After the first guy—who’d never given his name and kept his answers brief and concise—they’d moved on to room 408, whose residents had been a young oni couple. The two had been far more vocal and friendly than the other guy, introducing themselves as Shawn and Mary. It turned out that they’d been the ones who’d reported Dalisay’s death.
“We’re used to her banging on the walls in the middle of the night when we get a little loud,” Shawn said, the blue-skinned oni wearing a large basketball jersey and looking like he’d intended to have a nice relaxing day at home. “That’s… fair. If we’re so loud we wake her up, she’s got every right to tell us to knock it off. But then she started banging on the walls in the middle of the day.”
“It would happen around noon,” Mary said, “usually when we were eating or about to go out. At first we ignored it, but then she started doing it more and more. When we knocked on her door to try and talk to her, all she’d do was knock back. That’s when we started to notice the smell in the hallway. We told the building manager, and he went up to talk to her and…” She shuddered, looking disturbed and glancing at the wall they shared with 409.
“That’s when they found her body,” Shawn said grimly, also looking towards the wall. There was no fear there, merely a mix of discomfort and annoyance. “They said she’d been dead for two days, and…” He shook his head, glancing at the wall again. “After that…we’d hear knocking on the wall. Sometimes it was on this side, sometimes it was like she was knocking on the guy next door. But then it started happening less and less. Over the last month, it’s like it had stopped entirely.”
“But then it started again this week,” Mary said. “We were having dinner last Tuesday, and there was a knock on the wall. It went on for a few minutes, and then it stopped. We’d heard that a new tenant was moving in, and thought it was them—I thought I heard them moving around a couple of days before that—but when we tried to talk to them about it…”
“All we got was knocking,” her husband said, reaching up to rub his right horn. “And… it was a familiar knock. My horn also started aching, which my grandmother used to tell me is a sign of a ghost. We stayed away after that.”
“We tried to contact the building manager, because they told us the matter had been dealt with, but they haven’t gotten back to us.”
Unfortunately, that was the extent of what the couple knew. After that they started talking about the deficiencies of the building management, and no matter what other prompting questions Harmony asked, they didn’t have any answers. They didn’t know if Dalisay had any friends who visited, nor did they really have any insights as to what sort of person she was.
The resident of 410 corroborated what they had learned about the knocking. The young woman had looked a little nervous until Harmony had asked Loren to step outside so they could have some ‘girl talk’, which seemed a bit weird to him since they’d just met, but he complied. It was only when he was outside did the thought occur to him that the woman might have been nervous to be outnumbered by two strangers.
He was playing on his phone and staying well away from the door of 409 when Harmony finally stepped out, a thoughtful look on her face. “Anything useful?” he asked, keeping his voice low. He didn’t know how well a ghost could hear, after all.
“Not sure…” she said. “Though apparently our ghost is a well-behaved one. No noises late at night, at least so far.”
“Huh… is this normal? Shouldn’t spooky ghost stuff happen at night?”
Harmony shrugged. “Yeah, most of the time. Sure, we’ve encountered them during the day, but more often unprovoked phenomenon is at night. Ghosts are usually on a nocturnal schedule because during the day they’re spending their time gathering heat so they can do things, and they’re focusing on that. The fact that this one is up during the day means she hasn’t learned to conserve her energy yet and is moving around when she feels strongest. It also looks like we definitely have the right person.”
“That’s important?”
“Well, how would you feel if people called you the wrong name? Besides, from all indicators, Dalisay was kind of a lonely person.”
“How do you figure?”
Harmony nodded towards 409. “Just a guess, but… well, Steve’s talked to you about the effects of isolation, right?”
He nodded slowly.
“The closest Dalisay’s ghost has tried to mitigate her isolation is knocking on her neighbor’s walls, without seeming to care if they were actually present to hear it or whether they would respond. Being able to psychologically subsist on that level of social contact, of just reminding people you exist without having to actually communicate with them…” Harmony shrugged. “It implies someone who’s used to being alone, or at least takes comfort from simply knowing other people are nearby without actually contacting them.”
