TWENTY YEARS LATER

BRADLEY SCHOLL burst into the house out of breath, his chest hitching as he labored to breathe. He slammed the door closed, double-bolted the latches, and leaned against it a moment while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

He’d always hated this cold, miserable time of year that mostly seemed to be night. Bad things happened at night. Bad things were happening now.

Or were they? His thoughts had been so muddled this past year that he could scarcely keep things together. It became a struggle enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and eat and put on clothes like a normal person. The thing he’d heard at the bar tonight? Could have meant anything. He’d been drinking; he could have misinterpreted a conversation on which he’d had no business eavesdropping.

He patted the wall for the switch, knowing a scaly, clawed hand would reach out of the shadows and ensnare him, but the light came on without incident.

Bradley shrugged off his coat and threw it over the back of the recliner. Not for the first time, he wished he didn’t live alone. It would have been nice to come home to someone who could lie and tell him everything would be all right.

He went to the fridge and selected yet another beer, then went down to the basement to play around in his lab in an effort to distract himself from his troubles.

The lab was just a hobby. Rows of potted plants—all of them legal, of course—lined up under banks of grow lights he’d ordered from the internet. Some of them were blooming—a December miracle.

Bradley swigged his beer and picked up a scalpel. It shook in his hands as he used it to slice away the outer skin of an aloe leaf. He placed the pale green strip on a glass slide, squirted on a single drop of methylene blue to enhance the color, and dropped a slide cover into place before slipping it under his microscope.

He twirled the knobs to bring the plant’s rectangular cells into focus, hoping to forget the thing that had sent his nerves on a nosedive. His microscope had been his most loyal friend in recent years. Using it to peer into a less chaotic version of reality generally calmed him.

“Bradley?”

He stiffened at the sound of the voice, and though he kept his eye in front of the microscope’s eyepiece, his vision went out of focus.

“Bradley, you’ve got to move on.”

Gritting his teeth, he turned. A young woman in a white tank top and cutoff denim shorts perched atop his lab stool, eyeing him with pity.

My sister.

“Go away, Jess,” he said, hating the rasp in his voice.

Jess flinched at his words, and the sight of it hurt him. “Bradley, you shouldn’t be here anymore. You’re dead. You’ve been dead awhile.”

Bradley choked out a sob and brushed away a tear with the back of his hand. “No. You’re the one who’s dead. You got high at a party and fell off a hotel balcony.” Bradley had been so devastated by the news that he took a month-long leave of absence from the product testing lab where he worked.

Where he used to work. They’d sent him packing months ago, and not because of his continued grief.

Jess’s brown eyes were wells of sorrow—she’d inherited them from their mother, while Bradley had been given blue eyes so pale they could have been made of ice. “Please don’t do this. You know you’re dead, too. You just don’t remember it.”

Memories rushed through his head: drinking at a different bar, getting into a fight with another patron, and being thrown out into the cold.

“I don’t remember it because it never happened,” Bradley growled. “Now I don’t know what you want from me, but you’d better go before I—” He broke off, embarrassed. What could he do, call the cops on a ghost?

Jess slid off the stool and strode up to him, the top of her head coming to his chin. He tried not to recoil. She looked like Jess down to every last detail, but he knew it couldn’t be her, not in the flesh. He’d watched as the lid closed on her coffin, and as the coffin was lowered into the earth.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “I can show you.”

Before he could object, she latched her other hand onto his, and the next thing he knew, he was stumbling drunkenly along the shoulder of the road.

Something clanged close by: the railroad crossing. Bradley squinted, his cheeks stinging in the frigid air, and realized he stood precisely where the tracks crossed Umpqua Street.

An oncoming train barreled into him, sending him into oblivion.

Then he was back in his basement like he’d never left it.

Jess released his hand. “See?”

Bradley shook his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t. I mean…” He gestured at the rows of potted aloe, romaine lettuce, and peas. “If I’m dead, how are these plants still alive? No one else is here to water them.”

“They are dead. Take a closer look.”

Bradley blinked. All of the plants had withered, even the aloe plants, which he’d found virtually impossible to kill. A layer of dust coated everything in the lab, and spider webs stretched their way from the grow lights to the table beneath them.

“Now do you believe me?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know.” Bradley ran a hand through his blond hair. “I want to see where it happened. To see if I can remember for real.”

The corner of Jess’s mouth turned up in a knowing smile. “Let’s go, then.”

She took his hand, and together they ascended the stairs into the living room. Out of force of habit, Bradley slipped on his coat.

He really, truly, despised the cold.

They set out into the night, hand in hand once more. Bradley was surprised that Jess’s hand gave off warmth. Perhaps he perceived it that way because he was dead, too.

“Don’t be sad,” Jess said as they walked to the end of the street and turned left. “Everybody dies.”

Bradley just nodded. The thought of spending his entire afterlife with his baby sister at his side took away some of the sting. They’d been the best of friends in life. That could continue on into death.

It only took a few minutes to reach the tracks that crossed Umpqua Street, as they were only a few blocks from his house. The wind scattered dead leaves across the road and into the parking lot of an abandoned factory beside the tracks. Bradley veered off the road and walked down the parking lot parallel to the tracks, letting go of Jess’s hand to shove his own into his pockets.

“I still don’t remember it,” he said.

“And I don’t remember falling off that balcony,” Jess said. “Injuries like ours are traumatic. It’s normal to forget them. It makes it easier to cope.”

Bradley supposed she might be right.

“There is one way to prove you really are dead.”

Bradley turned. “What’s that?”

The wind tossed Jess’s long hair into tangles that she didn’t bother brushing aside. “Stand in the middle of the tracks and wait for the next train. It won’t be able to hurt you.”

The thought of doing such a thing made his skin crawl. “And if it does?”

“It can’t. I promise. Now go on and see for yourself. I’ll be right here waiting.”

Bradley let out a pent-up breath (could he really breathe if he were a ghost?) and stepped closer to the tracks. Jess had never led him astray, and he couldn’t see why she would start now. “Will you stand here with me?” he asked.

Jess’s smile lit up the night. “Of course.”