As the days went by and they had a lot of free time to talk to one another, the two souls crammed into the same body started to better understand one another. Or more precisely, to understand Catherine. The girl had a sheltered existence. A mute songbird in a gilded cage, rejected by her mother for reasons undisclosed and burdened with keeping the family name alive regardless of her young age. Despite the family name’s Jewish origins, their religious rites followed a particular version of Christ’s teachings instead of the Hebrew scriptures. Which version was not important. Just the fact it was a very strict sect and Catherine’s mother was a fervent devout in public but a poor practitioner in her private life.

  The girl was raised on such strict guidelines, pressured and curtailed. Like a clay doll, she was molded to be a naive and educated lady, whatever that meant in Mrs. Wallenstein’s perturbed mind, in Cat’s opinion. The girl was a living… walking… no, a bleeping contradiction. While she was currently undergoing social media withdrawal, she also had a mentality that seemed it wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century fifties TV show. That was a shallow evaluation done with what little Cat’s painkillers-addled mind could come up with during these two weeks at the hospital.

  Every time Cat had to take a shower or undress for some reason Catherine started to berate her for being lewd just because her natural curiosity caused physical reactions the other could sense. Cat tried to be patient but once again was betrayed by the body she found herself bound to. Catherine’s brain was still an eighteen-year-old teenager, raging with hormones.

  So far she was able to avoid an argument with her soul-tenant. But she was at her limit. And it was time to wash her body because in a few hours Dahlia would visit them. Cat hadn’t yet faced such dread after her reincarnation. The meeting with her… William’s former fiancée had her nerves on edge. She entered the bathroom, thankful the physical therapy combined with her divinely gifted vitality allowed her to walk and take a shower on her own.

  The nurse dressed the IV line and gave her the usual warning. Cat was to keep her left hand out of the water and do her business with only the right hand. She acknowledged with an unmotivated grunt and a nod as she walked naked into the bathroom. Being hospitalized, she gave up on trying to keep a modicum of modesty. Most of the time she felt like a slab of meat at the mercy of the hospital staff. Not that the people working there weren’t friendly but the constant need to run exams, tests, therapy, and other activities that come with such a lifestyle made her question the ownership of her own physical form more than the ghost’s indoctrination.

  She didn’t even glance at the mirror and went straight into the shower. Putting her hand out of the way, she opened the cold and hot water faucets, letting the water mix before going underneath the showerhead. She braced against the wall and let her head hang, the water dripping through her long hair. It desperately needed a stylist, in Catherine’s opinion.

  

  Cat bit her lower lip and sighed. Glancing sideways, she took the sponge and lathered it, proceeding to scrub her skin without answering the ghost.

  

  She groaned and rubbed underneath her breast with a bit more strength than necessary.

  

  “Shut up, Catherine. Not today,” Cat grumbled out loud, knowing very well the nurse was right outside the door, as usual.

  

  She didn’t answer. Cat just knelt and scrubbed her shins and feet, then dropped the sponge to grab the shampoo. After washing her hair and putting on the conditioner, she let her back lean against the wall and slid down to sit on the anti-skid mat that covered the floor. Her heart pounded as if it wanted to flee the ribcage.

  

  “You did. But that’s not it.”

  Catherine didn’t press for an answer, a small mercy Cat was grateful for. After a few minutes, she addressed another issue.

  

  “Yes, mistress,” Cat droned and opened the cold water only. Catherine’s underweight body had little resistance to cold and the specter protests went into deaf ears. Once her hair was completely clean, she closed the water and reached for the towel.

  

  “Then stay silent for today, at least,” She slammed her right hand against the bathroom wall. “Dammit. Not today. Shut up.”

  The door opened and the nurse peeked inside. “Is everything alright, Catherine?”

  She opened her mouth to answer with a rude statement but held back at the last moment. “Sorry. No, it’s not alright.”

  “Oh, dear. Are you hurt?”

  “Not physically, at least,” Cat dejectedly admitted. “Today is a very important day.”

  The nurse paused to think for a moment, then did an ‘ah-ha!’ pose. “Right. An important visitor today.”

  Cat’s eyes stung. She swallowed hard to keep her from crying, “Can you help me get dressed?”

  “Sure thing, honey!” The nurse took the opportunity to fawn over the girl. Some of them were like this, they seem to play with Cat like a doll. Or it was their way of giving some affection to the lonely teenager. Aside from that one visit from Dr. Hill, the only people who visited her were Oliver and the police.

  With a fresh set of underwear and a clean hospital gown, Cat climbed into the bed and offered the nurse her left arm so she could reattach the IV. Of the electrodes, most of them were gone, the oximeter at the tip of her finger more than enough to monitor her heart rate. It was still going fast, the anticipation of meeting with her former fiancée mixed with dread still taking up most of her thoughts.

  After she left the bathroom, Catherine kept blissfully silent, until she didn’t.

  

  Cat bit hard on her tongue, not enough to draw blood but enough to hurt.

   The ghost continued after a while.

  The girl rolled her eyes. Outside their head, the nurse was blow-drying her hair, commenting idly on how pretty it was.

