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It was with not a little dismay that I found my first and subsequent attempts at booking rejected.
I studiously pored over the terms and conditions. Nowhere could I find what had exempted my application. I lucidly described the level and scale of phantasmagoria which I sought. Alas, elusive, it would seem my description lacked in some especial way.
I compiled a detailed outline of my basic, desired haunting ephemera. Clearly not well enough, it would seem they’d have me believe.
I presented my hoped-for notions of terror to old friends, relatives, and even the odd trusted acquaintance. Each time, I sensed they only told me what they thought I wanted to hear. Their replies were tautly dissonant while they were largely absent as though I wasn’t really there.
Clearly, booking a ghost is not as simple as the terms and conditions initially led me to perceive. Desperate, I retracted, redacted and sought to uncover the core of why each application met such a cursory, rejective non-response.
Those working in the booking of ghosts do not provide feedback or, perhaps in doing, only to those fortunate enough to pass the first selection stage of the process.
Exploring less conservative measures, I reached out to a client with a long history as a regular user of the service. I dreamt for a moment. Thoughts seemed to clog the heart where my mouth should have been. Maybe my currency was out-of-date and, as such, out of order. Out of phase.
Again, I was acknowledged yet ignored.
It was as though I were hot air or some other contraindication my condition withheld me from experiencing, as though the living of it would bring me to harm.
This client could not convey much apart from one vertigo-inducing, life altering thing. Our reading of the terms and conditions differed in that there lay, right at the bottom of the inexplicably small point text, a grossly discombobulating caveat.
Somehow, it refused to avail itself to what I considered my eyes.
Some things, once read, can never be unseen.
The client acted strangely, as though I were making him read it aloud, unbeknownst to and perhaps even against his will. His lips would go on to state that a Client or Member of the Public may acknowledge yet not now nor forevermore assist those performers [sic] (“Ghosts”) who, for no reason that is known, inadvertently attempt to leave the world of the non-living by inhabiting then becoming said Client. No negotiation will be entered into; punishment shall be swift. It is simply not permitted to cross over from the uncanny to that life lived in the physical realm.
