“What would you trade for wealth?”
“What do you mean?”
“That thing that you are so desperate for… what would you trade for it?”
“I’m not desperate.”
“I see your soul, child, desperation boils in it. You seek naught but money.”
K paused, aware that he had been ensnared, “what’s the offer, then?”
A rough smile, “You gain wealth, and in return you are haunted.”
“Haunted?” K laughed, frowned, looked at the flaps of the tent which seemed to ripple as though somebody toyed with the idea of entering.
“From a point in the near future, for every moment of every day.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“That will not prevent the haunting. Nor did I mention ghosts.” The words were slow, curious, as though K had said something unintelligible. “I can’t imagine you’ll disbelieve anything for long.”
“So, I get wealth…” K said, slow and steady to make sure he wasn’t getting this wrong, even though it was complete nonsense, “and in return I am haunted for the rest of my life?”
The lady grinned and her dark teeth slipped out from behind her reddened lips. “That is the deal.”
“Where do I sign?”
“You understand that this is a weighted conviction?” Her smile was gone, and her frown showed a wariness at the events she had set into motion, “that this is not something which can be undone?”
“I don’t think any of this is real.” K said, his voice flat and firm. “I’ll play along because it’s warmer in here than out there.” The tent groaned under the breeze, or from some unseen beast clambering over its centre.
Her smile returned, “you just have to sign here.” A piece of paper was brandished from nowhere and slapped down in front of him. “I have given you fair warning. This is no game. I know that your unquenched desire for wealth is what is going to make you pick up that pen and jot down your name. I have given you fair warning as to what the trade requires.”
K paused. This was all absurd, but there was a part of him that wished it to be true, a hope that him signing his name would be enough to trigger a monied future. He just couldn’t fathom any supernatural stalking would come along with it: there was no desire to make it seem even slightly possible, so he dispelled it as an impossibility and squiggled his name. “Done.”
“The trade is complete.” Her smile was thin, reticent.
“What happens now?”
“The spirits will do their bit to provide what has been sworn to you.”
“And a big bag of money will fall from the sky?”
“Unlikely. They’ll find a way.”
“I just have to keep an eye out for Casper?” This received a frown of unknowing, “the friendly ghost?”
“Oh, my dear, these beings are anything but.” Her eyes had begun to dart about the tent, and she shifted uneasily in her seat. “Please, be on your way.”
“Okay, okay.” He rose to his feet with a nervous laugh. “What do you get out of this?”
“It was my haunt, child. And now it is yours.” There was sadness in her eyes that he tried to decode: guilt? “Be gone, child. And good luck.”
He left the tent and shivered into the close, cold night. His friends were gathered at the foot of a rollercoaster, taking rough bites from livid pink candyfloss that stuck to their cheeks.
“That was weird.” K said, but the wind must have caught his voice because his friends didn’t even flinch.
K checked the app again: all bright colours and rolling dials. His balance was -3.1% since yesterday, but that was normal; the crypto market was volatile, akin to gambling. The app had been open for most of the day and - as he sat in the hotel lobby waiting for his boss to arrive - his phone was hot from maintaining the fiscal pixels and calculating churned internet data every 50 milliseconds or so. The number flashed red and dropped to -3.2%, and his stomach rolled with the disappointment. This was not the get-rich-scheme he had been told about on YouTube and X. This was a scam, and it was only losing him money. He felt weak with the uselessness of the endeavour. I should have just put my money in a normal savings account like everybody else, he thought, pained. He could hear his uncle telling him all about how important it was to save, and to save sensibly. Not with crypto-currency, that was for certain.
“NEW COIN AVAILABLE: CasPER”
The alert made his phone tremble in his hand, and he blinked at the words for several seconds. It was not an unusual notification to receive: new crypto assets appeared almost daily. But the name scratched at a memory, tugged at an event in his past that he was sure added some nuance. It couldn’t be, could it? He smiled at the screen, aware of the coincidence, and excited by the impossible. Worth a try though, right? He was only losing money in the other coins, why not just try something new. He transferred his life savings in a series of hurried taps and then waited for it to go green.
K lay on his hotel bed, staring at the ceiling. Music thumped at the walls from a party and the residue of alcohol did the same to the inside of his head. Champagne was evil. Especially when drunk by the bottle. He had a vague memory of Jay pouring it down his throat. Someone spilled some on the cocaine: another catalyst for his mind’s thrumming. He rolled onto his side, and then up to a seated position. The bedside lamp offered the only light: thin, from the energy-saving bulb, which painted the room in a dull-orange glow. He rose to his feet and stumbled to the window, drawing the curtains back to reveal the night beyond. He checked the alarm clock on his bedside table, beside the half-empty bottle of Champagne, and it read 3.40AM.
