Absence: Whispers and Shadow

by J. B. Forsyth

  It was whilst he lying there thinking of this, that the warmth on his face began to weaken. He opened his eyes, expecting to see a cloud drifting across the sun. But there wasn’t one. The sky was a wash of blue without a single cloud in any direction. The sun still shone, but it was being devoured by a black semicircle.

  The Black Eye!

  He leapt to his feet in a near panic and dived behind the nearest tree. Then he pressed his back to the trunk and pulled his arms and legs into its shadow. And like this he waited, balled up and terrified as the Black Eye leached ever more light from the woods. He cursed himself for getting caught out, but understood why he had been. Black Eye reminder boards would be up in town, but he’d been too preoccupied with spending his money and keeping an eye out for Bill that he hadn’t registered them. The one in the market would have been right above him when he bought the damsons. And he hadn’t heard the warning bells. He always heard the bells, even if he was up at the lake. Then he remembered the crow he had thrown a stone at that morning and the malevolent cawing it made as it flew away. It must have cast a spell on him, he thought; one that made him doze while they were ringing.

  He watched as the Black Eye scoured the woods. He could feel its poisonous glare striking the tree and breaking around it - rushing away to either side of him as if he was on a tiny island in the middle of a black river. The shadow in which he was sitting weakened to the point where it almost matched the deepening shade around it and he knew then that The Black Eye was wide open. He held his breath, not daring to breathe until the light began to return to the forest and the shadow of the tree began to sharpen again. And it was only when bright sunshine flooded the woods that he got to his feet and stepped out onto the lakeside again. If he’d been at work this afternoon Mr Febula would have taken care of him. They sat through the last Black Eye together whilst the miller regaled him with the story of the flour dust explosion that blew a hole in the side of the building. But he had only himself to rely on now. And if he was going to survive on his own, he would have to be a little more focused.

  He spent most of the afternoon around the lake, but when a dark smudge appeared on the horizon and a wind picked up, he headed for the tree house. He knew the good weather would come to an end, but he had hoped it would last long enough for him to find somewhere else to sleep.

  Emilie watched him climb in and wondered what he was up to. Kye had come here last night; stumbling through the woods and climbing into his tree house. She had watched from a distance, expecting him to call out to her - assuming his visit was some kind of ruse to get her to talk to him. But he just went to sleep. This morning he had gone off to the mill, only to return twice before noon. The first time at a run and the second time at a more leisurely pace, carrying a bag of damsons which he gobbled down one after the other. His strange behaviour intrigued her – but if it was a trick to provoke her into talking, she had already decided that it wouldn’t work.

  The last time they spoke, they had argued. She told him for the hundredth time he needed to stop visiting her. That he needed to move on with his life - to let her go and to grieve properly. This was true of course, but there was more to it than that. She wanted him to stay away in case she hurt him.

  Two years had passed since she drowned in the lake. Dying hadn’t been so bad once she got past that last cold, panicky fight for air. After that she simply faded – the brightness of her mind dimming painlessly into nothing. Then she was slipping out of her body and rising into an invisible membrane that wrapped her like a skin. It began to tear open right in front of her, exposing a black void that seemed to call to her. But she wasn’t scared. The opening whispered a promise of a velvety darkness that would swaddle her for the whole of eternity and she went to it with peace in her heart...

  …But then she caught sight of her brother - falling through the ice in a reckless attempt to reach a body that was floating in the lake. Her body she realised – the body she had left behind only seconds ago. It was a sight that wrenched her back from the void, causing the Membrane to reseal the opening.

  She went to where he thrashed in the water and tried to help him - not understanding why her hands passed through him and why he continued to sink. She screamed at him to swim; but he didn’t see or hear her. His terrified eyes looked right through her and all she could do was sink into the dark water with him and watch him drown. She had died in the same way just moments ago, but watching the life go out of him was worse – much worse.

  The water churned as someone plunged in beside her, grabbed Kye by his collar and pulled him to the surface. She rose from the lake and watched as a man dragged her brother through the water to where woman and a little girl waited with bloodless faces. He was out of his depth and moving with appalling slowness, half swimming and half springing off the bottom; smashing through broken ice with one thick forearm and gasping against the cold. He hauled Kye onto the snow and dropped to his knees alongside him, thumping his chest and blowing air into his mouth. The woman and the little girl looked on - their necks bent and their fur mittens held to their mouths.

  As she watched, her distress was replaced by a feeling of expectation – a certainty that someone or something was about to precipitate in the air. It was a feeling so strong she drew back from it at first. But then she saw what it was. Her brother’s soul was slipping from his body and his spectre was rising from his chest. But it only came half way out. It rose until it was head and shoulders above the man that was working on him and then it just hung there – a beautiful apparition that glowed in front of the stark winter woodland.

  The man thumped and blew, thumped and blew, and at one time even shook her brother and slapped him across his face. She didn’t know what he was doing, but it was having an effect. As he worked, Kye’s spectre rose and sank as if it was torn between abandoning or reinhabiting his body. The man seemed to be oblivious to it and so did his family. All they were seeing was a wet boy with blue lips, who looked like he had drowned. For what seemed like an age the man laboured on, his wet shirt skin tight across his back and his hands shaking with the extreme cold. Then all of a sudden Kye’s chest jerked - he coughed and spluttered and with an enormous gasp, he yanked his soul all the way back in.

