Chapter 3: Ghost in the House
The moving truck smelled of diesel and old fabric, a metallic tang in the back of Yaa’s throat. She sat squeezed between Soap and Gaz in the cab, watching the London sprawl soften into Surrey’s greener blur. The citrine necklace was a cold stone against her sternum.
Soap, trying desperately to fill the silence, started singing. “24 carat magic in the aiiiir…” His voice was aggressively off-key, a joyful assault.
“Christ, mate,” Gaz muttered, rubbing his temple. “Have some respect for the dead. And the living.”
But a sound, thin and rusty, escaped Yaa. A breath that was almost a chuckle. She covered her mouth, surprised at herself. Soap beamed, doubling down on the chorus, thumping the steering wheel. The absurdity of it—Bruno Mars, Simon’s serious friends, the chasm of her grief—created a bizarre, fleeting equilibrium. She let the noise wash over her, a temporary anesthesia.
The house looked both inviting and foreign. Its red-brick facade and little porch were just as she’d remembered, but now it felt like a set piece for a life that had been cancelled. The garden was overgrown, the lavender a tangled grey mass.
“It’s not exactly ready,” Vanessa said gently, hefting a box of kitchenware.
“It’s fine,” Yaa said, her voice firm. “I need to be here.” This was the last thing they had chosen together. Abandoning it felt like a second, slower betrayal.
They became a chain brigade, passing boxes from the truck into the echoing rooms. The air was thick with dust and fresh paint. Yaa worked on autopilot, muscles moving without her mind’s engagement. She was in the new kitchen, its white tiles stark and clinical, unpacking plates when she felt it. A distinct, cold pressure at her back, like someone standing too close in a queue. The fine hairs on her neck lifted. She spun around.
Nothing. Just empty space and the sliding door to the garden.
She turned back to the cabinet. As she reached for a stack of bowls, the cupboard door directly above the counter swung open on its own with a slow, precise creak. It wasn’t a sudden slam; it was deliberate, like an invisible hand had pulled it. Yaa stared, frozen. The house settled. A pipe groaned somewhere.
“You alright in there?” Adeola called from the hall.
“Fine,” Yaa replied, her voice clipped. She pushed the cabinet shut. It felt solid, normal. Old hinge, she told herself. Settling house.
Later, as Gaz assembled her bed frame with quiet efficiency upstairs, a series of loud, sequential creaks echoed from the empty guest room across the hall. Step, step, step. Heavy, like Simon’s tread.
“Gaz?” Yaa called from the landing.
His head popped out of the master bedroom. “Yeah?”
“You in there?”
“In here. Why?”
She just shook her head, retreating downstairs, her heart a trapped bird against her ribs.
The finale came with the television. Soap was cursing at a tangle of cables behind the wall-mounted set in the living room. “Bloody thing’s got more leads than my nan’s life support. Right, should be…”
He found the power. The TV blared to life, not at a low volume or a murmur, but at a deafening, distorting roar—a chaotic blast of daytime game-show applause and shrill host shrieks that violently shredded the quiet. Yaa stumbled back, hands flying to her ears. Soap fumbled with the remote, jabbing at the button until the sound cut off, leaving a ringing, violated silence.
“Fuck me,” he breathed, his face pale. “Must’ve been on max volume from the last owners.”
Yaa wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the draft from the fireplace. The occurrences were stacking up, forming a pattern her rational mind refused to acknowledge but her nerves screamed was real.
By late afternoon, the boxes were inside, if not unpacked. Her friends hovered, their concern a palpable weight. “I’m fine,” she insisted, forcing a smile that felt like a crack in plaster. “Really. You’ve all got lives. Go. I’ll be fine.” They left with embraces and promises to call, the house swallowing the sounds of their cars until only the deafening quiet remained.
Alone, the silence wasn’t empty. It was watchful. She built a nest of blankets on the new sofa, a fortress against the sprawling, unfamiliar dark. Every creak was amplified. Every shift of the settling foundation felt like a footfall. She couldn’t read. She just sat, clutching her phone, the glow of the screen the only light.
The memory ambushed her then, vivid and tactile. Not a ghost, but a ghost of a feeling. Simon, in their old kitchen. On his knees. The cold tiles, the heat of his mouth. The way he’d held her hip, fingers digging in, claiming her. She remembered the slick, filthy sounds, the raw intensity of his tongue fucking her, the way he’d growled “You taste like me” against her throbbing clit. Her body responded to the memory with a jolt of pure, unwelcome ache, a deep, hollow yearning that was both sexual and devastating. She’d been so alive then. So his. The physical memory was so acute she could almost smell him—sweat and soap and that unique, warm scent of his skin.
