More nothing replaced it. Then more. More, more, more.
Finally a chink of light moved into place, give the blank space around Katie a faint navy glow that seemed to get brighter and brighter the longer she stared. Silver light poured through jagged holes torn into this midnight blanket, light that made everything featureless in contrast. Holes in the fabric of space and the energy of the heavens was leaking through. The beams were filling the void with white light, a pure power that seemed to eat away at the darkness. The bullet holes of avenging angels.
Floating in the vacuum of the timeless space, Katie twisted over onto her back until she had achieved the closest position to lying down as was possible. A thousand silver laser beams rushed over her body. She was calm, just hanging there, floating in the darkness where there was no air to support her and no air to breathe. It should have panicked her. Should have, but didn’t. Here, in this moment, she existed nowhere but inside her own soul. Very soon, she knew, this bliss would be over. But here, now, she would lie back and forget the mortal world was beneath her. She would not think of darkness or death, killers and kidnapping, fear or fantasy. There was nothing but glory, silver and shimmering. The blackness all around her was fading, washed to navy then royal blue, powder blue, cloud grey and then, at last, white. She was floating up. Up through the skies and clouds and hovering in a wonderful, twisted plane she had visited once before and never wished to see again.
It was okay.
Katie floated.
The mortal world was far below her; full of tiny people living tiny lives.
You don’t belong there now.
Katie imagined herself being pulled down by gravity and settled her suddenly bare feet on a cool silver bridge. On either side of her was a thirty foot drop to an icy river, paradoxically heated by a fire beneath the unbroken surface. She wasn’t worried. Her balance was faultless, better than an average girls’, better than the training had made it. It was supernaturally perfect.
You’re with us now.
Katie sank to her knees for a moment, awestruck by the land before her. The land of the Creators and the Keepers. She stood on a bridge of silver infused with the magic that kept the living away from this world. Before her, the silver bridge stretched on almost until the colours blended with the white sky and the creamy arches of broken bone in the distance. A thin mist of silver and gold drifted over the ground. Not the sinister black of before. This was pure and good. There it swirled but Katie could not move towards it. It was too beautiful, too intense, she was not worthy of it. This – this was the energy of life. The silvery mists swirled harmlessly on the floor but they were hypnotic – not giving her a moment to look away. It wasn’t safe to stop watching it. As surely as it was the goodness of the Keepers, it was hard and logical and would not hesitate to take her out of the world if they saw fit.
But I want to be with them. Katie wasn’t sure if she thought or spoke the words. None of it felt real. It was as if she was walking through a dream and couldn’t think of a single question the waking version of herself might ask. Nothing seemed important. She rose from her crouch in one smooth movement – not right, not right at all – her sunny tennis dress hanging off her in rags and tatters. Thoughts of Jaye teaching her how to clothe her phantom form floated through her head. Vaguely knowing it wouldn’t work, she considered her pitiful excuse for a wardrobe.
You can stop that Katie. Those rules don’t work up here.
Where is here?
A place you should never have been brought to. We know what has been done to you. What Shimma has done. He will be punished.
The silver beneath her skin was making her feet tingle. It was no dream now. No dream contained a feeling somewhere short of discomfort and so far from pleasure. It was… awareness. Sensation. And it was very very real.
Before you come back to us…
Katie took a step back. And another. Still, the thin, metallic fog did not move an inch closer although it seemed/sounded curiously threatening, in a passive kind of way. Like it was only predicting the inevitable. It spoke for the Keepers, she realised, and for the Creators too. Once again, she moved closer. Even though they hadn’t saved her yesterday, they had given her the chance to take the sheriff down with her. Hearing them out was the least she could do.
… you should see them one last time.
Katie spun on her tiptoes and faced a shimmering wall of shadow and hints of energy. She threw herself towards it, just wanting to get out, get away from this place and find her family. The Keepers spoke the truth. For whatever reason, and no matter what she did, this place would have her back. Until then she had to spend every minute with the people she loved because each moment might be the last.
Before she hit the curtain though, a tendril of golden mist brushed across her left shoulder. Cold. It traced the scar along her collarbone.
Real, whispered into her head.
It was gone as soon as it had touched Katie.
The bright fantasy world dissolved around her. broke apart and left Katie falling. Plunging through a million and more colours. A dizzying rush of red, blue, green. Burnt orange, twilight purple and poison yellow. Shades and tones that had no name and no place on any spectrum. There was no feeling, no sound, just this sickening kaleidoscope but she was falling so fast – holy crap fast – that the air screamed as it tore past her. Far below was Northwood, identifiable by the few spots of light but mostly by the complete stillness radiating up from the town. Except there. Right where her home – her house, she reminded herself, it could not be her home any longer – was buried somewhere under an aura of shattered darkness, slashed with red lines like open wounds. There was pain there; a deep hurt, confusion, fury and fear. It was pouring out of the house, pumping out like there would never be an end. And there was no time to sink further down through the skies to investigate. Katie cried out at the intangible current pulling her through the new dawn. Why wouldn’t it let her go to them and patch up the lesions in the calm? But there was no time for explanations. Real life would go on whether she understood it or not: this town would carry on with or without her. Just because it had to. Realisation hit her hard and fast – I don’t even matter – and then, almost as if the air was rejecting both her and her words, it dropped her.
