"Hurry, Ru. Or we'll be late."

Ruben stopped in his tracks and looked at his grandma, a frail woman in a long maroon dress and heels that had been fashionable half a century ago. A triple rope of thin pearls around her neck; she fiddled with them when she got nervous. Her perfect Sunday clothes, as she had called her outfit this morning.

But this wasn't a Sunday. This was Samhain, All Hallows Eve, Halloween. The only day in the year that the dead could visit the living.

Ruben was dead.

An accident, at the end of summer. One minute he had been browsing songs on Spotify, deciding the perfect soundtrack for his walk from the rehearsal room back home, the next there were screeching tires, a large weight crushing his back; an immense pain.

Then darkness.

His phone forever stuck on 'Angels Calling' by Sabaton.

The irony.

"You look like you're seeing a ghost, Ru." His grandma chuckled lightly. She touched his shoulder, rubbing it.

"That's not funny. It's still all..." Ruben sighed. "... fresh. I didn't expect it to be so depressing."

"The first year is always the hardest," she said. "But the grieving process isn't just for the living. You've been miserable since the authorities knocked on my door, all those weeks ago."

"I'm nineteen. I'll be nineteen forever."

His grandma shrugged. "At least you'll be a beautiful young man for all eternity. Oh, how I wish I could—"

"This isn't about you, Grandma," Ruben raised his voice. "You go back. There's still something I must do."

"Ru, it's almost twelve. Where are you going? Back to your mother?"

Not answering, he strode off.

"Ru? Ru! Answer me!"

No. He had seen enough misery in his childhood home to return there. His father was spending even more time at the firm than before the accident, working himself to an early grave filled with paperwork and lab tests, as though finding a cure for Alzheimer's would fix it all. His mother hadn't slept much since that dreadful August evening. She had been more of a ghost than he had. He had tried hugging her, which had freaked her out.

"I sense Ru," she had said to his little sister when he had walked through their walls and was standing in the living room, visiting but unable to communicate.

"What?" Mich had taken off his gaming headphones, the beats blaring out. She had clung to his music collection like she had clung to her blanket as a toddler.

"Ru." Her mother had been trembling. "Ru is here."

"Mum, no." Mich had dropped the headphones on her desk to comfort their mother. "Remember what Ru said — Halloween is a commercial crap fest to make us buy stuff we don't need."

"He did say." His mother sobbed. "I miss him, Mich. I miss him so much."

Ruben had wanted to shout that he was really there, that he had been wrong, that there was a heaven (he wasn't sure about hell — people upstairs didn't want to talk about that), that he had found Grandma and was now living with her and Molly, her best friend who smelled of cats and cat food.

Grandma had stopped him. "They'll be able to sense you, but they can't hear you."

Ridiculous. What was the purpose of visiting, anyway?

Yet now that the time was almost up, Ruben wasn't ready to return to a world where conversations opened with 'Once when I was alive'. He had cared little for the nostalgia of walking the streets of Midlothian, running past people he had gone to high school with and who were preparing for the Halloween party in Ye Olde Shed (a pub, not a real shed) and stressing about their last-minute costumes. And he had plainly refused to visit any more friends after the debacle at his parents' place.

Unfinished business was gnawing at him. He wanted to be nineteen again, properly nineteen. Not to see people's face turn serious as they saw him in heaven and shook their head, saying he left the mortal world too soon. There were other teens in heaven. Former cancer patients, a few drug users, suicide victims, and others who had been killed in traffic. They were still a minority, and none of them particularly interested Ruben. They were either extremely dull or extremely depressing people.

He went straight into Ye Old Shed, cutting the line comprising a Captain America, a Chewbacca with a Luna Lovegood friend, and a string of sexy shivering nurses and nuns half regretting their costume choice.

Inside a band was playing. Tricky Beans. His band.

Jax in his 'Planet of the Apes' costume was hammering at the keyboard, attempting to play the notes faster than his instrument could follow. Tarzan Crickey punched the drums up a notch and the crowd went wild. A fanged Logan played the bass steady and loud, yet still danceable. Girls shrieked as Goth Queen Riley grabbed the mic and sang her heart out.

A tantalising riff dominated all other instruments. Miles was playing the guitar.

A pang of jealousy struck Ruben. The long-haired bobtail was playing the guitar higher on the guitar than he would have, ruining the song he had written for Riley and which she had made more supreme with her angelic voice.

Why did they have to replace his with Miles? Miles who had been after Riley since kindergarten, and who had broken her heart every year from the first year of secondary school until the penultimate one when Ruben had finally been brave enough to ask her out. Miles who punched people when he was drunk. Miles who had been arrested for shoplifting and minor drug offences. Miles who...

The lights flickered before going out completely.

The music died with a screech. Strings were being plucked, the drums banged on, even Riley continued singing for a few seconds longer. The crowd booed.

"Our apologies for this blackout," Riley tried to say. The rest of the band had stopped playing. "We'll be back shortly."

At the mixing console, Glenn was frantically pushing and turning buttons. Behind the bar, Jessica was studying the electrical panel. 

