It was three in the morning and the only sounds that could be heard around Block K of the university hostels were that of gentle snores coming from the students sound asleep in their beds.

Jun was standing next to the window in one of the third floor rooms, sullenly watching the lump under the blanket heave up and down in a rhythmic pattern. A thin, red thread was peeking out from beneath the blanket, wriggling its way down the bed, along the floor and right past him—out through the open window and probably towards some hospital morgue. A pair of shiny, golden scissors hung limply from his right hand, glinting under the moonlight.

He had been trying to cut that damn string for a good two hours now but still it refused to snap. He narrowed his eyes as he stared at that ugly, red snake. It was mocking him, he was sure of it.

Jun let out a deep sigh and sank down onto Gemma's swivel chair, shoulders sagging despondently. He knew the appropriate thing to do now was to go back to headquarters and report the incident so that one of the senior faeries could come and solve this knotty problem, but his pride was stopping him from doing just that.

This is your first assignment, that little devil on his shoulder was whispering into his ear. If you go back now, everyone will brand you as a failure! You'll be relegated to the dusty storerooms winding up balls of string and the boss will never give you another assignment again.

He couldn't just go back like this.

At the very least he had to untie the string so that he could bring the card back to the assignments office and demand to know why they had given him a card with a dead man's name on it. Then, it wouldn't have been his fault—the blame would lie solely with the chaps at the assignments office.

Just when he was lost in his own thoughts, a white shadow and a chilly breeze floated past him. Jun instinctively looked up, and then he screamed and fell off the chair.

Standing in front of him was a translucent figure—he could see right through the guy to the League of Gods poster that was plastered on the wall. It was a ghost. He was actually looking at a blooming ghost.

"Who the hell are you and what do you want?" he yelled, covering his eyes with his hands. The temperature in the room had suddenly dropped a couple of notches and he couldn't tell whether he was shivering because of the cold or because he was about to wet his pants.

The ghost looked down at the cowering figure on the floor, tilting his head in bewilderment.

"You can see me?"

"Of course I can see you! Why else would I be talking to you?" Jun shrieked. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves, then opened some gaps between his fingers so that he could peek at the spirit. There was something familiar about the pale face that was staring down at him—the floppy fringe, angular jawline and almond-shaped eyes...

"Oh my bloody warthogs!" Jun exclaimed, leaping up to his feet. "It's you!"

"You know me?" the ghost asked quizzically.

"You're him! Hayden Chung!"

That was why he found the ghost so familiar. This was his ghost. The fellow that had been alive and kicking less than twelve hours ago until a reckless black Honda rammed him down right outside the university gates.

"Uhh I think you've got the wrong guy," the ghost replied. "Who are you and how is it you can see me? No one else seems to be able to."

"Of course no one can see you. You're a blooming ghost for goodness sakes. And if you're wondering why I can see you, that's because I'm a— Wait a minute, what did you just say?"

"No one else can see me?"

"No, before that."

"You've got the wrong guy?"

Jun laughed. "What do you mean I've got the wrong guy? I can't have gotten the wrong guy. You're Hayden Chung." He fished out the assignment card from his pocket and read, "Hayden Chung, age twenty-two. You're the only son in the family and your father owns an IT firm specialising in internet security. You're a final year student in the Faculty of Computing and also the captain of the university frisbee team. You like blue, hate carrot cakes and have a habit of picking your nose when you think no one's watching."

"He picks his nose when no one's watching?" the ghost mused, looking thoughtful for a moment. "Well that's Hayden alright, but I'm not him."

"You're n-n-not h-h-him?" Jun stammered. A shiver went down his spine.

The ghost shook his head. "Nope. I'm Ryu. Takahashi Ryu."

"You're joking."

"Why would I be joking about something like that?"

Why would he be joking about something like that indeed? But if he wasn't joking, then it would mean that the ghost standing in front of him right now wasn't actually Hayden Chung. If this dude wasn't Hayden Chung, then where was the real Hayden? Jun felt his sanity slowly crumbling into tiny bits and pieces.

"How did you get here?" he murmured.

