Subtle stirrings beneath a hospital bed proved a prelude to louder scuffling as Jack awoke in his unintended sleeping spot. It was not the first time he had fallen asleep crying, but it was the first time in a long while that he didn’t have to worry about Sam asking about red, puffy eyes and tear-stained pillows, or floor in this case. Unfortunately this lack of worry was not comforting. Rather, it was like some object he’d carried to work everyday was missing now, and he felt like he was devoid a shard of himself, like he wouldn’t be whole without the weight he knew so well.
Careful, so as not to wake the still sleeping Berry he heard breathing on the bed above, Jack extracted himself from beneath the bed and found the room still cast in the familiar darkness that had been there when he’d gone to sleep. Curious, he went to the window and realized that even though he felt fully rejuvenated, like one might after a good night’s rest, the world outside seemed to have hardly aged a moment. The stars and moon shone plainly through the hospital room’s window, drizzling their light onto the ground beneath Jack.
Shaking himself from the multitude of musings that drifted through his head, Jack spared a glance back to the sleeping mare. She was peaceful in her dozing, more so than Jack had ever seen from her. It was not a great change from before, merely the absence of minor fitful episodes that would manifest occasionally while she slept, but it was still a change nonetheless. At the thought of it, some shard of pride began to form from the idea that he had helped her, and Jack turned his attention once more to gaze at the world beyond the hospital’s walls as he appreciated the feeling.
It was too late, or early, for Jack to do much of anything to occupy himself, which had the unfortunate effect of causing the weight of his thoughts to compound and compound in the silence of the hospital room with every passing second until they felt a mere moment away from smothering him. Jack tried to think of something to do to wait for morning lest he be forced to deal with that most frightening of passtimes: introspection. Even now the roots of his self-doubt stretched and reached for that fragile crystal of pride he now harbored, threatening with every moment to snatch it up in the jaws of unfortunate memories and dark thoughts and shatter it.
In the midst of this internal crisis his eyes alighted on a distant building that protruded like an obelisk from the distant tree line. It’s colors and minor details were unreadable in this moonlight, though the shape of a barn was still easily discerned. As his eyes lingered on it as he remembered his interaction with Bright Mac the previous night, though it felt much longer ago now. Jack had more or less promised to visit the ghost and his wife, and now seemed a perfect time for it, given the time of day and lack of anything else to do. So, happy to have found something to occupy his time and thoughts, Jack gave one more fleeting glance around the room, out of habit, before he placed a hand on the hospital wall and phased through it out into the night.
The soundscape shifted immediately from the relative quiet of a sleeping hospital to the nightlife of the wilderness. The well made walls of the formidable structure proving just how much noise they kept at bay. The sounds of crickets and owls and all their other nocturnal brethren proving loud enough that it forced Jack to pause for a minute to acclimate to the sudden cacophony. As he blinked a few slow times, Jack orientated himself towards the distant barn and took a deep breath. Then, when he was altogether again, he set out. Unsure, at the moment, if this was the normal volume for such night creatures or if something had them riled up.
It wasn’t a particularly long walk, but the mere action of motion was a welcome friend that helped put other thoughts away, delaying them for the moment. Despite the brevity of the walk, however, Jack still felt exhausted all the same by the time he reached the edge of the orchard, his earlier rejuvenation proving to be extremely short lived. He paused a moment to check his surroundings on the threshold of the orchard and took a few deep breaths before turning to look around the apple farm. Squinting, he managed to spot the towering building that seemed to loom over the surrounding acres. It was an imposing dark silhouette, back lit by a full moon. The trees around him creaked eerily in the night winds and distant howls echoed through the night. Yet, despite the ominous phenomenon, the barn still seemed a very homely welcoming house.
Picking up his pace slightly, eager to meet the only other ghost that Jack knew of, he managed to close the remaining distance at a reasonable speed. His alacrity was halted, however, when he came to the door of the structure. It proved to be quite an obstacle.
Not, as one might expect, because of its physical presence. No, Jack was fairly confident that he could simply phase through the door with little effort. Rather it was a societal obstacle. Did a ghost knock on another ghost’s door? He assumed yes, the purpose for knocking was to let the owners of the house know you were there, after all. To politely request entrance into another's home. Yet, interacting with the door at all, let alone producing an audible knock, would be significantly harder than simply walking through it.
Jack regretted that he had not been given a book on ghost etiquette, though if he had he wasn’t sure he would’ve been able to read it anyway unless the literature itself was also, itself, a ghost. Anxious, he glanced around the empty apple orchard, hoping that Bright or Butter might arrive with incredible convenience to let him in. Thereby sparing him from guessing as to what the function of a door was in ghost society.
