True, he and Carole were probably not as close and loving as they should have been, but even intense hatred would not have accounted for the feeling he got from the figure across the room. It was like nothing he had ever experienced; the emotional knowledge that he was in the presence of something profoundly unnatural, a wrongness so concentrated and powerful that it permeated the room and everything in it, creating within him a sense of complete engulfing dread. The naked, smiling ghost looked like the shade of a human being, a weakened reflection of the person it had been in life, but its aura seemed to be that of something much deeper, much more inexplicable.

It was still Carole, though.

He knew that. He could feel it.

And that was what scared him.

The figure, still smiling, reached out to him… and faded away into nothingness.

He’d taken a week off from work, using his two days of bereavement leave as well as three “personal necessity” days, but he was not sure that had been such a good idea. He felt restless during the day, the suddenly empty house seemed way too large, and he thought that he should have continued working in order to keep himself busy and keep his mind off Carole.

And her ghost.

She did not appear again until the following night. He was in bed, trying to sleep, trying not to focus on the unusual sounds he’d been hearing in the house, on Carole’s death or her apparent afterlife, on anything that he’d seen or felt, when, for some reason, he was compelled to open his eyes.

And there she was.

Still naked, the ghost stood on the mattress on Carole’s side of the bed, looking down at him. There was no indentation on the mattress, no indication that any weight was being put on the bed despite the fact that the ghost feet were clearly standing flat on the sheet. This close, the detail was amazing. He could make out on the see-through skin the heart-shaped birthmark just below Carole’s right breast. Between the thatch of pellucid pubic hair was the faint suggestion of pale pink lips.

He sat up, but she didn’t disappear this time.

His heart was pounding with fear. “Get out!” he screamed. “You’re dead! Get out and don’t come back!” He’d heard from one parapsychologist on some New Age pseudo-documentary that ghosts were people who were hanging around terrestrial life because they didn’t know they had died and weren’t ready to move on. He figured it was worth a shot. “You’re dead! Leave me alone!”

But the ghost only smiled down at him, lifted her foot, pressed it into his face—

—and disappeared.