A tear traced her cheek. She missed his weight on her, in her. The brutal, loving ownership of it. The way he’d flip her onto her stomach, his hands huge on her back, spreading her cheeks, his cock, thick and relentless, driving into her from behind. The filthy, perfect things he’d whisper in her ear, his voice gravel rough with lust. “Take it. It’s yours. This cunt is mine.” She’d come so hard she’d see stars, her cries muffled by the pillow.
Now, there was only this chilling emptiness.
The wind picked up outside, whistling through a gap in the new window frame. A storm was brewing. She pulled the blankets tighter.
Then, with no warning, the living room window—the one she’d checked, the one with the new latch—slammed open with terrifying force. The burst of sound was explosive. Rain and wind hurricane into the room, whipping the curtains into frenzied ghosts, scattering her carefully stacked moving papers across the floor.
Yaa shrieked, a raw sound of pure terror. She scrambling from the blankets, sloshing through the sudden damp, fighting against the gale to reach the window. She heaved it shut, her muscles trembling, fumbling the latch with numb fingers. The rain lashed the glass violently.
Terror overrode everything. She fled. She didn’t stop to turn on lights, didn’t grab a knife from the kitchen. She sprinted up the dark stairs, feet pounding on the bare wood, and threw herself into the master bedroom. The door slammed behind her. The only furniture was the bare bed frame Gaz had built. She didn’t care. She yanked the duvet from its plastic packaging, crawled into the centre of the mattress, and pulled the covers entirely over her head.
She lay there, shivering, soaked not by rain but by a cold sweat of primal fear. Her breath was ragged in the hot, enclosed darkness under the duvet. The house groaned and whispered around her. Every sound was a threat. She curled into a tight fetal ball, the memory of Simon’s touch now a cruel joke in the face of this chilling, violent presence.
She lay there for an hour, maybe two, until the static terror in her veins thinned enough for rational thought to leak through. The phone was downstairs, dead. Her charger was in the mess of the living room. Cursing, she pushed the duvet off and crept to the door, the floorboards icy under her feet.
The house was deafeningly still. She retrieved her phone and charger, then locked herself back in the barren bedroom, plugging the device into the socket by the bare bed. As it powered on, the first thing she did was hit dial.
“Mummy?”
“Yaa? Baby, what’s wrong? It’s the middle of the night.” Sarai’s voice, thick with sleep, was an immediate lifeline.
“The house… it’s…” Yaa’s voice broke, childish and small. “Weird things are happening. Things moving. The window just blew open by itself, like something forced it.”
There was a weighted pause on the line. Sarai’s tone shifted from concern to something denser, older. “You’re in a new place. An empty place. They gather in the corners, you know. Spirits. They sense your energy, your sadness. It’s like a lamp to them.”
“Mum, please, not the mmoatia folklore right now.” Yaa pressed her fingers to her temple. “It’s an old house. It’s the wind.”
“Is it just the wind, though?” Sarai persisted softly. “A window latch does not fail so perfectly on a night a grieving woman is alone. They are drawn to unfinished business. To strong emotion. Simon was a soldier. His spirit wouldn’t just… drift away peacefully. There’s violence in that.”
Every word was a splinter of ice down Yaa’s spine. She’d wanted comfort, not a confirmation of her deepest, most irrational fears. “So what, I need to sprinkle rice or something? Get a pastor?”
“I’m just saying be aware, my love. The world is not all we see. You feel a cold spot? You hear a knock? You acknowledge it. You do not invite it, but you do not pretend it isn’t there. That makes it angry.”
This was worse. So much worse. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll… be aware. Love you.” She hung up before her mother could say more, throwing the phone onto the mattress as if it had burned her. The empty room felt infinitely more crowded.
She needed noise. Light. Something that wasn’t this crushing, supernatural weight. She opened a streaming app, searching for the most inane, brightly coloured comedy panel show she could find. The canned laughter was like acid, but she forced herself to watch, to focus on the hollow banter and ridiculous games.
Her eyes grew heavy, the adrenaline crash pulling her under. The phone slipped from her lax fingers, the cheerful hosts fading into a murmur.
She was on the old sofa in their previous flat. Sunlight streamed through the windows. Simon was there, solid and warm, his thigh pressed against hers as they debated some film. He was laughing, his hand on her knee, his thumb tracing idle circles that sent sparks through the denim. The argument faded into a comfortable silence, his gray eyes holding hers. Then his hand slid up her inner thigh, a deliberate, claiming pressure.
“Simon,” she whispered in the dream, but it wasn’t a protest.
