Started a new story. I don’t know where it is going necessarily.
Pausing at each word, he asks, “Are…ghosts…real?”
“Are ghosts real,” the old man scoffs, “You’ve just seen ‘em.”
“But, what are they?” Michael blurts. Running his hand through his hair he begins pacing up and down the little room they’d locked themselves in. The grizzly bearded beggar stands still, his dark eyes possessed with an unageing intensity. Try as he might, Michael couldn’t escape that penetrating gaze.
“The question is not, ‘what are they,’” the old man finally answers, “as if you could weigh and measure ‘em. What did you expect, that a spirit would fit under a microscope? Is it possible you thought the world could be dissected, that in analyzing all the little bits you would know the whole, that your expensive education did anything other than blind you?”
“But what are they?”
The locked door rattles, the brass handle twisting right and left at a dizzying speed. Unseen fists pound from the other side. Michael turns from the door and faces his companion. They had hid themselves in a little closet under the staircase, and the old beggar sat where the descending ceiling stopped, as if the very room itself were bending around this rugged character, lending credence to his next words.
“They are that which cannot be forgotten, that which remains when all else fades.”
Michael’s exasperated thumb twitches, his keychain’s light blinking a moment. In that brief shadow, in that blindness, he could no longer see, as if for a moment all reality stopped.
Tale Told 
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