Simon Riley

Death had always been an inseparable part of life, whether people wanted to acknowledge it or not. It was there in the quietest corners of existence, waiting patiently for its turn. The loss of a beloved pet. A parent. A sibling. A friend. A partner. Someone you thought would always be there, until suddenly they weren’t.

It was impossible to escape entirely. Death appeared on television screens over breakfast, in newspaper headlines left abandoned on train seats, in hushed conversations between neighbours. Someone murdered in the street. A child beaten to death by their own father. Entire families wiped out by war. A genocide unfolding thousands of miles away, reduced to numbers and brief reports before the world moved on to the next story.

The truth was, death never really left anyone alone.

It walked beside people quietly, patiently, an invisible companion they carried from the moment they were born.

For most people, the thought of it was unbearable. They avoided it whenever they could, dressing it up in euphemisms and refusing to look too closely at the inevitable. They convinced themselves there would always be more time. More birthdays. More mornings. More opportunities to fix mistakes, say the things they’d left unsaid, chase ambitions they kept putting off.

Simon Riley had never been afforded that luxury.

Death had been following him for as long as he could remember.

Long before the army, long before the mask, long before the name Ghost had become something people whispered with a mixture of fear and reverence, there had been death waiting in the background of his childhood.

He remembered the Bone Lickers concert.

He couldn’t have been more than ten when his father made him watch a prostitute die from an overdose. Simon could still remember the smell of alcohol and sweat hanging thick in the air, the noise of the crowd continuing around them as though nothing important had happened. People laughed. Music played. Somewhere, someone shouted.

And a woman was dying.

He remembered the old woman next door, too. She used to watch Simon and Tommy when their mother worked long shifts, always fussing over whether they’d eaten enough, always telling them to wipe their shoes before coming inside. One morning, she simply didn’t wake up. Simon found her on the floor in their living room.

Then there was the stray dog.

Simon had tried to save it. Tried to hide it from his father, sneaking it scraps of food and water, keeping it tucked away wherever he thought it would be safe. It was frightened, filthy, half-starved—but it trusted him.

His father found out.

Simon remembered begging him to stop. Remembered throwing himself between them, only to be shoved aside like he was nothing.

And then he had to watch his father beat the dog to death.

He remembered the sounds more than anything else. The desperate yelps. His own screaming. The sickening thuds that eventually stopped.

When it was over, the dog lay completely still.

Simon had sat beside it, one small hand buried in its fur, unable to understand how something could be alive one moment and simply… gone the next.

After a while, death stopped shocking him.

It became background noise.

Something constant and inevitable, like rain against a window or the ticking of a clock in an otherwise silent room. The faces changed. The circumstances changed. The sounds changed.

The ending never did.

He learned young that death wasn’t something you could bargain with. You couldn’t outrun it. You couldn’t reason with it. Eventually, you simply learned how to live with the knowledge that it was always there.

So when Simon signed up for the British Army at eighteen, death wasn’t new.

Neither was blood.

Neither were screams.

Later, when he joined the Special Air Service, the scale simply changed. The places became different. The uniforms changed. The weapons changed. The people standing beside him changed.

The end result remained exactly the same.

People died.

And Simon kept going.

Until his mid-twenties, when death finally stopped being something happening around him and tore straight through the centre of his own life.

His family was murdered.

His mother.

Tommy.

Tommy’s wife.

Little Joseph.

Every piece of home he’d ever had was ripped away in a single, brutal act.

There was no coming back from it.

At first, it hadn’t felt real. Simon remembered moving through those days as though he were watching someone else live them, unable to make the pieces fit together in his mind.

Then the numbness came.

It was almost worse.

The world lost its colour. Sounds became distant. Conversations became things he endured rather than participated in. Food became something required rather than wanted. Sleep became an unreliable interruption between one day and the next.

There was nothing left to return to.

So Simon stopped trying.

He buried himself in the only thing that still made sense.

The army.

The job became his entire existence. Orders were simple. Objectives were clear. There were rules. There was structure. There was always something that needed doing.

