They keep this house shut against me, and that is the first strange thing, because everything here is already trying to leave. I slip under the door they nailed weather-stripping to, and the smell hits me before the dark does: dust that has not been stirred in years, old smoke gone cold in the chimney, a sweetness underneath, apples somebody left in a bowl to rot in another decade.
I lift it all and carry it up the stairs the humans will not climb.
They say something lingers here. I move through every room in a breath and find no lingerer, only the things that stayed when the people didn't: a coat still on its hook holding the shape of shoulders, a clock stopped at a time that meant something to someone once, a child's drawing curling off the wall, a door that swings when I lean on it and makes the living downstairs go quiet and grip each other's hands.
I do that. The cold that touches the back of a neck, the curtain that breathes when the window is shut, the whisper that is only me finding the gap in a warped frame. They feel me and call me the dead, because they cannot imagine anyone moving through a house without wanting to keep it.
But I have kept nothing. I have carried a dead woman's perfume out of one town and set it down in another and watched a stranger turn, searching, for a face already gone. That is all a haunting is: something that arrived from far away, touched the room, and left before you could hold it.
The door slams behind me.
I am already three streets over, carrying the smell of rot and someone's cold hands to a house that has never heard of them.