Philip shifted back, all his weight bearing down to the balls of his heels as he regarded the girls and then glanced back at Rylee again. "Going on six months now, I think. But you know me now, so that at least makes two people," he said, with a sound that very closely resembled a laugh escaped his lips, except that it was too short-lived, muted by the sudden restriction of his throat that prematurely strangled its emergence.
He'd never really sat down and contemplated just how long he'd managed to squat in the apartment, though it delighted the part of him, which reveled in devious acts that he had managed to get away with it for so long. Yet, there existed in the back of his thoughts just the suggestion of an unpleasant feeling, like the slithery, ephemeral shiver that occasionally ran up ones spine so quickly that one couldn't help but feel they imagined it. Because there were times when he wasn't entirely convinced he'd stuck around of his own choosing, but rather that some other outside force, or the building itself, willed him to stay. These were the sort of silly notions that came to him in the darkness after waking up sleep-fogged and disoriented, or staring out into the hypnotizing blue of the ocean at that single gleaming island off the coast.
"You know, maybe it's a ghost that caused all the lights to go out," he speculated carelessly as he looked back out into the room. Whenever such unsettling feelings took hold of him, he often remembered that very same island and the lore surrounding it, how many believed it to be haunted. "Someone died here not all that long ago. A violent death can leave a mark, they say." Philip didn't bother to specify who 'they' were but it was hardly a detail of importance to him, just something once heard and now echoed. He couldn't entirely say he fully subscribed to such a theory, but he believed in the possibility of something, whether it was spirits or negative energy, or another type of baffling phenomenon that scientists could no better reconcile than the disparity between quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity.