After twenty years of watching remnants of your braindead body attempt to live life, you started to get used to it. That didn’t mean you were friends with it.
Such was the case of General Rayshade. Not a General anymore. Far from it. But his zombie counterpart still preferred to wear the uniform. Rayshade himself had no other choice. He floated through the House’s walls with little to do besides haunt the place. And watch his zombie knock his head around, lose a limb, growl, slurp, scratch – pretty much anything it was that braindead things did.
Rayshade had no idea what made him like this. If he was destined to be the living dead, then why couldn’t it simply be one or the other? What had he done to deserve being a ghost, invisible to everyone, while his zombie body represented him by strutting around stupidly? He felt as if he missed a very important meeting in the afterlife. Surely there must have been a form to fill – a checkbox with your preferred method of haunting the living. Multiple choice survey? Wheel of misfortune?
His current semi-existence consisted of bickering with his zombie, floating through walls, flapping curtains, and causing random electricity cuts. But he was tethered to the body and for safety reasons, they spent the most part hiding in the secluded House. Death was good.
And then the girl arrived.
She walked into the House as if she owned the place. Rayshade considered that perhaps she did in fact own the place, but that didn’t mean she was welcome here. Where had she been for the past twenty years? He was the one who ensured the House didn’t get demolished by greedy contractors. The House may have been hers, but this was his home.
They watched her from the third floor.
“Looks like a garden,” said Rayshade in a low voice. “She’s planting something.”
“Grr,” came the reply. Rayshade didn’t have to look to know that his braindead counterpart had stuck a finger in its ear and left it in there.
“Well, whatever the case,” he mused, “we’re going to make sure she leaves within the week. Nobody disrupts our peace, right soldier? Soldier?”
His body was walking away from him. It almost reached the staircase and revealed itself before Rayshade stepped before it. “Stop! You can’t go there. She’ll find out about us.”
Solider blinked at him with eyes that were once his. But there was no life behind those pupils anymore. No color in those irises. Rayshade was talking to nobody.
“Listen to me,” Rayshade pleaded, “she’ll send us away. Or worse.”
At this, Soldier attempted to raise an eyebrow, as if there was any fate worse than being bossed around by your spirit.
“We must protect the House at all costs, you got that, Solider? Protect. House.”
“Hrgg?”
“Yes.”
They looked down at the intruder again as she patted the soil and sprinkled more seeds onto the sandpit. Rayshade eyed her horns. Some sort of faery. He had fought against the Fae in the War. Turned out all his efforts were futile; humans needed the fae to save the earth. Not that it mattered to his life. He was dead long before they stabilised the planet. Life was a struggle. But his dreary afterlife made him yearn for the old times.
Now the only home he had was in danger of being taken away from him.
Solider shifted its feet at that thought. Rayshade didn’t know whether it could even read, let alone read his thoughts. But he was glad that they shared the same goal: protect the House at all costs.
First step: get rid of the girl.
They watched her for a few hours more as she worked in the soil meticulously, almost with a surgeon’s care. She made tiny holes in the sandpit, and sprinkled something that looked like seeds, which she had kept in dozens of finger sized jars in her satchel.
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Rayshade knew how to be patient. Being dead and invisible for as many years as he had taught him many virtues. He couldn’t say the same about Soldier – his undead companion only grew more troublesome as the days went by.
But being invisible also had its perks. Rayshade would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy being in a room full of people who were hiding so many valuable secrets. Secrets only a ghost could unravel.
Once, their gardening intruder had paused her work to stare at a device’s screen. Rayshade peeked from over her shoulder to see an advert of a product that looked oddly like a sternum. Even more bizarrely – the advert was promising things like “500 resurrections” and “death cap ink included!”. He doubled back when he saw the price. Perhaps she was a cosplayer of a very serious kind?
Finally at evenfall, when the sky began to dim, she wrapped up her supplies and made way for the kitchen. Watching her do so was excruciating. Rayshade spent his mornings in the kitchen; it had the perfect window view of the teleports, of rushing commuters making their way to work or school. This ritual often reminded him of the rush of life, and almost made him feel grateful for being a ghost. Almost.
