Part 2

This story was made using the solo RPG: Lighthouse at the End of the World, by Bannerless Games.

Without a jenga tower, I used Max Kämmerer’s die-rolling alternative, here

The weeks were long in the lighthouse. Time passed slowly for Thomas as he muttered his way up and down the lighthouse steps. He cursed the chills and the heat, he spat on the creaking wood and sneered at the fragrence of rotting seaweed that permiated the stacks of flotsam that lined the walls.

“Ten,” he muttered, after counting. “Ten of you, eh? No matter. I’m ready for you. Got my own, see? Got my own.”

Tending the lighthouse was a simple enough job. He changed out the oil every day, adjusted the valves and chimney as required, and that was that. All he had left to do was explore the detritus of the sea and avoid any ghosts.

“No such thing,” he muttered one day. “Phah. Used to think all wrong, didn’t I? Wonder if any are mine…”

He picked through the debrie like a vulture, his nose peeking over the tops of bags and crates as he continued searching. He didn’t know what he was looking for — or even if he was looking for anything — but he kept looking all the same. He found scraps of lives everywhere; pieces of silverware, waterlogged money, lockets, letters, jewelry of all kinds…

“Nice for you,” he muttered, tossing clothing around the room. “Not for me. Not for me. Good, that’s mine. Yours, that. Yours. Mine…”

One day, after his sorry meal of withered potato and salted meat, he decided to open what he had come to think of as the King’s Cabinet. He dipped his plate in the barrel of water next to the sink and rubbed it with a ragged cloth. He never saw the need to wash up. Who would he put on airs for?

He marched back down to his bedroom, but not to his bed. Instead, he opened the large oaken cabinet at the far end of the room, the one with ornate doors, carved with some family’s house crest. It was one of the better kept pieces of furniture, largely free of dried barnacles and dead seaweed stink.

Inside, the cabinet was piled high with folded stacks of thick clothing. He brushed his fingertips over the rough fabric, clicking his tongue in dissapointment. “Too much for me,” he muttered, scratching at the wool with a dirty fingernail. He could smell the rot of the sea that had soaked into the clothes. “Good for firewood,” he snickered to himself. He could imagine the saltwater boiling away like poison in the fire, turning it a sickly blue before the shirts and trousers burned clean.

With a sharp pull, he yanked the stacks of clothing out and sent them tumbling to the wooden floor. With a cackle he tossed the clothing about like a kid in the snow. The smell grew worse, but Thomas didn’t care; these moments rarely came in his life anymore.

He had only just paused to pick up a ragged silk robe, when his eye fell on the viola case.

It had been hidden behind the clothes, or perhaps simply forgotten, but the case was there, black and crusty. Thomas dropped the robe in the face of this new delight, and pulled the case free from the cabinet.

The latch was secure, the seal tight. Thomas sniffed at the rusty metal, scraping it with his nails. Cases were always good prizes; hidden secrets and keepsakes, pieces of who people really were.

Thomas licked his lips and carefully clicked the case open. With a rusty creak, the case opened to reveal a perfectly polished viola. The bow was carefully set in its proper place in the lid, and the strings all gleamed, even in the dim light.

Thomas carefully lifted the viola to his neck. Plucking the bow from its place, he laid it on the strings and scraped it back and forth. The viola shrieked like a banshee, cracking and spitting as Thomas giggled, hopping about the room. “Dance, my ghosties,” he coughed. “Dance for me!” He kicked at the piles of clothing. All about him were pieces of someone elses life. They were likely dead now, or as good as, and this was all that was left of them. Everything was a ghost of a kind. There was nowhere more haunted than this lighthouse.

They were all around him, ten at least, spinning and shrieking along with the viola. Old dances long since forgotten, new dances known only to the dead, music that no one had ever heard, or ever would hear, filled the empty space where people once danced. Thomas laughed and coughed and giggled again as the dust and cloth became figures of the past.

His delight ended as soon as it began, the sound became grating his ears. The ghost’s delight became pleading, a nagging. He tossed the viola away, dissapointed that he could not make it sound as beautiful as he imagined. “Rotten,” he muttered. “No use crying to me, I won’t listen. Time for other things.” He pulled at the case…

A rattle caused him to stop.

“Phah,” Thomas sniffed, shaking the case. Sure enough, something else was inside. Opening the lid, he listed carefully for the sound as he shook it again. Set in the frame of the case’s neck was a small box. He opened it, and out fell a tiny pewter key. “A key,” he licked his lips, sniffing again. “Whose are you?”

