Cam doesn't believe in ghosts, but there is nothing to do in Forks besides read, fish, hike, and watch television; his interlibrary loans are taking a while, he likes his brain inside of his skull, he likes his blood inside of his body, and he likes the television inside of its cupboard. In theory he could also be doing homework but he is presently having an attack of the "but I will never use this in real life", so it's all done to an adequate standard and he does not feel enticed by the prospect of improving it. Halloween is a school holiday and he is BORED.

So he tells Charlie he's going to go explore the abandoned Frazier house - they say the back door never locked right again after the cops went after the kid, and the house is abandoned enough that nobody fixed it, but it's only been a few years so he doesn't expect to collapse through a rotten floorboard or anything. Charlie says he'll come in siren blaring if he's not home by dinnertime and Cam says sirens will not help him if he falls down a well, the gold standard for that situation is a collie, has Charlie not heard the good news of the documentary Lassie. He will look around, find no ghosts, and have a very mildly interesting anecdote for the wild parties he might take it into his head to attend when he goes to college.

He pulls up to the place in his beater truck a little after lunch and parks in the driveway. Lets himself in.

The house is abandoned!  The lights don't work, should he try them, but the day isn't so cloudy or the windows so grimy that he needs his own light source.  The back door opens into a sitting room.  A lot of it's been gutted by previous explorers—even through the dust, it's clear that there used to be a rug over there—but the couch and somewhat ancient TV remain.  There are some doilies thrown around that people appear to have taken the side tables from underneath; overall the remaining decor seems to be going for 'wholesome'.

His footprints through the dust are far from the only ones, though they are notably fresher than the others.

He did bring a flashlight in case of basement but, yeah, with the windows not boarded up he wasn't expecting to need it for the living room. It's amazing the TV hasn't been stolen, really. Is there any water left in the pipes if he tries a sink?

Nah.

Alas.

Is there a basement?

Yep!  It's surprisingly tidy, if you count being unsurprisingly empty towards that.  Here's what was once a tool bench, a laundry hookup, a hot water tank.  Here's the underside of the Bilco doors.  Here are some shallow puddles where the concrete wasn't poured evenly.

Huh, they didn't have laundry machines or someone managed to loot a set all the way up the stairs? ...he doesn't spend long in the basement, if it leaks it's going to be moldy in here.

Here's a bedroom!  This one looks mostly untouched, at first glance.  Maybe because of the enormous amount of blood on the comforter.  And splattered on the walls.  And some on the ceiling.

He's going to have to ask Charlie why they didn't take at least the duvet in as evidence. At least it's so old that it smells like nothing. What else is there upstairs?

Well, there's a cool attic room, decorated completely differently from the rest of the house and seemingly fully intact.  Lots of posters, CDs, tapes, records, books, all pristine.  The books in particular are markedly less dusty than everything else has been.

One book, in particular, is lying open on the desk in front of the window.  Dustless.

Maybe the last person who swung b y the house left it there. And wasn't a looter, there's lots of very movable goods here. What's the taste exhibited on the shelves?

Eclectic, leaning punk.

What's the deskbook about?

It's open to something claiming to be a spell for resurrection.  Or, the book calls it that, but it really seems to be closer to resuscitation, based on the description.  Lots of limitations on when it can allegedly be used.

Atmospheric. What else is in here, does it have a table of contents?

He feels a sharp chill on his hand—and quite a ways up his arm, and maybe at the corner of his shoulder—the moment he touches the book.

hwaet the fück

does it happen again if he does it again

No.

...Table of contents!  There are two main sections: Background and Application, with the latter being a fair bit longer.  Samples from the first include, 'Time and Cycles', 'Materials', 'Tethers', 'Unmooring', and 'Ghostly Lands'.  The back half of the list's got, 'Scrying', 'Divining', 'Communing', 'Possessing', and 'Transforming'.  Among others.

...he's gonna find a place to sit, kick the place to sit in case it freezes his leg up to midthigh before he sits on it, and curl up with this book and read the whole thing. His interlibrary loans are taking a while.

The desk's chair does not freeze him.

'Time and Cycles' has subchapters on times of day, the days of the week, the moon, the seasons, years, and the relative-to-earth cycles of stars and planets.  Apparently, most spells have some time-based requirement or other; they need to be performed at midnight on a Tuesday or Thursday, or under the first quarter moon in this set of years the pattern of which the author was not able to discern, or in springtime.  See this page through that one in the Divining section for a set of spells for telling what time it is on a relevant measure; mundane timekeeping doesn't always match with that of magic.

.....Did the window in front of Cam have a 'Hi' smudged into its grime before?

You know, he didn't actually check, so he isn't sure! But the book freezing his arm was really something and if there is no one around then no one will hear him say: "Hi."

There's a noise, at the corner of the desk.

tap             tap     tap   tap                           tap

"Iiiiii don't speak Morse code. Tap once for you can use a pen tap twice for nothing doing."

Tap.  On the other corner of the desk, the right side.

"And you're right handed. Or something. Okay." He'll pull off his backpack and pull the last page out of a notebook without opening it enough for anything that is using conventional senses to see what's inside the first few. Offers a pen.

The pen is now floating!  It writes, quite shakily,

Be careful with that book.

"...just reading it or trying stuff in it?"

Trying stuff, getting ideas, wrecking my copy.  Don't.

Don't leave either

"Getting ideas you say.

"Who are you?"

