Ghost Machine - NaNo 2016 Days 4&5

IV

“You're morbid. Why do you have to be so morbid?”

My mother's voice, muffled and subdued from passing through the stone and plaster that separated their small bedroom from my even smaller bedroom. I didn't know what time it was as there was no clock in the bedroom but I had been lying awake from what felt like an impossibly long time, chasing sleep but too frightened to close my eyes. I didn't like what had been painted on the inside of my eyelids when I did, and so lay there with the light on, listing to the gap toothed whistling of the wind, pulling my thin covers closer to my chin and staring uselessly at the white washed walls which were naked save for one amateurish painting of a house by the sea. I didn't like my bedroom of the cottage. I didn't like that painting or the wind that always got inside the house, perhaps invited in by that silent spectre that had followed us since the previous winter. The personification of loss. 

It still follows me.

Join the queue I tell it.

It was the night that followed the day of the newspaper article (such were the days in that cottage that there was resolutely nothing more of note to that day and so, even now, I refer to it as such), and my parents had gone to bed some time after me. They made little effort to keep quiet, their footfalls up the bare staircase exacerbated and amplified by the wine my mother had consumed, the whisky my father had drank. I hated the smell of it on his breath the next day, what drinking it did to his temperament, not even at the best of times. I was young. Too young. What could I say? I just made sure that I stayed out of his way the following morning whenever I caught a whiff of it on his breath.

He was morbid, my mother said. I didn't know what that meant but I got the just of the rest of the conversation. It wasn't difficult as I was able to hear most of it once I got up from my bed and moved towards the inner wall.

He had gone to the beach that morning. Just briefly, he said. To see if there was anything to see.

“Like what?” My mother replied shrilly, the wine lending her a slight slurring to her inflection.

My fathers voice - deep, resonant – replied that he didn't know why. Just that once he had read that article he wanted to go to the beach, to see where the “old bugger” had been found. He said that he felt drawn there. He asked her: “Don't you feel that it's a bit odd sweetheart, that we were there the same day he was found? A bit, I dunno, fated?”

My mother couldn't comprehend what he meant, although I think I knew. Even then, I think I knew.

I didn't wish to hear any more and went back across the cold floor to my bed, climbing in and drawing the covers over my head, soon (but not soon enough) succumbing to sleep. My first of the dreams followed me into the darkness. I dreamed that I was standing on the beach alone in still twilight. There was no breeze, no sound. The tide was all the way out, the sand vast and I stood there for some time, trying to perceive the where the sea ended and the sky began, the horizon a faded watercolour blur. I began to become aware of a whistling behind me. The sound increasing in volume, coming closer, until I could feel the breath on my neck. Smell the damp leaves and black bags. I wasn't afraid, although I still did not wish to turn around.

I walked forward, slowly at first and then my pace increasing until I broke into a run. I was scared then, the whistling right behind my ear, the stench now suffocating. He was still right behind me and this time there were no parents to run to, nothing except that horizon. I ran on, unable to feel my heart or hear the breath which surely escaped my lungs in staccato heaves. My feet were wet, my pace slowed and I looked down to see that I had reached the ocean. It was so still, surface like glass. I moved as quickly as I could, that whistling still right behind my ear.

The water was nearly waist height and I dared to go no further, coming to a standstill in the motionless sea and steeling myself. I would turn and I would face him. I would show him I was not afraid. The smell was making me gag as I turned. I could feel my hands opening and closing. A tight fist, knuckles white, and then open, my finger tips touching the cold stagnant water. I couldn't see beneath the surface, I didn't want to. I could feel something soft underfoot, something that shifted to accommodate my weight. Just sand, yet alive, undulating beneath me.

I stared into his dead face then and I awoke suddenly, the morning light burning against my curtains.

The mattress was sodden, my legs soaked. I had wet the bed.

Mother made me wash it myself, filling a great iron basin that was kept in the outhouse full of warm soapy water and watching soundlessly as I scrubbed at it. There was a washing machine in the cottage. She didn't have to do that, but she did. I didn't see my father for most of the day.

I had the same dream often since then. Mostly the same. I was always the same age in it, even as I grew older, I was always looking through that six year olds eyes as I ran across those static sands to a familiar resolution. In fact I had it on the bus that day three (or four) years later. I think now that I must have been nine, as our teacher for that school trip was Mr Barron, I'm sure of it. I'm also fairly certain that I had Mr Barron in primary five, but I could be mistaken. It's hardly an important detail. Yet I feel now I must get it correct. All these things matter now don't they? It's not like they never did before, but I think they must matter more now. 

