The ocean held its secrets beneath a veneer of unruffled calm, the sky's gray hue lending its color to the swell that broke gently on the distant shore. Alaster Paques stood at the water's edge, his bare feet sinking into the cold, wet sand, and watched the horizon, as if daring it to reveal its mysteries. His feet grew colder but his heart was still the coldest part of his body. The world felt strangely hushed, a quietude that stretched beyond the absence of sound into the realm of spirit, where whispers lived unbidden in the spaces between his breaths. He was not alone. The specters gathered like shadows in the periphery of his vision, their presence as familiar to him as his own loneliness.
Most appeared as transparent mockeries of their former bodies, wan and ineffable, with more longing in their eyes than regret. There was the woman he'd mentally named Nora, her hands folded tightly at her navel. She was always at the beach. Alaster opened his mouth to speak, but the words dissolved on his tongue. He knew she would not hear him. When he reached toward her, his fingers passed through the space where her shoulder should have been, leaving only a ripple in her form that settled back like disturbed smoke. He was reminded again of how alone he really was. Next to him, Andrus still limped beneath the hem of his grave clothes, every step a watery echo of remembered pain. Even the dog, one of Alaster's favorites, half a memory of a brindled mutt, padded circles around Alaster's ankles, looking up with a question it could not voice, not only because he was a dog.
Alaster dragged a breath into his ribcage, tasting salt and the faintest brine of rot, although his therapist had once suggested these phantom odors were manifestations of his depression, like the way he sometimes smelled the coppery taste of blood in his mouth when he was sure there was none. The ocean's endless waves, given like its an ancient sacrament, bounded against his feet. He let the cold leech upward into his bones, a confession of sorts. Here he could almost believe in the absolution of sunrises promised, though it was an old and battered hope that faded quickly. He turned back towards the sand, towards the parking lot, to return home. The dashboard clock in his car read 7:30am, its red digits glaring against the gray morning. Alaster's fingers tightened around his steering wheel as his mother's voice echoed between his temples: "Another tardy slip and they'll call me again, Alaster. I can't keep taking time off work for these... these meetings. Your father's insurance barely covers the therapy as it is." He knew he was a burden on his mother, but that burden extended to the world itself.
Alaster wanted to die not as an escape, but as a fulfillment; death was the algorithm governing everything meaningful. When he thought about his own death among the thousands occurring every moment worldwide, he felt awe, not dread. The ending of things had always driven his curiosity. He saw the world as one organism, with death as its necessary immune response, culling the weak, the sick, and sometimes even the beautiful without comprehensible reasons.
After therapy appointments, Alaster often spent hours online, tumbling down rabbit holes of obscure obituaries, mass tragedies, and epidemiological bulletins. He marveled at the multitude of causes—heart failure, overdose, homicide, acts of nature. People die every day; Alaster wasn't fond of the number (around 150,000), with 26,000 to cancer, 3,000 to car accidents 2,000 to suicide. These were numbers he'd seen once and never forgotten. Alaster couldn't wait till he became part of that minority—a number on a page somewhere—his death an indisputable statistic.
Although Alaster craved it desperately, he knew that there are too many people who romanticize suicide. Taking your own life is gruesome and sets you up for a hell of a time in the afterlife. Yet, every day Alaster acknowledged the literal monsters around him and every day it seemed more and more appealing to join them. He didn't want to become a monster. Ideally, he would go to heaven, or even straight to hell, not be trapped in limbo like the souls he watched in his worldview every day. But even being trapped in limbo, where his mother's eyes wouldn't follow him with that familiar mix of concern and resignation, seemed a bit better than the life he was living.
You could argue that the opposite happens daily too. People are born. (Although the infant death rate worldwide is 3.77%). But babies don't show up in limbo. Children rarely make appearances in limbo and the times they have Alaster could count on a single scarred hand.
On Tuesday mornings people rushed the school hallways like it was black friday despite there being no real urgency. The bell had rung and people walked past the window at varying speeds, some rushing like they were late for their grandmother's funeral, others barely moving, the look on their faces empty, and hollow. Barely discernible from the souls he could see in limbo. The hustle and bustle was notable but barely deterred Alaster's attention from the teacher finishing her lesson.
"Paris was in a health crisis in the seventeen eighties," She began, in a French accent barely noticeable prior to today's lesson, emphasizing the accent to bring attention to her previous life in France. "The current cemeteries, used for nearly a thousand years, were causing significant illness. Because of the immense public health issues arising from the overcrowded cemeteries, Parisian officials were scrambling."