J. D. Frazier

The handwriting's a little less trembly, on this one.  Signature-like.

Don't leave

"I am not leaving but if I'm not home by dinner Charlie's gonna assume I fell down the stairs and come get me."

OK

"So do you mean getting ideas literally or just as metonymy for trying stuff."

It's not going to make you go crazy or whatever to read it.

Whatever you felt when you touched it was me, not it.  A warning.

"It got my attention, certainly. 'Whatever' I felt? You didn't know what you were doing there?"

I think it's usually a chill when I overlap with someone but you jumped.  It's Halloween.  The veil is thinner.
Sorry if it hurt I didn't mean it to.

(The pen goes back and adds a comma and a semicolon in the appropriate places, after a moment.)

"It was surprising! I didn't believe in ghosts, I was just really bored! I don't think I'm damaged."

It's hard to prove to a bunch of people at once that ghosts are real.  Because of stuff like the timing.  I can't hold a pen like this most days.

"...what can you do most days?"

It depends on how much I've done recently.  Keyboard probably works if you come back tomorrow, or I can push around planchette for a while.

But I'm different from almost all other ghosts.

"Different how?" Is it the double axe murder - no, he's leaning into the guess that the guy's parents had it coming, dude was in the hospital for a "fall" down the stairs earlier, and as someone who falls down the stairs sometimes Cam doesn't jump to the foul play explanation but if the recovered hospitalized dude later axe murders his parents you do a little arithmetic on the situation. He's not asking because it's probably a sensitive question and because it could be very bad to juke wrong if he discovered that actually this guy just loves to axe murder.

I did a ritual from the book.  Back when I was alive.

"Have you met many other ghosts? Are you stuck in the house?"

2.  Yes.

I also have the yard.

"The obvious ones?"

What do you know?

"Charlie - my dad - is the chief of police."

The two are my parents.

"Yeah, that was my guess. Awkward."

I feel really bad about it.

The most important things I would tell everyone alive about ghosts being real if I could are:
1)  It's REALLY IMPORTANT to die with your body as whole as you can manage, even if it means dying sooner or more painfully
2)  Location location location
3)  Major religions are all super fake and bad

"Is there a good reason for me to not... gather newspeople to return here next Halloween, or something along those lines...?"

It shouldn't be tomorrow but it probably doesn't have to wait that long.

"Day after Halloween is unusually bad...?"

No.  I guess I might be more tired than usual after all this writing.  But it needs more than a day and maybe less than a year of planning.

"If you have a ouija board around I can probably get used to reading that, if that's easier."

No.  And this is better while I can do it.

"What's being a ghost like - besides, uh, informed in some way by your corpse's intactness at time of death."

For me or for everyone else?

"Both."

It's
Actually you should just read the book for this one.  Chapters 6 and 7.

The pen sets itself back on the page.

"Okay. I can probably finish this book before I need to get home if you don't have a lot else to say but feel free to write up notes for me while I'm on that, I have more paper." He grabs the notebook out of the bag to take occasional someone-over-the-shoulder notes on the book as he goes.

Chapter 6.  Ghosts are tethered to the place where they died.  This means that by default they cannot leave it.  Often the boundaries follow property lines, but not always.  Common exceptions include:  an effective property line such as one visible in the landscape that differs from the legal one; properties that are too small or too big for the number of ghosts they contain; ghosts who died in places with no concept of property attached, e.g. because they're older than the concept of property; and ghosts who died in the high bits of skyscrapers, who are usually confined to some number of floors above and below where they died, instead of having access to the whole building or only one apartment.  Places such as hospitals and sites of natural disasters or battles, where by default the density of ghosts would be very high, tend to have much longer tethers associated with them, and ghosts associated with them spill out into the surrounding area.  See these pages for spells affecting tethering.

Chapter 7.  Ghosts are unmoored in time.  This means that they spend most of their time after death not actually existing.  It's quite common for a newly-dead person to turn a corner and only arrive on the other side a month later.  Ghosts who died together tend to be moored to each other, though sometimes they will separate, usually temporarily.  Ghosts spend smaller percentages of time existing the longer ago they died.  If you interact with a ghost and later can find no signs of them, this is probably why.  But!  Some of the time that ghosts aren't at their tethers, they are in fact somewhere else.  Not much is currently known about these other worlds, such as where they are, whether they're physical locations at all or merely spiritual ones, or why ghosts can go to them.  They are primarily composed of strange biomes, with no buildings in them.  They are empty of living people, but not always of other ghosts.  In this way, ghosts with unrelated tethers may sometimes meet each other.  See these pages for spells affecting mooring.

Cam scribbles down what makes a property "too" big or small for N ghosts and could you graph your guesses about what times you have skipped/not or is it too hard to tell? do you want a clock with the date if I can find a battery op one? while he's reading through this.

When Cam's done with chapter 7, the pen drops conspicuously on the desk above the book.

"I do not know ghost nonverbal cues well enough to interpret that."

Tap tap tap on a page of notes.

