Elsewhere
Two thousand miles away, an abandoned manor was having a perfectly normal evening.
Which was to say: it was empty, dark, and politely falling apart on schedule.
Then a man appeared at the gate.
The ghost in the upstairs window had two thoughts about this. The first was go away. The second was don't step off the path, you'll scare the fox.
He liked the fox. Sometimes it acted like it could see him. On good days, it sat on the porch while he talked to it through the door. On bad days, he wondered if it was just there for the mice.
Most days were bad days.
The man at the gate probably would not care about that.
He was, on the whole, rather unremarkable — brown hair, average height, wearing a funny-looking bow tie.
The ghost wondered what he was doing here.
More importantly, when he would leave.
"Fuck off!" the ghost yelled through forty-year-old glass.
Yelling at people to go away had rather become a hobby of his. None of them ever heard him, of course. But it was this or talk to the fox, and the fox was a terrible conversationalist.
The man at the gate looked right back at him. "I'd rather not," he said pleasantly.
The ghost blinked and stopped moving.
What was happening?
"You can hear me," he said slowly.
"I can."
"Oh."
The ghost did not entirely know what to do with that. It had been a long time since he'd gotten past fuck off in a conversation.
"I owe you an apology," the man went on. "And a fair warning. I'm bringing you a roommate."
"A what?"
"A roommate. He's going to walk in here with a tape measure and a camera and approximately zero respect for the building." A small pause. "Try not to throw him out a window."
"I will absolutely throw him out a window."
He would try, anyway. Haunting was so much work. Last week he'd spent forty-five minutes trying to knock a picture frame off a wall and only succeeded in making it slightly crooked.
"Mm." The man adjusted his bow tie. "I had a feeling you'd say that. He also has a YouTube channel."
The ghost stared at him.
"...a YouTube?"
"Right. We'll come back to that."
And then he wasn't there anymore.
"Wait," the ghost said. "Come back."
But he didn't.
The garden remained empty, the gate closed.
The ghost stood by the window and thought.
Someone was going to move in here. Someone with a YouTube.
He had no idea what that was.
But he already knew he wasn't going to like it.