Here you can read the opening perspectives of Not Technically Ghosts. As the book has not yet been published, these are subject to change, but I'm (naively!) hoping not too much.
Ryan
Overeager fireworks pepper the New-Year’s-Eve sky as I cycle through the graveyard. Is looking for a Victorian ruin in a graveyard at almost-midnight a bit morbid? Absolutely. Plus, I’m a sixteen-year-old with my hood up, so I get menace-to-society points too! But this is still better than a sad evening stuck at home with Dad, watching TV as some aging popstar from the 90’s sings in the new year.
I think the post online said I’m supposed to go right at the angel statue, then keep going past the tall mossy Victorian headstones… or was it left when I get to the big willow tree and the war memorial? The gravel path crunches as I brake to a stop. Finding Clarance Hall is a lot harder in the dark.
Ping, a message buzzes my phone. Mum. I can’t remember which country she’s in this month, but at least she’s trying, despite the time difference. I swipe up my screen.
Looking forward to the new year - hope
you are too hun. See you in April
xo
Five minutes to midnight. OK fine. If I can’t find Clarance Hall in five minutes, I’ll head home and face whatever crooning lizard-person is trying to make a comeback. With a big huff of cold air, I cycle past a row of picture graves – those sort where there’s a grainy photo of someone’s nana beaming beside her death-date – then another row, then – there it is.
Clarance Hall.
“OK Linas,” I admit, flicking on my chest-cam, “that looks pretty sick.”
Leaning back, I make sure to capture the whole view of the ruined hall, where floodlights planted in the tall surrounding grass illuminate the ancient walls. I’d heard some surveyors were checking it out a while back and had left their stuff behind. The largest, central part of the abandoned building was a huge space that might have once been a ballroom or assembly hall. A tiny, enclosed corridor hugged the right side, whilst the left wall had been torn away, the larger building Clarence Hall once joined having fallen down long before, leaving this piece behind, like a sad architectural orphan.
Linas had only wanted some shots of the outside for our Media Studies project, but there’s something special about this place, I realise, as I lay my bike down on the gravel. I hardly notice I’ve moved closer, until the wetness of the long overgrown grass tickles my palms. I’m here now; might as well see the inside. No one else should be around, but I dodge around the floodlights just to be sure as I enter through the missing wall.
Turning on my phone’s torch, the tiny beam of light feels pathetic after the floodlights’ glare. The feeble glow reveals exposed foundations underfoot, most of the ancient wooden floors having been ripped up, with what remains having turned to discoloured rot. Unpleasantly out of place red girders dot the hall, stretching to the ceiling, likely added to ‘save’ the ruin years back. They might be ugly, but I’m pretty sure they’re the only thing keeping the ceiling up. The right side of the hall is mostly whole, two sets of double doors at either end of the wall obviously leaded to that little linking corridor.
OK, that’s definitely all the footage I need…
… Is what I’m thinking as I go for the corridor’s nearest doors. They’re heavy and slick with the cold, but still, they ease open.
As expected, I find a corridor that runs the length of the hall’s right side, where another set of doors at the other end leads back out. It’s warmer here, the windows that look out across the wild grounds still miraculously hold their glass. The walls seem stronger, stripped back to plaster, but where the rest of the hall had rotted, this place feels only… forgotten. Even the old wooden floor, while not gleaming or polished, is at least intact. Halfway down the corridor, my torchlight catches a mirror leaning against the wall, its glass murky with age, the elegant flowery design around its edges dulled and grimy. A patch of wall above the mirror is slightly less discoloured, a shadow of where it must’ve once hung.
My footsteps echo in the silence as I continue down the corridor, not even sure what I’m doing. Those doors at the other end would only take me back in a circle, into the main hall. Yet that weird pull is still here. It feels like – I stop when I realise – a person. It’s the same as whenever I go home, even if I don’t see Dad straight away, I know if he’s in the house. Something about it just feels ‘inhabited’.
This corridor feels the same way. And that is not what I want to be feeling, in the dark, in the middle of the night! Frozen, all I can hear is the distant, occasional fireworks and my own hammering heart.
I take a step, catch movement in the corner of my eye, whip around, see a person-shaped something – and I yelp!
But it’s just my blurred reflection in the fallen mirror.
Even through the mirror’s murk, a turf of ginger hair is visible poking out the front of my hastily-pulled-up red hoodie. I pull a strained smile at myself, then frown. How is it my features are blurred but my braces and buckteeth still stand out?!
“Linas, edit that out… obviously,” I say for the recording, before turning off the chest-cam.
There weren’t technically any signs saying to keep out. OK, we had a whole assembly in school about how we shouldn’t hang around historical wrecks that could fall down at any minute. But I’m not stupid. Not stupid about this anyway. Better to keep me out of the video and claim we’d just ‘found it online’.