The main ways I'm different are that I'm fully moored (no time skipping except sort of when I try to zone out really hard and can kind of sleep) and better at interacting with physical objects.  Sometimes ghosts can get really emotional and send a bunch of pots and pans flying around a kitchen or whatever like a horror movie, but I'm better at little stuff.  Flying is nice but it would be a lot better if I could go higher or farther.  I miss recorded music a lot.  I have all of this

(There are probably hundreds of albums up here, between the vinyl and the tapes and the CDs.)

but I can't play any of it without electricity.  What batteries does your flashlight have?  You can play anything you want if they'll go in my CD player and it still works.  I spend most of my time reading; I've read everything here so many times.  My night vision is better than when I was alive, I'm pretty sure.  Sometimes it's hard to turn the pages.  Once people know about ghosts we should play them lots of books on tape.  I think it might also be possible to kill objects and that would be pretty great, if we could pass out ghost books.  Or ghost food, especially if it can be tasted multiple times.  All of my senses are kind of flatter, I think, than when I was alive.  I don't know whether colors are as bright.  Touch is very different of course.

 

I realize that between the two of us I'm the one who's an axe murderer, but that doesn't mean I know you.  I don't want you to read too much of the book before I have a better idea of you.

"Batteries are double A. What kind of idea of me do you have in mind?" He goes to scan through the CDs with more of a view to what wouldn't distract him from reading a book, which alas his stereotype of most punk music definitely would.

Over here's a small (only ten discs or so) collection of classical?

You could start with your name.  But I've seen what this book can do in the wrong hands, and I've spent the last eight years trying to figure out what the right ones look like.  It's not like I can ask for references on you; anything I say I want in a person is something you can pretend to be.

The pen sets itself down, and a moment later a drawer opens itself and a CD player and a pair of little speakers bob over to the desk.

"I'm Cam. I mean, I could go get my dad, he doesn't have the day off but it's a small town and he can usually sit and wait for a call wherever he wants." He picks out some Beethoven and does the battery transfer. "If this runs 'em down I'm going to need to leave earlier, I don't want to try getting out to my truck in the dark."

Hi, Cam.  I'm Jeremy.  I'm not going to let you read the book today.  Sorry.

And you should leave before dark anyways.  The veil is thinner and my parents could show up at any time.  I don't think you'd want to meet them.

(Cam tears out another couple pages for him, it's not like he can't flip it over but if he's not going to read the book he's going to need more paper real estate eventually to have this conversation.) "I admit that is not my fondest ambition."

Th

The music comes in and the pen pauses.

After a few measures it starts conducting along.

"Can I at least read more of the first half, you had me skipping ahead in there."

The pen 'sighs'.

Why do you want to so bad?

"...it's about fucking magic? That exists?????"

If I point you at a useful but harmless spell will you chill out some?

"I was going to just spend the afternoon talking to you instead of reading the book, there's a case to be made that's a better use of your pen-holding hours anyway, but then you seemed like you'd rather focus on the music."

I really fucking missed music and I needed a minute.  Singing's a bit easier without lungs but it doesn't make up for not having everything else.  Will you miss the batteries if you leave before dark?

"Not especially."

Then maybe we pause it and I jam out after you go. 

Do you want a spell to let you know whether there's a ghost around?

"Yeah."

Go turn off the music while I find the page.

To Sense the Presence of Ghosts

Cast within the pair of Hours before or after Dawn, Noon, Dusk, and Midnight and not on Sundays, under the Quarter Moons, in the Week surrounding an Equinox or Solstice, on May Eve, or on The Caster's Birthday unless Halloween.

Take in Hand one Grave Flower.  Over a plate of any material on which a candle stands centered, destroy it Manually, Incanting:

O candle, you cradle of light and enlightenment's shining
Already revealing the world to my sight
Already disclosing the forms which by night try declining
Now add to this power, by my will and rite
The knowledge of spirits' proximity to your divining

Light the Candle.  Its Flame will then burn no other objects, and may not be extinguished until the Candle is spent.  In the presence of Ghosts, the Flame will burn blue, and more strongly so the closer they are, until it burns white at closest distance.

"Bossy," mutters Cam, but he turns off the music. "Grave flower mean a flower that was left at a grave or one that grew there or is there just a kind of flower I've never heard of? Does this mean that it's okay to do it before midnight Saturday but not the hour following on which it would technically be Sunday, does it track formal timekeeping like that? What's May Eve, just the last day of April? Week surrounding an equinox or solstice like three days either side of it or like seven days either side of it?"

Sorry.  My manners are 8 years out of use.

A grave flower is one left or grown on a grave with intent other than it being a magic ingredient.  Magically, the end/start of a day happens between midnight and dawn.  Walpurgis Night.  3½ days.

"Between midnight and dawn, that's not very specific."

There's a specific point but it moves around compared to human clock numbers.

"Gotcha." He rewrites the spell in a mostly-checklist format in his notebook.

Before I died, I had some luck with getting them to move closer and farther away for yes/no questions.  It works even if they can't touch anything.

"Who were you talking to?"

A few people.  There was a girl, a town over, who wanted me to get a message to her mom.  I think she was going to move away.  You shouldn't count on being able to find any of the same people I did.  But I guess you don't have anything else to go on.

"I mean, I can probably buy a ton of birthday candles and do some looking but I have school and stuff and college after that."

No response.

"Unless I discover ghost stuff substantial enough that I should ditch higher education, which is not impossible. Summer's open for finding that out."

Hard to say.

"I can ask Charlie to bring you batteries, or whatever."

Maybe.

"Do you have, like, goals, here, besides being able to put on music?"

Yes.  I want to reveal the existence of ghosts to the world and make it so all the living and dead can communicate with each other.

"Yeah, that sounds good to me too. Just ghosts existing, not the rest of the magic? Where'd this book come from?"

People will probably need to know some magic to be able to communicate with ghosts.  A yard sale.

