Chapter Text
After the Ghost with the Most was swallowed by a sandworm, Lydia felt like something had changed within her.
The first sign was that she started to feel like being alive wasn’t so bad after all. That night had been like a kick in her butt, a push to make her fight for a life worth living.
So, she fought. For the next few years, she was just a normal teenager—or, as normal as she could be with Delia as a step-mother and two ghosts as godparents.
Her highschool years were rocked by the usual trials: stressing about exams she knew she’d find insignificant in a few years, dealing with a social hierarchy dominating what were supposed to be learning grounds—not the most pleasant thing, considering that Lydia was never at the top—or butting heads with parents that wouldn’t let her stay out too late.
On that last point, the Maitlands played a much bigger role than her living and breathing parents. Go figure.
But overall, she still managed to find happiness in her everyday life, thanks first and foremost to the Maitlands.
Only once she left for college did she realize that maybe everything wasn’t so simple after all. Moving to a big city meant she was among way more people. Which meant more dead people. Which meant more ghosts.
In all her years in Winter River, she had not seen that many ghosts. There had been a few encounters, but she never lingered long with them—the memory of that night was still fresh in her mind, and she tried to avoid another… situation.
But a surprising number of people managed to die in cities with so many inhabitants, and a lot of them did not look dead. Sure, it was easy enough to notice that the gentleman with a brain leaking out of his half destroyed head was probably not the most alive individual. But so many people looked no different as ghosts as they did alive, and more than once, Lydia accidentally struck a conversation with a ghost, noticing her mistake only once the dirty looks directed at her multiplied. After all, from the onlookers’ point of view, she was talking to a wall.
Lydia didn’t really care: she was already used to being an outcast, and she had gone through far worse than a few glares. It was all very manageable.
But there were also those moments.
It was nothing, really. It wasn’t proof of anything. But sometimes, she thought she saw stripes that weren’t there. Or a laugh resonated a bit too loudly and she would turn around, searching for its source.
Before the Maitlands left, they told her it would take time before she stopped being scared, but that it would happen someday.
Lydia never disagreed to their faces, but deep down, something told her she wasn’t afraid. What she felt, she didn’t know. But scared? No.
Sometimes, she wondered about what she would do if those stripes weren’t just stripes; or if she found the source of that laughter, and it was in fact who she thought it was. Every time, she drew a blank.
Still, despite it all, Lydia considered that everything was going pretty smoothly. She came out of college with a degree she’d never use, an alarming number of ghost friends, and a man she thought was the love of her life.
By that point, she had accumulated enough knowledge to self-identify as a ghost expert, even if no one really knew about that except for her parents and Richard. And if she could turn that knowledge to her advantage, then she would.
Thankfully, she had Richard with her. Being with him felt natural: they were both full of energy—him with his environmental activism, her with her medium carrier. Somehow, it worked well: they fed off of each other’s energy and supported the other towards their respective goals.
The birth of their daughter only cemented their happiness, and Lydia thought that truly, she had started to live again.
Astrid met her first ghost when she was six. Even if she didn’t know it at the time.
She was at Celia's birthday party, someone she was supposed to call a “friend”, even though Astrid didn’t consider any of her classmates as such. She had been invited probably more out of obligation than anything else, so she hadn’t really planned on going. But her mom, overjoyed to see her daughter finally make some friends, had been a bit too eager to get her there.
“—and three days ago, the neighbors left the house for ever.” Celia said. A shiver ran through the crowd of small children.
Astrid had checked out about halfway through the girl’s story. She was telling something about her neighbors’ house, and how haunted she claimed it was. Astrid knew what haunted was, because it only happened on her mom’s radio show—at least, that’s what her dad had said.
So there was no way this house was haunted.
Astrid yawned. “The house isn't haunted.”
Her words broke the tension, and a few children started murmuring among themselves.
“Yes, it is! ” Celia huffed. “If you’re so sure it’s not, why don’t you go there and prove it yourself?”
The whispers grew louder and this time, Astrid knew the tide was against her.
“I’m not going in someone else’s house. That’s bad,” Astrid said, crossing her arms.
Celia put her hands on her hips and walked slowly towards Astrid, a smirk on her lips. “Are you scared?”
Astrid jumped to her feet. She could live with being called a liar, but not a coward.
Now that Astrid stood in front of the old oak door, her resolve had all but disappeared. It was one thing to say the house wasn’t haunted, and it was another to actually go inside it. There was something… weird about this place.
