Marley once said that if he died, he’d haunt me, just like his literary namesake. Typical of him to get something like that wrong, and all the more satisfying that when I died I was able to put it right; haunting Marley now that I am dead is a great pleasure.

Marley and I had met as children, become friends as adolescents and business partners as adults. For a time, we had an excellent relationship, I doing the accounts and the stock inventory and tending to the administration of our small business, and Marley attending to the customers, their orders and the hunting out of stock. It was an arrangement that played to both our strengths; my love of order and his gregarious need to impress people. Our profits were up, our reputation gaining solidity and our friendship untroubled. And then, there came Adele.

For forty years, Marley and I argued over who had the strongest claim on Adele. Marley claimed this victory as his own, stating that he had seen her in the company of Piers Chanter at the theatre at the beginning of March. He knew, he said, because it was at a revival of one of Wilde's plays that he had treated himself to as a birthday present, and his birthday was March 2nd, ergo, he had seen her first. I claimed that Adele was mine because I had spoken to her at Mark Helt-Gotter's party; Helt-Gotter's party was mid March, and besides, speaking to her meant more than merely seeing her. As in everything after Adele, Marley and I couldn't agree, and the truth of it was unimportant. Only the arguments mattered.

Adele was beautiful, pleasingly full-chested and dark haired, and she betrayed me by ignoring my advances and taking up with Marley. My own earnest protestations of love clearly meant nothing to her, and she began to make plans for a future with the oaf Marley. How could I have been a friend to this man, who ignored my entreaties to him to step aside and leave Adele for me? He was ignorant and selfish, and their relationship could not last.

She was not for him, that much was clear; quiet and reserved where he was outgoing and loud, pretty and agile where he was flat-faced and flatter-footed, she was better suited to me, but Marley saw none of this. Or rather, I suspect, he saw it but refused to accept it. She was with him, he would say with maddening patience, I had to accept it and find another. But how could I? The times I had spent with Adele had opened up to me a world of new experiences, of conversations with someone my intellectual equal as well as my emotional counter-part. I could not let her waste herself on Marley.

Rumours are such simple things to start, yet so complex and impossible to stop. One or two indiscreet comments in ears whose mouths could not help but flap, and it was done. Nothing about the business, of course, as this might affect me, but about Marley's private life.

His staying in a suite of rooms above the shop was because of his having been thrown out of his last home; his apparent bachelorhood prior to Adele a careful front to disguise immoral and possibly obscene activities. Docks were mentioned, and cheap ale houses with sawdust floors and poor hygiene. And I, his long-suffering business partner and friend had helped him to cover his shame, find his way out of the messes he so frequently found himself in. It was wondrous to watch these little untruths grow, to see them take a life of their own. Details made their way back to me that I had never considered, had not uttered. People made new claims, insisted on the truth of their statements, and all the time I watched, delighted, and waited for Adele to hear and rush to my arms.

She did not do this; on hearing the dreadful stories of her beloved Marley, she came to the shop, gathered herself up, told him she was leaving and, as an afterthought, slapped my face. Marley was bad, she said, but could no more control his urges than a rat could live a decent life, but I? I had colluded and that made me worse than him. Ignoring both mine and Marley's protestations of innocence, she turned and left and I do not believe either of us saw her again. And that was the start.

Marley blamed me for the loss of his beloved; I blamed him for taking her from me when she was rightfully mine. I had assumed that there was honour among friends, and that he would see that she was better for me than him, but no. Marley had showed himself to be boorish, insensitive and a betrayer of friendships, and I could no longer count him as being amongst my friends. I could not remain in business with him, of course. Accordingly, I made him a generous offer for his half of our small business so that we could untangle ourselves from each other and go our separate ways.

Marley would not sell. Instead, he made a counter-offer for my half of the business and became angry when I refused to sell to him. He called me a back-stabber, a spineless traitor and other, worse, things. For my part, I told him that selling and buying was the easy part of the business, but that he would have been declared bankrupt long before, were it not for my careful fiscal management and organisation. I told him that I would not see a business I had worked so hard to build be put in the control of such a man as he, so that he could run it into the ground. He replied that the business was his by moral right; he had bought all the stock, dealt with dealers and customers and any profit we showed was because of his hard work and that he wasn't prepared to see his business destroyed by selling it to such a "boring, spiteful idiot". Impasse, and neither of us prepared to move, and thus we remained.