"So there are presumably plenty of people who know things about ghosts, do you have any speculations why they didn't blow the lid off the whole thing?"

I think the people who had enough information either didn't want to or went about presenting it in a way that wasn't smart enough, and that many many more people than that have had only enough information to wreck their credibility.

"I guess I can see that happening. And you -" did not make progress on this while alive because you were resolving the probable abusive parent situation and then fell out of a tree, right. "- hm. Well, if you're interested in performing scheduled stupid ghost tricks I can work the breathing end of the problem, assuming we can come up with a working relationship where I am allowed to read books."

I can perform scheduled stupid ghost tricks.  Or non-stupid ones, for that matter.  You're welcome to read any of my other books.

I'm sorry about keeping it from you.  It's just that I've promised myself to never make a decision to do something that might be obviously stupid and evil in retrospect without really thinking about it first.

I mean, I really thought about my parents, for over a month, and that still ended up being those things.

 

To be honest you're kind of worringly chill about that.  But maybe you're just pretending.

"I mean, I haven't been wanting to directly ask about this so early in our acquaintance, but you were in the hospital before that and Charlie said he tried a couple times to get you to say you had help falling down the stairs before he had to give up, one makes a guess."

The thing is that it's still pretty bad to murder your parents with an axe.  Even under those circumstances.

"It is not what I would personally choose to do!"

Would he really have helped if I'd told him, do you think?

"I mean, I could imagine him having his hands tied by the social workers or something, I haven't looked into applicable regulations extensively, but that would be why he was asking, yes, so he could help you."

fuck

"I am sorry you had to find out this way? But yeah I'm the child of those mythical creatures a good cop and a good teacher."

There are plenty of good teachers.

"There are plenty of good cops too, I'm repeating somebody else's joke."

I still don't know that he would have stayed wanting to be helpful if he knew why they were beating me up at the top of the stairs.

"Well, if you want me to venture a speculation I would need to know why they might do that."

The handwriting's been getting steadily steadier; now it's faster and still relatively smooth, but messier.

I guess I just have to hope that in light of Christianity not being real you're not the sort to think it's okay to axe murder your parents but not to be gay.

"I wasn't a Christian even before a ghost told me not to be, I think I would have had more of a reaction to that if I were. Charlie was fine with me coming out to him four years ago but I admit he doesn't give off the ally vibe very emphatically, I was sorta nervous."

OK

It's really weird as a ghost to get stressed enough to feel like you can't breathe.  It's like, no shit, I already knew that...

"Oh no, I'm sorry but that's also kind of funny?"

ha ha ha

"It's really hard to determine tone from handwriting."

Well, if you were making fun of the fact that I can have strong emotions while dead then I'm being sarcastic but if you were good-naturedly trying to lighten the mood then I'm laughing with you, natch.

Sorry.
I really feel like I'm blowing this whole interaction, my one chance, or even if I'm not then I'm wasting the one day when communicating is by far the easiest, and

The pen taps a few times in place, as if that'll help the right words come out of it.  Eventually it scratches out the 'and'.

"Yeah. If it helps this is not super low stakes on my end either, this is a big deal."

Yeah.  Good.

Maybe you could stick a pen on a planchette, and then at least I wouldn't have to hold it up.  If you don't have a laptop.  Or a typewriter.

"I have a computer, I just didn't bring it and its battery life is real bad. I do not own a typewriter or know where to get one. Would it help if the writing utensil were lighter? Golf pencil? Is it worth me ducking out to get stuff and bring it back?"

I mean for all the days that aren't Halloween, but thanks.

I would feel better about wasting today if I knew there was an okay option going forward.

"I am not planning to just never talk to you again."

But I won't be able to talk to you as easily.

"No spells about that?"

We can probably work something out but I wasn't thinking about that because I was instead panicking.  Not for every day but more often than once a year.

"Alternate Wednesdays when it's partly sunny and I haven't sent all my Christmas thank-you notes yet and the moon is having seasonal allergies, yeah-huh."

"Ha, ha," he wrote sincerely.

"Oh did he now, that's good. Did you ever write a new spell, is that a thing?"

Not yet.  It's possible.  That's one reason teaching people magic could be so dangerous.

"No shit. - I do not have much ability to assist you in physically defending this here book if we invite a media circus over for the stupid ghost tricks."

Ideally you untether me and I go do the stupid ghost tricks elsewhere.

"Oh, see, I didn't know that was a thing, 'cause of not having read the whole book."

Well it is.

"How exciting. What other things are things?"

Things affecting mooring, for ghosts.  Ways for us to possess you guys, or objects.  Ways to communicate.  Getting information, becoming more powerful, some healing.  If someone dies around you bring them to me as fast as you can, there's a revivification spell that works any time but only for my weird kind of ghost and only while they're fresh.

"That would be very awkward to manage but fortunately is also extremely unlikely to come up."

That's not the only

He scratches that out.

Right.  I think it might also be possible to take living people to the other worlds.  They might die on them by default but maybe there could be space suits, or magic protection.  We could send probes, maybe.

"These are like, planets type of worlds or alternate universe type of worlds?"

I don't know.  I'm not sure anyone does but it's not exactly easy to spread word if someone figures it out.

"So they're at least not obviously alternate universes, like, they don't have dinosaurs or the timeline in which Rome never fell or whatever."

I've never heard of anyone seeing a living creature on one before.

"Nor evidence of past living creatures?"

