There are two universally acknowledged laws regarding the dead. 

One: Any living creature that sees a non-living creature will die.

Two: A ghost takes on the form last seen by the person looking at them.

    Don't look. Don't turn your head, don't make a sound and don't look. 

“ASHLEIGH!”

She was cold. Ashleigh wasn’t sure why she felt cold. Maybe the air-conditioner was playing up again. She was also completely soaked. Bloody Ben. He was a dead man when she got her hands on him. How many times did she have to tell him not to throw the water buckets around?

“Oh my god, Ashleigh. You’re going to be alright, ok? Just stay with me. Don’t close your eyes. Oh my god. Somebody call an ambulance!”

God, Sally always freaked out over nothing. Panic stations Sally. She was fine. She’d just tripped over the useless, supposedly no-slip mat. She’d be up in a –

Evening shifts were the worst. Shoving a tray of dirty dishes through the dish-washer, Ashleigh bent over, stretching the complaining muscles in her back. She needed to change jobs. She wasn’t made to work late nights. Yesterday, she swore she saw someone behind her in the toilets. In the single person toilets. Obviously she was going insane, and working five nights a week was why. Weekend work sounded good. In JB-Hi-Fi or something. Day time hours, no tripping over broken equipment…

“Hey, Ash? Have you seen my knife?” Sally called out from the cold-room.

“Yeah, it’s on the bench.” Ashleigh yelled back, deftly avoiding Ben who was on the meat run that night.

Yawning widely, she stuck her head into the cold-room, searching for Sally.

“Are you making white sauce?” She asked, finding the girl behind the leaning tower of lettuce.

“No. Caramelised onions.” Sally replied, dragging the onion crate out from under the vegetable shelf. “Can you get a cutting board for me, though?”

Ashleigh nodded, backing out. Reaching up to the shelf where the cutting boards were stacked, Ashleigh steadied the microwave next to it. It was balanced precariously on the edge of the shelf, with both ends overhanging. Ashleigh swore up and down it was going to fall and kill someone one of these days. Probably her.

“Jesus Christ!” Sally exclaimed, tripping over the non-slip mat, coming out of the cold-room. The crate of onions she was carrying scattered all over the floor. “I always trip on that!”

Putting the cutting board down, Ashleigh tracked a stray onion as it rolled to her feet. She honestly didn’t think that she’d be able to get back up again if she bent down, she was that tired. Oh well.

“Here Sally. I’ll help you.”

Sally grinned, kneeling down next to the upturned crate.

“Thanks Ash. We really need that new mat.”

They’d needed new no slip mats for almost six months now, but with the refurbishment going on upstairs and the oven going bust in the last week, Ashleigh doubted that they would get new ones anytime soon.

“Well, it might happen after they open upstairs.”

“In fairyland,” Christina, the sole qualified chef working that night muttered, disappearing into the cold-room.

In fairyland was Christina’s standard response to anything that needed fixing in the kitchen. It was also her standard response to queries about early finishes and weekends off. Ashleigh wished she lived in fairyland sometimes. It sounded like an awesome place.

 “What time do you think we’ll be finished tonight?” She asked aloud, not hoping for much. Taco night rarely finished before ten and then there was clean up.

“Who knows?” Sally said gloomily, opening the oven door as the timer went off. “I’ll ask Ben how busy it looks out there after he takes these out.”

Getting back up was a struggle but she made it. Fist pumping quietly, Ashleigh turned to the sink, the dishes having piled up as she was helping Sally. She blinked when she saw a girl hovering in the doorway. Christina was still in the cold-room and Sally had opted to take the taco meat trays out herself instead of waiting for Ben.

“Can I help you?” Ashleigh asked, slightly freaked out.

The girl was just standing there, staring at her. At least Amanda thought she was staring at her. She could be staring at the wall for all she knew. The girl stayed silent and Ashleigh turned slowly away. Looking back, the girl was gone. Ha-ha, she was going crazy. She looked exactly like the girl that Ashleigh saw in the toilets the other day. Crazy lady in the building.

Tripping over the no-slip mat, Ashleigh swore as she fell on her ass, rattling the bench as she tried to find something to grab onto. Her breath was knocked out of her when the microwave tipped over the shelf and crushed her chest.

Emily shifted impatiently, hot underneath the heavy white cloth that she and two other girls had over them. The Curse of C Block toilets was practically fable in the school, and with the school’s fifty year anniversary coming up, the girls in Mrs Andrews drama class decided that their contribution would be a stage production of the school’s most famous ghost story.

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

Brittany’s voice rolled out over the muttering crowd. Their audience today were their fellow classmates, who were indifferent at best, as well the principal and vice-principal who would judge whether the mini-play could be performed at the festival.

Some thought that it was too soon to be talking about the death of a student, after Ashleigh had died in that work-place accident over the Christmas holidays, but Brittany, who’s idea it was to stage the story, argued that the ghost story wasn’t actually about a student who died, just that a girl’s body had been found in the school toilets. No-one could really make a connection between someone who died ten years ago and Ashleigh’s death just last month. It wasn’t like the story was true, anyway. It was a school myth.

Emily let out a breath, shaking her nerves. Lifting the sheet, she peered out at the crowd, spying Gertrude down near the front, her camera flashing. Emily nudged Sam, who was in front of her, playing the head of the ghost.

“Almost time,” she said, flipping the sheet back over herself.

Rebecca, playing both the narrator and the girl who would become the ghost, let out a piercing scream. After she ‘died’, the room went black and smoke rolled out across the stage.

“That’s our cue,” Emily muttered as she, Sam and Beth – the tail- stumbled out, Emily tripping on the sheet.