Because if what you say I did.

Because of what you say I am.

I'm not refuting it, but as a teacher of mathematics I feel that there must be an equation that fits this. I have the answer. You have the answer. How do we solve for this answer?

“You're going to need a bigger blackboard”, Roy Scheider didn't say.

He died not long ago if I remember correctly. A cancer of the blood. White plasma cells. The ones that produce antibodies, that protect our body. The irony I'm sure is lost on no one. That which should protect us end up destroying us. 

Sand in the blood.

I don't know where that came from. I'm telling you about this ghost. 

It was him you see. The old man. The vagrant. It's often him (but not always) that I saw as I was growing up. My art teacher said I had a magnificent imagination. She also said I was morbid (you're morbid, why do you have to be so morbid) sometimes, and that perhaps my choice of subject matter was perhaps a bit “gothic” at times. The truth was that I would often just paint and draw what I saw. It's not my fault she couldn't handle it.

I had that dream on the school bus as my year travelled raucously to Stirling Castle, a rare trip out but something to do with the topic that we were discussing that term obviously. Medieval history perhaps, or castles. It could have been school buses for all I can remember. I was excited to go, we all were. Well, except Alan Farley who had detention on account of sneaking into the girls toilets and drawing a four foot high penis on the mirror using the lipstick he had taken from his mother's handbag before leaving the house that morning. He would have actually gotten away with it as well, seeing that nobody noticed him sneak in or out, but he felt that he had to exclaim it loudly in the playground at the exact same time Mr Barron was walking over from the staff room to take the register.

I had the dream regularly, although I distinctly remember that I was having it a little less so by that point, perhaps only once every other week. Thankfully the bed wetting that initially accompanied it when I was six soon stopped as my subconscious regained control of my bowels. That would have been far worse than the cold sweat I awoke in, running my hands through my hair and turning my face to the window so nobody could see that I was upset. It had ended the way it normally did, me turning to look upon that wicked visage. I couldn't change the course of the dream any more than I could later control the passing of time, no matter how much I wished it.

The towns and villages passed the window in a blur, the rain coursing down the glass in rivers. The songs sang at the back of the bus becoming more and more blue until Mr Barron saw fight to take control of the situation, standing up at the front and signalling with both arms that perhaps it was time to stop the songs. I remember the book I had in my bag, Haunted Britain. It had the listings of every known haunted location across the UK, and I was keep to know if Stirling Castle was indeed haunted by the ghost of a pink lady, like the book suggested. She was said to be a widow of a man who lost his life during a battle in the castle's earlier history. There was also a ghost said to be a man in full highland dress, or a lady in green. I studied the finer details of the book as the bus pulled up and Mr Barron ushered us off and split us into groups, reeling out our assignments for the day, but I wasn't listening.

I saw the ghost that day, but not the one I thought I would see. 

My group were tasked with visiting the chapel, armed with a sheet of paper each containing a list of items that we had to tick off once we had found. There was room in the bottom third of the sheet to write any anything that we had found interesting. I had stopped to read an information board situated just inside the main entrance and began to scribble on my sheet, writing awkwardly as I leant it against my knee. The royal chapel, as it so happened, dated back to 1593 and was one of the first protestant kirks in Scotland. King James ordered it built in just seven months for the baptism of his son, Henry. James VI was actually the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and ruled over Scotland and then England (as James I) in the union of the crowns. His second son would rule as Charles I, the ill-fated king who was executed at the end of the Civil War. Partly the fault of his father James, who instilled in him the divine right of kings, leading Charles to believe he could rule according to his own whims. Something which did not turn out particularly well for him. It was under King James rule that the gunpowder plot was hatched and subsequently foiled as well, and I still remembered being taught all about Guy Fawkes earlier in my school life. I took a book from the library to find out more, revelling in the illustrations of the executions of the accused.

(you're morbid, why do you have to be so morbid)

I had run over, turning my sheet and continuing my scribbles, the lead of my pencil piercing the thin paper and nipping my leg through my school trousers. I didn't notice, just wrote on until I had exhausted all that I knew. I was apt to do that, do run over, My school work beset with comments in red ink like “good work, perhaps a little long” or “remember to answer the actual question”, sometimes just “see me”. I would approach the teachers desk tentatively to be reminded about the dangers of “going off on one of your many tangents”. Something which I apparently did often. I didn't even know what tangent meant when Mr Barron first mentioned it and had to ask him.