His fingers hooked into the waistband of her cotton shorts and knickers, peeling them down just enough. He didn’t look away from her face as he parted her folds with two blunt fingers. She was already wet, the dream memory so vivid she could feel the slick heat. He pushed one thick finger inside her, then two, his palm grinding against her clit with a perfect, filthy pressure. “This is mine,” he murmured, not in the dream-memory, but in a voice that was here and now, a raw whisper in the shell of her ear. His fingers crooked, pumping slowly, scissoring, stretching her. “Always mine.”
She arched, a moan trapped in her throat, the pleasure coiling impossibly tight. It felt so real. The calluses on his fingers, the specific way his knuckles brushed her sensitive flesh. Her hips rocked against his hand, chasing the feeling, eyes fluttering shut.
Her eyes fluttered open.
The room was dark. The phone screen had gone black. Disorientation swamped her. The pleasure, the phantom touch—it lingered like an echo in her nerve endings. But the mattress was dipping beside her. The duvet was shifted. She lay perfectly still, breath held.
Her sleep shorts were gone.
They weren’t tangled at her ankles or kicked to the foot of the bed. They were simply absent. The sheet was rucked down, exposing her bare legs to the cool air. The space next to her in the bed bore the distinct, deep impression of a heavy weight, as if someone had just risen from it.
Someone was there.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. “Simon?” The name was a feathered breath, torn from her.
That’s when she felt it. A warm, solid pressure on her thigh. A hand. Unseen, but undeniably present. The warmth of a palm, the shape of fingers, settling high on her skin.
The warmth of a palm, the shape of fingers, settling high on her skin.
It was no dream. The pressure was firm, real, a brand of heat through the dark. Terror and a terrible, twisting hope collided in her throat. Her body moved before her mind could—a violent, recoiling flinch that sent the back of her skull cracking against the solid oak headboard.
“Stop!” The word ripped from her, a raw shout aimed at the empty air above the mattress. “Simon, if that’s you, you need to stop! You’re scaring the fuck out of me!”
She clapped a hand to the throbbing spot on her head, tears of pain and sheer adrenal overload blinding her. Her sobs were ugly, wrenching things that filled the silent room. “Please,” she wept, curling in on herself. “Just stop.”
For a long moment, there was nothing. Only the sound of her own fractured breathing echoing off the bare walls.
Then she felt it again. Not on her thigh. Softer. A presence at her back, and then the unmistakable, specific pressure of a large hand settling between her shoulder blades. It began to move in slow, wide circles, exactly the way he would do it when a nightmare woke her—a firm, grounding rhythm designed to soothe the panic from her muscles.
That’s when she knew.
Simon was there. She couldn’t see him, but the essence of that touch, the familiar weight and motion, was a signature. It was him.
She choked back a sob, her body slowly unclenching. “Why?” she whispered into the pillow, her voice cracked and small. “Why did you have to leave me?”
The rubbing hand stilled. The mattress seemed to hold its breath. There was a profound sense of contemplation in the stillness, a wrestling with something unanswerable. Then the hand began again, firmer, as if the only language left was this.
She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling where his form should be. The emotional whiplash left her gutted and tender. “I need you,” she said, the statement simple and absolute. “I missed you.”
As if in response, she watched the mattress compress deeply beside her, the springs groaning under a significant, invisible weight. A zone of warmth manifested near her thigh, a pocket of living air in the cool room.
Her mind, ever pragmatic even now, scrambled for protocol. “How are you even here?” she asked the space above the dent. No answer, just that sustained, attentive presence. Right. Stupid question.
“Yes or no,” she breathed, an idea forming. “Are you… were you here the whole time? Since I moved in?”
The warmth shifted. She felt two distinct pats against her thigh through the sheet. Yes.
“The cabinet. The footsteps. The telly.” A stunned incredulity mixed with her grief. “That was you.”
Another single pat. Yes.
She swallowed, her mouth dry. “Do you know what’s happening? Why you’re… like this?”
No response. She waited. The space beside her felt inert, confused. She reached out tentatively, her hand moving through the warm air until her fingers found not air, but a solid, textured plane. The knuckles of a hand. She wrapped her fingers around them, feeling a contour she knew, a scar across the ridge she’d kissed a hundred times. She gave them a soft, reassuring squeeze.
The tension in the air lessened palpably. His hand turned, enveloping hers, his thumb stroking her palm. The normalcy of the gesture fractured her.
“Okay,” she whispered, tears leaking anew. “Okay, you’re here.”
She lay there, holding a ghost’s hand, for what felt like hours. The digital clock on her phone ticked from 3:17 to 4:02. The storm outside had passed, leaving a dripping quiet. Her exhaustion was a lead blanket, but her mind raced, churning with impossible questions. The warmth of his hand was the only anchor.
Then his touch changed. His hand slipped from hers. The warmth travelled, a deliberate path up her arm, over the slope of her shoulder. He was tracing her. Mapping her. The heat settled on her collarbone, fingertips brushing the citrine pendant that lay there.
