Was it over?
Was it just beginning?
Neither option seemed exactly likely as a high pitched shriek sliced through the air, bringing Katie slowly back from that precipice. The noise was interspersed with jagged, gasping breaths that did not sound as if they could sustain that level of sound. She wanted to race over to the source of the screaming and shut it up. Just so it stopped drilling into her brain and let her think. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. And what she saw whizzed past her inner eyes so fast her brain couldn’t pull the pictures apart. When those memories were important, they would come back. If the world could just slow down… if she could just have some time to catch up… instead of this maddening blur of things she half thought she knew. And this, this was another of them, this man swimming into focus right in front of her. Dark hair, thinning a bit by his ears. A chipped canine tooth on the left. The green fleece he had worn around the house since the beginning of time.
“Dan, there’s nothing there, sweetheart.”
“I swear on my life Dad. Can’t you see her?”
Broken screaming had now given way to choking sobs.
“We’re all upset enough already without you hurting yourself more with a fantasy.”
“She’s there, Dad. Right there,” she insisted and pointed right at Katie. “She came back for us. She did! And now she’s hurt.”
“Katie didn’t come back, sweetheart. And she’s never going to get hurt again.”
“You don’t understand. I spoke to her and she… she let me see things. Thing she did in Northwood. And they hurt her, Dad. They scarred her inside and out. So badly that she thought dying was easier than-“
He bent down and put his hands on Dan’s shoulders, pulling her close and tight until she lifted her arms and buried herself in his soft, musky body. Her baby tears soaked into his fleece. Although Katie badly wanted to go and join the group hug her body still wasn’t under the control of her mind, locked rigid by indecipherable flashes of memory. It was strange to feel your muscles stiffening and seizing up as though full of lactic acid after a marathon instead of floating free and weightless like a phantom should.
“You don’t… you haven’t seen her.”
“Neither have you, sweetheart.” He bent close and kissed the top of her head. “Neither have you.”
“I did see her. She’s got scars everywhere – on her face, on her arms. And she looked so tired. Like she hasn’t had a decent nights sleep since she left here.” That much, at least, was true. Northwood was, by definition, a peaceful town. Unfortunately, the weirdness that underscored the quiet could fry nerves at a hundred yards. “And…and we should do something.”
“All we can do now is lay her down and let her rest.”
Me? Rest?
“Let her rest?” Dan wiped teary eyes on the shoulder of Dad’s fleece and glanced across at Katie again before turning back in to her father. “Running around here is not resting. It’s killing her. I know what you’re gonna say and I’m not seeing things. Some bad people hurt her – a lot. She can’t rest yet. She can’t just give up and…”
“Come on now. Ssshhh, now, it’s okay.”
“I promise you, she’s here. I know what I’m looking at.”
“It’s your imagination, Dan. Even I want Katie back but it can’t happen. And if you keep convincing yourself that her… her ghost is haunting you, it’ll only be worse in the end.”
“No.” She pulled away from the man and wiped her eyes with trembling hands. “You want me to prove it? I’ll prove it.” Dan looked over at Katie with a plea in her eyes. “Katie, do something. Anything.” But there was nothing she could do. Ghosts had no physical presence – could have no effect on the world. Even if she could have done something, her limbs were slowly returning to life and she didn’t trust herself to stand up just yet. Whether falling down would hurt or not, her brain still had a mortal fear of not being on solid ground. Zooming through space, time and other dimensions at the whim of other beings she did not entirely trust had only heightened that. Exposure to her fears should have rendered them powerless according to her lessons. Nyeh, school lied. She couldn’t be anything she wanted to be – Katie could only be a ghost. A useless, helpless, spook. She couldn’t do anything she set her mind to. She couldn’t do anything at all. “Please, do something. Move the curtains. Just let him know I’m not making this up.”
But Katie knew there was no way she could convince her father. Whether she had been able to do something or not, he wouldn’t have believed it. Too lost in that tornado of sadness she saw in his eyes.
Try. The single word seemed to come from Dan. Katie saw a thick grey mist around her sister – not malevolent, just intensely miserable.
She wanted to make it better. She wished their family could be whole once more – or as whole as it had ever been. Hold onto that thought, soldier. It could be important. The brusque sergeant voice in her head issued the order just as she was about to brush it aside with her empty wishes, cut her losses and leave. There had to be somewhere she could still be of use.
Leaving her father and sister to it, Katie found her mother glued to the television in the living room with the remote control in her hand all but forgotten. About to walk past and out of the house, something she recognised came on screen. Katie moved into the living room to see better and stopped behind the sofa, right above her mothers’ curly brown head. She forced herself not to look down because if she saw even a tiny slice of Mom then she’d never leave. And with the report that was running on the local news, leaving was something she could not risk.
