ONE YEAR AGO

For nearly two years, Liv worked at her day job and went home at five PM, her overactive brain choosing between two trains of thought to wallow in for the evening: contemplating her mission, Gene, and the ghost frequency or following the plotline of reality television, an avoidance technique that worked better if it was paired with a whiskey and beer chaser. She changed her phone's pin to 1898 so that even during periods of forced forgetfulness, a stubbornly persistent wedge would lodge in her mind.

She pursued her mission in fits and starts. During her fits, the ghost frequency was an IMAX movie, all her senses inundated. Supernatural surround sound. Her vision became one of a raging fire, always wanting to consume while she stood in its wake, on the verge of being incinerated. There was a peace to this violence; whenever she was focused, her existence contingent on an uncontrollable fire, the cloud never appeared in her room. The ghost realm ceased its haunting, as though her attempts and ambitions were enough to call a temporary truce.

It wanted her to do this. She followed the right path. The righteous one.

Even in her frenzied state, having such thoughts frightened her. She existed as both kindling and match. The right path could not be walked upon without her going up in flames.

After a few weeks of relentlessness in which she drank more than she ate, Liv would put the match away, let it sit unstruck, red phosphorus untouched, tucked away in a corner of her mind. She'd give herself over to environmental data analysis, to casual drinking with work colleagues, to sleeping with random people, and to going about the act of forgetting—forgetting meaningless hook-ups and Helina and frequencies and all that mattered to her.

In the middle of forgetting, the hauntings would resume, a whole realm invading Liv's reality to reassert its dominion over her, to remind her she was meant to do these terrible things, no matter the consequences for her.

After all, the voices would chide, it's what you want.

Monsters, clawed fingers, journeys in a shadow world, blood drawn and lines between right and wrong erased. The fear she felt for her ghostly visitors, the reason she shuddered at the thought of traversing their world more than the mental terror they relished in, was that these creatures, this foreign realm, had begun to feel familiar. Were they the enemy if they were helping her? Weren't they enabling her to do what she most wanted?

Kin, they told her, but Liv would not accept this.

"You killed my sister," she'd say to the cloud swirling around her bedroom. "She was my family. You are not what you think you are to me."

This is how we are. This is how you are. They'd laugh and take her from her world again, make her journey through their homeland, a thousand images of horror pressed into her memory like lead type pieces onto paper before they allowed her to return home. She'd look around her normal bedroom, brightly lit by a harsh western sun, and wonder why this place felt no more real to her than where she'd just been.

"There's no coming back." Allen Chen's last message lay in the bottom of a cedar box on top of her dresser. Over the note, she'd placed dried daisies plucked from the fields near the wind turbine that had been the site of her sister's murder. That little box and its contents served as a memorial to him as well as to Penelope. It glowed warm now, its own little furnace, its presence a gateway between the realms that Liv had foolishly failed to acknowledge she'd been harboring. A peace offering from those who could not understand the concept.

That evening, she took the cedar box downstairs and around back to the cement patio where her landlord had built a stone firepit two summers previous. There, Liv took out the match from where she'd stowed it away in her mind and built with it a roaring fire. She barely felt its heat after the years she'd spent living in her own personal hell.

Lifting the box's lid, she shifted the dried flowers and traced a finger over the surface of Allen's note. Thin, fragile paper, warped from becoming waterlogged and then airdried on the dash of Liv's car.

Closing the box, she chucked it into the flames and watched her memorial to Penelope burn down to ash.

That night, she resumed her mission with renewed determination. First, a look at Gene's discovery, which she had to note, was not quite at the stage Gene had claimed it to be to his internet followers.

"It will work," he'd told her as he photocopied several pages of information on his printer the day she'd seduced her way into his house. "There's just something missing from the equation."

Liv had been pissed by this point. She'd slept with this man—stone cold sober—to get what she needed from him, only to discover he didn't actually have it. "What is it then, Gene?" she asked, trying not to sound as vexed as she felt. "What's missing?"

"You." He handed her the photocopies. "You're the last step."

"Seriously?"

"I've been waiting for you. Sorry—someone like you, to come here and ask about my work ever since I posted about it. Honestly, I thought it would happen a lot sooner. I did get a few curiosity seekers, but none with the knack that you have."

Fuck, which one of them was playing the other? Liv could no longer tell.

"I've gotta say, it was worth the wait." Gene stretched his arms above him and then placed them behind his head, elbows out, a shit-eating grin completing the look of someone who knew which way the cards were stacked. "I truly do appreciate your approach."

Liv squinted. "If you need me, might I suggest wiping that smirk off your face and telling me everything we're about to do."

If Liv hadn't been living her extraordinary life, she wouldn't have believed what he then revealed. Gene's solution involved 18.98 hertz, and a prolonged hypnotic trance where a person's natural frequency would be tuned to match that of an individual with "the knack," as he kept on calling it, as if she was a teenage witch in an early aughts occult film instead of an emotionally disturbed data scientist.

"That's why I declared my work to the world," he told her. "I am confident in what I've come up with, but I need your baseline, Liv. I lured you here so I could actualize this."

Two years later, Liv still had misgivings. Not that it mattered. She had made her choices and so had Gene, only her contribution had failed on the first go-around, and Liv never stayed in her fits and starts mode long enough to let Gene try again.

The night she burned Chen's note, she called him. "Has it worked yet?"

A long sigh on the other end of the line. "Obviously not. For the millionth time, Liv, you need to come back here. We have to do this again."

"Or maybe..." She tried out a flirtatious voice to test his resolve. "You've had it solved all this time and you're holding out on me because you want to see me again."

Another long pause. "It's not like that. I have a girlfriend now."

"And?"

"And you won't be manipulating me with sex this time around. It's a professional relationship only. I wish it didn't even have to be that."

"Ouch." Liv couldn't blame him. She'd gone back and forth on Gene for all these months and at a certain point, he'd given up on her in favor of his own mental health. "No more people with the knack hitting you up, I take it?"

"Your kind is, unfortunately, rarer than being hit by lightning."

Liv almost said something cheesy, like, "well then, you're about to get struck," but she'd used all her social energy on the first part of the conversation and now all she wanted was to finish her business with him, hang up, and try to get some sleep.

"You'll get your way—I'm not going mess with you or your relationship if that's what you're concerned with. I know I've acted like shit to you, let doubts creep in but..." The ghosts are back, and they're aggressive and I'm not sleeping, and I don't know how much longer I can do this but also, they tell me things that I want to hear, which is the scariest part of all this. Sometimes, I want them to stay. "I'm ready."

Eleven days and a trip to Nebraska later, Liv returned with frazzled nerves and a mind more battered than ever, but she had also secured what she wanted... the answer. All she had to do now was put everything together.

The ghosts stayed hidden and quiet as she worked. Every now and then, though, they whispered to her—words that were both a threat and encouragement.

You belong with us.

Typing in the PSU forum web address, she created a new username with a bio that read, "I'm haunted by thoughts of haunting you."

Time to check in on an old friend.

_____

Author's note: Slowly, the past catches up with the present. Things are starting to come together and Liv's mission progresses. But what is that mission exactly?

I enjoyed writing this chapter in particular, as well as the next one. Not sure why except that Liv's mind had become a fascinating place to explore--it is it's own realm with shadows and monsters and the occasional moment of levity. If you've made it this far in this story, I am truly grateful to you for exploring this realm with me. We are on the home stretch now!

Until the next update, 

XOXOXO