A ragged sound escaped her. His touch moved lower, hesitating over the thin cotton of her vest top before his palm, vast and hot, covered her breast. He didn’t move, just held the weight of her, his thumb resting beside her nipple. It was a possessive, reverent hold that shattered her completely.
“Simon,” she pleaded, but it wasn’t a ‘no’.
His thumb began to move, a slow stroking arc that made the fabric rasp against her peaked flesh. A hot bolt of pure sensation, visceral and welcome, shot straight to her core. She arched into the touch, a low moan pulled from her lips. It had been so long. Since the kitchen. Since before.
Emotion and a desperate, physical hunger fused. Grief had hollowed her out, and this—his touch, even unseen—was a violent, necessary filling. She needed to feel anything but the howling void.
“Please,” she whispered, the word soaked in want.
The sheet was peeled back. The cool air hit her skin, followed instantly by the encompassing heat of him blanketing her side. She felt the press of him, the muscular weight of a thigh slotting between hers, the hard ridge of him—familiar, formidable—pressing against her hip. He was fully formed, solid, yet the space above her remained empty darkness.
His mouth found her neck, not a kiss but a hot, open-mouthed press, and she felt the scrape of stubble. Real. So terrifyingly real. His hand shoved her vest top up, baring her breasts to the dark. His mouth left her neck, breath hot, and latched onto a nipple.
“Fuck,” she gasped, her hands flying to the back of his head, her fingers sinking into the crisp, short texture of his hair. It was real. He sucked hard, his tongue a ruthless flick against the peak, while his other hand kneaded her other breast, rough and perfect.
This wasn’t a gentle reunion. It was a reclaiming, frantic and raw. She was slick, soaked, her body singing a chorus of yes after weeks of numb silence. His hand plunged between her legs, his fingers sliding through her wetness with a gruff, satisfied sound against her breast.
“So desperate for me,” his voice echoed, not in the room, but inside her skull, a gravelly vibration that was pure memory and pure now.
“Yes,” she hissed, spreading her legs wider, inviting the invasion. “Always.”
He shifted, his body a solid weight settling over her. She felt the blunt, swollen head of his cock nudge against her soaked entrance. He hovered there, a question in the tense stillness of his hips. She answered by wrapping her legs around the solid press of his back, her heels digging in.
“Do it. Fucking do it, Simon. I need to feel you.”
He drove into her with a single, deep, punishing thrust that stole the air from her lungs. He filled her, stretched her, a perfect, burning fit that made her cry out. He was silent above her, a presence of sheer physical force, and then he began to move.
There was no softness. It was a brutal, piston-like rhythm, each snap of his hips slamming her into the mattress, the bedframe shuddering against the wall. She could hear the wet, obscene slap of their skin meeting, feel the coil of her orgasm building with terrifying speed. His face was buried in her neck, his breath harsh and hot.
“This cunt,” he grunted into her skin, his voice strained, “is mine. Even now.”
“Yours,” she sobbed, clutching at the powerful, shifting muscles of his back. “Only yours.”
His pace grew frenzied, losing rhythm, bordering on violence. It was a fuck of anguish and possession, a howl given physical form. She came violently, her inner muscles clamping around him in relentless waves, her scream muffled against his shoulder. He followed with a final, shuddering thrust, a hot, flooding release inside her, and a ragged, broken sound that was her name.
Then, collapse. The crushing, welcome weight of him pinning her to the bed. The sound of their ragged breath mingling in the dark. The sticky heat between her thighs. She ran her hands over the sweat-slicked plane of his back, anchoring herself to the reality of him.
Slowly, too soon, the solidity began to fade. The weight grew lighter, the warmth dissipating like smoke. He was withdrawing, not in body, but in substance.
“Don’t go,” she begged, clutching at air that was reforming into emptiness.
The last thing she felt was the brush of lips, impossibly soft, against her forehead. A whisper, not in her mind, but sighing through the room’s very air: “Can’t stay.”
Then he was gone. The mattress rose, relieved of his weight. The room was just a room again, cold and empty beside her own sweating body and the physical evidence smeared on her thighs.
She lay there, wrecked and trembling, staring at the impression his body had left on the sheets. It was real. He was here. And he was gone.
A new, cold realization settled over her. This wasn't closure. This was a thread. He was anchored here, but not free. She thought of his mother at the funeral, a silent phantom at the back of the church. She thought of the unanswered letter, the hardened set of Simon's jaw whenever his family was mentioned.
His unfinished business wasn't just her. It was a trail leading back into a past he’d sealed shut. And if she wanted more than midnight visitations, she would have to follow it.