The Tragedy of Eden's Gate

4 - Do Ghosts Have Feelings?

Pain welcomes me back from the dark. An insistent, unpleasant pounding on the back of my head. Memories and thoughts swirl uselessly in a fog of delusion.

It's so fucking cold.

Slowly, I come back to myself.

Ears ringing, ice seeping into the nape of my neck, I force my eyes open. It takes a few attempts, but eventually I manage it.

Sluggish thoughts slide to clarity. Shadows and silence greet me.

There's a face looming above me, vague brows pinched with concern.

Absently, I wonder why my mum is back so early. The room is dark, still, and the dim lamp on my nightstand barely penetrates the smothering shadows. Then, more absently, I wonder why my mum looks nothing like my mum and rather strikingly like a boy.

Then it hits me.

This is not my mum.

Terror sets in; clenching like a fist of ice around my throat. I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't move.

All I can do is stare up at the boy.

The impression of a boy, I should say. Something's not right— as though there's a few frames missing, and I can't quite make out features.

And then, just when I think I've finally lost it, he speaks.

"Hello. I'm sorry about your head."

A noise — something caught between a yelp and a pitiful whimper — rushes from me. My mind stutters and trips over itself in an effort to make sense out of this chaos. Horror seizes my muscles and sends my nerves firing, and I scramble away even as my ears ring and my head pounds and dizziness sharpens to nausea.

"What— who— the fuck—?!" I screech, wedging myself between the bed and the nightstand.

My flighty scramble has, apparently, startled the boy, whose form flickers and darts like a candle's flame as he backs up, hands raised, until he reaches my dresser. He sinks to his knees slowly, as though to keep from scaring me any further.

The distance between us is a mere five feet and frankly a pathetic attempt at escape on both our parts, but we stare at one another as though the space between us stretches on and on and on, and we're safe as long as we keep it that way.

The boy looks miserable and forlorn, gazing at me with wide, stricken eyes. I can't quite look at him properly, as though my brain is desperately trying to ignore his presence. I get a vague impression of dark, tousled hair, a smudgy complexion, and muted blue eyes. He appears young — late teens, I think — and his form is slight. He sits hugging his knees, and I think he looks strikingly like a child spooked of the dark.

And that, alone, resonates with me. Keeps me from bolting downstairs and out the house and straight to a psychiatric hospital.

The boy looks incorporeal under the lamp's dim, bleak glare. I wonder if I've lost my glasses in the chaos, but when I check, they sit stubbornly on the bridge of my nose; mundane proof that my eyes aren't making anything up.

Pain spikes in the back of my head. With a wince, I check for blood, thinking vaguely of the nightstand corner I knocked myself out with. The sheets are still tangled around my legs and are the culprit of my awful escape attempt.

Perhaps I've knocked something essential loose, and now I'm seeing things.

Right at the base of my skull, right where the pounding is most lethal, my hair is cool, almost icy, but there's no blood.