Rattling Chains Read online

  He nodded again, a little more confidently.

  “The word is ‘ludicrous’. Ludicrous. You’ll remember?”

  “Yes,” he said, shyly.

  She waved and started slowly fading.

  He stepped out of the circle and turned to face Dr. Cunningham again. “She said…ludicrous.”

  Dr. Cunningham beamed. “You passed the test.”

  Chapter Two

  Harlan kept his eyes closed during the drive. He’d hardly left the Centre since he’d arrived, and he wasn’t used to so much…everything. Ghosts aside, and even with his eyes closed, it was a complete sensory overload of unfamiliar sounds and smells. Every time a noise startled him, which was often, he had to squeeze his eyelids tighter, and before long, he had a headache from the strain and the constant, too-loud sounds of the city outside the car.

  The driver was silent as he navigated the winding streets, and Harlan was grateful. Listening to someone and having to respond coherently would have been beyond too much.

  “We’re here,” the driver said, the first time he’d spoken. There was the sound of his door opening. A pause. Then Harlan’s door opening.

  The open car door let in a rush of hot, stinking air that made him gasp. Exhaust, rotting garbage and cheap, greasy food… His stomach lurched. He popped open his eyes. Looking directly at him was a mostly decapitated ghost standing halfway through a parked car across the street, and that didn’t help his nausea any.

  He swallowed, hard, forcing a mouthful of bile back down his throat.

  He knew he couldn’t get out of the car, grab his bag and walk into a strange building with his eyes shut, but he truly wished he could.

  The driver was staring at him impatiently—an expression Harlan was familiar with when dead people distracted him from the far-less-patient living, though he hadn’t seen much of it since he was a child. He hadn’t missed it. The driver had probably asked his question several times already, and Harlan hadn’t heard a word.

  “Sorry. What was that?” It had been an all-too-familiar question as a child, and he was fully aware of how stupid and spacey it made him sound. He suspected he’d have to ask it more often again, now that he’d been forced to leave the Centre.

  “Your keys…sir.” The last word came after a pause that was slightly too long, making it sound mocking.

  Thinking back to his Life Skills classes, Harlan wondered if he was supposed to tip the driver with some of the money from his envelope, and if so, how much, but that comment made up his mind. He took the keys from the driver’s hand. They were on an ugly, heavy plastic keychain shaped like the Tasmanian Devil’s head. He’d never liked Bugs Bunny.

  That didn’t matter. He had money now. He could buy a new keychain—though it was hardly worth the effort of going out in public where he’d encounter both ghosts and living people just to replace it.

  Gripping the key tightly, hard enough that the cut edges dug into his palm, he stared up at the building that he now, apparently, would call home.

  It was old but fairly well maintained. The age didn’t necessarily mean more ghosts. He was sure people had died in this place long before there were buildings, and this probably wasn’t even the first structure that had been here. But there was a certain truth to the cliché of spooky old places being haunted. Harlan had been taught that old buildings tended to collect or concentrate spirits. When a building was torn down, any resident ghosts usually dispersed. Apparently, there weren’t many ghosts from before the arrival of buildings in the world. While ghosts could remain for hundreds of years, most disappeared—or were removed by mediums—within their first century.

  The driver already forgotten, Harlan grabbed his bag from the back seat and paused just outside the building, trying to get some sense of the place, which was silly, of course. His talents lay with the dead, unlike some of the other kids, who could do things like touch an object and see what its owner had eaten for breakfast.

  The red-brick building was attractive enough. Its name—Parkview—and address were spelled out in brass letters above the front door. It was four stories high, plus it likely had a basement. The window frames were painted white, and none of the paint had peeled or flaked off. Rain, wind and the dust of years had worn the bricks’ edges smooth, and the concrete accents sported spots and lines of green growth.

  So far, so good. Harlan liked the look of the place. It was certainly more attractive than the practical, utilitarian buildings of the Centre. All that remained was to see if there were any restless former residents roaming the halls and if he could tolerate their company.

