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They said that the house at the crossroads was haunted.
Crossroads typically have a paranormal spark to them that other roads don’t; they’re the crossing of two paths, the limbo of being stood in the middle of a place that could take you in such different directions. It’s not an awfully huge conclusion to jump to, when it comes to the talk of life and death and everything in between. There’s a reason, after all, why suicides were buried at crossroads in unmarked graves a few hundred years ago – something to do with confusing their spirits enough to bar them from heaven. Apparently, spirits aren’t very good at taking directions, or reading maps.
The house at the crossroads was more than just a house; it had a name. The Sawney House had stood in Trost for as long as any local could remember, but the haunting had only started in the 1930s, when the homeowner moved away and a new family entered. They didn’t linger. Nobody did.
The ‘haunting’ always went the same way; it started small, with objects going missing and appearing later in odd places, and then it would grow to larger and more fantastical heights, with some culminating in actual apparitions of a boy in a waistcoat and a sour expression. Nobody ever died, but things certainly got thrown about and threats were certainly made. No one in their right mind would buy the Sawney House if they knew what was good for them.
The ghost, meanwhile, was quite happy with the house being empty, thank you very much.
Because there was a ghost.
There had been a ghost for almost two hundred years.
And said ghost was incredibly, irrevocably pissed off about that.
Hence the throwing.
Jean Kirschtein was not your typical ghost. He made sure of that. When he’d come back, at first he’d thought it was the universe’s idea of a sick joke. He’d not been a massive fan of living, in honesty, so death had come as something of a welcome, if not unexpected, relief. When he’d returned fully conscious and without a physical body a few days later, however, it just felt like fate had taken a steamroller to him without thinking it through.
Learning the physics that now applied to him was by far the hardest thing to overcome. He could walk through walls, sure, and he could levitate things like a magician in the storybooks he used to read as a child. There were other, more niche, aspects of his new existence that fascinated him, though. The first was that he would not be allowed to leave the house. He tried a few times, bac when he had first come back, but the moment he reached the boundary of the Sawney House, every atom in the living world gave him a not so gentle shove backwards. The second was that he could be seen by people – but only in one particular mirror, kept in the Master bedroom. Ironically, however, this was the one mirror that had a curtain draped over it, so no one could see him even if they wanted to.
Once the initial panic had worn off, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Leaving the house wasn’t an option – there was a tether somehow that made it impossible – and picking up objects was harder than it looked, without a slab of meat to control. No, Jean was quite happy to simply walk about the place and make sure everything was in its rightful place. He had, after all, lived there at some point – or had he? That was the thing about being around for so long – you tended to suffer from short term memory loss, which was definitely something that should have been added to a terms and conditions of house haunting, Jean reckoned.
But yes. The ‘pissed off’ aspect of his haunting.
Jean hadn’t particularly liked strange people poking around in his business when he was alive, and being very much dead hadn’t changed his attitude. He wanted his own space. He liked the quiet of an empty house, the crackle of an open fire and the sound of nothing more than a turn of a page and gentle sighs in the twilight.
He thought that, at the very least, he would have that in death. But, alas, apparently not. He threw a single book at a single head back in the 1800s and now the world and its mother wanted to visit him. Well – not ‘him’, per se, but his temper. His annoyance. He’d started off not intentionally trying to scare people; he just had a bit of a temper, and it was incredibly hard to explain to a screaming, hysterical family that no, he had not aimed a plant pot at their cat on purpose, he’d just forgotten his mother’s name and thrown a tantrum about it and to please stop screaming.
However, it soon became something of a game to him. When the house was bought by a professional couple in the hopes of tearing it down and starting anew, Jean made it very clear what he thought about that. Many a thing was thrown, and many a curse uttered down the large corridors of the dusty house. That particular couple hadn’t lasted long. But that just led to word getting around, and more people coming to Sawney House. Jean had thought some people were stupid before, but now he was certain they were all complete imbeciles.
It became something of a game to him, wondering whether or not the family who moved in or the paranormal investigators who stayed a single night would break and run at the first sign of strangeness, or whether they would stand their ground and tremble like leaves in a gale. It sure did help beat the boredom. He wasn’t a bad guy, he told himself as he hovered on the ceiling of his kitchen one morning, just a guy who wasn’t fond of trespassers.
