The broken gate swings in the wind, thumping the linnet post with a hollow knock, knock, knock-knock. From the main house I can hear it, where my brain spits fitfully as the storm builds into a squalling tantrum, like a wilful, denied, child. The fire whooshes and crack-crackles in the hearth as the wind tugs it up the flue. As the weather rages outside, so my body rages with fever. I sweat, I shake, I quail. I lose all sense of perspective, distances wax and wane. By bringing all my powers of concentration to bear on a spot on a rafter in the roof I bring it within inches of my face and study the minutiae and the dust and the insect husks that lie there. By force of will alone I push my feet away until I am five leagues long. My body twists itself like an unearthed worm, my skin pops and fizzes in its sweat, my knees feel backwards like a bird’s. I stamp like a seagull after the rain.
As I swim in and out of focus, dreams slip the leash of sleep and I know neither truth nor fiction. Ghosts come to me one by one, each slipping into view regretfully, or boldly, with grace and with petulance, each as to their manner in life. A sliver of a girl, translucent in the ghastly lightning and flame licks, sidles up and pours her brittle breath in my ear. She tells me how her teacher, sickly jealous of the butcher boy who kissed her under the spreading maples at the autumn fair, came to her as she washed her linens in the river and caved in her head with a mossy rock. She leads me by the hand down the river to the tide pool where she came to rest. She sinks her skinny legs into the thick layer of seaweed that cosseted her remains and begs me to wade in and hold her, to warm her cold, salty bones. I cry for her and flee back to the hearth where my febrile body twitches and groans. The stink of damp ash precedes my next guests, a woman and her black eyed boy who crawl from the grate leaving a trail of wet char in their wake. She tugs at my feet as he flops around on the rug, his listing mouth flapping like a banked trout’s. These ghouls were burned alive in their house on the bluff, when some indolent boys set fire to the long grass to spite the son, whose lazy eye marked him out in the village and at school. The hot summer wind caressed the flames into a fierce wildfire, which encircled and then ate them in that tiny cottage. Their bones still lie upon that cliff, still burned black, the stinging rain of winter whipping through the blown roof to drown them in silty pools of cinders. They implore me with their burst and blistered eyes, their useless tongues bloated and boiled in their mouths.
The whole night these mean sprites come to me, each gasping their dreadful tales, each pleading for peace to their damned souls. Wives, brothers, sons and mothers, lost all. I am powerless to help in my wracked state, even if I would. They come alone and in pairs, in small ragged groups. They are broken and abused and sorry each and every one, but I cannot care. Each story numbs me, the more terrible, the less I feel. I wait for her to come, the only ghost with meaning, the only one whose story I long to hear. What happened to her? I ask, plead and cajole for crumbs, but selfishness is not limited to the living and the ghosts obsess over their own vulgar ends, awhile the hours. The fever swells and yet they don’t leave me alone. There are more and more, crowding into my parlour, shrieking and yabbering and croaking like a morbid zoo. They have no mass, but the density of their blighted presence wears on me like a lead suit. A woman stumbles from the crowd, naked from the waist down, head missing. She drops to her knees and rips open her shirt, offering her black and rotting breasts to me for release. I close my eyes, but a headache like a hundred tiny axes hacks into my head, a pain as hideous as the headless hag juddering behind my bulging eyelids. The vomit bubbles up in my throat, searing and tearing. Suddenly my whole frame spasms and seizes, twitches and clutches and I heave a stream of torrid bile over my shirt, where it seeps onto my stewing belly. I shudder again, sending a boiling stew of vomit down my leg, making my vision blur with tears. I stay doubled over until my eyes refocus on my foot, and I watch a thin drizzle of gastric juice slide between my toes and trickle onto the floor. I remain like that, watching the stinking liquid soak into the rug until the ringing in my ears ceases. Only then do I notice that the battered woman and the other ghosts are gone. There is no sound except the soft cracking of the last of the logs in the grate.
There are two gentle footfalls and I raise my aching head to see who my new tormenter is. Two feet from where I sit, doubled up, are a pair of dainty feet, nails short and clean. They are as white as dewdrops, they are brushed by a long cotton skirt, faded green. I raise myself painfully, and gasp, not from the pain, but because it is her. I am instantly ashamed about my condition, my sweat, dirt and vomit. She doesn’t seem to notice, just stands there, unfocused, stone still bar one hand fluttering at her side, a butterfly. I pull the blanket around, to hide my derelict state and look askew into her face. It is just as I recall, pale blue eyes like a rain filled dawn. I sob at the reminder in her lips, a fuller blue than her eyes. At the sound, she seems to start, her gaze returning from afar to rest on me. She seems to smile, a gesture as slight as the weight of her insubstantial wrist. It is the first I have had all night and it cracks me wide open. When she speaks, there is no sound, but I hear her slender words as though she was cradling her head on my chest, the tones of her voice playing in the cavity of my chest.
“Will you come with me? To show you is all I can do.”
“I will.”
We are on a hillside, dewy grass blue in the moonlight, a copse of bone white birch behind us. I recognise it as the place where we used to come, where we’d lie in the long grass to watch the sunrise over the village where we had grown up and had grown together. There are other ghosts here, as real as I, of me and her, and our moments. She slips her hand into mine and we walk those familiar steps into the trees, through the fronds of ferns where she had twirled her fingers and laughed freely. We passed the spot where I kissed her first, and climbed the mound where we pretended ancient kings slept, waiting for the world to need their strength again. At the crown, she stops and turns to me.
“It was here. In our copse that it happened. I waited here as we used to, but he was here instead of you. With his hands around my throat up against a tree, his breath on my cheek hot and silty he choked me and shook me like a silly puppet and dropped me, spent, in the dirt.”
“I never…”
“It doesn’t matter, my darling.”
She laid an alabaster finger on my lips.
“Promise me. Bury me under the oak tree. Wrap my bones in white linen and lay them to rest. Will you?”
“I will.”
She smiles, and this time a little heat touches me, lightly, like a sage scented summer breeze. Then she is gone, leaving me alone, once more. I curl into a ball in the rough, cool dirt and, finally, sleep takes me.