"I never thought ghosts could be real," breathed Josh, still and quiet in the hotel corridor, "until last year."

Silence stretched thin as a wire: dim fluorescent lights, pale walls, worn patterned carpet, doors with numbers emblazoned in old tarnished brass, crooked and broken. Some of those doors had been fastened with old padlocks, wooden frames splintered by years of forced entry. Others were bolted shut by hurried screws and bent nails.

Alice led the way forward, her footsteps soft and careful. She listened to the walls. Her voice was a whisper. "They're everywhere, if you know how to look."

The temperature held steady at 76 Fahrenheit. Electromagnetic fields hummed low, flickering with the quick pulse of an overhead light. There were no anomalies in Alice's scanner. No heat signatures. Nothing moved in the infrared spectrum.

She was being watched.


Josh paused at the stairwell door, and he looked up at a child's pencil drawing etched on the wall where it met the ceiling: a round figure with stick legs, a smile, two dots for eyes. "Reports say a little boy haunts this hallway," said Josh. his voice was the only sound. "No one's seen him, but they felt him hold their hand and walk with them back to their room."

[TEMPERATURE: 72F]

Alice stopped where room 1252 should be. The door here had been carefully sealed, painted, walled-in - an empty frame, vacant white - a memory someone had gone to great lengths to forget.

She stepped closer. Pressed her palm against the cool sealed remains of a door.

[TEMPERATURE: 68F]

"He's in here."

Josh stepped close beside her and laid a hand on the cool white surface, tapped with his fingers to hear the hollow resonation on the other side. He drew in a steadying breath. "Okay." He looked down to find Alice's pale face staring up at him. He took her small hand. "Are you sure?"

Alice nodded without hesitation. Her fingers tightened in his. "Yeah."

Certainty held steady in her eyes. Josh nodded in return. He braced himself. "All right. On three."

Alice stepped close, gripped his wrist with her other hand.

"One … two …"


In a blink, the hallway disappeared - and they were standing instead, teleported, in the shuttered dark of a hollow, stagnant room. The door behind them had been sealed for decades. The windows were painted black, caulked shut.

[TEMPERATURE: 53F]

The dark and the cold drew a well of tears to Alice's eyes - a memory of black emptiness, the thrum of a monstrous heart - but she felt Josh squeeze her hand, and she swallowed down her fear.

"Are you here?" whispered Alice, with a timid step, though she kept a firm hold on Josh as an anchor. "Little boy? Don't be scared. I'm Alice. This is Josh. We want to help you."

[TEMPERATURE: 41F]

Something moved in infrared: a mist, shifting and turning, fading in and out. Alice saw a wisp like an arm … the cloudy shape of a head … suspended in a corner beside the darkened window.

Her vision dimmed and fizzled. Her biocomponents whirred noisily while her battery drained, her power depleted. Alice's voice, weakened, crackled like a broken radio. "Hi. I see you."

"Alice, he's draining your power!" Josh warned clear and sharp, tugging on her arm. His wide eyes darted from Alice to the ghost and back again. "This isn't worth it, we should go!"

"It's okay. He won't hurt me." Alice stretched out a gentle hand toward the mist in the dark. Small fingers touched hers, cold as ice.

Hi

The little boy's voice rippled through the air on a frequency beyond human ears.

Did you see

The picture I drew

Josh stared, his jaw slackened, at the figure of a child that formed out of the mist: a mess of dark hair, untied shoes, a wool coat - disheveled as a depression-era photograph, translucent and humming with stolen electricity.

Alice let go of Josh's hand.

What are you

Gonna be

When you

Grow up

Alice wavered, unsteady on her feet. "I …" She was shaking. Her processors strained.

Josh gripped her shoulder. He'd been monitoring her power depletion, her stress level, the whirr of her biocomponents against the dropping temperature. "You've gotta do it now. He's draining you, he can't stay here."

Do you

Wanna play?

Alice stretched out her hands in the dark. She thought of the people she loved - Kara's embrace, Luther's gentle voice, Ralph's bright smile, the quiet warmth in Connor's eyes - and her heart swelled. She extended that love to everyone else - to Josh, and to the little boy who stood smiling in the cold - and a glimmer of gold cast out the dark.

The sword manifested, shining and gilded, clutched in Alice's sure grip.

"It's okay," she whispered to the little boy, and she gave him a soft smile, a shimmer in her eyes. "You can rest now."

The little boy stared at the sword, wide-eyed in awe.

Okay

With a touch of the blade to his forehead, the little boy dissipated like a breath of smoke. All that remained was a tiny bright light, like a firefly skittering through the air. It swirled upward, paled … and vanished without a sound.

[TEMPERATURE: 76F]

The sword faded away, power flooded back into Alice's biocomponents, and she grasped Josh's sleeve to keep from falling.

