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The ghost threw himself at the front door — not with his hands, with everything, every scrap of cold and pressure and furious intention he could gather — and the door held.

The knob rattled again.

The door held.

Yes.

“Go away!” the ghost shouted through the wood.

A pause. The ghost pressed harder, pouring himself into the wood, the frame, the lock. This was his house. His door. His —

The footsteps moved off the porch.

Oh?

The ghost blinked.

The footsteps went left. Down the porch steps, around the side of the house.

The audacity.

The ghost let go of the front door and raced through the sitting room wall. The medium was outside the sitting room windows now, flashlight tucked under his arm, hands pushing up on the lower sash of the first window.

“Don’t you dare,” the ghost snarled, slamming himself against the glass.

The window didn’t budge. It was latched—or painted shut, but in any case, it held, and the medium moved to the next one and pushed up on that, but that held too. The ghost chased him from window to window screaming things that would have been very intimidating if the medium had shown any sign of hearing them.

“This is trespassing! You are trespassing on my property! I will make your life — I will make every minute of your miserable —”

The medium moved on. Around the corner, toward the dining room.

The ghost shot through the wall and got there first. The medium tried each dining room window in turn, pushing, testing, shoving at the frames with the heel of his hand. All stuck. Decades of paint and swollen wood doing what the ghost’s threats could not.

Still, the ghost allowed himself to feel smug.

“That’s right,” the ghost hissed. “Sealed shut. Every one of them. You think I don’t know my own house?”

He did not, in fact, know if the windows were sealed, but he would never admit that to the medium.

The footsteps kept going. Around the back corner now, heading for the kitchen.

The ghost flew through two walls and the pantry and arrived just as the flashlight beam swept past the window above the sink. But the medium didn’t bother with the window. The beam dropped, moved sideways, and landed on the back door.

“No! Don’t —“

The handle turned from outside.

The ghost threw himself at it, the same way he’d thrown himself at the front door.

“You are not coming in here! Do you hear me? I am telling you, I am ordering you to stay away!”

The medium’s hand pressed steady and patient from the other side.

The latch shuddered.

For a few seconds, the door held. The ghost could feel his grip fraying at the edges, but he could not let this happen. He dug in because this was his house and his door and —

The latch gave.