  When the man disappeared from sight, carrying Kye over his back, she had searched for the tear in the Membrane. But she hadn’t been able to find it. She had remained at the lake ever since - trapped in the strange plane between life and death, willing the Membrane to tear open again and for the endless darkness behind to swallow her up. But as time went on she began to doubt if it ever would. With every day that passed she was becoming ever more certain that she had missed her chance – that in trying to help her brother she had sentenced herself to spend the rest of eternity in this intolerable limbo.

  Kye was her only visitor - apparently the one person who didn’t feel the disquiet she was said to cast over the woods. He was overjoyed to discover she was haunting the lake and for a short time she had looked forward to his visits. They talked like old times and his appearance was like a splash of colour in her endless grey days. Her parents hadn’t been to see her and Kye had told her not to expect them. When he told them she wanted to see them her father had split his lip and blackened his eye; warning him that if he ever mentioned her again he would hobble him for a month. She couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t come. If they had loved her as much as Kye said they did, then surely they would want to see her again – even if it was just to say goodbye. Worst of all, they were blaming Kye for her death. If they came up even the once, it would give her chance to tell them it was an accident. She could tell them it was all her fault – that she ran onto the ice ahead of him and that he tried to call her back. Hearing how they were mistreating him had broken her heart and seeing him turn up every other week with fresh injuries had saddened her.

  Had saddened her; because such things were becoming harder to feel.

  Cravings

  Sympathy and empathy were two
of the many emotions that were abandoning her. She was becoming callous and self-centred and as a result her sibling bond was unravelling. She couldn’t say when this started, but she was clear on the cause. In her new existence she was starved of sensation and her preoccupation with it was beginning to consume her. Sure, she could still see and hear – but she could no longer feel, taste and smell. Even the concept of these sensations was beginning to fade. She didn’t know whether the breeze that rippled the lake was warm or cool, or whether it carried the scent of the fireweed that grew on the bank. She didn’t know what the raspberries that grew on the north bank tasted like and she didn’t know what it would feel like to grab a handful of leaves or a fist full of snow. The list was endless. But what she missed most was the warmth of the sun.

  One day she had hovered for hours over a place where sunlight scorched the ground, hoping to feel some of its heat. But the rays had streamed through her as if she wasn’t there. Which of course she wasn’t. She didn’t belong to the world any longer and couldn’t expect to interact with it.

  Kye was the only living person she had contact with and the contrast between his sensory body and her callous soul was becoming harder to ignore. And harder to bear. She watched him now like a beggar would watch a banquet – searching ravenously for clues to her missing sensation. There was the way he sniffed a flower head; the impressions that the grass made on his bare skin; the way the breeze tossed his hair and the red lines that appeared when he scratched his neck. All so simple, so beautiful, and so maddeningly beyond her understanding. She would watch him walk and try to imagine what it would be like to feel the weight of a body through her feet. And she would watch him fall, trying to imagine the pain of his grazed hands and the sudden jarring of his bones. Once, when he was munching bilberries, some of them burst and juice squirted from his mouth. Watching the purple liquid dribble down his chin and seeing him wipe it away and lick it off his finger was so unbearable that she fled; retreating into the depth of the lake without so much as a word to him. She watched, she watched and she watched and in the hollow cavity that her sensation had left behind a terrible bitterness began to grow.

  Lately she had started asking Kye about sensation. The puzzled concern on his face might once have restrained her, but she could no longer help herself. She asked him to describe the feel of the perspiration on his face, the rub of his clothes against his skin, the texture and flavour of bilberries and the smell of smoke and damp earth. At first he joked around, as if it was all some kind of game. But after she got angry with him he tried to give her some serious answers which ultimately frustrated her even more. He used words like damp, sweet and itchy - words that had no meaning for her anymore. She could remember walking through a damp glade, biting into a sweet plum and scratching an itch on her back, but she couldn’t get a feel for the words. It was as if even the memory of such sensations had been erased.

  One winter when she was very young she went on a trip to Irongate with her mother. In a narrow street dusted with snow, they came between two shops that filled her with the most overwhelming desire. In one shop, the most beautiful cakes she had ever seen were displayed in the window. There was more of them than she could count and some were topped with a lavish pink icing and had a rich cream bulging between their layers. The other shop was selling dolls. Its window was filled with a hundred different faces: some cloth, some wood; but all dressed in colourful cotton and velvet outfits. Her mother looked through the windows with her, but wouldn’t allow her to go inside. Wouldn’t permit her to smell those delicious cakes, or hold those little dolls. She had cried at the time; telling her mother over and over again how mean she was being. It wasn’t until after she died that she was able to understand her restraint. The meagre content of her mother’s purse wasn’t able to stretch to such luxuries as cream cakes and fancy dolls, and to go inside and leave empty handed would only have served to increase her disappointment.

