The first thing he tried was Meditation.
Breathe in, breathe out. Inhale the good, breathe out the bad. Find your center. Inhale. Think of the things you don't want in life, and cast them out.
Exhale.
Danny opened his eyes, but his reflection behind the milk jugs still wasn't quite him . The facial features were the slightest bit warped, by the reflective surface or something inherent to it, he couldn't tell. Danny grabbed the milk, staring at his reflection.
Its gaze followed his hand.
He closed the door, and the glass reflection was his own - the metal mirror only showed rows of half-gallons.
At the counter, the girl shrugged off his murmured mention of a strange reflection, quickly swapping dollar bills for lesser denominations and a small palmful of change. They clinked too-loud in his pocket, and the prickle of his neck said something was still watching.
Inhale.
It wouldn't follow him out of the 24-hour gas station.
Exhale.
It never did.
Jazz suggested therapy, of course she did. When he relented and sat on her bed, explaining honestly of the whispers that followed him from bus stop to bus stop, hiding in the seats of parked cars that never seemed to leave their driveway.
He explained the set of sparrows that always seemed to chirp the same tune when he crossed the corner of Mangolia drive - always the same tune, and the same back-and-forth swoop before landing together on the telephone line. He could have transformed and examined them closer, but the idea of it made the hair on his arms stand on end.
They weren't right.
She concentrated on the whispers first.
He could still hear them, but the music in his ears and the humming in the back of his throat drowned them out a bit. He still felt the prickle of their eyes watching him from moments in the world that didn't seem quite real.
Yoga was next. Chakras and clearing your energies - breathing deep and letting whatever stress there could be just flow away. Tucker may have snickered at him, but Jazz was glad to have a partner.
Danny carefully didn't mention the way the man smoking outside seemed to have a hat, but…aLao no face. Certainly, his hat was sitting on a head, and the casual lifting of a cigarette must have been touching something. There was just something not quite right about the way smoke billowed out around him, clogging the air with black particles without leaving a trace of scent.
Breathe out the bad energy.
In the space between one breath and another, after yoga had ended, the smoking man faded from view. Only a few crumpled butts laid on white cement to tell of his passing.
They hadn't been there before, and when Danny left the studio, he bent down to tidy up the litter. Though he had seen the man only moments before, the butts were cold and dead.
Still no smell of smoke.
Graveyards hummed back to him, when he passed them. Cold, empty places where humans would linger for moments before rushing away again, leaving only damaged atmosphere and grieving spirits behind. He didn't like hanging around them. Not the spirits per se - he couldn't really sense them properly before a good soak in the Ghost Zone. The graveyard itself seemed to bear down on him, laying its mighty weight upon his chest like a lonely dog far too big for a lap.
Come to me, it whispered, and a thousand spirits echoed the sentiment.
No.
With every rejection, the Graveyard and its residents settled back down, amusement curling between the blades of grass that never seemed to grow, watching him with rows of solemn grey stones.
You will eventually.
Danny avoided graveyards.
A girl with warm eyes stared at him through a reflection, smiling shyly. She waved at him through bus windows and met his eyes in the backseat of a car driving away. She always appeared in the "In Between" but never "In.' - Always a moment's way from asking his name, eyes always warm, mouth always crooked in that lopsided smile.
When she spoke, he could hear nothing. When he spoke, she shook her head. No matter what he said, she shook her head 'no'.
He tried aromatherapy. He tried talking out what had happened, and tried clamming up about it to reflect.
It was never enough, though. No matter how grounded he tried to be - however real and present and in-the-moment and a thousand other meditation-slash-psychotherapy terms he tried to be, the moment he wasn't actively concentrating on staying here …. Those places would tug at him, just a bit. The more he noticed them, the more he slipped, until the world was full of bright spaces and dark spaces and in-between spaces where a thousand other worlds connected just so.
Sometimes he met the cautious eyes of a Janitor who had seen too much to not recognize him as one of us , but too tired to point it out. Even as he slipped between his classmates in broad daylight, he could feel the man's eyes on his back, and the soft whispers in both their ears, from lockers unopened for years, and classrooms that somehow remained unused despite a bustling school.
They knew.
Jazz's college was no different. There was a man sleeping tucked in the shadow of a building, and Danny would have sworn he knows that man - had seen him before a thousand times, but at the same time was absolutely certain they were complete strangers and had never met in their life.
He was just as certain that, until he asked for directions, the stairs did not exist, and there was no way to find room 156. He had circled the building, and tried every entrance. Hands cupped to windows, he peeked into classrooms and halls. There WAS no first floor. But then, there were stairs, and the front entrance didn't open up into the 200's classes after all.
Jazz told him that the professor who gave directions had been teaching a class at the time, while a classmate of hers jokingly pointed out that THAT professor had retired decades ago. Jazz was flustered, the other student was frustrated, and when Danny reached into his pocket, the little slip of a business card was no longer there.
The class bell was ringing, and Jazz asked if he knew his way back to her dorm.
It was fine, he said. Don't worry about it.
Sometimes he met the eyes of the girl mopping the floor at three in the morning at an otherwise-empty gas station off a long, empty stretch of highway. He glanced pointedly at the small footprints appearing in her freshly mopped floor, any body invisible even to his ghost sense. She rolled her eyes, but didn't mop again that night.
The motion sensor 'ding'ed at her, but the door never opened. She seemed used to it, and also seemed very talented at Sudoku.
Sometimes he felt the worlds flicker under his fingertips, chasing and spinning and dancing around each other in a waterfall of possibility. The Waffle House's door swung open, and the blinding light that obscured the outside world fell away. This was the right Waffle House, right? Danny turned around, not quite remembering when he had stepped through the doors.A sign flickered, and there seemed to be far more visitors inside than he remembered.
If he lingered too long, the whispers of long-forgotten cars would rise up again from their clearly-new automotive bodies. So, Danny quickened his step and hummed a bit louder, pulling an earbud up to fasten in place. He could still smell maple syrup and charred bacon grease.
The same man he had seen a thousand times, in a thousand different fast food joints, spoke on his phone as he juggled drinks and absently held the door open for someone else - Neither really saw each other. That was just the way of things, in these places.
There were secrets there, in the spaces where humans passed, but did not linger. Places where voices softened, hackles raised, footsteps were placed carefully lest something from the elsewhere somehow could cling. He could see them - the others that prowled or paused or just lived in the liminal spaces between this world and whatever worlds were beyond it.
Spaces and places and people that didn't quite align with this world. Who were just a touch out of synch.
Some people - the Librarians, the cashiers, the chefs, the janitors, and the thousand other after-hour people quietly going about their business, simply learned to ignore the phenomena with a resigned sort of shrug.
Liminal spaces.
What could you do?