It gave him a reason to wake up each morning. A reason to get out of bed, put on the uniform, and keep moving even when there was nothing inside him that wanted to. The army gave him structure, purpose, something concrete to cling to when everything else had already been stripped away. As long as there was another mission, another order to follow, another objective waiting at the end of the day, he didn’t have to think about what was left of him underneath it all.

It was enough.

Or at least, he’d convinced himself it was.

He’d spent years believing there was nothing left in him that could truly break. He’d already lost his family, watched comrades die, buried pieces of himself over and over again. There wasn’t supposed to be anything left for death to take from him.

Then Johnny died.

And somehow, impossibly, it hurt.

Not like the others had. This wasn’t the distant, familiar ache he’d learned to carry. Johnny’s death reached straight through all that numbness and found something Simon had thought he’d buried for good. It tore open a wound he hadn’t even realised was still there, leaving him with the unbearable realisation that, somehow, there were still people in this world he could lose—and still pieces of himself capable of hurting when they were gone.

It shouldn’t have mattered this much.

But it did.

The grief wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It simply settled somewhere deep inside his chest and refused to leave, a constant weight he carried without ever quite knowing how to put it down. For a man who had spent his entire life surrounded by death, it was a cruel reminder that some ghosts didn’t disappear simply because you’d learned how to live with the dead.

He was placed on mandatory leave, along with Price and Gaz. There was no clear end date, no mission waiting for him, no deployment to prepare for. Just civvy streets, an empty schedule, and an apartment in Manchester that had slowly begun to feel less like somewhere he lived and more like somewhere he’d been left.

It did absolutely fuck all.

If anything, being removed from the rigid structure of military life gave his thoughts far too much room to breathe. Without orders to follow or objectives to focus on, there was nothing left to drown them out. Simon spent most days inside the same four dark walls, barely moving unless he had to. The curtains remained drawn from morning until night, leaving the apartment perpetually dim and stale. Dishes accumulated in the sink. Takeaway containers gathered on whatever surface was closest until the smell became impossible to ignore. Some days he ate whatever was easiest; other days he realised, usually late at night, that he’d forgotten to eat at all.

Mostly, he existed.

That was the only word for it.

One morning, he found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror for longer than he intended. The light overhead was harsh and unforgiving, illuminating every detail he normally ignored—the hollowness beneath his eyes, the faint pallor of his skin, the roughness of several days’ worth of stubble. His hair had grown longer than usual and refused to sit properly, falling messily across his forehead.

He stared at the reflection.

A man he’d long since forgotten stared back.

Simon Riley.

The name felt strangely distant, like something belonging to another person. He barely recognised the man anymore. If he was being honest with himself, he sometimes wondered whether that man even existed anymore, or whether he’d been buried years ago somewhere between the bodies of his family and the ruins of everything he’d once considered home.

The reflection remained expressionless. Hazel eyes, dull and exhausted. Dark shadows beneath them from nights spent tossing restlessly beneath tangled sheets. His face looked older than it should have, worn down by something that had nothing to do with age.

Six months.

It had been six months since Johnny died.

The nightmares had started almost immediately. At first, they were the familiar kind—the ones he’d carried for years without much thought. Blood. Gunfire. Screaming. Faces without names. Things he’d learned to wake from without remembering by morning.

Then Johnny’s face started appearing.

Sometimes Simon woke with his heart pounding, convinced for a brief, disorienting moment that he’d heard his voice somewhere in the apartment. Sometimes he dreamed about the mission. Sometimes he dreamed about moments that had never happened at all—conversations they’d never had, places they’d never been, ordinary things that felt painfully real until he opened his eyes.

Those were somehow worse.

And beneath all of it was guilt.

Of every emotion Simon had thought himself incapable of feeling anymore, guilt was the one that had surprised him most. He’d expected grief, perhaps anger, even the familiar numbness. He hadn’t expected something so persistent and corrosive. Guilt had teeth; it sank deeper every time he closed his eyes, feeding on every memory until even the smallest detail became another reason to blame himself.

He kept thinking about what he could have done differently. What he should have noticed. What he should have said. What if he’d moved faster? What if he’d been there? What if he’d done something—anything—that could have changed the outcome?

