stuck here forever? No, I needed to figure things out for myself.
I decided that the logical first step would be to see if I could find my way back to the last place I remembered being when I was alive and retrace my steps from there. So, the only question was how to get there from here. I thought back. I had been at my apartment building. Closing my eyes, I could clearly see myself parking in the back lot that afternoon and walking towards the building… And that was when I suddenly walked into something solid. My face bounced firmly off the surface, and I was already rubbing my forehead before I realized that it didn’t hurt. Which made sense, I supposed. I dropped my hands and took a couple of steps back, to see that I had walked into the side wall of my apartment building. The fog had dissipated somewhat, though the color of the world was still less… saturated than I remembered it being. Still, that seemed like progress, somehow. Maybe from here I could retrace my steps and figure out what happened to me. I pressed my hand into the brickwork. It seemed solid enough. So, it didn’t seem like I would be walking through any walls. That was disappointing. Being dead was supposed to have some advantages. Lacking other options, I decided to just try the door.
The front door of my apartment building, well my former apartment building I supposed, was painted a vivid blue that stood out despite the relative pallor of the rest of my surroundings. As I approached it, I remembered walking this same path on my last day. I glanced back, looking at the spot where I had parked my car. It was still there, parked under the light post. I knew I’d left my lunch bag on the passenger seat, and my used dishes were going to get all moldy, now. For some reason, that really bothered me, even though it was too late to do anything about it, and by all rights it shouldn’t even matter. What if that was my unfinished business? Could it be something that stupid? I truly hoped not. That would be embarrassing. Shaking my head, I resumed my walk towards the door. Normally, I would need a key to enter, but I didn’t seem to have one on me, just now. I supposed I could wait to see if anyone entered or left, but I decided to try pulling on the door, just to see what happened. As my hand touched the knob, though, it passed right through. Huh. Apparently, I could pass through doors, but not walls? I would have to experiment more with that. Later. I stepped through the door and began climbing the stairs to my unit. As I climbed, I remembered that I had returned early that day. The power had gone out at work, and we had all been sent home almost two hours before my usual quitting time. The last time I had walked up these stairs, I had been excited to spend a rare free evening with my fiancé, for once. What could have happened?
Reaching my unit I paused at the door, hearing the faint sounds of sobbing from inside. The thought suddenly occurred to me that he would be in there. Cameron. I would see him if I went in, and I realized that I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I should miss him, I supposed, be upset that I was dead and couldn’t be with him. But I mostly felt nothing. Odd. Perhaps that was a side effect of being dead. I steeled myself and stepped through the door. Cameron was sitting on our living room couch, wearing the sweater I had bought him for our last anniversary. He was sobbing into his hands. For a moment, I felt a brief flicker of sadness and regret. We had been together since college; our wedding was supposed to be in 4 months. However I had died, he was clearly broken up about it. I took an unconscious step forward and reached a hand towards his shoulder, but I froze in my tracks when a woman emerged from the kitchen, carrying a mug of tea. She sat down next to Cameron on the couch, rubbing his back gently and making soothing noises. I didn’t know her name, but I realized with a start that I did know this woman. Not well, I had only met her once, the last time I’d entered this apartment. When I had walked in early to find my fiancé on the couch with her, in a similar situation. Of course, he hadn’t been wearing the sweater, then. In fact, he hadn’t been wearing anything at all. Which must have been the dress code, because neither had she. Anger flared briefly in my chest. I remembered. The bastard had been cheating on me. And now his mistress was here, in my apartment? Was this why I had died? Had they killed me?
“You know you didn’t do anything wrong,” the woman cooed in his ear.This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
I moved closer to listen to hear them better, their voices seemed muffled and hazy, as if coming from far away.
“Didn’t I?” he asked.
“Oh come on, she probably just needs a bit of space right now. She’ll resurface when she thinks she has punished you enough. Frankly, it would be better if she just stayed gone,” she continued. “Then we can finally be together, without all the drama.”
He pushed her away and stood abruptly.
“For god’s sake, Leanne, I just got back from the police station. They think I killed her!”
“So what? You know you didn’t.”
“You think that matters? Also, what if something really has happened to her? Won''t it seem a little inappropriate for us to be…”
“You were fine cheating on her when she was alive. It isn’t worse if she’s dead.”
She had a point, I conceded.
