Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

Genres: Supernatural suspense; Occult & Supernatural; Psychological Thrillers; Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

Kate Collins has been ghosted.

She was supposed to be moving in with her new boyfriend Scott, but all she finds after relocating to Brighton is an empty flat. Scott has vanished. His possessions have all disappeared.

Except for his mobile phone.

Kate knows she shouldn't hack into Scott's phone. She shouldn't look at his Tinder, his calls, his social media. But she can't quite help herself.

That's when the trouble starts. Strange, whispering phone calls from numbers she doesn't recognise. Scratch marks on the walls that she can't explain.

And the growing feeling that she's being watched....

Jason Arnopp — author of The Last Days of Jack Sparks, a Radio 2 Bookclub pick — returns with a razor-sharp thriller for a social-media obsessed world. Prepare to never look at your phone the same way again....

Release date: October 22, 2019

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 496

Sample

2 October

Where the hell is Scott?

I pound my interlocked hands onto Roy’s sternum, pressing deep and hard to circulate blood. Each time I release, the suction effect allows his ribs to recoil and fills the heart again.

Too late. Roy’s light has already ebbed. Wide and blue, with that unmistakable cataract gleam, his eyes stare clean through me. It’s no surprise when there turns out to be no electrical activity in his heart.

Despite this flatline, I carry on for Pat’s benefit. I want her to know that we’ve done everything we can.

She wavers in the living room doorway with one liver-spotted hand cupped over her mouth. My colleague Trevor makes gentle but fruitless attempts to coax her onto the sofa, in case her legs give out.

When life becomes extinct, there’s always shock. Makes no difference whether people deny the facts of mortality, or contemplate death on a regular basis, or even actively plan for death, right down to the grim nitty-gritty of graves and urns. None of this makes any difference at all. Because in the end, they never truly believed this day would come.

Hey, here’s an idea. What if Scott’s every bit as dead as Roy?

I pound on Roy some more. The grating of the ribs I’ve broken feels horrible, as it always does. But even worse, his face has become Scott’s face, because I’m a massive weirdo whose imagination is liable to run away with itself.

Scott goggles blindly up at me, his eyes two blown bulbs. A thick purple tongue lolls in his open mouth.

Pat finally plonks herself on the sofa. “He can’t do this, can he?” she says. “November’s our fiftieth. The pub’s booked. We paid the deposit in August.”

August. It’s been a little over four weeks since Scott asked me to move in. I told my landlord straight away, handed in my work notice and secured the transfer to Brighton. I’ve disposed of so many possessions that Marie Kondo herself would consider me hardcore.

Scott can’t be dead, can he? He’s only thirty-seven.

People die unexpectedly all the time, regardless of their age. If anyone knows this, it’s you.

That’s enough, brain. Any minute now Scott will text me back, so I must get my head back in the game. I have to maintain laser focus on Pat, whose husband really has died from a cardiac arrest in his late seventies.

Delivering one final compression to Roy’s chest, I feel yet another rib crack. Reality regains its grip on my sight, and Scott’s lifeless face becomes Roy’s once again.

Resting my backside against my heels, I swipe the back of one hand across my brow and claw at the collar of my shirt. This cheap polyester shit never gets any easier to work in.

Joining Pat on the sofa, I hold her parchment-paper hand, look her straight in the eye and say, “Pat, I’m afraid your husband has died. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Pat studies Roy’s corpse, which lies in the middle of the cramped living room where they’ve laughed, cried, watched TV and bitched at each other for so many years.

“Pat, would you like Trevor and me to move Roy through to your bedroom and cover him up on the bed until the police arrive?”

Her weathered face holds this frozen disappointment, like Roy’s genuinely let her down by failing to last until the big anniversary. By having forfeit that piddling deposit.

Everyone handles this in their own way.

Hey, why not tell Pat she can hold the wake in that pub instead?

I squeeze her hand. “Your husband’s moved on to a good place, sweetheart.”

Pat turns cold, appraising eyes on me. She says, “You don’t believe that. I can tell,” then returns her attention to Roy.