That was why, when the next potential owner of Sawney House stepped through the threshold, Jean was already concocting the next way of terrifying them out of their wits. He perched himself on the bottom step of the staircase, invisible to the twitchy estate agent shuffling into the hallway. “Honestly, Mr Bodt, this is quite a wonderful little house, perfect for single occupancy and plenty of rooms you could turn into studies or libraries.”
“We already have a library,” Jean muttered under his breath. He was passing a ball he’d found from hand to hand, every sound making a reverberating noise around the empty rooms. The little man gave a shudder before he even turned around. Jean couldn’t help grinning. The estate agent knew the house well, and knew Jean by default. When he turned around, he gave the house a suspicious, piggy little glower. Jean glared right back – and made sure to pull the rug the man was standing on just a little bit. The little man fell forwards, pinwheeling his arms madly, but straightened up before the prospective buyer could see him. He cleared his throat. “You’ll find that this house has, uh, a lot of character,” he said, stepping aside to reveal the house to the person stood in the doorway.
Jean straightened up immediately, momentarily forgetting that nobody could see him.
The person that ducked through the threshold wasn’t a smarmy landlord or a snobby businessman. He was young, and a little scruffy around the edges, with a tartan scarf knotted about his neck from the coat and a smile that only grew as he stepped into the hallway. He was tall, taller than the estate agent who continued to blabber on about the period features and foundations, and brought a faint smell of paint and canvases with him. When he got further inside and shut the door behind him, Jean caught the speckling of freckles across his cheeks and down his neck.
“God, you’re handsome,” Jean breathed.
Both the man and the estate agent turned to face him. For one terrifying, exhilarating moment, Jean thought they could see him. Then he realised that the ball he’d been concentrating so hard on passing from one hand to the other had gone straight through the palm of his right hand and bounced, solemn and lonely, down the final step to rest at the boy’s feet. He stooped to pick it up as the estate agent gabbled, “Th-that’s odd, I don’t recall there being any children living in the house beforehand. I mean, this has been a family home before but-”
“Probably nothing.” The man – the boy – spoke with a smile that melted away all concern on the estate agent’s face. “Besides, I like a house that talks back. It’s charming, in its own little way.”
Jean frowned. This was not something he was used to. Sometimes, he got the newcomers straight away, right by the door, with stunts far less obvious than that. They would say the place felt dark, or sinister, and would just end up backing out before even looking at the rest of the house. But Marco had seen something clearly paranormal and smiled at it. Even as he was being shown into the kitchen, he kept the ball in his palm, squeezing it every now and again as if to remind himself it was still there.
Jean followed them into the dining room, drifting up to lounge on the large light fixture that, back in the days he was alive, had been a chandelier. Marco was listening to the estate agent talk with a polite interest, though his eyes were roving around the entire place. Once or twice, Jean was sure that the boy’s eyes met his own in a far more intentional way than innocent. “This really is a lovely house,” the boy was saying to the agent, tucking the ball into his pocket and running a hand along the large, ornate table Jean had once sat at for dinnertimes.
“Thanks,” Jean said, feeling a little bolder now. “I’d say I decorated myself, but my parents were very specific on how they liked their house.” He knew they couldn’t hear him; it just brought him comfort every now and again to act as though they could. “I’d really like it if you turned around again now – I have a bet with myself that your butt is incredible and I want to make sure I’m right.”
Predictably, Marco made no sign whatsoever that he had heard Jean. “And you say the furniture comes with it?” he asked the estate agent, instead.
“All comes with the house, Mr Bodt.”
“God, no one calls me Mr Bodt,” the boy laughed. “Call me Marco.”
Marco. Jean liked the sound of that name. It felt warm and welcoming, even in his mind.
As they drifted up to the bedrooms (Jean wondering if it was sad that the first time a beautiful boy got to step inside his room it was when he was dead and watching from above like a creeping angel) Marco asked, “so why is this house so cheap? It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s certainly old.”
Jean settled himself on his bed, though his lack of a body meant that the mattress didn’t even crease. He cocked an eyebrow at the little man Marco was asking. “Go on, then. Tell him the truth. Or are you going to lie?”
The estate agent wrung his hands. “Well, you see, you’re out of town so you don’t really know but…” he darted his eyes around, as though mortified Jean would materialise out of thin air and start dropping things on him. “Folk around here talk about this place. It has… something of a reputation.”
