Page 105 of Love at First Fright

“But—but maybe solving it would move you on!” My voice reached crescendo levels of excitement. “Maybe that’s why you’re stuck here. You know, unfinished business! If we figure out what happened, you could finally—”

“Maybe I don’t want to ‘move on!’”

The snap in Bat’s voice stopped me cold.

He dropped his hold on me to turn away, facing the pond, and the spirit plants instantly faded from sight, leaving only dark weeds in their wake. Bat’s shoulders hunched. The windchimes continued their melody, oblivious to the tension.

“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “That was… sorry.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Bat’s reflection stared back at him from the pond’s dark surface. “It’s just… I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. Years and years and years of thinking. And the thing is, what if there’s nothing? What if I ‘move on’ and there’s just… emptiness. A void. Nothing.” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “At least here, I exist. If we’re not scaring people away, I can read, listen to music and talk to the others and feel something, even if it’s just boredom or frustration or—” He broke off. “What if moving on means I stop existing entirely?”

The grief rolled off him in waves. I felt it like a physical presence, cold and vast and terrifying—the fear of oblivion, of ceasing to be, of surrendering the only thing he had left.

Oh.

What did you say to that? How did you argue with someone’s fear of ceasing to exist when you couldn’t promise them otherwise? I had no idea what came after. Nobody did. And Bat had been stuck in this liminal space for decades, clinging to existence by his fingernails, knowing that letting go might mean vanishing entirely.

The weight of it hit me square in the chest. That fear. I knew that fear. Not the same, obviously—I wasn’t dead—but that gnawing terror of being nothing. Of not mattering. Of all your years adding up to zero.

Except Bat had already died once. Already lost everything. And he was terrified of losing what little he had left.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “Sorry. That’s fair, Bat. I shouldn’t have presumed that’s what you wanted.”

Bat turned back to me. “No, I’m sorry. You were just trying to help.” He stepped closer, close enough that I could see the dark circles under his eyes, that smudge of eyeliner. “You’re lovely, Charlie.”

Heat prickled across my cheeks. “Lovely?”

“The loveliest.”

My heart stuttered. Beat ten times faster.

The compliment shouldn’t have affected me so much. It was just a word. A compliment from a ghost who’d been dead for decades and probably didn’t even remember what normal human interaction felt like anymore.

But I absorbed it like a plant drinking in sunlight after months of drought.

When had I last let myself feel this? When had I last bothered with dates, with hookups even, with any kind of attention that made me feel seen and wanted? So, so long. I’d been sleepwalking through my life, going through the motions, telling myself I was too tired or too busy or too broken to bother.

Bat reached towards me, took both my hands in his.

The garden exploded back into light.

Ghostly flowers bloomed in waves of luminous colour—roses unfurling petals of soft pink fire, every vine, every hedge, every blade of grass sparkling once again.

But I barely noticed any of it.

Because the light caught on Bat’s face.

His pale skin seemed to absorb the garden’s glow, reflecting it back in shades of rose and gold and violet. The sharp angles of his cheekbones softened. His dark hair framed features that looked suddenly, impossibly delicate. And his eyes—brown, warm, alive—shone with something I couldn’t name.

Not dead. Not for this moment, at least.

Just beautiful.

So beautiful, I had a mad urge to reach for that leather collar around his neck, to hook my fingers under it.

“Well, you’re lovely too,” I eventually croaked.