I wrote this story for a contest. Well, it was the idea for a story I wanted to write, and I squeezed in some references to the contest prompt – which means I didn’t win, get published, or get mentioned, because that’s not really the best way to approach a contest. Anyway, it was a fun challenge to write to a strict 2000 word limit for the first time in ages, having to find something to cut for every new detail I needed to add. I’m quite happy with how the story turned out!
Kat leaned over the bridge’s rail, contemplating the gun in her hand as the Silent Falls slipped over the cliff below. Despite its empty chambers and spiritwood grip, the chromed revolver felt heavier than ever.
Her hands turned the revolver, over and over. A gift from a foreign king, sent with her dad’s sword and mom’s coat. To protect her, the letter said. What kind of king gave a gun to a seventeen-year-old who just lost her parents?
Three years later, Kat didn’t feel very protected.
In a small headline the day after it happened, the papers called it an unfortunate mishap. The Baron’s prosecutor ruled there was no case. Even Protectorate officers spent more time comforting Kat than arresting her. They all said she’d been defending herself. It was an accident. And besides, he’d been a criminal, a petty thief.
The man was still dead. Whether or not the city held her responsible, it couldn’t stop Kat from blaming herself. Couldn’t stop the nightmare.
She let the gun slide down her palms, off the tips of her fingers, into the soft whisper of the river. The current carried the revolver over the edge, one last glint of mirror-chrome. She thought about following it, then lost track, her eyes wandering instead down the cliff to the lower city.
Thick evening fog rolled through the permanent storm at the mouth of the bay, crept across the water, pale feathers of mist winding through blackstone streets and mossy alleys among dense low buildings. Old Ravenshore settled into monochrome, crows murmuring in their roosts as streetlights failed to pierce fog.
Now all that was left of the accident was bad dreams and memories. Uncle Vopota would handle the nightmare and dad’s last bottle of Palawan dark whiskey would help her forget.
You think you can get rid of me that easy?
Kat startled awake. She slammed her knee on her desk, spilled the half-bottle of whiskey across desktop and floor. She stumbled to her feet, gasped as her leg wobbled and nearly gave way. The bottle rolled off the desk and cracked. Her mom’s bomber jacket she’d been using as a blanket slipped into the puddle of booze and glass.
Serves you fucking right.
“Who’s there?” Kat shrieked as if she didn’t know. She fumbled at her desk drawer, reaching for her gun. Futile, but half-asleep and three-quarters drunk, instinct and adrenaline ripped open the drawer to reveal nothing but
the gun.
Impossible. She dropped it into the river. She watched it tumble over the falls, lost forever.
Kat stumbled back, tripped into her chair. She kicked at the floor and desk, rolled herself across the room, as far from the gun as she could manage. She careened into the shelf where the turntable lived, heard its cover crack.
The room was still. Kat’s eyes searched every dusty corner and dilapidated cranny, every shadow cast by streetlight through half-slit blinds, the empty closet, the scuffed blackwood floor. Nothing. No one. But the voice continued as whispers, not quite words.
Kat tucked her legs up onto the chair, hugged herself, and shivered. That voice… Her gut churned and leaped; she dug her palms into her ears. The whispers brought the sound of rain. The rooftop. The hole where his face used to be.
She reached with trembling hands for her small stack of records, for the loudest thing. Drown out the voice. Kat tossed records aside until – there, the Riot Hypothesis album Loud Music & Dark Places. Perfect.
Three tries to seat the record, another four for the needle. The turntable spun, speakers crackled; electric guitar and crashing cymbals overpowered everything else. Kat cranked the volume high enough she wouldn’t be able to hear complainers banging at her door.
To the rhythm of metal, whispers quieted, she edged her chair back toward her desk, toward the dropped coat and spilled drink. Kat kept her eyes on the open drawer in case the… the thing inside… somehow moved. Her fingers were almost too weak to rescue her mom’s jacket from the puddle of whiskey, but she shook it out and shrugged it on. She tried to kick the drawer closed, missed, pushed herself away.
A flicker of shadow through the blinds – a big raven disturbed by a drunk or a raccoon. But the shock of movement drew Kat’s attention to the window.
She bashed the stuck latch with the heel of her palm. Kat forced the window open, looked to the street below: shrouded in fog, she could scarcely see the shining-damp blackstone cobble, but enough to know the street was empty.
Kat took three shaky breaths and stood. She flexed her fingers, closed her eyes to let the music amp her courage.
As if touching it too long would burn her, Kat snatched the revolver from the drawer and hurled it out the window. She dropped to the floor and curled up against the wall.
If the gun’s spiritwood grip cracked on blackstone, or if chrome rang against streetcar track like a toll for the dead, Kat didn’t hear it.
The next morning, Kat woke from the nightmare, still on the floor between her desk and window. She sat up to find the revolver in her desk drawer, staring at her.
Kat threw the gun in the trash and watched the garbage truck take it away, then went out to replace the spilled whiskey.
The next morning, the revolver was in her desk drawer. She packed it up and mailed it to the king who’d started all this, but days later, it was in her desk drawer. She stayed with uncle Vopota above his dreamstuff shop, slept in the change room at her fencing teacher’s gym, even tried a grimy cheap hotel in the Redlight – but always the revolver would be there the next morning as though carried in by the nightly fog.
