Frank

“You really don’t make things easy for me, do you?”

I gasped, spinning around to see Emily stood behind me, her arms crossed over her chest and her face looking very un-impressed.

“You need to stop doing that,” I muttered, turning back around to face the window. “If my heart was still beating you would have given me a heart attack.”

“Listen kid,” she grumbled, moving forwards completely silently. “It’s not my fault if you never pay attention. And it’s just a bad habit, turning up out of nowhere behind people. I think I actually did make one guy faint... I just keep telling myself he fainted because he was dazzled by my beauty.”

I smiled at her dry, sarcastic tone, looking down and shaking my head. I glanced at her feet, only to see they weren’t touching the floor and only the ripped, ragged strips hanging off of her dress trailed along the floorboards.

“So?” I began, looking back up. “How can I help you?”

She gave me another un-impressed look. “That’s my job Frank. I do the helping and you just seem to do all the messing up and making things harder for me.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t mean to mess it up for you, I just... I don’t even know.”

She sympathetically smiled and her freezing pale hand gently squeezed my own. “I know. I get it Frank, I get that’s this all hard for you to deal with. It’s not exactly what you expected, is it?”

“I knew things would be completely different and probably bad for me, but...I never expected to fall in love,” I whispered.

“Love,” Emily said in an amused voice. “I thought I was in love once or twice.”

She rolled her eyes at the look I gave her when she mentioned her love life.

“Don’t give me that look Frank,” she smiled wearily. “I was human once too.”

“How did you become like this though?” I asked.

I’d never thought about it before. About how Emily was one living and breathing and not... well, dead. Dead and glowing and floating.

She smiled sadly. “Death, of course.”

“I know, but... can you tell me everything? Like, about your life and your death and all the ghostly shit you get up to?” I asked, giving her a hopeful grin at the end.

She laughed. “Ghostly shit? That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone call it that.”

“Sorry,” I grinned, rubbing the back of my neck. “But really, can you tell me? I want to know?”

She drew in a deep breath and sighed. “I suppose my death was the most interesting part of my life. I was born in 1804 in France, a few years after the revolution and hundreds of years before vampires took over the world. My father was a doctor and my mother used to work before she got married. She decided that having a husband meant she didn’t need a job. My parents had triplets, me, Sebastian and Olivier. My real name is Emmeline, but I quickly ditched that name and used Emily instead. My brothers went to school and I stayed at home. I was lucky enough to get taught to read and write by my brothers. My mother had come from a very poor background and didn’t know how to do anything really. She had this dream for me, thinking that if I stayed home doing needlework all day I would become a ‘respectable lady’ as my mother called it. She never had what I did growing up so she’d always pin all of her hopes on me, thinking I could become what she never was.

“I decided otherwise of course. I wasn’t going to sit there and let myself become nothing more than somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. I wanted to be someone. I was engaged and supposed to marry a boy I barely knew. I didn’t marry him in the end. A few days after I turned nineteen I left France on a ship with my two brothers, on the night of my wedding. We wanted to go everywhere. Sebastian had a friend, Will, who was a sailor. He joined us and we left France together. I... I fell in love with him. I don’t know how much I ever meant to him, but we were... together, let’s say. I know he didn’t love me back, but it still meant the world to me that he at least liked me enough for us to be together.

“We were about to reach America when we got caught up in a storm. Our ship was destroyed and it sank,” she whispered, a small frown settling on her face, her eyes vacant, her mind clearly somewhere else.

“What happened?” I asked, desperate to know more.

“I was knocked unconscious. I tripped over trying to get off the ship and I hit my head pretty hard. The others were all leaving the ship too but none of us made it. We all drowned. I don’t remember anything. I just... I just sort of woke up. At first I thought I was alive until I met James. He was waiting for me, sat right next to me when I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back near the end of the beach and I was so confused. I saw... I saw people lying face down on the sand further down the beach. I ran to them, thinking it was my brothers and Will. My body was there too. I didn’t understand what was happening, how my body could be lying at my feet.