   Pursed lips were Catherine’s only answer.

  “All done, sweetheart. Why don’t you try to sleep for a while before your visitor arrives? Do you want me to turn the TV on?”

  “Tune in the cartoon channel, please. The police don’t seem to mind that one,” Cat answered.

  The nurse smiled and reached for the remote. What she said was true. The police didn’t want her watching news channels for some reason they didn’t bother to explain. They made it clear she shouldn’t even be allowed to watch TV but made an exception for the cartoon channel.

  On top of it all, she was under custody. She had to remind herself to thank the doctor for keeping her without handcuffs but the room she was in was made to hold criminals under custody. The windows were made of ballistic glass and were impossible to open. The only way out was through the door and the bed had special fixtures for restraining both arms and legs of suspects, aside from leather straps to pin the body with. All of them remained, thankfully, unused.

  Cat was sure she would be deep into existential dread if it weren’t for the out-of-body experience. She was literally told the afterlife was real and some elements of Abrahamic theology were true. Hell, purgatory, the Guf. Angels, demons, the grim reaper. Maybe Santa too but that was wishful thinking. In a deeper analysis, she wouldn’t even be “she” if it weren’t for the out-of-body existence, which made this whole mental exercise futile. William’s spirit would be enjoying whatever went for entertainment in purgatory. Not bad enough to go to hell, not good enough to go to heaven.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  However, one of the interpretations of purgatory said it is where everyone not condemned already goes to wait for the final judgment, so YMMV. The entity that came down did mention three forms, an angel, the reaper, and a devil. Not a fourth one however it might’ve been omitted.

  The final lesson she learned about ghosts was that they weren’t completely self-aware. Rational and sentient, yes. But William wasn’t in full control of his thought process, not thinking as a corporeal human would. That might be what was holding Catherine up.

  She was sure the sounds of a rabbit bonking a pig with a huge hammer with an orchestra playing in the backdrop would be enough to drown their hushed conversation, so she called the ghost.

  [Catherine, can we talk?]

   she snapped, clearly annoyed.

  Cat wanted to retort and rectify the specter’s behavior but held back. They could bicker and argue another time. Instead, she went straight to the point. [When I was dead with the entity that came to get us, I found myself detached from my life’s goals. I didn’t grief my own death, didn’t miss my fiancée. I was just filled with a sense of peace and a wish to help you out of your predicament. Did that happen to you as well?]

   she cynically quipped.

  [Not my intention. I’m being objective here.]

  

  [But did you miss your money or your designer bag?]

  

  [Entertain me. Do you have anything you care a lot about? A friend or a pet?]

  Catherine gasped.

  [Is that your cat?]

  

  [Do you miss him now?] Cat asked rhetorically. The body’s subconscious missed the damn feline. She could feel a spike of anxiety and even visualize the critter in that “corner of your eye but if you try to focus you lose it” way.

  

  [Tell me about Esmeralda. What’s great about her?]

  

  [When we were as ghosts on that sidewalk, did you miss either of them?]

  

  [But you miss them now, don’t you?]

  

  Cat got flashes of Esmeralda’s in her memory. So some of Catherine was leaking into her psyche.

  [I don’t know. But do you see how we are not that far apart? We are a team, Catherine. We have to reach a middle-ground. I even think we might be just crazy. You see, it is probable I’m not--]

  Someone knocking on the door made Cat stop sub-vocalizing. She could think they were crazy but if others did too it would jeopardize her life.

  “Come in!” She shouted over the cartoon animal’s shenanigans. It was something with anvils and dynamite.

  The door opened and Cat’s heart stopped beating, figuratively. The nurse led Dahlia into the room. The girl shook with tension and dread. She tried to smile.

  “Catherine, your visitor has arrived,” the nurse said. “Is everything alright?”

  “Y-ye-yes! Sure. Please, come in. Welcome,” she tittered.

  Dahlia smiled and nodded as she made her way to the chair by the bed. “Hello, Catherine. I’m Dahlia,” she too was anxious. Cat knew very well how she used to fidget with a lock of hair, curling it around a finger when she was that way.

   Catherine cooed.

  It might be another example of Cat’s mental state affecting the ghost’s reaction and vice-versa. The girl shelved it for later.

  “Yes, Dahlia. Thank you for coming here. Please have a seat. I’d love to talk to you.”

  She plopped down on the chair, causing the synthetic upholstery to creak and expel air making a noise like a fart. Cat giggled to ease the tension and Dahlia did it too. “Oops.”

  Cat sighed with relief, “Oh, thank you. My nerves were killing me,” Cat confessed. “I was so nervous.”

  “Me too,” Dahlia frowned. “At first I didn’t want to come, but Mr. McNamara was kind enough to explain you wanted to apologize.”

  Cat shut her eyes but it was useless. Her tear ducts were like the freeway at six PM. “I’m so sorry, Dahlia,” she started to bawl. “I’m so sorry you had to lose so much.”

  She grabbed Cat’s hand and gently squeezed it. Dahlia was soon crying too.

