text: The car rolls down the highway in your search to meet up with Kess. He should be at the house with that deranged codger, where you were until a few years ago when he sold you to Paul. That old man would collect anything he thought was haunted, and his damnable superstitions make his mind impenetrable. On any night but Halloween, you can't do much to separate from your container without traveling through solids. There's no textbook on the physics of being a dead ethereal wisp, so everything you know is from years of watching others make mistakes. Kess probably has things under control by now.
  
  You drive through a series of increasingly obscure backstreets until you arrive at the house, identified by its cheap metal roof and the oddments littering the yard. There's nobody outside, the lights are off, and the place remains undecorated. Maybe he's out trapping for ghosts or something. You park the car against the curb a house away.
  
  > peer in through the windows
  You step out of the car and make your way up to the side of the house, walking over small twists of metal that seem to have fallen off a nearby piece of "lawn art". You duck under a window and take a peek from below. You see furniture: a television, an armchair, and a table, all swept to one side of the room. In their place, candles take the arrangement of a seance pattern. Greg, the old man, sits in the middle of the circle, forming words on his lips that you can't hear from outside. You lower your head out of view. What exactly is he trying to accomplish, you wonder, never having seen this before. But Greg always puts his best foot forward to anything he tries to accomplish, so unless he became senile in the last few years, he's not following a D.I.Y. occult recipe.
  
  Trying the front door would be fruitless, given what he's up to. You could break in through a window or drive the car into the house. That's certainly one way to make an entrance.
  
  > break a window
  Breaking in from a window is more sensible, you think. You lean down to collect a particularly jagged metal scrap from the lawn, admiring its potential uses as both a shiv and hammer. You take a good step back and heave it into the window, resulting in a loud but ineffectual thump. You drop it in favor of a concrete statue (it's upper half) shaped to look like a marsh witch. The makeshift ram puts a radial crack in the window that spiderwebs to the edges. Another hefty run does it in, throwing glass shards around like the spray of a champagne bottle. Picking up the shiv-hammer, you climb through the window and run up to Greg. He's still chanting gibberish that means as much to you as it did when you couldn't hear it. You plunge the sharp end of the metal fragment in his flesh, pressing in with both hands to grind it into his organs. To your surprise, he holds it from going further, and looks at you with contempt.
  
  "Who are you and why are you interfering with me, ghost?" A metallic voice questions from beyond. Greg pushes the metal out of his chest, overpowering your arm strength. The wound begins to heal of its own accord. "Just a little longer, and then I'll play your games." It looks like Greg's goal was to get possessed by some creature. He always was a nut job, so you're not too surprised. Whatever is currently transferring into his body is as weak now as it will ever be, and still has the strength to control some limbs. You don't know what it is, but you hardly want to wait and find out.
  
  > try to halt the possession
  It looks like Greg is unable to move for the time being. You start kicking over the candles around the circle, which earns you a scowl. A heap of unrelated baubles and clothing lay in a pile near the circle. Only some of them cast purple shadows...an offering for the possession, maybe? The ghosts left must be too afraid to leave their containers, for fear of being absorbed or exchanged as currency for the arrival of this being. You kick the pile away, and Greg's face twists with anger. He continues chanting.
  
  You walk around him. He shifts in place to face you, but he has to lift himself only with his hands. It's easy enough to outpace his clumsy hand-turning. You circle around and catch him in the neck with the shiv, snapping through the vocal cord. He screams hoarsely and then goes quiet. Something arises from the body, juxtaposed between the house and its distant origin. It's stuck, halfway between the planes. You laugh — a mixture of spite and satisfaction. The red mist can only quiver in place. Greg's left hand goes limp, releasing a stone figurine with demonic features. It looks like it could've been the catalyst that started the whole thing. You switch over to the blunt end of your shiv-hammer implement and slam it down.
  
  With Greg taken care of, you move on to the clutter around the house. With so many haunted objects, you do all your sifting through the rubber insulation of your shoe. Direct contact is the easiest way to get possessed, and you're not sure how strong you are against some of the spirits in this house, especially after putting an end to that.
  
  "Kess. Come out and jump into a convenient vessel so I can carry you off to a habitable body." He needs an actual mouth to relay information, and it's just about the only leverage you have to get information out of him to help yourself. From your mortal years, you know he doesn't give things out for free. A pale cloud snakes out from a flashlight, circles, and returns. "If you're not Kess, I will personally return you to the Otherside. Come out again if you want to confirm who you are." It does. You grab the flashlight with your sleeve.
  