Not that I've heard of, but again: communication.

(We can also go underground but it's too dark to see anything, let alone identify fossils.)

"And I assume you can't bring anything with you down there looking for caves or whatever?"

Not until we figure out how to kill a flashlight.

"I wonder if you'd have to keep killing new batteries for it over and over."

Me too.  My book is confident dead objects exist but doesn't know how to make them.

"Huh, does it give examples?"

Some books we're pretty sure of.  I heard from my dad of an old sound machine, a gramophone or something, with one record, but it was a third-hand story and by reports it was a manual crank model anyway.

"...do they have better range than you or something?"

Sometimes there are other ghosts in the other worlds.  And sometimes they even speak English.

"If you can kill a gramophone, then what about... a squirrel. A tree."

Probably.

"No plants or animals have died on the property in the last several years?"

I actually tested out my revivification spell on a rabbit last year.  But I think by default plants and animals don't die the same way humans do.  There has to be a specific ritual to get them ghosty.

"Hm." Can I - no - are you going to pitch a fit if - no - "Do you object if I look at the, like, publisher and whatnot, front matter, of the book?"

No.

Farison, Meda. The Spiritual Order and its Manipulation. EmeryWickham, 1973.

Cam copies this into his notebook. "Only 1973, that's promising in some ways!"

I think a lot of it's older stuff that she collected.  But yeah.

"Did she collect anything that you've checked and found false, because even if she's just compiling, if she's doing it accurately... and is either alive or died in an accessible location..."

I haven't found anything outright wrong.  A lot of spells note that the set of times might be missing qualifications or disqual.s, things like that.

"So I will have to look her up."

I tried but didn't get very far with it.

"Where'd you leave off?"

Drafted a letter to the publishing company.  Didn't send it.

Because you were dead or for some other reason? "Well, that's probably where I will also start."

I think it's a vanity press but I don't remember why I think that.

"It'd make sense, I'm not sure the entertainment value alone is enough of a sell for a regular publisher to take it while not believing in ghosts."

Y

The pen pauses, then knocks itself twice on the paper.  (Though one side of it stays a finger's width away from the page.)

eah.

Clothes.  Clothes are the most common examples of dead objects, by far.

"...do you want to clarify my mental image at all here or do you want to not do that."

The clothes people die in also exist as part of their ghost.  The physical clothes are obviously still there despite this.

Sometimes this also happens with murder weapons.  Or I guess objects that killed someone on accident or whatever.

"Do you have a... dead... axe...?"

✓

"Can it interact with not-dead stuff?"

The same amount that my dad can.  So, sometimes.  Rarely.

"It's - attached to him, not to you or to your mom?"

It's usually in his face.  He can take it out but it ends up back in there after a while so he usually leaves it in.  It's not like it's preventing him from getting through doorways or anything.  We can go through walls.

Oh no that's so awkward.

I think if I had done the same thing to my mom we would maybe just have two ghost axes.  I'm not sure that's how that works but I think so.

"Was she... not... also... axe murdered... I bet it does work that way, you can imagine somebody dying in an heirloom article of clothing that their grandma died in too so if you get all your clothes no exceptions then - yeah."

I got her head off pretty cleanly at the neck.  It wasn't stuck in.

"Gotcha. ...how does that affect, uh, her ghostliness."

Her head is not attached.

"Does it still, like, work, for head things, though?"

Yes.

"Do you mostly... avoid each other or..."

Not always.

It turns out they didn't actually mean to send me down the stairs.  They She, my mom specifically, just wasn't careful enough about where I was when she was hitting me.  But they acted like she did, afterward, I guess because it's really embarrassing to do that by accident and she did mean to rough me up a little.  And my dad is actually pretty okay on his own but he went along with it because he wanted to present a united front.  But they did, you know, bring me to the hospital, instead of leaving me there or finishing the job or anything.

I don't really remember the later parts of the incident itself because of the concussion, but this is what they've told me.  They got better in some ways once they realized they weren't going to end up in heaven.  Or hell, either.  My dad especially.

"I guess that's... about as good as could be expected."

The pen sets itself down.

A few seconds later, a drawer on the other side of the room opens, and a leather jacket extracts itself.  It slings itself on a frame a little taller than Cam's, at the shoulder, and glides back to the desk.

Happy Halloween.

"Pretty good ghost trick."

Special offer, one night only, I think.

"Well, maybe, if you let me read the book eventually, I can figure out how to kill your leather jacket for you."

Wouldn't help living people to see me, then.  And I don't get cold.

"Your call, I think I'd get tired of not... having... possessions... after a while."

Clothes show up back on your body after a while, if you take them off.  I've already got two shirts; I don't really want to add another top to the ensemble.  If it would stick to me the same way.

Or maybe you meant something broader.  To which I say:  Now I have some batteries.

"I suppose you have, at that. Happy Halloween."

Cheers.

The arm of the jacket raises as if with a glass.

I really do think I'm probably going to let you at the book.  I just—can't— tonight.  Do you understand?  I can't.

"...It really seems like the best time for it since it will be so much harder for you to answer clarifying questions at basically any other time, and I do not understand you to be unable to do so, but I acknowledge that you really really don't wanna."

The spell I've been working on is for giving ghosts more juice—more fuel for interacting with objects.  It's been really limited by me not being able to run to the store for birthday candles (metonymy).  But with you helping it could be a lot easier / more powerful / faster to write.