“Going off in different directions Malcolm” he said as he packed the class's school books into his large battered satchel. He used to tell us that that satchel had travelled the world with him, that he had been on many great adventures in foreign lands. We never knew how much credence to put to his stories, as they quite often seemed quite fantastical. He could never quite keep a straight face as he regaled us, as though not even able to believe what he was saying himself. 

Once he told us about a three month tour of Africa, becoming separated from his native tour guide and having to survive in the wild himself for days until he found his way back to civilisation. He would, he said, collect various herbs and plants, keeping them all in his large battered satchel, brown leather so heavily creased, stained and wrinkled that if one wanted to, one could readily believe his tales. He would cook a stew of the herbs and the animals he caught (he was a skilled hunter, he said, learning to adapt quickly, and fashioning a spear from a stick and splinter of stone) over a camp-fire. Once the fire was out, he said, he would lie back in the hammock he made himself from creeper vines and stare up at the stars. “There was no other light there you see,” he said, perched on the corner of his desk, “not like there is here. When you go home today, later tonight, you should look up at the sky. I'll bet you can't see much past the odd star here and there. If you were to go out into the countryside though, ah well, it would be much like I saw, but I saw more than that.” He had a far off look in his face as he spoke then, his kind eyes drifting towards the window, his hand going to his salt and pepper beard, brushing it absently. I always thought him to be around my fathers age, but I found out later that he was much younger. Something had aged him.

“I saw the universe” he said, the giggle from Alan Farley bringing him from his reverie. Strange thing to say that, I remember thinking at the time.

A few years later Mr Barron was dead. I found out at high school, the news like wildfire through us that had been in one of his classes in primary school. The story went that he had killed himself; specifically that he had hung himself. The story grew wings of its own of course and a mere week or so after we first found out a whole manner of grisly details had been added, until if you wanted to believe such things you would think that Mr Barron had shot himself in the head after killing his wife and children, scrawling all manner of satanic symbols on the wall first in their blood before turning the gun on himself. Children are so 

(why are you so morbid)

gruesome.

Mr Barron once spoke to me about Mikey (there, I finally said his name), asking me how I was was and if I ever thought about him. He stopped me just as I was leaving the classroom and called me back to his desk. I thought I was in trouble, thoughts flying through me head, trying to remember if there was something I had forgotten to do, or if I'd inadvertently done something wrong. I could see by the look on his face that I wasn't however, and he sat me down in front of the desk on his blue plastic “see me chair”, the early afternoon sun catching the motes of dust that swirled around us ion the air. A personal universe. I don't know why he wanted to ask me about Mikey, about what happened years before. I didn't even think he knew. Yet he did, although I surmised afterwards that he had probably read it from my school records. I thought that such things were probably a matter for my file.

Name: Malcolm Patience

Brothers or Sisters: One – Dead.

So he spoke softly to me for some time as the dust settled around us, Helios taking the sun on it's course across the sky in his chariot. The leaves had yet to brown and the days were long. I thought then how strange it was that an adult was speaking to me as Mr Barron was then. Not like an adult at all. Like we were equal. He spoke about a brother he once had, about his own childhood. He said that it was okay to want to be by myself, but I had to remember that there were other children that would be happy to play with me. He said what a good pupil I was and when I stood up, he clapped my lightly on the back, telling me that if I ever needed someone to speak to, someone other than my parents, then I could speak to him.

I was upset when I found out he had died. I wanted to go to his funeral but mother wouldn't let me, she said that it was 

(morbid, so morbid)

not “the right thing to do” on account of the fact that I didn't really know him. That funerals were more of an adult thing. I think it was more that she herself couldn't face it, knowing that she would be the one to take me now that father was off-shore again.

Too many memories.

Yet I still scribbled my notes on my paper, wanting to impress Mr Barron (this was even before we had the “chat”) until I could write no more. I folded it and stuck the paper in my jacket pocket as I followed my classmates into the main body of the chapel itself. 