But he’d deal with making the kitchen off-limits later. For now, he had to find out more about this intruder. And she had, most graciously, left her satchel in the courtyard right at his feet. He bent down to rifle through it instead of picking it up – in case she returned without warning to see her belongings floating in the mid-air.
There were jars with labels he didn’t understand. And many, many compartments. He was thorough with his search and with good results – he came across a secret zipper on the inside to find a stack of business cards. The card was all black with gold text that said: Ace Slyspore, Fungus Faery & professional Necromancer. Available for hire. Contact: [email protected].
If Rayshade had a heartbeat, it would have skyrocketed. A Necromancer! Did she have the power to help his situation? He flipped the card around to see the word “SLYSPORE” in a gothic font. And below it was a symbol he had grown extremely familiar with; an elongated skull with two horns curling at the sides, mushrooms sprouting from its hollow eye sockets.
He let the card slip from his grasp as he thought about the implications of this knowledge. A Slyspore. She did own the House.
That meant she was more of a threat than he first thought.
The threat at that moment was cooking. Cooking. Rayshade could hardly believe his eyes. The kitchen stove was on. The cupboards were wide open, exposing how truly neglected they had been.
And Slyspore – she was stirring mushrooms in a steaming pot. Mushrooms. Of course! The sandpit – she wasn’t planting flowers. She was growing mushrooms. Rayshade had the vision of his House being devoured by fungi within the week. Sooner or later, she would discover Solider. He would be discarded like a pest. It wouldn’t be difficult for her to get rid of it. Fungi thrived on dead matter. What of Rayshade then?
He felt a chill go up his spine. And for a ghost, this was not a natural occurrence.
“Harf.”
Rayshade snapped to attention to see Solider stepping out of the shadows where it was safe. Its footsteps thudded, made heavier by the beaten down soldier’s boots it never once removed. The floorboards creaked so noisily that Rayshade winced.
“Stop!” he gestured frantically to Solider. “Go back! Go!”
Solider tilted its head as if it was on the receiving end of a telepathic communique. Meanwhile, the Slyspore didn’t seem to have heard anything. At least Rayshade could rely on the fact that she wouldn’t suspect anyone of paying a surprise visit to the House. Nobody visited here.
And yet it was so darn crowded, Rayshade thought.
“Let’s go to our room,” he told the zombie. “Go. Room.”
Soldier scratched the few tufts of hair still left on its head before turning and making its way back up the staircase. Rayshade would have let out a sigh of relief if he had a breath. Except he also didn’t feel relieved, not entirely. So instead he resorted to glaring at the fungus faery intruding in his kitchen.
It seemed like she was done cooking and was now serving herself a fresh dinner. The dining table was covered with a blanket of dust, but she rested her plate on it with the demeanour of one who was at an upper class restaurant, in a room full of people, instead of her pitiful and lonely reality.
Upstairs, he found Soldier lying on the bed, doing nothing. It lied there like Stillness itself. Not a muscle needed twitching. Or spit needed swallowing. Or limb readjusting. Just the remainder of a human doomed to witness its own decay.
“I think we’d be doing her a favour,” Rayshade said, floating across the room to the seat by the window. The first few stars popped in the sky along with another sunset. He hardly saw these things anymore. He just let his eyes fall on the sight. He was dead after all.
“Grr.”
“If we make her leave,” he clarified. “We’d be doing her a favour.”
“Grr.”
“We’ll make things inconvenient for her, of course. We’ll start by destroying that fungus garden. If she can’t regrow her supplies here, she’ll be forced to move.”
“Hrmf.”
“No, I don’t think even the Slyspore can help us.”
“Praaaf.”
“I know a thing or two about Necromancy, alright? Her powers won’t help us. We’re way beyond that. She can’t even see me, let alone sense me around. Sense you around. She’s oblivious.”
Soldier was quiet at that. Good, Rayshade thought with a tinge of triumph. The zombie could be stubborn as a stone when it wanted to. Honestly, it was like arguing with himself.