“Are you chickening out already?” Celia shouted. A chorus of laughter and chicken sounds rose from behind Astrid. She clenched her fists. Not one of them had dared enter the garden, and yet they thought they could make fun of her?
She swallowed. With her trembling hand, she reached for the handle and pushed.
To her surprise, it actually opened, revealing a disappointingly normal living room. Astrid heard a few gasps behind her when the door creaked open. Emboldened by this apparent normalcy, she turned around, smiled at the other children and entered the house, letting the door close behind her with a soft click.
Now what? She didn’t really have a plan, but going back now didn’t seem like an option. They would say she was scared.
Astrid decided to explore. There wasn’t much to see: the living room was a place made for adults, and there was never anything interesting to see in places made for adults. She wandered between the furniture, looking around for any sign that would prove there were no ghosts.
She wasn’t sure how one could prove the absence of something, but even just staying here would show the others that she wasn’t a coward.
The smell appeared as she was kneeling next to a shelf, trying to look under it. A faint odor, like that time she went to her grandpa’s cellar, where humidity mixed with the smell of old people.
“Well, well well. What the fuck are you doing here, kid?” A voice boomed right in her ear. Startled, she let out a cry, jumped to her feet and spun around.
The first thing she saw was the wild mane of green hair. It took her a second or two to notice the man it was attached to. He was looming over her, and it looked like two or three meters of black and white stripes separated her and the man’s face. His wild eyes seemed to jump out of two black circles, and a smirk stretched his lips.
He looked weird. Scary, even. But the lack of a floating white sheet could only mean one thing: he was not a ghost. Which meant she had just met the owner of the house, and she did not know how to react.
“You’re ugly” Astrid blurted out. She slapped a hand on her mouth. That would get her into more trouble, wouldn’t it?
“Thank you.” The man caressed his chin with two fingers. “Hey, does your mother know you’re here?”
Astrid froze. Oh. She was gonna get grounded. She fiddled with her shirt, avoiding the man’s gaze. She felt tears well up in her eyes as she realized that she was not supposed to be here, this was bad, oh no—
“Oh, no, no, don’t worry about anything, kid.” The man had knelt in front of her, and handed her a handkerchief when she sniffed. It was striped like his suit, and had the same smell as the one she had noticed earlier. Unwilling to get the thing near her nose and unsure of what to do with it, she squeezed it in her hands.
“I won’t say anything if you don’t say anything. Deal?”
Her eyes shot up. She nodded, and mimed closing a zip over her lips.
“That’s it, kid. You’re already smarter than a lot of adults.”
Astrid crossed the garden, humming. The other kids waited with bated breath as she reached them nonchalantly.
“So?” Celia asked.
“There were no ghosts inside.” Astrid declared.
Lydia could tell that despite her initial reluctance, Astrid had had a good time.
She kept her eyes on the road as they drove back home, but she could see Astrid in the rear view mirror, excitedly reenacting one moment or another of the party.
Astrid had a lot to tell and Lydia was more than happy to listen. She knew Astrid had had a bit of trouble with getting friends, but it all seemed to be going a lot better recently.
When they stepped out of the car, Astrdi ran to the porch with a big smile that Lydia couldn’t help but mirror.
That was until something fell out of Astrid’s pocket.
Lydia froze.
“Where did you find that?” Her throat felt completely dry, but she tried not to let the panic seep into her words.
Astrid followed her mother’s gaze down to the striped handkerchief that was now lying on the ground.
“Oh. Hm… I don’t know?”
If Lydia had been more present, she would have noticed the hesitancy, she would have seen straight through her daughter’s lie.
But she was barely paying attention, and when the words registered, she took them at face value.
“It’s fine, honey. Just get inside, I’ll join you soon.” Lydia said with the softest voice she could muster, her eyes still on the offending piece of fabric.
When she heard the door close, she jumped into action. What made her do it, she wasn’t sure, but she did not hesitate. She grabbed the handkerchief and stretched it between her fingers.
“Leave my family alone. You won’t like what happens if you make them pronounce your name even once .” She paused for a second. “Do not cause any harm to them, or to me, ever .”
There was a shift, a whip of cold air that Lydia wasn’t sure she imagined or not. She knew something had happened, but she did not know what, exactly. Instead of feeling silly for screaming at a piece of fabric, she felt powerful. In control.
Satisfied, she slipped the handkerchief in her pocket and entered her home.