Chapter 1

~~The Pleasures of Hell~~

~~Day 1~~

~~Mia~~

Dying sucked. She hadn’t expected it to, but there it was. All the old movies made it seem like a quick and borderline painless process. New movies, not so much, but she didn’t like new movies.

She stared down at her body, her open eyes, and her open mouth leaking milk and cereal on the small, round, black table that’d cost a whole fifty cents. It teetered when she ate. It wasn’t teetering anymore.

Right next to her was David, her brother. Same state, head on the table, or rather, kinda on the table. Poor guy’s face was straight down in his bowl of cereal, milk splashed everywhere. No bubbles.

“Whoa,” David said. She almost jumped. He was standing next to her, staring down at his body with the same frozen fascination and confusion she was.

Her twin brother David had shortish red hair, with soft green eyes and a clean-shaven face showing his freckles; not that the guy could grow a beard if he tried. He stared at her for a few more seconds before looking back down at his body sitting on the lawn chair they’d confiscated from a nearby garbage pile, for their equally shitty dorm.

Mia came up behind her body, and stared down at her dead expression. Same sort of face as her brother, freckles, pale skin, soft eyes, vibrant green, and long and mostly straight red hair that reached the center of her back. A small woman, maybe five feet tall on a good day. She never minded being short, unlike her bro, but right now it made the horror scene in front of her even more sickening. She was just a ... a small thing, sitting there, dead, with eyes wide open.

David reached down for his body’s shoulders, gasped, and yanked his hand back. His fingers had passed through his body, like a—

“Ghost,” Mia said. “We’re ... ghosts.”

“Oh shit.” David gulped, eyes locked on his body, then hers, before looking at her her, ghost her. “You’re naked.”

She blinked at him, looked down at herself, and then at him.

“So are you. We’re ghosts. I ... guess clothes don’t come with you when you die.” Which probably threw a lot of old beliefs to the curb.

“Fuck me,” he said. “That ... that ... really fucking sucked.”

“I know, right?” She threw up her hands and gestured to their corpses, before stomping around their dorm. Apparently ghosts could stomp. “That hurt! I just, started fucking choking on nothing, and everything hurt, and my insides felt like they were on fire!”

“Heart attack?”

“We both died of a heart attack? At the same time? We’re way too young, anyway.” Not even twenty, yet.

David shrugged. “Well it’s not like we were poisoned. You started eating ten minutes before I did. And who the fuck would poison us?”

She stared at her body a little more, her little white t-shirt and her shitty boxers, and the cheap cereal that’d probably doomed her to dying of cancer eventually anyway. After a couple more seconds of cold silence, she threw up her hands again, screamed, and marched into their tiny living room, attached to the tiny kitchen. The dorm had concrete walls, so it wasn’t like anyone would hear her if she screamed herself hoarse.

It wasn’t like anyone would hear her no matter what, anymore.

She looked at the torn-up loveseat, the only seat in the small living room. She looked at the TV collecting dust. She looked at the exercise equipment she shared with her brother, gymnastic rings and resistance bands and kettlebells. She tried picking one up, and sure enough, her hand passed through it.

She looked back to David. The fact they were naked was a little more obvious now that she had half a dozen feet between them. David was in great shape for a little guy, and so was she, lean and fit, all with the goal of getting laid — ha — and living a long life — ha ha.

He wandered around the table, circling it, holding his chin and going into his classic nerd detective mode. Given some time, he’d eventually freak out and panic when the reality of what was happening set in. The panic was already setting in for her.

David stepped around the counter, past the shitty microwave and fridge, past the spot where an oven should have been but wasn’t, and tried to open the cupboards. Again, his fingers went right through them.

“Dead,” he said. “We’re ... actually dead.”

“Yeah.” Finally, it was sinking into his thick skull. “We’re fucking dead.”

“No more class...”

“Did you actually want to go to class?”

“I was kinda enjoying programming.”

Sighing, she walked down the hall and into the tiny bathroom.

“Yeah. I was kinda enjoying Psych 201.” No need to stick her head out to speak. The concrete walls and their thin coating of white paint made all sound bounce. Seemed to continue doing so for ghost voices.