Ryu held out his right hand which had a cheery red string tied around the wrist. "I followed this string here. Do you have any idea what this is about? Am I in a dream right now? I must be in a dream, but it's a bit of a crazy one. Never had one like this before," he asked, tugging at the string with his fingers.

"You followed the—" Jun groaned. Of course, the dastardly string. All of a sudden everything made perfect sense. The assignments office hadn't made a mistake—he had. Instead of tying the string to Hayden Chung, he had gone and tied it to the wrist of this dude called Takahashi Ryu. And Takahashi Ryu wasn't meant to be finding the love of his life. He was meant to die.

Now he was royally screwed.

"Come here." He tried to grab hold of Ryu but all he got was a handful of air instead.

Ghosts were immaterial. Under normal circumstances he would have remembered that but his mind was too jumbled up right now to be thinking straight.

Picking himself off the floor, Jun raised his golden scissors and tried to snip the red thread from Ryu's wrist, but the string simply twanged and remained painfully intact. Tossing the scissors onto the table, Jun switched to using his fingers to pry apart the knot that he had personally tied in the first place, only to realise that he had tied one bloody good knot.

"Can't you get this off?" Ryu asked, trying his hand at undoing the knot himself.

"If I could, I would. Trust me."

Jun stared hopelessly at the red string around Ryu's wrist, and then at the other end of the string that was tied to the girl under the blanket. He must have been a fool for thinking that he could undo the knots after they had been tied. The red strings were indestructible. The only way for it to disappear was to let destiny run its course. This was why there were no instructions for undoing a red string in his little manual. The boss might have a way, but did he have the guts to go back to headquarters now and tell everyone that he tied the red string onto the wrong guy—and that guy was now a floating spirit?

Ryu looked down at the sleeping lump under the blanket. "So do you know what I'm doing here? This is a dream right?" There was no other logical explanation for why he had been able to float three stories up and walk through a wall to get into this room. The laws of gravity didn't apply in dreams.

"You're just taking the piss, aren't you?" Jun scowled.

"Huh?"

"Are you telling me that you honestly don't know what's happened to you?"

Ryu scratched the back of his head, trying to recall the events that had elapsed. "Well, I woke up in the middle of a road outside the university and for some reason no one seemed to be able to see me. Except you. Then there was this red string tied to my wrist," he jiggled the string again, "so I just decided to follow it all the way here."

"And you don't remember what happened before you woke up in the middle of the road?"

The ghost shook his head.

"Oh blooming gods..." Jun buried his face in his palms. Not only had he just committed career suicide, he had landed himself with a lost spirit who didn't even know that he was dead. Where were the reapers? Weren't they supposed to show up to claim this fellow's soul? He stood up and poked his head out of the window, looking around for any sign of the black cloaks of the reapers. All he could see was a stray tabby cat crossing the street.

Letting out a deep sigh, he stood up and gestured towards the door. "Come on, let's go," he declared.

"Go where?" Ryu asked.

"To the morgue."

#

Contrary to Jun's expectations, Ryu's body was not at the hospital morgue. Instead, he was lying on a bed in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit hooked up to so many tubes and covered in so many bandages that they might not even have recognised him were it not for the tag outside the room that had the name "Takahashi Ryu" printed on it.

The air-conditioning in the hospital was already way too cold, but Ryu's presence just made it even worse. Jun did up all the buttons on his jacket and was still shivering in his socks.

"I'm still in the dream right?" Ryu asked, chuckling awkwardly as he looked down at the mummy lying on the bed.

Jun looked at him sympathetically. "Look, I'm not really an expert in this because I'm supposed to be specialising in love and marriages and not this sort of morbid stuff, but..." he struggled to find the right words to put the message across, "... this isn't a dream. It's real. That's you." He found a chair on the opposite side of the room and sat himself down in it. It was much too cold standing next to Ryu. "I suppose the good news is that you're not dead! Yay!"

