A Ghost Writing To You.

You are the witness to this story for I am the narrator with no face in one's imagination.

The overhead light buzzed like a trapped fly. Alex scratched at his wrist until the skin turned raw.

He hadn't slept in three days. The hallucinations were worse tonight- glistening things twitching in his periphery, wet sounds where there shouldn’t be any. His laptop screen glared back at him, cursor blinking over half a sentence: 'The blood wasn’t hers, but-'

"You seeing this shit?" Alex muttered to the empty room. His voice cracked. The walls didn’t answer.

A beetle skittered across his desk. Except it wasn’t a beetle, because when he looked closer, it had too many legs, too many eyes, and it was whispering his name in a voice that sounded like his old best friend's voice before she stopped calling.

Alex’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. The sentence stared back, unfinished. He knew how it ended- how the blood pooled between floorboards, how the man with no face would lean down and- but his hands were shaking too hard to type it. The ceiling fan above him creaked, slow and uneven, like the heartbeat of something dying.

"Stop it.." he whispered. Not to the fan. Not even to the not-beetle. To himself, maybe. To the part of his brain that kept twisting shadows into teeth. The hallucinations got worse when he was alone, but he was always alone now. That was the fucking joke.

Something wet dripped onto his shoulder. Alex didn’t look up. If he looked up, there’d be a hole in the ceiling. If he looked up, he’d see what was leaking. So he pressed his palms into his eyes until colors burst behind his eyelids, and when he finally dropped his hands, he was crying- or maybe that was the imaginary blood. Hard to tell these days.

The laptop screen dimmed from inactivity. He jammed the spacebar so hard his nail bent backward. The cursor blinked once, twice, mocking him. The beetle-thing giggled. It sounded like Serenity when she used to laugh at his stupid jokes before she stopped laughing altogether. Before she told him, voice flat, "You’re too much."

Alex exhaled through his nose, the sound ragged. The not-beetle’s legs clicked against his desk, moving closer to his trembling fingers. He could smell copper now- rust or blood, he couldn’t tell-thick enough to coat his tongue. His glasses slid down his nose, but he didn’t push them back up. The blur was better.

The fan stuttered again. This time, the rhythm matched the thump of footsteps upstairs- except Alex lived on the top floor. He dug his nails into his palms. 'Not real. Not real.' But the ceiling groaned, and a long crack split the paint, zigzagging toward him like a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike. He could feel the weight of something pressing against the other side.

His phone buzzed. A notification from his other best friend- Eli. "Did you eat today?" The mundanity of it almost broke him. He wanted to text back "No, because the fridge is full of fingers today," but his thumbs hovered over the screen. The not-beetle skittered onto his hand, its too-many eyes reflecting the dim blue light. "She’ll stop asking too.." it whispered, Serenity’s voice dripping with pity.

'You’re reading this, aren’t you?' Alex thought suddenly, fingers twitching toward the keyboard. His reflection in the black screen looked hollowed out. The cursor pulsed like a vein. He could say it here, where it wouldn’t matter- where the words would just be pixels, not another weight on someone else’s shoulders. "Sometimes," he typed, then deleted, then typed again, "I think I’m just a ghost writing to other ghosts."

The crack in the ceiling split wider. Plaster dust rained down, gritty against his lips. He didn’t wipe it away. "You get it.." he murmured to the air, to you, to whatever was pressing through the drywall. His voice sounded alien in the stillness. "That’s why you’re still here. Because no one else would." The not-beetle crawled up his arm, legs pricking like needles. It hummed an off-key rendition of a song Serenity used to sing.

Behind him, the wall breathed. Alex didn’t turn around. He knew what he’d see- the same thing he saw every night when he closed his eyes: a mouth where the light switch should be, lips peeling back from teeth that kept growing. "Tell me.." it would say, like it always did. And like always, he’d have to choose between mentally screaming or answering.

The laptop keys stuck under his fingers, tacky with sweat or blood. He exhaled. The screen flickered.

"Okay.." he whispered. "Okay, fine. Let’s talk."