Sample chapter -- Our Side of the River Styx

We were already hours behind schedule and driving in darkness when I spotted the hitchhiker. Young woman, white dress, pale in the moonlight that shouldn’t be hitting her in the thick shadow of the trees behind her… I recognised what I was looking at immediately.

I nudged my wife, lost in her usual reverie of staring vacantly out of the window. Once upon a time she’d be napping by this point in the journey, but she didn’t sleep any more. I wondered if she missed it.

“Love,” I said. “There’s a hitchhiker ahead.”

She squinted through the windshield, even though she knew as well as I would that she wouldn’t see anything. As she leaned forward, the glass marble she wore around her neck seemed to sparkle in the limited lighting of the dashboard instruments.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll have to pick them up.”

I sighed. “We were supposed to be at the hotel two hours ago.”

“Then they won’t mind another ten or fifteen minute delay.”

I didn’t bother arguing. If she wanted to take some extra time cleaning up the streets, well, that was what we did, I supposed. I just popped open the glovebox and pulled the handcuffs out. I hesitated.

“They’re not usually violent,” I said. “Do we really need to…”

“The last one tried to take your eye out, Heart.”

“I ducked!”

“You’ll be driving.”

“Yeah, okay,” I grumbled, handing the cuffs over. My wife quickly shackled herself and used a padlock to secure the cuff chain to the eyebolt we’d set under the dash for this purpose. I reached for the glass marble hung around her neck and, very carefully took it off her. I didn’t have to look away from the road to do this; I’d done it so many times.

The moment my hand withdrew, her shoulders stiffened, and through the corner of my eye I watched her go lifeless. The glass marble I very, very carefully wrapped in a strip of satin and nestled it into a heavily padded pocket. The hitchhiker hadn’t moved. I pulled up next to her and opened the passenger side door.

“You need a ride, little lady?” I asked.

The thing about ghosts is, they’re not smart. They have scripts. They’ll respond to set things in set ways, and if you can predict their scripts, you have them.

This can be difficult for certain types of hauntings, but vanishing hitchhikers? Easy. You offer them a ride. Our ute was a two-seater, and the ghost didn’t pay any attention to my wife’s lifeless body shackled in the passenger seat as she climber into that seat herself.

I closed the door and began driving before she had a chance to properly settle in, but it was mere seconds before she was panicking and trying to yank my wife’s hands out of the cuffs.

“Hi,” I said. “I know how this looks, but you’re not in any danger.”

She pulled harder. Because of course she did. This was why I hated handcuffing them; it made my job so much harder. I knew my wife didn’t like the risk of waking back up with my blood under her fingernails, but I’d take the inconvenience of the occasional ghost injury over having to talk them down out of this state.

“I know this probably seems really unusual and scary,” I told her, trying to sound reassuring and not like a large woman driving a vehicle she was being held captive in. “That body you’re in is unfamiliar, and the brain is worth. It’s probably been a long time since you had something to think with, right? Don’t worry, this will all make sense pretty soon.”

She was already settling into the idea of having a brain again. My wife’s eyes latched onto me, appraising. The hitchhiker was trying to figure out how to deal with me – try to escape? Wait? Attack, even?

There had to be a better way to do this than pulling out the goddamned handcuffs.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. She didn’t answer, of course. I sighed. “Okay, fine. You’re smart and I’m in a hurry, so let’s do this the fast way.” I told her my name. “Do you believe in ghosts, ma’am?”

She glanced down at my wife’s cuffed wrists. Back up at me.

“Are you a ghost?” she asked.

Now, thatwas a question I hadn’t gotten before. I shot her a quizzical look. “What makes you think I’m a ghost?”

“I was in Tyler’s truck,” she said, “and suddenly I’m here. I thought maybe he’d drugged me. Are you going to try to convince me it’s supernatural?”

Weird conversational route, but I’d take it. “Let’s pretend I was a ghost,” I said. “What would we do about that?”

“Can you… not kill me?”

I barked a laugh. “Ma’am, I know this looks bad, but I can swear on my restless soul that I’m not even physically capable of hurting you.”

“Because you think you’re a ghost,” she said, not bothering to hide the cynicism in her voice.

“Hypothetically, if you were in a vehicle with a ghost, what would you do about it? It the ghost can’t hurt you.”

She hesitated, thinking. I kept my eyes on the road, giving her a minute. Presumably, she thought I was a madwoman and she needed to play along to get out of this alive, and was picking her best approach.

“I think,” she said carefully, “I’d help the ghost move on. To the afterlife, or whatever. Finish their unfinished business, I guess?”

I nodded. “Makes sense. It’s a bit of a misconception that all ghosts have ‘unfinished business’ tying them to this realm, though. Quite a few of them will ask for some kind of resolution before moving on, but they don’t need it. That’s not what a ghost is.”

“What’s a ghost, then?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her head move; she was looking out the window. Once, we’d made the mistake of cuffing a ghost to the door, and they’d tried to jump out when they thought the car was moving slow enough. The results had not been pretty. We got the eyebolt installed under the dash the very next day.

“A ghost,” I said, “is a wound left in the world after a death. Usually a particularly traumatic or intense death, or just the death of a really stubborn person, at a place and time where the veil is weak. Most of the person moves on, but a fraction is left behind, imbued with a few memories and a lot of emotional intensity. Problem is, a ghost on itself isn’t really capable of thought or proper reason, so they can’t conceive of their circumstances or know how to move on; not in that state, anyway. You need to force them out of existence, or get them into some state capable of reason. You understand, ma’am?”

