Will is five and his mother has been buried but she's in his kitchen watching him.
He watches back.
His father knows better than to ask.
Will is ten and the girl from the newspaper's front page is following him. He reads everything about her, learns nothing he hadn't from seeing her, and calls the police to tell them where to look for her body.
She disappears and Will won't be sure for twenty years whether or not she was real.
Will is fifteen and the ghosts are piling up. Murder victims, suicides, murderers, it doesn't seem to matter- they all follow him.
He can't keep up with all their stories.
Will is twenty and his college professor is a murderer. Her victim follows her everywhere, whispering in her ear with blood-stained lips.
Will knows better than to ask.
Will is twenty-five and everyone on the force wants to know how he can solve the unsolvable. Will dry-heaves into his sink and carefully doesn't look at the three dead girls with him in his bathroom.
He still hasn't decided if they're actually there.
Will is thirty and Hannibal Lecter unflinchingly, brilliantly blazes with life like no one Will has ever met before. Hannibal either has no ghosts or too many to count, and, as he wipes the blood from Will's glasses, Will decides he doesn't care which it is.
Maybe if Hannibal keeps smiling like that Will can let the living haunt the living and leave the dead to the dead.
End.
(Loosely inspired by this poem:
ghosts, n., pl.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" you ask me, all shaking hands and wide eyes.
I flash my good Catholic boy smile and let you believe that's a yes.
Ghosts- I believe in the living haunting the living. That's all.)