lionofstone

It takes Reyna a few weeks to notice the ghosts. 

In her defence, she’s never been haunted before. When she finalises the rental agreement and signs in the dotted line, she’s thinking about what furniture she still needs to buy and whether she’ll be able to convince the landlady to let her paint out the magnolia walls, not ghosts. Maybe she should be thinking about ghosts, given that the aforementioned landlady refuses to let her sign anything for longer than six months, citing the fact that no one stays longer than that anyway. Reyna intends to live in London for the foreseeable future and a year-long lease would be preferable, but she signs it anyway. It’s a new-to-her two-bedroom flat only a stone’s throw from the White City underground station, rented for £1700 per month, conveniently located for shopping and her desk job. It’s a well-kept flat and the landlady, despite her hesitance to rent the place for a longer period, seems nice enough. 

“Can I paint the walls?” Reyna asks as the landlady hands her the keys. She’s not surprised when she scoffs and shakes her head, muttering about how it would just have to be repainted in six months anyway. 

For the first few weeks, Reyna’s trying to come up with clever ways to disguise the awful wall colour and deciding how to decorate her new bedroom. She’s preoccupied with normal housekeeping things, and, as previously stated, she’s never been haunted before. So when the faucets leak and the walls creak, Reyna’s first instinct isn’t that she has ghosts. When the telly flashes and the window crashes, she figures it’s just the wind. And when she thinks she hears snickering and bickering coming from the second bedroom, she brushes It off as probably coming from the neighbours instead. 

The child standing in front of her, holding a paperboy cap in his hands and fading in and out of view, is much more difficult to explain away. He looks to be about seven or eight, but it’s hard to tell. His cheeks are sunken and hollow, creating dramatic shadows under his cheekbones, and the dark circles under his eyes rival those of a Tim Burton character. In a city as historic as London, Reyna thinks that maybe she should’ve anticipated something like this. 

“Hello?” she says, because what else is one meant to say to a depressingly young ghost child standing in the middle of one’s kitchen? It can’t hurt to be polite. 

The child, however, sighs heavily. “Not even a scream, Tommy. Not even a whisper.” 

“Who’s Tommy?”

The child looks at Reyna and then away, shaking his head firmly. Then he disappears from view. 

Over the next few weeks, Reyna does her best to pay attention. Suddenly, the windows rattling at midday can’t be explained away by the wind and the telly flickering at eight o’clock when she sits down to watch old episodes of Love Island can’t be passed off as faulty electrical wiring. The faucets dripping isn’t because she didn’t tighten the taps enough and the creaking walls aren’t caused by the building settling, at least not exclusively. She knows now that the whispering voices are coming from the second bedroom but, try as she might, she can’t make out any of their words. She assumes that Tommy is the owner of one of the disembodied voices but, since she hasn’t even seen the child since their brief confrontation, she really can’t say for sure. 

Her mother thinks she should call someone. Whether she needs a therapist, a ghost hunter, or a priest varies from day to day, because Reyna’s mother has never been particularly good at making up her mind. Their text thread is full of links to NHS web pages about mental health and flyers for local churches of various religions. Reyna shakes her head at her mother’s most recent suggestion (Georgie Clark: Getting Ghosts Gone!) before replying that she’s not really that worried. The ghosts in her house seem to be harmless, all things told, and she really doesn’t want the hassle. 

“Sam was right,” says a voice from behind her, and she whips around to look at the speaker. She hopes the way her heart races doesn’t show on her face. Like the other ghost, this one is dressed as a newsboy. He’s probably about sixteen and has grime smeared across his nose. She wonders if ghosts can wash their faces if they want to or if this lad has had that mark on his face for a hundred years. He grins at her, his uneven teeth making it especially charming, and elaborates, “You really are hard to startle.” 

“You startled me,” Reyna says, honestly enough. “Are you Tommy?” 

