[September 4, 2042]

When she awoke, the glare of the sun in her eyes, Mel had to take a moment to re-oriente herself. She twisted and turned in the air, pulling down the ends of her white sundress that had drifted up to her knees while she slept. Recently, time had been passing differently for her. She could count the days as they passed. They no longer accelerated and blended together like a viscous syrup. It was almost like being alive again.

Mel glanced over at the bed, which as always, was empty when she woke up.

That boy is mean, but he’s certainly fastidious, she thought to herself.

Cal always got up, showered, and departed the room before she woke up. During the day, he occupied himself with various chores: cleaning the old dusty manor, cooking for that older girl and the one in room 02, pulling the weeds that had accumulated over time over the path that led to the manor. When he returned to room 01, usually in the evenings, he was tired and too irritable to talk with her for very long. As far as “staying out of her way”, the terms that he and Mel had agreed upon starting their cohabitation, the boy was certainly holding up his end of his bargain.

I should be happy about that… but it’s kind of annoying too.

The principal issue was time. Now that the days had slowed to a crawl, Mel had nothing to occupy her time with. True, she could float through the walls of Otter Manor and watch the two other residents go about their daily lives, but it wasn’t very exciting when the other girls could neither see or talk with Mel. Besides, the girl named Ellie who got along with Cal so well was hardly ever in Otter Manor. Mel had no idea where she spent the majority of her days. Ellie would leave around noon and not come back until after Mel had gone to sleep. The other girl: Ram, was a little more exciting to watch, since sometimes she would exit Otter Manor through the window of her room, however, she mostly just stayed in her room watching videos on the internet, hooked up to those weird machines she kept by her bed.

In other words, Mel the ghost girl was bored. Thus, today, she had hatched a plan. Today, her true haunting of Cal would begin.

She recalled their conversation last night in room 01, before going to sleep.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” she had asked, rotating aimlessly in the air, talking more out of listlessness than curiosity.

Cal had looked at her, as if deciding whether to ignore her. “Shopping, mostly,” he replied simply. “The building isn’t stocked enough for the amount of people living here, plus, we’ll have a new tenant in a couple of days. We need amenities for the bathrooms, detergent for that old-fashioned laundry machine, hand towels for the kitchen — oh, and I want a vacuum. The modern ones won’t be able to digitally sync with a building designed like this, but I can at least get a hand-held one for cheap.”

He grimaced. “I’ll be spending most of my first paycheck before I even receive it.”

Mel was sticking her fingers, one at a time, through the closed doors of Cal’s wardrobe and then withdrawing, getting a mundane amusement from watching them appear and reappear. She had her back to Cal, which made her next words easier to get out.

“Can I… can I ask you a favor?” Her voice sounded small and shy, even to herself.

She could feel Cal’s piercing dark eyes on her back as he replied: “That would depend on what the favor is. Anything requiring possession is strictly off the table.”

Mel spun around indignantly, the immaterial back-end of her dress and body sinking into Cal’s wardrobe as she moved. “No!” she began aggressively, before lowering her eyes. “It’s just… that is… if you’re going shopping anyway… I was wondering if you could play a DVD player.”

Mel remembered the look of surprise on Cal’s face. “A DVD player?” he had asked, shaking his head. “Why on earth would we need such a thing?”

“I’m bored, okay! I’ve got nothing to do all day… the old DVDs I used to watch when I was small and a USB should be still around here somewhere-”

“You’re still pretty small.”

“Shut up. The television downstairs is — what did you call it? — retro. That means it can connect to a DVD player. If you get one, I’ll be able to watch those old movies again. I’ll have something to do when you’re out of the house.”

Cal was silent for a bit, before apparently deciding it was a harmless enough request. “Okay. I’ll try, but I won’t promise anything. Finding such an old piece of tech won’t be easy. I’m not going to look all over the city if it isn’t in the first vintage tech place I visit.”

“Okay,” said Mel, raising her big blue eyes to look at Cal, holding her palms to her chest in a way designed to be cute. “Thank you, Cal.”

In the present, Mel grinned sadistically.

You fool, Cal! You’ve fallen for the charm and craftiness of a malignant spirit — a classic blunder in the movies!

Mel didn’t know much about the current outside world, but even she knew that finding a DVD player in this day and age would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. She had bought herself plenty of time to practice her perfect haunting.