“Christ.” He said aloud to the otherwise empty room. He had barely slept, but it felt as though he had just chewed through a dozen hours of slumber; with his head heavy and his body trembling from all he had consumed over the preceding days.
The party is still going, he noted with irritation. There would be inevitable rebuking, and perhaps even a fine from the hotel staff. Not that money was an issue anymore, but he could do without the confrontation. Why are my friends so selfish? Not just friends, the weird hangers-on that emerged from vague half-meets in the past, that now declared his friendship sacrosanct, above all else. Wealth had the ability to drag all sorts of people from the woodwork or the gutter and throw them loosely into one’s path. There were no requests for gifts or cash, which he had naively assumed would be the case, it was just a desire to be within the circumference of wealth, within touching distance of the source, and to inevitably hoover up any food, booze and drugs that happened to be within reach. Some people measured their own success by their proximity to successful people. Or desperately lucky wealthy people, K corrected.
The place was deserted. Empty bottles littered the floor, and the music thundered into every corner of the room, but there was nobody to be seen.
“Hello?” K tried, but his voice tangled with the blaring audio and dissipated to nothing. He frowned and then winced as his hangover balked at the noise. He moved to the stereo and switched it off with a click. Silence swept through like a breeze and K shivered against the stark emptiness. Who leaves without turning off the music? He wondered, as he steadied himself against a tall speaker and surveyed the room. Bottles of champagne were leant or lying everywhere he looked, open pizza boxes yawned at the ceiling dressed with puddles of grease and slithers of tomato sauce. Everything seemed wet; wet with a sheen of moisture retained from the party before, it was ethereal, and other-worldly. It made the pastel colouring of the furniture and other inanimates of the room seem unreal and roughly distorted. My eyes aren’t yet recovered from the alcohol. “Hello?” He managed again, though with less conviction this time, relaxed with the summation that he was indeed alone in his abandoned wreckage of a party.
Something smashed in the bathroom, and he held his breath. “Who’s there?” He took a step towards the closed door and strained his ears to hear any sequel to the bright, breaking sound, but silence had smothered whatever had happened before, swept it away into a bereft vacuum.
K reached the door and watched as the light within bled from beneath it onto his feet. A turn of the handle and the light erupted into the living space, drenching his squinting face and the mess of a room behind him. Quick blinks helped his eyes accommodate and the blank space revealed itself. Nothing. A broken Champagne bottle lay on the ground. It must have slipped from the sink. There’s nothing to worry about. The thought had barely finished forming in his head when he saw the mirror, and any semblance of reassured comfort abandoned him in a wave of panic and fear. The mirror was broken, shattered almost, but the cracks held a deducible pattern of interweaving and interlinking curves that ran from left to right, filling almost every inch. The word was in flowing, cracked, cursive that reflected his pale face back to him in a thousand slightly askew angles: HAUNT.
The tentacles were slapping at his shins before he had even noticed their appearance; their movement searching, drunken, each thud against his skin wet and heavy. K screamed and managed a step back away from them, his eyes following them back to their source: the toilet. There were eight of them - tangled and squeezing, bulbous and pink - and they emerged further and further from the porcelain seat with each second. Suckers puckered and groped in each direction, one audibly gripping against the tiled wall at the far side of the bathroom, blindly surveying and assessing the new environment. K screamed again but his feet remained planted. He watched as the tentacles that had found him moved closer and they wrapped quickly around his naked legs. The moisture was unbearable, the warmth visceral. Each sucker burped away the air beneath it to maintain a solid grip and the limb beyond it flexed in a rolling, repeated swell to move higher up K’s body. He watched it jerk and twist and climb, his mouth contorted into a silent scream of equal parts fear and disgust. Something was emerging from the bowl. Beyond the limbs, at their source, was a central focal point, and it was coming. K shook his head with a wild determination for all of this to be over, for him to be away. The broken mirror caught his eye.
He had to lean and shuffle to the basin, dig his fingers into the marble surface to ease his body closer to the cracked, reflective surface. And then he had it. His fingernails found purchase on the bottom left corner of the mirror and the segment popped free: a three-inch triangle that glittered in the over-bright lights.
The wail from deep within the bowl was grotesque, as K plunged the sliver into the meaty heart of the highest tentacle. There was a shudder through the entire beast that had him, and then all that he needed: a momentary loosening.
In a heartbeat he was gone, free from the beast but for a thin residual layer of slime. He ran from his hotel room, and down the stairs, through reception, and out into the street. He panted, screamed a few more times, and then wept as he gazed up at the moon that peered over the skyscrapers. Despite the steady roll of traffic, and the grumble of an underground train, he could just about hear and feel the injured and angered beast rumbling through the pipes beneath his feet.