She’s right, of course. Despite having seen countless people die, I’ve never once sensed their spectral essence coil out of them, destined for Heaven, Hell, Valhalla or anywhere else.

The sorry truth is, dead people resemble complex biological systems that have ground to a random and sometimes ugly halt. What we humans think of as our minds, it’s all electricity. All our thoughts, desires and funniest jokes, they’re just lightning bolts, bouncing around inside a bag of meat.

“I do believe,” I tell her. “I really do.”

When Pat does not respond, I abandon these lies and offer to make tea. There’s always time for a quick brew when someone’s died. Trevor takes my place beside her as I disappear into a kitchen that smells of cooked sausages and fried onions. What would have been Roy’s final meal cools and congeals in two pans on the hob.

Once the kettle’s on, I feel the burning urge to check my phone. If Scott had texted, I would have felt the vibration against my hip, but I want to check anyway. This kind of compulsive behaviour feels dangerously like my old, bad ways. I really should restrict myself to one check per hour, max, but this is no ordinary day. This is the end of my life here in Leeds and the start of my life with Scott down in Brighton, so I decide to consult my old Nokia once again.

The tiny screen glows into life, opening a restricted window onto the world. This antiquated device shows me calls, texts, low-res photos and little more. Bare bones.

Still no reply from Scott.

He’s probably had second thoughts about this whirlwind romance – and can you blame him? If you were Scott, would you honestly want to live with some tedious Miss Average who comes home every night smelling of blood and sick?

I remind myself yet again that it’s only been seventeen hours since his last text. This is by far the longest we’ve ever gone without comms in the four months since we met, but there’s got to be a perfectly good reason.

There had fucking better be. What a truly weird time for him to drop out of contact.

Don’t you dare ghost me on the day before I move in with you, Scott Palmer.

Don’t. You. Dare.

Steam gushes from the kettle spout. The urgent bubble of hot water makes me feel panicked, so I switch off the kettle before it hits the boil, and I make the widow her tea.

14 February

The first time I ever see Scott Palmer, he isn’t really there.

His face has been rendered by one zillion points of light. Untold zeroes and ones. A whole bunch of nothing, which nevertheless ignites chemicals in my brain.

Say what you will about the dating app being the death of romance, but there’s such a primal power to swiping left to reject a stranger, then being confronted with a new person who speaks to you. A potential new partner in crime, as the great Tinder bio cliché goes.

Half an hour into my tragic Valentine’s Day Tinder trawl, Scott Palmer’s face doesn’t so much speak to me as yell out of the screen.

Some Tinder fuck-boys pose with a big dead fish. Oh wow, dude, you killed a sentient being by ramming a hook through its mouth and watching it suffocate? Please allow me to cock-worship you forever.

Other guys present themselves among a group of their mates. I don’t know which one you are.

And then there are the blokes pictured at their own weddings. WTF is that trying to communicate – “Hey ladies, someone once liked me enough to marry me”?

Scott Palmer, meanwhile, has chosen a simple portrait that allows his face to fill the screen. My ovaries may be twitching. My inner filth-goddess may be imagining how those cheekbones and the wild-yet-somehow-curated stubble would feel against my bare thighs. My fingers may be judging how his thin-but-nice, sandy-blond hair would feel. But these eyes, they seal the deal. Apart from being divine pools of azure blue, blah blah blah, their open nature betrays something else deep inside them. Something entirely at odds with the wolfy smirk on his lips.

This guy, whose screen-name is simply Scott, has this real vulnerability about him – one that you only see when you spend more than a passing moment gazing into these peepers. Up until Scott’s face entered my life, I’d been swiping with vigour. Having buried the guilt of passing shallow split-second judgements on people based on the configuration and proportions of their facial features, I had allowed myself to enjoy the chemical brain-hits that accompany the anticipation of the new. But I’ve now become an anomaly in the online world, simply by examining one single image for more than ten seconds.

What is the nature of Scott’s secret vulnerability? Can’t tell whether it’s hurt, or fear, or self-loathing, or whatever, but it makes me want to mother and fuck him at the same time. Yeah, I want to mother-fuck him.