We barely spoke for forty years, except to discuss specific business matters. When it came to new ideas, Marley accepted mine without undue resistance, and I was magnanimous in allowing him to try out schemes, some of which I admit were not unsuccessful.

The silence between us suited me, as I could find nothing of interest in my once-friend's conversations, and became amazed at myself for ever having considered him to be more than an acquaintance. I stayed in my little office, keeping our expanding business on track with careful management of the income and expenditure, whilst Marley did little other than talk to the customers and operate the till.

But, if we were silent with each other, about each other we were both positively verbose. Rumours and slurs reached me on a almost weekly basis, about my assumed miserliness, my social ineptitude, my lack of humour, all spread by Marley to discredit me and blacken my name with these foul calumnies. I, for my part, missed no opportunity to tell people the truth of what Marley's carefully cultivated mask of bonhomie covered. I hoped that he might be shamed into leaving if he knew that people knew, but his thick skin and lack of concern for the social graces kept him well insulated and he remained, an unpleasant presence in my life until my death.

My heart attack was quick. I remember nothing of it save for brilliant wave of white pain that grew from my chest to suck at my whole body, and then I was gone. In the shock of that time, I paid little attention to Marley when he found me, or the ambulance men bustling around me as I lay on the floor with my head pointed towards the door and drool collected unflatteringly beneath my open mouth and staining the dust black.

Death is neither frigthening nor particularly spiritual. In the period after my demise, whilst I was buried and arrangements presumably made for my estate, I investigated my new state. I was alone, but this did not bother me; I am solitary by choice.

Alone in my shop and unencumbered by flesh, I would drift along isles, letting myself brush against the stock or the shelves. I could feel them, but seemed unable to have any effect on them. I could not move them, pick them up, carry them, yet I did not miss my body at all. I did not need sleep, found time an irrelevance and needed no food or water. Experimenting, I found that I had the ability to slip through the narrowest of spaces and could lose myself in the tiniest of objects, marvelling in their complexity and solidity. I could not leave the building, was hemmed in by its familiar walls, but this too did not bother me. This place had been my life; now it was my death.I was oddly happy in this period, enjoying the experience of this placid haunting. And the n, Marley came back.

I had not noticed his absence. It was only when he burst into the shop in a riot of laughter and scent that I realised I had not seen him since my death. I had taken little notice of a sign, neatly placed in the shop doorway. It read, Closed Due To Bereavement and it was typical Marley. The writing was florid, overblown and over-capitalised. Extravagant and showy, like everything he did. I had enjoyed myself, and now he was back to spoil it. He wandered the isles for a time after his arrival, talking to himself and running his fingers around the books and antiques that lined the walls and shelves. There was something unpleasant in that caress, something overly sensual, as though he were imagining he was touching something else rather than the rare bound volumes that were our main selling item. Finally, he left the shop floor, going not to his apartment on the floors above, but into my suite of offices at the rear of the building.

My offices. My sanctuary, where I tallied and added and predicted, where I found peace and calm, and now he was in it. He began to open filing cabinets, leafing through folders and papers, taking some out and letting others drop back into their carefully marked places. When there was a large pile of papers on the corner of my desk, Marley sat and began to study them in detail. I have no doubt they made little sense to him; for a man of such base pleasures, the rows of rational, emotionless figures, with their ascetic beauty, must have seemed like ancient hieroglyphics or some complex code. How could he hope to read them, these notations and signatories to deeper places? And yet, he sat at my desk, his fingers tapping a rhythm on the leathered surface, and showed every sign of reading them with understanding. What could he hope to be looking for? And then, the final indignity; he opened the bottom drawer and removed my crystal tumbler and one of the bottles of single malt I keep there. He poured himself a huge measure and leant back in the chair, sipping at the whiskey and leafing through sheet after sheet of my records. It was too much.

"Get off that single malt!"

