Eliza is dead and there is a party going on downstairs.
For hours now, she has been sat by the foot of the bed, curled up with her knees tucked into her chest while she stares at her own body and sobs. Nobody can hear her over the music, it seems, or has noticed her absence. Even worse, it's now impossible for Eliza to pick up her phone. The call she was making to Holden when she died never connected, her thumb slipping from the screen before she could make contact with the right icon. The screen is dim, her hand passing right through the entire device and the floor below it every time she attempts to touch it. In fact, everything in the room - anything with permanence in the space - is immaterial to her hands... impossible for her to touch.
It's all real, she realises with a heavy resignation. Holden wasn't hallucinating after all.
His talk of ghosts has always seemed far-fetched, if a little unnerving with how specific he could get, but easy enough to accept as fabrication. The startling truth of her new reality is only half realised, she knows, but even experiencing this much of it is enough. If Eliza is dead, and she provably is, because that's her corpse lying there on the floor... and her soul has not immediately crumbled to dust...
She feels certain this is the afterlife. Perhaps it's strange to accept it with such readiness and lucidity, but in a way, now that she recognises Holden has been right all along, wouldn't it be weirder for her to go into denial?
Slowly, Eliza eases herself up from the foot of the bed, finding that if she focuses enough on it she can lean on the furniture to aid her in standing up. She's still unable to move anything, but she can make it real beneath her hand, hold enough substance to withstand her.
The corridors are deserted at this time of night, all activity in the house centered around the wedding party taking place downstairs. Despite her certainty that she is dead, Eliza finds herself tip-toeing along until she reaches the grand staircase. From here, she can see the disco lights, highlighting flashes of shadows from the room below. It's kind of surreal, to know that her body lies cold in a room just above where this party is taking place. Descending at a snail's pace down the stairs, Eliza takes the spectacle in with what she considers to be an alarming level of calm. Everyone is slow dancing, couples embraced all about the room as My Girl by The Temptations plays through the speakers. She notices a strange, clustered group approximately in the middle of the dance floor, all dressed like figures from different eras in history. They're turned away from her, all watching Mike and Alison up on the small stage.
An absolutely disgusting sensation hits her, passing over her like a wave of something unknown yet distinctly unpleasant as a cold nausea wracks her body. Shuddering, Eliza swivels to watch as a woman continues on in a trajectory that could only have been achieved by walking straight through her. God, she wants to vomit.
Now that she's paying attention to her own presence in the room, she's noticing the absolute lack of it. True to her suspicions, it's like she's not even there. People's eyes never fall on her, not even in passing. Just as that woman had a minute before, a man walks straight towards her with no sign of hesitation. She's forced to skitter backwards to avoid him, angling her body out of the way to avoid that horrific sensation from before.
I'm a ghost. I'm really a ghost.
Her eyes dart reflexively towards the stage when the music changes, only for her eyes to lock onto Alison, who is staring right at her.
Eliza glances over her shoulder, in case there's anyone stood directly behind her that Alison might be looking through her to stare at. But there's no-one, only the buffet table and beside it a small tower of chairs. When she looks back, Alison is gone from the stage, instead making her way through the dancing crowd in a beeline towards her.
The strange group all turn to watch Alison as she goes, their expressions betraying their obvious confusion. Eliza isn't sure at this distance, but she thinks one might have something protruding from their neck.
"Eliza? Are you okay?" Alison asks, slightly out of breath when she comes to a stop before her. There's this look of urgency in her eyes, something frantic about her demeanour.
"I'm dead upstairs..." Eliza admits shakily. "I died. I tried to call Holden, but it felt like my brain was exploding, and then I died. I think I'm dead."
"Oh, god..." is all Alison can say in response, eyes wide and complexion gone extremely pale. Behind her, the eclectic group assembles, fanning out around Alison as they all come to gape at Eliza.
"Is she...?" Asks the one wearing a cravat. "Are you dead? Can you see us?"
"Oh, god. Shit. I need to call the police..." Alison mutters, as if the man hadn't spoken at all. She rakes her hands back through her hair, pacing about in a small semi-circle as she tries her best not to freak out. "How did you die? Does it look suspicious?"
"Please," Eliza urges rather weakly. "My body's kind of just... up there, at the moment. I don't think I can stand to look at it again."
"Entirely fair, that," remarks the scout leader (with what she realises is an arrow through his neck), nodding wisely. "I were much the same, when it happened to me."
The rest of the group all offer various murmurs of agreement, offering overlapping declarations of their sympathy.
They stay with her for the rest of the night, her loyal companions even as the flashing lights of the party become the flashing lights of police and ambulance vehicles. It's beyond bizarre to watch as her body is brought out on a stretcher, covered carefully to preserve her privacy even in death. Alison and Mike are awake answering questions until the early morning, then are kept busy with cleaning up after the wedding when the emergency services are gone - her body going with them.
Eliza watches the sun rise for the first dawn of her afterlife and tries to convince herself that she's just dreaming. At eight, her alarm will go off and she'll wake up in her own bed. Life will go on and all of this will be nothing but a product of her overactive imagination.
Even in death, it's important to cling to positivity.