“All five of us were soaked, completely saturated. Our lips were blue and our skin was sickly pale and our clothes were all ripped and the back of my head a mess from where I’d hit it, all shredded flesh and blood. It was horrible. James appeared next to me, told me it was best that we left before someone came and found the bodies. I asked him how I could be stood there and yet at the same time I was lying lifeless on the sand. He told me the body on the floor was simply my shell and that it was dead. I asked him what he meant and he told me. He told me I was ghost and so was he.

“I laughed at him, thinking all of this was a bad dream and I would wake up any moment, back on the ship, lying next to Will. I didn’t. So I...I suppose I just accepted it. I just took his hand and told him to take me away from that place. He did and I spent the next eight years with him. I didn’t have to spend so many years with him, but I had convinced myself I was in love with him. Ghosts often live together. They make their own new families with other ghosts. James even mentioned finding a child a few times but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t take someone’s dead child and decide it was my own. It wasn’t right. In the end I left him and set off on my own.”

“Could you not have your own children? What happened after you left James?” I asked, completely fascinated by her.

“Ghosts can’t have children. We can have sex, but it’s impossible to get pregnant. Ghosts aren’t born as ghosts. We were all alive at some point but only some of us carry on after death. If you don’t become a ghost then there’s nothing after death. We don’t age either. We’re just stuck like this. Humans are the only ones who can become ghosts. Vampires are already dead you see, so they couldn’t become a ghost. They can become pregnant though. I’m not sure how it all works, but they can have children because they’re a completely different species. It’s complicated but it all works somehow. Werewolves couldn’t become ghosts either because they’re not completely human.

“As for what happened to me after I left James, it was pretty uneventful. I met other ghosts and just... wandered I suppose. It was what I needed. Time on my own to figure out what I was going to do.”

“And what did you figure out?”

“Ghosts can appear to certain humans. If they can see you then you know it’s your job to help them. That’s why you can see me. All of the dead can see each other which is why vampires can see us. I’ve never been told what your purpose is when you become a ghost. But you’re kept behind for some reason and you have to work it out on your own. I thought at first it was because I’d done something wrong and I was being punished. But then I changed my mind. I thought that maybe the word ‘ghost’ was simply just another name for what we were. I wondered whether we were angles, kept behind here to help those who needed it. I don’t know and I never will. All I do know is that I’m going to be here forever, helping whoever can see me.”

“But I’m a vampire now. I’m not human so I shouldn’t need your help, should I?”

“No, I suppose not. But I’m still determined to straighten out your life for you Frank, whether it’s the last thing I do,” she answered firmly.

I stared at her in silence. “You know, you really are amazing.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “Well I wouldn’t be a very good fairy Godmother otherwise, would I?”

I laughed. “No. You wouldn’t.”

“So that’s pretty much my entire life. It was a very short and uneventful nineteen years but my time as a ghost has been much more exciting. It makes me feel better that I didn’t just end, you know? That I was still kept behind to help people who needed it.”

“My life was awful before all of this,” I muttered. “Well it still is awful, but just different. There was a small good bit in between before I ruined everything and got bitten by Mikey.”

She remained quiet and chewed her lip nervously.

“I feel like time’s running out Emily,” I whispered, my voice drenched with fear. “I just don’t know how I’m supposed to get both of them to agree to the plan.”

“I think if it comes down to it you’re going to have to blackmail them,” Emily suggested.

“I would never do that,” I disagreed immediately. “And even if I did, I would ruin everything. Mikey and Gerard would have nothing to do with me if I blackmailed them. But... can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Emily said, looking round at me and giving me an intrigued look. “Shoot.”

“Would I be able to kill myself?”

Her face morphed in to shock and horror the moment the question left my mouth, the words hanging heavily in the air. “I... It would be extremely difficult and nearly impossible and I really don’t think it’s a good idea Frank-”

“Emily, please, you have to tell me!” I begged, grabbing her icy white hand.

She sighed. “I wish you’d never asked now. You’d have to... well, you can temporarily break your bond with Mikey and if you did that then you’d be able to kill yourself and Gerard would have to do the rest from there.”

“How do I break the bond?” I demanded.

She looked away and I swear if ghosts could blush, she would have. “You break your bond with Mikey by lying with Gerard.”