Dead Name

"Sorry, I'm just...I didn't expect this to work. I don't, or I didn't, believe that ghosts were real."

She spun, graceful even in heels. Her skirt spun around her body, revealing the tops of her stockings. "I'm very much real, though I suppose that's only a temporary state of matters. These rituals are fickle things. I'm Clara. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Nick. Did you...know Morris?"

She nodded, a slight curl of a smile on her lips. "I knew him, in a way. And his partner Michael. But what of you? Why are you here?"

"I'm related to Michael, vaguely."

"Ah...the Will. What year is it now?" Nick told her. Clara gasped, her hand cupping her mouth. "That long? I didn't know...time passes differently, you see. You fade in and out. Years pass between moments." She looked off to the side, her lip quivering.

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" he asked. Maybe he could take her mind off the whole death thing.

She nodded. There's a fetter...an object of great importance to me in life. While it exists, I cannot pass into the next. Might you find it for me?"

"Of course," he replied instantly. His heart ached when he realized his words had hurt her. Perhaps ignorance was bliss. "Just tell me where to go."

***

Nick entered the library once more. His hand held one of the candles from the ritual in the candelabra from Morris' study. Floating nearby was Clara, temporarily channeled through the candle's flame. Her feet didn't quite touch the floor; her movements were that of someone unbound by gravity. Still, she kept pace with him. Perhaps it would have been considered rude to just fly forward through the walls.

"It's in here," she confirmed, and pointed over to the middlemost shelf of books, in the Fiction section. Nick approached hesitantly.

"One of the books?" he asked, looking for an obvious candidate.

"Not quite. Remove the Woolf for me, would you?" she asked. Nick skimmed the titles on the spines and found 'Orlando: A Biography' out of alphabetical order near the middle of the shelf. He pulled out the cover, but the front of it was caught on some kind of cord. The grinding of metal on metal made him step back. The book sank into its alcove.

"Michael made it for me. He had a penchant for the dramatics of the moving picture," she said, then held out her hand to usher him forward.

He stepped back as the bookcase spun into the wall. It opened up a passage to a new room. There were no lights within. Stale air replaced the smell of old tomes, making him wrinkle his nose. Nick held the candelabra in front of him and headed inside.

The sight of another candlelight made him step back in sudden apprehension. He calmed when the candle moved in tandem with his own. It was a mirror! A very long mirror, running the length of the room from his waist height to just above his head. A seat like one might find in a barbershop waited in the middle of the room. Dressers and drawers stacked below and to the sides of the mirror hinted at the room's purpose. On top of these, mannequin heads held wigs and hair accouterments while others held jewellery. Gaudy baubles of gold and silver with all manner of precious gems socketed inside. Nick couldn't have guessed the worth of the objects in this room alone, but it was likely more money than he would have ever made in his lifetime.

"Whose are these?" he asked. The ghost was silent, merely allowing Nick to explore the room at his own pace. He opened one of the large oaken wardrobes. A rack of beautiful dresses in differing styles and colours greeted him. Caught by their beauty, he found himself sliding his fingers through the fabric while examining each. They were sure to be worth something, he reasoned. That's why he was so interested.

The last dress on the rack was a familiar outfit. Nick parted the dresses to the side to get a better look.

It was Clara's white dress.

"I don't understand," he asked. "Why did Morris have a secret room for you, Clara?"

Her smile was sad now, weary. "Oh honey. Morris and I were the same person."

It all made sense. The 'other self' in those journals! Nick slapped his head for not realising the obvious answer sooner, followed by another terrible truth. "Fuck. I had no idea. I've been calling you...shit, sorry. You don't look at all like his picture.""

She waved him off. "I appreciate your apology, but it isn't necessary. When your soul leaves the body, the mortal coil holds no sway on your true form. This is who we really are. Morris was just...my cocoon."

Nick nodded, though he still regretted his lack of foresight. "So...which one of these is your fetter? What is keeping you here?" Nick asked.

She floated over to the cabinet underneath the mirror. Her translucent hand pointed to the silver pendant on a chain around one of the mannequin heads. Nick picked it up by its beaded chain. The pendant itself was in the shape of a heart, with similar sigils to the ones he'd used to begin the ritual carved into it at odd angles, some overlapping. Close to the candelabra's light, he could swear the symbols were glowing.