She stared at the mirror. Normally she’d see a small, cute-approaching-sexy ginger woman with small breasts, a flat stomach, and a surprisingly nice, firm ass. Now, she saw nothing. Sure, she saw herself just fine when she looked down, and everything seemed perfectly normal. She wasn’t hazy or see-through or anything, and minus the lack of clothes, she seemed to look identical to how she’d looked right before dying. David looked the same. Just, no reflection. So far, most her ideas about ghosts were being tossed out the window.

“Oh shit!” David said.

She stuck her head out the doorway, nearly falling over when she tried to grab the door frame for balance. Her hand passed through it. Ghost rules were strange.

“What?”

David ran past her and into his bedroom, bedroom door open; not that it’d have mattered. She followed after him.

“I can’t ... oh fuck oh fuck.” He tried to grab his mouse and keyboard. No good. He desperately tried to turn off his PC next to the barely standing old wooden desk. No good. His hands phased through everything, leaving the monitor with the naked, posing succubus background in plain view.

“David,” she said. “No one’s going to give a shit about your background. Besides, we’re dead. Who fucking cares about—”

“Not my background! My browser history! Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.”

She stared at her brother as he swung his hands fruitlessly at his mouse and keyboard again and again, and she laughed. She couldn’t help it. The laughter ripped up through her and had her struggling to breathe — somehow — and she teetered back as she reached out for the door frame. And fell flat on her ass as her hand phased through it.

“Got some kinky porn you don’t want the world to know about?” Okay, this was good. They were dead but they could still laugh about shit. They— “Oh fuck my toys!”

David stopped swinging at his desk long enough to look at her before she disappeared down the tiny hall into her own bedroom and its white concrete walls. She reached for the handle for her small closet and tried to swing it open, but of course it didn’t go anywhere. But, she was dead, so she stepped through the door and into the darkness of her closet.

Apparently ghosts couldn’t see in pitch black, but she knew her way around her closet in the dark well enough. She’d opened it and gone digging for her toys in the dark hundreds of times. But, again, once her fingers found the big box, it was pointless. Untouchable. The box, sitting at the top of the closet, filled with all kinds of vibrators, lubricants, and very strange, very large dildos, was doomed to be found by whoever investigated their room. The whole university was going to find out she liked to fill herself with toys, frequently, most of them not based on any human penis. She was going to be the laughing stock of everyone.

She choked down her sudden urge to cry, clenched her fists, got up and out of her closet, and walked back into David’s room.

David looked at her with terrified eyes. “You think ... you think they’ll check my internet history?”

“Guaranteed.”

“Oh nooooo.”

“Can’t be any worse than my dildos.”

“I beg to differ!”

She shook her head as she rolled her eyes. “Dave, I have a dildo that looks like it belongs on a dragon. A large one.”

He shrugged. “What girl doesn’t? I have so much ... really fucked up hentai shit on here, you know? Not anatomically possible shit!”

There they went again, comparing who was the bigger pervert. Well, at least that was better than panicking.

“I have a double dildo that looks like two hor—you know what? Let’s not do this. We’re dead. And no one’s reviving us. We shouldn’t care about who finds our fucking porn history or sex toys.”

Easier said than done. She couldn’t stop picturing it, every uni student scrolling on their phone and being shocked at Mia’s death, but then laughing at the reveal of her toys. Would whoever found their bodies share that information publicly? God fucking christ she hoped not.

“Fuck fuck fuck. You’re sure this isn’t a dream, Mia?”

She pinched herself as hard as she could. Plenty of pain, but that was all. Why the fuck did her ghost body feel pain? Being dead sucked.

“This isn’t a dream.”

“Fuuuuuuck.”

She moved over to David’s bed, ignored his nudity, almost sat down, stopped herself before she phased through it, and laid on the floor instead. She didn’t care she was naked anymore. David and Mia had seen each other naked a few times growing up together, and really didn’t care anyway.

“We’re dead,” she said.

“I know.”

“We’re dead.”

“Evidently.”

“We’re ... dead.”

“Apparently.”

She sat up and threw her arms up again. “The fuck do we do?”

“Panic?”

“We’re not panicking!” Fuck, she sounded like she was panicking.