  A curtain twitched in one of the windows, and Harlan caught a brief flash of a pale face before the fabric settled back, covering the window again.

  It was a living person, Harlan thought, not a ghost, but he couldn’t be sure at this distance and after such a short glance. He knew ghosts could do far more than ruffle a flimsy curtain, if only from training videos and half-forgotten childhood memories.

  The driver stared at him, as well as a woman wearing a navy-blue dress and a grey-green beret. She unlocked the front door of the building, fumbling with her keys in her distraction as she watched Harlan instead of what she was doing. Not sure what else to do, Harlan flashed his new keys like an ID badge and strolled past her once she got the door open. He was sweating and breathing hard, and he took a moment to lean against the wall beside the door with his bag on the floor, pressed tightly against his feet as a very ineffectual shield.

  The woman strode past, still eyeing him warily. Her heels clacked on the black-and-white tile floor.

  Harlan closed his eyes, slowed his breathing. That was one of the first things he’d been taught at the Centre, when the sight, sound or touch of even the most benign ghost had sent him into what he now knew was a panic attack. He’d been so haunted—no pun intended—so on edge, that even a loud, sudden, but completely mundane noise or someone touching him unexpectedly could bring one on.

  In. Out. In, slow. Out, slower.

  He opened his eyes. The lobby was small and pleasantly dim. It was lit by an overhead chandelier, sconces and a few floor lamps, all casting a warm, soft glow. There was a bank of locked mail slots beside him, made of brass like the lettering on the building, each marked with a unit number. Several black leather benches—a little shabby, but clean—stood against one wall. One of them held a small stack of old paperbacks, apparently there for whoever wanted to take them. He liked that. It gave him a sense of the others in the building. Apparently, they were generous and liked to read. Good people.

  The place felt welcoming, despite the translucent teenage girl who stood peering out the front door, anxiously waiting for a ride that would never come—or had arrived years ago. She was quiet, a simple repeater—a ghost caught in an infinite loop, not interacting with anything or anyone, growing fainter and fainter until she finally vanished completely.

  She stood at the window, took a few steps—away from Harlan, toward the elevator—paused, bit her nails and briefly flickered out of existence before reappearing in her original position. The loop didn’t show how she’d died, and aside from being able to see a painting of a lily through her, there was nothing to indicate she actually was dead—no blood, no missing limbs, no bloated, distorted features. This moment had been important to her and close to her death, and now she played it out over and over again.

  Her clothes—bellbottoms and an orange sweater—looked at least a few decades out of date, but it might have just been her personal style.

  He wondered why exactly her spirit, her essence—whatever was still present here—had chosen these few seconds to repeat. She looked to be about sixteen, though she could have been a few years older or younger. Harlan wasn’t great at estimating people’s ages.

  Maybe she’d gotten pregnant and was waiting to tell her parents or boyfriend. Maybe she’d been waiting for a friend to pick her up, they’d gotten drunk and ended up in a fatal collision. Maybe her friend had survived and t
hought about the dead girl to this day, however many years or months ago the accident had happened.

  They’d been encouraged to do this sort of speculating at the Centre, guessing what a spirit’s motivation was. They’d mostly worked from videos, a flat, monotonous-voiced narrator stating the facts of the haunting before each clip—male, age thirty-four, died of cirrhosis. Reason for haunting—his ex-wife’s new marriage.

  Even as a child, Harlan had found the exercise pointless and a little stupid—Why guess what a ghost was thinking or feeling when you could just ask?—but here he was, out from under the watchful eyes of his teachers, not even in the Centre and still doing it.

  Harlan risked a glance at the rest of the lobby, but it was fortunately empty of persons living or dead. He exhaled, slowly. He could live with this sad, silent ghost. Of course, she wasn’t guaranteed to be the only spirit haunting the building—or even the lobby. Ghosts could appear at any time, not only after dark—though many spirits kept ‘haunting hours’ and were only visible during certain times of day. They could only be sensed as a cold spot the rest of the time.