Kat turned it back over to the Protectorate. She left it in the cursed item drop box at the archmage’s tower. She hired a ranger to take her as far into the swamp dragon’s territory as she dared and sank it in the bog. She bribed her way into the transit yard foundry and hurled it into a vat of steel and watched it melt.
The revolver always returned to her, and with it, the whispers. Never as clear and loud as that first night – infrequent, unintelligible, unpredictable – but undeniably him. Following her, haunting her, as if trying to speak to her. Always when Kat was mired in memories of pulling the trigger, his body falling onto her, his blood running in the rain.
She didn’t get much sleep, those weeks, waking every forty-one minutes to reset the turntable’s needle and begin the record again.
When she could no longer tell the difference between Loud Music and Dark Places, when the whispers began and ended, or whether she was awake, Kat broke down over the radio with uncle Vopota, sobbed that she couldn’t live haunted metaphorically and literally. And when uncle Vopota gently suggested Kat see a medium and try to have a conversation with this ghost in her gun, she didn’t speak to him for a week.
Kat flicked her lighter and held it near the soul candle, again, and hesitated, again. Kat took another gulp of the whiskey she’d replaced and grimaced at the overpowering spice and burn.
Blinds drawn against the streetlamp, the guttering flame in her hand was the only light in the room. Not enough to illuminate more than her desk, merely to highlight lines and curves of metal and glass in the dark.
She lit the candle and snapped the lighter closed, examining the steel rectangle in her hand so she wouldn’t have to look at the revolver glinting in the flame. Uncle Vopota said the lighter was a gift to him from her father when they were young. A gift of light that bonded friends into brothers. The kind of story uncle Vopota would make up to help her feel better.
Kat looked around the cheap, worn, mostly-bare old office, the small apartment beyond. It was shitty but it was hers, and she wouldn’t let the ghost ruin it. She cleared her throat. “If you can hear me… this is a soul candle. I’ll be able to hear -“
“You fucking murdered me!”
“You came at me…” she mumbled, but trailed off.
The voice. The ghost. Raw with fury and violence, but impotent, unable to affect Kat physically – at least according to the medium who sold Kat the candle. Small comfort now as Kat’s pulse raced, her breath went shallow, she reeled off-balance as if drunk.
He raged. Every insult and curse Kat ever heard, and more she hadn’t, fired from the revolver into her soul. Worse, when the screaming accomplished nothing, the ghost cried.
“Frank,” she whispered.
He stopped dead.
“Frank, I’m sorry,” Kat sobbed, her gut lurching, choking the words.
“I don’t give a fuck’s ass how sorry you are. Sorry doesn’t get me out of here. But how do you know my name?”
She took a breath to steady herself. It didn’t work. “It’s how I tracked you after you stole – it was an accident, I went to your grave, I -“
“I’m not at my grave, am I! You want to make me feel better? How about you turn around and jump out that fuckin’ window so at least we’ll both be -“
“You think I didn’t consider jumping off that bridge?” she asked softly. He shut up, but victory was momentary and useless. Again she fought the temptation to toss the gun out the window, this time with the petty hope he’d feel it.
“You know what pisses me off the most? I’ve been craving a cheeseburger for weeks.”
Frank’s growl was aggressive, vindictive, but a sudden, hoarse, blurted laugh caught in Kat’s throat. “You can’t even eat anything,” she replied.
“Yeah, that’s the gods-damn problem.”
She watched the gun in uneasy silence. There was no indication of Frank’s presence, no movement save the flicker of flame distorted in chrome. The soul candle burned fast, already half gone. Kat rubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her mom’s sheepskin jacket. “Look, Frank – I won’t be able to talk to you for long, or often. Is there anything you want to say, if it’s the last thing I hear for a while?”
“You’re gonna cheap out on candles after all that effort to get rid of me?”
Sarcasm. Wonderful. Well if he wouldn’t, she would. “Did it hurt?” she asked.
A pause. “Nothing hurts.”
Kat looked down at her clenched fists, through the door toward the bed she’d barely used. “Sounds kind of nice.”
The candle’s flame sputtered lower, the minutes slipping away from Kat. She straightened, took a breath. “We’re almost out of time.”
“I want you to promise me something.”
She bit her lip. “Tell me what it is first.”
“It’s not a trick. I want you to promise you’ll get me out of here.”
“Sure,” Kat said. She crossed her arms. “Obviously I want you gone.”
“Whatever it takes.”
The ghost was calm. Why wasn’t he arguing, begging, screaming, crying? “I already said yes,” Kat growled.
“No matter what.”
She slammed her hands on the desk. “I said yes. Gods, you think I want you around? Not a -“
“Please.”
Kat thought of her parents. No matter what musty old books and priests claimed, there was no way for her to reach them. “Frank…” she hesitated. “There’s no afterlife. Not anymore. If there ever was.”
“I know.”
She nodded once, slow. She reached past her glass of whiskey to the drawer and withdrew the king’s leather gun belt and holster, strapped it to her left hip. Carefully, as though it could go off at any moment, Kat hefted the revolver. “I promise,” she whispered as the candle’s flame faded to smoke and ember.
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