"I am not planning to cast any spells until I have read the entire book."

Good.

He doesn't ask where the in-progress spell is. It might not even be written down.

Has anyone close to you died?

"Not yet."

That's good.

"Yes, but it means I'm going to be doing so much talking to strangers."

Hahahaha yeah.

"Not that this hasn't been delightful."

Sure.

It's been pretty stressful for me and I'm not even learning anything worldview-shattering.

"Sorry about that."

You seem to be taking it really well.

"It's mostly good news, probably!"

I hope so.  I guess it's good news even if something ends up going really wrong from here on out.

"Mm, it has a lot of nasty possible implications but also a lot of good ones, I'm definitely most excited about it if I'm in a position to shove the balance there at all."

The jacket and the pen head off to pace for a moment.

The Materials chapter just has a bunch of definitions of what Grave Flowers and stuff are.  I'd say you could copy it over to your notes but maybe you want to wait until tomorrow for that.

What's his watch say?

2:42.

"I think I've got time but if you're pretty sure they won't need a lot of clarification I can save it."

You could read it, ask questions, make notes on anything that comes up, and copy it tomorrow.

"Sure. Do you want to flip to the section while I cover my eyes or are we not being that paranoid about me reading more stuff than you've authorized."

The constant comments like that are really not putting me at ease here.  In case you thought they were.

"Sorry."

I'm not really holding them against you but it's like.  There are some things in here I just really don't want to teach someone after only knowing them for a couple hours.  So, I'm not going to, even though I know very well that you really want me to, and I assume, I really hope, that you're not going to try and see what methods I have available to physically stop you, so it's like, what are we adding here?  With the snark or the pressure every two minutes.  It's stressing me out.

It adds nothing besides Cam having a personality, and clearly that is uncalled for. "Sorry." Cam pages forward from the front matter to the chapter listing, finds the page number, and then turns only corners till he reaches that page number.

The jacket goes and paces.

The second chapter begins with a note on styling: as with time spans in the last chapter and with actions in the next, capitalized words in the middle of a sentence refer to specific terms of art and noncapitalized ones are more general.  Some cinnamon could be sourced from the bottom of the box of one's box of toasted cereal, some Cinnamon had better well be the pure stuff with no sugar mixed in.  A pool is any little body of water, but a Pool is the one you've done the relevant divnination spell preparation on.  A wind chime is any old thing that can be blown around to make noise, a Wind Chime is made of these materials in this configuration tuned to these pitches.

There's a strong warning that everything should either be constructed carefully or gathered naturally.  Don't try to fake stuff.  If a spell calls for a Stair Board, one had better not get out the drill, remove an existing step, slap on a 2x4, have some tea, take off the 2x4, call it a Stair Board, and put their original step back.  No cheating.  (The book fails to specify what might go wrong in the event of 'cheating', or to draw a finer line about what counts.  Nor does it offer a concrete way to distinguish that which should be constructed from that which should be gathered.)

And then there's just a whole list of objects and substances that can be used in spells, and their definitions.  Air (Cellar Air, Exhaled Air, Frigid Air, Ocean Air...), clay (Baked Clay, Dried Clay, Sifted Clay, Wet Clay...), dirt (Garden Dirt, Grave Dirt, Graveyard Dirt, Home Dirt...), dust (Abandoned Dust, Attic Dust, Sill Dust, Stair Dust...), glass (Drinking Glass, Glass Shard, Molten Glass, Wine Glass...)—there's a lot here.  Specific plants, specific crystals.  Products of specific basic rituals which can be used as components for more complex ones, defined only by the page number of the relevant spell.  Ectoplasm.

What pray tell is ectoplasm.

What ghosts are made out of.  Sometimes they produce amounts of it that can be nondestructively separated from their 'body', such as by crying, or through a ritual on this other page.

(But one of the listed variations is "Whole Ectoplasm: that from an entire Ghost.")

...probably some people are dead because they wanted to be dead and maybe they find ghosthood an unpleasant surprise?? Does this end the ghost or do they pop up again.

It doesn't specify here.

Well. He finishes the chapter and leans back in the chair.

Any questions?

"Do you happen to know if Whole Ectoplasm is" vegetarian "doubly fatal?"

Yeah.

He makes a note of that. "Definitely no secret additional layer of ghosts?"

The shoulders of the jacket move in either a sharpish sigh or a small, single laugh. 

I've seen no sign of one.

We are cutting down on the snark over here so Cam doesn't say anything.

I mostly hope there isn't.  It's been bad enough hanging out here with all my books for not even a decade.  I really don't want to have to see what happens a million years after the sun envelopes the Earth or whatever.

Maybe unless we convert all society into ghosts first.  We'll see.

"Are people who die old still infirm?"

Thoughtful tap-tap-tap...

I think not the way you mean it.  It doesn't hurt, right, for my dad to have an axe in his face.  We don't hurt, on our own.  But things still impair us in obvious ways.  If I'd died before my broken arm healed, it wouldn't hurt to use it but it'd be kind of wiggly and not as stable as the other one.

"So cataracts and wobbliness and stuff are still bad."

Cataracts moreso than wobbliness.

The jacket glides to be rather more than a little taller than Cam, at the shoulder.  It stays up there to write, in significantly worse handwriting,

ι十`s   ħo +   լ|кc ш୧ '/e  ப ട

It descends.

It's not like we're using our bodies to interact with the world much.  Although apparently telekinesis is a lot better at slamming doors than writing.  Maybe if I practiced.  Or was closer.