Having fully absorbed his face, I tap the info button to see what he has to say for himself. Turns out he’s written no words at all. Hardly unusual on Tinder, but a lack of text is always disappointing. Makes the whole thing feel all the more intensely superficial.

The only information on display is Scott’s age: thirty-six. His distance from me is not stated, and neither is his occupation.

How am I supposed to know if we might get along if he tells me nothing about his personality, lifestyle, hopes or dreams?

Ah, fuck him. He’s blown this.

So of course, I hit Super-Like. Simply can’t help myself, even though Super-Likes on Tinder are a really bad move. Whereas regular Likes are kept secret from the person you’ve Liked, a Super-Like means the person actually gets notified. So when a woman gives a Super-Like, it’s the digital equivalent of doing a handstand and shrieking. While wearing a wedding dress.

See, part of me quite likes the fact that Scott has chosen to remain a man of mystery. An enigmatic array of pixels. Soon as I tap on that little blue Super-Like star, his face gets whisked off my screen, back into the labyrinthine servers of Tinder. Ridiculously, I feel a tad bereft. Why didn’t I take a screen grab of him?

Doesn’t matter, Kate. He’s out of your league anyway. He’ll take one look at your profile, with your crooked smile splayed across that weird mouth, your eyes that are too far apart, your short hair of no fixed stylistic abode and your paltry cleavage, and he’ll think, “Aw, how sweet, the plain girl loves me.” Then he’ll move on, hunting for women with perfect teeth, blow job lips and tits that look like they’re inflated by a hand-pump twice daily. That’s the way of the dating app: everyone’s forever holding out to see if someone better lurks one swipe around the corner.

Having dumped the phone beside me on the bed, I force myself to get ready for work. Somewhere out there, across the sprawl of the city, there are people whose lives will need saving. These people currently have no idea, but they’re about to have one of the worst days of their lives, often for some cruelly arbitrary reason.

I’m attacking my damp hair with a towel when the phone goes ping.

Wow, someone has Super-Liked me on Tinder.

Okay, okay, let’s not get excited. This person is highly likely to have tapped the blue Super-Like star by mistake. All too many times before, I’ve Liked a Super-Liker back, only for them to totally ghost me.

In fact, it’s happened every single time.

Still, I may as well enjoy this minor chest flutter for the minutes it’ll take me to dry my hair and take a proper look.

Oh God, wait…

Surely this can’t be… what was his name again? Scott?

As much as I try to resist, a new future rolls out before my mind’s eye. My mother, suddenly growing a soul and flying back from New Zealand for the wedding. Scott, standing before the altar, grinning back over his shoulder at me and my magnificent frock. That last vision is weird, seeing as I don’t particularly want to marry. I suppose I like the idea of someone being there, for good.

Oh. This isn’t Scott. This is an altogether more Venezuelan guy named Rudolpho, with a broad brow and even broader shoulders. He looks pretty damn hot, isn’t clutching a dead halibut and he may genuinely Super-Like me.

Could be worth riding. I mean, investigating.

2 October

“Izzy, seriously: where the fucking hell is Scott? Why hasn’t he texted? I’m moving in tomorrow.”

Tickled by my histrionics, Izzy lays into her rum and Coke. She never used to drink before the accident happened. I wonder if she’ll carry on boozing when she can walk again unassisted by the crutches propped up against our pub table.

“Kate, I need to tell you something,” she says, deploying frank eye contact. “And I need you to hear me: you’re talking like a crazy person right now.”

“By the time we finish these drinks,” I tell her, checking my watch, “it’ll have been twenty-four hours since this guy, the one who cannot wait for me to move in with him, last texted. And he hasn’t responded to any of my little follow-up prompts. You know: Helloooo? Are you there? All that needy shit.”

Izzy’s braids jostle as she shakes her head. “Crazy, crazy, crazy. So what’s going on in that little bauble of yours, mate? What exactly do you reckon’s happened to this bloke who hasn’t replied for a while?”

“Well, worst case scenario, he could be dead.” Ignoring what Izzy’s eyebrows are doing, I press boldly on. “I don’t know any of his friends or family. So there’s no one to tell me Scott’s been hit by a bus.”

