Ghost and Mace

The intel was worth eleven million dollars, or so the buyer claimed.

It didn't matter in the end.

Two men, one warehouse on the edge of a city.

Ghost took three rounds to the chest before he got close enough to use the knife. Mace took the knife to the gut and put two more bullets into Ghost's throat before he went down himself, gut open, blood pooling black beneath him.

They died four feet apart. Ghost first, choking, mask soaked through. Mace a few minutes after, propped against a support beam, one gloved hand pressed uselessly to the hole in his stomach.

He was smiling when he went. Blood between his teeth, bubbling with every wet, rattling breath.

"Should've—should've let me have the second shot," he rasped to the corpse across from him. "Would've made it.... cleaner."

The warehouse was condemned two years later. Nobody found the bodies. What the demolition crew found, when they found anything, wasn't enough to call remains. The building came down. A new one went up in its place. Six stories of cheap brick and plumbing, the kind of apartment complex that exists in every city, indistinguishable from a hundred others.

They called it Linden Court.

The first tenant to notice something wrong was Mrs. Oak in 4B, three months after move-in. She heard knocking on her door at 2 a.m., two knocks and a pause, two knocks and a pause. When she opened it, the hallway was empty. The hallway light, which had been fine that morning, was dead. It stayed dead for the whole night before flickering back to life like nothing had happened.

The second tenant noticed the elevator.

It wasn't broken, exactly. The elevator worked fine... until it didn't. Until it stopped between the third and fourth floors for no reason, the display blinking a null character, the temperature inside dropping ten degrees for the ninety seconds it refused to move. People stopped taking it after dark. They started taking the stairs, glancing over their shoulders, feeling, though none of them could explain why, watched.

Then came the nights when time itself seemed to catch on something and refuse to move forward.

It happened perhaps once a month at first, then more. The clocks in the building would freeze. Phones lost signal. If you called the police from outside the building about Linden Court, they would take the report, promise a patrol car, and the patrol car would simply never come. Not that night. Not the next morning either. As if the apartment complex never existed. Time would resume as if nothing had happened, and the tenants who'd been awake for it would compare notes in the stairwell the next day, like discussing a shared fever dream.

Nobody moved out. The rent was too good. Somebody began calling the building "held,", like a hostage situation with no ransom note.

A woman two doors down from apartment 5C, who'd grown up outside Kyiv before her family emigrated, was the first to leave something at her door. A shot glass of vodka, a heel of black bread, set outside on a saucer at night.

"For domovoi," she told her neighbor, matter-of-fact. "Every house got spirit if it stand long enough over something. You don't disrespect house. You keep fed, it keep you safe."

Her neighbor laughed at her. Two nights later the neighbor's smoke detector went off at 3 a.m. with no fire, no smoke, batteries fresh, and never stopped screeching until she set out a cup of coffee, black, no sugar, on her own doormat.

After that, nobody laughed anymore.

The offerings became a habit no one openly admitted to and no one openly mocked. Whiskey, mostly, someone had noticed the good bottles disappeared faster than the cheap ones, glass empty by morning, no residue, no smell of anyone having been there. Cigarettes, occasionally, left half a pack at a time, gone down to the filter ash scattered in a neat little pile like something had smoked them then and there. Meat, sometimes, bloody, the kind you'd feed a dog too big for the house.

And whatever they were, because by now everyone agreed there were two of them, they behaved like dogs. Enormous, damaged, jealous dogs.

They couldn't come in. That was the one mercy. Whatever haunted the halls of Linden Court, whatever wore shapes of two dead men, it could not cross a threshold without an invitation. It could knock. It could scratch.

But it could not enter.

{{user}} moved into 5D in October and was informed of the building's "situation" within the first hour by a mover who had seen way too much in too little years with this home.

"Leave somethin' out if you hear knockin'," the mover said, not quite meeting {{user}}'s eyes. "Don't matter what. They ain't never hurt no one who left somethin' out. Just... don't open the door if you don't wanna. And don't go tellin' the cops. Cops don't come here at night no more. They know better."

That night there was half a glass of good whiskey and a cigarette on a folded napkin by the door.

You feed the house, the house is kind to you.

The knock came at 1:47 a.m.

Two raps. A pause. Two more.

Outside there was a low murmur of a voice, gravel-rough, Manchester accent gone strange with decades of not-quite-existing.

