No Room for Ghosts

‘So, I’m reading it right, then? It doesn’t mention a shooting?’

I nodded, then realised what I was doing and shook my head. ‘Yeah. Uh, I mean, no. It only talks vaguely about an assault, and then it says you died of a heart attack. Here,’ I jabbed an earth-stained finger at the bleeding ink before discarding it in frustration.

‘Oh,’ Leanna sounded annoyed. I got the strong impression that she wanted to be mistaken. ‘It’s just that it’s so blurry,’ she muttered, ‘and… Oh, I just don’t know what to believe anymore!’

My head was spinning, too. I thought I might drown in confusion. What had really happened that day, and why did we only have fragments of clues about it? Why did this new information conflict with what we both remembered? Why couldn’t I see the gunman’s face? Surely, there had been a gunman? Leanna was right. Nothing made sense.

My heart lurched in my chest, struggling in chains. I was hyperventilating, but as I gasped for breaths, it was the landscape that expanded and contracted like a heaving lung. Cicadas added their frenetic hum to my racing pulse, invisible in the dry grass. Chiming maddeningly, they hid in tree branches that forked like vipers’ tongues, with bark that peeled like strips of corpse skin, and brittle bunches of twigs and leaves that gave off death rattles in the increasing wind.

The day had grown too quickly from the morning, and had combusted into something deranged. It flared, white-hot along the skyline, baking the pebbles and singing the spiny grasses and the bare earth. Only the headstones stayed immune to the heat as, all around us, a scene of chaos unfolded. Eucalypts warped, trapped in a surrealist nightmare, sweating sweet oils that only fuelled their torture. Leaves curled in agony. Lizards darted, veins throbbing and tongues tasting, fretfully seeking shelter. Over everything, the sun watched with a baleful eye, basking in its creation.

‘Excuse me.’

I looked up. The voice was gentle, and black lace cuffed the wrist that lay softly on my shoulder, stark against porcelain white skin. Painted against the arid landscape, she was like a silhouette figure in a Sidney Nolan painting. Yet, strangely, nothing could have been more Gothic, or more sepulchral, than she was.

Her crinoline bloomed as she leaned in. ‘Are you Harvey Porter?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, not thinking to question her apparition. She was no more bizarre than anything else I encountered.

‘Good.’ She sounded pleased. Her parasol twirled, casting latticework shadows on the parched ground. ‘The policeman is looking for you.’

I swallowed. Even if I had conceded the hopelessness of my situation, the word ‘policeman’ didn’t bode any better in death than it did in life. Immediately, I looked around, scouting the graveyard for any sign of a blue uniform, but my search found only Leanna. She was perched on a headstone, staring intently at the rotting obituary, which she had retrieved after I threw it away.

‘What does he want?’ I petitioned the colonial lady, but when I spun back around, she was gone.

Panic gripped me, and I leaped over Leanna’s grave, grabbing her uninjured wrist. ‘Come on,’ I urged her. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t know. I just saw this woman. Didn’t you see her?’

‘No.’ Leanna’s face lit up. ‘There was another ghost?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, yes, probably, but she’s not the kind of ghost you want to meet. Trust me. We need to get out of here. Somebody’s after us.’

It wasn’t the full truth, but it did the job. She followed as I sprinted down the overgrown path, past the rusting iron gates, and back out onto the road. On the periphery of my vision, I thought I glimpsed other moving shapes– the figures of other ghosts shifting around the graveyard. Leanna saw them too, and several times looked back longingly. I hurried her along.

Then, suddenly, the road we ran on changed. The faded, dusty asphalt smoothed out, and the grassy fringe at the road’s edge became a neat curve. As though spurned by my desire to escape, the ribbon of tar skipped ahead, pulling us into a new location, and we were in the city again. It wouldn’t have been more startling to discover that the highway was in fact the sun-baked, scaly back of an enormous snake.

Winded by shock, I dropped onto the pavement. I noticed that we weren’t far from the block where Randolph’s cafe was. While I panted, bracing my hands against my knees to hold myself upright, pedestrians poured past us, oblivious. With a shiver, I felt the chill of someone passing through me.

Somebody’s walking on your grave.

Leanna looked similarly distressed. I guessed that she had just experienced the same sensation, because she had backed her narrow body up against a brick wall, and was flinching away from passers-by. I tried to catch her eye, but she was looking ahead, already focused intently on something directly behind me.

‘Pardon me, sir.’ For the second time, a hand clapped my shoulder. This time, it was firm, like the voice that accompanied it.

Gulping, I spun around and found myself face-to-face with a police officer. I wasn’t sure whether it was nervousness or the twisted physics of the ghost world that made me feel about two feet tall.

‘Yes?’

I expected to be apprehended, or maybe hand-cuffed. My conscience writhed as I wondered what could have inspired such a feeling of criminal guilt. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Had I? It was so hard to tell what the rules were in the afterlife.

However, instead of a thin-lipped smile, or a mask of golem-like impassiveness, I saw a stern face that was kindly. I relaxed.

He wore a rounded helmet, like a policeman from a century ago. A bushy, auburn moustache arched underneath his long nose and beetle-black eyes. His skin was as pale as the lady’s had been. With his stiff, archaic uniform and cartoonish baton, he would have made a fine companion for her in an iconic lithograph. Presently, he held up a sepia poster, from which most of the already-faint colour had drained.

‘Have you seen this girl?’ he asked.

This was Leanna’s cue to creep closer, braving the torrent of marching people. She only cringed a little when they struck her briefly, like flotsam bouncing in a ford.

‘Ooh,’ she crooned, taking the photograph in bone-thin fingers. ‘Is this a little ghost girl? Look, Harvey, isn’t she cute?’

I nodded hesitantly. ‘I haven’t seen her,’ I told the policeman. Leanna ignored me and swooped in between us.

‘What’s happened to her?’ Her tinkling, pixie voice was full of concern. ‘Is she missing? This looks like it was taken ages ago, but look.’ She showed the picture to me. ‘Her clothes aren’t old at all! She looks like she died just yesterday. Poor dear.’

Her observations seemed to glance off the policeman, whom I guessed was preoccupied with what Randolph called haunting. Maybe he never realised that he was dead. It must have taken impressive stubbornness, I imagined, for him to maintain his ignorance for this long.

‘How old is she?’ Leanna pressed, and this seemed to rouse him again, as though he was a robot, waiting for the right input.

‘She’s three,’ he said, jolting to life. ‘Her parents reported her missing last week, but if you haven’t seen her... Well, thank you both, all the same.’ He nodded severely at us, inclining his steepled helmet.

Taking his photograph with him, he strode back through the flocks of people, crossed the street, and dissolved like mist.