It was bright and airy, the light streaming in through the window despite the fact that it wasn't a particularly bright day (at least the rain had stopped as we got off the bus) and I found my gaze wandering around the interior. Catching sight of the large frieze painted not long after the completion of the chapel in expectation of a coronation visit by Charles I. I thought I should mention that in my notes as well and I wandered over to have a better look. My classmates lost interest quite quickly and were already exiting through a set of double doors at the rear of the building as I traversed along the body of the chapel. The was an older couple behind me, whispering to themselves (something about the visitation of a large older building prompting one to whisper instead of holding a normal conversation) about the sandwiches they had consumed earlier in the Castle's visitor centre cafeteria. The man was saying softly how he thought the tuna tasted a little odd, whilst his wife admonished him, saying that he was fine, but they would find out soon enough if he had food poisoning. They soon drifted towards the same set of doors my classmates had exited from and I found myself alone with merely the echoes of my footfalls on the expansive floor and the sound of my own heartbeat.

I wandered aimlessly up and down, casually glancing towards the windows and the arching wooden ceiling. In truth, I was enjoying the silence, the space, the feeling one got being in somewhere that had so much history to it. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a Polo mint, popping it in to my mouth and sucking it as I wandered, my tongue unconsciously exploring the ever increasing hole in the centre of the mint. 

The double doors were up a small flight of stairs, recessed back at the end of a small mezzanine, and so I decided to follow my classmates and the older couple of make my way outside. There was a lot more of the castle to see and after checking my watch I discovered that I still had the best part of half an hour. I frowned as I approached, seeing that both of the heavy wooden doors were shut. I was sure they had been open when the elderly couple had left, and I had not heard the sound of doors shutting. I outstretched my hand and wrapped my diminutive fingers around the large iron ring that served as a handle. My hand snapped away. It was cold. Freezing cold. I tried again, tapping it lightly with my fingers to acclimatise my skin before gingerly wrapping my hand around once more, turning and pulling. The door would not move. I turned the handle the other way and pulled. Then I pushed, turning, pushing. No movement. I tried the other door to have the same result. Neither door moved. Both either stuck fast or locked.

A trick? Alan Farley and Thomas Whyte probably hiding behind the doors, giggling as I tried to open them? My heartbeat increased along with my breath. I shivered. The light behind me changed slightly. Grew dimmer. Fresh rain began rattling against the large windows like the drumming of skeletal fingers. The air was so still yet I began to hear a familiar gap-toothed whistle. I tried the doors again, hammering a hand on the dark surface of the wood. I shouted, was there anyone there? I strained for the sounds of laughter. Of running footsteps. the doors remained closed.

Of course, there was another way out. The way I had entered the chapel the entrance hallway at the other side of the long building. Someone must have though the chapel was empty, locking the doors. Perhaps the doors weren't meant to be open in the first place and a member of staff had noticed when the elderly couple had left, closing them after they departed. It was no big thing really, there was another way out. I would just walk back the way I came and leave. There were no doubt other visitors in the chapel by now.

Except there were not. I stood on the mezzanine as the light dimmed further, the skeletal rattling growing louder. A staccato rhythm over the steady bass drum beat of my heart. A soft sigh as the sand shifted in the dunes behind me

(what dunes?)

and I walked forward along the floor of the chapel towards the door. But it was there in front of me. Between where I walked and the entrance vestibule. At first I didn't know what it was, and stopped short, squinting to try and make it out. I thought perhaps that a cleaner was in the chapel, and it was he or she who had shut the doors. These were rubbish bags, collected from the various bins around the castle and placed in the centre of the floor whilst whoever it was busied themselves in an unseen part of the royal chapel, away perhaps to collect more. It didn't make sense really, but that's what my mind first told me as I looked upon the dark shape ahead. 

A soft sigh as more unseen sand shifted. A soft whump as the dunes breathed.

The bags were rippling. A wind I couldn't feel was coursing through the bags, causing them to undulate wildly. I didn't want to be there anymore. There was a smell drifting over from the bags. Old leaves. Mildew. Something dank and foul. I would need to pass these bags to reach the exit and so I willed my legs to move. They did so, albeit woodenly, my whole body walking stiffly forward like a marionette. 

I kept my eyes on the door, refusing to look down as I drew level with the bags. I was closer to the windows, the rain still hammering down. The bags shifted beside me, the smell was nauseating. I turned then, I couldn't help myself, as he sat up, turning his head to look at me. 

Not bags.

A rattle escaped his throat, and explosion of foul air. He raised his right hand as my nerve failed me and I ran for the door. 