The key didn’t answer. It was small, not big enough for a door or gate. It was simple, so it might have fit in a clockwork toy or music box. It could have belonged to a jewelbox, or a tiny chest of coin and gemstones.

“No,” Thomas muttered.

It could have been a key to a little boy’s stash of candy, hidden away like a pirate’s treasure from his siblings and his parents. His mother found his facination with the sea-bandits charming, and so gifted him an old box to fire his imaginations.

“Too many,” Thomas grunted.

It could open the lock on a young lass’s diary, filled with her hopes and dreams of the future, thoughts on the past, and a thousand secrets she would never tell anyone. Never wanted to tell anyone, now all dead as she was.

“No more,” Thomas snapped.

It could have been to a wealthy man’s cigar case, filled with only the finest and most luxurious of tobaccos. It could have opened the hunting kit of a forester, to keep out the curious woodland critters. It could have belonged to an old factory worker, a wealthy duchess, or a strapping bachelor.

“No,” Thomas cried, shoving the key in his pocket. “No, no. Too many. No more, there’s already too many.” Leaving the room strewn about with clothing, he hobbled as fast as he could down the steps, away from the wailing ghosts of the past. “Lemmie alone!” he cried, stomping towards the cellar.

The cellar was not the deepest floor of the lighthouse. It was the last floor with stairs, but in the corner of the cellar lay a trap-door, behind which sat a ladder. This ladder took Thomas to the basement, a place he did not like to go to often.

There were no windows in the cellar nor the basement, so he carried a candle with him, hastily lit from a small iron striker. Climbing down the ladder was difficult with only one hand, much less with his old and laboured body, but he managed. Huffing and muttering to himself, he crept into the corner of the basement. “All that talking,” he gibbered. “Boys and girls and men and women and can’t even get to sleep.”

In the corner of the basement sat the machine. He didn’t know what it’s real name was; it was more than a boiler, less than an engine. It was far more complicated than the oil-lamp atop the lighthouse, but it was every bit as essential to the lighthouse’s function. If the machine wasn’t working, neither would the horn.

Thomas hated the horn. He had blown it once, and never again; the horrific tone had shaken him to his very bones, and he was not eager to repeat the experience again. Nevertheless, his posting had been very clear on when the horn was to be blown, and Thomas was not about to have a ship crash under his watch.

“Too many,” Thomas simpered. “Too many already.”

It was a complicated machine, one that required careful management to keep proper pressure and suitable temperature. With the changing seasons the fire required consistant attention, always making sure the three metal chambers didn’t get too hot or too cold.

Thomas didn’t know a thing about the machine. The posting had left few instructions on how to keep the dials steady or the mechanisms clean. There were wires and coils and strange pistons that moved up and down like slow windmills. He had managed well enough, knowing something of boilers from his brief stint below decks on a steam boat.

“Not me,” he muttered. “Not anymore. Old ghost, that.”

Thomas checked the dials and inspected the piping. Everything looked in order, and the valves were clicking along, steady as you please.

“Fine,” Thomas muttered. “Fine. All fine. No need to mess.” He turned and looked back at the ladder.

“Still up there,” he sniffed. “Fine. Go out, I guess. Won’t follow me there.”

---

Thomas rarely wandered the cliffside. Sometimes the sun was too bright, shining down on him like a firy poker. Other times the winds were too strong or the storms were too harsh. Most of the time it was too dull. The horizon stretched out like a flat stretch of blue linen, wrinkled and wet. Thomas didn’t care much for it, and it didn’t care for him.

But it sent gifts every once in a while, and the ghosts never followed him outside, so he wandered all the same.

The salt air was fresher than indoors, free from the foul stench of death. The grass waved gently in the breeze and the rustling of leaves in the forest harmonized with the crashing of waves on the rocks.

“Damned tomb,” Thomas wiped his face, glancing only briefly at the penal colony. “Nothing but dead things here, s’truth.”

A gentle glint of metal caught Thomas’s eye again, this time not from the hidden inlet, but from the cliff face below. Peering over the edge, Thomas squinted his eyes to see what could shine in such dim daylight.

At first he didn’t believe it. Then, he couldn’t believe it was anything else. Ignoring his aching limbs, he found a ragged slope that provided some stability as he climbed down towards the metal object.

As he got closer, he became more and more certain. It was a sea-mine.

