How the World Ends #53: Ghosts

The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living.

Nobody knows why.

The list of ghosts includes:

• The ghosts of everyone who ever lived, anywhere, at any time in the history of humanity, whether for a hundred years or just a few minutes – plus the ghosts of their children and parents and grandparents and everyone they ever knew or heard about or fell in love with or never even met
• The ghosts of pets and other domestic or wild animals – including fleas and sheep and killer whales, and ants and elephants and single-celled organisms in their billions and trillions
• The ghosts of objects, such as rocks and chairs and cursed toys, of which a subset is the spirits of place: sacred mountains, malevolent old houses, lonely stretches of water etc. as well as a range of meteorological and atmospheric conditions including winds, and sunsets, and haunted rain
• The ghosts of smells and sensations, half-forgotten perfumes and paint colours, snatches of scratchy songs from old tapes or vinyl records, piano chords coming from distant rooms you could never find your way back to, behind doors you closed a lifetime ago and so on
• The ghosts of the people that people once were, or could have been if things had turned out differently, or could never have been, no matter how hard they tried
• The ghosts of missed chances, missed opportunities, missed everythings

It turns out that the animists were right. Everything has a soul. And, consequently, an eternal afterlife. And, consequently, the need for somewhere to live it.

Soon you can’t move for supernatural apparitions.

Old school ghosts moan in wardrobes and attics in their hundreds of thousands, unsettle people by appearing, mute and unknowable, at the ends of millions of beds in the middle of the night, are seen, apparently oblivious, walking again and again through walls or up and down the same sets of stairs or along the same forgotten, silent corridors.

Others are encountered in graveyards and on golf courses, on night buses and beaches, in abandoned factories and cinemas and in unabandoned factories and cinemas.

And, endlessly, in digital photos and videos and social media posts that make it impossible for anyone or anything to ever be forgotten.

The ghosts of lost children clatter, laughing, down suburban streets, or are found weeping on railway platforms in clouds of spectral steam.

People are startled by Japanese suicide forests appearing in their living rooms, get spooked by the smell of autumn afternoons drifting through their bedrooms at three in the morning.

In quiet hallways they come across the echoes of ghostly musical movements aching with the romantic possibilities of youth, or find themselves, halfway up attic ladders, suddenly lost inside phantom snowstorms that sing with regret.

There are ghost trains and the ghosts of lost airplanes, ghost airports and ghost ferry terminals, ghost roads and ghost bypasses and ghost traffic jams that go on, at angles to the real traffic, for miles.

The ghosts of unbuilt, cancelled housing estates flicker in the distance across out-of-town greenfield sites in the hours before dawn.

And the night skies are filled with the ghosts of burnt-out stars.

It is discovered that wherever two ghosts intersect they create a weird kind of psychic jelly, a sticky emotional residue which stays behind after they move on and proves impossible to get rid of. It gets on walls and surfaces and into clothes and the workings of things and gums them up. People get it on their fingers when they pick up spoons, or have to wade through it on their way to work, and end up haunted by ghostly emotions left over from other people’s lives, and find themselves unaccountably anxious or hysterically sad or crippled by nostalgia at random points throughout the day.

Schools and hospitals and office buildings are afflicted with outbreaks of sobbing, or wistful sighing, or random, horrified gasps. Sometimes it’s hiccups. Business meetings and lectures and operations go disastrously wrong, and everyone has bad dreams and guilty consciences.

Even you – you of all people – spend months longing for the touch of someone else’s lost love, become desperate to feel just one more time something you’ve never felt before.

Understandably your actual, real-life relationships suffer. Yours and mine and everyone else’s.

Nobody can get anything done. Nobody much wants to, anymore. We’re all half in love with the dead.

Exorcisms are conducted according to the practices of all the major world religions, with little-to-no effect. Offerings and promises are made. Earth is salted. Drinks are raised or poured out. There is some discussion of sacrifices, of paying reparations and making amends, but nobody can work out what for or how to pay them. Or to whom they could ever be paid.

“What do they want?” we ask ourselves, as we watch the future being slowly silted up by the past. “Why now? Why us?”

But the ghosts just keep coming, filling every last bit of space, and do not explain.