No one heard the guilty tread of heavy black boots creeping up the stairs. In fact, one could hear little else but the patient burbling of BBC Radio 4 downstairs, keeping company the resident recovering addict sat motionless in a solitary chair in the living room.
Feeling like an intruder, Alex arrived on the tiny landing of the building's uppermost floor, unnoticed. Before her, brooding, was a room of sadness, of sacrifice, of birds flown forever. Tom had been most hospitable by showing her round the house, but had only gestured vaguely towards the attic, unable to bring himself to elaborate, perhaps. Hal, now attempting to sublimate his bloodlust into a healthier hunger for current affairs and soap operas, was tolerable when not spitting curses into her face with all the vehemence of a chained beast, when he was simply laughable.
The room sighed sleepily as Alex opened the door. She was the only ghost here now. Any odour of stale milk had faded, or was lost to the oppressive yet vacuous atmosphere. Over the cot, a host of hanging crucifixes fluttered uneasily as Alex crossed the nursery to crack open the window. She wondered where the nearest stake was concealed. She peeled limp curtains aside to reveal a feeble daylight. It did little to alleviate the curious gloom, only turning whatever it touched into soft, insubstantial shapes, like dreams.
Imaginary spiders, unperturbed by her phantom flesh, trickled down her back like cold water. Ghosts imagining ghosts. Perhaps Alex's disquiet stemmed not from her apparent intrusion, but a hollowness in her heart, mimicking the nursery's, but neglecting the room's aching desolation. She had barely known Annie. She had never held Eve in her arms. When Alex passed on, would she too become subject of a little mourning, a little grief, then indifference?
Alex shrugged to herself. People could suit themselves. She let her mind stray to her family; they would have noticed her absence by now. Imagining them worrying about her, or even despairing at the news of her death, hurt. If she hadn't been hauled into this freak show she now played a leading role in, they would be eating fish and chips by the beach - they were supposed to be on holiday, after all - and her brothers would be cursing at some especially agile seagull taking dives at their meal. In the evening, they would be in a pub watching football, and her dad, mildly inebriated, would be thumping her fondly on the back whilst loudly reminiscing for the sixty-fourth time about that morning when, thanks to Alex, he had almost gone to work with an apple sticker on his forehead. Suddenly, Alex felt seven years old, homesick and with a lump in her throat.
She exhaled and tried to concentrate on logistics rather than emotions. Whether in her imagination or in reality, seeing her family devastated at her death would be excruciating, but didn't Alex need her own kind of closure? She would have to visit them, with Hal. People die all the time, Alex tried to tell herself - her family would be alright in the end.
"Alright?"
Startled, Alex turned around. Framed by the doorway was a floating head. It was Tom's.
"I've been meaning to clear this place out a bit, since we won't be needing this stuff no more," he said. "And I need to sort you a room, and start the swimming pool from scratch, too."
"What d'you fancy doing first?"
"The swimming pool," he admitted. "This room is too... sad."
He wandered into the room and stopped by the cot, wearing his customary expression of misery and hardship. Alex thought that maybe he was looking even more miserable than usual - the frown lines seemed a little deeper, the eyes a little more sunken - or maybe it was just his face.
"Hal probably hated every minute of baby-sitting, but I quite liked it, really. I read her stories and stuff." He gently kicked an abandoned toy on the floorboards.
"What about Annie?"
"We're not Mitchell and George, or that well-oiled machine of a household she always freaked out about, but she looked after us, Annie did." He scratched the back of his head. "It sucks that you're... you know... dead. But we're gonna help fix what we've landed you in, Alex."
"You mean, what Hal's landed me in?" Alex replied, smiling. "An addict and two young adults of questionable irresponsibility. We are a sorry state of affairs."
"Yeah, well, it probably wasn't the afterlife you were expecting. But, us freaks, we gotta look after each other, watch each other's backs. We'll help you on your way, but in the meantime, we've just got to keep going, act normal, be human."
Today, there had been no trespass on any forbidden floor. An existence, albeit as a ghost, without companionship is neither convenient nor secure; besides, Alex considered herself no stranger to soloing a household of churlish blokes with problems. This was her home now.
"You know what, Tom? You can get to work on the... swimming pool. I'll clean this room up and put it to rest."
Tom grinned. "Thanks." As he was leaving, he called up the stairs, "and after that, which room d'you fancy?"
If ghosts left shadows, Alex did not wish to exist in the darkness left by a ghost already gone. This was her home now.
"I'll take Annie's."