She shrugs. “Well, you already know how I feel about the whole friends-and-family weirdness there…”

“Yep, you’ve been expressing that opinion since June. And you’re right, it is pretty weird, but I honestly think—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know: you honestly think that couples often seal themselves in an insular bubble in the early stages of their relationship. In other words, you think Scott’s been too busy banging you to introduce you to a single friend or family member… or even mention any of them. But why have you never asked?”

I blow out a fat plume of air. “Because… I suppose… if I ask about his family, he’d probably ask about mine. And then, if I tell the truth, he’ll have to hear about me never having known my dad. And even worse, about Mum herself and, you know, the whole… coma thing. Anyway, we’ve gone off topic.”

“None of that stuff is anything to be ashamed of,” Izzy insists, “and Scott will hear about it someday. But all right, moving on, here’s an idea: have you checked his social media?” When I frown at the very suggestion, she checks herself. “Of course you haven’t. You can’t. But surely if you’re worried, you won’t be breaking your own code by looking at his bloody Twitter for ten seconds.”

Temptation triggers a warning sign in my head and makes the back of my neck sweat. My addiction is the only thing in the world I feel unable to properly discuss with Izzy. Back in March, when I destroyed my smartphone, I told her I’d just got sick of the internet.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I tell her. “Slippery slope, and all that. I’ve been loads happier since I went off-grid.”

“Oh yeah, you look dead happy right now, for sure.”

“God, I’m being stupid, aren’t I? You’re right: Scott’s fine. Busy, that’s all. Probably getting the flat ready. He’s rushing around, buying celebratory balloons.”

“Hey, do you want me to look at his Twitter for you? Would that work?”

Seeing me fidget, she adds, “All I want is to see you happy, you know? You’re about to move in with Mr Perfect. You should be glowing, man.”

The knot in my throat makes it hard to speak or swallow. Despite having laced Mr Perfect with sarcasm, Izzy truly does want me to be happy, even though I’m leaving her and Leeds behind. Even though…

Even though… actually, let’s not think about how very badly I let her down, not right now. Let’s nod and fight back these infuriating tears.

“Are you nodding,” Izzy says, “because you agree you should be happy, or because you want me to check his Twitter for signs of death?”

“Both,” I manage to say.

Izzy whoops with relief and whips her phone from her bag. Unlike most people, who feel on edge if their phone isn’t on the table right in front of them, Izzy has a healthy, normal relationship with hers. What a total cow.

I gulp my drink as she taps her phone screen and navigates through to Twitter.

“Okay,” she says, scrolling down. Then she stops dead and peers at the screen. Oh shit. She doesn’t look concerned so much as horrified.

I’m waiting for the big fake-out laugh, but it doesn’t come. Instead, she says, “Brace yourself.”

“What the fuck is it? What the fuck’s happened?”

“You know Sarah Harding, who used to be in Girls Aloud? Last night, Scott posted a picture of her and him, saying she’s his… new girlfriend.”

My brain spasms, then snaps back into shape.

“Fuck right off,” I tell Izzy, who finally breaks cover with one of her bomb-blast cackles.

“Sorry mate, I couldn’t resist.”

“Fuck’s sake.” I’m not even smiling, let alone laughing. “Why did you have to pick someone vaguely plausible? Why couldn’t you have chosen Madonna, or Kim Kardashian?”

Seeing my total lack of amusement, Izzy composes herself. “Because I’m… evil? Also, Kim’s already spoken for by Kanye… sorry, I mean by Ye.”

“So… has Scott tweeted?”

“Not since you last heard from him. Shit, I really am sorry.” She peers at the drink I bought her. “Is this a double? That was mean of me. But serves you right for sodding off to Brighton and leaving me here.”

“You’ve got Jared to keep you busy. You’ve got plenty of other friends, too, you daft mare. And if you think I won’t be in touch, like every hour of every day, then you’re sadly mistaken.”

Izzy knocks back the rest of her drink. “Have you tried calling Scott? Your olde-worlde piece-of-shit phone does do calls, right?”

