No Room for Ghosts

It was a bright day. For someone like me, who existed on a convoluted timeline, the vast quantities of sunlight were disconcerting. It glanced off the sleek skyscrapers, painted the sides of the lampposts, and rolled down the cratered pavement. Lazy and feline, it lay in long, flat pools along the top of the sandstone wall surrounding Hyde Park. Like a sponge for shadow, it dabbed patches around the giant fig trees, which summertime had filled with leafy smells and faint, flowery perfume.

It was tourist weather. The teams of t-shirt wearing students and sight-seers out for light adventure stood in contrast to our much more serious mission. They meandered in the park, chatting and photographing the spires of the cathedral and the war memorial located inside the park, rearing out of the canopy like a fantasy castle.

Leanna and I hurried past them. We were taking a short-cut through the greenery, but we were devoted to a cause as unsuited to scenic Hyde Park as Dr. Jekyll was unlike the character who shared its name.

The combination of the sunlight and the languid air was difficult to ignore. I felt it warming my skin and sloshing in my veins, inducing sloth, and was forced to push it away. I ignored my body and my surroundings, so that I felt like I was driving an avatar to our destination. We were super-imposed images, and our shallow awareness of the tourist world was surreal. We were a series of dichotomies– slow and fast, trivial and desperate, life and death.

Or, perhaps the world was only warped because I saw it through the bulb of an hourglass that drained our minutes away.

We hiked up the gravel path, passing buttery frangipanis and gigantic, prehistoric figs with sprawling boughs and roots that broke the earth like tentacles. Their leaves were dinner plate sized. Vines dangled twenty metres from their canopies to the ground, hanging like ropes for jungle monkeys. Children ran laps around their girths. Screaming and shouting, they climbed in the wonderland of branches, straddling limbs that were as thick as the trunks of trees in other parks.

They were mirror children, I thought. Living and breathing and playing, they were the opposite of Abigail, and that drove me on. I ran faster, towing Leanna along in my wake.

‘How much further?’ I puffed. Despite having lived for five years in the city, I had never made much of an effort to get acquainted with it.

‘Just up this path, then around the block.’

Drawing even with my longer strides, Leanna panted much more wheezily. Her lungs laboured with rapid, shallow breaths, and her weak heart fluttered in her birdcage chest, struggling to brighten her cheeks.

I still wasn’t completely clear on our plan. I knew that we were running because we didn’t have much time, of our own, rather than of Abigail’s. As far as I could make out, the poor child would repeat her pattern of skipping distractedly onto the road for the rest of eternity. On the other hand, Leanna and I had no idea how long we had until we vanished.

The only other self-aware ghost we had found, by sheer luck, was Randolph. He didn’t seem to fade at all, but he also never seemed to leave the shop, and he didn’t have a whole lot of control over the objects in it. Thus, he had to scavenge for newspapers. The best conclusion I could come to was that he managed to linger in a limited capacity as the result of his goodwill towards other ghosts.

Or, I reconsidered, maybe he wasn’t prolonging a temporary state at all. Maybe this was his afterlife. Who knew where ghosts went when they faded out of the real world, and couldn’t roam as they pleased? I shuddered. Randolph had only told Leanna that he didn’t know where she would go if she vanished. He hadn’t mentioned whether he’d ever vanished himself.

So, that was another reason we were running. Even if fading out didn’t mean obliteration, it might separate us, and as far as Leanna and I were concerned, that was worse.

Leanna hated to think of Abigail suffering, even if it was possible that she felt nothing, like a kind of sleep walker. Yet, apart from the obvious, there was another reason for our haste.

As we raced through the park, I was alert for any signs of blue. A couple of times, I caught flashes of the hated shade, and zeroed in on button-up, collared shirts that were unfortunately coloured, but devoid of any insignia. In place of soulless shades, I was relieved to find the exposed eyes and faces of other park patrons. Occasionally, they looked slightly affronted, but pensively stern, as though they couldn’t put a finger on what had upset them.

Every time we turned a corner or emerged from behind an especially hulking tree trunk, my heart skipped a beat. I was certain we would find at least one hunter, or that one would find us. I was so sure, now that I was not only fleeing, but actively interfering in the ghost world, that the police would stalk me even more relentlessly than before. Yet, so far we had evaded them completely. It felt like a trick, or like being in the eye of a storm. Or, perhaps something else was to blame.

We slowed to a jog, emerging into the crowded street, and I clutched Leanna’s hand like a talisman.

Exertion made her more skeletal than ever. With arms and legs extended, and no time wasted hiding her thinness, she was a scarecrow, or some kind of Slender Man, a figment of dream or nightmare. I supposed that was appropriate, at least from the points of view of the pedestrians we didn’t have time to weave around. Either way, I was convinced that this much exercise would have killed her, when she was alive.

Then, as suddenly as if she had appeared on cue, we saw Abigail. Arms held wide, as though mimicking an airplane, she was balancing along the top of a wall, steadily approaching the intersection. Her perfectly round bob of brown hair swung carelessly beneath her paper crown.

‘Look!’

Leanna heaved the syllable, pointing feebly. She clung to me for support, but not too tightly. More than anything, she wanted me to run and intercept the girl.

‘What do we do?’ I asked hurriedly.

We had been too fixated on getting here in one piece for Leanna to explain in much detail what needed to be done. Now, the apologetic look she offered made me suspect that she didn’t know either.

‘We just have to… um. Randolph thought she haunted because she didn’t know she was a ghost.’

‘So,’ I paused, assembling this new information, ‘I’m supposed to tell her that she’s a ghost?’
She shrugged hopelessly.

‘Why do you need me at all, then?’ I narrowed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose with my fingers. ‘You don’t, do you?’ I realised, when she was silent. ‘You just wanted to get me out of the house, so that I’d come with you?’

Sheepishly, she nodded, and then swiftly changed her mind and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not it. I do need you, and she,’ she pointed a thin finger at the child, who had her back to us, oblivious, ‘needs you.’

It took me longer than it should have to piece this together. ‘Why?’ I demanded.

‘Oh!’ Leanna sounded exasperated. ‘I thought you said you were lonely? Aren’t you?’ I was put on the spot, like a witness during cross-examination, so that all I could do was nod vaguely. ‘Well, we are too,’ she explained. ‘We could all be together, like,’ she paused, and blushed, as though she were embarrassed to say it aloud.

‘Like what?’

‘Like, we could be a family.’

‘Ah.’

I hoped it sounded like I understood, rather than like I was withholding some objection. Leanna regarded me half-expectantly, and half with a look that that suggested she might have missed her cue to feel rejected. Did she want me to sound more excited? To throw my arms around her? I didn’t know what people were supposed to do when…

What were we even doing?

I shot her a querying look, hoping for an indication, but only met with the same, lost expression. I opened my mouth to reassure her, but then rubber squealed on tar, and, instead, in inhaled sharply. The last, obscuring grains of sand trickled out of the hourglass, and when they had disappeared, the way ahead of me was clear.

There was no more time.