Marley clearly did not hear me, but he did react. He looked around, a bemused expression on his florid face. Curiously, he looked at the bottle of whiskey on the desk and then down at his glass. Heartened, I leant in close to him and hissed in my sternest voice, "Put it down! It's wasted on you!" This time, Marley took a deliberate sip of the whiskey, holding the glass in to his chest afterwards as though he were guarding a delicate flower or injured bird.

"You know, I might almost believe you're here, you desiccated old fool," he said conversationally. "Getting annoyed because I'm in your precious office drinking your expensive whiskey, are you? Whiskey that, I see, our business bought. Our business? Well, no more. My business now, and I shall do with it what I want."

I listened in horror. He was lying, surely; I had left my half of the business to my nephew, sure in the knowledge that he would continue to run it with the care and attention to detail as I had.

"Are you here? Well, no matter," continued Marley. "Perhaps if you had spent more time talking to your beloved nephew, you might have realised how little he liked you or the business you left him. He was eager to sell. Desperate, really. Oh, I gave him a fair price even thought I could had had it cheap if I’d wanted. So it's all mine now, including the contents of the offices. Including this lovely single malt whiskey." He tilted the glass to the air, a sarcastic gesture of companionship. "Let's drink, my old friend. Good riddance!"

It was true; I cold see it in Marley's eyes, and in seeing it, I realised something. I knew then that death had stripped me of the comfort of my illusions. Where before, the meat and fat of my flesh cocooned my intellect in a protective shell, now all protection was gone. Free by the concerns of my own carcass, I could see into the truth of others with absolute clarity. And Marley, curse him, was telling the truth, and enjoying it. He did not believe I was there, of course, but even so, he enjoyed telling the air of my misfortune, pretending I could be affected by it. I screamed then, wishing I had lungs to squeeze the air and make some sound that could be heard. Hurling myself around the office in a fury, I tried to hit Marley, throw papers around, anything to be known. I wanted desperately to be real, but my efforts were for nothing. Marley simply picked up his, my, glass of whiskey and leaned back in the chair, reading on through papers that resisted my every touch.

I think that the next hours and days were my blackest. Everything I had worked for in the hands of that ape, and there was nothing I could do. How had it come to this? Let down by my flesh, my work lost to that dreadful boor, and unable even to touch, to feel, to make a sound. I am not prone to depressive moments as I have long considered it to be a sign of weakness, but I must admit that I came close to misery then. I drifted the isles of the shop, lingering in the nooks and crannies and enjoying the sight of the stock, the books and ephemera piled high on shelves. Through the offices I went, and up to the rooms above before returning to the shop, the place where I felt the sharpest tug of misery. Marley and I had, even in our worst moments, agreed on how it should be. Books, we said, should be loved and in company. Shelves should be piled high, order at a minimum. There should be trails to follow through the shop, lost corridors leading to dead ends, anterooms and open spaces sprouting unexpectedly from between shelves and cases, and it was to these that I went. Marley had stocked these places, to be sure, but it was my financial expertise that had allowed for it. God only knew what mess Marley would create now that I was gone. I drifted, becoming then the ghost that I am now. Walking was not required; I have no weight for legs and feet to bear. I am only thought, and must float as I see fit.

And in floating, I have discovered that the place I haunt is greater than I could ever have imagined.

My first understanding of this came when I found myself in a corridor that I did not recognise. Shelves stretched about me, and I found that I could not see their end. Where had they come from, these new shelves, and what things were upon them? Peering closely at the books, I found that I could read no titles on their dusty spines and pull none of them from the shelf. In my misery, I panicked, hurling myself down the grey length, but could find no end. I wanted to scream, did so, to no avail. Where was I? More corridors beckoned from either side and tiny rooms appeared, like eddies at the edge of a stream. Stopping in one, I tried to catch the breath that I no longer needed. Terror overcame me, lost in these grey places, and I threw myself back into the small space. I backed as far as I could go before I bumped into the shelves. A cloud of dry, sweet-smelling dust rose around my shoulders. Flailing around, my fear becoming a helpless, shrivelled anger, I knocked books from the shelves, kicking at them as they lay on the floor and trampling their pages and bending their covers. In that moment, I hated them, hated myself, hated this haunting death that trapped me in the building of my employment and most of all, I hated Marley and every page I tore and leaf I mutilated was him.

I was touching things.

