An unconventional collectable

Raymond Fabble was, as all people tended to be, comprised of a great many multitudes. He was the only person who could accurately manage the online archives of the little bookstore in which he found himself employed, never accidentally selling the same book more than once. When his pay could justify it, he had a habit of dropping off a little collection of cans and dried goods to the local food drives. While he hardly could claim the most impressive collection in the world, he had managed to acquire a decent enough collection of antiques through auction or oddity store to make his cosy little unit feel just that little bit more like a home.

It was, unfortunately, this final point that passed Raymond from just your average oddball and into a person that warrant a story about him.

See, it was not just a nice miniature sailboat that he had brought home with him one day, and he continued to be unaware of the fact he had invited with it the spirit of its precious owner along with it.

This unawareness was not a fault on the ghost's end. In fact, he was trying very hard to be noticed. A strange bump in the night could easily be brushed aside as nothing more interesting than someone more nocturnal than he was returning home after whatever activities they had found interesting enough to keep them out after the sun had hidden away for the day. An object disappearing from one room and reappearing later in an entirely different room a day later had the mundane explanation of him moving things about while cleaning and forgetting to return it. The fact the old spyglass occasionally smelt of the ocean when the closest to nautical the area ever got came in the form of a travelling fishmonger wasn't actually anything to do with the ghost, who had a sneaking suspicion (as ghosts often did) that something else had affixed itself to the spyglass.

It was terrible! It seemed as though every attempt to haunt was thwarted by some perfectly rational explanation or another, and it frustrated the poor ghost senseless!

There was one moment where he had gotten so close to, well, getting the man that the fact it didn't just felt a bit like an insult, really. He even tried one of the real classic haunting manoeuvres and wailed to no end through the flashing screen of the old television the man had in his joint sitting room and workspace. Instead of terrifying the living to no end, as he had hoped for, unfortunately Raymond just assumed the old contraption was on its way out, as old devices tended to go thanks to planned obsolescence or genuinely aging software. So, he set his laptop aside (this week's selection of exciting new released for his work's newsletter would have to wait, it seems) as he got to work tinkering with the television. There was no point throwing it out there and then, not if he could salvage it at least a little bit and get a few more months out of the old thing.

Of course, you couldn't really tinker a ghost out of a television like a faulty wire or something, but the absolute lack of care disheartened the ghost just enough to give up this particular tactic anyways.

But then, there are tactics that ghosts have used long before the invention of modern technologies. Mirrors were always thought to have a connection to the spiritual world, even if not everyone could quite decide how. A glimpse to another world, the connection between the worlds of the living and dead, or even a reflection of the true inner self of a person, that of which some people considered the soul.

Whether there was actually any truth to it or not did not matter all that much to the ghost, but he did hope it may have matterer a little more to the living man than it ended up mattering. Raymond was frustratingly not vain. He happened to just not acknowledge the mirror at all when he would potter on by, which also happened to be the same moment when the ghost tried to alarm him with a glimpse at his haggard, spectral form. When he attempted the angle of being a shadow against the glass within the man's periphery, the man just went and polished his glasses because he assumed he'd smudged them.

Really, the attempt got a little bit embarrassing after a whole, so the ghost dropped it relatively swiftly, all things considered.

In the defence of the ghost himself, it is important to note that this was his first time with the whole ghostly haunting business so did not necessarily know what to expect from it or even really what to do. It was not, clearly, some sort of instinct that a ghost developed following their death, and he managed to land himself with somebody particularly immune to hauntings. Utterly unhauntable even!

The ghost had considered scrawling 'GET OUT' in big, bloody letters across one wall, but that fell apart relatively quickly. First of all, he didn't actually have any blood to scrawl anything with and wasn't entirely sure where ghosts were expected to get it from. Secondly, Raymond was there before him, so it would have just seemed a little silly. Really, uninvited as he was, technologically speaking he was still a guest in the man's home and maybe it did seem a little rude to keep bothering him so relentlessly.

Why was he bothering the living anyways? Just because that was what ghosts did so he had to follow some tedious expectation that was given to the dead for no real reason beyond the expectation of an expectation? What a ghastly afterlife that would be!

Maybe it was a bit dramatic to claim he was going to go and reinvent the very process of ghosthood and all that it consisted of, but he did think he had a bit of unspent rebellion holding over from when he was still alive, and it would be a shame not to try it at least once.

Like all rebellions do when guided by the unacquainted, it started off small.

Raymond had nodded off on the couch while reading and found his book resting on the side table, glasses folded neatly on top. Any time he happened to misplace something, just before he had to admit that it was lost, it just so happened to conveniently appear in the very next place he happened to look every time. Though nothing changed in his routine, he was sure he had to clean up just a little less than he used to, things and places staying cleaner for just a little bit longer. All in all, things were just a bit nicer and more manageable in all the little ways that seemed to matter most.

Now, of course, Raymond would not make the connection between the arrival of the little model sailboad he had brought back home on a whim. Nor would he have assumed there would be any ghostly goings on to blame for his gradual increase in comfort, even if he might have wondered if there was something out there looking out for him.

And maybe that was enough for both of them. An unspoken symbiosis between the haunter and hauntee. It was odd, but it managed to fit in with all the other odd little things that the man had collected quite nicely.