Katie was falling impossibly far.
No, it was entirely possible, it just was unnerving when she didn’t hit the ground after a few seconds. A feeling crawled across her, making her shiver in mid-flight, and she could only liken it to trying to swim against the current of the sea. It rolled over her again and again. Katie refused to open her eyes, knowing that she would see ground rushing up to her and never getting any closer, or the drag marks she was making as she plunged through the air – if ghosts made any impression of that kind. Either way, it would start a new headache. She was just wondering how much more of this she could take, when she ploughed through a solid surface and felt her body being brought to a slow stop on top of something hard/soft and not entirely comfortable.
“Ohhh,” she groaned as motion sickness threatened to spill over. Katie swallowed, not tasting the bitter acid of vomit that she expected and opened her eyes to the grey felt of a car roof. There was a slight rocking and the manic whirring of an engine in need of a gear change. There was a muttered expletive and a clunk as the gearbox finally found fifth and calmed down. “Damn thing!”
Dad? It was too much to hope for.
There was a sharp intake of breath and the first tremors of a piercing scream from beside her. On instinct alone, and not even thinking about the source of the noise beyond keeping it quiet, she lunged over the seat to a younger girl and slapped a hand over her mouth holding the shriek in. Whether the potential screamer could feel her hand or had simply thought the better of it would never be known. Katie waited in that position until she felt the warm tickle of breath beneath her fingers return to an eerily
familiar rhythm. No, best not get too carried away. But she couldn’t resist turning her head and looking at the girl she was keeping quiet. She thought she recognised her just by the breathing pattern but there was more. Much more. Stuff that Katie hadn’t even realised she had noticed. Those golden streaks in her dirty blonde hair. That freckle just to the right of the tip of her nose, at least twice the size of the hundred others. The patch of red on one hand where she always rubbed. The constant vibrating of a small body thrumming with the energy of youth.
“Oh my God, I’ve missed you loads Dan!”
She stared into her sisters’ brown eyes and saw a jumble of emotions so tangled the best shrink in the world could not unravel them. Behind everything, though, was a calm, unshakeable quality; complete belief. It was so deeply hidden beneath confusion and doubt and a million other things… but it was there. Dan believed, on some level, that Katie was really sitting on the backseat and wrapping her in an awkward sideways hug.
“Are you okay back there?” a woman called back from the front passenger seat, scrubbed raw hands fiddling with the buttons on the radio. “Do you need to stop for a bit?”
Before the pause could get suspiciously long, Katie hissed out a warning. “Don’t say a word!”
Too shocked to argue or ask questions, Dan shook her head. “I’m fine, Mom. I just thought I wanted to cry but I don’t. It’s all good,” she said with the most unconvincing smile ever.
“I think we should pull in at the next services anyway, hun. I could use some air.”
“Mom speak for she needs a wee,” Katie recalled. Dan laughed but quickly covered her mouth and turned to look at the black platforms she was wearing. School shoes if ever there were any. “Seriously? You wear three inch heels to school?” Not that Katie hadn’t done it herself at times. It was just that her baby sister was… well, apparently her not-quite-so baby sister now. She had rarely seen Dan outside trainers or flat sandals in the last ten years. If she couldn’t climb a tree in it – she wasn’t wearing it. “What day is it?”
Dan opened her mouth to speak but Mom gave her a wide eyed look in the rearview mirror and she closed it again. She made a W by lacing her fingers together.
“Wednesday.” Thank God. She might not even have been missed yet. Something more important came to mind. “Why aren’t you at school?” she asked, instantly feeling like a fussy old maid.
Dan bent down to the backpack full of munchies she had in the footwell and fished out her Nintendo 3DS. She flicked out the stylus and scrolled until she found a program she could use to type a message.
Clever girl. Mom and Dad can’t hear me but they can hear you.
IT’S HALF TERM HOLIDAYS. OFF UNTIL NEXT WEEK.
I’ve been gone a whole week? Yeah, she had definitely been missed! Oh no, that meant she’d missed Freddie’s birthday too. She hoped he’d had a good day; Jaye would have tried to make it as much fun as possible. “Oh. I must have lost track of time.” Katie took in the fields and occasional signs outside the window as the car they were in moved slowly along a jammed motorway. “Going anywhere nice?”
HOME, Dan typed.
“Jeez, you’re a conversational little madam!” Katie had almost forgotten she had been like that not so long ago. It just felt so good to be picking up other people for it now – and when you happened to be related to that person… bonus. “I’ll rephrase; been anywhere nice?”
Dan threw her a look that could slice steel, or dirty an angel. YOUR FUNERAL.
For the next few minutes, Katie didn’t speak. The words she wanted to say seemed fake. “I’m sorry,” sounded so empty, so wrong. There was nothing to apologise for. She was only sorry she hadn’t lived longer and given her family a better chance at going on without her. A couple of miles of emptyish road opened up, they sped down it, then got choked up in tail-backs again. A car in front of them beeped its’ horn and the driver put on his left indicator to try to switch lanes. All four lanes soon snarled up with them only managing another hundred metres before the road was completely clogged again.