The damaged books around me were testament to my force, to my touch, and yet I these were the first things I had been able to touch for many days. Reaching down, I tried to pick up one of the torn pages, but my fingers passed through it. Irritated, flapped at it and watched, surprised, as it snapped away from me. Tentatively, I reached out again, only to have my fingers drift through the paper once more. Slumping down, I kicked out, and again my touch had weight, surrounding me with drifting pages. Was it my anger and frustration that gave me the ability to touch, to have an influence on the world? It certainly seemed so; thinking back, I remembered that it was only when I shouted at Marley in anger that he appeared to notice, however barely, my presence. Perhaps anger gave me solidity, even if it was just for a moment? And if so, a moment was all I would need.

This time, the featureless corridor held on fear for me. I hurled myself along it, knowing instinctively which way to go to move from it back into the more reassuring surroundings of the shop. Through the jumbled isles, past the offices and upwards, moving into the suite of rooms above where Marley slept and where I would take my revenge.

I could not do it.

I do not mean I was taken at the last minute by regret or some moral barrier; I tried to attack as he slept, but my hands had lost their weight and no matter how angry I became, they obstinately refuse to have an impact upon his bloated, puffy flesh.

I had not realised how much living humans smell! The stink was awful in those rooms, of meat and sweat and perfumes which covered but could not remove the odour. Had I smelled like this in life as well, unaware of the rich, sour scent that I was producing? My God, I hoped not, but I knew that I had. Marley himself produced a smell unlike anything I had ever come across before, so thick that I could almost see the pores of his sleeping skin open to let it out like sweat. I hated, hated him, but still my fists had no effect. How angry did I have to be, I wondered. How furious, how deep should my hate run? How could I have my revenge?

The answer lay in those seemingly endless grey corridors. Leaving Marley that night, I was frustrated and angry but could not touch anything. The books remained on the shelves, inviolate despite my best efforts to tear them down and cast them to the floor. Like Marley's flesh, they resisted my touch. As I threw myself up and down the isles of the shop, I found that they were once again stretching, opening out and becoming a place new to me. Ranks after rank of high shelves appeared, filled with identical books. Dust coated them, and here my anger could have affect. I could take the book from the shelves, opened them, hold them. Rip them and pull them to pieces. But why these and no other? There seemed no answer, no reason to it. I drifted along becoming more and more despondent, passing more and more of those curious rooms at the side. These rooms were ever unfurnished and apparently without function, simply blisters off the corridors filled with more books. Sometimes I entered these rooms, but mostly I ignored them; they held little interest for me. Until, that is, I found the cavernous room where the walls fell away to nothing.

I have realised something about death; not everyone's perhaps, but my own certainly, and the realisation came in the entrance to that great room. The dead have two simple choices. Either they can accept that they are one of the ended and give themselves to the nothingness or they can open themselves to the darkness and let it enter them.

The cavern was massive and black, its entrance at the rear of one of the small rooms. The walls, lined with shelf after shelf of books, fell away from the entrance and were lost in the blackness. I could not see the far side of the cavern nor the ceiling above me or floor below. its blackness was the blackness of an absolute vacuum and I clutched at the sides of the entrance, terrified that I would be sucked into it and lost forever. The fear was massive, an overwhelming thing, and I felt my fingers dig into the wooden doorway, gouging out chunks in my desperation to stay. It beckoned, the cavern; the darkness inviting me to join it, to lose myself in it, and I did not want to. I had to find a way of taking my revenge on Marley. After all, that was the reason why I had come to haunt the building, and I was not about to relinquish my chance without a fight.

The darkness was not absolute. As I hung in the entrance, fighting to stop myself drifting out into it, I perceived prickles of lights above me. They were like tiny stars, lost somewhere in the firmament and glittering miserably. Come, the limitless space seemed to whisper, you simply need to accept that this is the end and you can be with them. No more worry or anger or disappointment. Simply accept and let yourself truly cease to exist, and I was tempted despite myself. To stop thinking, to worry no more, to not be angry sounded relaxing. Pleasant. Dull. I screamed my resistance to it, and in that moment my choice was made.