“Okay, we’re not panicking. Let’s ... Let’s confirm.”

“Confirm we’re dead?”

He nodded, got up, stepped over her and headed back into the kitchen. It took him a whole seven steps. She followed.

Their bodies were still there, but it wasn’t them David headed toward. He took a right, stepped up to the apartment door, gulped, and walked through it. Naked. She almost yelled out to put some clothes on, but reality smacked her brain around a bit, and she groaned before following after him.

She froze as other people in the dorm walked by. Walked by, and almost directly through her. She dodged at the last second, but when someone else walked and went through David, she gave up dodging the second person. Straight through her, no sensation, nothing. They didn’t look at her or her naked body, and they didn’t so much as make a sound when they were literally inside her, and her inside them.

“Hello?” David said. No one reacted.

“We’re dead,” she said, shoulders drooping.

“Yeah ... confirmed. We’re dead.”

They both stood in the hallway as more students went to morning classes, most of them around nineteen like Mia and David. Young, most of them completely unaware of what it was like to have their next door neighbor die on them. They were going to find out, eventually. It’d be days, maybe weeks, before anyone would bother to check on a couple uni students not going to class. And it wasn’t like they had any parents keeping an eye on them who’d call and ask the university to check on them.

David took a deep breath, and walked down the hall.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“I wanna try something.”

“Try something? Like ... contacting whoever we’re supposed to contact?”

He looked back over his shoulder at her, eyebrow raised.

“We’re supposed to contact someone?”

“I dunno, are we?”

“No idea.” He shrugged and stepped into the shower room.

Of. Fucking. Course.

She groaned as she followed him in. The dormitory was unisex, and the bathrooms in each dorm didn’t have a shower. You could brush your teeth and take a shit in your place, but if you wanted a shower you had to go to the shower room, which had separate stalls for showers.

David stepped through the door, looked around, and casually walked through the nearest stall side-on, and into it.

“David!” God damn it. She followed after him, and the world blurred into a mess of colors and shades as she stepped through the shower stall wall, and into David’s back. Okay, she could collide with her brother, good to know. And he felt like normal flesh, too, alive and well. Very strange for a ghost.

He stumbled forward before turning around and facing her.

“What?”

“David you idiot! This isn’t the—” Mia blinked as she stared at the naked woman showering. Marcy Thomson. Attractive as all fuck, busty as all fuck, and washing herself. There’d always been rumors that Marcy had had surgery to get tits like that, but fake tits didn’t ripple like that.

Mia glared at David, marched forward through Marcy into her brother, and shoved him into the next stall. Empty.

“Weren’t you just thinking about what the fuck do we do now?” she asked. “What, you’re suddenly okay being a ghost and now you’re gonna spy on naked chicks?” Standing naked with her brother in a shower stall while another woman, oblivious to them, was busy washing her giant tits in the next stall, was not what she wanted to be doing.

“I’m in denial.”

“You’re not in denial. You know we’re dead. You confirmed, right?”

He shook his head. “Clearly I’m still in denial and want to wander around and spy on naked chicks.”

Mia threw up her hands. “Dude, you don’t even know if you can get hard as a ghost! The fuck is the point in all this spying if you can’t jerk off?” And, unfortunately, she glanced down at her brother’s dick, and rolled her eyes and looked away. Well, he wasn’t hard, but he was shaved, same as her, which put the annoying image of her brother shaving his junk in her head. Ugh.

“Just ... let me be a pervert for a little bit before the existential crisis of being dead really sets in, okay? I’m sure I can panic a bunch later about it.”

“Uh huh.”

He squinted at her with one eye. “Don’t even give me that shit. You’re just as much a pervert as me. You don’t have any dudes you want to spy on?”

“Not spy on!” Okay, that wasn’t entirely true, but James and Adam and Mark and Derrick and Tim and Oscar and Sam and Nathan and Josh and the other James and Tony and Brian were all probably in class. “Fuck, yes, but not spy on. I—oh god.”

David’s eyes opened wide. “What?”

“We died virgins.”

David collapsed to his knees, and slapped the shower room floor.

“Nooooooooo!”

It took effort to not fall to her knees and join him.