Soon, the electricity went back up, and the band continued their set as though nothing had happened. The crowd danced to Wormwood, The Castle on the Hill and Ravencry. Beer flowed wilder as the pub became hotter and hotter. 

The group of sexy nurses and nuns, no longer regretting their costume, were flirting with a bunch of superheroes hoping to get laid later.

"The next song will be our last song for the night," Riley announced.

"Oooooh," went the crowd.

"For this last song, we wanted to do something special. For Ruben." Riley touched her left boob and raised her head to the sky. "Ru, if you can hear this, this one is for you, buddy."

If only she knew he was standing twenty feet in front of her.

"Dream of Heaven. Angels are calling your name," she sang more beautiful than the original song.

Still, his anger levels rose. His mates had probably thought the song symbolic, the last song he had listened to before he died. But it was just a song he had liked. It had no special meaning. He hadn't even liked Sabaton that much, not to be remembered by one of their songs, anyway.

"Losing track of time and of space. Midnight at sanity's edge."

He wished she could stop this madness. 

"Riley!" he shouted, thinking she would never hear him.

The lights began to flicker again.

"Dream of heaven. Angels—"

"Riley!"

The electric panel behind the bar began the smoke.

"Riley!"

Right before the pub went dark a second time, Riley's green eyes turned wide and her first reaction was to look at Miles. She stopped singing, and with her, the rest of the band halted. Beer flew from one side of the pub the other.

"I am not sure what's happening," Riley said, audibly moved. "Glenn, Jess, can we get the electricity back up?"

Ruben didn't stay to find out. He rushed through Pennywise, a fat guy with a pumpkin drawn on his belly, and a nun with a big cross and a short skirt. 

When he stood back out on the streets, the light in Ye Olde Shed went back on. 

The band resumed the song from the start. The idiots...

He returned to the cemetery. The streetlamps quivered as he walked past. He shouldn't have come, he should have stayed with those whose friends and family were all in heaven and had no more reason to visit Earth. He didn't want to see father working all the time, pretending all was well. He didn't want to his mother wasting away, and Mich trying to keep strong for mother's sake. God, it was better to have dull and uninteresting friends for all eternity than friends who replaced you and remembered you only through the wrong song.

The church came into view. One view on the clock and Ruben's heart sank.

Twenty minutes past midnight.

He had missed the time slot to return to heaven.

Now what? His grandma had warned him to stand before his grave when the clock struck twelve, and Hallow's Eve was over. But she hadn't told him of the consequences. 

And he hadn't asked.

There wasn't a soul at the cemetery, neither human nor ghost. He walked up to his grave. 

Ruben Scott
14/05/2000 - 27/08/2019

Notes graced his stone, the opening riff of Fear of The Dark. Now that had been his favourite song! His family had known.

"Hello?" he called out.

Silent as the... dead.

Was he stuck here forever now? Doomed to roam the Scottish village like a nineteenth-century cliché? 

Was this what hell was?

He sat down, the stone wet from the earlier rain but not wetting his jeans. Being a ghost had a few perks. He stared at the clock, watching the minutes tick by slowly. Half-past twelve, twenty to one, ten to one. One o'clock. 

In class, he had often counted down the minutes until a break or the end of a school day. But he had nothing to count down to. No more ambitions. His dreams had gone up in smoke. Tricky Beans would soon be too big for Midlothian. They already had a few shows books in Edinburgh, Glasgow, even one in London. First the United Kingdom, then Europe (if the Brexit kept getting delayed) and then the whole world.

With fucking Miles Lindsay on the guitar, playing his songs, soon dating his Riley and breaking her heart for the umptieth time. 

He would ruin it all.

The lanterns at the graveyard's gate flickered.

Something clicked. The electricity failure at the bar, the streetlights, now this lantern. This was his doing. It must have started at midnight.

As the hours ticked by, Ruben came with various ideas to turn Miles' life into a living hell. He could keep the guy up at night, sabotage his guitars, smoke up his amps, make his picks disappear. Anything so the band figured he's bad luck and sack him, get a better guitar player who doesn't attract trouble.

And so Ruben became the ghost of Midlothian. He went wherever Miles went, turning the lad crazier and crazier by the day. A week later, Miles only slept during the day. He no longer touched his electric guitar, only played acoustic until Ruben found a way to make the strings snap. Two weeks later, he stopped coming to band practises. He fought with Riley over the phone until the phone burned in his hand. 

Ruben laughed.

A month later Miles entered himself into the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Hallucinations due to insomnia was the official reason for his committal.

Ruben couldn't follow Miles there; he was physically unable to cross the village borders. 

And his death felt terribly empty again.

The clock of the Midlothian Church of Christ chimed midnight. December had begun. Soon the Christmas decorations would lighten up the streets. After the endless Christmas dinners came New Year. Fireworks, then darkness, cold and rain all the way to Valentine's Day. A Valentine's Day Riley would spend with Miles in Edinburgh, most likely. Easter, exams, then summer and the festivals. 

The steady beat of life that he was no longer a part of.

The clock ticked on. Three hundred thirty-five days until Halloween. 

He was really in hell