  Her life now, or rather her existence, was being played out in much the same way as it had that day in Irongate. Now the shops were all around her and whichever way she turned, the glass was pressed against her face. But these shops were stocked with sensation and somewhere in the back were the very same ones she had taken for granted all those years ago: the brush of her winter coat, the feel of her runny nose and the warmth of her mother’s hand. They were all behind impenetrable glass and there was no currency with which she could buy admission. She would take anything now - an ache or an itch, a scratch or a sting; anything to break up the monotony of her miserable, numb existence.

  The craving all but consumed her now – a situation that had come to a head a few weeks ago when she happened upon her brother, dozing on the lakeside. It was after one of their arguments and she wasn’t speaking to him. So she started to turn away, intending to drift back out over the lake without waking him. But something about his peaceful face captivated her and she just hung in the air, watching the rise and fall of his chest with greedy eyes. She got the sudden urge to sink into him, knowing that she could access his sensation by dissolving into his body. She knew she could do this instinctively and told herself it would only be for a minute. The idea horrified and charmed her in equal measure and only with a tremendous call on her willpower was she able to steer herself away.

  She guessed that what she was going through was common to all ghosts. Trapped in a world without sensation, spirits were drawn to those they could steal it from. And when the cravings got too much, they were eventually and inevitably driven to possess them. She had stopped herself from possessing Kye that afternoon, but her cravings were strengthening every day and she wasn’t sure what would happen the next time she was tested.

  Two weeks ago she had been meditating in a patch of sunlight when she saw another ghost in the woods. It was the spirit of young girl and she was aglow with warm light. The idea that other spirits might visit the lake had never crossed her mind and this one’s sudden appearance scared her. She fled back to the water and hid in a patch of water lilies. At first she watched with fear, but it soon turned to wonder and then envy as she contrasted the girl’s glowing soul with the wretched grey of her own. And the girl was travelling through the woods in what appeared to be playful twists and turns, with a look of happiness or even joy on her face. She couldn’t understand how this was possible, given that this ghost existed on the same cold and sterile plane that she did. When the girl disappeared, she drifted back onto the bank and into that part of the woods through which she had travelled. Did this ghost know something about the afterlife that she didn’t? Something she could learn? And what was that interesting residue she could feel in her wake?

  She set off after the girl and caught up with her in the open fields beyond the woods. It was the furthest she had been from the lake and for the first time since her accident she began to feel some resistance to her movement. Following the girl was demanding an ever increasing call on her will power and concentration and she knew that if she were to lose focus that some strange magnetism would draw her back to the lake. It was the restrictive power of her haunt – the force that binds spirits to the place where they entered the Membrane. She had learnt about it at school, but had never imagined she would experience it herself.

  She was nearing the outer limits of her haunt when the ghost girl disappeared into a house at the edge of the woods. She expected her to re-emerge the other side, but she didn’t. Intrigued, but unable to go any further she watched from a hedgerow. Time passed. How long she couldn’t tell; but when the girl finally came out it wasn’t in the form she was expecting.

  She was inside a living body!

  At first she thought it was a possession, but she soon saw that this person matched the ghost girl she had followed in every detail. For a time, she was so shocked that she could only stare. She had never heard of anyone who could come and go from their body at will and would have thought it impossible if she hadn’t seen it for herself.

  The girl was pretty – blue eyes
and a tangle of corn coloured locks. But she was painfully thin and was using a crutch to walk. She watched her hobble down the steps and over to her wildflower garden where she brushed her hand over the long grass and bent to sniff at the occasional flower - displays of sensation that were painful to watch. She had followed the girl on a giant crest of hope and now she was sliding off it. The explanation for the girl’s joyful radiance was right before her. Impossible though it seemed – this ghost still had a connection to a living body. This she didn’t have. Her body was at the bottom of the lake and the fish were still picking its bones. She left the girl to her garden by switching off the will to be there and letting the power of her haunt pull her back to the lake.

  She had remained beneath the lake for a few days, trying to put the ghost girl out of her head. But she wasn’t able to. Her interest was stoked and for the last week she had taken every opportunity to watch her. She discovered that the girl always used the hour after school to leave her body and that she never crossed the lake. It was almost as if the girl knew she was there and was trying to avoid her.

  But what was more interesting were the warm currents the girl left behind. Warmth was the sensation she missed the most and it was a concept that had almost vanished from her mind. Travelling in the girl’s wake had reawakened her to it. It was like the girl was shedding invisible streamers of heat and the closer she got, the warmer they became. In the last few days she was becoming bolder and now she was beginning to wonder what it would be like to reach out and touch her.

  Yesterday she was going to try it, but another altogether unpleasant sensation gave her pause. She was on her way to the girl’s house when a beam of whispers passed through her. Whispers that spoke to her with such a menacing tone that she fled back to the lake and cowered in the deep water. Soon after she heard a scream and knew it was the girl’s. She had no idea what it meant, but last night she heard the whispers again, sweeping back and forth over the lake as if they were searching for something. They stopped in the early hours of the morning, but she remained by the lake, fearing their return. But her courage was back now and she was in dire need to feel the girl’s warm streamers again. She watched Kye climb into his tree house then set out, determined to find out what had become of her.