ARE YOU REAL?
Katie shrugged, no more able to answer that than a question on the quantum mechanics of space travel. It just wasn’t on the college syllabus. She knew what the meaning of life was though. Forty two. She was a ghost. Her body was in the ground. She had no physical presence whatsoever; no pulse, no breath, none of the things that scientists defined human life by. And yet, she felt real. The heat and the chill, the scratchy upholstery, the bulk of a small girl when they had hugged. Even if those feelings were just psychosomatic, that was all the reality Katie needed.
YOU’RE HERE BUT WE JUST… WE LEFT YOU SOMEWHERE ELSE. HOW CAN YOU BE HERE?
“Looks like something may have happened up ahead.” Dad pulled the handbrake on and tapped his fingers on the steering wheeling, straining forward to see better. “Blues and twos are out in force.”
“You know why I’m here.”
Dan started tapping away again, writing the next instalment in a conversation that would only end up going round in circles.
At the sound of a police helicopter whirring somewhere above them, Katie knew she had to go. Leaving the safety of this tin can seemed like a bad idea. In her incorporeal bones, she knew that whatever waited for her out there was going to be a hundred times worse than an awkward conversation. And still, not going to help was unthinkable.
“Open the door.”
Dan didn’t move. Perhaps she suspected where her older sister was going; what she was planning to do. Why did twelve year olds have the infuriating habit of being right all the time? They were coldly logical and saw everything as a good or a bad thing to do. A million shades of grey didn’t even exist. But, when you had seen everything Katie had seen, black or white had no place on the radar. Everything was grey. She had to do things she did not want to just because those were the rules.
“Open the fucking door, Dan, or I’ll-“ Katie blinked, realising that she had just sworn at her little sister. And not in the jokey, flip way they used to use when making fun of people that they disliked, but with vehemence and violence. Why? There was nothing on this Earth important enough to make her speak to a twelve year old like that. Nothing and no-one. She was just lucky neither of her parents had heard her. Foul language wasn’t the hugest no-no in the world for the Cartwright family – it wasn’t exactly everyday vocabulary but they sure knew there were worse crimes – but saying the F word and meaning it in such an edged way were two very different things.
Katie opened her mouth to apologise to Dan and found herself outside the car and staring down rows of cars at distant police tape and hastily erected STOP and ACCIDENT HERE signs. As she watched, the overhead dot matrixes stopped warning drivers of a dramatic slow down in traffic movement and started instructing them to turn off at an earlier junction and find another route. Considering the warning was a little redundant if motorists were this far down, and the police weren’t completely stupid – whatever Katie’s personal experience had shown – they had to have been altered for quite some distance. ESTIMATED TIME UNTIL CLEARANCE flashed up but Katie had a sinking feeling about this. The dreaded 5 HOURS+ blinked up. That meant the emergency crews were expecting to be working here well into the night. And that, in turn, meant this was bad. Really, really bad. Something called her forward – something she couldn’t ignore and didn’t think she wanted to. Onwards between cars and the occasional van or lorry and she was standing at the edge of the cordon. The police had been canny enough to park their vehicles in such a way that rubber-neckers couldn’t get their look at the accident without leaving the comfort of their cars. Unfortunately, it meant Katie couldn’t see either.
You’re a ghost, spoke up Sergeant Voice.
Thanks for that. I nearly forgot.
She could always count on her sub-conscious to state the obvious.
You’re a ghost. A ghost. You?
??re a damn ghost girl!
Finally she got it. The officers on duty wouldn’t see her if she ducked under the twisted plastic tape and got closer to the scene. An invisible force gently bade her go forward. Katie got through the cordon and through the milling hi-vis clad men and women, past the sensory assault of idling engines spewing exhaust fumes, flashing lights and blaring sirens which- teamed with the tang of blood and burning metal and the constant buzz of industrial cutting equipment –was enough to bring Katie to her knees. How used she had gotten to the crisp, clean air of Northwood with only two motor vehicles in the town and the odd car passing through and generally not being very happy about it. Less weeks than she had fingers on both hands, and Katie was practically choking at the onslaught. Even though she technically didn’t breathe or feel now, her brain was still processing all this stimuli and sending her right to the edge. But she couldn’t afford to go over. Ohhh no. Giving in to this sensory overload now would stop her from getting to the actual accident site. And that was where she wanted – needed – to be. Why, she had no idea. It wasn’t as though there was anything she could do to help. Even a few steps further, behind this monster of a fire engine, and the mangled wreck of a car would be waiting, maybe with paramedics trying to save the driver while rescue workers tried to cut the roof off. Maybe there would be breathless screams and a panic to treat the injured person. Underlying it all would be the crashing waves of the traffic behind the cordon, so uncaring as they whined and whinged about being a bit late to where-ever they were headed.
“Shut up,” Katie said to the open air and flexed her fingers. No-one was sounding their horn, flashing their lights or even shouting out the window but all the same, she could hear them as if they were.