“And how do you do that?” she asked in a clear ‘keep the lunatic talking’ tone.

“There are multiple ways. Every exorcist has their own methods, but if you’re going with trying to convince the ghost to leave, the big pitfall is memory. A ghost is only a wound left in the world by a person, and has only a fraction of their memories.” I looked at her. “Sorry, ma’am, what was your name again?”

“Veronica,” she said, after a moment.

“It’s alright, you don’t have to tell me your real name. But you know it, don’t you?”

“Of course I – ”

“What about your mum’s name? Your dad’s? Where do you live, ‘Veronica’? Don’t tell me, but you know, right?”

She stared resolutely at the road, lips pursed.

“Do you remember why you got a lift from Tyler?”

“Kangaroo!”

“Shit!” I slammed on the brakes. But, looking back at the road, I didn’t see anything.

I did hear the passenger door open, though.

“Shit!”

The ghost was already disappearing into the forest. I leapt out and gave chase. She must have found something to pick the cuffs with? We’d never had one that could pick locks before!

This whole conversation wouldn’t have escalated to this point if we didn’t use the damned handcuffs! I absolutely wasn’t going to lose my wife’s body out here in the goddamned bush. Fortunately, the ghost wasn’t hard to track; she left a trail of broken branches, and I could hear her crashing through bushes up ahead.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Stupid goddamned hitchhikers in the middle of lonely goddamned roads. What was even the point of being a disappearing hitchhiker out here? This road got, what, a few vehicles a day? These people should at least have the good sense to die in a city, where their ghosts could actually get rides.

There was a crash and a small scream up ahead. I picked up speed.

The ghost hadn’t bothered to get up after her fall. She was sitting on the ground, hugging my wife’s knees and sobbing. The handcuffs still hung from one wrist.

“H-hey there,” I said, trying to sound comforting, and sat what seemed to be a nonthreatening distance away.

She mumbled something.

“Sorry?”

“Leave me alone!” she said, louder.

“I… can’t. You, um. You have my wife.”

She stared at my wife’s hands as if she’d never seen them before. She stared to cry louder.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, it’s going to be alright. Veron – ”

“My name’s Eileen,” she snapped.

“Pleased to meet you, Eileen.”

“I doknow it. My name.”

“So you do.”

“But.” her voice quietened. “I don’t remember my mum’s name. I don’t know where I live, I… I don’t…”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We usually try to do this a lot more... gently.”

“What happens now?”

“Well, ideally that’s up to you. I don’t have the tools on hand to force you to move on. But, you know.”

“I’m scared,” she sobbed.

“Why?”

Eileen looked up at me, too surprised by the question to keep crying.

“You’re already dead,” I pointed out. “What are you afraid of? Dying harder? It’s us poor living bastards who need to be scared.”

“Do you know what happens if I disappear?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“It’s not for me to say. That experience rightfully belongs to the dead alone. But, Eileen. Consider your options. Do you have any memory of what you are, here? Do you really want to keep doing that for eternity, just mindlessly climbing into random vehicles forever? Repeating one experience over and over?”

“I don’t have to.”

“You do,” I told her, “if you stay. You’re thinking in a borrowed brain right now. When we leave…”

“Well, I’ll keep borrowing it! You just told me that you can’t force me out.”

I could force her to the car and drive her somewhere to get the right tools, if I had to, but I didn’t think that threats would really help the situation. So instead I said, “So you think that you have enough of yourself to maintain a body? That thing is going to start falling apart within the day. After a week you’ll be shambling scraps, finding it harder and harder to think. You’ll know that the end is coming, the moment where you’ll no longer have a brain left, no longer have the capacity to make your choice. And you’ll have to make the same choice you’re trying to avoid right now: stay or go.”

“I can try,” she said. “It’s worth a shot, right? If the alternative is – ”

“Staying here? I can tell you this much – on the other side, there is something to see. Can you say that about being a mindless shade on the side of this road forever?”

She looked away, scowling. I expected her to look back up with a sharp retort, but she didn’t. She wasn’t moving.

I realised that my wife’s eyes had gone lifeless.

I sighed. That really could have gone better. A success is a success, but I didn’t like being so cruel or blunt about it. Hitchhikers always brought this out in me; they were predictable until you gave them a mind, and then, because there was so little left of them, they became the most unpredictable ghosts around. Give me a good old poltergeist any day.

I stood up and prepared to carry my wife’s body back to the car, but you know what? Fuck it. She was the one who’d wanted to pick up the hitchhiker. She could walk back. I retrieved the marble from my pocket. The tiny amount of moonlight that filtered through the trees seemed to catch and reflect within it, so the crimson streak in the middle danced like a tiny flame. I laid the chain around her neck, and she blinked.

She stared, puzzled, at her own hands for a moment. “Didn’t go well?”

“Success,” I said, “but we really need to think of a way of restraining them that doesn’t put them so on edge. Can you walk?”

We got back to the ute – or, at least, where I’d stopped the car. I hadn’t taken the time to properly brake and switch the engine off before rushing into the bush after the hitchhiker, so it had rolled down the hill we’d been driving down and into a tree. That wasn’t an issue, at such a low speed; the problem was the uneven ditch the front had pitched into with the old fallen log in it and how the two back tyres were just slightly clear of the road surface. This was going to take hours to get back on the road, and doing so before the sun came up was just stupid.

“I don’t think we’re going to make it to the hotel tonight, Love,” I said.