“… nobody yet knows how or why this lorry overturned,” said a female reporter on the TV. She had long blonde pigtails and was dressed in a green windbreaker with a blurred brand logo on the chest. Dozens of people had been injured – had even died – in that crash and the station were worried about brand promotion. And then they charge the story to the work experience girl with a stupid smile on her face like it didn’t mean anything. “The casualty total is still rising, with some not even regaining consciousness. The scene we saw here yesterday was the last thing the victims saw. Although we would remind drivers…” The blonde journalist continued but Katie stopped listening. Her mother was humming a tune she had used to get both her daughters to sleep after a tiring day when they were younger. Brahms Lullaby. The woman dropped the remote control on the seat beside her and got up to go to the kitchen. The clinking and clashing sounds of tea being made came from the room. She couldn’t go there, couldn’t go through and stand there as Mrs Cartwright watched another child vanish from her life. What she might see there frightened Katie. It might be a vortex of crashing hurt and stormy fury. And there was nothing she could do to ease that trauma. So she stood behind the settee, numbly hearing the discordant lullaby her mother was humming under the too-cheerful tone of the reporter who was still broadcasting from a temporary shelter near the crash site.
“This is one of the biggest traffic catastrophes to hit the area in years.” All the sounds, both in the house and on the TV, died into white noise once more, just a shade above mute. Something grabbed her attention. It took over every spare shred of though she had. A ghost appeared on the camera a few feet behind the girl.
The camera didn’t shift and focus in on it nor did the journalist turn to see the apparition; it was fairly safe to say that nobody else could see it. Instead of being as human looking as Katie was, this one was hunched and wandering in the back of shot like it was confused. Then another joined it. They looked alike. They were both from the family of refugees who had been hiding in the wagon of the lorry which had caused the accident. Like anyone, even the dead needed comfort and they found it in each other’s arms. It was sweet for a minute – until a black shape sort of dissolved in reverse and seemed to say something that the couple pulled apart to listen to. Katie couldn’t hear what was sai
d but she could give a pretty good guess when they walked towards Shadow Boy. I thought I was helping him. I try to house-train him and then he just goes back. He seemed to move almost haltingly. He pointed to the camera and the two family members turned into the lens, their faces twisted and screwed up, all angles and points. Crap. She barely saw her mother come into the room with a steaming mug in one hand and a glossy brochure for Grace Memorials. She didn’t want to think about herself right now – much less her own funeral.
“This can’t be happening,” sniffed Mom. “Not again.”
Another piece of the puzzle slammed into place. All the memories she had shared with Shadow Boy today. Everything made terrific/terrible sense. Shadow Boy knew her.
And Shadow Boy hated her.
It didn’t feel right but that was what Katie had to work with. If Shadow Boy truly had a grudge against her, then he’d had plenty of opportunities to act on it – not least today when they’d almost had a proper conversation.
Frowning, she looked down. It took along minute to pierce the haze and realise she was watching tears drip slowly on each falsely bright page her mother turned over. It was another minute before she remembered to wipe her own eyes, but her sleeve came away dry. Her own tears probably wouldn’t have made that plip plip sound or soaked into the thin cardboard pages. No-one would have noticed them once they dripped off her face. Mom. Mom was crying, silent, still, and alone. Katie wrestled with herself, wondering if she was within her rights to dip into her mother’s memories to see if she had even cried for her eldest daughter yet. In front of other people. That was the kicker with their whole family – they all tended to feel the deepest hurt alone, waited for a lonely moment to feel things so that nobody would feel obliged to take some of the weight. Moving to stand over her mom, Katie discovered that she couldn’t do it. There were too many memories crowding her own head that it might – no, it would – be too much if she tried to stuff any more in. Even if they were ones belonging to her mother. However badly she wanted to be there; to understand Mrs Cartwright’s pain, it was going to overwhelm her.
Believe it or not, I can still do some good here. With or without my friends.
She glanced down to see her mother staring at the same page as she had half an hour ago. It was now soaked through. “No. No, no, no,” she kept muttering, a thin keening sound that was blind and deaf. Even though her mug was still half full, the coffee had stopped steaming and Mom went back into the kitchen to make more. Katie followed this time. But she never made it to the kitchen.
One step into the dim hallway and she was suddenly at the front door and staring at it. Seriously, the Keepers were not big on subtlety. Behind Katie, the rest of her family thumped down the stairs. Dad disappeared into the kitchen and the sound of clinking glass bottles tinkled along the air. He was getting the whiskey from that box of beers in the cupboard under the kettle. If any situation called for a drink or five it was this. Katie was saving Jack, possibly her friend, helping her family through this, saving lost and traumatised souls from a crash, being taunted by some boy draped in darkness, and all while being dead and figuring out why she wasn’t in Heaven. It sounded so simple when you put it like that.