"Can you, like, fly, I just realized that might be an implication of being able to navigate underground at all."

I already said that I could.

The papers shuffle themselves around until the relevant page is on top.

"Ah, so you did."

It's fine.  But it would be a lot better if I had more than a yard.

"How fast can you get?"

I can get from one corner to the other and be accelerating the whole time.  I don't have numbers.
(Underground corner to opposite air corner)

"Huh, it's sort of weird to me that you have to accelerate like a physical object would."

Jacket shrug.

Cam taps his fingers on the book, still open to the last page of ingredients, then pushes it away from him to reposition the notebook more conveniently. He goes over their conversation to date and extracts the facts to mark down in small neat handwriting.

The jacket goes and lies on the bed after a minute.  Floating, to get there, rather than climbing on.

"So besides maybe my computer, maybe a generator if I can borrow one, etcetera, anything I should bring next time I'm by?"

Hup.

I wouldn't mind a new book.  Ideally one that can mostly stay open on its own.

He'll go scan the bookshelf for a taste assessment.

Lots of things that seem likely to have been picked up secondhand, and are a fair few obvious library discards.  Some Baudelaire, some Dostoevsky, some Homer, some Hugo, some Orwell, some King, some Christie, some Lackey.  Sci-fi omnibus.  Poe Omnibus.  Doyle Omnibus.  The Kite's Attending 100th anniversary illustrated set, in far better condition than anything else on the shelves.  A collection of textbooks that overlaps by almost half with Cam's set for this year.  Medical history, history of plagues, of witches, of esoteric societies.

"Any particular section need filling out more than the others?"

I might be too distracted by real life death??  are we doing the dumb cutesy phrase swap outs do you think?—by events which are actually happening to me, to be able to really appreciate anything very deep tomorrow.

"I was anticipating picking a book I could just leave here with you indefinitely but if you want to read it tomorrow, sure, I can try for something lighter."

Oh, if you have some going spare I might like some more poetry and nonfiction especially!
(I guess even if phrase swapping seems like it should happen, you are a real life that I'm distracted by.)

"So I am. There's things I have multiple copies of for various reasons and I too like classic literature. Is the Shakespeare omission intentional or nah?"

No, I'd definitely take some.

"Cool. Distant relatives who haven't met me since I was six months old hear the classic lit thing and don't compare notes with each other."

Cute.  But inconvenient for you, I guess.

"Library's usually got me covered."

Must be That's nice.

Cam can't wait to go meet a bunch of strangers and get his eggs out of this prickly basket. "Books, computer if it'll hold a charge for the duration of the drive, maybe computer anyway so you can press keys at me."

Sounds pretty nice.  I know there must be obvious stuff I'm not thinking of, but

(tap-tap-tap-tap-tap)

I'm not thinking of it.

"I don't suppose you or your folks know who legally owns this house."

No idea.

"Because getting the power back on would be really convenient... I don't know where I'd start finding out, I guess Charlie might know."

That would be

The jacket shifts some.  The ghost inside maybe runs a hand through its hair.

I don't know what to say.

"That makes two of us?"

That sounds potentially expensive and definitely very good for me.  But maybe also somewhat good for you.

"I don't know how much it would cost and I don't have, like, a job, so I'm not promising anything."

Good.

But it's kind of you to consider it anyways.

"I assume you don't need the water for anything?"

Nope.

"What happened to the laundry machines, do you know? They would have been awfully big for someone to just loot."

They broke before we died.

"I guess that makes sense."

I mostly let people just take whatever except from my room.  By the time I'd done enough peacemaking with my parents to care about the rest of the house most of the good stuff was already gone.

"How come you let me in your room?"

I pretty much always let people in my room, I just don't let them take stuff out with them.

It's gotten easier over time, now that it's been so long and everything in here's fine even though the rest of the house isn't.  I don't have to be as spooky because the situation already is.

What do you do when people try to take - no.

"It was a little spooky, yes."

Thank you.  For not running screaming.  And trying to talk to me, and stuff.

"You're welcome."

No one's done that before.  Past learning who I was, at least.

"How many people know about you?"

Depends how you count it, I think.  The gossip mill / news coverage spread pretty far, some number of people came and left on their own, some went at the first slammed door or weird chill, four people have talked to me.  Plus you.

"And the four people... what, just left and never followed up?"

Yes?

"Weird."

I wouldn't know if they went to seek out ghosts who haven't murdered anyone after they left.  But yeah, lots of people believe in ghosts and just don't really do anything about it.

"Well, there haven't been any splashy media circuses that you wouldn't have gotten the news about, anyway. I guess individuals could be doing ghost related things for fun and profit in private all the time."

I think it's a mix of that and, a lot of times people just don't think about the implications.  Which is probably a good thing.  I guess my parents—again, more my mom specifically—talked while I was in the hospital about whether it would be better to kill me, if I'd be more likely to go to heaven that way, and they'd have a better chance of repenting of that than I would of being gay, or maybe if not then wouldn't it be noble of them to go to hell instead of me.  So I guess it runs in the family, but most people don't take their religions that seriously in that way.  So why shouldn't it be the same with ghosts?

"...wow. I guess?"

I mean, they didn't, in the end.  And I did.

"Not, presumably, to send them to Heaven."

Nothing so noble.

I'd apologize for the fact that the ghost you ended up meeting is so messed up, but it's not like that's not correllated.
I guess I can apologize anyway.  Sorry about that.