“Come on. I mean, yeah, I wouldn’t mind spying on some people, too, but I’m a little more worried about being dead and I don’t think we should procrastinate on dealing with it.” Whatever dealing with it would entail.

David sniffed and gulped, nodded, and forced himself back to his feet.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She stepped out of the stalls, and waited for him to follow. He did, out of the other stall with Marcy. “God damn it Dave.”

“I’m here I’m here.”

“Okay. What do we do?”

“How could I possibly know what to do?”

“I’m sure you’ve read a book on after-death experiences.” She could always trust her brother to know random shit about random shit.

“I’ve read a few articles and stuff, sure.” He shrugged as the two of them stepped back out into the hall. “Pretty much every out-of-body experience has been discredited. It’s all bullshit.”

“All of it?”

“No one’s managed to provide any even remotely decent evidence to back it up. And every ghost, haunting, and shit like that, is in the same ballpark. There isn’t any good evidence anywhere, and I can’t come to a conclusion about what to do or how to do it, without some kind of evidence.”

“Okay, then we wing it.” Nodding, she grabbed his hand, did her best to ignore they were both still naked, and took them down the hall to the stairs. Their feet and hands interacted with the floor, for some reason, so unless they developed the ability to hover and fly through shit like movie ghosts did, they had to take the stairs. Maybe they could learn to do that shit with time?

Except, why the fuck would they stick around? Other than indulging their perviness and spying on people, what possible fucking reason did they have to stick around? Ghosts haunted shit because they couldn’t let go, supposedly anyway.

David and Mia didn’t have anything, or anyone, they were holding onto.

They approached the lobby of the dorm, a sort of rec room with a tv and some couches, and some doors on the other side where people came and went. Sure enough, a couple dudes were playing a video game, a couple girls were sitting across from them chatting with them, and other students passed by, backpacks overloaded with books and laptops. And it was all glowing gold.

Mia and David traded glances, and looked to the four push doors that led out of the building onto the campus. The windows in the doors would normally show the grass, the paths lined with sidewalk, the nearby buildings, several stories high with lots of windows on their walls showing students filing in. University life. Not that David and Mia ever really got into university life, but maybe some day they would have? Except, not anymore.

It didn’t show that. The door windows showed a glowing gold haze, and gold mist dripped from them over the floor, fading out but reaching far enough to touch their feet. It felt warm. It felt nice.

“That, looks a lot like a doorway to the afterlife,” David said, shifting his weight a bit from side to side on the black tile floor.

“Glowing gold doors.”

“Yeap.”

“Sort of on the nose, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Kinda has to be, right? We’re dead, and no one’s showed up to show us what to do?” He gestured to the doors. “So, I mean, looks like we can go through the doors and go to wherever we’re supposed to go after we die. And it wouldn’t be a mistake. Has to be a decision.”

“But it’s blocking our way out.”

He stepped closer to the glowing doors. “Eh, we can go around. Seems like the right and left door don’t go into the light.”

“Into the light...” She shivered and rubbed her arms. “Maybe some of those out-of-body experiences people have were actually true?”

“Yeah, maybe.” He stepped back from the doors, and looked at her with serious eyes. David usually had a soft expression, until his brain went into think mode. Then it got serious. “Okay, we’re running through this kinda fast. We’ve been dead twenty minutes. Let’s just, stop for a second, and think.”

“Yeah.”

“We have no idea how we died.”

“True.”

“Genetic condition?” he asked.

“I don’t know about any genetic condition that would kill us at the same time.”

“Yeah, me neither. And ... and I kinda wanna stick around until we find out what happened.”

She raised a brow. “No one’s gonna check on us until they smell us rotting. You want to stick around long enough to see that?”

“No, but ... maybe the killer will return?”

“Assuming the killer’s a dumbass. Assuming we were murdered.”

“Something happened! Something weird. Something very weird.” He looked past her to the doors, frowned, and went back to their dorm room. She followed. She knew she could rely on David to come to a conclusion about something, a smart conclusion, a logical one, once he’d gotten past the initial shock of everything. Dude was always like that, deer in headlights at first, but reliable once he got things to click.

Could he get this to click? The whole being dead thing? Well, it was better than a bunch of screaming and panicking and crying about things lost; they just did that in the shower room, anyway.