"Quarries just outside the capital underneath the plain of Montrouge became the solution. Excavations began in seventeen-eighty-five. Transferring's primary focus was on the largest cemetery in Paris, Saints-Innocents."
"Today the site is visitable. The six million bodies that now call the catacombs their final resting place are sure to welcome you." She said with a wink that betrayed her dark words. The hallways were already filled with students while Alaster shook his head, gathered his things, and did his best to brush off the doom and gloom of today's english lesson. His teacher's words were nowhere near as dark as his thoughts but still her words resonated with Alaster, and he knew it was going to be an even worse day than usual.
The souls in limbo were stuck, and sometimes angry, but not able to physically hurt Alaster, nor interact with him. That apparent safety allowed Alaster to function on a daily basis. But, still, processing the daily apparitions Alaster saw was draining.
Today's school assembly was mandatory and reeked of theatrics. The gymnasium, over-bright with fluorescents, hummed with the battery-acid energy of near-panic. Hundreds of students compressed to the bleachers, most whispering or thumbing at their phones, but Alaster sat on the boundary edge, one leg jostling so violently it rattled the metal support beneath the seat. His face dared someone to ask him to stop, but no one did.
Principal Juno Pataglia took the mic. Her rigorous American accent grated over the PA. "This morning, we mourn the loss of a bright light in our community," she announced. "Nadja Vallentine, a senior and honor roll student, completed suicide last night. The Vallentine family are—" Pause, wait, let the drama marinate, "—requesting privacy at this time."
Alaster's stomach twisted, not with sadness, but envy: Nadja had done it. Not the dying—he didn't even know her—but the escape, the cut cord. He scanned the faces near him, the twitch of fingers, the gloss in eyes, the wide mouths all bent in a question: How? Did she jump, cut, shoot, or just drift off on a tide of pills, the standard playbook? No one would say. The rumor would trickle out soon enough though, probably by last period.
Pataglia droned on about school counselors, the "importance of mental health," the "resources available at Westridge Highschool" Fake sympathy extruded from her in long, syrupy lines. She didn't care that Nadja had died. Nadja was just another name on a class roster. Alaster wondered if Nadja's death would even count as a disruption to the graduation rate or if it would simply be a rounding error. He pictured the figures in the next district newsletter.
He turned his head to look at the girl he had sat next to at the edge of the gymnasium. She had been easy to observe and even easier to focus on than the murky thoughts lingering in his brain. Her long brown-black hair reached her mid back, and she was turned away from him, staring at her hands. There was something dark staining them, he noticed as she played with her fingers. He looked up, wanting to see her face when she abruptly turned towards him.
The first thing Alaster noticed was a large, gaping bullet wound on her forehead. It was off-center, about an inch above her left eyebrow. But the blood was dripping down her face and looked frozen in time, like blood-red candle wax that had gotten cold. As his eyes inched their way down her complexion he saw eyes looking directly at him, a crooked but petite nose, and lips pinched together as if she was worried. It was a face he recognized, if only barely from seeing her face on posters hung up around the school. Nadja Vallentine. Her expression quickly changed into one of fear and she jumped as Alaster felt her hands grip his face. He looked back into Nadja's eyes and recognition lit them up like a vending machine. She stuttered, trying to say something, and it hit Alaster that she was talking to him, as no other soul in limbo had ever been able to do.
The shock of that realization hit Alaster like a bucket of ice water, making his ears ring and his vision narrow until her moving lips became meaningless shapes. "What?" he managed, his voice barely audible even to himself.
She rolled her eyes—a surprisingly human gesture—though panic still swam in her irises, dark and glassy like river stones. "You can hear me? No one has been able to hear me since I died!" She reaches out again, her fingers trembling near his throat.
"Well, yeah, that would make sense. Since you're dead." Alaster deadpanned, his face a mask while his pulse hammered against his throat like something trapped and desperate to escape. He was sure Nadja could feel it, her fingers directly on his carotid. "Trust me, I'm as disappointed about it as you are. The souls in limbo are almost always silent."
This was new, this had never happened before. The student in front of him turned around, looking at him like something that escaped a comic book. Alaster caught the student's raised eyebrow, the slight lean away, the quick glance around to see if anyone else had noticed the boy at the edge of the bleachers carrying on a one-sided conversation in the middle of a memorial assembly.