"This is...this was very important to me. It took a good deal of my fortune and several years to understand the mysteries of sigil crafting, but the results were undeniable. Try it on."

"It's magic?" Nick asked. Though he wasn't some credulous buffoon, he would have to take the ghost of the trans girl currently talking to him about enchanted objects. "Is it dangerous?"

"Not at all. It projects the soul's inner self outward overlapping on top of the physical body. You become who you see yourself as inside."

He looked over at the ghost woman. "So...this necklace let you look like you do now?"

"Yes. Of course, there's no reason I couldn't dress up a bit. But I had the body I'd always wanted, so long as I wore that pendant. Oh. Oh my." Clara's gaze fell on the mirror. "I didn't realize..."

"What do you mean?" he asked. When he turned to the mirror once more, he screamed.

There was someone else in his stead.

Her auburn ponytail looked like his mother's had when she was young. Eyes the same colour as his stared out of dark, sunken sockets, like she hadn't slept in days. She was several inches shorter and had smaller shoulders, but the stranger had his cute nose. She wore a leather jacket straight out of some retrowave album cover, a black shirt with a broken heart logo, and black slacks with holes torn in the knees. When Nick moved, she mimicked his movements. And when he spoke, she copied his words perfectly.

"What the fuck is this?!" he asked. His voice came out high pitched and melodic. A singer's voice.

Nick watched in the mirror as the ghostly form slid up behind her, putting ethereal hands onto the auburn woman's shoulders. "I see now! This is why I was able to communicate with you, unlike the others. You're just like me!"

Nick let the pendant fall from his hands. The effect evaporated around him, and the person in the mirror was Nick again. "I thought you said the pendant reveals your true self!" he shouted, his outraged voice back to its normal register.

"It does! I...did you know?"

His face was beet red when he turned from the mirror. "Absolutely not. This is some kind of ghost trick! Or the pendant is a cloaking device that makes you look hot. I'm not a girl!"

Clara nodded to the mirror. "You could have fooled me."

He fled.

DAY FIVE

Nick ran out of the kitchen's supply of salt, but a line surrounding the bedroom from the rest of the apartment. Nothing paranormal could cross lines of salt. One of the first lessons of spiritualism.

He heard the knocking again. Nick ignored it, collapsing onto the bed. It wasn't true. It could be true. If he was trans, he would have known. There were no signs. Flickers of memory passed by like glimpses of a station from a subway window. His mother's dresser. His sister's 'makeup practice' game. The voice of his best friend in the whole world, Mia, telling him he was just like one of the girls.

Except for the signs, there were no signs.

"Nick. Can we talk?" Clara asked from behind the door. Nick clutched himself.

"Go away, Clara. I can't deal with you right now."

A long pause. He wanted her to go away, but he was also worrying she might take it personally. His desire to protect her warred with the tripwire self-defence system that had him in a mental lockdown. Could she be both victim and perpetrator?

"Very well. I will wait out here. But, please, the candle is almost melted. The ritual will lose its power and..." Her voice trailed off.

Nick tried to speak up, but the knot in his throat refused to untie itself. Over the next 24 hour people he did a lot of things: cry, scream, stare blankly at the wall as a maelstrom of dysphoria unleashed itself, finally set free by a collapse of denial.

He didn't hear Clara again.

DAY SIX

Forty-eight hours, he thought to himself. Without sunlight, the clock on the wall in his bedroom was the only way to tell that it was morning. He spent yesterday careening wildly between emotions. Now, he simply didn't have the strength to continue to feel so torn up inside. He still felt a dull ache, but his other needs were overcoming his anxieties. For one, he was starving.

He broke the line of salt and left to make a meal of...something. Anything really. There were ingredients enough to make a soup, so he set about doing that. Cooking some leftover chicken in a pot of broth and rotini, he was well on his way to a bangin' chicken noodle soup. He did, however, retrieve some salt from his impromptu line of defence against the supernatural for seasoning.

While he cooked, he stewed over the encounter he had with Clara. What had that been? Had she tried to mislead him? What reason would she have to lie? None of it made sense.