The ECG monitor that was sitting next to Ryu's bed was still registering a weak blip every now and then, which meant that the fellow was still hanging on by a thread. That was probably why the reapers hadn't showed up—because Takahashi Ryu wasn't actually dead yet. Still, that didn't solve Jun's problem. He could see the red string attached to Ryu's wrist—both their wrists—crawling along the floor and out through the door of the ward, leading right back to the girl that they had left back at the hostel.

"You're joking."

"Why would I joke about something like that?"

The two boys stared at each other. The bleeps from the ECG machine seemed especially loud in the silence of the night. Deafening even.

Ryu turned to look down at his comatose self, his expression suddenly deadly serious. "What happened?" he asked.

"You were knocked down by a car in the afternoon after you left the library. Right outside the university gates."

"And you were there?"

Jun nodded his head ruefully. The headache that he had been having since the afternoon was escalating as he contemplated his dreary future in the stores, surrounded by piles of tangled string that he would have to untangle and roll up for the rest of eternity.

"Who exactly are you?" Ryu eyed Jun suspiciously.

"I'm a faerie and I work for the God of Marriage," Jun replied in a deadpan voice. "We tie lovers together," he gestured at the red string, "so that they'll eventually be able to find each other and live happily ever after."

"A... faerie?" Ryu arched an eyebrow sceptically.

"Yes," Jun snapped. "We're real. Want to give it a pinch?" He held out his right arm for a moment, then let it slide back down. "Sorry, I forgot that you can't quite touch anything right now. Ghost and all."

Ryu paused, looking pensive for a second.

"So you were the one who tied this to me?" He waved his wrist about, watching as the string trembled merrily as he did so.

"Yes." Unfortunately.

"Then that means that the person who was lying under the blanket in the hostel room earlier—that's supposed to be my soulmate?"

"No!" Jun burst out irritably. "She's not your soulmate. She's supposed to be Hayden Chung's soulmate. You're a mistake. One big, fat, warthog-sized mistake! I don't even know why you're still alive. You stopped breathing for goodness sakes." The shimmering string was mocking him again and he wanted nothing more than to cut that damn thing to pieces.

"Oh."

It didn't take Ryu very long to piece the puzzle together.

"But if I'm still alive," Ryu pointed at his body, "then why is my spirit here?" He looked down at his own translucent self, frowning.

"Good question." Jun pondered upon it for a moment. Contrary to popular belief, ghosts weren't just freely running amok everywhere. Upon a person's death, reapers would be sent almost immediately to collect their souls and take them to face judgement in the afterlife. As such, roaming spirits were far and few between, and those that were around were those that had escaped from their reapers for one reason or the other—typically because they were still in denial about their own passing. As for the so-called out-of-body experiences attested by some psychics, those were complete bullocks. It was pretty much impossible for the spirit of a living person to leave the body.

Jun looked at the still figure lying on the hospital bed, then up at the corporeal being floating beside it. Things just got weirder every minute.

"If your spirit is outside the body, then technically you should be dead," Jun murmured to himself, "but you're not." The readings on the ECG monitor proved that much. "How could a spirit be roaming when the person isn't—" His gaze fell once again upon the red string around Ryu's wrist. A single strand led from Ryu's physical being towards the ground, where it fused with the strand that was coming from Ryu's spirit and then headed out through a crack under the door. An uneasy thought suddenly crossed Jun's mind.

What if Ryu was meant to die, but couldn't?

"Ok, I think I have a theory," Jun started, "but it's just a theory. What if you were actually supposed to have died because of that car crash? You should have died and your soul should have been collected by the reapers and taken to the afterlife, but you can't leave because of that." He pointed at the shiny red string. "The string represents an unfulfilled destiny and it's what's keeping your spirit here, tied to the living world."

"Right. So you're telling me now that I'm meant to be dead and that this," Ryu flicked the string with his fingers, "is what's keeping me stuck in limbo. A ghost that's not quite dead." He fell silent, staring at the string that was tied to his hand—both his hands. Thinking.

Jun leaned forward, waiting for a reaction to his theory.

"What the hell! You're telling me that you're the reason for me being like this? Because you were an idiot and tied this fucking string to the wrong fucking person?"