“Scene of the crime,” he said as he phased through their door, her behind him. Their bodies were still there, unchanged. “I’m ... dead, definitely. If there was any chance I was alive, drowning in my cereal milk finished me off.”

That, was too fucking funny, and she snorted on a chuckle, earning a harsh glare from her brother. She coughed, and stood opposite of him around the small table.

“I’m ... definitely dead,” she said, and she forced herself to lean in close and look her body straight in the eyes. Holy fuck that was chilling. “There’s nothing going on in there. She’s not breathing.”

“So we both just ... went through a shit load of pain, at the exact same time, for ... what, ten seconds? Could barely move. Every limb felt like it was burning off. And then we just died.” David gestured down at the two bodies. “That isn’t normal!”

“So you want to stick around to find out what happened.”

“Yes. Because ... there’s just no fucking way this happened. It couldn’t have happened. It’s not possible.”

“Unless?”

David groaned as he walked into the living room, and tried to sit down on the couch. And went through it onto the floor. She snorted on a chuckle again and managed a small smile for him and his head, the only part of him visible, sticking up from the couch cushion.

“Unless what?” he said. “There’s no medical explanation for this, and no criminal one. Like we said, maybe poison, but you started eating before I did. Even if it was poison, we died in seconds, in the exact same way. Poison doesn’t work like that.”

She raised a hand. “Allergic—”

“Nope.”

“Poison in the air?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then...”

He shrugged, shoulders popping up through the couch momentarily. “I don’t know. So all we can do, is sit here, and wait.”

“Wait here, and ignore the stairway to Heaven?”

“Assuming that’s where it’s taking us.”

“Oh come on! Those doors were practically radiating angelic ... ness.” She joined him and sat beside him. Two heads, sticking up out of the couch cushions. “We’re not going to Hell.”

“Might not be Heaven or Hell. Could be some other astral plane of ... existence.”

“What Dreams May Come sorta deal?”

And for the first time that night, David smiled. A real smile.

“That would be pretty nice. Crafting our own personal Heavens, sharing them with other souls.”

“Right?” She returned his smile, peeked past him back at their bodies, squeezed her eyes shut for a second to try and wipe the memory of her corpse away, and looked back to her brother. “We know what your personal Heaven would be like. Bunch of barely legal busty chicks lying around waiting to get railed by ... well I assume you’ll be a giant minotaur or something, with a two-foot-long dick.”

“Maybe not two feet.”

She laughed. “But everything else—”

“Oh definitely.” He grinned at her. “But let me guess. You’d want a bunch of giant sexy buff dudes, or giant sexy buff monsters, fighting each other for the right to pin you down and fuck you, despite your girly little mewls. ‘Oh no, please, don’t, oh please don’t I’m small and frail and you’re so big oh please don’t hurt me mister big bad giant monster with two dicks and a perfect body’.”

Damn it, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“What’s wrong with that fantasy?” she asked.

“You’re too much of a bitch to be the dainty little helpless princess.”

“And you’re too much of a nerd to be a dominant alpha monster.”

“True, true.”

“It’ll be our personal Heavens,” she said. “We can be whatever we want, right? I can be a dainty little helpless princess.”

“You’re already little.”

“Coming from you, that’s rich.”

“Well, like you said, our own personal Heaven. You know, assuming that’s what’s awaiting us. It could be something different entirely.”

“Got some more examples?” she asked.

“An endless plane of cosmic exploration, souls drifting on an ethereal wind, with each breath a millennium.”

“Boring.”

“Yeap.”

David, her fellow head sitting on a couch cushion, shook his head before looking down, smile fading.

“I’m scared to go.”

Sighing, she looked down at her cushion, too.

“I’m scared too, but we’re ghosts. The fuck else are we supposed to do?”

“Find out how we died, and haunt the person who killed us?”

“Assuming—”

“We were killed,” he said. “I know I know. But, let’s just ... give it a bit, okay? I have to know. I can’t not know.”

She smiled at him. Yeap, he was in one of his special moods, the kind that didn’t let up until he resolved whatever it was on his mind. It made him hard to deal with sometimes, because it’d full-on stop every other aspect of his life until he did, sometimes even eating and sleeping. And right now, it meant that to him, the idea of leaving before they found out how they died was pretty much impossible.