This was something he'd have to find an answer to. He set the burner to low and went back to the closet. The candles had burned out, with wax in little pools around the five points of the pentagram. It took a while to clean those up. Finding new ones wasn't hard, as Clara had apparently had a cabinet full of them in her study. How much time did she spend on this spiritualism stuff, he wondered? Is that how she knew she could communicate after she passed?

This time, she appeared almost immediately after he lit the final candle.

"Nick! Oh thank goodness," she said, holding a hand to her chest. "I was worried I scared you off."

He parsed his next words silently, pacing back and forth while he got his thought sorted.

"I've been trying to deal with what I saw in the mirror. That...person...I don't recognize them. But I don't know if I recognise the other one either. The guy, I mean. The way I look now. Does that make any sense?"

She nodded, but motioned for him to continue. "Please."

He continued to pace, but kept talking. "I've dealt with certain feelings my whole life. Nothing quite so overt, but I've never liked the way my face looked, or the way my voice sounded. I always thought that was just self-loathing. But...when I saw her in the mirror..."

"You felt indescribable relief?" she proposed.

"Yes! I...wait, how do you...oh, right. Shit."

Clara tried to leave the circle but got stopped by the wall of salt. After an apology, Nick broke the seal and let her float out. "You may have surmised that I would have encountered prejudice had I been myself. The pendant had been my idea. To cast aside the mortal coil and assume the shape of my true self? It was too good to be true." She sighed.

"I'm guessing it was? Too good to be true, I mean."

"The constant switching...each time I switched back to being 'Morris' I felt a little part of me die. It wasn't me, and I never wanted to be me. But I couldn't very well be the manager of a major electronics concern as myself. From what I've gathered from our conversations, the world is different. I wish I was born a few decades later."

Nick laughed bitterly. "Not too different. But yeah, things are better. I do wish I could be myself too but, y'know how it is. Family, friends...it's way too much."

"But it is possible, right?" she asked, hope in her voice. Nick was reluctant to acknowledge that. It meant that he'd have to, maybe, one day, in the future consider the chance of maybe being closer to how he felt inside. "Because the pendant can help."

"I'll admit, the idea of an instant girl piece of jewellery has its appeal. My browser history would attest to that," he waited a beat before remembering that, when Clara died, television was barely a thing, "Right, sorry. But wouldn't that just be another form of masquerade?"

She shook her head. "If the pendant just hid your physical form, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to craft. In my time, such charms were commonplace among the wealthy elite. No, the true magic is in the sigil work. The pendant slowly but most assuredly works to transform yourself into that self-image."

Nick's jaw dropped. "So the pendant does more than just throw up illusions?"

"It can. But only if you wear it continuously. The powers within it need time to manifest. I could never be my true self for long enough for the transformation to take hold, for it to transform me into the person I was inside. With the business, with Michael, there just wasn't enough time. And then, of course, I ran out of time," she held her hands out as if to indicate her current state.

He wanted to reach out and hug her but knew his hands would pass right through. "I'm sorry. The world can really suck for people like us, huh?"

"Suck? Ah, yes, I guess so. Michael was a dear. He was so supportive, but he was also very protective of me. I could tell that my situation was hurting him as much as it did me but...When I died, he took it hard. I tried to tell him, tried to warn him about the pendant and how it was what was keeping me stuck to this world but I couldn't get through."

"Do you know why he drafted the Will in the way that he did?" Nick asked.

"I wish I did. A week in a haunted apartment? Sounds like something out of one of his serials! Maybe he wanted someone I would approve of, or could at least communicate with. Every time someone entered, I tried to talk to them. But when you're past the veil, interacting with the world becomes much harder. And my efforts may have done more harm than good."

"The realtor did say you caused some of my family to flee."

Clara laughed. "Oh dear. I hope it wasn't too much of a fright!"

"Hey, if you hadn't been, I wouldn't have met you!" Nick said with a grin. Clara returned the expression, which made him feel even better. The despair of the previous day felt like a distant memory now. "So... what now? Where do I go from here?"