The questions never ended, and unlike bullets, there was no armour thick enough to stop them.

His therapist kept telling him that guilt was part of grief. That six months wasn’t a long time. That healing wasn’t linear, and that some days would inevitably be worse than others. Simon didn’t particularly believe him, but he kept going anyway.

Six months of forcing himself to do things that felt pointless: showering, eating, leaving the apartment, answering messages, attending therapy, trying to exist in a world that no longer required him to be useful.

Going outside had been the hardest.

At first, he’d barely managed the walk to the corner shop. Then, slowly, his therapist convinced him to go farther. Ten minutes became twenty, twenty became forty, and eventually the late-evening walks became something resembling a routine. He started taking them roughly an hour before his therapy appointments, giving himself enough time to walk without feeling rushed before eventually making his way to the clinic.

There was something about that particular time of day that made leaving the apartment slightly easier. Manchester was quieter then. The sharpness of the day had begun to fade, and the streets were washed in the muted colours of approaching night. Streetlights flickered on one by one, their pale glow reflecting against damp pavement, while warm squares of light appeared behind curtains in the surrounding houses. Cars passed occasionally, tyres whispering over the asphalt. People hurried home with shopping bags tucked against their sides, couples walked shoulder to shoulder, dogs tugged at their leads, and somewhere in the distance a train rattled along its tracks.

Normal life.

It continued regardless of what Simon felt.

At first, that had irritated him. There was something almost offensive about watching everyone else continue as though nothing had happened, laughing with friends, complaining about work, rushing home to people who were still waiting for them. Johnny was dead, and yet the world hadn’t even noticed.

Now, strangely, Simon found something almost comforting in it.

The world didn’t stop because Johnny was dead. It didn’t stop because Simon was hurting. It simply kept moving, indifferent and relentless, carrying everything forward whether people were ready for it or not.

And perhaps that was the point.

Maybe he didn’t have to feel better yet. Maybe he didn’t even have to want to feel better. Maybe, for now, all he had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other and let time do whatever it was supposed to do.

His therapist had admitted that the late appointments were unusual and inconvenient for some, but they’d found that the schedule worked better for him. Simon preferred it that way. There were fewer people around, fewer questions, less of that uncomfortable brightness that came with being expected to function in the middle of the day.

So he walked.

An hour before each session, he’d leave the apartment and wander through the streets without much of a destination. Sometimes he walked for miles, letting his feet carry him wherever they wanted. Sometimes he barely made it around the same few blocks before turning back.

He didn’t always feel better when he returned.

Usually, he didn’t feel much of anything at all.

But he was outside. He was moving. He was, however reluctantly, participating in the world again.

And for the first time in six months, Simon thought that perhaps that had to count for something.

Among the other little things that hardly seemed important, a new neighbour moved in.

Right next to his own flat.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to notice. The communal hallway seemed permanently cluttered with cardboard boxes for the first few days, stacked against the walls and occasionally narrowing the passage enough that Simon had to turn sideways to get past. There was the scrape of furniture being dragged across the floor at odd hours, the muffled thud of something heavy being dropped, the occasional sound of footsteps moving back and forth behind the wall.

The walls were thin, after all.

Thin enough that Simon could hear more than he cared to.

He caught glimpses of the new tenant now and then, usually in passing—a figure disappearing through the neighbouring door, an armful of groceries, the brief sound of keys turning in a lock. Nothing that held his attention for more than a second.

Simon didn’t make any effort to get a proper look.

He wasn’t interested.

Neighbours came and went. People moved into buildings, stayed for a while, then moved somewhere else. Most were nothing more than background noise to him, and he preferred it that way. He had no desire for introductions, polite small talk, awkward hallway conversations, or the inevitable questions that came with being the quiet man who rarely spoke to anyone.

So he left the new tenant to settle in.

Simon went on with his days as though nothing had changed, slipping back into the same monotonous routine he’d built around himself.

The boxes eventually disappeared.

The noise eventually became less common.

And the person living on the other side of the wall eventually became nothing more than another anonymous presence in the building.