And truth was, she wasn’t just scared of going through a glowing door into some sort of afterlife. She was terrified. A lot of ghosts probably were. And no way she was going without her brother.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s stick around until we learn more.”

~~David~~

Dying sucked. Being a ghost, on the other hand, didn’t suck all that much.

The weird gold glowing doors stuck around. When David walked around them, the outside of the building looked perfectly normal, and instead, the gold glowing portal appeared in other places, as well. Always normal, natural looking, minus the gold glow, always obvious, always in a way David couldn’t accidentally walk through it. One of the doors into the Comp Sci building. One of the doors into the Arts building. One of the doors into the nearby Tim Hortons. One of the shower stalls back in the dorms. Whatever it was, wherever it’d go, it was asking them to come, but not forcing them.

It took a few hours of wandering around before Mia and David felt comfortable splitting up. Whatever the afterlife was, it was making it clear David and Mia could leave it whenever they wanted. If it ever came to a point where they obviously had to choose between remaining as ghosts or going into the afterlife, whatever was putting the gold doors everywhere would do something more ... loud, hopefully. A giant vortex in the sky, maybe? Whatever it’d be, it’d be obvious, so David and Mia decided to go wandering around on their own for a while.

David found an empty dorm room to sit in for a while, and cried. He was dead. Life was over. Poof, gone, game over. His ghost body produced tears, for some reason, but he didn’t mind. They helped him process the emotions better, so he let them flow for a good twenty minutes. It was enough, for now at least, and he turned off the waterworks, recovered, and got back to exploring.

David checked out various faculty rooms, listened to staff talk about shit, and he checked out security as well. No one mentioned the two dead students. No one knew yet. David should have been disappointed, but he wasn’t. Once he got past the initial panic and depression, being a ghost was fun. Walking around campus naked was strangely thrilling, and so was spying on people. He’d never spy on people if he was alive, but fuck it, he was dead. Why not?

He spent a few days trying to move things with his mind, or ghost body, but couldn’t make it happen. He couldn’t make people feel cold. He couldn’t so much as stir up a breeze or push a curtain. Frustrating.

He spotted Mia on the campus a couple times, wandering around randomly, and sometimes not so randomly. More than once he saw her either going into or out of the gym, conveniently before or after the basketball team and swim team came and went. Pervert.

He, on the other hand, went back to the dorms and spied on a few women taking showers again. And then checked out some of them in their bedrooms, excited to watch some sexy fun time. Maybe catch them masturbating, or catch some uni student sex?

And he did. And he watched. Because, yeah, ghost. Morality, right out the window. He’d died a virgin, so the least he could do was taint his soul with some harmless voyeurism before ‘crossing over’. He deserved it! Right?

Well, either way, the voyeurism was exciting the first couple days. He was even able to get hard and masturbate, which was a surprise, like the tears had been. Unfortunately, the voyeurism, the freedom to be able to see whoever he wanted, whenever, quickly became uninteresting. By day three he just felt sad, and guilty. Sad, because he was dead and he’d never get to indulge in any of the things he was spying on. Guilty, because even as a ghost, he was still spying on people and their private lives, and for some reason his conscience persisted after death. By day four he stopped spying on people all together, except to check if anyone knew about their dead bodies.

He didn’t have to ask Mia, it written on her face. She went through the same phases. Super excited by the freedom, morals out the window, overwhelmed like a kid in a candy store. By day four, she was sitting with him on the floor in their dorm, just as sad, just as guilty. And, just as bored.

“I stuck my head in the pool today,” she said. “I could breathe just fine.”

“Makes sense.” He looked to her, and her head sticking up out of the couch cushion, just like his. Sitting inside their couch had become their new routine. “I’m guessing whatever it is that’s making our bodies still need to breathe and sleep only cares about other ghostly things.” To demonstrate, he covered his mouth and nose with his hand and tried to breathe. He couldn’t, and his body wanted to. It still wanted oxygen, for some reason. Except, if they couldn’t interact with physical stuff, it couldn’t have been the oxygen his lungs wanted.