The Apparition || Bad Omens || Noah Sebastian

Chapter two

Noah had bolted from the rehearsal room like a bullet. He didn’t want to be there anymore, he didn’t want to see her again. He wondered why the world was making him face such trauma, yet again, only to remind himself that he wasn’t the real victim in this situation. He wasn’t the one who had lost his life that night.

He returned home and locked himself in his room again, the only place that made him feel safe, though now it felt like just a mass of memories that no longer represented him. He thought he’d lost a part of himself at that concert. With Ruby.

A cold shiver ran down his spine, and a gust of wind brushed his face. Noah turned towards the direction from which that ethereal caress had come and found himself staring at his own reflection in the mirror on the wall.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Behind him, he finally saw the ghostly figure of Ruby appear. She was dressed as she had been on the night of the concert: a loose shirt with the Bad Omens logo and baggy jeans. She didn’t look like she had the last time he’d seen her. In the daylight that filled the room, she looked like just an ordinary girl.

“it took you a long time to talk to me” Ruby said with a crooked smile.

He was talking to a ghost, and now she was teasing him – it was the last straw.

“What do you want from me?” Noah asked in a whisper, terrified by the vision in front of him, yet also intrigued.

“I could say 'a private concert', but that wouldn’t be the truth,” Ruby said, shrugging and sitting on Noah’s bed as if she were just an ordinary girl. A real girl.

“Stop joking around. Why are you here? Why do you come into my dreams? And above all, why have you decided to torment me?”

At those words, Ruby’s relaxed face grew sharp, revealing a sense of unease in the ghost. “It was the only way to communicate with you. You know, this situation is new to me, too,” she said, touching the mattress she was sitting on and showing Noah how her hand passed through the solid material. “In movies, dreams are usually a good way to communicate with someone, but your mind is so murky. You kept running away from me.”

Noah shook his head, completely stunned by what was happening. A ghost. He was talking to a ghost. And it was only Tuesday.

“Okay, fine. But why me?”

“You were there,” Ruby said, her voice cracking. “I don’t remember anything from that night, but when... when I was already... like this, I saw you, and after that, I found myself in your room. I didn’t choose it. It was like... I don’t know, I watched you toss and turn in bed for a while, and when I realized you were asleep, I tried to talk to you in the dream, but you wouldn’t listen.”

Now he felt terribly guilty. He hadn’t actively chosen to ignore her during the dream, but he had done so anyway, and now he had the ghost of a girl he didn’t know, but had seen die, sitting on his bed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to run away. I was... scared. This isn’t exactly... normal.”

Ruby nodded. “Yeah, well, if it’s any consolation, I’m struggling with this too. I stayed standing for days, tried sitting down everywhere. This is the first time I’ve actually managed to sit.”

“Do ghosts get tired?” Noah asked with a smile, sitting beside her.

Ruby smiled awkwardly. “No.”

Noah felt himself sinking. It was a stupid question in a surreal situation. Ruby didn’t want to sit because she was tired, but because she wanted to feel contact with reality again. To feel alive again.

Noah cleared his throat, as if to dispel the awkwardness that had settled between them. He had no idea how to act around an uncomfortable ghost. “Why have you stayed here? Isn’t there that whole white light thing and all that?”

“The only white light I’ve seen is from your bedside lamp,” she said, pointing to the small lamp on the nightstand next to the bed. “So, to answer your question, no, no light. It’s like I’m trapped here, with no way out. I tried to get in touch with my mother, with my friends, but the only one who can see me is you,” she said, briefly pointing a finger at him, and Noah felt touched to his core. An unreal and inexplicable feeling.

He was the only link she had left to the real world. Her one-way ticket to heaven, or whatever came after death.

“Is this one of those situations where you left something unresolved, a wrong you need to right, or something like that?”

Ruby nodded. Finally, Noah seemed more interested in her presence than afraid of it. “I thought the same thing, but there’s a problem. I can barely remember anything from the days leading up to the concert.”

Noah noticed how she had used the word “concert” instead of “the day I died,” but he said nothing about it. Maybe ghost psychology was identical to that of the living – you remain trapped in your regrets and traumas for so long that your mind starts avoiding them in any way possible.

“What can I do to help you?” Noah asked her.

“Help me figure it out.”