People assume death is loud.
They expect thunder, screaming, light, darkness, angels, fire, hands dragging you somewhere you did not consent to go. They imagine meaning attached to it, a reason, a moral punctuation at the end of a sentence that finally makes sense.
Death is quieter than that.
Death is water filling your ears so thoroughly that even your thoughts drown. It is cold pressing into your chest until breathing feels optional. It is the sudden realisation that your body does not belong to you anymore.
I was nine years old when I learned that.
The river behind our housing block was not wide, but it was old. Old enough to show patience. Old enough to pretend it was harmless. It curved lazily through garbage and weeds, carrying stories no one bothered to ask about. Children played near it because adults were too tired to stop them. The river had already taken a few lives by then, and countless pieces of firearms but poor neighbourhoods have a way of forgetting their dead quickly.
I slipped because I was trying to impress someone whose name I no longer remember.
That detail always bothers me.
I remember the smell of algae. I remember the sun blinding my eyes. I remember the exact sound my skull made when it hit the submerged rock. What I do not remember is why I thought crossing that river on slick stones was worth anything at all.
The water closed over my head and the world ended without ceremony.
At first I fought. Arms flailing, lungs burning, panic screaming louder than reason. Then something changed. Panic is exhausting. Terror consumes itself. Eventually the body realises there is no winning, and in that surrender there is a strange, shameful relief.
The silence came.
And in that silence, I was no longer alone.
Something moved beneath me that was not a fish and not a current. A shape darker than the water, denser than shadow. Then another. Then many.
They did not rush me. They did not grab me. They watched.
That was the worst part.
One of them drifted closer. A man, or what remained of one. His face was swollen, skin split, eyes cloudy with the patience of something that had been waiting a very long time. He looked at me like a bored customs officer deciding whether to stamp my passport.
Not yet, his expression said.
Then a hand grabbed my collar from above, and the world snapped violently back into noise.
I woke up coughing river water and humiliation onto the mud. My chest felt like it had been peeled open. My mother's voice cut through everything else, high and breaking, screaming my name as if volume alone could resurrect me if I had failed.
Behind her, standing ankle deep in the river, the dead man watched me wake up.
He sighed.
I stared back.
That was the moment my life split in two.
After that day, the world refused to stay simple.
I saw them everywhere. In reflections that did not match. In doorways that should have been empty. In the spaces people avoid without knowing why. Some were clear. Some were warped. Some were so faint they barely registered as more than a wrongness in the air.
They never spoke at first. They did not need to.
The living world hums constantly. Noise, movement, breath, friction. The dead exist in contrast. They are quiet in a way that presses inward. Once you learn to hear that silence, you cannot unhear it.
I did not tell anyone.
Children learn quickly which truths are dangerous.
Our home was already a battlefield. Adding ghosts to it would have been reckless.
My father drank himself hollow long before he died. Alcohol did not make him violent. It just removed the shame that kept him pretending otherwise. He moved through the house like a storm looking for something to break. Sometimes it was furniture. Sometimes it was words. Sometimes it was us.
My mother survived by shrinking. By apologising for things she had not done. By working until exhaustion erased fear.
I survived by watching.
Observation is a powerful shield when you cannot fight.
I watched the way my father's rage peaked and collapsed. I watched how alcohol made him sloppy, predictable. I watched the cracks forming in him long before anyone acknowledged they were there.
And after the river, I watched something else.
At night, when the house was quiet and my father passed out on the floor, his ghost would sit in the corner of the room.
He was not dead yet.
That was the part that terrified me most.
The ghost version of him was thinner, sharper, stripped down to the parts of himself he could not hide. His eyes followed my mother when she moved. His mouth twitched when he was angry. Sometimes he looked at his own sleeping body with confusion, as if trying to remember which one of them was real.
I learned something then that would shape everything.
Death does not begin at the moment the heart stops.
It starts when a person gives up on being alive.
The night he tried to kill my mother, the house smelled like blood and cheap liquor.
He had been drinking since noon. I knew because the glassware was wrong. He poured vodka into a chipped mug when he wanted to forget himself completely. When the mug came out, you stayed out of his way.
I was awake in my room, listening. Counting the seconds between raised voices. Mapping escape routes in my head. Planning where to hide if he came for me too.
Then my mother screamed.
There is a specific sound people make when they realise they might not survive the next minute. It bypasses language. It bypasses pride. It drills straight into your spine.
I ran.
The knife was already in his hand. His face was calm in a way I had never seen before.
Focused. Decided. That scared me more than his anger ever had.
For a moment, the three of us froze. Time stretched thin.
And in that moment, I saw his ghost fully formed behind him, overlapping his body like a bad reflection. Its mouth was open, screaming silently. Its hands twitched, eager.
He hesitated.
I do not know why.
That hesitation saved her life.
The police came. The ambulance came. Neighbours gathered and whispered. Someone took my mother's shaking hands and wrapped them in a blanket.
My father locked himself in the bathroom.
By the time they broke the door down, he was hanging from the shower rod.
Officially, he killed himself out of shame.
Unofficially, the truth did not matter.
He died angry.
And angry ghosts do not leave quietly.
After the funeral, things got worse.
Objects moved. Glass shattered. Doors slammed hard enough to crack frames. My mother stopped sleeping properly. She flinched in the shadows. She cried in the shower so quietly she thought no one could hear her.
I could see him clearly now.
My father followed us everywhere. He loomed over my mother while she cooked. He sat on my bed while I tried to sleep. He paced the house like it still belonged to him.
He was furious that he had lost control.
When I finally told my mother, she slapped me hard enough to make my vision blur.
"You will not bring him back into this house," she said, voice shaking. "Not even as a story."
So I learned my second lesson.
Truth is only useful when someone wants to hear it.
I stopped talking.
I started experimenting.
The ghosts responded to attention. To acknowledgement. To confrontation. Fear fed them. Confidence unsettled them.
I waited until my mother left for her night shift.
I dragged a chair into the bathroom.
I locked the door.
My father's ghost appeared almost immediately, drawn to the place he had died like a moth to rot.
"You don't own this anymore," I told him.
My voice shook. I did not let it stop me.
I forced him to look at the rope. I forced him to feel the memory of his body failing. I named everything he had run from. Every excuse. Every lie.
He tried to reach for me.
I did not move.
The moment he realised I was not afraid, something in him fractured.
Ghosts are bound by obsession. Strip that away and they unravel.
He screamed soundlessly as the room filled with pressure, with the weight of his own failure.
And then he was gone.
The house exhaled.
I sat on the bathroom floor until my legs went numb.
That was the night I became something else.
People like to pretend children cannot be cruel.
They are wrong.
Children are honest.
By the time I was a teenager, the ghosts had stopped frightening me. They bored me. They annoyed me. They interrupted my sleep and my thoughts and my attempts at normalcy.
I learned to help some of them. I learned to break others.
The difference depended on mood, context, and eventually, money.
I told myself I was doing what needed to be done.
That lie aged well.
Years later, standing on a private jet runway with cameras pointed at my face and money promised in absurd amounts, I would think back to the river. To the man who had watched me drown and decided I was not worth collecting yet.
I wondered sometimes if he regretted that choice.
Because Enma Kyson grew up to be very good at making the dead uncomfortable.
And this was only the beginning.