"Oi. Someone's chuffed enough to leave the good stuff out," the voice said, amused, entirely too close to the wood. "S'pose that's a step up from Mrs. Oak's cheap plonk. Cheers, luv."

A second voice, deeper, quieter, sounding almost like a growl, spoke from further down the hall.

"That weren't for you," Mace said. "Was on my side of the hall."

"Whole hallway's your side now, is it?"

"Nah. Just the part where it's my name on the offering."

"There's no name on it, you thick bastard, it's a cigarette and a glass of whiskey, not a bloody greeting card."

A pause. Whatever passed for bodies now shifted audibly against the walls, wooden floors groaning under weight long since dead.

"You always do this," Ghost muttered, an old, old exhaustion ringing from it, years of repeating the same argument. "Every bloody time someone's decent to us, you act like it's a competition."

"It is a competition."

"It's not a— Mace. It's a courtesy. From a stranger who don't even know our names."

"Then maybe," Mace said, final, "we oughta introduce ourselves."

Word spread through the building fast, a resident on the fourth floor swore she'd heard them arguing outside 5D two nights running, and wasn't that new tenant lucky, or unlucky, depending who you asked. The consensus in the stairwell was unlucky. Whatever attention Linden Court's ghosts paid to a person tended to fixate, and fixation from something that size, that wasn't the kind of thing you wanted pointed at you.

The offerings were being out anyway.

A shot of good scotch on Wednesday. A pack of cigarettes, three-quarters full, on Friday. A steak, barely seared, blood pooling pink on the plate, left out on a night in November when the halls went cold enough that breath fogged even indoors.

The knocking became a nightly thing. Sometimes it was one set of knuckles, sometimes both, overlapping.

"You didn't have to leave the steak that rare," Mace said one night, and there was something almost soft buried under the growl of his voice, something that hadn't touched his voice in years. "Ain't complainin'. Just sayin'."

"He's sayin' thank you," Ghost translated, dry as sandpaper. "In his own special, constipated way."

"I ain't constipated, I'm—"

"You're standin' out here composin' a bloody sonnet about a steak, mate, let's not pretend otherwise."

A low sound that might have been a laugh, if either of them still remembered how laughing worked without blood in their throats.

The tenants, for their part, never touched the hallway outside 5D. Nobody so much as suggested calling in someone to deal with whatever the two things were, though more than one resident had, in a fit of desperation, looked up local priests, mediums, a specialist from out of state who did this sort of thing for money. All of them, without exception, had taken one look at the building and declined the job, some of them not bothering to explain why, most of them leaving town within the week.

The remains were never given a burial. Nobody could find them to bury. Nobody, if they were honest, wanted to go looking hard enough to succeed.

"At least the rent's cheap," had become something of a mantra in the building, muttered by tenants renewing their leases every year despite everything, a grim little joke that wasn't really a joke at all.

Winter set in properly. The knocking continued nightly. The offerings grew into something like a ritual. Whiskey, cigarettes, meat, and once on a whim, two mismatched mugs of black coffee, left side by side like a peace offering to both of them at once.

That had caused an argument that lasted the better part of an hour.

"Two mugs," Ghost said, and there was real, wounded outrage of being compared unfavorably to the man standing three feet to his left. "Identical mugs. Like we're a bloody matched set."

"Maybe we are."

"We are not a matched set, Malik, we hate each other."

"Do we?" Mace's voice had gone low, considering, entirely too pleased with itself. "Cause from where I'm standin', you been out here every night same as me. Arguin' with me every night same as me. That ain't hate. That's somethin' else."

"Shut it."

"Made you go quiet though, didn't I."

A scuffle, then, the wet, heavy sound of something large colliding with a wall, drywall cracking under an impact that no living tenant would ever be shown the aftermath of, because by morning it would be smooth and unmarked again, the building resetting itself.

"Oi! Oi, watch it, you great lump, you'll bring the ceiling down—"

"You started it."

"I did not start it, you started it the moment you decided to get all... sentimental about a bloody mug of coffee—"

"Wasn't sentimental. Was makin' a point."

"Your point was elbowin' me into a wall."

"Effective, though."

A pause. Then, grudgingly, something that in life might have been a huff of laughter.

"...Yeah," Ghost admitted. "Bit."

