phneumatophony

“Thank you for calling ‘Wraith Wranglers’, where all your spectral, haunting and communicative needs are just a call away! What can we do for you today? – Uh huh, uh huh I see! With the Class B Haunting pack you can expect all the classics that we pride ourselves on, including the ever popular cold chills and faces in the mirror, as well as your choice of either mild poltergeist activity or bleeding walls. – Yes of course, good choice, the bleeding walls are always very popular ma’am. For just a little extra, can I interest you in upgrading to – No, no you’re right. I’m sure that your choice will prove to be more than efficient. I will send your case over to our haunt of experts right away, and your ex-husband should begin to start seeing things within the week. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to call us here at any-“ 

Before the man was given the opportunity to finish his mandatory spiel, there was a click on the line, the customer evidently had hung up on him without even saying goodbye. Of course, this was at least half expected by this point, customers were insufferable at the best of times and one would have to assume anyone calling them there was hardly going through the best of times. But no matter, jobs were jobs and they were always going to be at least a little awful no matter the profession. 

Anthony let the fake smile – a grimace, if anyone was close enough to actually look – that he held to maintain the artificial customer service voice drop back into a bored neutrality once again. He rested his chin on his palm as he drew open his emails, making the actually interesting part of the job somebody else’s problem with the mere click of a button. Such efficiency! 

Now, it seemed entirely unfair that still had to open emails at all despite the fact he was very much dead. He had not lived long enough to experience even a single email while he was still alive. So, he still felt, at least a little, like emails should have been something left behind in the world of the living. Yet there he was, nearly two hundred and thirty years on from the unfortunate incident of his being poisoned, sending more emails every single day than he would have thought anyone would have ever been expected to get through when he was still alive, though this was a scale based on letter writing rather than anything electronic. But he could suppose the transition to posthumous work would have been a great deal smoother, comparatively, then it would have been for the man who had shared the cubicle with him before finally being promoted to actual haunting. He had been swept into the sea from the deck of the naval vessel he served aboard and into the sea a good hundred years before Anthony was born, let alone died. While he did miss him and his strange figures of speech he treated as common knowledge, he was glad that the new person wasn’t perpetually soaked and so left any and everything around absolutely saturated. That said, his new cubicle-mate had the habit of doodling little hearts and smiley faces on the shared walls with her own blood, oozing its steady flow from the wound to her throat. But she was a great deal more technologically savvy than he was so that worked in his favour. 

Speaking of the woman who shared his cubicle, she turned to him, swiveling in her office chair to turn her whole body to him. She had quickly learnt this was a wiser way to do it than turning her head after the gash her former partner – she wasn’t entirely sure if they counted as an ex, as they were dating when she passed so she didn’t know what that made them – had left across her neck proved deep enough to have thrown off the structural stability and caused her head to flop to one side. It, she had claimed, was disorienting to have her view of the world be flipped around like that and so made the point of trying to balance her head as best she could. Curiosity twinkled in the darkness of her eyes.

“Did I hear you say that someone ordered a haunting for their ex?” Mandy asked. Her voice was strange, a result of her vocal cords being severed, and so as she spoke it was almost as if she was not actually talking at all, but rather a slightly muffled recording she was mouthing along with instead of her voice actually coming from her. Of course, nobody would notice that on the other side of a phoneline, so she had been placed in the same customer service role that Anthony had been stuck with. “That’s actually hilarious.”

“Quite,” agreed the man, the uncomfortable scratchiness of his voice returning once he wasn’t trying to put on a voice for sales, the poison – slipped inconspicuously into his drink by a spurned lover after catching him in the arms of another – having done more of a number on his throat than he liked to admit, especially not to those who wore the nature of their demise more visibly, “Apparently she found out that he was attempting to court her younger sister once they parted ways, which her sister informed her of promptly.”

This won an undignified bark of laughter from the woman. Anthony had not yet worked out whether the way she brought her hand to her head as she laughed was a lingering habit that remained after she died or an effort to keep her head steady. By that point it had gotten a little too long to ask about it without it feeling weird, so he simply chose not to. 

Anyways, if it was a habit, he was sure to be a little jealous that she had been able to keep to hers while his was doomed to remain in the mortal plane. Whoever had decided that cigarettes were a privilege that only the living could enjoy was exceptionally cruel. Even now, over two hundreds years since his last drag of a rich, imported cigarette, he still found himself reaching for them, or worse, absentmindedly drawing a pen to his lips out of habit and being left with nothing to show for it other than a smudge of ink on his lip. 

“You know what though?” the woman remarked, “Good for her. We love to see it. If it were me, I’d probs be out there pretending to me the ghost, messing with his doors and windows and whatever until he thought he was crazy. You know, like in that old book.”

“Old book?” the man returned, “Now I do hope you aren’t referring to Riddell’s work, ‘The Open Door’, because I can assure you that is far from old. I recall it being published when I was still alive, and that hardly makes something old.”

“Dude, you’re, like, super old too so that doesn’t count.” Mandy teased.

“I will have you know, I am just as old now as I was the day I died.” Anthony returned, just haughtily enough to make sure the fact he was at least mostly joking about being offended came through.

“So am I,” came the reply, the woman batting her eyelashes theatrically, “But only one of us used the word ‘henceforth’ in a mass email.”

Anthony let out a scandalized gasp, one that he had refined to an art while he was alive and being accused of far more interesting scandals than just using arguably outdated terminology in a workplace email. Now, those had been some good scandals, the sort that didn’t matter if they were true or not as long as they were interesting. Being caught in a scandal, as long as he knew how to manage it well enough to come out better on the other end, made a person marvelously interesting. He missed it tremendously, not to mention he had been free to live as recklessly and scandalously as he wanted without having to work a day in his life. He had wondered if he had wound up in some sort of call center hell – he had not been a man of religion while alive and did not have any particular intention of becoming one while he was dead enough for it to not mean anything – but he had partaken in enough conversations over mediocre office coffee with a nun who had spent her life dedicated to helping disenfranchised children, and so came to the conclusion that this was simply what happened once a person died. They were forced to work an office job arranging hauntings for the living until they – seemingly arbitrarily, or he was doing something wrong that he did not understand – were promoted to actually doing the hauntings. 

The man had the full intention of offering a remark back, something that he was sure would have been delightfully petty and cutting, and would leave her devastated over her own linguistical habits. Unfortunately, he was not given the opportunity to work out exactly what this remark would have been, as the telephone – or ‘skelebone’ as Mandy had dubbed it almost immediately upon arriving – rang. 

It was never ending, the living always had some grievance with another that they wanted to make the dead sort out for them, or some unfinished business with the deceased that they wanted to be put into contact with, or even just questions about the whole perishing process. It was against company policy to actually discuss what it was like to die to anyone who had not experienced it for themselves, so this was always one of the more annoying calls he had to deal with.

He rolled his eyes as the device buzzed and sang its ring to the world before putting on the sort of fake smile that forced an equally fake upbeat customer service voice.

“Thank you for calling ‘Wraith Wranglers’, where all your spectral, haunting and communicative needs are just a call away! What can we do for you today?”