“Look, if I had really wanted to be with you, I would have broken up with Mara in the first place. You were only ever for fun. It never meant anything to me.”
I rolled my eyes. I had run out of the apartment pretty quickly the night I had found them together, but I remembered him yelling something similar after me. I didn’t care then, and I cared even less now. The fact that it meant nothing sort of made things worse, honestly. It just meant that he had betrayed me for nothing. For fun. I couldn’t believe I had wasted my life, literally as it turned out, on this asshole. Amazing. Leanne seemed to agree, because she slapped him,
“Just fun? That isn’t what you’ve been telling me for the last 8 months.”
“Yeah, well, so what?” Cameron rubbed his cheek. “What did you expect? You knew I was engaged.”
“Really? Is that what you are going to hide behind?” her voice pitched up. “Like you didn’t pursue me? Like you didn’t whine to me every day at work about how terribly she treated you? About how you would break up as soon as you could ‘untangle’ yourself financially?”
“And you believed that?” he snorted incredulously. “I kind of thought we were both just… choosing to roleplay a convenient fiction.”
I heard the mug shatter against a wall, but I had already turned away. I had hoped they would discuss my death, but it seemed that they didn’t even know I was dead. It sounded as if they simply thought I was missing. Which meant that there was nothing more for me to learn here. And it surprised me to realize that, outside of that, I didn’t have any interest in either of them. I honestly thought I would care more about my fiancé and his mistress, but even the brief flash of anger hadn’t lasted long, and I found no satisfaction in their bickering. I remembered being distraught when I found out Cameron was cheating. I remembered hating Leanne. And that couldn’t have been very long ago. But now, I didn’t feel much towards him but a vague contempt. Maybe being dead put things like that into perspective. I didn’t know. All I knew was that they couldn’t help me. So, I would just have to keep following my own path from that night and hoping it would jog my memory further.
After I found them together, I had run out of the apartment; Cameron had chased after me, but he hadn’t followed very far, probably because he wasn’t wearing any clothes, just a blanket from the back of the couch. I walked out to the street and retraced my steps from that night, out into the city. I had wandered for hours, before I had realized that it was getting late, and cold, and I couldn’t stay out there all night. But I also knew I couldn’t go back to our apartment. In that moment, I hadn’t thought I could ever go back there again. Apparently, I had been right, unless my ghostly visit just now counted, which I decided it did not. I had left my car keys on the side table by the door when I ran out, which explained why my car was still in the lot. So, where had I gone? I stood on the street corner, looking up at the traffic lights, the same as I had that night, hoping for inspiration, but nothing jumped out at me. The streets were empty this time of night, not that anyone else seemed to be able to see me or interact with me, even if they were around. I didn’t belong here. I was just a visitor, looking at the tableau of life through a hazy window. Unable to touch it.
I sat down on the curb and tilted my head back to look at the stars. I could hardly see them through the mist that seemed to follow me everywhere. It thinned and thickened, but it never fully dissipated. At that moment, it closed in around me, leaving me isolated in a tiny island of clarity. I sighed. What was the point? Did how I die even matter? My life was, apparently, a joke. My fiancé didn’t even care that I might be dead, only that he could be blamed for it. Did anyone care? I felt very tired, suddenly. Not physically, I seemed to lack any physical needs. But maybe that was part of the problem, now that I thought about it. No thirst, no need to sleep, no hunger. Why even bother doing anything? What was there to motivate someone to even get up off the curb? It wasn’t like anything I could do would change my situation. And nothing seemed to be able to make me happy, or sad, or even angry, anymore. At least, not for more than an instant. Maybe the best thing to do would be to sit here and just wait to become a demon. Nothing else really seemed worth the trouble. So, for an indeterminate amount of time, that is what I did. The sun rose and set, people walked across the sidewalks and through my silent form on the curb. At one point, a taxi door even opened through me. But I didn’t move. I just couldn''t summon the will to even bother.
I had resigned myself to this being my afterlife forever, until suddenly I smelled something. Well, smell wasn’t precisely the right word, but I don’t think there is an equivalent that a living person would understand. I use smell because it awakened a hunger in me, one I had never felt before the moment I set eyes on that demon. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but for the first time in however long it had been since I sat down, I wanted something badly enough to get up and go after it. So, rising from the ground, I set off in search of the enticing aroma.