blueberry cheesecake and flavour of the day with whipped cream and a cherry
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Ghosts
Rating: R
Challenge: FOTD: plangent, Blueberry Cheesecake #1: human nature
Toppings/Extras: whipped cream, cherry
Wordcount: 2,685
Summary: Blackledge VC-11 and death.
Notes: I’m sorry for disappearing into silence, summer is a busy time for me! I’ll put some time aside soon for reading and the like, I love you guys really… and I am shocked I managed to pump this out in one day! Seriously. Plangent: expressing sadness; plaintive. Warning for death, implied suicide, minor gore, creepy children, disturbing Blackledge stuff... I gave myself a cherry because this is so dark and I don’t often do that.
The first time he saw a corpse it was the tenth day of June. He was five and the weather was sweltering; the Facility looked like some sort of sweaty kid factory on the best of days, metal grilles at every window and heatwaves pouring from the tarmac, but that day was something else.
Light shafted in through the latticework of the tall windows and the air was stifling to breathe. VC-11 looked down towards his feet.
LB-4 was lying with his limbs twisted and his head broken into at the back. The blood was dried to a crust on the tiles and into his short, dark hair. The pale skin of his face was luminous in the gloom, his eyes open, the profile of his nose stark against the floor.
After a moment, VC-11 knelt down and turned the teenage boy’s head so that it was straight again, looking up towards the ceiling. His hands came away from the boy’s cold temples and moved back to his own lap, clenching into fists atop the black uniform trousers he wore.
He didn’t know why LB-4’s eyes were open yet he appeared to be asleep.
There was no creeping horror in VC-11’s breast, no sickening thrum of something direly wrong. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t sense the lack of life in front of him, a void where there should have been… more.
“You’re not meant to sleep here,” he said, still crouched by the flimsy body at the bottom of the stairs. “This is the hallway.”
There was no response, and neither did LB-4 ever respond to anything again. Dust motes whirled in the shafts of light and everything was silent for a while.
-----
“What the bloody hell is the point of an aquatic Blackledge that drowns?” grumbled a deep voice on the other side of the door. VC-11 was scared of that voice. He had been for as long as he could remember-which was a long, long time. Even when he’d been barely sentient, when the voice had been a looming presence he didn’t quite understand, the words warped into nothingness through lack of linguistic understanding… even then, he’d been scared of the voice, conditioned into permanent fearfulness.
“We think that it may not have been an accident, Dr Blackledge,” said another voice. VC-11 frowned and inclined his head. It was bad to listen by doors, he knew that, and he knew what happened to children that were bad. But he didn’t understand-
“You mean someone killed her?” VC-11 heard footsteps slapping against ringing metal, the shuffle of medical tools. Scalpels. Clips. Gauges. Breaths shaking, he took another step towards the door, a chink of light falling across one smoke-grey eye, watching shadows move against a bright light. There was a table.
“No. Not someone else, anyway.”
VC-11 didn’t understand, really he didn’t. If JE-10 hadn’t died by accident and someone hadn’t killed her, what in the world had happened to her? His fingertips brushed the wall by the door before a hand fell on his shoulder from behind-he startled badly, breathing like someone had punctured his lungs, but he didn’t make a noise. He spun around.
It was only Pickaxe, though she was supposed to be called ID-2. She was nice. VC-11 stared at her: he was seven, she was twenty. A grown-up! She was meant to help the doctors and the scientists now, meant to be on their side, training the children and reporting back to Dr Blackledge, but VC-11 knew she wouldn’t tell. She never did.
He could tell that she was looking at the pictures in his head-he was good at telling now. The scientists didn’t usually notice but he was a Rememberer, and Rememberers noticed everything. It was a very faint feeling, like someone burning the tip of his fingernail or digging a hook into the nerveless part of a tooth. He knew she could see the waterlogged hair, the blue skin around the lips, the way JE-10 had drifted through the water like outer space. The gentle lapping of the water had created eruptions of stars against the outline of her body under the halogen lights.
“Do you think you could forget something if you tried really hard?” Pickaxe whispered. He didn’t reply. There was no point. What could he say? This was the way he’d been programmed to work. He didn’t forget. He never forgot. She held his wrist-gently because she knew he hated being touched. “I’ll take you back to the dorms.”
-----
There was one baby that wouldn’t stop crying. Solemn and silent, eight-year-old VC-11 stood over the crib, remembering when he had been that young. When everything had been blurry and the walls kept ringing all night long. The tiny Blackledge from the newest batch kept scraping at his face, little hands pink and lumpy, tiny moon-slice fingernails scratching.