Can’t they go faster?
Never get home at this rate.
Now which dickhead can’t drive?
Come on. Hurry up guys.
Pain in the arse, these things are.
For God’s sake, get a move on.
It’s not my fault some idiot can’t drive.
Katie turned on her heel, unable to ignore the hostilities any longer. “Shut up! Just shut. The hell. Up. This is not just an inconvenience, this is serious! People might be dying!”
And she knew then. As she slowly turned back around and baby stepped forward until she was in full view of the crash site, her mind chewed over all possible explanations and spat out the least pleasant one.
The Keepers had brought her here.
That meant one of two things. Well, she could only think of two possibilities at that very moment. The chaos had probably scared off a dozen other explanations so the two options she had left were obviously the most likely. And oh my God why was she babbling to herself? Distraction technique.
The first explanation was pretty much a certainty as she steeled herself to look at the crash. A car hadn’t simply clipped another as it tried to traverse the lanes. It wouldn’t, would it? A multi-car pile-up greeted her. An articulated lorry was jack-knifed around them, tipped onto its’ side and cars which had managed to stop before they ploughed into it had been shunted from behind by others who had not noticed and now there was just a mess of contorted metal and burnt rubber. A handful of people were standing and staring in shocked silence; some were being treated at the side of the road for minor injuries, and emergency personnel flitted from one hunk of metal to another, trying to keep tabs on the people who were still trapped. And there had to be some. Where Katie expected the air to be ringing with screams and hollers, there was mostly silence and the weight of quiet agony. She longed to fill that void. Longed for something – anything – to fill the hush. There was nothing but more merciless silence. It only added to the lead anvil in her stomach. Somebody was going to die here today. Maybe more than one person. From even this considerable distance Katie could see pools of blood, scraps of fabrics torn away by broken windscreens, chunks of flesh gouged out; nobody could survive this kind of carnage for long.
Which thought led her to the second possibility. The Keepers were testing her in some way. She was obviously here for a reason – the desperate need she had felt to leave her family behind and get along here had been more than just morbid curiosity – it had been the Keepers forcing her here. But why? Katie touched her thundering head as she thought. What’s the ghost equivalent of paracetamol? Maybe I should just take my entire head off and give it a good old scrub. Hey, maybe the headless horseman had the same idea. Pack it in, girl. Get your shit together and think! Why? What possible use could the Keepers, a group (or maybe just the one) of God-like beings she really had not even seen and only spoken to very briefly, have for an underage dead girl? Why were they putting her through this? What were they hoping to achieve? What did they expect her to do? Yet, however little sense the situation made, however little she could actually do, she had to try.
Even if was pointless.
Dusk was creeping up on the scene and neon suits were running around with torches strapped to their hard hats.
“Can I get one of those?”
A firefighter who looked to be in charge whizzed straight past her.
“Damn, still can’t see me.” Irrational, yes, but she held out the fading hope that somebody around here would suddenly magically start seeing her. A first walk around the crash site had brought it home how lucky most of these people were to have even got out alive. One of the cars – it appeared to have been blue at some point – was being cut open by rescue workers whilst paramedics held a writhing man still. It must have hurt terribly. One of his legs had been broken so badly that the yellowish glow of bone stood out through a confusion of blood and muscle. At least… she hoped it was a mere break. The alternative (amputation, amputation, involuntary amputation) made her shudder. He must be able to feel every moment of contact, every minute vibration. And then the men in orange had cut the car roof off and sliced enough of one side that they could slide the man free of his prison and onto a stretcher with as little further harm as possible. They had to stick fresh pads to his leg to slow the blood loss while the man opened his mouth to yell out in pain. Katie could hardly bring herself to watch as he worked up enough energy just to whimper like a baby, but she had to watch, fearing the worst if she looked away. A squeak of wheels and an, “okay, he’s good to go,” and he vanished into one of the ambulances.
“He’s not good to go,” she barked at the sky. “He’ll never be good to go again.”
There was no reply but hell, yes, she knew they were listening. Watching every second of this torture.
Okay, where next? Katie whipped her head around, vaguely annoyed that the wind could still turn her hair into Worzel Gummidge chic. She imagined her hair tied back in an elastic band and then decided to put one of her trusty baseball caps over it – the one with the glow in the dark NYC logo. Realising that she had left her brown fleece with Jack in the Dead World, she thought of her matching baseball jacket and shucked it almost instantly – pumping adrenalin had chased away the chill.
Over there. That’s where you’re needed.
There’s no-one else there and I’m scared to go on my own.
Suck it up. There’re more important things than your feelings.
Much as she would have liked to stand there and argue the toss, Sergeant Voice was right. Who-ever was trapped in that car needed company more than worry about whether anyone even knew they were there. She wouldn’t have liked to be trapped in a metal cage alone – and there was somebody in there. She knew it as surely as night followed day.
