“Exsurgent mortui…”
Speaking to spirits in someone’s parlor is more manageable, more controlled, but there’s an overwhelming presence in the living room now, a density of specters.
“Rise. Come through to us. Speak to us.”
“Rise,” his users breathlessly echo, repeating his evocation. “Speak to us.”
Tobias warned us about breaking the barrier. I can feel the gravitational pull in my bones, my very skeleton wanting to take root in the house like a sapling, as I exit the living room and stumble down the hall, my hands skidding across the wall as I head toward the front door.
If Silas taught me anything, it’s that Ghost opens the user’s perception to the other side—but there’s no controlling what spirit you connect to. No telling who’s on the other end.
So let’s reach out and touch someone.
I fling the front door open.
The lost souls clustered in the cul-de-sac haven’t moved since I entered the house. It’s not long before a revenant senses something has stirred; a fresh scent.
“Hey!” I wave my arms through the air. “Over here!”
One, then two, turn toward the house. “Here! Over here!”
The door is open. The sigil is broken. The vessel beckons.
In a breath, all the lost souls sense my presence. A hundred ashen spirits crammed in the cul-de-sac turn to face me, staring with their milked-over eyes. I now have an audience.
“Come on,” I shout as loud as my lungs allow. “Come to me!”
I am a beacon, a bright guiding light tempting them to enter. I’m the invitation they’ve been waiting for. One revenant takes a first step. His body is covered in trenches of scar tissue. He’s almost hesitant, as if he doesn’t trust me. But I watch the pull of his desire take over.
“Come in,” I call out, like I’m some supernatural realtor and this is my open house. I imagine staking a sign into the front lawn with my own soft-focused face emblazoned across it:
OPEN HOUSE. WALKINS WELCOME. NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY.
Others follow. I see the dull excitement in their eyes grow. They look like babies taking their first few steps, tentative at first, but their pace picks up, a herd of gray bodies.
“Come in,” I keep shouting, my voice raw and cracking. “Come home!”
I step back inside the house, slowly walking backward, making sure the lost souls follow. I don’t close the door, leaving the container wide open for any spirit willing to enter.
Silas said I had a strong voice, so why not use it? “That’s it! This way! Keep coming…”
The first to peer through the doorway does so almost sheepishly, as if he’s unsure what might happen. I’m inviting them in. I’m offering them four walls. A roof over their heads.
Finally, a home to call their own.
“Speak to us!” I hear Silas demand from the living room. “Speak!”
Pale bodies pour through the front door. Too many revenants try forcing their way in at once, their arms reaching through the doorway, and I can’t help but picture ground meat funneling through a grinder. These lost souls are so desperate to enter, to feel the comfort of confinement.
“Speak to us…”
More revenants fill the hall, their naked bodies squirming. They run their hands over the drywall, plywood and plaster. The energy from the séance draws them in. Their steps pick up until they’re scrambling, bodies stumbling over each other as they surge into the living room.
“SPEAK—” The candles blow out. Darkness spreads over the living—
dead it’s now a dead
—room. These users have no idea what hits them. A cold wave smashes across their bodies as every last revenant slips through their skin, inhabiting their fleshy vessels.
Two lost souls fight over the same body, three, even four or five cram their way inside a single user. I can’t help but picture rabid customers rushing into a Walmart on Black Friday, fighting over the same flat-panel TV. Only these are bodies, human bodies, receptacles of skin and bone. How many spirits can possess one body at a time? How many is too many?
Ever watch a junkie take a bad fix? Their body jolts in revolt. These people know they’ve dosed on a bad ghost. It goes beyond cold. These are Freon phantoms. Their veins turn to ice. Their bones are no longer their own, bodies buckling, possessed, in the throes of an overdose.
Oh god…Look at them all.
The user in front of me—Melissa, my god that’s Melissa—rakes her fingernails down her face. She moans, the very sound of it reaching up from some unknown depth. She keeps clawing, tearing through her neck now. Trenches of red are left in her fingers’ wake. The skin comes away with little resistance as Melissa begins to eat her own flesh by the handful.
Silas can only stare, hiding behind Tobias’s dumbstruck eyes. “What have you done?”
Too much. Too many ghosts. And they’re all ODing.
Another user—Adriano, that’s Adriano!—takes his forefinger and plunges it into his right eye socket and plucks it out. The eyeball slips free with a wet spluuuch. A quick yank snaps the connecting nerve, the broken thread retracting back into the socket like the pull string on a doll. Then he goes for his left eye.
“Stop.” Silas can’t muster any strength in Tobias’s voice. “Stop!”
Adriano pops one eye in his mouth and swallows it with a smile. Then he gulps down the other. Blood seeps between his teeth and runs down his cheeks.
Silas can’t stop them. There are too many lost souls in the house now, all of them punch-drunk on Ghost, their spirits slipping and sliding through these human vessels.
I watch as another user—oh god that’s Marcia, poor Marcia—forces her hand into Stephanie’s mouth. First her fingers disappear. Then her whole fist. Stephanie’s lower jaw snaps back to accommodate Marcia’s hand, lips wrapped around her wrist. When Marcia pulls her glistening fist back out, now painted red, she holds Stephanie’s uprooted tongue—and eats it.
They’re eating each other. The revenants greedily run their hosts’ hands over each other’s bodies, feeling for the nearest crevasse of flesh to peel away and devour. They all giggle like school children between swallows, lips glossed in blood. Their eyes roll up into their sockets—those who still have their eyes—leaving behind nothing but white in their wake. They don’t need to see anymore. The veil is tearing open, two planes flooding into one another.
This is one really bad trip.
“Stop it! Stop!” Silas can’t control his own séance, if he ever had control. Now they come for him. A cluster of lost souls filter through Tobias’s body, revenant wrestling against revenant, three now four now five passing into his flesh like plunging into a pool of water. Tobias’s body flings itself back and flops on the floor. He gasps like a fish desperate for water. Silas takes himself in, lost in his limbs, his own hands, as if he’s never seen them before.
“I’m sorry, Toby,” I say, even if I know he can’t hear me. I pray he’s already dead, that he’s not trapped inside the prison of his own flesh to suffer through this, that Silas didn’t push him into the deeper recesses of his consciousness. He doesn’t deserve to die like this. None of them do.
I can’t tell if it’s Silas marveling at the sight of Tobias’s skin, transfixed by his friend’s flesh, or if it’s any of the other ghosts now calling his body home. They’re all trapped inside, bound by Toby’s carved sigils. He runs a hand over one arm, then the other. His body has become a book, a grimoire bound in skin. Written in blood. Every layer of flesh is another page, revealing muscle tissue. Sinew. Tendons and blood.
The ghosts keep reading, page after page, flipping down, down, all the way down to the bone. It’s best I leave them alone. Let them read in peace.
There’s still one last room I need to visit.
harvest
The air is cool and dense below. The earthy smell only grows stronger as I descend the basement steps—an organic stench of decay that thickens, like rancid cheese. Every breath curdles in my lungs.