  > visit the neighbors
  If the neighbors next door are around, one of them would do. You walk up to the nearest house, blue-trimmed and nice in stark contrast to Greg's, and knock at the door. At first, there's no response, and you're waiting impatiently under the yellow porch light. A young girl answers the door; she must be around ten. You put your foot in the doorway and lean forward, touching the flashlight to her arm. She stands still for a moment, then closes the door. Just in case something goes wrong, you walk back out to the street, casually returning to Greg's. A light goes on. A minute passes, and it turns off. A man steps out from behind the door and walks over.
  
  "Kess?" you inquire.
  
  "Yeah."
  
  Now that he's got a mouth, you want your answers. "I need to know how to push out a conscience," you bluntly state. "The original. So I can live in this body through and past sleep, if you wouldn't mind sharing."
  
  "Thanks for the body, by the way. I'll have to go find something to do that myself. I'll be leaving you to do the same, Viktor. After all, there's only so much time left in the night, and I can't risk wasting it to train you on the few things I learned at old Greg's mad house," Kess replies. "I suppose if you promise to pay me, wherever I go, so I can live a stable life without work, that would be fine by me. Just for a lifetime, mind you. Say what you need to now. I've got to get this done as soon as possible."
  
  There aren't many options. It's a promise to work for Kess in exchange for a permanent secret to immortality — the kind you thought you'd get when you first became a ghost. There's no guarantee of success, especially when his host has a lot of willpower. The alternative is to likely end up haunting a trinket for yet another year. All activities that delve into dark mysticism tend to carry the risk of oblivion when they go wrong, which is something you're not looking forward to.
  
  > search for answers at Greg's
  "I'll pass, Kess. I've got my own ideas on how to make this last." He shrugs, walking back inside with you. After a moment of fumbling around, he snatches the keys to Greg's car and takes his leave. You're standing alone in the house, with its bipolar arrangements and the cold draft coming in through the window. You snuff some of the candles still burning around the summoning circle. You collect them up to an unassuming dining room table, swiping off heaps of paper and clutter. This will be your study chamber for the coming hours.
  
  The first few are spent congregating all the books roaming the floors and ranging across shelves. There are several hundreds of them. More time yet is devoted to turning through the table of contents for most of them, discarding the ones that seem least related to your goal. Except for a few outliers describing the history of famous hauntings (both places and people), the majority are a mixture of conjectured witchcraft and psychosis. On the Indigo Plains sounds like a vision of the Otherside through the lens of a horror narrative. Inhaling Immortality comes across as someone's power trip fantasy; you know all too well the restrictions of ghosthood. You continue on through the mostly handwritten books, reading the chicken scratch edits in the page gutters. A Compilation on Ghost Theory seems to be little different than the baseless hypothesizing of other volumes. But, in frenetic, fine sharpie are little notes. A chill tingles your neck and spine. The notes and their descriptions...these were written by the mind of another ghost.
  
  You lean in, scooting the candle closer, and take a deep read. Stanley is in there somewhere, exerting his maximum force to expell you. Your concentration is partitioned between the book and maintaining bodily dominance; time flows by. The portal between the mortal realm and the Otherside yawns open only once a year, on Halloween. When it closes, it brings finality to any ghost without a physical tether.
  
  You glance out the defunct window. The sky is rising into a deep blue color, and your head is bobbing dangerously in sleep deprivation. Stanley is likely to awaken at a different time than you...if he wakes up first, he'll probably send you to oblivion.
  
  > Inhabit an object for another year
  You sigh. It's time to pack it in. Regretfully, you depart from Stanley. He falls immediately to sleep. You follow suit, waiting just long enough to ensure he's not watching. In your lassitude, you slide into one of the many books scattered around. Some come in to clean up the body, and an investigation follows. Dutiful feet mince across the floor, and then they're absent, none approaching the bookshelf or your particular prison. Winter passes into the new year. All the while, you're stranded in isolation.
  
  June rolls around, and new feet enter the house. You overhear something about an estate sale, but you're goaded into the garbage by gloves you can't travel through, apparently unworthy. The garbage comes to a processing center, where standard procedures stymie any hope of direct possession. Eventually, you reach your final destination in landfill, waiting for the next outing. But sometime in all that isolation, you lost count of the current day, and there's no one around to remind you, not for miles.
  
  It's the little things that damn us the most.