Her feet were moving before she could command them, knowing exactly where they were meant to carry her while her mind raced to catch up. “Hello!” she yelled out as she ran over to the wreck of a car, so twisted into the crash barrier that it could have been a battered roadsign or an emergency phone box. Certainly, there didn’t seem to be enough room left for a human being… however badly injured. But a hea
rtbeat fluttered out of the heap. Faint and fast. Katie raced faster, refusing to be too late. She had a heartbeat to follow and, dammit, it was going to keep beating. It seemed to take an age for Katie to reach the car. She ducked down by the blown out window but nobody was immediately visible. The pulsing sound was definitely coming from here though… The beats were faster, louder, more desperate with each pitiful thump. “Is there anyone stuck in here?” Which was quite possibly the stupidest question she had ever asked. And there are a lot of contenders for that crown. It was still better than the alternative. Wincing slightly, Katie asked it anyway. “Is anyone still alive in here?”
A long moment. Did she really expect a response?
Then there was a grunt/sob.
“Can you hear me?”
Another sound.
Katie dropped to her knees and crawled through the broken window, feeling the glass scrape her imaginary knees and elbows and distantly wishing she would bleed from those wounds. Knowing she could be hurt and never really feel the effects should have gladdened her – made her as giddy as a goat, Mom used to say. Instead, it depressed the crap out of her. Made her feel less real.
I’m not a real girl.
Where the car had rolled and some flying debris or other had caved in the roof and half of the driver’s side, Katie found herself looking at an impossibly dented sheet of steel. A scrap of gold muslin waved beneath it and she knew, just knew, that the person she had to find was on the other side. How to get there though? Well, she was a ghost, right? And ghosts could walk through walls, right? Maybe the hospital had just been a fluke. That paranoid part of Katie made her wonder if that was all a myth and she would just end up knocking herself out or something. Shrugging, Katie decided she had to try. Nobody deserved to die alone. As a test, she pressed her hand to the metal and felt it slide through. It met a bit of resistance but hell… floating through sheet steel hardly sounded easy! Katie wiggled her fingers, feeling the tickle of air and ripped material and almost pausing to revel in another new ability, and pulled her hand back. It was fine. And it felt … odd. Like it wasn’t hers any longer. Blinking away tears she finally felt as though she could cry, Katie placed it. Her hand, at the very least, felt as though it belonged to an actual phantom and not just a dead girl whose brain did not know it yet.
“Hang in there just a little longer. I’m Katie and I’m on my way. Don’t freak, okay?” And that was all the warning she had time for because that invisible force pulled Katie forward until she had passed through the former roof and found herself staring down at a familiar face. Gold and green on top; white roses in her hair; eyes of silver and gold all at once. “Mademoiselle Romani.” She hunkered down and saw something flicker behind her eyes. The shadows seen far too often on the faces of her friends. Mademoiselle Romani was a psychic and she knew things before they happened. And she never told what she saw if it couldn’t be changed. She knew something she couldn’t change, and she was not going to tell Katie what it was. “It’s okay. I know what you’re thinking.”
Metallic eyes focused and then swam away, focused again. Breathing was getting hard – and it wasn’t just the slowly deflating airbag crushing her ribs or the half a steering column piecing her chest right through.
“Sometimes people have to stay dead.”
Mademoiselle Romani smiled and left a few pictures in Katie’s head before her features dissolved into the altogether plainer ones of the woman who had been driving. Apparently Mademoiselle Romani could see the past as well as the future. No time to think about that now. The woman slumped between the driver and passenger seats was clearly in tremendous pain; she was the priority. “Can you hear me?”
Half-lidded eyes, green and brown powder all smudged, searched for the voice, strangely able to hear but not see Katie. She didn’t bother to question why or how this bizarre situation was happening. All that mattered was that she had some way of communicating with the woman. “Breathe, okay.”
To her credit, the woman tried to slow her panicked breathing, but the frantic, shallow breaths were making so much movement that a lung could easily tear. “Please,” she rasped. “No.”
“No. No what?”
The first thing that came to mind was that the woman just didn’t want to die. Who did?
Katie found a gap between pieces of the splintered dashboard. “You’re going to be okay.” It wasn’t a lie but it felt like one. As always, Katie felt guilty about it, about allowing another person to believe in something false. But the woman needed it. She had to trust things were working to save her. She had to trust she was not a lost cause. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Where..?”
“I’m right next to you.” A pink-haired good luck troll dangled, lop-sided and way too smiley, from the bent rearview mirror. She instructed the woman to look in the shards of looking glass still left in the frame. For some reason Katie had a reflection. Or it could have just been that the woman was touching death and could perceive a new dimension to the world through it. Her eyes flew wide and the breathing got panicky once more. She instinctively flinched away from Katie, a devastating mix of confusion and terror tensing her body, making her heart pound like a butterfly in a tiny iron cage. What if the metal shifted and perforated her heart? “de Rossa would know what to do,” Katie murmured. Even Lainy or Chris would have a better idea than her. Lainy might have mainly treated minor injuries in her years as a nurse but surely they covered gross chest trauma in training. And Chris was a paramedic and used to patching people up on the fly – maybe even people in worse states than this. Dr de Rossa, a nurse and a paramedic who’d risked his life for her, and she’d left them all behind. They should be here – not her. “Try not to move. That’s kind of a stupid thing to say, huh? I mean, where are you going to go? Did I think you were going to get up and dance the Hokey Cokey? I’m an idiot.”