Later that day, Cal returned to Otter Manor, his hands full of shopping bags. First, he stopped by the kitchen and downstairs bathroom, offloading the majority of materials he had bought. Then he returned upstairs, picked up the note that had been left outside room 02, and silently nodded to himself.

When he re-entered room 01, Cal immediately noticed something was wrong. It was empty, for one thing, something that had never been in the case in the days he had lived here, and there was a strange chill filling the space, like it was filled with water.

“Mel?” Cal called out uncertainty, “are you here?”

“NOTHING,” said a deep voice that seemed to sink into Cal’s very bones. It resonated with a terrible evil that seemed to drop the temperature in the room even more. “NOTHING.”

Cal whirled around at something banged behind him. The door of room 01, which he had left open upon entering, had slammed shut. He hesitantly reached out to try the handle, only to find that it wouldn’t turn. Another large slam made him reel around a second time. Cal’s textbook, which he had left upon his writing desk, and been thrown to the ground.

“NOTHING,” said the horrible voice again — a horrible voice which seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. “NOTHING IS HERE. YOU ARE ALONE. YOU ARE NOTHING.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The light disappeared. It was as if the sun outside the window had been extinguished like the flame of a candle. Cal was plunged into darkness, and the most he could see was his own hands. A sense of terrible isolation came over him, and the temperature dropped so much that he felt as if he was standing in the midst of a blizzard.

“NOTHING EXISTS ANYMORE,” said the demonic voice. And then: “RAAAAARGH!”

A mummy appeared out of thin air right in front of Cal, its arms outstretched, wrapped in filthy white bandages — the wide-open mouth around a sickly path of greenish skin emitting a loud and terrible screech.

For a moment, Cal didn’t move an inch. It was as if the young man had been frozen in place by fright. Then his wide dark eyes focused on the mummy, and he said: “Five out of ten.”

And he karate-chopped the mummy in the forehead.

“Ow!!!” yelled someone, flinging herself backward in the air, holding her head. “Y-you hit me!”

The moment that Cal had made contact with the mummy, all the illusions had vanished. The light became normal in room 01, with the sun shining outside the window. The temperature returned to a pleasant mildness, and instead of a mummy, a ghost girl in a white sundress was floating in the center of the room, holding her head with both arms, her toes curled in embarrassment, and an expression of shock and indignation on her face.

“You jerk!” Mel exclaimed. “That hurt!”

Cal rolled his eyes and threw the bag he was holding onto his bed. “I think it was more than a fair enough response for such a tepid haunting. Five out of ten. Also, why a mummy? You were clearly building up to a demon with that voice.”

“Shut up…” Mel said in a sulky voice, still rubbing her forehead with a palm. “It isn’t easy to plan this sort of thing.”

Then she looked at Cal, umbrage entering her voice. “And what’s with you?! How were you not even frightened a little bit?” She said this as if Cal had let her down in some way. “Aren’t you scared of anything?”

“Of course I am,” retorted Cal, picking up his textbook from the floor. “But things are only truly frightening to me when there is some sort of genuine enmity or hatred present, and I can detect neither things from you. How did you pull this off anyway, Poltergeist?”

Mel was still sulking, and had begun to pat down her messy dark hair as if to regain some sort of dignity. “It’s easy, as long as you spend some time visualizing it and practicing a bit. I’m a ghost, and that means I have spiritual energy. I can use it to psychically move objects, or make people have auditory or physical hallucinations.”

“I see,” said Cal. He was looking out the window, holding his textbook in his hand. “Is that how you did that thing with the light? Like making it seem as though the sun had gone out and everything was dark?”

Mel nodded, clearly glad he had noticed this part of the haunting. “Yep! That part took a lot of practice-”

“Hey Mel,” interrupted Cal. He was still looking out the window, his face obscured from Mel. “That thing with the light… never do it again.”

“Huh?” Mel stopped moving in mid-air, looking over at him.

Cal turned to face her, his profile illuminated by the sun. His voice was utterly cold. “I’m serious. Don’t do it again, okay?”

“Um…” Mel’s heart sank and her lips felt dry. She felt as if she had crossed a terrible line that she hadn’t intended to. “Okay… I won’t.”