When he reached its side, there was no doubt. The mine was half-rusted and jammed hard into the cliffside, pressed into a crack. A broken rusted chain dangled from its bottom, half wrapped around a sharp stone.

Like a priest seeing a holy relic for the first time, Thomas reached out with his gnarled fingers to rest his hand upon the rusted metal.

“Still alive?” he muttered. “Dead? Rusted ghost, or…or might you live again?”

Thomas turned to the sea, hand reflexively sheilding his eyes from the sun, already muted by the clouds. “Where you from, then? Whose side you after? Want to knock out a few? Phah.”

Far in the distance, Thomas spied a small cluster of black dots. Five or six, at the outside. Thomas clicked his teeth. “Which ones…which ones, I wonder…”

With the sudden energy of a man inspired, Thomas climbed back up the rocky cliff, scrambling like a spider towards his lighthouse. Ignoring the pain of scraped knees and stabbed palms, he hauled himself back onto the tiny path and hobbled as fast as he could towards the door.

By the time he reached the first flight of stairs, the distant echoing thunder of cannon fire reached his ears. He paused, listening carefully to the resonant overtones. “No,” he muttered. “Not ours. Maybe? No, couldn’t be. Too brassy.” He continued climbing when the second salvo fired. Then a third. By the time he had grabbed a telescope from next to his bed and shuffled back outside, the dots had vanished.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Damn, damn, damn. Too far? Maybe. Won’t see much, only three salvos. Not enough to sink a ship…unless a small one. Too small? Might get a few…damn…” He turned back to the door. “Already got three of you…soldiers, sailors…don’t need another. Don’t need one of them…might be one of ours, though. A small one…”

Thomas walked back into the lighthouse. “More…more ghosts. More dead things…more tombstones…” He walked up to his bedroom and replaced the telescope on the small table. “Too many. Too much.”

Without even thinking about it, his hands reached out to the piles of leftovers. He picked and prodded as he paced back and forth, his mind beset with thoughts of metal ships and rushing water.

His eyes landed on the cast-aside paper from where he had shoved it off his desk. “Write something?” he cast about, looking for something he couldn’t quite name. “No poet, me. Nah, not worth a penny. What am I going to write? You want me to write about you lot? You dead lot? Nah, stories are for the living. Songs and poems and…and…not dead things.”

He tore his gaze away and tore open the first box on his left. “Something in here,” he muttered. “Sure as sausages, something in here. Lets see…no, no…rags, shoes, leather —”

Thomas stopped as his hand gripped a slim box. Even after so long, he recognized the shape and size.

“Come, Mr. Salford,” the sharp voice of his Captain grated his ear like sandpaper. “It’s there on the shelf. Hand it to me, will you?”

Thomas’s fingers snapped the latch and opened the tiny box. Inside lay a stoppered crystal inkwell and two perfectly clean and white quills, suitable for a nobility’s hand.

“If discharge is what you are after, Mr. Salford, then discharge is what you’ll get.”

Thomas dropped the box. “No! I’m not going to do it! You all can bugger off!” He grabbed the next box and yanked it open without so much as a single sniff. He was rewarded with a dazzling array of silverware and china plates, all strapped in to the sturdy wooden case. Monogramed on every plate was the maker’s symbol, two initials: S.W.

“The Sea Wolf is the finest ship you’ll ever see,” the ship’s Captain gave a curt nod to the assembled soldiers. “You’ll not see her like again in some time. Sit tight, and we’ll get you to the front in no time.”

The sound of rushing water filled Thomas’s mind. The distant thunder of ship’s guns promised a storm. Twisting metal and screaming voices flowed through the cracks in the hull. Water poured on Thomas’s head as a million lives called out from the depths, long since lost to the roiling waves.

“Trapped,” Thomas groaned, clutching his throat. “Not anything but dark and twisted water. You’re choking me, you’re all choking me!”

The thousand tombstones of flotsam and jetsam loomed over Thomas as he collapsed on his bed. Cannons fired again and again. Men fell to bullet and sword. Farmhouses burned and parents cried over their lost children. The thick smell of smoke and iron covered the skies in darkness.

They were there now, all of them. They were dancing, screaming, eating, fucking, laughing, crying, writing, playing…

Thomas screamed.

---

How long had it been? Thomas stared at the lamp. The nights had been cold, and he had not bothered to adjust the valves or clean out the oil. It had congealed, clogged with bits of grime and smoke. The light had been out for days at least, and now the lamp might take another week to repair.

