Ghost Written

PROMPT: A ghost is trying to haunt someone but can't get his attention

I’d be the first to admit that it was a missed opportunity. Hell, for both of us: what scientist doesn’t want to see proof of the supernatural? I mean, honestly: it’s only supernatural because it hasn’t been reproducibly described yet in the literature; then it is no longer ‘supernatural’ but ‘a newly discovered phenomenon.’ And newly discovered phenomena have names: generally the name of the person who wrote the article.

So as much as anything, I guess, this is the story of the Nuttal Effect, as might have been.

I will start by saying that there is no orientation for new ghosts. You die, and then you’re a vaguely-associated discorporeal presence. It actually takes quite a while to get your consciousness together, and it takes an effort of will to keep it from dissipating -- never entirely, of course; that would be too easy, but enough to allow you to flow along in a sort of fugue consciousness.

Until something attracts your attention, as Trevor Nuttal attracted mine in the spring of 1962.

I had no idea why I was a ghost. For a long time I couldn’t remember the circumstances around my death, and a lot of the details of my life were hazy: The things that make you you fade into the background -- birth dates, first loves, pastimes, all these things sort of... fade out. What makes you a ghost -- as far as I know -- is obsession: an obsession with some particular task, especially. A ghost is essentially... well, it’s what’s left when you strip away everything except obsession.

What I was, when Mister Nuttal walked into my particular haunted house, was a poorly-amalgamated set of sensory inputs and a really quite extreme urge to be noticed. Seen. Verifiably.

There are, apparently, a set of heisenbergian rules around spectral phenomena, which, simply, prevent a ghost from being seen. You can’t affect objects in a way that’s observably supernatural; you can’t manifest visibly, where you can be seen by the unsuspecting; you can’t make noises that aren’t explainable via a shorter Occam path.

In short, in other words, you can’t be seen by someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. If a  person isn’t willing to take the leap of faith to interpret what’s going on around them as the work of a spirit, then I’ll never be able to communicate with them. On the other hand, the more convinced someone is that there’s a ghost behind whatever is going on, the easier it is to talk to them. 

There doesn’t seem to be any specific mechanism that I can identify that prevents it; it’s a sort of Newton’s Second Law of spectral happenings; in the same way that it seems like there’s no reason why Villard’s hammer wheel shouldn’t keep going forever, if you just apply common sense, none of my attempts to make myself known to orderly-minded people -- such as Mister Nuttal -- failed for common-sense reasons; they just failed, and tantalizingly, as though maybe if I just oiled the wheels a little better, improved the hammer-length ratio...

Anyway, it was enough to keep me trying, despite Mister Nutall’s studied indifference.

Hilariously enough, he was in the house attempting to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the house was haunted. He believed firmly that there were no such things as ghosts, but was willing and able to suspend that disbelief -- in the face of evidence to the contrary.

I, on the other hand, could not provide that evidence, unless he first chose to believe...

In the years following my... my discorporation? My becoming a ghost, whatever you want to call it; I do not count the time from the date of my death, because... well, you’ll see, as the story progresses: the span of my life and the span of my afterlife are not contiguous. 

In any case, in the first years of my ghosthood, I was just barely there at all: I could sometimes sense the passage of time, I could occasionally summon self-awareness from the disjoint stream of perceptions of the world that was what passed for my... consciousness. By the time Mister Nuttal arrived, I could more or less become present, mentally, at will; and I could cause small phenomena -- the odd rustle of paper, the whistle of wind: I could observe that an act of my will preceeded the physical phenomena, but only so long as noone else could observe such a causal chain.

Mister Nuttal set up his cameras and his spectral analysis devices and his recorders and...  and, well, prepared to camp in the house. 

I was filled with an excitement I could never remember feeling before: a desperate need to... to reach out, to speak, to appear on the film of one of those cameras, to be recorded on one of those tape recorders.

It wasn’t to be, however. For reasons that now seem obvious -- the nature of ghosthood, as seems -- there was no way I was going to attract his attention: My efforts of will never resulted in the triggering of a motion capture device, or even a ghostly sound on a tape recorder -- at least, not as long as there wasn’t a breeze blowing through the chilly old house.

I began to resort to more and more childish tactics: I knocked his things over, when he wasn’t looking; I put things in his path, as he moved about the house. I set roller skates on the stairs.

It was this that finally got his attention, although not in a way that I was hoping for. I was downstairs; I had spent the entire night rigging the house with all the plausibly-accidentally-placed traps and pitfalls I could think of, and I was standing in the living room; just as an exercise, I stood in front of the camera at the bottom of the stairs and willed myself to vilibility.

And was rewarded with the snap of a camera’s shutter.

I floated there, staring at the thing, wondering what to do next, when I was startled by a noise on the stairs: I was not the only one who had heard the shutter snap. Mister Nuttal was flying, pell-mell, through my field of booby-traps; he rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, one hand gently on the rail, and began to pound down... only to put one foot on an antique and abandoned roller-skate.

He tumbled down the stairs, and about halfway through the tumble his limbs stopped flailing for balance or purchase and simply, limply, flopped around. He arrived at the bottom of the stairs with his eyes open and staring and a ridiculous expression of surprise on his face; and he arrived at the bottom of the stairs with just enough velocity to knock the camera off its tripod, so that it fell over and struck the railing, popping the film compartment opening and exposing the negatives.

After that, it was decades before I attempted anything again; it seemed as though the whole universe had been designed exclusively to make me unhappy, to frustrate me. In fact, this may not be far from the truth: A ghost is nothing but disembodied frustration.

It took me a long time -- a pathetically long time -- to realize that the sequence of events which lead to the death of Mister Nuttal were entirely in keeping with the rules. Because the film would be exposed, I could incorporate and be seen by the motion capture device; because he would die without verifying the cause of it, Mister Nuttal could hear the snap of the camera’s shutter.

Once I’d worked this out, worked out the implications of it, it became somewhat more bearable. The house was purchased and renovated; it is much, much nicer to haunt an inhabited structure. Watching people go about their lives is very satisfying, even if it’s not scratching the main itch I have.

This trick I learned not too long ago: When a live person is... less than in control of themselves... I can inhabit their body, so long as I don’t use it to do anything that could be perceived as evidence that I exist. 

The current man of the house is prone to heavy drinking, late at night when he thinks nobody knows; his wife knows, of course, but she hasn’t said anything about it. When he drinks, he gets maudlin and thinks about how he wanted to be a writer; this often ends with the typewriter out on the table, a couple of lines of bad prose typed out, and then a crook in his neck and a hangover from having slept slumped over he typewriter.

Tonight, however, he’s spent a couple of hours typing; and when he wakes up, he’ll have tapped out a nice little short story. And it will be entirely plausible that he typed it while drunk, and can’t remember doing it.