  Desperate, Cat wished for nothing more than reveal who she really was and what happened. She almost did it but she knew Dahlia would react badly to that. Another one joined the trio.

  

  The words caught on Cat’s mouth each utterance a struggle between sobs, “I’m sorry, Dahlia. I’m sorry I split you apart.”

  “Why?”

  “A monster stole my first time and left me with a baby. My mom would kill me and I… I just wasn’t thinking straight. I wanted to escape, to end it all. Turns out I was bound for a place more terrible than any this world could offer me. William saved me even though I wasn’t worthy, Dahlia,” Cat replayed the phantom’s words.

  Seeing the lovely woman Wiliam was about to marry. Feeling and sharing in his pain as she rode along in her former body made Catherine realize how much she’d screwed up. William’s grief was real and she could tell he was about to reveal the truth to her, despite they both knowing and argued about how stupid it would be to do so, how people would just think she was insane.

  “Thank you for coming here. Would you tell me something about William?” Cat almost refused to ask Catherine’s question.

  Cat became just a relay between the two women. It felt right to do so and he felt like he was intruding in his fiancée’s intimacy just by listening to her lay praise in his memory. Catherine was eager to soak every single tidbit of information about him but Cat couldn’t fault the ghost. It was only fair since she’d taken over her body and life. Dahlia took her phone and showed photos of them together, of their trips, of the years they spent together, first as classmates, progressing to dating and the long engagement. She showed their modest apartment only five blocks away from Central Park, William’s workplace, finally bringing up his funeral.

  Yes, his funeral. It was something Cat hadn’t thought of but William left behind his physical body and life. She broke down at the sight of his grieving family immortalized before his own open grave. Dahlia stood up and hugged her, inflicting even more damage as Cat felt the scent of her perfume, William’s favorite fragrance.

  A nurse even came to check on them because the heart monitor sounded an alarm. A long while later, the tears dried up only because of exhaustion and dehydration. Cat had a bout of hiccups not even breathing exercises could fix. She felt her throat sore and Dahlia’s blouse was soaked with tears and snot.

  “I’m trash,” Catherine admitted through Cat’s mouth.

  “You’re a victim as much as Will was,” Dahlia soothed and caressed Catherine’s hair, twirling it in her fingers.

  “William gave me this life I have now,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if it were not for him.”

   Cat left this part out.

  “He did suffer from a mild white knight syndrome,” Dahlia jested and sighed longingly.

  “Yes, he does-did,” Cat parroted the specter’s Freudian slip.

  Dahlia froze for a moment and stared at her. She pursed her lips and swallowed dry. Cat could tell she wasn’t wholeheartedly forgiving Catherine but she didn’t expect that either. Before Dahlia lied the killer of her fiancée. One under custody, the cops outside had warned her the protocol was the same as a prison visit.

  Then Cat, on her own, stuck her foot in her throat then shot at it. Metaphorically. “What I am about to say might sound crazy and you have all the right to slap me in the face and walk away,” she said. “But I had an out-of-body experience that day. I met William.”

  Dahlia frowned, her eyebrows coming closer together as a fire lit in her eyes. Cat knew she wasn’t a religious person although her family was catholic. “I’ll hear what you have to say,” she said bluntly.

  “I swear I’m not making this up. On my life,” Cat begged.

  “I can prove it. Not only he told me some things only you two would know but he also left me some information. The police won’t let me access the internet, though.”

  “They told me to keep my phone on airplane mode. Screw them,” she said as she swiped her screen. “What do you want to do?”

  “Access his Dropbox account, even though he has two-factor authentication on,” Cat then proceeded to tell her the login credentials. The password was Diceware but had over twenty words. Then they went through the security process to disable the two-factor authentication, typing in the emergency single-use backup code. “I could’ve used social engineering or hacking to get the credentials, but the emergency code is single-use. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise and it was impossible to figure out.”

  Dahlia shook her head. “William sometimes called me technically illiterate,” she snorted. “But what you say rings true. What do you want me to see in his Dropbox?”

  “His bad poetry,” Cat revealed, bashful and ashamed of the cringy poetry William wrote and never dared to show her. They navigated to an encrypted folder and once again Cat produced the right password.

  Dahlia downloaded the text files and started to read them out loud. Cat cringed. Catherine cooed. Everyone started to cry again.

  It also made Cat feel great relief. There was one hypothesis that explained their situation very well. Catherine was a stalker with multiple personality disorder, and Cat wasn’t William but just a facet of a deranged suicidal girl. Everything, the out-of-body experience, their behavior after waking up in the hospital, it could all be explained by just throwing Catherine in a straight jacket and pumping her with psychiatric drugs until she either stopped hallucinating or became a vegetable.

  However, these passwords were as impossible to know as Cat claimed them to be. Unless Catherine had access to some sort of secret agency that captured and tortured William to get that information out of him, then she orchestrated her suicide attempt and managed to fall exactly on top of him to impersonate him in her body.

  That or the afterlife, the supernatural, heaven, hell, and the purgatory were real.

  Occam’s Razor flipped the tables and left the room.