Hearing footsteps, VC-11 turned to see one of his clones, VC-10, walking down the row of cots towards them. It was their first day doing this particular job, keeping an eye on the newest batch. They trained in the day and worked in the evening. The sun was setting, the sky through the window a colour that reminded VC-11 of bruised peaches.
VC-10 was holding a large pair of scissors in his hands. Fabric scissors, perhaps.
Silently, VC-11 watched his clone approach the crib of the crying, scratching baby. Light warped across the metal of the scissors and VC-11 felt very sick. Thin wails continued to rise and fall over the air. The rest of the babies were silent-as they should be. Dr Blackledge encoded them a certain way. They weren’t meant to make a fuss.
This baby was abnormal.
“Quiet,” VC-10 said. “Be quiet.”
The chunky scissors looked big in his young hands. Too big.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” VC-11 whispered.
VC-10 leaned over the rails of the crib. The scissors made a soft swishing sound as they opened and closed on thin air, thunking to a close after each snip. VC-10 looked down at the baby with bright madness in his eyes. Slowly, he took the baby by one tiny hand and opened the scissors wide, sliding them around the baby’s wrist.
VC-11 felt cold dread right to his centre. “Stop it!”
Laughing loudly, VC-10 withdrew and threw the scissors at his clone, who fumbled to catch them. He cut his thumb as he did so; bit his lip at the sharp sting.
“Fine. But he’d be better off dead,” VC-10 said in a light tone, almost jocular, before strolling away across the foot of the other cribs, trailing one of his hands along each of the metal footboards. VC-11 looked down at the blood on his thumb and then at the scissors. He had the breathless urge to bury one of the points as deep into VC-10’s back as he possibly could, to feel it fight through the flesh and the blood leaking hot from the impact, to get rid of the appalling boy forever.
He wiped his blood carefully from the blade with one of his sleeves and watched VC-10 reach the end of this row of cots and start up another.
It frightened him a little, how easy it would be.
VC-11 turned and padded out of the room, dutifully putting the scissors away.
-----
Dr Blackledge burned to death and VC-11 was glad for it. He’d never been so happy about a death in his whole life. It was a poisoned happiness, tainted by the sickeningly violent nature of it, but VC-11 didn’t care. The children were all stood outside of the Facility, hundreds of them, saying nothing, expressing nothing as the place they had called home for their whole lives tumbled to the ground, smoke pouring from every smouldering gap.
News choppers circled the area with their blades thumping through the air, ambulances and volunteers swarmed the place, firefighters trawled through the ravaged wreckage of the innermost buildings and the mostly still-standing outer ones. The Facility had been burned from its core, from the heart of its darkness.
Having never been outside before, VC-11 didn’t know what would happen to him next, what would happen to any of the children next. A part of him thought that they were going to die-now they were useless they would be put down one after the other by an injection of clear liquid. The thought didn’t scare him or alarm him in particular. He was sure it would be nicer than burning to death, and that meant they won.
-----
Eleven-year-old VC-11 was walking home after school. He kept his eyes down and moved purposefully but not too quickly-nothing to draw attention to himself. Being a Blackledge was enough to get yourself beaten to a pulp in some areas. People looked at him funny even now. Didn’t trust his nervous, fidgety demeanour. They said he had the look of a killer. If only. He was a wire-thin boy with a narrow face and scarcely any presence at all. He drifted by like a spectre and was glad when people didn’t notice him.
Before long he was nearly upon his foster home, though he never really thought of it as ‘his’. It was hard to think of anything in terms of home, really. He stepped stiffly across the walkway, the autumn wind picking up strength and whistling between the skyscrapers-soon he was inside of Brunel Spire, near to the bottom of course, a run-down place with a constant fug in the corridors. Uncomfortably humid in the summer, bitingly cold in the winter.
The corridor was narrow and passing each door he could hear the things he heard every day on his way home: daytime TV blaring adverts for online bingo and pet insurance, someone in the midst of a coughing fit, the cutting cry of a baby, doors slamming, an argument rising to a crescendo, music pumping so loud that he could feel it through his shoes.
He was reaching into his pocket for the doorkey when he turned the corner into the little dead-end piece of corridor that was studded with two doors: on one side it went into the foster home. On the other lived their neighbour, Mr Gausman, who was obese and shouted at his TV a lot.