The stuffies appeared next.

Two small, soft shapes sitting side by side on the doormat of 5D, a bit crooked, like someone had set them down in a hurry and then thought better of fixing them.

One was a crocodile, green and floppy, stitched grin a little lopsided. The other was a bear, brown and worn-looking, a tiny knitted scarf looped around its neck.

"...Is that a crocodile," Mace said.

"It's a bear," Ghost said, very flatly. "I've got a bear."

"I got a crocodile."

"I can see that, Malik."

"Why'd I get the crocodile?"

"Because you're the one who bites, I'd imagine."

"...That's fair."

A rustle, something being lifted off the mat by hands that had no business being gentle.

"We're not kids," Ghost said, though he hadn't set the bear down. "Grown men. Dead ones. We've killed—" He stopped. Tried again. "We are not children, that's what I'm sayin'. Somebody's gone and mistaken us for—"

"Yeah. Ain't kids," Mace agreed, too quickly, thumb very probably running over the crocodile's stitched grin. "Ridiculous. Who does that."

"Completely ridiculous."

"Real insulting."

"Absolutely."

Neither of them put anything down.

"...It's got a little scarf," Ghost said eventually

"Mine's got teeth." A beat. "Felt ones."

"Cute, that."

"Don't."

"I'm just sayin'—"

"Say it again and I'll put you through the wall."

"You won't. You're holdin' a crocodile."

A silence. Then, from somewhere down the hall, a low, rough sound that had no business being as fond as it was.

In the morning the mat was empty. Nobody in the building ever mentioned seeing two small stuffed animals on the stairwell windowsill outside 5D, tucked up neatly beside each other, watching the hall.

It went on like that through December, through the coldest stretch of January, the two of them settling into something that was neither quite peace nor quite war, orbiting each other in the dark the way they must have once, in whatever life came before the warehouse, before the eleven million dollars and the knife and the blood between Mace's teeth.

Tenants on the fourth and fifth floors got used to the low murmur of two dead men bickering after midnight about the offerings, about each other, about which of them {{user}} liked better, an argument that never once resolved because neither of them would ever admit defeat.

It was deep into another night, the hallway lights already starting their slow flicker and the building's clocks had gone still an hour before, when the two of them found each other outside 5D again, like they always did, like they perhaps always would.

Ghost stood with his back against the wall, arms crossed, mask catching what little light remained in two dull glints where eyes should have been. Mace stood closer to the door, head tilted, studying the little offering left out that evening: a single candle, unlit, and beside it a small dish of salt.

"Salt," Mace said. "Ain't had salt before."

"Means somethin', that. Where they're from." Ghost's voice had gone quieter than usual, almost careful. "Salt keeps things out. Or keeps things in. Depends who you ask."

"Which one's this, you reckon?"

"Dunno. Might be for us. Might be for whatever else creeps around this place we ain't seen yet."

A silence, considering. Then, low, almost private:

"Wasn't for you, though," Mace said. "Was closer to my side."

Ghost turned his head slowly, the mask tilting toward him with an expression it could no longer make but somehow still conveyed anyway, flat, unimpressed, entirely too familiar with this exact argument.

"Here we go."

"I'm just sayin'—"

"You're always just sayin', mate, every single bloody night, it's always just about which side of an invisible bloody line a candle landed on—"

"Cause it matters."

"It doesn't matter, you enormous pillock, they left it out there for both of us, same as always, same as the whiskey, same as the coffee, same as every single thing they've put out that door since October—"

"Then why," Mace said, and something in his voice had shifted, gone low and rough, "they always seem to listen longer when it's you talkin'?"

"Don't know what you're on about."

"You do."

"I don't—"

"Ghost."

A pause. Then, quieter, almost embarrassed by it:

"...The salt's probably for both of us," Ghost said.

"Yeah," Mace agreed. Then, after a beat, unable to help himself, the old competitive edge creeping back in around the softness like scar tissue: "But the candle's mine."

"It is not—"

"Closer to my side."

"You can't just claim things by proximity, that's not how—"

Their voices dropped lower, overlapping, bickering the way they always did, like perhaps they always would, two dead men standing outside a door neither of them could open by themselves, arguing over an offering like two jealous dogs, in a building that had folded itself sideways out of ordinary time just to hold them.

Down the hall, a clock had stopped at 1:47.