Dying Is The Easy Part

Chapter Six: January 6th

Thursday morning, Quinn chugged a terrible cup of coffee in the cafeteria before they hunted down a desk in the library and got to work on their laptop. They started optimistically, simply typing Vincent Baker and were unsurprisingly met with thousands of results: a bunch of Wikipedia entries, hundreds of LinkedIn profiles, some random news articles, none of which were relevant.

Googling Vincent Baker 1932 made them stumble down the rabbit hole that was findagrave.com, a website that offered exactly what it said on the tin. Quinn found hundreds of entries for Vincent Baker, but none of them in Oakriver.

Lastly, with the caffeine buzz already wearing off and their permanent headache turning from a mild pressure into a vicious pounding, Quinn searched Vincent Baker Death. There were dozens upon dozens of obituaries dating back to the 19th century, but none of the deceased had lived anywhere near.

It seemed that, even on the internet, Vincent was a ghost.

With a low groan, Quinn leaned back in their seat and stared up at the arched ceiling of the old library building. It was just their luck to get haunted by a white boy with the most basic name imaginable.

Some part of them wanted to use the disappointing lack of information as a sign to give up, but the other, much bigger part was still hung up on the look on Vincent's face the night before; the surprise when Quinn had addressed him directly, the flicker of hope in his eyes when they had offered to help him, his distress when he'd struggled to remember his last name.

For almost a hundred years, he'd been stuck here.

For almost a hundred years, no one had seen him.

There was no way Quinn could simply sit back and watch him have to haunt the campus for all eternity, aimless and invisible to everyone else. As much as they hated this ability, it was theirs, and it brought with it a sense of responsibility that was hard to ignore—harder, still, when the ghost in question was so soft-spoken and sincere, so uncomplaining despite his obvious misery.

Quinn hadn't asked for any of this, but neither had he.

And so, they decided to do what they'd sworn weeks ago they never would: they visited the cemetery.

***

Quinn wasn't sure what they'd expected they would find in the graveyard. For some reason, they'd assumed it would be a hotspot of sorts, a place bustling with spirits everywhere they looked.

Instead, they found everything eerily quiet. There was no noise except the crunching of the thin layer of snow that had fallen while Quinn had been in the library; there was nothing to see except crooked headstones and shivering trees, naked branches clawing at the overcast sky.

Quinn moved between the graves with their hands buried deep inside the pockets of their dark coat, only taking them out to brush aside snow and vines every once in a while to uncover a name. Like everything else in Oakriver, the cemetery was small; after roughly thirty minutes, they had seen every headstone and every cross, read every weathered inscription and studied every statue. Vincent's name was nowhere to be found.

By the end, Quinn found themself standing at the gates again, much colder but no wiser than before. Had Vincent remembered his name wrong? Or had he not died in Oakriver at all? But then why would he be haunting this town? Could ghosts just pick and choose where they wanted to spend the afterlife? Quinn felt severely undertrained for any of this.

With their cheeks stinging from the biting cold, they cast another cursory glance around the cemetery that sprawled before them. They tried to make out their footsteps in the snow, winding systematically between the graves to tell if they missed anything. It was only then that they noticed the second pair of footprints. Quinn hadn't seen anyone else while they'd been here and the snow had fallen only two hours ago, so sometime in between their arrival and their trip to the library, someone else had to have been here.