The door was open.
The boy hesitated.
On one hand, he’d been told many times that it was inappropriate to walk into other people’s properties uninvited. On the other, it seemed that something was wrong, and the door was open…
Wishing that choices like these would stop presenting themselves, VC-11 turned towards the door to the foster home for a moment and then stopped. What if he could help?
He so wanted to be helpful.
Taking a deep breath, he turned back towards the open door and stepped towards it. He raised a fist and knocked on it hesitantly a few times, which only pushed it further open. His brows knotted and he stepped over the threshold into the house. One quick scan revealed nothing-the TV was on, baying laughter crackling the speakers as a comedian with an American accent talked about sex on a big stage.
Then he saw Mr Gausman’s legs protruding from behind the counter of his poky kitchenette.
Tilting his head slightly, VC-11 walked across the cigarette-burned carpet. He walked in a curve, circumventing the counter, wishing his schoolbag didn’t cut into his shoulder so much. Then he stood where Mr Gausman’s feet were and looked down at him.
He was sure he was dead but he couldn’t see how it had happened. When he thought back to finding LB-4’s body all those years ago, he knew now that having a big smashed-in hole in the back of your head made you dead. He hadn’t understood that at the time-but Mr Gausman seemed fine. Waxy-skinned, but that wasn’t unusual. He had odd facial hair, not really a beard but too long to be called stubble. VC-11 didn’t like looking at it. His shape was funny, sort of contorted, but there was no blood. No missing body parts.
Putting his bag down, VC-11 carefully knelt next to the body and looked around for anything that might have killed him. He touched a hand to the greasy comb-over and then quickly withdrew. He could see the oil on his fingers.
Just in case, he dutifully felt for a pulse in Mr Gausman’s neck, pressing it under the flabby chins that were clammy and cold to the touch. Dirty dishes were half-submerged in a sink filled with milky water and the light above their heads buzzed and clapped in and out of life occasionally. The curtains were mostly drawn. The air smelled bad.
No pulse.
VC-11 thought for a moment and then stood up, walked over to the sink and washed his hands in it. Water jumped across the dishes and plates, washing crusted sauce and dried crumbs along the plastic surfaces. He dried his hands on the towel just under it, picked up his bag and then walked out of the room, out of Mr Gausman’s house, and opened the door into the foster home. He stopped in the hallway to put the key back into his pocket.
“Hi, VC,” Mrs Tantridge, his foster carer, said with a weak smile as she strolled out of the living room. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” he said because he wasn’t injured and didn’t feel sad or angry, and that seemed to be the general definition of being OK. He hesitated. “But Mr Gausman is dead.”
-----
“He died of coronary heart failure,” Lottie said. She was two years older than him and another of the girls in the foster home, another kid with no place to go. People said she had a bad attitude. She did, a bit, but VC-11 would never say that. She checked her mascara in the mirror and then glanced towards the Blackledge to see if he was following. “His arteries were all clogged up.” She turned her thumb and index finger into a ring. “It all built up and his arteries got smaller and smaller…” She moved the fingers past each other, narrowing the hole. “Until…”
She snapped her fingers and then laughed.
-----
For Victor Blackledge, death as a concept was one that took a while to sink in. He’d known many people who died but he still saw them clearly-they appeared, not partially-visible but perfectly solid, in the distance or up close. It was one of the reasons why he couldn’t possibly talk about it with other people. People… humans, generally speaking, functioned in a certain way when faced with death. He did not.
He saw LB-4’s uneasy smile all of the time and JE-10 swirling face-down in every body of water he passed, Mr Gausman nodding at him gruffly as he passed on his way home from school. On bad nights it came back strong, scissors making that thick and satisfying sound as they closed, Dr Blackledge’s voice in the night. There were some things people were meant to forget. If he’d been an ordinary child he was sure he would have forgotten those things, forgotten all of the punishingly vivid details that haunted him day and night, and he was quite certain he wouldn’t spend quite so much time talking to them.
As long as he remembered-which would be as long as he lived-their shadows would catch in the corner of his eye, strangled and birdlike, vying for him to slip. They wanted him to pay attention, to listen, to see just as he had seen before.
He wasn’t scared of the ghosts. He was scared of the fact that he would miss them if they ever went away, because then they would truly die and he didn’t want to feel what it was to lose someone forever. As long as they were safely locked up in his mind he was convinced they were still there in their own way, a faint imprint on the mortal world.