“Damn ghosts,” Thomas grumbled. “Sitting on me like that, making me lose my time…Want more, do they? Well, I won’t give them the satisfaction. No friends for me, no friends for you!”

His muttering was punctuated by the clatter of his bundle of tools on the stone floor. There were spare parts somewhere in the store room, and he knew his way around a wrench. He’d fix the lamp if it took a month. “My job, it is. I get a job, I do a job. Hmm. Butter and oil. Could use some soap, get nice and clean. Dance? No, not now. Busy, me. Get one ‘o them nobs to give you a spin, eh?”

Thomas worked as hard as he could manage with his gnarled hands and bent back. His knees protested in agony as he twisted bolts and tightened nuts. He pried at the dried oil with a sharp awl and claw-hammer. He muttered and groaned as his knuckles brused and bled from hitting the sharp metal. Some pieces needed to be replaced, and his limbs did not thank him for the constant moving up and down the stairs, hauling tubes and tiny metal pieces.

At long last, he had pieced it all back together. “Phah,” he muttered, “How’s that for a discharge?” Pulling out his iron stiker, he sent sparks flying over the wick until it began to burn, fed by the small trickle of oil.

In moments, the lighthouse was re-lit.

Muttering to himself with satisfaction, Thomas turned to see a large black bird staring at him from its perch on the edge of the metal railing.

The Crow cawed at him three times. Thomas stared at the bird, and it stared back. It had claimed a perch on the end of a stack of rifles, poking curiously at the muzzle, but now it had focused on him, like it knew him. He knew — as sure as rain — that his time was running out. Tomorrow, he would climb over the wall and die to enemy bullets. He would collapse on the ground, choking as warm blood filled his lungs. He would vanish, and his only tombstone the salted earth of the battlefield.

The bird on the railing fluffed up its feathers in haughty indignation, and cawed at him.

Three times.

---

Thomas’s feet felt heavy as he staggered down the stairs.

Doom.

He had been running from it for so long, had almost forgotten what it felt like to stay in one place — but he had been, for over a month. Here, in the lighthouse, he’d been safe from the war, the pain, other people…

“No,” he corrected himself with a mutter as his foot hit the stair hard, “you’re all here, aren’t you.” He sniffed.

His other foot almost slipped off the stair as he turned around. “No!” He hobbled down the last three stairs before addressing the room. “No, you’re not her!”

She smelled like lilacs, fresh in the spring. “Please, don’t go,” she bit her lip. “I’ll never know if you’re alive or dead. Let someone else fight in this damn war! You don’t have to go!”

He didn’t have to go, but it was easier this way. “Sorry, love,” he scratched the back of his neck, her perfume filling his nostrils. “We can’t fight destiny. Gotta stand up for us all, right?”

“Gerroff!” Thomas plucked his shoe off his foot and hurdled it at the large oaken cabinet with the ornate doors. The thwack of his shoe on the wood shook the perfume from his nose. “You bugger off, right? She’s not here, so you can bugger right off, you…you…”

They had names. He didn’t know them, but they had them. Other people had known them. Some day, he’d die and all the people who had known his name would die too. He’d be as much a ghost as every object in the lighthouse; bits and shards of a life unfinished.

He picked about through the tombstones again, aimless and tired. He found a child’s toy, a small spinning top. Was a child’s skeleton now under the waves, or did they die not knowing if their father would ever come home with a present for their loved one? He stopped when he reached his shoe and picked it up. He stared at it a moment, and then put it down again, gently nudging it under the cabinet. There. Now he was every bit a part of this macabre graveyard as anyone.

“Hmm,” he muttered to himself. “No, need a shoe. Got no other good ones. Maybe some in the piles? Too long to find them. Buggerit,” Thomas groaned as he lowered his aching bones to the floor, and reached under the cabinet to pull his shoe out again.

As he felt around for the shoe, his hand sank, pressing into a loose floorboard. The creak echoed through the silent room like the horn of the lighthouse, calling Thomas’s focus. “Eh? What’s this, then?” He pressed about, hearing the creaks and feeling the board bend and move like a loose lever. Feeling towards the end, he could feel that the board hadn’t popped loose with a rusted nail; he could feel the hole where a nail had once been. The board had been purposefully loosened.

His back protested and his arms screamed as he worked away at the board, trying to slip his hands through the small opening when he pushed on the other side. It could have been easier, had he the strength to move the whole oaken cabinet off of the board, but his back wasn’t nearly strong enough for such exertion.

