There’s a room on the first floor that creaks and groans and sometimes ejects unpleasant-smelling gases from the crack under the door. She can hear what’s going on in there first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and is starting to suspect that the ghost doesn’t sleep the same hours as she does, or perhaps doesn’t sleep at all anymore. In fact it may not even be possible for the ghost to sleep. Every day she enters the room to scavenge dozens of empty cans of highly sugared and caffeinated energy drinks, navigating the detritus by touch alone, only knowing she is approaching the room’s inhabitant by a strangely heightened humidity around him. Sometimes he burps softly. Sometimes he wriggles and the synthetic upholstery of his chair rasps against his thighs and then falls silent. She likes the sounds because they remind her of when he was a baby. She’ll often stand at the door and listen to him for an hour or more, or will drift around the bedroom, a spectre herself, listening to him burble and groan. The ghost is her son, Gabriel Bäcker, fifteen years old and no longer of this world.
Stephanie doesn’t realise the package has arrived until she collides with it in the hallway. She goes face-first into the top of it, inhales the rich chemical bouquet of the cellophane wrapping, and then finds herself clinging to the box like a sailor to a shipwreck to stop herself from ending up on the floor.
