“Would you help me?”

The girl, a ghost, asked with a desperation that was sincere but peppered with self awareness.

Allie was walking to the gym of her housing complex and had to turn around to see the apparition. Her headphones were in, but the girl’s voice had cut through. Allie scanned her. She had curly hair and wore a sundress. She was also more faint than the others, and Allie wondered where or when she might’ve come from.

“If I can. What do you need?” The girl didn’t seem to think she would be heard, and so had trouble forming another sentence. Allie breathed a deep sigh waiting for her. She could feel others getting closer, but she focused on the girl, who was now smushing and wiggling her face in thought, trying to come up with the perfect words. “Hey, what do you need help with?” Allie spoke and the urgency shook the words out of the girl’s mouth.

“I can’t find my dad, and I don’t know where to go.” As she spoke, they both realized why the girl had so much trouble verbalizing. She started to cry, and her face shifted cartoonishly. Allie had never seen such a wet-faced ghost, blubbering and drooling. The girl’s form began to fade, and Allie awkwardly reached out to her before recalling the futility.

“Hey. Hey!” Allie tried to get the girl’s attention, but with no success. It was harder to interact with them when they weren’t focused on her. She had learned that some time ago.

She basked in failure, and looked around to make sure no one was watching. When she saw that no one was, she finally felt the wave of creatures and spirits and ghouls reaching for her, trying to connect to something, any piece of the physical world they remembered. And they would scratch and tear at the boundary between worlds through her own cursed body. She began to hear them again and again, not just the girl’s crying now, but all their pleas, all their regrets, all their souls barred for her.

And she ran, back to her condo, and slammed the door behind her. She threw her gym bag on the couch and yelled.

***

Years later, when Allie was alone in her apartment, a lifetime’s worth of dodging ghosts, she reached for the remote and heard an odd whirring. Thinking she might’ve left a fan on in the bedroom, she stood from the couch, hand on back, and trotted down the hall.

She opened the door to the bedroom. The fan was off, the whirring low but still audible. She turned the corner to the bathroom and placed her hand on the knob. In the moment before she turned it, she thought she felt the door vibrating, but overlooked the idea and proceeded.

The door opened and a gust of wind knocked Allie backward, onto her throbbing back. She winced in pain as a tall, dark figure in a sundress strutted from the bathroom. A mop of curls covered the figure’s head, but red eyes peered through.

The figure craned over Allie, who writhed in fear and agony, completely muted at the sight of it. As she shivered in silence, the figure’s jaw opened and stretched and bled until it was as wide as Allie was tall. Saliva and bile dripped from the teeth and gums of the form as Allie, frozen in fear now, stared down into the cavernous blackness of its throat. As she did, she saw small hands grip the rim of the bottomless gullet. What pulled itself up from the black was the girl she had left crying all those years ago, now a brimming smile spread across her face. She spoke and reached her hand out toward Allie.

“I understand now, can I help you?” In a trance, Allie grabbed the girl’s hand. Quickly the girl began to sink back down and in the span of a moment, the girl, Allie and the monstrous form, were all sucked into some dark oblivion.

What remained in Allie’s lonely apartment were all the ghosts left behind.