Everything Costs Everything

The woman's fingers bleed onto the music box—three drops, crimson against porcelain—but she doesn't notice. I do. I notice everything now, since the counting began. Since the objects started breathing.

"How much?" she whispers, but her voice comes from inside the dancer's hollow chest, echoing through mechanisms that shouldn't have space for sound.

The music box trembles in her palms, and I can see the tiny heartbeat pulsing beneath its painted surface.

My ledger lies open between us, pages breathing with their own rhythm. The ink moves without my pen—words forming themselves, dissolving, reforming into configurations that spell out her name before I've asked for it. Claire. Claire. Claire. The letters march across ruled lines that bend like ribs expanding with each breath.

"Everything costs everything," I hear myself say, though I don't remember deciding to speak. The words taste like copper pennies and wedding cake, flavors that shouldn't exist together but do.

Here. In this place where the fluorescent lights pulse in time with hearts that stopped beating months ago.

She opens the music box. The dancer spins, but her porcelain face is wrong—features shifting between expressions I recognize. My mother's disappointed frown, Sarah's final smile before she signed the papers, the face of the woman who sold me this stall, her eyes black holes that reflect nothing.

La Vie En Rose begins to play, but the melody crawls out backwards, notes tumbling into my skull where they nest like insects. I can feel them building something in there, a structure made of reversed melodies and borrowed grief.

"That's our song," Claire whispers.

Now I see the ghost standing behind her—a man in a hospital gown, IV tubing trailing from his arms like transparent veins. He mouths the words along with the backward music and where his breath touches the air, frost patterns bloom and die.

My pen moves without guidance, scratching across pages that multiply beneath my hand. The ledger has grown to seven volumes overnight, then seventeen, then seventy. Transactions I don't remember conducting. Names I've never heard speaking themselves in handwriting that looks like mine but slants wrong, as if written by someone wearing my fingers like gloves.

Entry #1,847: Music box (inhabited). Buyer: Mrs. Claire Dennison, 42 Maple Street. Currency: Wedding photograph plus phantom limb syndrome. Exchange rate: One song played backward for every year of marriage cut short by cancer.

The words write themselves while I watch, horrified.

I don't know Claire's last name. I don't know about her cancer.

But the ledger knows. The ledger has always known.

"I can still feel him reaching for me," she says, pressing the photograph against her chest. "Every night at 3:17 AM. The exact time he died. His hand, cold against my shoulder, trying to pull me down with him."

The ghost behind her nods, and I count the precise measurements: his reaching hand passes through her skin at exactly 2.7 inches below her left clavicle, disappearing into her heart where it clenches in rhythmic contractions—four beats, pause, four beats. She gasps—a sound that harmonizes at exactly 440 Hz with the music box's backward melody.

"The phantom touches," I say, though I didn't know I knew this. "They occur every 23 hours and 43 minutes. Seventeen-minute variance. He's still reaching. The music box will take his hand, trapping it in the mechanism's seventh gear assembly. But only if you give it something to hold instead."

She sets the photograph on my counter.

Wedding day, all white dress and impossible promises. But as I watch, the image moves. The bride turns her head, looks at me, mouths a word that might be help or hell—but backwards, the syllables reverse into something that sounds like breathing through broken glass.

I reach for the photograph and my fingers pass through it like smoke. Not solid. Not anymore.

Nothing here is solid anymore.

The realization crawls up my spine like a living thing: I'm not conducting transactions, I'm documenting hauntings. Each exchange isn't redistributing emotional weight—it's feeding the dead.

My ledger flips its own pages, showing me entries I do not remember making.

Entry #1: Wedding ring (my own).

Buyer: Sarah Martinez-Chen, former wife.

Currency: Three years of documented happiness. One marriage dissolves for every gram of gold.

Note: The subject experienced immediate spectral attachment to the previous ring bearer. Phantom ring syndrome has now transferred.

Entry #237: Coffee mug set.

Buyer: Marcus Chen, 47, widower.

Currency: Muscle memory of making two cups of coffee.

Exchange rate: Automatic mourning behaviors absorbed by ceramic.

Note: The subject's deceased wife now inhabits kitchen objects. Manifestations increase during morning hours.

Entry #1,846: Guitar case (inhabited by unfulfilled ambitions).

Buyer: David Martinez, 23, musician.

Currency: Performance anxiety plus four years of creative output.

Exchange rate: Stage fright for trapped artistic spirits.

Note: The case contains six deceased composers. The subject now channels for unrealized symphonies.

I understand now.

The compulsive counting, the obsessive measurement—it wasn't a disorder. It was preparation. Training my mind to catalog the impossible, to maintain records of transactions between the living and the dead.

The warehouse isn't a market. It's a feeding ground. Every object carries its corpses, and every purchase is a haunting waiting to happen.

Claire completes her transaction, trading her wedding photograph for the music box that contains her husband's reaching hand. She doesn't realize she's given the trapped dead something to hold onto—her captured wedding day, playing inside porcelain chambers where time moves backward.

As she leaves, I see the ghost's hand finally close around something solid.

The reaching stops.

But in the photograph, the bride begins to scream.