Title: Ghosts
Rating: R
Challenge: FOTD: plangent, Blueberry Cheesecake #1: human nature
Toppings/Extras: whipped cream, cherry
Wordcount: 2,685
Summary: Blackledge VC-11 and death.
Notes: I’m sorry for disappearing into silence, summer is a busy time for me! I’ll put some time aside soon for reading and the like, I love you guys really… and I am shocked I managed to pump this out in one day! Seriously. Plangent: expressing sadness; plaintive. Warning for death, implied suicide, minor gore, creepy children, disturbing Blackledge stuff... I gave myself a cherry because this is so dark and I don’t often do that.
The first time he saw a corpse it was the tenth day of June. He was five and the weather was sweltering; the Facility looked like some sort of sweaty kid factory on the best of days, metal grilles at every window and heatwaves pouring from the tarmac, but that day was something else.
Light shafted in through the latticework of the tall windows and the air was stifling to breathe. VC-11 looked down towards his feet.
LB-4 was lying with his limbs twisted and his head broken into at the back. The blood was dried to a crust on the tiles and into his short, dark hair. The pale skin of his face was luminous in the gloom, his eyes open, the profile of his nose stark against the floor.
After a moment, VC-11 knelt down and turned the teenage boy’s head so that it was straight again, looking up towards the ceiling. His hands came away from the boy’s cold temples and moved back to his own lap, clenching into fists atop the black uniform trousers he wore.
He didn’t know why LB-4’s eyes were open yet he appeared to be asleep.
There was no creeping horror in VC-11’s breast, no sickening thrum of something direly wrong. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t sense the lack of life in front of him, a void where there should have been… more.
“You’re not meant to sleep here,” he said, still crouched by the flimsy body at the bottom of the stairs. “This is the hallway.”
There was no response, and neither did LB-4 ever respond to anything again. Dust motes whirled in the shafts of light and everything was silent for a while.
-----
“What the bloody hell is the point of an aquatic Blackledge that drowns?” grumbled a deep voice on the other side of the door. VC-11 was scared of that voice. He had been for as long as he could remember-which was a long, long time. Even when he’d been barely sentient, when the voice had been a looming presence he didn’t quite understand, the words warped into nothingness through lack of linguistic understanding… even then, he’d been scared of the voice, conditioned into permanent fearfulness.
“We think that it may not have been an accident, Dr Blackledge,” said another voice. VC-11 frowned and inclined his head. It was bad to listen by doors, he knew that, and he knew what happened to children that were bad. But he didn’t understand-
“You mean someone killed her?” VC-11 heard footsteps slapping against ringing metal, the shuffle of medical tools. Scalpels. Clips. Gauges. Breaths shaking, he took another step towards the door, a chink of light falling across one smoke-grey eye, watching shadows move against a bright light. There was a table.
“No. Not someone else, anyway.”
VC-11 didn’t understand, really he didn’t. If JE-10 hadn’t died by accident and someone hadn’t killed her, what in the world had happened to her? His fingertips brushed the wall by the door before a hand fell on his shoulder from behind-he startled badly, breathing like someone had punctured his lungs, but he didn’t make a noise. He spun around.
It was only Pickaxe, though she was supposed to be called ID-2. She was nice. VC-11 stared at her: he was seven, she was twenty. A grown-up! She was meant to help the doctors and the scientists now, meant to be on their side, training the children and reporting back to Dr Blackledge, but VC-11 knew she wouldn’t tell. She never did.
He could tell that she was looking at the pictures in his head-he was good at telling now. The scientists didn’t usually notice but he was a Rememberer, and Rememberers noticed everything. It was a very faint feeling, like someone burning the tip of his fingernail or digging a hook into the nerveless part of a tooth. He knew she could see the waterlogged hair, the blue skin around the lips, the way JE-10 had drifted through the water like outer space. The gentle lapping of the water had created eruptions of stars against the outline of her body under the halogen lights.
“Do you think you could forget something if you tried really hard?” Pickaxe whispered. He didn’t reply. There was no point. What could he say? This was the way he’d been programmed to work. He didn’t forget. He never forgot. She held his wrist-gently because she knew he hated being touched. “I’ll take you back to the dorms.”
-----
There was one baby that wouldn’t stop crying. Solemn and silent, eight-year-old VC-11 stood over the crib, remembering when he had been that young. When everything had been blurry and the walls kept ringing all night long. The tiny Blackledge from the newest batch kept scraping at his face, little hands pink and lumpy, tiny moon-slice fingernails scratching.