“Twice so far: morning and afternoon. I mean, you play it cool when you’re first seeing someone, but surely when you’ve agreed to move in together, all that crap’s off the table.”

She seizes upon a new angle. “Which network is he with? Could the network be down?”

I consider this thin sliver of hope, then brush it aside. “Look, if he’d changed his mind about me moving in, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he?”

“Course he would.” Even as Izzy says this, I’m painfully aware that she’s never met Scott. She has no idea of what he would or wouldn’t do.

Neither do you, Kate. Not really. And that’s why your stomach feels like you drank bad milk.

“I’m going to miss you so much,” I tell her, welling up again. “Sarah Harding or no fuckin’ Sarah Harding, you are awesome.”

Something diverts Izzy’s attention over my shoulder. She says, “You’ll love me less in about three seconds.”

Wearing his one decent shirt, Trevor leads a grinning, whooping posse of our ambulance colleagues across the tacky carpet towards us. Each of them clutches the string of a bobbing, Day-Glo helium balloon. I barely tolerate half of these people, but apparently they’ve tolerated me more than I knew. Or, more likely, they’ll grab any old excuse for a piss-up.

Izzy and I get sucked into the maelstrom. Everyone wants to hug me, push a drink in my hand and wish me luck on the next step of my journey through the bewilderingly twisty corridors of life.

I’d feel so much better about this little soirée if only my phone would vibrate.

1 June

The second time I see Scott Palmer, he comes out of nowhere.

A faint breeze ruffles my hair. I’m cross-legged on one of the blankets the organisers handed out, which in turn sits on the bare earth of this wooded glade.

“And when the black, black obsidian sea tries to claim you,” says Tomm, “know that you, and you alone, are your own sparkly little lighthouse.”

Is this really a glade? What’s the difference between a glade and a clearing, for instance? Being an urban upstart, I have no clue. Also: why am I thinking about this when I should be meditating like the rest of the group?

“Mother Nature, let me feast upon your apples,” says Tomm. “For you are my mother too. You are all of our mothers. You are everything.”

Would I get any of my £295 back if I wrestle Tomm to the ground while barking the word Silence? I’ve already eaten one of the included vegan meals and heard the first of this weekend’s talks from the nice anthropologist woman. That might be fifty or sixty quid’s worth, so far.

“You are the trees. You are the hedgerows. You are the living, prancing fire of the Earth.”

Tomm probably isn’t the type to press charges. He’s such a bright-eyed muppet, he’d write the whole incident off as me having become so fired up by his poetry that I couldn’t help myself. People express their positive energy via different channels, yeah?

“You are the tiny mice that make homes in the hillside. You are the rabbits, nestled deep in their warren…”

These days, meditation feels like a forlorn hope, because life no longer allows you to clear your head. True mindfulness may have been achievable prior to 1980, but that ship has sailed. Our heads are jammed way too full of data.

I’ve now been without my smartphone for two months, three days, eleven hours and about twenty-two minutes. But hey, who’s counting?

Even after this chunk of abstinence, I remain haunted. My skull rattles with the ghosts of old Likes, Favourites, message requests, tweets, retweets, deleted tweets, tweets that weren’t deleted but should have been deleted, photographs, videos, memes, bounced emails, emojis and the pings of ten million notifications.

Being without my smartphone has felt like acclimatising to the loss of a limb… or even the loss of my old self. This has meant trying to figure out who the fuck I am and what I enjoy doing. So far, the answer to the second question has been helping other people, guzzling booze and wolfing down easily prepared comfort food.

No longer online? Prepare to feel like you’re stuck on the outside, looking in. Prepare to feel intensely alone and isolated, as the world’s biggest party carries merrily on without you, barely even sparing a thought for your absence. All those Twitterers who apologise to their followers for not having tweeted in a while, they’re kidding themselves. Might as well apologise for no longer pissing in the ocean.

