NEW: an introduction to a ghost hunter.

 

He could smell the cigar smoke as it filled the room - he could even see the thick billowing cloud as it flickered across the divide between them - being present, but not quite. As yet, he couldn't pinpoint the smoker - the ghost. He could sense him though, could feel the sliding full lips as they pulled at the cigar, could feel the contentment in the man, the sense of pleasure between smoker and cigar - he just couldn't focus directly on where he was in the room, but he suspected he wasn't meant to.

The room had been stripped bare, not even a carpet on the floor. It had been on his insistence, the present occupiers of the house readily agreeing. In the room there was just the ghost and himself. And who was he? A tall, loping man, of uncoordinated limbs and failing eyesight. Past his best certainly, with a body built for nothing useful. And yet, here he was, confronting a ghost that others wouldn't, couldn't.

He was no friend of them - ghosts, but no enemy either. He often referred to himself as the man between. What was sensed by others - a flicker, a shadow, a coolness in a room, a tap on a wall - to him, it was much more, much more heightened, much more real. And because of that he was kept at a distance by many, but he had become used to that distance, come to favour it. He was after all, no lover of the living.

But enough. He needed to focus. He had a job to do, and he needed to do it well. He stepped forward, his bare feet reverberating on the plain wooden boards of the deserted room. As he stepped closer, each step deliberate and confined, he sensed the ghost of the smoker turn and give him his full attention. It was time.