Correlated has one L. Cam decides not to mention this. He could say he expects he will one day broaden his dead people social circle. He does not really think he should say that either. Wow, not saying the first thing that pops into your head sucks, he feels like he's made of cardboard. "I am none the worse for wear," he says after what feels like way too long.

The ghost doesn't respond immediately, either.

I guess I should maybe look at it like, I have the power that I wanted, even if I shouldn't have, and now I might be able to use it to do some good.  If we're lucky.

"Is there more of a luck component than I'm imagining?"

Well, at least w.r.t. the big thing, no one has ever succeeded at doing it before.

"You know, I don't think I can even think of anyone... obviously trying in a way that might work? I guess if they were especially bad at it I wouldn't have heard of it."

It's reason to be cautious.

Any big news since '97?  New technology?

"Computers keep getting better. Uh, somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center and we started a war in the Middle East about it."

Oh shit

"Yeah, that wasn't great. That was 2001, September 11. Uh - it's actually really hard to think in terms of what news there has been in the last several years, is there anything specific you were tracking?"

Not really.

"I will mention things as I am reminded of them."

Thanks.

"No problem."

If you leave me some paper, I can write down anyth

fuck
think I hear my parents

"Is that necessarily a big problem?"

You said you didn't want to meet them, I thought.  Maybe you changed your mind.

"You have since then explained their deal in more detail."

I sure have.
I'm gonna go explain to them that you're here, I think.  Sound good?

"Sure." He will very much not look at the book.

The jacket glides away from the desk, then descends to the floor and piles upon it.  It stays like that for several minutes.

Oh, probably the jacket can't go through the floor.

Eventually it gets picked up again—seemingly from above?  It's hard to say—and shrugs itself onto something.

We're here.

"Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Frazier, I'm Cam, Charlie Swan's son."

The jacket has a silent conversation facing towards the middle of the room.

Melody Anne: Pleased to meet you.
David: Hello.

Handwriting is different and everything?

Nope, it's the same.  The jacket's the one writing it.

"- you two can't hold a pen even on Halloween?"

Conversation conversation.  The jacket goes and sits on the side of the bed.

The pen budges.  Rolls, a little bit.  Budge.  Budge budge.  Gets a bit of angle up, falls back down.  —There it is, up and putting ink to page, a wavy squiggle—it falls again, onto the floor this time.

The jacket returns.

J:  They'd prefer I do it.

"Okay. Well, if there's anything you've wanted to catch up on from the world of the living, or want known to said living from the land of the dead, here I am."

J:  They're thinking about it.  If there's any obviously supernatural noises or moving objects in the room that's them disapproving of something I've written.  If we picked a specific thing there's a chance I could just hold it still but I can't do that for everything in here.
Or if you get chilled all of a sudden.

"Is that likely to be as heavy-duty as when I touched the book, or...?"

I would guess not but I might be wrong.  Th

 

MA:  We won't do it unless the other options don't work.
J:  Which they will, because I won't try and stop them, and also hope to not get to that point in the first place.
D:  It's a precaution.
MA:  More for his s your sake than ours.

"Good to know..."

Was it that bad?

A 'J:' appears belatedly at the front.

"It's just an interesting balance between - considerations, is all."

MA:  It's only sensible to be a little worried about the possibility of deception, in this case!  So it's polite to put you at ease with the knowledge that none's happening at any given moment.

"I appreciate the sentiment."

D: How are the Seahawks doing this season?

"I have absolutely no idea, I don't sports. I can ask Charlie."

MA:  Don't you worry about it.  We're not from the area; he was just trying to be polite.
D:  We've lived here longer than anywhere else since Jeremy was born.
MA:  No, we've been here longer than [that].  It doesn't count if you can't watch a game.

"...then I will not ask Charlie about the Seahawks if that's all the same to you."

D:  It is.

"Can I get you guys anything? Jeremy wanted books..."

MA:  Oh, I don't think we're going to be here the next time you are

—the jacket turns back to the center of the room.  Converses converses, lightly hits the desk (to no production of sound or feeling of vibration), sighs, and adds—

, dear.

"For next Halloween, maybe?"

D:  Most likely sooner than that.  There seems to be a bit of an unevenness around Halloween, from what we can tell.  If one's already around for it, they'll tend to stick around for and through it, but if you show up on the day itself it'll probably only be a few hours.  But we haven't missed an entire year yet.
MA:  We just got back from a little world all covered in water.  Decent to fly around on, but a little small and no variety.  Or, it feels like we did; of course it could have been any amount of time.
D:  We'd love some books for learning other languages.  There were other ghosts there but we didn't have any tongues in common with them.
MA:  Oh, yes.  And—I don't know if there are any books about, can you look at the stars and figure out where a place is.  I don't know that I'd have the mind for it, since we can't write anything down, or draw it for comparison, but if there's anything with general principles, there's a chance we could meet someone who meets someone with a steel-trap mind, you know.

"Those sound like great ideas, I'll see what I can find." He makes a note. "Do you have any guesses what languages you run into most often?"

D:  It's hard to tell apart the non-European ones more closely than by continent.
MA:  We might prefer to start with some of the ones closest to English, to get proficient faster.
D:  But maybe a set of basic phrases in lots of them.

"Phrasebooks, sure. I assume you aren't going to want to ask where the bathroom is and whether they take American dollars, what are you going to want to say?"