Ghost

Ghosts aren’t people. I don’t know if people have souls, but if they do, I’ve never seen one. All I see are ghosts. People’s emotions leave after-images of that person’s thoughts and feelings that hang around until they’re scrubbed out and diluted beyond recognition by the next person to come along. Sometimes, the faint echoes gather in the quiet spaces, and if they’re similar enough they reinforce each other. You get a place with a kind of pre-built aura, somewhere that just feels nice to hang around, or always gives you a chill down to the bottom of your stomach.

But if something happened that was so horrible, or traumatic, or scarring that it’d be beyond most people’s frame of reference? Instead of an echo, you get a scream. Instead of an after-image, you get a tapestry of something that no-one would ever want to see or feel or hear ever, ever again.

Ghosts like this aren’t that person back from the dead. It might have a little glimmer of their personality, at its darkest and most fractured, but it’s caught in the loop of the event that created it. It’s a snapshot of who they were at that exact, terrible moment, I think, but not something you could have a conversation with.

Most people aren’t set up to perceive them properly, can’t see them and hear them directly. So you wind up with a subliminal playback of what happened, still a whisper in the back of your mind. Most of them just get smudged out by the sheer psychic weight of people with their daily lives and their normal, sane thoughts. But for some, a whisper is all it takes to push them over the edge. A wife-beater grabs a kitchen knife in a particularly bad episode, a schizophrenic goes for the baseball bat he’s hid under his bed, the little kid decides playing with daddy’s gun would just be super-cool —

With a little reinforcement, a whisper turns into a shout. More snapshots are added to the collage of misery and hate. Something begins to stir.