“The one and only,” he says, flicking his thumbs under the collar of his shirt. “You’ve met my brother, Sam, already. You know, he was very hurt that his appearance didn’t make ya scream.” 

“He just seemed like a sweet kid,” Reyna says, biting her tongue to stop from saying that Tommy does too. She remembers being sixteen and how much she would’ve hated being called a kid at that age. Besides, Tommy’s clearly been around a lot longer than sixteen years and she doesn’t know how ageing works for ghosts. “It was hard to be scared of him.” 

“He is a pretty cute kid, ain’t he?” Tommy’s voice is full of pride. “And, don’t tell him this, but I think it’s kinda refreshing that you ain’t running for the hills at the sight of us. This whole haunting thing…it gets pretty monotonous after a while.” 

“I can imagine,” she agrees, nodding a few times. “All the window rattling and the resulting terror. Not to mention the thing with the telly—”

“Oh, no, I do that ‘cause I can’t stand you watching this rubbish.” Tommy gestures rather pointedly to the screen, where contestants Curtis and Amy are arguing about something that Reyna’s missed. 

“You…have strong opinions about my TV habits?” 

He scoffs. “I’ve been in this house for over sixty years. I’ve seen enough things on boxes like that to know the good from the bad, you know?” 

Reyna has always imagined ghosts being much more stuck in time, unchanging and uninfluenced by the world around them. She’s pleasantly surprised to see that’s not the case, even if her reality TV addiction is being judged. She can’t say it’s undeserved. Picking up the remote, she clicks away from the ITV Hub and makes room for Tommy to sit next to her. “What do you want to watch?” 

Tommy blinks, first with his eyes and then by vanishing from sight for a split second. “You want to watch with me?” 

“Why not?” she asks, gesturing to the sofa. “We’ll have to figure out what you like. You strike me as a BBC lad. Have you seen Peaky Blinders?” 

Tommy shakes his head. “I don’t think so.” 

“Well, come on!” Reyna pulls up the first episode. It may not be an entirely appropriate show for a sixteen-year-old but, in her defence, Tommy isn’t exactly an average sixteen-year-old. “We won’t watch this while your brother is around, though.” 

Tommy laughs, uneven teeth proudly displayed with his excitement, and Reyna decides that she quite likes living with ghosts. 

Later, she walks by the second bedroom and can actually make sense of one of the voices. Tommy says, “No, I’m telling you, she’s nice.” There’s some sort of muffled, largely inaudible response and then he continues, “Trust me, I think this time is going to be different.” 

Reyna calls out, “Goodnight!” 

The second bedroom echoes with the sound of children’s laughter. Reyna, who has become very desensitised to horror movie tropes, giggles as well. 

They fall into a strange sort of routine. The faucet leaks, the walls groan, the windows rattle. Tommy still flicks off the telly whenever she tries to catch up on reality tv, but it’s only ever for a split second at a time. Sam takes every opportunity to try to scare her, but he becomes more and more childish in his efforts. He seems like he’s only a few tries away from covering himself in a bedsheet and shouting ‘boo!’ 

Reyna laughs fondly at his attempts and pretends to startle, but this is routine for him too and he can always see right through her. 

“What’ll it take to get you?” he asks one day, scowling petulantly from under his cap. 

Reyna wishes she could nab the cap from him and ruffle his hair. She settles for smiling affectionately and crouching down to his height. “Why do you wanna scare me so bad?” 

Sam rolls his eyes like she’s being ridiculous or slow. “It’s what ghosts do.” 

“Why?” 

“Why what?” 

“Why is it what ghosts do?”

Sam tilts his head to the side and considers this for a long moment. “I dunno. But ghosts haunt people, everyone says so.” 

Reyna hums. “Do you ever get bored of haunting people?” 

“We get new ones every six months,” Sam says, looking at Reyna and then swiftly away. “Anyway, what else am I supposed to do?” 

“Well,” she says, standing back up and throwing away the watermelon rinds she’d just be cutting up. “Right now, we can go back to the living room and watch some Horrible Histories, if you want?” 