Instantly, the urge to let myself become lost in that great cavern was gone, replaced by a desire that was as close to lust as I have ever felt; I let go of the entrance and opened my arms to the darkness and the lights above. Instead of going into it, I let it into me. It filled me, soaking into the corners of my being and swelling my anger like a deluge taken into a bone-dry sponge. In it, there was the comfort of fury and the knowledge of great spaces and the cold, interstellar reaches of fear. It is not power that it gives, exactly, but something else, something sharp and focussed. It gives the dead a choice, this afterlife, and I have chosen to remain. At that moment, I understood; I am a ghost and I am the darkness becoming.

Marley never stood a chance. My mistake before had been to attack him, to try to physically abuse him. By concentrating, I might make my presence felt, but I would never be able to bruise him. Flesh is simply to brutish to respond to the delicate entreaties of the spirit. Instead, the spirit must be subtle. Returning from the cavern, I was languid in my travels, drifting down isles and letting my fingers trail across books that I could not feel. How could I? I was dead and they were of the living, things for flesh to hold and love. It was night, but not late, and Marley was still awake. He was in the office, once more reading through the paperwork I had left so meticulously, once more drinking my single malt in great swallows that worked his Adam’s apple under an unshaven neck. I watched him for a few minutes, peering at his great, bloated body as I imagine a collector might stare at a particularly rare butterfly as it twitched in the killing jar. So ugly, so corpulent! To think that I had once believed him my friend.

There were changes in the office already, new furniture nestling up against the carefully chosen pieces of my tenure, clashing and garish in their modernity. Typical, thoughtless additions that made me tremble with anger. I let Marley feel my presence, calling his name softly. Volume was no longer needed, only intensity. He looked around nervously, reaching out for the fine crystal tumbler filled to its brim with my whiskey. His previous arrogance was gone; even now, he could feel the difference in me.

"Are you here again?" he asked, his voice shaking. "I told you the last time you were here; this place is mine now. Go to Hell, you old devil!"

Such obscenity! Such ignorance, such shallow intellectual rigour. He sat at my desk, with my whiskey, benefiting from the financial skill I had brought to the company, and this is how he talked to me? Well, no more. I shall not go to Hell; no, I bring hell to him! I moved in to the light, and let myself be seen.

I am dead; the vast, cold reaches of the afterlife hold no fear for me. Unfettered by the sacking of flesh, my mind is able to embrace the infinite distances of the place beyond life. When I made my choice, when I took that smooth blackness into me, I became it and it me. In exposing myself to Marlow, I allowed him to see what awaited him when his sad, abused flesh gave out. Spreading my arms, I imagined the shadows billowing around me like the approach of some terrible storm, glowing and roiling and unsympathetic. Joyously, I saw that Marlow saw it, felt it. He screamed, just once, and backed away from the desk. The tumbler dropped from his hand and I had a momentary flash of regret that the precious liquid in it was wasted, soaking into the desktop blotter and dripping to the floor, and then I turned my attention back to Marlow.

He had fallen to the floor, clutching at his chest. His flesh, the stuff of life, could no more cope with exposure to what comes after than a fly could cope with exposure to a furnace flame. Silently, he writhed, spittle flecking his lips and his eyes bulging. I leaned in to him, still allowing the darkness to flow from me, and whispered, "Do you see? This is what awaits you." I have no idea if that was true, but that last spark of fear that I saw in those bugged eyes made the lie worthwhile. And then, with no more sound, Marlow died.

I have come to realise something else. I believed that I was haunting the building, the place where Marlow and I had spent our years in constant battle, but I was wrong. I was haunting Marlow himself, and with his death came not a release but an expansion. My revenge is still a burning thing, is still aflame with my anger. Marlow touched so many people during his excessive life, and a piece of him is with them still. He lives on whilst there are memories of him, even ones that are buried and long forgotten, and I cannot have that. I cannot. All of you who met him, this larger than life fellow, are keeping him alive, and my haunting is not over. You may not remember him, or have only the most fragmentary recall of a man whose boisterousness overrode your initial impressions of him, or of a shop full of piled stock and nooks and crannies and the proprietor serving you with a cheery wink and a joke, but it does not matter. He is in you, and by being in you, he opens you to me.

I am coming, and I bring my darkness with me.