Cal pointed at the bag on the bed. “I got your DVD player. I had to go to like three different places to find it, but it should work. That’s the only reason I came in here. I’ll set it up for you later.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

There was a horrible silence. Cal didn’t so much as look at Mel again. He returned the textbook to its place on the desk and sat on the bed. He was checking something on his cellphone. Every second that passed seemed excruciating to Mel. Tapped into the spiritual side of the world, able to view the auras and energy that surrounded people, Mel was extremely aware of the hostility toward her that was coming off of Cal. Typically, through Mel’s eyes, Cal’s aura and energy were always completely neutral, almost undetectable — which was very unusual for a living human. Now, it was strong enough that it felt like she was being pushed out of the room. It was a suffocating feeling, and genuine concern arose within her. She had intended for her “haunting” to be a fun prank, a way to get back at Cal for all the times he had made fun of her. She hadn’t wanted this — this distance.

“Um,” Mel approached Cal very slowly as she talked, taking care not to float too close to him. “Are… you angry with me?”

“No,” was the short, flat response.

Mel dared to drift a little closer. She reached out to tug on his sleeve, but immediately remembered that it would be a pointless thing to attempt, and withdrew her pale hand. The boy and the ghost girl could see and hear one another, but physical contact was completely impossible. For the first time, that realization made Mel a little sad.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to scare you a bit. I didn’t intend to upset you.”

Cal didn’t reply.

For a desperate second, Mel thought that Cal had lost his ability to see or hear her, and horrible fear instantaneously filled her body. She felt like bursting into tears.

No! See me! Hear me! I can’t be like that again. An absence in the air. A voice nobody can hear. Less than nothing. I was fine when it was my fate to never have anything. But I can’t handle losing something ever again…

“Cal!” Mel exclaimed, her throat choked. “I’m sorry, okay?! Don’t ignore me, please!”

The change in Mel’s voice made Cal look up, and something in the ghost’s face made him instantly attempt to comfort her. “Hey,” he said, in a voice more gentle than he had ever used with Mel before, “it’s okay. I’m not angry and I’m not ignoring you, okay? I was just… frustrated. You made me remember things I didn’t want to. But it’s over now.”

Mel bit her lip, and self-consciously held her shoulder. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do. I was bored.”

“Seriously, stop apologizing.” Cal sighed. “It’s just… I suppose I don’t understand why you bothered. With this ‘haunting’ thing. Didn’t I tell you the day we met? A truce, where both of us are free to do what we want as long as it doesn’t inconvenience the other. That's the solution we agreed upon.”

Mel timidly interlocked her fingers. “I don’t know… it’s just…” She looked at Cal with an intense expression. “I’m a ghost, you know?!”

Cal narrowed his eyes. “Yes, I’m aware.”

“And… it’s just…” Mel seemed to be squirming inwardly. “If I don’t do scary things and stupid things, like moving objects with my mind and making people jump when I say ‘Boo!’... I mean… it’s like… if I don’t do any of that sort of stuff, what exactly am I supposed to do? I can’t touch anything with my body. You’re the only one who can see me. Like, what’s the point of a ghost like me? …I suppose.”

There was another long pause, but when Mel looked up at Cal, she was surprised at his expression. It was an extremely earnest expression, and so fixated on her that Mel began to feel a little embarrassed. It was as if Cal was looking at her, really looking at her, for the first time.

“I can’t answer that for you…” Cal began, a little falteringly, “but I guess in my opinion… things and people… and ghosts… none of these things need to have a real reason to exist. So, if you ask me, you’re fine the way you are — passing the time, day by day. It’s not something to be ashamed of.”

Mel spoke quietly. “Really?”

“Yeah. That’s what I think.”

Her next words were even quieter, almost tender. “Thank you for getting the DVD player, Cal. I mean it.”

“It’s not a problem.”

She smiled at him. “If you want, we can watch a movie together, seeing as you’ve seen none of the good ones.”

“Okay. Not tonight, or tomorrow, ‘cause I have some chores, but okay.”

Another pause. Cal looked at Mel and spoke: “However, if you want, I have a suggestion to fill your time for the present.”

Mel smirked and leaned her face toward Cal, her blue eyes gleaming with mischief and irony. “Oh, and what’s that?

The side of Cal’s mouth twisted, almost as if he was trying to hold in a grin. “Meeting the neighbor, of course.”

A few minutes later, the pair were in front of the door to room 02. Cal made a face at Mel, and knocked twice on the wood.