At long last, he managed to slip his hand into the hole and produce a small journal. It was leather-bound, and fit easily in even Thomas’s withered hand. He flipped the book open to the first page.

The folowing is a journal of my time here, as watchman and keeper of this lighthouse, begining this March in the year of our lord, 1822. My name is Jonathan Briggs, retired Leutenant of our Majesty’s Navy, with Honor.

Thomas stared at the page long and hard. It was just the sort of thing he had started to write not a week ago, but couldn’t. Licking his lips, Thomas turned the page.

He read as best he could, struggling to read words he had never seen before. Thankfully, the old lighthouse-keeper had been a sailor, and so his penmenship was that of a working man, and not a posh noble. Thomas could follow along easier than the couple of smutty letters he still kept under his pillow, though the journal was less interesting.

I have made a practice (one page said) of trying to descern which of the vessels in the old manifests may have brought these items to our shore. It is possible, if fortune blesses me, that I may then divine the next of kin, or perhaps even the original ownerrs of these things that choke the air out from this place.

Thomas turned the page, and a folded slip of paper slid out to the floor. Bending his creaking knees, he fumbled with the thin sheet for a moment before he managed to unfold it and cast his bleary eyes over its contents.

It was a list of ship-names and dates. The names that followed looked to be ports, destinations of the ships, no doubt.

Thomas let the journal fall. Shipping manifests? He hadn’t seen any manifests among the tools and supplies in the lighthouse; were they lost in the wreckage’s tombstones? Had the last keeper hidden them somewhere?

Almost without thinking about it, Thomas’s hands began to peck. He crawled over the detritus like a spider, clawing at boxes and opening bags. He sniffed and licked at every item like a hungry dog, eager to find a scrap of meat hidden in the brush.

As he looked, he sang;

How long had it been since he had sung that old nersary rhyme? Years — decades, even. He couldn’t remember all the words, even, but somehow the words came anyway. Perhaps the ghosts were singing through him. It didn’t matter, he had to find those shipping manifests!

He found more clothing, more tools, a crate of building nails, an old ship’s wheel…thousands of pieces, all scattered through the lighthouse. He ran up and down the stairs, slapping unopened chests and scratching at tightly tied bags. The smell of old soaked leather and rotten fish filled the air like thick smoke. Dried pieces of dead sea-creatures scattered over the floor as ancient boxed were opened once more, and their contents upended.

Thomas paused only once, when a thin box revealed itself to be a chess-set, complete with pieces. Thomas stared at the pieces, marveling at their smooth polish and careful crafting. The kings were missing, but the old salt and pepper-shakers could serve, if he ever got it in his mind to learn to play.

He kept searching until his legs and arms gave out from exhaustion. He collapsed to the wooden floor, gasping for breath. He still hadn’t found the manifests. They had to be somewhere, and when Thomas found them, he could finally find a way to lay the ghosts of the lighthouse to rest.

As the lights began to flicker on in the penal colony, the distant call of a song filtered through the air. Had they heard him singing earlier, or was it some kind of holiday? The deep voices in the work shanties crooned in the dimming light. There were words, but the music was too distant to descern every line. Thomas could only hear the single phrase:

“Work,” Thomas muttered. “Work all day, all night, and you end up here. Ley off, you; go pester the general. I got things to do…things to do…”

Thomas lay on the floor, listening to the creaking wood as the night crept on. It wasn’t until the last echo of the song vanished that Thomas noticed how dark the outside was. Hoisting himself up off the floor, he scrambled up the stairs as fast as his aching body would allow.

When he reached the top, he saw his concerns were not unfounded: the wick had gone out. He reached into the lamp and squeezed the fabric: it was dry as a bone. The oil wasn’t flowing.

Thomas ran to the alarm lever: as long as the oil was getting caught in the overflow container, a small pivoting lever remained pressed down, blocking the alarm mechanism. If the overflow was dry, the arm should have raised, lowering the alarm mechansim and ringing the bell in the lighthouse. Why hadn’t it sounded?

The answer was simple enough and easy to see; the overflow was overflowing. The drain had become plugged somehow, and oil had flooded over the side and down onto the lighthouse floor. “Damn!” Thomas stopped at the edge of the oil, staring at the mess. “Damn, damn…” he turned around to scan the ocean. Were there any ships coming? None that he could see. Still, it was better to work quickly, just in case.