"No need to get rude," Jun spluttered, taken aback by Ryu's sudden outburst. The temperature in the room had taken a deep dive and he could feel the layer of frost forming over his lips and his teeth starting to chatter. The angrier Ryu got, the colder it became. "Get a grip. You're going to make yourself die from hypothermia," he said, pointing at the body lying on the bed.

Ryu took a deep breath and seconds later the room seemed to warm up ever so slightly. "Since you're the one that got me into this mess, you're jolly well going to get me out of it. What should I do now?" he asked.

"I don't know?" Jun shrugged his shoulders. He honestly didn't have an answer—this was his first assignment for goodness sakes. He sure as hell wasn't expecting to make such a blunder right at the get-go. "You could try to go back into your body?" he suggested helpfully. "Maybe if your soul goes back in then you'll wake up. We could figure something out from there."

Ryu tried floating back in, just like how he had seen it happen in films before. That didn't work. It didn't matter how he tried—from the top, bottom, left and right—the moment he came in contact with his body, some invisible force would bounce him right back out.

"It's bloody useless!" He threw his hands up in the air in exasperation. "Why can't I get back in?"

"Hmm." Jun rubbed his chin, trying to figure out what they were doing wrong. "Maybe there's some defence mechanism in place that stops a person's spirit from going back into his own body once it's left. It would make sense, because if you could just zip back into your body after you die, then everyone would be doing that, wouldn't they?"

"What?"

"It's just a hypothesis. I'm no expert in the rules of the dead. That's reaper domain."

"Just cut the crap and tell me how you're going to get me out of this." Ryu was losing his patience. "Where's that white light I'm supposed to be walking into huh!"

"Y-y-you're f-f-freezing the r-room ag-g-gain," Jun chattered. He could feel his lips turning blue and he suspected his nose was going to fall off.

Ryu marched over to Jun, reaching out to grab hold of his collar. He tried to yank Jun up to his feet and throw a punch into his skinny face, but his hand went right through the faerie and the momentum sent him toppling forward towards the latter.

Something completely bizarre happened in the next few seconds.

#

Ryu blinked one, then twice. His field of vision had abruptly changed—he was now facing his sleeping self instead of Jun. He looked around, but there was suddenly no sign of Jun anywhere. Where did the dumbass go?

"Hey, where—"

Ryu immediately clapped a hand over his mouth. This was weird. That was definitely not his voice. He was a bass, but the words that had come out of his mouth had definitely been an octave higher than his usual. He looked down and the alarm bells started ringing in his head when he saw the garish red outfit that he seemed to be wearing. Red shoes, red socks, red trousers—even his belt was red. What was he? A new year's red packet? Then, he felt someone give him a shove from behind and all of a sudden he was standing up again and Jun was back in front of him.

"What the hell just happened?" he whispered, spooked by that brief experience.

Jun looked equally mortified, touching himself all over as if to make sure that his body was still there.

"You just possessed me, didn't you?" he said in a hushed tone. He was leaning all the way back in his chair, as if he wanted to put as much distance between himself and Ryu as he possibly could. "The coldness feels like it's emanating from inside me!" he squeaked with a shiver.

"What?"

"It was like my consciousness was locked away in a dark room and I completely lost control of my own body. Like I'd been invaded! Kidnapped! Possessed."

Possession.

Ryu was not unfamiliar with the concept—it was all the rage in mainstream horror films for a couple of years. Some diabolical demon or vengeful spirit taking over the body of a helpless host, usually a creepy kid with eyes that were too large for their faces, and then making use of their possessed body to do all sorts of macabre deeds.

Could he actually do that now?

There didn't seem to be any other explanation for what had just transpired. For that single minute, he had been Jun. When he moved his hand, Jun moved his hand; when he wanted to speak, he spoke using Jun's lips, using Jun's voice. He didn't even want to imagine what he would have seen if he had looked into a mirror—he had a feeling it wouldn't be his (self-declared) handsome, chiselled face.

"So," he started, looking at the traumatised faerie questioningly, "I can actually possess people now?"