The ghost wasn’t human shaped, more like a floating spectra than anything else. Rebecca said that it would look scarier that way. Emily thought that it was because they had too many people then they had parts for, and they couldn’t have ten people on lighting and smoke machines.

“Ooooh…” the three girls sighed eerily, waving their arms to flutter the sheet around their bodies.

After a pause for dramatic effect, Rebecca whispered over the steady thump-thump of the drum beats meant to represent the ghost’s still beating heart.

 “She swore vengeance on the school from that day forth. It is said that she still haunts C Block toilets and that whoever sees her will die a horrible death!”

Gertrude looked down at the camera screen, flicking through the photos she just took of the ‘Curse of C Block Toilets’ mini-play. Well, there had to be something she could use. Good enough to put into the school paper anyway. Pausing over one photo, Gertrude slipped a second SD card into the camera, transferring the picture and putting the card back into her bag as the bell rang for lunch.

“Well,” Gertrude murmured to herself. “That is interesting.” Did Emily know she had a stalker?

Sneaking backstage was easy. Technically she wasn’t actually sneaking, but it was lunchtime and she wasn’t really supposed to be here. Luckily, Gertrude had held onto the camera and she could always say that she was taking some backstage photos for the paper.

Flattening herself against the wall, Gertrude carefully crept across the sound set-up area. Some of the girls were still on-stage, packing up their props and going through lines. She took the camera out from under her jumper and held it up to eye level. If she was right, then what she saw should be about-

“What on earth are you doing?”

Gertrude jumped a foot in the air, landing awkwardly as she attempted to face Emily and tuck her camera behind her back. Emily folded her arms across her chest, unamused.

“Hey Em! Long time no see!” Gertrude said, fumbling with the camera.

“Just taking some photos… You know, I was just looking for you. School paper interview.”

“Really?” Emily asked dryly, turning and walking away from side stage. Gertrude followed her, switching the camera to review mode and catching up to Emily’s brisk walk.

“The play went well. I think Mr Goodwin is going to put it on the main stage,” Gertrude said.

“So it’s about the ‘Curse of C Block Toilets’ then? Do you think there’s any truth behind the tale?”

“It’s just a story, Gertrude. And a stupid one too. Ghosts? Haunting? Please.”

Gertrude sighed. After Amanda had left, she and Emily drifted apart. There was nothing left to hold them together ever since Emily decided that she wouldn’t, couldn’t believe in ghosts anymore. After Amanda, it wasn’t a game. They could get hurt. Their families could get hurt.

And Gertrude couldn’t fight them by herself. Not the really dangerous ones, like the ghost that took out Amanda’s eye, so she told herself to forget about them too. And for a while, she did. She stopped seeing the ghosts that stood just out of sight, until she convinced herself that it was just the make believe of a group of girls.

Emily looked up at Gertrude warily.

“What is it? You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“The ‘I have something to tell you, but I don’t know how you’ll take it’ look.”

“That’s a look?”

Emily slapped Gertrude lightly on the arm.

“Ow. Ok, fine.”

Taking out her SD card, Gertrude held out the camera to Emily.

“What do you see?” she asked.

Emily looked down at the screen. It was as the lights were coming back on, after the cast had come back onstage for their final bow.

“Nothing. Why’d you take the photo from that angle anyway? You can’t really see any of us.”

Gertrude tapped the screen, pointing to the person standing furthest away from the camera. The person was blurry, like Gertrude’s hand had slipped.

“You know what that is, Emily. You saw it when you were onstage, I know you did. We’re seeing them again.”

Emily shoved the camera away from her.

“I didn’t see anything. It’s just your imagination, Gertrude. I have to go.”

Gertrude watched as Emily walked away, camera hanging limply from her fingers. They were coming back, and there was nothing that she could do to stop it.

Amanda glared at them duly from her remaining eye. Gertrude was sniffing fretfully, her bright red curls looking slightly wilted in the stark white of the hospital. She always was the most emotional out of the three of them. She and Emily were standing by Amanda’s hospital bed, awkward around each other for the first time since the three of them had met. It was the also first time Emily and Gertrude had seen their friend since the… accident.

“Thanks for the flowers,” Amanda said. “How long was I out?”

Gertrude shrugged. While she and Emily had not been hurt, she’d been kept bed-ridden for a week. Over-protective parents.

“Three weeks. Give or take.”

Amanda nodded, playing with the bandages wrapped around her head.

“What did you tell them?” Emily asked, arms crossed.

“The truth,” Amanda replied. “That we tried to get rid of the ghost of your dead babysitter who wanted to kill us all and she shoved a knife into my eye.”

She grinned sardonically. “That’s why they’re putting me into a mental asylum, I think. So I don’t take out my other eye.”

“We’ll visit,” Gertrude promised, clutching Amanda’s hand. Emily nodded, turning her head.

“When do you leave?”

“As soon as I can get out of bed.” Amanda said, flicking a glance over to her parents, who were hovering in the doorway.

“Listen. I’ll be fine. Don’t come visit me… I don’t think they’ll let you see me anyway. Private institution or something.”

“But what if it comes back-?” Gertrude protested.

“Don’t think about it.” Amanda interrupted. “It never happened. It’s safer that way. For all of us. So just forget about it.”

Emily looked at Amanda carefully, and nodded. Gertrude looked between the two of them, mouth open.

“What? So we just pretend that ghosts don’t exist or something? That we can’t see them? Like we haven’t spent the last year trying to-”

Emily elbowed her sharply, flicking her eyes over to Amanda’s parents.

Amanda nodded.

“Yeah. Ghosts don’t exist. And we can’t see them.”

Emily and Amanda held out their hands to Gertrude in their old secret handshake.

“Ghosts don’t exist.”

Ghosts don’t exist.

Except they do.