When no such luck proved itself present, Jack turned back to the door and took a deep breath in a small attempt to calm himself. Steeling his mind, he placed a hand on the door, closed his eyes, and pushed his head through the wooden barrier.
Just as they had back at the hospital, the sounds changed again once his head was on the other side of the barrier, though less dramatically. With the world of noise he had been in before now merely muffled by the wooden walls, instead of muted. When Jack opened his eyes again to view the interior of the barn he was greeted by a heavy inky blackness. It was unremarkable in its darkness yet unique in some other way that Jack couldn’t place his finger on. After a moment of examination wherein nothing stuck out to him, Jack raised his voice.
“Hello?” He called into the void, flinching at the volume of his own voice. The quiet interior seemed to somehow hold its breath in response. “It’s… uhm… Jack? From the... house? Bright Mac said I should come by sometime?” Suddenly a cacophony of noise erupted from the loft and Jack fought the urge to pull his head back through the door and run in response to the sudden spark of fear that ignited in his chest. Then, just as suddenly, a glowing head phased through the wooden boards above and locked eyes with Jack and the terror died away.
“Jack?!” Came the shocked voice of Bright Mac. “I thought that- You were- Oh stars, Butter’ll never let me forget-” Then a welcoming smile blossomed across the stallion’s face before he turned his attention fully to Jack. “Forget it. We’re glad you could make it. Come on in. I’ll be down in a minute to show you the ladder up.” To punctuate the end of this greeting, Bright Mac’s face phased back up and through the wooden boards above, leaving Jack once again in the darkness.
Wringing his hands, one of the few mannerisms that had the same feel to it as it had when he was alive, Jack stepped fully into the barn. In the dark and quiet room his mind whirred, grasping at strands of thought in a desperate attempt to occupy itself. He suspected that if Bright Mac were still alive this is the part where he would be loudly descending some nearby ladder that would help fill the atmosphere with the knowledge that there were people, or individuals, conscious beings existing in this barn. Instead, there was only the distant sounds of wild life, bleeding in through thick wooden walls.
Jack suspected that, given enough time, he might’ve been able to find this ladder that Bright Mac had spoken of. It wasn’t in clear view, at least not from where Jack stood by the door, but it was still a barn. Not a labyrinth or a shopping mall, just a barn. So it probably wouldn’t have taken all that long to find the way up. Jack also knew that Bright Mac was not the kind of soul who would ask that a stranger bumble their way around until they found what they needed if he knew the answer. No, Bright Mac was kind and seemed the sort who liked to help.
On the other hand, Jack would’ve liked to be the kind who liked to help. Instead he found himself too often afraid to lend aid. Not even afraid of anything, truthfully. He already didn’t get along socially with people so there was little reason for him to fear what others might think. Still, he feared all the same. Just as he feared now, in the dark and quiet of the barn at midnight. What had seemed homely from the outside now felt… wrong. No, it didn’t feel wrong, he realized. It was homely as always. It just felt wrong for him to be there.
He heard his breaths growing close and shallow but was unable to stop them from doing so. So they grew even shorter and even shallower. Being dead meant there was no physical limitation to stop his spiral as he felt like the world was collapsing on lungs he did not have. As if the darkness were trying to suffocate him, unaware he could not be smothered anymore but trying its hardest to do so all the same.
His breath grew tighter and tighter until it stopped altogether and the world seemed to shift suddenly. Everything looked the same, it just... wasn't. Jack didn’t feel anything in the moment, except that he should have felt something. It felt like his breath was gone like a memory, like the world was collapsing, as if the idea of words had been lost to some place he had lived in before and didn’t anymore. He could feel now, in the same place the anger had come from those couple of days before, some haunting depth within himself yawning open like a great maw. Some mass collusion of all his anxieties, hungry.
And then a familiar face stepped into the room.
Jack’s breath snapped back like a rubber band. The great maw faded from inside him. He stood paralyzed at the door, bent over with a hand latched onto a leg to keep himself upright, one hand clutching at his chest where he thought he felt some scar he did not have in life and could not see now. Jack breathed and breathed for a few seconds before he looked at Bright Mac, who stood beside him now. Jack realized the stallion must have run over in a panic.
“You alright?” Bright asked, worry plain as day on his face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. No pun intended.”
Jack felt like he’d almost died a second time, except worse. More permanent. Still, he’d been asked all his life if he was alright so he did what he always did.
He lied.
“Yea, yea. I just… zoned out for a second.” He said, wearing a fake smile on his face. Not that anyone would’ve been able to tell, most didn’t have a real smile to compare it against. “You said there was… a ladder?”