Loren glared at her. “Was that a jab at me?” he said, just as she knocked on the door of 411.
“Besides me, who else do you still talk to from grade school?” was the dry reply before the door opened. She smiled at the payatin woman standing there, her long, lithe limbs letting her loom at least a foot over them. From her hairstyle, she was about their age. Kinda hot. Loren wondered if she was single. “Hello, Miss. I’m sorry for bothering you, but I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about one of your neighbors?”
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“What’s with that look?” Harmony said as the elevator doors closed in front of them and they began moving towards the ground floor.
“I’m just… vaguely disturbed by how freely people answered you,” Loren admitted. “I’d have thought that they’d be more suspicious.”
“That’s because I wasn’t asking for information about them, except little bits like ‘how long have you known the victim?’,” Harmony said. “One thing you learn about interviewing people to find out about their dead former neighbors, most people are perfectly okay with giving someone else’s personal information. It’s how news channels always find someone to interview.”
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“Did we actually learn anything useful?”
“I think so…?” Harmony said. “I mean, I’m not some kind of trained profiler or anything, but then, no one in the office really is.”
“Wait, so all that stuff you said before was just bullshit?”
“Hey! It’s not bullshit, they’re intelligent, evidence-based deductions!”
“Oh goddess, you’re just playing investigator! This is your agency all over again…”
“First off, I’m not playing investigator, I actually am investigating, so shut up. Second, this is going to be nothing like that summer, because you are an actual paying customer and we aren’t being hired to ‘find out what the tool shed looks like clean’.”
“Didn’t Steve and I agree that I didn’t have to pay for the stuff that you took care of?”
“…then stop complaining about free, quality services, you asshole.”
“Fair enough. Lunch? I feel like cup noodles for some reason.”
“I’ll want two, there’s never enough in those cups!”
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Two days later, Harmony asked to meet with him. It would have been a day later, but he had internship interviews he needed to go to. Unfortunately, he’d already started getting notifications that he hadn’t gotten internships he’d applied for, which made him a bit keen to do better in these. Loren wasn’t sure he did all that well. They’d asked him some of the usual interview questions—how did they get the MB on Moonbit chocolates, where did he see himself in five years, why did he want to intern with them (beyond the obvious answer of ‘needing the internship credits’)—and he’d given the usual internships answers.
He should have probably tried to give more sycophantic answers, since they obviously wanted immediate undying company loyalty no matter what shit they shoveled on him, but… for an internship? That was asking a bit much, wasn’t it? Sometimes people just want to set up their own friendly neighborhood pharmacy.
“So, what’s up?” he said when they finally met in her aunt’s house. “How are you doing with my ghost situation?” He pointedly did not bring up how he had a quarter of a month’s rent going to waste right then.
“I think we’re ready to try to negotiate with Dalisay’s ghost,” Harmony said, spreading out some print outs on her coffee table in front of them. He was sitting on an arm chair, while she was on the sofa, so they were at right angles to each other. “We can do it tomorrow, if you want.”
Tomorrow… “What time?”
“Well, if we go you and I need to be over at the office so Steve and Malory can talk you through the magic we’ll need to prepare in case of emergency and the procedure we’ll need to follow. Then we’ll take the company van to your apartment, we go up, and… well, we either talk Dalisay into being roommates or we perform an exorcism and hope the place doesn’t get beat up too badly.”
Loren frowned. “That was an option?”
“Well, yeah. We’re going for the roommates thing so the building doesn’t jack up your rent, remember?”
Oh, right. “Oh, right. Forgot…”
Harmony frowned at him for a moment, before the expression melted. “How’s internship hunting?”
He glanced at his phone. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He’d gotten some more rejections and a maybe that had become a rejection when they’d asked him if he’d be willing to move to another city in another island. It might have been fine if they’d asked him to move to Sugbu, he had family there, but he’d never even heard of where they wanted to send him.
A hand patted him on the shoulder. “You’ll get one soon,” she said. “Have you considered applying at a military hospital?”
“That’s only an option for ROTC officers,” he sighed.
“Oh… well, about this ghost!”