Hearing footsteps, VC-11 turned to see one of his clones, VC-10, walking down the row of cots towards them. It was their first day doing this particular job, keeping an eye on the newest batch. They trained in the day and worked in the evening. The sun was setting, the sky through the window a colour that reminded VC-11 of bruised peaches.
VC-10 was holding a large pair of scissors in his hands. Fabric scissors, perhaps.
Silently, VC-11 watched his clone approach the crib of the crying, scratching baby. Light warped across the metal of the scissors and VC-11 felt very sick. Thin wails continued to rise and fall over the air. The rest of the babies were silent-as they should be. Dr Blackledge encoded them a certain way. They weren’t meant to make a fuss.
This baby was abnormal.
“Quiet,” VC-10 said. “Be quiet.”
The chunky scissors looked big in his young hands. Too big.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” VC-11 whispered.
VC-10 leaned over the rails of the crib. The scissors made a soft swishing sound as they opened and closed on thin air, thunking to a close after each snip. VC-10 looked down at the baby with bright madness in his eyes. Slowly, he took the baby by one tiny hand and opened the scissors wide, sliding them around the baby’s wrist.
VC-11 felt cold dread right to his centre. “Stop it!”
Laughing loudly, VC-10 withdrew and threw the scissors at his clone, who fumbled to catch them. He cut his thumb as he did so; bit his lip at the sharp sting.
“Fine. But he’d be better off dead,” VC-10 said in a light tone, almost jocular, before strolling away across the foot of the other cribs, trailing one of his hands along each of the metal footboards. VC-11 looked down at the blood on his thumb and then at the scissors. He had the breathless urge to bury one of the points as deep into VC-10’s back as he possibly could, to feel it fight through the flesh and the blood leaking hot from the impact, to get rid of the appalling boy forever.
He wiped his blood carefully from the blade with one of his sleeves and watched VC-10 reach the end of this row of cots and start up another.
It frightened him a little, how easy it would be.
VC-11 turned and padded out of the room, dutifully putting the scissors away.
-----
Dr Blackledge burned to death and VC-11 was glad for it. He’d never been so happy about a death in his whole life. It was a poisoned happiness, tainted by the sickeningly violent nature of it, but VC-11 didn’t care. The children were all stood outside of the Facility, hundreds of them, saying nothing, expressing nothing as the place they had called home for their whole lives tumbled to the ground, smoke pouring from every smouldering gap.
News choppers circled the area with their blades thumping through the air, ambulances and volunteers swarmed the place, firefighters trawled through the ravaged wreckage of the innermost buildings and the mostly still-standing outer ones. The Facility had been burned from its core, from the heart of its darkness.
Having never been outside before, VC-11 didn’t know what would happen to him next, what would happen to any of the children next. A part of him thought that they were going to die-now they were useless they would be put down one after the other by an injection of clear liquid. The thought didn’t scare him or alarm him in particular. He was sure it would be nicer than burning to death, and that meant they won.
-----
Eleven-year-old VC-11 was walking home after school. He kept his eyes down and moved purposefully but not too quickly-nothing to draw attention to himself. Being a Blackledge was enough to get yourself beaten to a pulp in some areas. People looked at him funny even now. Didn’t trust his nervous, fidgety demeanour. They said he had the look of a killer. If only. He was a wire-thin boy with a narrow face and scarcely any presence at all. He drifted by like a spectre and was glad when people didn’t notice him.
Before long he was nearly upon his foster home, though he never really thought of it as ‘his’. It was hard to think of anything in terms of home, really. He stepped stiffly across the walkway, the autumn wind picking up strength and whistling between the skyscrapers-soon he was inside of Brunel Spire, near to the bottom of course, a run-down place with a constant fug in the corridors. Uncomfortably humid in the summer, bitingly cold in the winter.
The corridor was narrow and passing each door he could hear the things he heard every day on his way home: daytime TV blaring adverts for online bingo and pet insurance, someone in the midst of a coughing fit, the cutting cry of a baby, doors slamming, an argument rising to a crescendo, music pumping so loud that he could feel it through his shoes.
He was reaching into his pocket for the doorkey when he turned the corner into the little dead-end piece of corridor that was studded with two doors: on one side it went into the foster home. On the other lived their neighbour, Mr Gausman, who was obese and shouted at his TV a lot.
The door was open.
The boy hesitated.
On one hand, he’d been told many times that it was inappropriate to walk into other people’s properties uninvited. On the other, it seemed that something was wrong, and the door was open…
Wishing that choices like these would stop presenting themselves, VC-11 turned towards the door to the foster home for a moment and then stopped. What if he could help?
He so wanted to be helpful.
Taking a deep breath, he turned back towards the open door and stepped towards it. He raised a fist and knocked on it hesitantly a few times, which only pushed it further open. His brows knotted and he stepped over the threshold into the house. One quick scan revealed nothing-the TV was on, baying laughter crackling the speakers as a comedian with an American accent talked about sex on a big stage.
Then he saw Mr Gausman’s legs protruding from behind the counter of his poky kitchenette.
Tilting his head slightly, VC-11 walked across the cigarette-burned carpet. He walked in a curve, circumventing the counter, wishing his schoolbag didn’t cut into his shoulder so much. Then he stood where Mr Gausman’s feet were and looked down at him.
He was sure he was dead but he couldn’t see how it had happened. When he thought back to finding LB-4’s body all those years ago, he knew now that having a big smashed-in hole in the back of your head made you dead. He hadn’t understood that at the time-but Mr Gausman seemed fine. Waxy-skinned, but that wasn’t unusual. He had odd facial hair, not really a beard but too long to be called stubble. VC-11 didn’t like looking at it. His shape was funny, sort of contorted, but there was no blood. No missing body parts.
Putting his bag down, VC-11 carefully knelt next to the body and looked around for anything that might have killed him. He touched a hand to the greasy comb-over and then quickly withdrew. He could see the oil on his fingers.
Just in case, he dutifully felt for a pulse in Mr Gausman’s neck, pressing it under the flabby chins that were clammy and cold to the touch. Dirty dishes were half-submerged in a sink filled with milky water and the light above their heads buzzed and clapped in and out of life occasionally. The curtains were mostly drawn. The air smelled bad.
No pulse.
VC-11 thought for a moment and then stood up, walked over to the sink and washed his hands in it. Water jumped across the dishes and plates, washing crusted sauce and dried crumbs along the plastic surfaces. He dried his hands on the towel just under it, picked up his bag and then walked out of the room, out of Mr Gausman’s house, and opened the door into the foster home. He stopped in the hallway to put the key back into his pocket.
“Hi, VC,” Mrs Tantridge, his foster carer, said with a weak smile as she strolled out of the living room. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” he said because he wasn’t injured and didn’t feel sad or angry, and that seemed to be the general definition of being OK. He hesitated. “But Mr Gausman is dead.”
-----
“He died of coronary heart failure,” Lottie said. She was two years older than him and another of the girls in the foster home, another kid with no place to go. People said she had a bad attitude. She did, a bit, but VC-11 would never say that. She checked her mascara in the mirror and then glanced towards the Blackledge to see if he was following. “His arteries were all clogged up.” She turned her thumb and index finger into a ring. “It all built up and his arteries got smaller and smaller…” She moved the fingers past each other, narrowing the hole. “Until…”
She snapped her fingers and then laughed.
-----
For Victor Blackledge, death as a concept was one that took a while to sink in. He’d known many people who died but he still saw them clearly-they appeared, not partially-visible but perfectly solid, in the distance or up close. It was one of the reasons why he couldn’t possibly talk about it with other people. People… humans, generally speaking, functioned in a certain way when faced with death. He did not.
He saw LB-4’s uneasy smile all of the time and JE-10 swirling face-down in every body of water he passed, Mr Gausman nodding at him gruffly as he passed on his way home from school. On bad nights it came back strong, scissors making that thick and satisfying sound as they closed, Dr Blackledge’s voice in the night. There were some things people were meant to forget. If he’d been an ordinary child he was sure he would have forgotten those things, forgotten all of the punishingly vivid details that haunted him day and night, and he was quite certain he wouldn’t spend quite so much time talking to them.
As long as he remembered-which would be as long as he lived-their shadows would catch in the corner of his eye, strangled and birdlike, vying for him to slip. They wanted him to pay attention, to listen, to see just as he had seen before.
He wasn’t scared of the ghosts. He was scared of the fact that he would miss them if they ever went away, because then they would truly die and he didn’t want to feel what it was to lose someone forever. As long as they were safely locked up in his mind he was convinced they were still there in their own way, a faint imprint on the mortal world.