A gasp of laughter sawed the air.
“I… like you… remind me… name?
“I’m Katie Cartwright. I’m going to stay right here until-“
Suddenly, the woman sniffed at the air and frowned.
“Smell.”
“Do I?”
“No. Not… you. Outside.”
Katie opened her mouth to protest – she couldn’t smell a thing – but then it flooded her nostrils like it had been there all along. All these long minutes and all around her. She hadn’t even noticed. Maybe she was learning, on some level, to turn off all unpleasant feelings and senses. But this sudden stink was as offensive as they came…
“Holy shit. I have to go.”
…Petrol.
In the space of a few seconds, Katie had braced herself for that deep nausea and fought it back as she faded through the grotesquely twisted roof, listened with pin sharp hearing for the steady drip drip drip of a fuel leak and traced it back to the car she had just left.
“Petrol leak!” she shouted, waving her arms around.
She was roundly ignored. Had she really expected anything else? Just ‘cos one dying woman saw me, I’m suddenly thinking the whole world knows I’m here. That makes perfect sense. So what could she do? She couldn’t even alert the rescue workers to the car wreck they appeared to have missed. And even if they did notice at some point they almost certainly wouldn’t catch the petrol leak in time. Nor would they probably smell it under smouldering rubber and the exhaust of ambulances revving and racing away. Petrol smelled much the same as liquid or gas. Marcie would know what to do now – she might even be able to use her mechanic skills to somehow plug the leak until it was safe. Was that even possible? Redundant question really. There was already acid-smelling liquid all over the ground. A hundred cars backed up on all four lanes behind her – about half with their engines still running in the vain hope everything would magically clear away to let them past. A rescue team was still busy chopping vehicles open with industrial strength cutters.
One spark… Just one errant bolt of metallic heat… It was scary to think that it took such a tiny amount of energy to set the whole thing alight. And right at the heart of the explosion would be a woman with a probably fatal chest wound whose name she didn’t even know. “Anybody! Can anyone hear me?!” It was worth one more shot. “Please! You can’t…” Katie tried to shout around a sudden lump in her throat. A handful of metres away, a woman was clinging to life by her fingernails. A woman who was going to die anyway.
From blood loss, yes. A collapsed lung, I can deal with. But if that petrol tank goes up… I can’t let her be blown up.
So, why wasn’t she doing anything? Katie looked at the car wreck behind her with stinging tears blurring her vision and knew with cold certainty that it was too late. Whatever she did now, it was going to be too late for her.
It wouldn’t be too late for everyone else though. She could still protect everyone else; accelerant based explosions weren’t fussy about who they hurt. The innocent motorists and their passengers, the real-life angels who were trying to save everyone today… she could save them all herself. And they will never even know. But how? How could she get them to pay attention? Think, think, think. She was battering at the puzzle and wandering past men and women in hi-vis suits when it came to her. She stopped beside a man who seemed to be in charge of the fire crew – he was barking orders at his team and they were obeying. It might not even work. Theory was telling Katie that if she could drift through steel and glass she should be able to go through flesh and bone. If she stopped moving midway, in the middle of the body, she could possess it – control what it said and did. Just until she was finished. Going through the idea more slowly, it sounded increasingly insane. It was beyond the section me now stage and well into fetch me a strait jacket.
Oh, and wandering around a crash scene the day they put you in the ground is totally normal?
Point taken.
At least, she thought she had been buried. Wouldn’t she feel it burning, breaking her into salt and ashes if they had cremated her?
Katie shivered. The flush of adrenalin was giving way to the ice of shock. Her head still ached, worse with every line of internal debate on what she was about to do. No more thinking. Thinking too much had always been her downfall. Katie stepped closer to the bigger man and closed her hands into fists, thrusting both into his chest just to be sure. Her hands sunk into him but she pulled back almost instantly.
No, no she didn’t like that at all.
There was something wrong about that man. Something distinctly creepy. There had been things inside him; formless and colourless but heavy. They gave the impression of evil. He was hiding a secret, a dark secret, and he’d been keeping it so long he was hoping he might forget it soon. If you kept things locked away for long enough, eventually they turned to dust. Memories that might be stories from some-one else’s past. And Katie had felt them – had felt those things crawling across her skin, tracking her with slime and dirt. She never wanted to be that close to pure evil again. And yet, curiosity was about to get the better of her. She had to touch him again to find out how a man who lived to save others could have such a dark streak. She put her feet on top of his and watched them sink through steel capped boots. They looked liked some strange man/girl hybrid, separated at the calves, although nobody else could see the monstrosity that was Katie and Eric. An experimental probe of his mind once she was fully inside his body revealed his name as Eric Jones. He didn’t look like an Eric. Erics didn’t have any particular look, she supposed. Another light brush of his mind pulled out his position as acting leader of this rescue team while his boss was on leave in Scotland. He got to boss the guys around and that was just fine with him. He’d always liked being the one in charge. And there it is again. That sense of malevolence running through him like a river. What was it? How could this streak be so pure and black without growing large enough to break free? Katie delved deeper and immediately wished she hadn’t. Because that darkness had broken free before now. On a cool Sunday evening in a park no more than five dozen miles from here. Instinct yelled at her to get out of that man. Get out now! She fought it back and grimaced. This man, this unlikely Eric, had chased her to the ground and terrified her so completely with one stony expression that she hadn’t dared make a sound as he raped her. Being inside him made her phantom flesh crawl. The memory had not faded with her lifeforce. A second was all she could afford to feel the chill of a million emotions. And then everything kicked back into high gear.