My ledger writes itself.

Entry #1,847 complete. The spectral hand achieved containment. Phantom touch syndrome resolved. The subject departed, carrying a music box that held a recently nourished entity.

Prognosis: Complete possession within the lunar cycle.

The ink has turned red now. Not metaphorically—literally red, seeping up from pages that feel warm and wet beneath my fingers.

A new customer approaches: David, returning, his face slack with exhaustion. The typewriter I sold him yesterday floats six inches above his hands, keys depressing themselves to spell out words in languages that predate human speech.

"Make it stop," he begs. "They won't stop writing. Margaret and the others—they're all in there, using my fingers, making me type their unfinished stories. I haven't slept in three days."

I want to help him. I want to explain that we cannot reverse some transactions.

But my mouth opens and different words spill out: "Everything costs everything. What are you paying with?"

He sets the typewriter on my counter, and I catalog the specifications: 1947 Royal Quiet De Luxe, 42 keys depressing themselves in sequence, 127 words per minute typed by fingers that cast no shadows. Margaret, gray-haired and desperate, her spectral digits measuring exactly 2.3 inches longer than David's living knuckles when they overlap. Behind her, I count them—seventeen other writers, all typing the same endless sentence in 12-point Courier font.

The story never ends, the story never ends, the story never ends...

"Your memory of music," I hear myself saying. "Every song you've ever heard. They need it to finish their symphonies."

"But if I give up music, what's left of me?"

The ledger answers before I can.

Entry #1,848: Memory absorption (musical). The subject will retain the ability to hear but not recognize melodies. Complete cultural amnesia regarding artistic expression. Spectral writers require melodic frameworks to complete unfinished compositions.

David nods, accepting his fate with the resignation of someone who has spent three days using the dead as a typewriter.

He presses his palms against his temples and I watch the music drain out of him—847 songs cataloged in my mind as they flow like invisible streams, each melody measuring 3.2 to 4.7 minutes in duration, flowing into the typewriter where seventeen pairs of dead fingers catch each note and weave it into their endless stories at a rate of 23 notes per spectral hand per second.

When it's finished, David stares at me with empty eyes. "What's that sound?" he asks, pointing at the music box that still plays La Vie En Rose backwards.

"I don't know," he says, and I realize that the music has completely erased itself from his mind, leaving him unable to process melody as meaningful. To him, it's noise—pleasant noise, but empty of significance.

The typewriter stops floating. Margaret's ghost smiles and fades, finally able to complete her novel now that she has David's lifetime of musical memories to structure her plot.

The machine settles onto my counter, no longer inhabited but somehow heavier, as if filled with invisible text.

My ledger updates.

Entry #1,848 complete. Musical memory successfully absorbed. The subject experiences selective cultural amnesia. Spectral writers departed with a sufficient melodic framework. Typewriter available for resale—warranty void in cases of posthumous inhabitation.

David wanders away, humming without melody, unaware that he has donated every melody he's ever loved to dead writers who needed rhythm to complete their unfinished symphonies.

I'm alone now, except for the objects and their accumulated ghosts.

The warehouse pulses around me like a living heart, its fluorescent lights beating in patterns that spell out obituaries in Morse code.

My ledger has grown to encompass the entire counter, pages breeding like cancer, spreading across surfaces that shouldn't exist. The entries document exchanges I don't remember making:

Entry #2,847: Soul mortgage (partial).

Buyer: Classified.

Currency: Sanity (measured in rationality units).

Exchange rate: One impossible thing accepted per day of madness sold.

Entry #4,673: Reality anchor (experimental).

Buyer: Self-purchase.

Currency: Linear time perception.

Exchange rate: Eternal present moment in exchange for escape from temporal progression.

Entry #8,291: Narrative coherence (damaged).

Buyer: Unknown—transaction initiated by ledger autonomy.

Currency: Reliable narrator status.

Exchange rate: Truth for story, story for truth, until the distinction becomes meaningless.

I understand now why the numbers keep shifting.

The ledger isn't recording transactions—it's predicting them. Creating them. I'm not a vendor; I'm a character in a story that the ledger is writing about itself.

And the final entry writes itself as I watch:

Entry #∞: Narrator (unreliable).

Buyer: Reader.

Currency: Belief in a stable reality.

Exchange rate: Complete story for incomplete understanding. Transaction pending—awaits reader's participation in the exchange.

Warning: You cannot reverse this transaction. Acceptance of the narrative constitutes a binding agreement to inherit the narrator's position. Previous narrator status handed over upon completion of reading.

Thank you for your purchase. The ledger is now yours.

The pen falls from my fingers—or my fingers fall from the pen.

The warehouse dissolves around me like watercolor in rain, and I realize I have been writing in a book that exists in dimensions I can't measure.

Somewhere, a new vendor is setting up shop, arranging objects that breathe and books that write themselves, preparing for customers who don't yet realize they are paying with pieces of their souls.

The music box plays its backward song.

The typewriter waits for new ghosts.

And the ledger opens to a fresh page, ready to document the transactions that transform readers into unreliable narrators.

Welcome to the warehouse.

Everything costs everything.

What are you paying with?