The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker

in. Kasper and the others had been lucky – they had no wounds.
“Oh, I dunno about that,” he said breezily. “You’ve raised the bar for rotting corpses everywhere.”
“Thanks, um—” She paused, clearly trying to remember his name.
“Kasper,” he said. He didn’t mind. She’d gone through a lot, very quickly.
She smiled at him, her eyes lighting up so beautifully that it completely changed her face. “Thanks for coming with me to get my phone.”
“No problem. There is something you can do in exchange, though.” He let a small smile pull up the side of his mouth in a way that he used to practise in front of the mirror during pre-drinks, back when he was alive and could go to clubs and flirt with all the girls he wanted.
“What do you want?” Her voice was wary.
He bit back a grin. “Well … you don’t happen to know how the Sky Blues are doing in the league tables this season, do you?”
Harriet grinned. Something inside him lightened. He had been hoping for this.
HARRIET
As they walked up to the top floor, Harriet made awkward small talk with this boy, Kasper. He had apparently been a rower, not a rugby player; he had been studying Art History; and he’d been seventh in line for a peerage when he had died.
When they reached the fifth floor, it was full of ghosts too. The ones up here seemed different somehow. They weren’t watching Harriet curiously, but just sat around, staring blankly into space. Some were slumped against walls or curled up on the ground. They were faint, too – dimly lit compared to the brighter ghosts she’d seen so far, who could almost pass for living people.
“What’s wrong with them?” Harriet asked.
“They’re still Shells,” Kasper said, sounding surprised to see them too.
“Shells?” Harriet moved closer to one, but he didn’t react – not even when she touched his arm. There was no sign of life on any of their faces.
“Ghosts with low energy are called Shells. They’re like empty husks of ghosts, nearly gone.”
“What?”
Kasper shook his head. “Energy doesn’t last for ever. When we first die, we’re fresh and bright, like you. But after decades, you just sort of use it all up. You stop being able to move around, and eventually your energy runs out completely and you disintegrate. Until today, we were all like this too.”
Harriet stared at him. “So what changed?”
He gestured at her. “You arrived. Your death released energy that spread through the building. We absorbed it, and it was enough to wake us up again. We were all Shells until the moment you died. We’ve been Shells before, but we’ve always found more energy from somewhere or other before we disintegrated. This time, we came really close to it, I think.” A worried look crossed his face.
“Wow.” Harriet was a bit miffed. Kasper had taken some of her energy? Surely that should have gone to her. It was Harriet’s death, after all. “So why didn’t the Shells up here wake up when I died?”
“Hmm. Well, you probably died when you hit the ground floor, right? The energy would have radiated through the building, so the ghosts on the lower floors got the most. By the time it reached this far, it was too weak for the tiny bit of fresh energy to make any difference to the ghosts here. So they stayed like this.”
No wonder the ghosts in the building were all watching Harriet. They were waiting for more energy. Well, she wasn’t going to give it to them. If losing energy meant turning into a Shell, then she was going to keep as much as she could for herself. When she got out of here, she needed to have enough energy to spend years watching over her gran with the ghosts of her parents.
The night they died was a horrible, panicked blur of fear and misery in Harriet’s memory. Her parents had eaten contaminated meat that had given them food poisoning. At first they’d just been sick, but after a few hours neither of them could breathe properly. Harriet had called an ambulance while her gran panicked and dithered, but her mum and dad had both died before the paramedics arrived.
Her whole life had been taken away from her in one moment. They’d been about to move to America for Harriet’s mum’s new job; they’d sold their house and were only supposed to be staying with her gran until their visas came through. Before the documents ever arrived, they were both gone. Everything Harriet had loved was lost, just like that – her family, her home, her life. Harriet was left with nothing except her grandmother.
The ache in her heart for her parents had never disappeared. Their deaths had been a terrible mistake. But now, more time with them was tantalizingly out of reach. Just.
Harriet and Kasper crossed the hallway, stopping once or twice to let a vacuous shell of a ghost drift past, blown wherever the wind took them. Finally, they reached the place where Harriet had tripped and fallen.
Peering over the edge of the floor, Harriet could see rust-coloured splatters of blood staining a steel beam that jutted out from the floor below. She must have hit her head on the way down.
Harriet realized she was rubbing at the hole in the back of her head and forced her hand down by her side. The quicker they found her phone and got away from here, the better.
“How big’s your pager?” Kasper asked, crouching down and searching the floor for any sign of it.
“Pager? What is this, Seinfeld? It’s a mobile.”
Kasper looked confused, so Harriet said, exasperated, “A mobile phone?”
“A car phone? One of those big bricks?” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I was never really that bothered about technology when I was alive.”
“No, it’s like –” she gestured the size of a small rectangle. “It’s silver.” It blew her mind that he didn’t know what an iPhone was. She kept forgetting that although the other ghosts looked like they