It took almost the whole night. The chill had once more congealed the oil, and he had to warm it with a lit candle to get it flowing again. The tubes were clogged again, the detritus of old oil crusting around the intakes. It took hours of prying, thawing, and hacking at the metal to get the lamp functioning again.

“Old piece of junk,” Thomas grumbled, spitting in the wasted oil. “Not worth a penny. Nothing but junk here.”

The deep sound of a horn echoed across the ocean. Thomas spun around to see a freighter in the distance, heading straight for the cliff.

“Damn!” He jumped up from his crouch, ignoring his legs’ protest, and ran to the lighthouse horn, pulling on the chain as hard as he could.

The chain rattled, but there was no other sound.

“Damnation!” Thomas ran around the lamp, slipping on the oil and nearly falling down the stairs, were it not for his flailing hands getting caught between the wall and the stair-railing. He pulled himself upright and hopped down towards the basement, cursing and muttering all the while.

By the time he had reached the basement, he had realized he had forgotten his candle — but there was no time to go back to get it. He would have to work by touch. He climbed down the ladder into the darkness and stretched out his arms to the wall, feeling his way around to the machine. He kicked the machine, he pounded it, he turned the wheels and pulled the levers back and forth like a madman. He couldn’t read the dials, he was operating on instinct.

By the time he had made his way back up to the top of the lighthouse, the freighter was already dangerously close. If the horn didn’t work again, the freighter would crash. More ghosts would find their way into the lighthouse…

He’d have to go back.

Thomas pulled down hard on the horn, and the air shook with a deep ressonant roar. The freighter’s horn answered, and the ringing of the alarum bell echoed up from the ocean. They were coming about, turning to avoid the cliffs. By Thomas’s judgement they’d have enough time, but without the light…

By the time Thomas had finished the repairs and re-lit the light, the frieghter had already lit her own lights, and was finding its way along the shore. Thomas muttered sullenly under his breath. There’d be a note in their log about this. Thomas would likely get in trouble. “No matter. Nothing going to get me going back.” He turned to go down the stairs —

He saw it out of the corner of his eye. A shape. Not a memory, but a living shape in the shadows. A sillouette of someone tall and dangerous.

“Gerrof!” he shouted. The shadow darted away. Thomas gave a nod. He didn’t want to deal with any more ghosts tonight. He needed a rest.

He could try to read; a book on local birds had caught his eye among the stacks of detritus below. He liked looking at the pictures — they reminded him of home — but the words annoyed him.

He hadn’t eaten dinner yet. He could grab some of the salted meat from the celler, though he had lost most of his potatoes to rats. He had seen them staring at him with cold red eyes that flickered in the candlelight, before scurrying back into the shadows, vanishing like the morning mists.

When he reached the bottom of the stair, a flicker caught his eye. Out the window, he could see the sillouette standing on the dirt path that lead down to the colony. He could tell it was looking at him, up through the chill night air. “Bugger off,” Thomas snapped. “I saved the freighter, what more do you want?”

He turned away from the window and marched to his bed. He was going to sleep. Perhaps if he had been in a better mood, he might have spent the evening picking through the detritus, or searching for the manifests. As it was, he was too exhausted to worry about that.

He stepped across the clothing-strewn room, pausing only when he saw a soft cotton dress crumpled on the ground. He picked it up and held it up in front of him. It would fit someone small and thin, demure perhaps. He could imagine the brown hair falling like a curling waterfall down her left shoulder, her small but firm breasts filling out the low-cut bust. He could smell the perfume clinging to her like a fog.

He placed the dress on his bed, and lay down beside it.

---

The next morning, he woke to the dark sillouette standing over him.

Thomas shrieked in fear and shock, leaping upright and swinging his gnobbled fist at the empty air. The silent morning filtered in through the window, dim light revealing he was well and truly alone.

Thomas slowly got out of bed, shoving the soiled dress to the floor. He rubbed his weathered face and blinked at the room. It was clean, the tossed aside clothing from the day before as absent as the ghost.

Had he cleaned before falling asleep? He couldn’t remember. Perhaps the ghosts had cleaned for him, eager to keep everything exactly as it was when they had died.

He understood. Florence was still standing there, smelling like fresh lilacs. She had to have been forty years older by now, but that didn’t matter. She was as young and clean as she had ever been, standing in the exact same place, tears threatening to fall…

“Phah,” Thomas grit his teeth against his aching bones and reached for his own clothes. He had work to do.