Who: Lorne Cameron What: Lorne is losing it When: Tuesday, 3:00 AM Where: His flat in Edinburgh
Lorne Cameron didn't believe in ghosts. He never had, but that thought was very little comfort when he woke up in a cold sweat for the fifth night in a row. It was more than normal, healthy, everyday paranoia. He was dead certain that there was something in his flat. The same way he had the four nights before, he got out of bed and went looking for whatever it was that was tugging at the corners of his mind. He wasn't sure he was fully awake. It was possibly that this was just some recurring nightmare. That would, somehow, actually be better. But better than what? Better than what he was sure was really going on, even if he wouldn't admit it to himself.
He padded through the house, half-asleep, ready to get the charade over with, to go back to bed where he could not sleep, half hoping and half fearing that he'd hear a voice urging him to dark and bloody deeds and asking him to swear on his sword. His eyes quickly moved to steel glinting in the dim foggy light of the street lamps creeping through the windows. The sword was propped by his bedside, in the amused hope that someday he'd get the chance to scare the piss out of a would-be burglar. He picked it up, holding it comfortably, the tip flicking back and forth with his gaze as he continued his tour of the small flat. He wasn't going to find anything. He never found anything.
He found something. The front door was standing wide open, a cold wind blowing in. He looked out into the dark hallway. Something moved on the stairwell. He thought it through, decided that locking the door and going back to bed would be the smart thing to do, then went out into the hallway anyway, following the mysterious noise. The noise moved ahead of him, always just out of sight. He went down the stairs and with barely a second thought out the door into the alleyway. The paving stones were cold beneath his feet and the drops of misty rain, cool even in summer, clung to his skin. Wearing just pajama bottoms, he wasn't dressed for chasing specters in the night.
"Oy!" There was someone in the alley. Not a drunk or a transient. A man with silver hair wearing a neatly pressed gray suit. He stared up at the cloudy sky. He didn't move when Lorne called out. "Oy! What'd'ya think yer doing?" The man turned and looked at him, staring daggers into his soul, still saying nothing. The man looked eerily like his father. His father, alive and well and miles away. The resemblance was uncanny, but it wasn't him. There was a wrongness there, so much that it didn't cross his mind once to think it might really be the man himself. It was just someone, something that looked like him.
"Speak." Lorne knew what he was supposed to do, even as he cringed at his own mounting insanity. "Speak, I'm bound to hear." Do not come your tardy son to chide. The thought, not his own, echoed in his mind.
The apparition spoke. It urged him to go home. No, not urged. Demanded. To face what's done and make right the things that, too much delayed, did meet their ends in tragedy. It spoke in a way that no person in waking life did, in a way that no real person did outside of a theatre. Lorne's head was swimming. This was too much to believe.
He didn't believe in ghosts. Unfortunately, that didn't matter in the slightest. This ghost believed in him.