tbh aren’t we all haunting our own corpses
“So, do you haunt this building? Was it something else before it was a night club? I didn’t think it was that old…”
The ghost shakes her head. She’s a murky shadow hanging in the air whenever the strobe lights flash on, but under the black light she glows clearly, like a glass statue faintly dusted in glow-in-the-dark paint. “No, I’m just a guest too.” Her voice is incredibly quiet; and yet whether in deafening music or in the near-silent lulls between songs, her words are always faintly but clearly audible.
“Oh, my bad,” the man says. “I’ve never seen a wandering ghost as old as you?” He glances down at her Regency era gown. “I thought only haunting ghosts can communicate and shit. Since they like, absorb energy from the thing they’re haunting?”
“I’m a haunting ghost,” she confirms. “An object, not a place. I haunt my corpse.”
The man blinks, taken aback. “Oh, what! You buried in the floorboards or something?”
She turns toward the dance floor, craning her head to peer through the crowd. “There.” She points. “Near the restrooms, in the tacky purple pleather jacket.”
He follows her spectral arm to peer across the room at another woman, who’s currently swirling an untouched drink and flirting with another club goer. The other woman looks like she could be the ghost’s sister. “What, is she carrying your urn or something? Is she your descendant?”
The man stares at the woman, eyes bugged out; then at the ghost again, comparing the very-not-dead woman’s face to the ghost’s. After a moment, he manages to stammer, “It—uh—looks… pretty good?”
A faint smile tugs at the corner of the ghost’s mouth, vanishing when the lights flash on and reduce her again to a floating shadow. “Do you know what makes a body ‘undead’ instead of just dead?”
He turns to stare at the woman again, this time trying to see her teeth from across the room. “Uhh… shit, this was in Dracula wasn’t it. I don’t remember any high school assigned readings.”
“It’s what you get when a body loses a soul but is otherwise still alive.”
“Right! Right. Knew that.”
“And a ghost is…” she prompts.
“A… soul without a body?” He laces his hands and plops them on top of his head, as if he’s trying to protect his mind from being blown. “Is that allowed? Can you—Can—Do a vampire and a ghost made out of the same person get to exist at the same time?”
“Which one of you is, like… actually you?”
The ghost shrugs more expressively. “We spent most of Queen Victoria’s reign arguing about it.”
“So you’re the same person?”
The ghost makes a so-so gesture.
The man turns to look at the vampire across the club, who’s wearing a wicked smirk and tugging a thoroughly seduced-looking club goer into the privacy of the restroom. “Huh,” he says. “Weird.”