“You, number 345!” Eric yelled at one firefighter, trying to clear broken glass to the roadside. “Get onto Highways. See about getting some light out here.”
“Yes sir.” Number 345 hesitated.
“Was I mumbling?”
“No sir. There’s a rugby club down the road. Maybe they’ve got some portable floods.”
“Get to it then, 345.”
The nameless firefighter hustled away and was instantly forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
But I’m in your mind.
She felt a tremor pass through Eric – not enough to signal he knew something was wrong, but enough to suggest he knew something wasn’t right.
Maybe he remembered her, remembered what he did to her. How ashamed she had been afterwards. How she had smiled even when she had nightmares. How she had even pretended to be so over the attack. All those feelings and so many more bubbled up inside her, barely contained. His heart was inside her own chest now. She could reach inside to it and squeeze out every last pulse. She could hold her breath – because it no longer made any difference to her – and watch his lungs shrink, shrivel and collapse as the last atom of oxygen wheezed through his lips. And then his body would just fall away from her, used up and useless, as hers had been.
But I won’t. ‘Cos then I’d be just like you.
The words whispered from Katie to Eric. They were bouncing around his skull and alarm bells started ringing.
You’re not getting away with it.
He was making a good show of caring. It just was not good enough now that Katie had seen what he was capable of. He was a God damn rapist! Her rapist! It was so tempting to wreak her revenge right here and now.
If she didn’t take control of his body and his voice, didn’t alert him to the overlooked car wreck and petrol leak, it would carry on unnoticed and eventually ignite. A thousand casualties would be his fault. Injuries, both major and minor, probably even a death or dozen, and they would weigh down his conscious for the rest of his life. But she wasn’t going to do that either. Not to all those innocent people. Putting in harms way the man who had haunted her days and nights for eight months wasn’t worth endangering everyone else. The old Katie, the Katie who had been drowning in darkness and hate and fear, might not have thought about that… but that Katie was gone now. This girl knew there would be a time and a place for her to find justice.
Not here. Not now.
The voice was hers; it was his too. He knew what was coming.
So when?
When it stops mattering so much. When you can hurt him without hating him, that’s when. That time might never come. But she had nothing but time to wait and see if it did.
Katie breathed deeply, trying to block out the bitter-sweet of evil. It still called to her, sang just for her, but she knew she didn’t have to listen. If only she didn’t have to be caught in a body suffused with it… She slid her arms into Eric’s like the sleeves of a strait jacket and shook her muscles out. Every part of him was reluctantly under her control.
Trust me. This is so much easier when you don’t fight. Maybe. And which of them it would be easier for buzzed liked a fly caught in a spiders’ web.
Hands cupped to his mouth and pointing in the direction of the twisted lump of steel, Katie made Eric bellow like his life depended on it.
“Guys! Over there!”
> It did.
It mattered to the victims of the crashed. It mattered to the families and friends of those people who hadn’t been able to help. It mattered to every emergency worker, every volunteer, everyone who was doing their best to make this disaster… less.
Failure was not an option.
It happened regardless.
There was no explosion from the petrol tank. The woman driver died before she could be cut out. And that should have made Katie happy – not being responsible for her being burned alive, just dying naturally, if gruesomely. But those few buoyed seconds soon vanished as she continued her mad rush into each crashed vehicle and checking for any more hazards. That’s where she found them. A dozen, maybe more, people huddled together in the freight of the overturned lorry. They were probably illegal immigrants – trying to hitch a ride into the country because all the lawful routes had been closed to them. She drifted a little closer. They were seeking safety. And now all but two of them were dead in the back of a lorry – never to be known or missed by another living soul. This was one large family. It was obvious now, by the same face shape, the fingers that were all so long and straight. She looked up at the older woman and young boy – her toddler grandson. Both were cuddled closer than seemed possible and muttering to each other in some Asian sounding language Katie did not understand. Their heartbeats were perilously slow and strong – like the heart knew it couldn’t beat often so it was putting everything it could into the few it could manage. Very dangerous.
“This is horrible. They came to us for help,” she told the air, “and all we did was kill them.” She blinked in the gloom. Night was creeping in and Katie thought about her parents, her little sister, her- No, that was all the family she had. How long had she left them alone and sitting somewhere in the tailbacks? Did they miss her? Did the family feel incomplete without her?