She’s discovered, over the last few months, that Sam loves Horrible Histories songs. He lights up at the suggestion and is suitably distracted from any further attempts to shock her, at least for a little while. 

Late into the evening, when Reyna is starting to get tired and the living room is lit only by the glow of the television, Sam says, “I don’t know why ghosts haunt people. Tommy says he gets bored of it sometimes. I think it’s fun to play jokes on people.” 

“But?” Reyna prompts, because she can feel a ‘but’ coming. 

Sam shrugs his little shoulders up to his ears. “We look different. See?” He crawls closer to her to point at her soft under eyes and then to his own dark circles. He touches his sunken cheeks and then gestures to her round ones. “Me and Tommy look creepy. People are already scared of us ‘cause of that. But I’ve been a ghost for a real long time, Reyna. I look normal to me. You’re the funny looking one.” 

Reyna has to work really hard to hold in a laugh as she listens to Sam’s explanation. These kids have become so important to her in the four months she’s lived in this two-bedroom London flat. Whatever Sam wants to talk about, she’ll listen. Even if she is a little bit confused about where it’s going. He can’t quite touch her, being a ghost and all, but he leans towards her anyway. Her shoulder feels icy in the place where she can see his head resting. 

“You’re not funny looking to me,” she says softly. “You’re just Sam. And Tommy’s just Tommy.” 

“That’s nice,” Sam says. She doesn’t think that ghosts sleep, but his voice sounds like he’s tired anyway, soft and a little distant. “Reyna, since you’re the one who came into our house, doesn’t that mean that you’re haunting us?” 

For all that they may have been aware of and influenced by the passage of time, Sam and Tommy are still seven and sixteen and every so often they come out with questions that force her to remember it. She’s smiling when she answers, “Maybe it does. Maybe I should start trying to scare you.” 

“I’d like that,” Sam says. “I’d like that a lot.” 

Tommy comes into the room a few minutes later, takes one look at where Sam’s head is still resting against Reyna’s shoulder, and says, “I told him not to do that. He’s gonna give ya frostbite.” 

“It’s fine,” Reyna says, mimicking Tommy’s whisper. It seems her assumption about ghosts not needing sleep is incorrect because Sam’s not-quite-existent breathing is slow and he seems unaware of his surroundings. “He told me that I should haunt him from now on.” 

“What?” 

Reyna grins up at Tommy. “He wants me to scare him.” 

Tommy snorts and reaches out to pick up his brother in his arms. Sam barely stirs. “Well,” he says, nodding to Reyna. “It would certainly be something new.” 

“In this house, we believe in reciprocal hauntings,” she says, playfully firm. “I’m gonna get you both.” 

It turns out to be very, very easy to scare a couple of young ghosts who are very, very unused to being scared. All Reyna has to do is wait for a quiet moment when she can hear them both talking in their bedroom (she’s not sure when the spare room became their room in her mind, but she’s far from complaining). Then it’s a simple matter of bursting in and shouting, “Boo!” 

They both startle so badly that they lift off the ground. Reyna can’t help but laugh at the sight of them, her creepy little newsboys with their dark circles and sunken cheeks, floating a metre off the ground with shock written into their features. After a beat they’re laughing too, coming back down to the ground. Sam looks delighted by the turn of events, a brilliant smile lighting up his ghost-dark face. Tommy gives her a nod of begrudging respect. 

“Reciprocal hauntings,” he says mildly. “I suppose I’ll have to get you back for that.” 

Reyna grins. “You’ll have plenty of time. I just signed on for another year. For some reason, my landlady was very surprised by that. Apparently, she’s never had someone stick around for more than six months.” 

“Gee,” Sam says with a cheeky smile. “I wonder why that might be.” 

They help her paint the walls. 

END.

more by Leandra Inglis:
short stories / books
join the lionofstone discord
listen to the reciprocal haunting playlist on spotify