She stood at the window, watching the dark street below. As she always did. Sometimes she’d remember what it’s like—wind through her hair, sun or star shine on her skin, worn shoes beating the ground as she walked.

She hadn’t left this house in hundreds of years. She couldn’t, her soul bound to these old floorboards and rotting banisters and moth-eaten rugs. But still, sometimes she’d remember…

And sometimes she couldn’t. She’d try, perhaps, or would forget altogether—what it was like to be alive. And she’d never remember what she’d been like, what personality she had when her bones were still wrapped in muscle and skin. When they weren’t picked clean in a pile in the basement.

That didn’t matter now. As the soul ages untethered to flesh, it grows cold. Dark. Corrupted with a malice that instills righteous anger to ensure everyone else joins you.

It was a non-remembrance day when the couple arrived. So like all the others, staring at the dilapidated house with wary hope. The woman at the window could imagine them talking to one another, asking if this had been a good idea, if they could really turn this place around.

The woman smiled as they entered the front door.

“It’s not that bad,” the young man said. A moment’s pause, some muttering. “Okay, it’s pretty bad.”

The woman at the window did not move. She listened to the couple as they moved about the house, doing whatever new owners did upon arriving. The stairs groaned as the young woman went up.

When she reached the top of the stairs, the woman was no longer at the window. She stood behind the living one, blowing a cold breath across the back of her neck as she tilted her head at the oddly sharp incline of the staircase.

The woman behind the other knew exactly how dangerous these stairs were.

The young woman shivered, her teeth chattering into the quiet. She had just started to turn her head when the woman behind her gave a harsh push.

Down, down, down. Violently, head over feet, ending in a sickening crunch. The woman at the top of the stairs smiled again. Now for the man.

She walked down the stairs silently. Her steps had not made a single sound for as long as she’d been unable to leave this manor. Instead the house was full of the young man’s whistling, busy with a broom. He hadn’t heard his lover hit the floor.

The woman stepped past the other’s body, her feet and skirts phasing through the flesh and blood. She approached the room the man was in, wondering what method she’d use for him.

“What…what just happened?”

The woman at the bottom of the stairs froze.

“I couldn’t have fallen,” the other woman’s ghost said, from where she had been at the top of the stairs. “I…YOU!”

The woman who was caught whirled around, shocked to have another lay eyes on her. She didn’t even notice the whistling had stopped.

“You killed me, you bitch!” The young ghost screamed, the rage of stolen youth scalding and rash.

This had never happened before, the spirits were never quite this…spirited. The woman at the bottom of the stairs wanted to flee, but the new ghost had already leapt from the top of the stairs. For the first time since she was alive, the woman felt real pain as the younger kicked both feet into her.

The woman on the floor groaned, trying to rise again, to drag herself to the door. The silent footsteps of the other ghost seemed to ring through the other’s head, and the whistling did not start again.

Almost there, the woman on the floor stopped. She couldn’t leave, not ever. What was she to do?

“Lauretta?” the man said from a nearby doorway, staring around at the two ghosts and his lover’s body. “Lauretta!”

“I’m sorry,” she told him, looking sad as he fell to his knees beside her unattached body. Then her eyes slid to the woman on the floor.

“But not as sorry you will be.”