  So, that was the lobby.

  Harlan took one last look back, just in time to watch the spectral girl blink out of existence, reappearing a moment later a few feet away.

  Realizing he had no idea where he was going, Harlan looked at the key he was still holding, hoping it had some sort of clue. The key itself had only the manufacturer’s name stamped on it, but taped to the back of the ugly keychain was a piece of paper with ‘seven’ written on it. The building was only four stories tall, so it was probably—hopefully—the suite number.

  Sighing, Harlan decided he’d start on the lowest floor, likely in the basement, and work his way up.

  The elevator was out of the question. Shortly before his parents had sent him to the Centre, Harlan had been trapped in an elevator with an angry ghost who didn’t speak English. He’d eventually ended up curled in a corner, screaming until his voice gave out, much to the embarrassment of his parents, who couldn’t see or hear anything but Harlan’s hysterics. They had no idea why the elevator had really stopped, why their son had screamed, ‘Stop, please. I don’t understand!’ over and over again.

  Taking the stairs was healthier anyway, right?

  There was no suite seven in the basement. The last apartment was six. Beyond that were two labelled doors—a boiler room on the right and a laundry room on the left.

  Harlan had never done his own laundry. Every Thursday morning at the Centre there’d been an announcement, reminding everyone to put their dirty clothes and bedding in the hamper before leaving their rooms for breakfast. After dinner, when he returned to his room, his clothes were neatly folded and put away in their drawers, his bed made by unseen hands. He’d tried to stay, once, hiding in his closet with the door open a crack, to see who took the laundry away. He liked to imagine Dr. Cunningham doing it, groaning as he lifted the baskets of clean laundry, grousing about Kleenex left in pockets and socks without mates.

  Harlan had been missed at breakfast roll call and found before he could see who handled his clothes. Dr. Cunningham had died a year later. Harlan hadn’t seen his ghost, but he had seen the body being wheeled out.

  As promised, he’d never seen any ghosts he wasn’t supposed to at the Centre, a luxury he’d come to rely on and was sorely missing already.

  The key slid into suite seven’s lock on the first floor but didn’t turn. He jiggled it, just in case it was sticky or there was a trick to it. It’d be annoying to have to try every floor, hauling his bag up and down the stairs, only to learn that he belonged on the first floor after all. The key didn’t budge, and Harlan left before someone came out of another apartment and found him trying to unlock a door he didn’t have the key to.

  The same thing happened on the second floor, and this time, Harlan hurried away when he heard the elevator door open and voices approaching. He felt like he didn’t belong there, and anyone who saw him would immediately know it. They’d know he was one of those damn kids from the Centre, and they’d call to complain, and the Centre would send a car to pick him up—probably just have the same driver who’d dropped him off turn around, if he’d even left. He was probably just waiting outside for Harlan to fuck up—then he’d have to bear the driver’s judgmental silence and he’d have to sit through a lecture from Tom about his failure to perform his civic duty and about how even though the Centre was always open to him, they encouraged him to live independently.

  Harlan’s hands were shaking and he felt his consciousness start to slip, as though he were watching himself move rather than being in control of his body. His teachers had called it ‘disassociating’ and encouraged him to tell them whenever it happened. Personally, he’d always thought it helped him understand ghosts. What, after all, were ghosts but the ultimate form of disassociation?

  He half-ran up the stairs to the third floor, as if someone were chasing him. He didn’t usually run. He was self-conscious about the way his body moved. That, and rapid movement tended to attract ghosts’ attention.

  Harlan had barely slid the key into suite seven’s lock on the third floor when it opened, jerking the plastic keychain out of his hands and startling him so badly that he yelped. He found himself facing a large, angry-looking man.

  “S-Sorry!” he managed, attempting to pull the key free—or close the door so he’d have a barrier between himself and the man. “I’m new to the building! Must have been the wrong door!” His voice felt too high, too shrill, but he couldn’t stop talking.