“I get it now.” Katie backed away and looked at the dying family with cold judgement. Something deep inside had shut down. What she wanted was irrelevant. The instincts that told her to save the lives she could must be ignored. Even if these two lives were saved, what chance did either of them have of surviving with broken hearts? “This is what I have to do now. I have to let you die with your family. Because that’s what family does, isn’t it? They can’t go on with missing parts.”
The older lady glanced up from the child she cradled like a doll, wrinkled and milky eyes seeming to focus on her for a moment before coming to rest on the smashed crates of pasta, sauces and soups. The woman said something in her own language. “Aabar dekha hobe.” It sound like a curse and Katie stepped back, alarmed. “Aabar dekha hobe,” the old lady repeated. It might have directed at the little boy or at Katie herself. All she knew was that it sounded ominous. It also sounded vaguely Indian. Dina might know what it meant.
The kid’s heart gave out first. The woman stroked his hair and was rattling through her last breath when shadow hands fixed on either shoulder and pulled Katie through the side of the lorry and out into a cool night. The panic that had been so real seemed lifetimes away now that she was struggling in the steely grasp of Shadow Boy.
“What do you want from me?” she screamed in his blur of a face, feeling the wind whipping past as they flew through the night. Shadow Boy deposited Katie far away from the crash site and let go of her. He didn’t say a word – just stared at her, his head slightly tilted, as if he was eyeing her up like a predator keeping watch over his prey. “If you won’t answer me, I have things to do.” Arm out, Katie moved to brush past him. But this figure of moving shadow was not hurting her, and Eric Jones stood behind glow in the dark police tape directing a group of firefighters as they waved cars down the one open lane. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Not quite yet. So this was the lesser of two evils. “Who even are you?”
Shadow Boy reached out… held out a hand. Dark shapes moved and overlaid each other, shifting from charcoal grey to midnight blue to black, shining like wet ink.
It wasn’t like she thought. He wasn’t a boy simply swamped in darkness. He was a perfect boy who was made of the night. And yet – his digits had no fingerprints, his face had no features to speak.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you keep following me but I’ve had it. Talk to me. Or back off!”
Was this the Shadow Jack had been running from in her dream? The danger he had warned her was waiting in the Dead World if she had stayed? It seemed quite likely but, now that she had seen it a few times, it was not nearly as scary as he made out. But her skin still sprouted goosebumps when she remembered the touch of him on her; today, in the back corridor of SHIMMA, even outside her own home. House. Stood to reason, though, that one of the few people that could touch her like a physical being had tried to drag her into a land of death.
Uuuurrrrggghhh.
A groan brushed her mind – feather light and barely there. It cane from Shadow Boy and he dropped his hand back to his side, head down and shaking.
Are you… do you need to say something?
It seemed that verbal communication was beyond this creature. Mental it is. And, probably, mental I am.
Hey. Katie ducked down until she could see the undulating mass that was his face. Then she searched for eyes, remembering a psychology lesson when the tutor had said that most people followed the general direction of eye contact. Eventually, she found two dark ovals that locked on her and tracked her up. There. Now maybe we can have a conversation like real people.
Remember.
Yeah, and about you just saying random words to me-
Remember.
You can’t say anything else, can you? “Jesus. Of all the stalkers in the world, I get the weird, silent, grunty one. I feel so safe.” Shadow Boy moaned again and it sounded like he was sad… like he wanted to say more but didn’t know how to. Then Katie realised that he might not be able to speak to her but he could probably understand every word she said. “Oh, shit.”
Remember.
Stop telling me to remember! If I could, I would.
The boy wrapped her in his dark arms again, suddenly behind her before she had even noticed he had moved, and buried his face in her hair. Part of Katie desperately wanted to tear away. Get away before he dragged her with him to whatever nightmare world he had crawled from. And yet a bigger part of her, the part that existed on emotion and impulses, forced herself limp and still inside his clutches. As long as he was here and chasing after her all the time, Jack was safe. If only there was a way to tell him he was safe for now; that he could stop running.
I need to take care of my family now. You understand that, right? I can’t leave them. And, frankly, last time you touched me, there was a tug of war and I was the rope. I’m dead and I belong with the other dead people but the spirits say I have no place there. And you… I don’t know what the hell you have in mind for me. But it couldn’t possibly be good.
There was one final whisper through her mind. Remember. And then Shadow Boy was gone and Katie thought she heard him echoing her name in the wind.
“Who was that?” Dan asked when she had found their car in the honking, suffocating traffic jam. Mom had fallen asleep and Dad was outside, making use of the downtime by refilling the screenwash. As long as the younger girl kept her voice low, they wouldn’t be heard.
Katie barely heard her sister. The older lady was filling her thoughts: the way she had seemed so calm in the face of her own mortality and surrounded by so much death. The way she had held that little boy to her chest, refusing to let go of each laboured breath before he had found his own fate. It made her ache just to remember. Then, her mind’s eye cut to the floating apparition of Mademoiselle Romani – beautiful/bloody and still trying to help.
“Who were you talking to? He looked… familiar.”
Katie shot a look across at the younger girl, but she was busy playing on her games console and didn’t
see the concerned look that surfaced.
Chapter eight