“You are the bees, collecting bounteous pollen and nectar to feed us all…”

While passing internet cafés, I’ve experienced frighteningly powerful urges to slip inside them. On two occasions, I have weakened and found myself settling in front of a computer terminal, preparing to reactivate Facebook. But then, having remembered what went down in the early hours of 28 March, I’ve left straight away, appalled by myself.

Time and time again, I’ll dream up a tweet that’s got viral written all over it, or I’ll mentally frame the perfect Instagram shot. Then I’ll pull out my Nokia handset and groan at the tiny screen, the blocky text and the SMS-only bullshit.

When I see the news on TV, my dopamine receptors twitch and yelp through sheer deprivation. I’m no longer part of the online conversation, weighing in with my own “hilarious” hot take on everything that happens in the world.

Maybe, just maybe, the world is better off without one more hot take from a nobody. The world can struggle on without one more person who thinks they can bring down the US president by quote-retweeting them and adding a devastating critique for all thirty-eight of their followers to see.

“You are the ants, the earthworms, the centipedes, even the spiders…”

Opening my eyes, just a crack, I dare to bring everyone’s silhouettes into view. Perched on the log, our guest poet Tomm reads from his tatty sheets of handwritten paper. Thankfully, our group leader Lizzie has her eyes shut tight. Is she really in a trance, or is she secretly gloating about her success in having lured a fresh consignment of lost, solvent souls to the back of beyond?

Yes, all sixteen of us not only volunteered but even paid to go on this digital detox retreat for an entire weekend, while the rest of society carried on hurling terabytes of data at each other. Are we delusional misfits or enlightened pioneers?

“And when the bold blue ocean rises over your head, know that you are safe in Mother Nature’s embrace…”

Oh shit. Rumbled. This ridiculously handsome guy is looking straight at me.

His neutral expression makes him worryingly unreadable, while his laser-beam eyes threaten to send me hurtling back against the nearest tree. I freeze and question whether I should close my eyes again, but I feel too entranced. This guy wasn’t with us before, was he? There’s no way. I would definitely have remembered.

Wait. He looks weirdly familiar. Do I know him?

Handsome Laser-Beam Guy side-eyes Tomm, then comes back to me. With tiny, gentle movements, he performs the universally recognised hand gesture for wanker, then he tips me a wink. His big wolfish grin showcases teeth so Hollywood-white that I actually blink. While returning the grin, I find myself wishing I’d devoted way more effort to cleaning my own teeth this morning.

“… and Mother Nature, in turn, will look after you. Thanks, everyone. You’re beautiful.”

As Tomm’s poem reaches this limp climax, Handsome Laser-Wolf and I exchange the looks of naughty schoolkids about to be caught. Amusingly, as we join everyone else in applauding, we both remember to squint against the sunlight, as if we’ve stayed as bat-blind as everyone else for these full fifteen minutes of torment.

Smirky Laser-Wolf and I, we’re like partners in crime. And now the penny finally drops. This guy is the one I Super-Liked on Tinder, back on Valentine’s Day.

The guy who never so much as Liked me back.

“So. Confess…’

When Scott whispers these words into my left ear, his breath makes me tingle. “You’re dying to get your phone back, right?”

Inside this big tent, our group sits in a circle once again. Always with the circles. Ferrying hot spoonfuls of vegan goulash from bowl to mouth, we engage in low-volume chat.

I never expected to meet someone here, let alone some hot guy I once saw on Tinder. I came to strengthen my resistance to temptation, but now a different kind of temptation has reared its fit, designer-stubbled head.

Could there actually be something between us? During our group’s walk across the moors to get here, Scott not only tagged along with me but stayed resolutely by my side. When I asked where he’d appeared from, on the second day of this retreat, he explained that he’d been forced to cancel yesterday after a client had made him “an offer I couldn’t refuse”. This segued nicely into a spirited discussion about the Godfather trilogy. Conversation already flows more smoothly between us than it ever did with any guy I’ve met through a dating app.

Scott and I, we’re dancing this fun little dance. The rest of the group are mere bystanders now, their faces blurred, their voices muffled and distant. Outwardly, he and I are going along with all these mindful activities, but our true focus is on each other.

Right now, I’m focused on lying to Scott,. . .