I wander the length of the corridor, passing each aged wooden windowsill, but not touching them, suddenly feeling like an astronaut who could bring a deadly earth-disease to some vulnerable untouched world. That weird feeling that drew me here has settled down. Maybe I was imagining it? I check my phone again. One minute to midnight.
The shadows dance away from rainbow blooms as the black sky beyond Clarence Hall explodes with dozens of fireworks, announcing the new year.
Three pings on my phone announce the other messages I expected. From Dad:
Happy new year! Keep your chin up, try
to make it a good one. Going to bed now,
don’t stay out too late
Then Linas in our ‘The Couple™… and Ryan’ goup-chat:
Happy new year bud :) Still time to get
round mine if done with C Hall
And finally Kara in the same chat:
HNY Ry!!!! <3
PS pls come save me from Linas he
keeps threatening to put on John Wick.
… AGAIN.
Linas:
Exposure therapy til you develop
taste *shrug emoji*
I smirk as I flick through Linas’ socials and find a flurry of pictures showing him, tanned and blond and Kara, dark-skinned and round-faced snuggled on the sofa. A fresh picture pops up, showing the two sharing a tender kiss in Linas’ garden, backlit by the fireworks. It’s been two months since Linas finally made a move with Kara, officially changing us from a trio of friends to, well – ‘The Couple™… and Ryan’.
I’d cheered at the time. Watching them awkwardly crush on each other for the better part of two years was torture. Except now their cuteness is like a whole bar of chocolate; nice but also leaves me a little sick.
Honestly, I’m mostly just jealous. Maybe the new year could give me a chance to find a boyfriend? Oh sure. Fat chance of that whilst Henry Cain is busy being our school’s star ‘queer kid’ – leaving no room for someone like me. Henry is everything people expect with the label: beautiful, witty, artistic, and so very brave.
Then there’s me. Ginger, bucktoothed, and wearing my brother’s hand-me-down hoody. My comedy is limited to finger guns and zingers I come up with five minutes after a conversation. I can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act. When I tried to continue Art as an extra subject last year, Miss Derry literally said ‘No’ and sent me to Woodwork instead. As for brave? How about the week I came out and then asked Henry on a date, in front of all his friends.
And he’d laughed in my face. “Oh my god, as if you think I’d ever go out with you!”
I shake off the memory and flick the chest-cam back on as I stand. Might as well get some footage heading back out. I’ll swing by Linas’ and say ‘Hi’, maybe get some of that amazing Lithuanian cabbage/meat thing his parents always make. This could still be an OK night.
At the windowsill beside the fallen mirror. I give the firework-streaked sky one last look and say, “Happy new year.”
Something scrapes off to my left and I flinch around. But there’s nothing there, only the empty corridor. The way the firework flashes light up the space, there’s no way I’d miss if someone else was in here. It must’ve been a rat or something. Cautiously, I move to the next windowsill along. Sure enough, there’s a long, deep scratch in the surface of the sill. Could a rat have done this? Or was it here the whole time and I’d missed it? No, I’d passed all the windows before, I’d have spotted it. Crouching level, I try to get a closer look, running my finger over the mark.
I have no idea what I’m looking for, so I straighten up, turn to leave – and walk into a boy with neatly combed black hair, an upturned nose, and a long nightshirt. He’s appeared out of nowhere, looking like an extra from a Charles Dickens story.
The moment holds for a heartbeat – then we both scream at once!
The ghost falls backwards, and I run for my life, the horrible cry ringing in my ears as I sprint out of the corridor and as far from Clarence Hall as my feet will take me.
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Albert
Sprawled on my back, propped up on my elbows, I can only observe, petrified, as the hooded phantasm wails its way out of the corridor, passing right through the solid doors! The spectral scream vanishes the moment the phantasm is gone.
It was quite bad enough mere moments before, hearing those ghostly words, “Happy New Year”. I had leapt in fright, scraping my candle-dish across the windowsill, leaving a most unsightly mark. But then seeing the apparition too! No wonder men lose their minds!
With all the courage I possess, I crawl across the varnished passageway. At the far end, I reach for the door handle with trembling fingers and at a gentle push, the way opens to the silent library beyond. No trace of the phantasm.
“Master Croak?”
“GOOD HEAVENS!” I cry, twisting to find old Miss Henshum standing over me, a shawl clutched around her shoulders.
“Is everything alright Master Croak?” the librarian asks. “I was fetching some night-time reading and came running when I heard your cry.”
Shakily getting to my feet, I brush down the front of my nightrobe. Thinking quickly, I say, “I was attending to the very same task, when I mistook a shifting shadow for an intruder. Gravest apologies, I must have startled you so. I should hope you would kindly keep this most unseemly meeting between us?”
“But of course, Master Croak,” Miss Henshum says, smiling fondly. “But you’re sure everything is quite alright?”
“Perfectly sure,” I respond, forcing the tremble from my voice. After collecting the book and candle-dish I’d dropped, I make a hasty departure. “Quite alright, indeed.”
I have simply taken complete leave of my senses.
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