Breaky Noises

Who: Thom
Where: His house
When: The wee small hours

It was the sound of something breaking that woke Thom. He lay in bed, wondering if he was hearing things. The house was so quiet. Dark. Maybe he'd dreamed it.

But there. Again - there was another noise. Something scraping across the floor by the sound of things. He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling in the darkness, listening hard. Yes, a scarping - a chair moving across the floor. Maybe it was his mother. There was another crash. No, not his mother.

Thom got out of bed quietly and opened up his bedside drawer, taking out the long, curved knife he kept there. Pushing his hair back out of his eyes, he crept downstairs, wondering if someone had broken in. They were a fool if they had done - generally people knew better than to break into a judge's house, after all.

He followed the sounds, pinning them down to the kitchen. Stopping just outside the kitchen door, he stood back against the wall and peered round into the room, trying to see who was in there. He hadn't expected a ghost, but there she was. He watched as the elderly spirit opened a cupboard door, took out a glass and dropped it on the floor, before following it with another.

"Hey," Thom said, stepping into the room. The last few days had made him less twitchy about ghosts - they seemed pretty harmless. Of course, generally, ghosts weren't smashing things in his kitchen. He figured he wouldn't need the knife though, keeping it held loosely by his side for want of anywhere better to put it. "What're you doing?"

The ghost ignored him, continuing on with dropping glasses from the cupboard one at a time. Thom tried again. And again. Nothing he did managed to attract the spirit's attention - not even when he swiped a hand through her (something which just ended up with him having a damn cold hand). he saved a couple of the glasses simply by catching them as she dropped them and putting them away again - only for her to reach and pick them up once more, dropping them to the floor. They played that particular game for over an hour - she'd drop, he'd catch and put somewhere, she'd drop again.

And then, around 4am, she just left. Just like that - faded back into the night, again, without a word, leaving Thom in a kitchen covered in glass and realising that he had little cuts all over his bare feet where he'd been too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on to really watch where he walked.