“Ah, so you’re going with the ‘dance around the topic’ approach. Good one.” Jean put his hands behind his head and looked Marco over, biting his lip as he did so. “God, you really are a handsome one, aren’t you? Maybe I’ll let you stay. If I get to see just a little bit of you shirtless I think we’ll have a nice deal going.”
“I’ll take it,” Marco said, a breath later.
Jean watched him talk things through with the estate agent in the living room, sign the paperwork, and get handed over the large, ornate looking keys to the house. His house. The house he grew up in, and the house that was now his prison, for one reason or another. Marco seemed enthused with the whole thing; he didn’t stop smiling the entire time, though the estate agent continued to look at him as though he was mad. As he fumbled his way towards the door, Jean made one of the mirrors beside the doorway rattle just enough to get the poor man scrambling for the door. He couldn’t help the snicker that burst out of him as the estate agent, relief etched on his face, scrambled towards his smart, snazzy company car.
Jean watched out of the window to make sure he really did drive off, practically pressing his face to the glass as the car squealed out of the drive in just enough haste not to be casual. He snickered again. Taking control of someone was easy when you had fear to bridle them.
Someone cleared his throat behind him, and Jean spun around out of habit. Marco was still here – of course he was, he now owned the house – and he was just heading out of the living room the estate agent had left him in. Jean watched from his place by the window as Marco crossed to the dining room, throwing the keys up and down and catching them every time. “Hmm,” he said to himself, looking about the place with a more practiced, critical eye than he’d had with the other man. “Lighting really is good in here, could set up plenty of canvases here. Could make one of the bedrooms upstairs a studio, there’s enough room for that.”
So the smell on him wasn’t just some strange ghostly perk that Jean had neglected to pick up before. Marco was an artist.
He hummed under his breath as he took another small tour of the kitchen, opening the doors and shutting them with a gentle reverence, touching every surface and appliance like it was a timid animal, ready to bolt at the slightest move. Maybe he had seen the mirror shudder. Maybe he’d put two and two together with the ball. Maybe he knew far more than what he’d let on.
Marco went back to the hallway and glanced up at the stairs. Jean frowned at him. “What are you looking at them like that for?” he asked to the air. “They’re not going to bite you. They’re not the things that are haunted.”
Marco took the stairs quickly, and Jean rolled his eyes and followed him, tapping a few times along the wall as he went. Those taps were the easiest things for people to reason away; they would call it nothing more than water pipes swelling and shrinking with the temperature. Before that, it had been mice in the walls that was the grand excuse, and Jean would have to put up with pest control coming into the house and gassing it out with putrid fumes that, although he didn’t technically breathe, still made him want to choke.
Marco paid no attention to them though, instead making a beeline straight for the room on his right. Jean stumbled to a halt, a strange emotion passing over him. That was the room with the mirror. His parents’ old room. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Jean said. He let Marco push the door open. He let him step inside. In fact, he let him go into the middle of the room before he slammed the door behind them both.
Marco jumped, but didn’t seem particularly surprised. Jean alighted on the floor, directly behind him, and ran a finger down his neck just to make the hairs he saw there stand to attention like soldiers. “I told you, you shouldn’t be in here,” Jean said, leaning in closer to Marco’s frowning, unsure face. “You’re cute, Marco Bodt, but you’re not that cute.”
Marco let out a sigh. Jean expected it was one of composure, of pulling himself together before he inevitably fall apart under days, weeks or even months of Jean being the true brat he could be. But then, Marco spoke.
“Flattery won’t get you anywhere, you know. Even if you are trying to threaten people.”
Jean froze. The humour drained from him like water down a sinkhole. “Excuse me?” he asked.
Marco wasn’t looking at him; his eyes weren’t focused, though his head was swinging this way and that as though trying to find where the sound was coming from, exactly. Because there was a sound. There had to be. Because Marco had responded to what Jean was saying.
“And I read that you were a little aggressive, but I never took you down for a flirt.”
Jean choked. Oh god. Marco, this living person was talking to Jean as though he was just stood with his arm around him, grinning like an idiot. Marco was talking to him like he was human. “You can hear me?” he dared to ask.
Marco smiled at the question. “Yes, I can hear you.”