Nadja didn't notice his distraction, and blinked rapidly, her fear momentarily replaced by offense and confusion. "Limbo? What do you mean? And disappointed? I'm screaming in a room full of people and you're the only one who isn't a brick wall. You're supposed to be... I don't know, a medium? A psychic?"
Alaster sighed, leaning back, and Nadja's hand fell away from his throat. "I'm a senior with a 1.8 GPA and a chronic sleep deficiency. If you're looking for a professional, you've got the wrong bleacher."
"But you… looked at me. You saw this." She gestures vaguely to the frozen blood on her forehead. "They're saying I did it myself. They're saying I gave up."
Alaster's eyes softened just a fraction, the only crack in his mask of nonchalance. "Statistics say people usually do."
Nadja shook her head. "I'm not a statistic, Alaster. I was murdered."
Alaster was surprised she knew his name but was immediately distracted by Nadja's presence slipping from solid to shimmer as the principal's voice faded and the students around them started to stand. Her eyes darted to the bodies clogging the aisles, then flicked to Alaster, a silent signal that she understood and warned him not to speak. She too noticed the student pulling out his phone to film the weird kid talking to himself. Alaster kept his head low and pretended to scroll through his phone as if he wasn't just having a conversation with the air.
A wave of students surged toward the exits. Nadja, in contrast to her bleeding skull, had the composure of a bored substitute teacher grading the room for infractions. It lined up with how Alaster remembered her. He didn't know her well but knew that she was smart, and middle of the road popular among the students in his highschool. She wasn't valedictorian, but she graduated with honors last spring. This new school year she was supposed to be starting college on a scholarship with her longtime boyfriend, Timothy Hayes, he remembered the principal saying during the memorial speech. That she was excited for the future and looking forward to the adventure that was college.
Nadja exited the gym into a mostly empty hallway, motioning for him to follow. He slipped out the side door and found her waiting in the shadow of the equipment cage, where the forgotten scent of rubber balls and dust hit him with an almost nostalgic ache. He remembered a time, albeit short, where he was carefree. Life was only for living, not for grieving, not for things like major depression disorder. He pictured him playing dodge ball in this same gym, laughing and getting hit in the face. Nadja stunned him out of his nostalgia with a snapping of fingers in his face.
"Focus, Alaster," Nadja said. "I was murdered. But the Principal, she mentioned a note. Earlier today she said I left a letter for my parents in my locker?"
Alaster adjusted his backpack, the strap digging into a shoulder that already felt too heavy. "People leave notes, Nadja. It's the final courtesy of the overwhelmed. It keeps the paperwork clean."
"I didn't leave a note," she hissed, stepping closer. The "frozen candle wax" of the blood on her forehead seemed to darken as her anger spiked. "I was halfway through the English essay about the Catacombs. I had a hair appointment on Thursday. You don't book a blowout if you're planning on a bullet. I didn't write a damn note."
Alaster looked toward the main office. The hallway was beginning to fill with the low, performative murmurs of grieving students. In the distance, he saw Timothy Hayes. Timothy was surrounded by a small circle of girls, his head bowed, his shoulders shaking with the kind of rhythmic, controlled sobbing that looked better in a mirror than in real life.
"There," Nadja whispered, pointing at Timothy with a trembling hand. She didn't give any clues to Alaster that she was looking at her, well, ex-boyfriend. "Look at him. He's the one who told the Principal about the note. He 'found' it."
Alaster's clinical mind whirred. "If the note is a forgery, it's likely in Pataglia's office with the rest of your personal belongings before the police take it. But if I get caught breaking into the administration wing, my mom isn't just going to be 'disappointed.' She hit dissapointed months ago. She's going to lose her mind."
"Then don't get caught," Nadja said, her fear giving way to a sharp, desperate bossiness. "I can go through the walls. Apparently you're the only thing I can actually touch. I'll tell you where it is, I have seen it in an evidence bag on her desk. You just have to be the hands, Alaster. Please." To emphasize her point she gripped his hand pleadingly.
Alaster looked at the red digits of the hallway clock. He was late for his next period. Alaster knew that he was just a "number" to this school—a GPA, a tardy count, a risk factor. He looked back at Nadja, at the hole in her head that shouldn't be there, and for the first time in a year, the statistics didn't feel like enough.
"Fine," he muttered, turning away from his classroom and toward the forbidden corridor of the front office. "But if I get expelled, you're helping me write my resume."
He heard the echoed laughter that no one else could, and thought it was a shame. It was such a nice sound.