A jaded seer and a dorky history student solve supernatural mysteries in their swanky apartment building… that used to be a sanitarium. Their first case is a mysterious spirit dressed in seersucker.

Jayce recognized the man right away but couldn’t remember his name. He was dressed in a fine seersucker suit, baby blue pinstripes on cream and a jaunty straw hat, the kind that spoke of wealth imitating poverty. He was handsome, Jayce determined clinically. A shame, really. Such a nice looking man and such a nice looking suit, ruined by the gaping, bloody hole right below his solar plexus. 

The man stood at the foot of Jayce’s bed, simply eyeing him imploringly. Jayce took this as an indication of the man’s good manners. Many spirits had breezed through his bedroom and would slink ominously in the shadows cast by his record player. Sometimes, an impatient few would even float weightlessly above him—their hollow, opalescent eyes just inches from his own. He thought, sometimes, that these were the ones farthest from life, most removed from the people they once were, and that they got so close because they were that much more desperate for the slow, even breaths of rest. 

Jayce did not have to rub the sleep from his eyes to determine the spirit was killed with a gun. Slowly, he mastered that instinctual fear that makes your heartbeat throb in your ears and sat up. Then it hit him: he had seen the man in the lobby. You’d think Del Mar Apartments would’ve taken a hint by now, what with the steadily increasing toll of inexplicable deaths. But, alas, real estate folks were as tone-deaf as they were greedy. Thus they had elected to keep photographs of the old sanitarium plastered all over the place: images of staff, patients, and families covered every inch of the place. 

The real tragedy, Jayce supposed, was not that the apartment complex chose to embrace their long history of abuse but that people chose to live here anyway. Every morning, he saw folks sipping lavender lattes five feet from a display detailing the frontal lobotomies once conducted on the third floor. The photograph to which this man belonged, Jayce recalled, was a picture of Del Mar Sanitarium’s annual baseball game. The messily scrawled caption hadn’t said much about the affair, only that it was for the family of patients, who weren’t too embarrassed to be associated with them. Del Mar had always attracted a well-heeled crowd—even before the yoga pant-clad residents of today. 

The half-a-man lingering just beside his bedpost was testament to that. Jayce pursed his lips, “What’s your name?” The man’s milky eyes fluttered. An expression of great concentration passed over his face. For spirits, it took monumental effort even to be seen, much less speak. “Take your time,” he reassured.

Purple lips parted but all that came out was blood, made black in the moonlight. The sound of what was once a voice seemed to rise from the darkest corners of Jayce’s room, whispers of gibberish. An attempt to piece together a language long forgotten.

“Hey! Hey! Chill,” Jayce told him, and the spirit shut his mouth sheepishly. “Don’t piss those Colonel Sanders pants, I’ll figure out your name eventually. But that’s not why you’re here, right?”

The man gazed back dolefully, faded into shadow, then reappeared by Jayce’s kitchenette. He faded again, then materialized beside the front door. Jayce huffed, “Now?” The spirit lingered, furrowed his eyebrows, opened his obsidian mouth to argue. “No! No! I get it! I’m coming!” Jayce threw on a Sabbath hoodie over his boxers and shoved his feet into his beat up, discounted Reeboks. He grabbed his keys out of the abalone shell on the counter.

“I’m trusting you.” He leveled the spirit with a stern gaze once he had locked his front door. He jiggled the handle a few times, always one to be sure. “You better not be one of those ‘your soul is mine’ bastards.” The spirit tilted his head, brought a grey finger up to his chest, and crossed his once-beating heart. Jayce laughed dryly, “hey, that’s pretty good.” 

Process

I was inspired by my mentor to write this piece for The First Line Journal. The journal provides the first line of the work, in this submission it was “Jayce recognized the man right away but couldn’t remember his name”. I was so surprised by how inspired I was by that one sentence and how much the story flowed after the first couple minutes of writing. I wish I could share the whole work with you all, but alas… the entire thing is over 5,000 words.