  The man slammed the door, catching the keychain and snapping it cleanly in half. The Tasmanian Devil’s forehead and eyes were still attached to the key ring, but the bottom of it was still inside the apartment. A tiny, subversive part of Harlan liked that thought, of the Devil’s mouth grinning, madly, at the man who’d separated it from the top half of its face.

  He grabbed the key from the floor, where it had been jarred loose by the impact of the door closing, turning the broken keychain over and over in his hand. Now he had an excuse to buy a new one, or maybe he’d just keep it this way. The number was still taped to it on three sides, the fourth piece of tape hanging over the edge.

  Harlan left before the man saw the broken piece inside his apartment and decided to throw it at Harlan’s head.

  He passed a shuffling, mumbling ghost in the stairwell on the way to the fourth floor, but they ignored one another—just the way Harlan liked it. If he could ever find his suite—and barring any unpleasant surprises on the way there or inside—he could stand to live in this building.

  When the door to the fourth and final door marked with a brass seven refused to open, Harlan was ready to huddle in the nearest corner and shake until someone noticed him and called the police or the Centre. He was almost ready to call them himself, never mind that the asshole driver who’d dropped him off would probably be the one to come for him or his shame at not lasting more than… He glanced at his phone—two hours on his own.

  He gave the key a vicious, frustrated jerk, hard enough that he worried about snapping the fucking useless piece of metal off in the lock—not that it would be his problem, because apparently this wasn’t his apartment, either, even though he’d checked all of them and was this even the right building—or had the driver dropped him off here as a cruel joke?

  Soft, friendly laughter. The good kind—laughing with him, not at him, or that was how it sounded.

  Harlan kept his head down, twisting the key one way, then the other, as though repeating the same motion over and over would change what happened. He wished the door would open and he could step inside, proving he wasn’t trying to break into the apartment.

  And close the door behind him. And disappear.

  “There’s a trick to it. You mind?” A large, male hand reached between Harlan and the door, hovering just short of touching the key.

  Harlan shrugged.

  “You’ve got to kinda…” The man jiggled the key, simult
aneously pressing a certain spot on the doorframe. “And…voila!”

  The door swung open, but before Harlan could dart past the stranger into the safety of his new apartment, the man closed the door again, swiftly turning the key in the lock.

  “Whoa, not until you can do it yourself. Teach a man to fish and all that.” The stranger gestured at the key with a flourish, stepping back and out of Harlan’s way. “You can tell management about it, if you want. Maria—the woman who lived here before you, who taught me the trick so I could feed her cats whenever she was out of town—always said she was going to complain about the lock, but she never did.” He shrugged. “Maybe she just got used to it. Maybe you will, too.”

  That sounded slightly, vaguely ominous.

  Harlan was exhausted, overwhelmed and overstimulated. He wanted to get away from the living and the dead and just be alone in an apartment he hadn’t even seen yet. He twisted the key the way his neighbour—he assumed the man was his neighbour—had demonstrated, pushing on the doorframe. The door creaked open.

  “I’ve got some oil for the hinges, if you want.”

  “Thank you. Do I have to do that when I lock it, too?” Harlan was a little surprised he’d spoken, never mind asked a question. Questions only made interactions with people last longer, and that was something he tried to avoid.

  “Nope. It just locks. Not sure why. Here… Try it.”

  Harlan had been borderline rude, but it didn’t seem to faze the guy.

  Harlan locked the door and turned to the man with a smile he hoped didn’t show how worn out he was. “Thank you, again…for your help.” Jiggle, twist, push—the door opened. Snagging his bag by the strap, he slid inside and pulled it in after him.

  As he closed the door, he heard the man say, “I didn’t catch your name. I’m Jared—” The last name was cut off by the surprisingly soundproof door.

  Harlan knew he probably wouldn’t remember the man’s name, anyway.

  Locking the door, Harlan gave a deep sigh he hoped the man in the hall couldn’t hear. Sound could be funny like that sometimes, only going one way.