"That depends. Do you want to move forward?" she asked. "I don't want to rush you or force you into anything you don't really feel. The pendant can't make you do anything you don't want. And our selves change all the time depending on our relationships, our experiences...it's just our bodies that stay inflexible. The pendant's power makes your form more malleable than most, but it can't give you one you don't already feel deep inside."

Nick took a candle and went back to the secret changing room. The pendant was on the floor where he'd dropped it. From where he stood, it looked like it weighed a ton.

"I don't know if I can do this," he said in a weak voice.

"You can. You're strong. I believe in you," Clara said.

He closed his eyes. After a final exhale, he bent down and picked up the jewellery. His form in the mirror instantly changed back to the red-haired woman. This time there was no surprise, no fear. He slipped the chain around his neck, fastening the clasp. A wave of tingling static washed over Nick, and suddenly...

"I'm...pretty?" Nick asked, examining her new body. She was still in her old clothes, but they hung loosely on her new body. Her breasts, perky handfuls, poked out of her shirt while her pants bowed out and looked ready to pop a seam.

Clara hugged herself, sniffling a little. "Oh my goodness, you are pretty. You're gorgeous. I'm just...so happy you can find yourself. Do you want a new name?"

"I...I don't have one picked out yet. Why not Nichole, at least for now?" Nichole asked, turning to Clara.

"Nichole is just fine. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Nichole!"

They talked long into the night about what this new stage in Nichole's life might entail over delicious chicken noodle soup, both of them unable to suppress their glee.

DAY SEVEN

In Nichole's dream, she was standing in a grassy field. Green grass swayed in a breeze over the gentle sloping hills. In the distance, amber waves of a farmer's field called to her to walk through, hands trailing behind her in Elysian splendour.

"I have to go now."

Nicole spun around. Clara was there in a beautiful sundress. She was no longer transparent, and her naked feet rested on the ground. Her voice sounded cheerful, almost anticipatory.

"Are you...moving on?" Nicole asked. After all she'd seen, it was still hard for her to accept the realities of an afterlife.

"Something like that. You'll find out when you make this journey yourself."

Nicole felt for the chain around her neck. "But the pendant. Your fetter...I haven't destroyed it yet!"

Clara chuckled lightly, waving off the information. "It's no longer mine. I've given it to a good home, and now it has no hold over me. You set me free, Nicole. For that I thank you, truly."

She couldn't stand still while the ghost passed on. Nicole stepped over to clutch the deceased woman's hands. Rather than pass right through, she felt them. Clara was as warm bodied as she was.

"What?"

"Consider this a Going-Away Present. Had to wrangle special dispensation for this. But I got it, so long as this happened in the confines of a dream."

"A dream?" Nicole asked. She hadn't realized it, but she reached out with her mind and tested the walls of reality by trying to wake up. Sure enough, the dream lost cohesion. She stopped just in time, convinced. "Sorry. Force of habit. I get a lot of nightmares."

"Not anymore," Clara said, then leaned in to kiss Nicole. She only touched her lips at first, but Nicole was surprised by how real it felt in the confines of the dream. Embracing this new reality, she wrapped her arms around the other woman and they shared a deep, long lasting second kiss. Their mouths opened in tandem and their tongues came out to play. Despite being almost a century out of date, Clara was no prude.

Time stood still during the kiss. It only resumed when Nicole felt a gentle push backward. She accepted the motion and found a comfortable bed meet her as she fell back. Clara crawled on top of her, the ghost's smaller body still able to keep Nicole pinned beneath her straddling form.

"Now I want to show you how sex would work, as a woman. The pendant will take a while to make all the changes, but let's skip to the fun part, shall we?~" She pulled down Nichole's pants to reveal a complete lack of dick. In fact, the only thing between her legs was a pretty pink pussy. She gasped, feeling a swelling of competing emotions. The surprise fought with the joy of knowing that her body felt more like hers and less like she was renting someone else's. The simple change of sex made her happy...and horny.

From underneath Clara's white dress, she pulled out her own equipment. The familiar organ couldn't have been anything but Nichole's old dick. The one her waking body had, at least for the near future. To be on the other end of a dick was something she'd wondered about in the abstract, but not quite so literally!

"Like what you see?" Clara asked, pumping herself to rigidity. Nichole's nod was jerky, her breath catching on her words.