Josh knelt, caught her in a quick embrace. "Alice, you alright?" He held her shoulder while he looked into her pale face. She nodded in silence. Josh exhaled, clapped a heavy hand on her shoulder, and nodded while he stood again. Alice's fist curled in the hem of his shirt. "C'mon," Josh murmured, taking one more look around the vacant room, "let's get out of here."


In a blink, Alice found herself standing once again in the quiet hallway, beneath the flickering fluorescent light, outside the sealed painted door to room 1252.

The only sound was the sharp scared hitch of her breath. She spun to scan both sides of the hollow corridor, desperate eyes wide.

Alice was alone.

"Josh!"


Josh's head snapped to attention in the dark. He spun around, smacked his boot into an old wooden dresser with a clunk, lunged to catch a brass lamp before it could topple to the floor.

"Alice!" he called softly while he righted the lamp. He scanned his new surroundings, hoping for a sign of where Alice had gone - but what he found instead made his thirium pump shudder.

Josh went very still.

He stared down at the old rotting bed. In the center was a dark sagging groove in the mattress, stained deeply in ancient dried blood.

[INCOMING CALL: ALICE]

"Alice, where are you?!" Josh gasped. He turned his back on the stained bed, hunched with a hand against the dresser.

[I'm in the hallway, where'd you go?]

Josh breathed for the first time. "Okay, stay there, I'm coming to you." He straightened, and he took one last look at the bed with a grim stare - his fists curled, jaw clenched - before he closed his eyes and focused on the hallway outside.

He felt the lurch in his stomach, the wobble in his balance that accompanied teleportation.

The air felt the same.

He opened his eyes. He was still standing over the bed in the dark.

[Josh?]

Josh shook his head, closed his eyes, focused, tried again. He felt himself flicker through space - but he still stood in the same place.

"Something's wrong." Urgent, fierce, Josh stood to his full height, took long determined strides toward the door.

[Josh I can't find you.]

The room door was smooth and sealed shut. There was no knob. No light underneath. Nothing to connect him with the outside world.

He bowed his head. Squeezed his eyes shut. Teleported.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing over the bed again.

[Jo- I ca- -re are -]

Alice's voice stuttered and broke. Josh shook his head, the heel of his hand against his temple. "Something's interfering with the connection. What's -"

CRASH

The brass lamp flung across the room, slammed into the wall, clattered to the floor in a shine of broken glass.

[CALL ENDED]


Silence pressed close and suffocating in the dark.

[TEMPERATURE: 31F]

Josh wrapped his arms around himself, trembling in the cold. His vision faded. With every beat of his thirium pump, spectrums of light flashed and faded. His biocomponents struggled, slowing and churning as his power levels slipped.

Something moved in the corner of his eye.

A black shape, a shadow on the wall.

You were always annoying as shit

North's voice trembled in the heavy cold air - a delicate sound, laced with hostility - but it wasn't North who had spoken.

Josh spun, scanned every corner of the room, but there was no source. Just a feather-light whisper in his head.

The next hushed voice was Simon's.

If it were up to you, we would've all frozen to death on that ship

Josh clenched his jaw, watched his scanners. Nothing else moved.

[TEMPERATURE: 29F]

"This isn't real," Josh snapped, coiled like a cornered tiger. "Let me go. I'll come back, I'll bring Alice. She can help you."

You really only ever cared about your own safety, didn't you

Markus' voice had a questioning quality to it. Josh could hear the way Markus squinted with that knowing, disappointed stare.

"No." Josh sneered, breathed deep and loud. "Get out of my head." He glared into the shadows, flipped through every spectrum of light, every frequency of sound, searched every shuddering electromagnetic ripple for the source of the voices. "I'm here to help you!"

What have you ever really done to help

Connor's voice struck precise and knowing.

Josh slammed a fist into the dresser with a rattling crack. "I know what you're doing!" he shouted. His voice rang on the cold dark walls, and the whispers, like venom, flowed into one another.

Why do we put up with you
You're really kinda useless
You couldn't even save yourself
You're a liability
You're just afraid

Josh squared his stance, rose to his full height, balled his fists shaking, his lip curled to a sneer.

"STOP!"

In a blink he was standing under the pale sting of fluorescent light, near the end of an empty corridor - peeling papered walls, worn patterned carpet - outside the blank space between rooms 664 and 668.

[TEMPERATURE: 76F]

Josh sucked in a ragged breath, bolted for the stairs, and never looked back …

… not knowing of the three new scratch marks in the plastic of his shoulder …

… and the whispers that still hissed in his head …

I̬͙ ҉̖̖̟̩̝̤̖s̺̕e̟̩̙̯̻̕͟e̢͖͇̗̥ͅ ̶̡͖y̵̱̙͡o̦̹̗ụ̱̝̼͇͍̤ͅ