Kline's Ghost

It was not a trick of the smart display, because the display was dark. It was Kline's face on the door itself, on the painted panels where the varnish had gone amber with age, plain as a headline: the jaw gone, the cheeks gone, but the eyes the same eyes that had watched him across a trading floor for thirty years, wide open, and staring, and aware of him.

Crane slammed both deadbolts and stood with his hand on the knob, breathing. "Nonsense," he said to the hallway. "I've been eating expired meal-replacement shakes since March. Nonsense." He said it twice, and the second time his voice cracked on the second syllable, like a file folder dropping.

Inside, he hung his coat, checked the cameras — all four, all green, all recording — and sat in his armchair in a puddle of lamplight with the heating vent sighing under him, and told himself, in the tone he used on late-paying clients, that everything has an explanation and most of them are cheap.

The church bell downtown tolled six, and stopped, and then tolled again, all by itself, a full hour late, and every lit screen in the house woke up at once and went dark again, and the deep freeze in the basement began to cycle, and beneath that, under the sound of the house settling, came another sound: drag, drag, drag, on the stairs. Like furniture being moved by someone with all the time in the world.

It came up through the landing and through the door without knocking, because it was already inside: Kline, in the cashmere overcoat he had worn the day he died, transparent to the lamp behind him, and wrapped, from scalp to shoe, in the chain he had forged. It was long and it was wound about him like a tail, and it was made of everything he had loved in life: shredded paper from the shredder room, zip ties, steel cable, padlocks, cash boxes with the lids torn off, ledger boxes, phones with dead screens, and around his neck, like a pendant the size of a tire, a brass door knocker off a house on Cedar Road, still swinging.

"I don't believe it," Crane said, and his voice was fine and steady until the end of the sentence. "I know that coat. It's the one from the summit in Dubai. How do you do it — projection? You always did like theater, Aaron."

"How is it," Kline said, and the words came out of him cold, each one separately, like coins counted onto a counter, "that you do not believe your own eyes? Why do you doubt your senses, Silas?"

"Because a little thing affects them. A stomach disorder, a bad night, an invoice unpaid. Anything can make a man see what he is afraid of. You were always my partner. Even now, if this is a prank, it's a good one. It's the best one. Come to the table, and let's talk about the estate, and the fees—"

"SILAS." The whole room answered the name. The lamp shrank. The heat lamp vent went cold. Every windowpane in the brownstone shivered at once, and outside, down the whole length of the street, car alarms began to sing. "I wear the chain I forged in life," Kline said. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? It is the exact pattern of the work you are still doing, seven years after they put me in the ground. Yours is a comfort of weight, a profit of length. It was full and heavy and long as this seven Christmas Eves ago, and you have added to it every quarter since. And it is nothing, NOTHING, beside the one you are dragging behind you, link by link, into a future I can see from where I stand, which is nowhere at all, and weighs exactly what every eviction notice you have ever served weighs, served again and again in my hands."

Crane's mouth had gone dry. "Aaron," he said. "Old friend. It was business. It was legal."

"Mankind was my business!" The chain surged. "Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence — those were all my business, and I filed them under other people's names, and I amortized them, Silas, I amortized my own soul across thirty years of quarterly statements, and now I stand in your living room holding the depreciation." Kline took one step forward, and where his foot landed, the rug did not move, and that was the worst of it — no weight at all, all pressure. "I stand beside you in everything you do tonight, invisible. I watch you count. I have watched you count for seven years. Hear me. My time is nearly gone. I cannot stay, and I cannot rest, and I cannot help anyone, and so I have come to help you, because someone came for me tonight — I will not say who — and gave me one chance, and this is it."

"You always were a believer in second chances," Crane whispered. "In collections."

"You will be haunted," Kline said. "By three spirits. Expect the first tonight, when the bell tolls one. Expect the second when it tolls one again, and the third when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate. The hours will not behave for you, and the nights will fold; do not try to count them. Weigh the three, Silas. Weigh them like coin, if coin is all you can read."

Crane's throat worked. "Why is this happening to me, Aaron?"

"Because it doesn't have to happen to you." Kline walked to the window, and his transparency pulled the streetlight through him like water through a net. "Look out there." The window was full of mist. And in the mist, faint as receipts through an envelope, Crane saw them: gray men and gray women, hurrying through the air above the street, each one wrapped in chains, each one bending toward the lit windows of the tents and shelters and apartment blocks below, reaching hands down toward people who could not see them, trying to help, and not able to touch anything, not even the snow, and weeping as they failed. One of them he recognized: Voss, who had run the syndication desk across the street for twenty years, an old rival, dead three years, who had once laughed at him for donating a building to a shelter and had never, in forty years of banking, given away a nickel.

The air shook. The bell tolled once — one stroke, falling like a stone down a well — and the room went dark, and Crane fell into a sleep full of hands, none of which touched him, all of which reached.