“Smooth,” he said dryly at the chance of subject.
“Yeah, I’m so suave. My boss and coworkers agree with my assessment that our ghost was a lonely person in life. I tried to contact her parents to try and get confirmation, but… well, when I called, they made it clear they didn’t want to talk to discuss the subject. I was able to talk to one of her old coworkers at where she worked, and they were able to confirm that Dalisay was a bit awkward when it came to socializing with her coworkers. When she ate with them, she just sat there and didn’t say anything, and she didn’t really say a lot about herself, at least as far as her coworker remembers. She just sort of sat with everyone but didn’t really participate. It all corroborates with what I collected from her neighbors.” Harmony frowned. “All this actually makes the fact we have a ghost at all concerning.”
Loren glanced up from his phone. He’d been paying attention, he’d just been watching for interview calls, honest! “What do you mean?”
“Not every death creates a ghost, Lor. There are two ways to create a ghost: either a magician dies while actively wielding a lot of magic—which is hard to do most of the time because it means they’re busy kicking ass, and even then usually the first thing their ghost does is drag the one who killed them down with them—or someone dies while feeling very strong emotions.”
"Like, being so scared or angry you have a heart attack?"
“The emotional peak doesn’t have to be at the moment of death—it can be as far back as an hour before—but the emotion must be something they were still feeling close to their death. It’s why most people who die in their sleep don’t produce ghosts. Most people need to calm down to sleep, and usually they’re asleep long enough for the emotions to dissipate from their soul and environment. Unless you set that on silent, it’s going to ring when they call you, so stop looking at it.”
He guiltily looked up from his phone. “Sorry.”
Harmony’s gaze was distinctly unamused, and she held out her hand. Reluctantly, he gave her his phone, and she put it on the far side of the coffee table from him. “Right. Given the available evidence, the conclusion I’m tentatively coming too is that at the time of her death, Dalisay was feeling very lonely. So lonely that she somehow decided downing five huge cans of energy drink was a good idea.”
“Are you certain?”
“Certain? If you want certain, we’d need to hire a Necromancer. And hiring Necromancers is expensive. I’m just a hot girl who did a bunch of interviews and tried to figure out what someone was like from them. Wouldn’t work anyway. The only thing a Necromancer would have to work with is the ghost herself.”
“That shouldn’t have been enough to kill her, surely?” Loren said. “I mean, I know sugar and caffeine are problematic substances for most people, surely they shouldn’t have killed her that fast?”
“Normally, probably not,” she agreed. “However, her coworker confirmed that she was often drinking energy drinks at work. At least one a day. The coworker remembered being concerned because Dalisay sometimes had two. If she had a habit of regularly drinking energy drinks…” Harmony shook her head. “That kind of thing will take its toll on your health, even if you’re relatively healthy.”
Loren looked skeptical. “Is it really that bad?”
“I used to try to self-medicate with energy drinks before I learned better. Trust me, having a sugar rush isn’t just going to magically make you feel better.”
“Hari… after this I think we need to talk about your self-medicating…”
“Yeah, we probably should…”
“And you might need to go see a dentist…”
“…fine… Anyway, Dalisay was probably feeling really lonely, and after five cans on top of what she’d drank at work, she had a heart attack that killed.” She frowned. “Alternately, she had a heart attack that disabled her, and all the energy drinks in her stomach came up and suffocated her. Manner of death isn’t really important, what she’d been feeling that resulted in creating a ghost is.”
“Why is that important?” Loren asked.
"Because that will be a strong influence on the ghost's mentality. Now that we're sure about what she was probably feeling when she died, we can tailor our arguments to convince her to live peacefully with you to something that will appeal to her disposition." She gave him a look. "Have you finally decided if you're going through with it?"
His voice was dry as he said, “Are you going to strangle me if I say no?”
Harmony bared her teeth. “Only a little bit,” she said cheerfully.
“Then let’s give it a shot. I can probably figure out privacy later. Maybe I can learn to use the bathroom with the lights off.”
“Lor, ghosts are immaterial spiritual existences. Why would they need light to see?”
“Well… fuck.”