Horror stole through Jean’s stomach – or what remained of it, anyway. “How long have you been able to hear me?”
“Since I walked into this house, if you must know.” Marco’s smile grew wider as he walked about the room. “I know this is the room with the most physical activity in it, so I figured it was best to talk here, where you’re not…distracted.”
Jean put his head in his hands and groaned. Oh god, he’d been saying how hot he was, how nicely his butt filled out his jeans, and he could hear every single thing.
Marco laughed. “Now, I don’t know if that was a groan of embarrassment or you’re trying to scare me, but it’s definitely working for embarrassment.” He paused. “I never knew ghosts could have a preference. Then again, I’ve never met any ghosts who are quite so vocal about it. You’re the first of your kind, whoever you are.”
Jean groaned again, and Marco pointed straight in his direction. “Aha! That was embarrassment, right there. I could tell. It sounds like you’re in pain, you honestly don’t have to feel so bad about it. It’s very… flattering. Odd, but flattering. Not every day you get hit on by a ghost.”
“How long have you been able to hear ghosts?” Jean asked, trying to ignore the very evident fact that every inappropriate comment he’d made might as well have been broadcast to a radio station for all the good it did.
“My family are mystics,” Marco shrugged. “Psychics. Mediums. People like that. I’ve always had the Ear for it, but the Sight came later.”
“Perfect. The one person who can hear me moves into my house.”
“It’s not all bad, surely.” Marco’s brows drew together as he honed in on where Jean’s noise was coming from. “This place must be lonely.”
Jean opened his mouth, shut it, then huffed. “I suppose it can be a little lonely,” he admitted, folding his arms as he glided forward.
“So you scare away everyone who lives here? I see the stellar logic in that.”
Jean bristled. “You can’t argue with me. I’ve been dead hundreds of years!”
“And yet you sound like you died about a year ago.”
Jean glowered at him, though Marco would never see it. “I get with the times, you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all. It’s refreshing, actually. Most of you are very set in your ways.”
Jean scoffed. “Now I’m the one who’s flattered.”
Marco laughed. “Wow, never thought I’d be getting sassed by a ghost.”
“You should get a jacket.”
Marco snorted and turned his attention, instead, to the one thing that stood out in the room. A long mirror. A full-length sort of mirror. The mirror that, for so long now, had been covered up. “Hello,” Marco greeted it, sidling closer. “And what do we have here?”
Jean gulped. “Uh, that’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.” Marco paused before it and drew a section of shroud back from it to reveal a small sliver of the surface beneath. Jean stepped closer, curious too, and almost jumped back. He’d seen one of his legs, poking out from behind the cloth like he was in a peep show. Marco noticed. “This can show you what you look like?” he asked.
Jean bit his lip. “It’s been covered up for so long I don’t think I remember what I look like.”
Marco frowned. “That’s awful.”
Jean hesitated. Was it? His memory was a hummingbird, flitting from flower to flower with no real course or route. He’d taken pride of his appearance, sure, but he’d never cared to worry about what he looked like after death. He was sure that he would look infinitely worse than he had in life, and that was not something he wanted to handle. “Please,” he said, his voice a little softer than usual, “don’t pull back the curtain. Not yet.”
Marco looked as though he wanted to disobey, but after a heavily pregnant pause stepped away from the mirror and held his hands out in front of him. “There. I moved away. Trust me now?”
“Trust you?” Jean let gravity slip and drifted up to the ceiling, bobbing over Marco’s head like a cork in the ocean. “Why would you need me to trust you?”
“Well, if you let me live here I presume there’s to be some sort of ground rules? And one should be trust.”
“You seem awfully confident that I’ll let you stay here.”
Marco grinned. “Oh, I dunno, I think those shirtless sights you wanted earlier than be arranged if you so wish.”
Jean hadn’t blushed in over two hundred years, but if he could have blushed at that exact moment, he knew he would have. “Fine, fine,” he said. “No haunting. Yet. But no promises.”
Marco laughed. “Alright, alright, I accept your terms, Jean Kirschtein.”
It was only later, when Marco had started moving in boxes of his stuff and discussing improvements with Jean, did he realise that Marco hadn’t ever been given his name. Marco had just known it, off the bat, straightaway.
Like he said – fate had a way of doing him over. Maybe this time, it was paying him back.