“What’s up?” Dan whispered when she reached the second to last stair. It gave her a long-desired inch or two over her big sister. And then it hit home – Katie would never grow again. Dan would always look up to her sister but, one day, she might look down on her. Never. Grow. Again. The force of the realisation made her stumble from the step but she gripped the banister and righted herself on the last step.
“No tears.”
Dan pressed her lips into a thin pink line and nodded. Then she jumped down the final few inches, grabbed a jacket off the peg and pointed outside.
“That’s my jacket. It’s miles too big for you,” Katie said once they had rejoined in the front garden. Dan said nothing – just stomped off down the garden and then turned left beyond the gate. No choice but to follow. Had she still been worried by such things, Katie would have stressed herself out about what damage the furious stamping was doing to her joints. But she wasn’t. And nor was Dan. They went past the shops she had always darted in and out of after school; the little cluster of lock-ups that reminded her of a horror movie; Junkie Heights; and then across the car park that had taken up half of Worth Park.
Once through the gates, both girls let out a breath of relief. The park was neutral ground. Even so, Katie shuddered at the memories it brought back. Not noticing, or maybe deliberately not noticing, Dan ran over to the nearest tree ad climbed up. The base of the trunk had split into two a few feet off the ground and Dan boosted herself up to sit in the V it created.
“You’re leaving again, aren’t you?” were the first words she had spoken to Katie in an hour and they were filled with such fury. “Aren’t you!?”
“Dan, I have to.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to do anything!” Katie snuck a peek at the rest of the park. A decent amount of families had braved the cold before the schools started but nobody was within earshot. “You can’t go running off all the time because they can’t be bothered to clear up their own mess.”
“They?” She tried to take a grip on the tree to pull herself up but she kept going through. Logic prevailed and she imagined herself sitting in that V. Dan watched as she disappeared from the ground and reappeared beside, questions burning right alongside anger in soft brown eyes. Eyes that shouldn’t be filmed with tears. “Don’t know any they.”
“Stop lying to me, Katie. Whoever’s making you do this. Because you wouldn’t leave us if you had any choice. You wouldn’t leave me,” she finished, her voice getting louder with each word. “I don’t care how big and powerful they are, they can’t force you into anything. Tell them no. You get them to do their own dirty work.”
If only it was that easy. “I love you and nothing can change that but…. you’ll understand when you’re older.”
“I don’t wanna understand! I want you not to go!”
“What do you think I should do then? Should I let twenty innocent people return to the scene of their death lost and confused and alone?” Although… hadn’t she done exactly that a week before? And if she couldn’t come to terms with that, how did she expect to smooth the passage into the Dead World for all those others? “Shall I go back home and watch the telly while Shadow Boy corrupts them? Do I sit back and say ‘You’re on your own’ while knowing I could have got there and put them at peace first? Tell me I should risk all those spirits because my family can’t wait a few hours for me to come back. Say that and I’ll stay.”
There was a silence, uncomfortable and brittle. Neither girl wanted to shatter it but every minute they wasted in this stalemate was another minute that Shadow Boy was loose on that motorway, turning lost souls to whatever dark purpose drove him and terrifying who knew how many living drivers to near death.
“That crash was forty miles from here. You guys have, like, a supernatural subway or something?” Dan asked, sounding resigned. Like the fight had just… gone from inside her.
“Don’t be ridic-“ Katie paused. There was no underground for ghosts but there was a supernatural sky train of sorts. To tell the truth, not one single cell of Katie was looking forward to being jolted, bounced, and loop the looped through the skies again until she reached her destination. And that was if the Keepers even wanted her to be there. Which was a pain. If they chose, they could just deposit her somewhere else - where-ever they decided they wanted her to go. But she had to be needed here, right? Because, otherwise, they’d have whisked her right away as soon as the crash had been and gone and she had failed to save anyone. Crap, they must be seriously pissed off with her. Would going on the rollercoaster through the air go very far to making it up to them? Or would that just get them even more mad at her? Would the Keepers even let her cadge another lift off them? Kati
e remembered something they had said to her on the day that she died: We have chosen well. You are known to us, Katie Cartwright. You have proved yourself worthy.
“They picked me for this.” They can’t say no to anything if they need me.
“Who picked you? And for what?”
Katie looked across at Dan as she wriggled to the edge of the tree to jump down. But her sister was no longer there.
Chapter ten