(please be open please be open please be open)

I could feel sand underfoot as I ran, causing me to slip, crashing into the archway that lead into the vestibule, pain racking down my right arm. I steadied myself and rounded towards the door that was open, the inner courtyard outside full of tourists, undeterred by the rain. Ten more steps and I would be outside.

Except he was right behind my. Hot decay on the back of my neck.

Seven steps.

An arm was outstretched, I could almost feel the fingers on my neck.

Four steps.

A cry began to escape me.

Two steps, nearly there. Fingers touching my neck.

(not real not real not real not real)

Outside. I didn't stop running until I found Mr Barron, standing under a canopy near the palace with a different group of my class. I stumbled into the group, my expression and manner prompting confused laughter as I struggled to regain my breath. Mr Barron looked at me quizzically, said something to the effect that it was nice of me to join the group, but I really didn't have to be so eager to hear him speak. More laughter and faces turned away from me as he continued his earlier talk. I was soon forgotten. I couldn't pay attention to what was said for the rest of the trip. I even forgot to hand in my notes, finding them in my jacket pocket weeks later. All I could think about for the rest of that day was the beach and the sand. An outstretched hand and a malevolent smile. 

This is how it began, far from how it ends.

Ghost Machine - NaNo 2016 Day 3

III

The sleep I had following that fright, and in fact the sleep I had for the entire two week duration of our holiday was light and fitful. My dreams were haunted. I was haunted. Is it possible, I wondered, that I had imagined the man at my back? His face so heavily lined it was as though he had been carved into the bark of one of the tall oak trees that lay behind our house. I was always scared during nights were sleep was lightest and the winds were fiercest, that one of those very trees would be uprooted from where it grew, lurching drunkenly towards the house and smashing through the window above my bed. I would be awake, frozen in terror as the large boughs shattered the glass, raining mirrors upon me.

The holiday cottage was sparsely furnished; bare wooden floors cold underfoot in the mornings; simple thin curtains the colour of soiled sheets hanging limply either side of the window in my room. The window that never seemed to be properly closed, that north wind finding a way in, whistling through the window frame like (an old man with one outstretched hand) whistling through the gaps in his teeth.

I intensely disliked that cottage, and wasn't comfortable there for the entirity of our stay.

It was the first real time we had spent together as just a family of three. Except we would never be a family of three. There was always that silent and empty space, wherever we went, wherever we stayed, whenever we spoke. It was with us in the car driving up the long single track road, weaving through the blasted hills like an artery, carrying us further and further north, where the landscape was ever more hostile. Where (dead) men waited in the sand dunes for young boys to hide from their parents. Where the sea dragged it's saline claws into the sand is it was expelled from the land, only to return.

Only to return. Like they all do.

The cottage never heated properly. The floor stayed cold. The nights drew in and three days later my father grunted whilst reading the paper he had collected from the small post office come newsagents further along the single track road that our cottage shared with the rest of the small isolated community. I don't know why my mother chose that place. Perhaps to bring us closer. Perhaps to force us apart. Perhaps just to push me further away.

Could they see some of him in me? The way my hair lay? The way I spoke or smiled?

I could see him in me every time I looked in the mirror. But I had by then stopped looking in the mirror.

The grunt sprayed a fine mist of toast crumbs and tea in my direction, stopping short and covering a small section of the faded and torn plastic table cloth that covered the wooden table we breakfasted at in silence every morning. The first morning, my mother tried to put the radio on, cursing under her breath (low enough, she thought, that I wouldn't hear – or maybe just loud enough so I could) as she fought with antenna to get a reception. I don't think she cared what, perhaps even she couldn't stand the silence. Perhaps sometimes even she wanted to drown it out.

“What is it John?” She asked him, as he rustled his paper. I tried to quickly sweep the toast crumbs from the table, offended by their prescence. I liked to have the area where I ate as clean as possible, and indeed grew up to be quite fastidious about it. Mother caught me and clipped the back of my head. I winced as her wedding ring glanced off my crown. “Do you want to sweep the floor that badly Malcolm?”. I shook my head quickly and brought the crumbs closer to my plate, hoping to avoid having to act out the threat, but she was back to looking questiongly at my father.

“Not in front of the boy” he answered her, rustling the paper again and turning the page, a sound that punctuated the end of the brief breakfast conversation.

A short time later my father announced that he was going to take a walk. Said he wanted to know what was further past the post office, that he had seen a small church spire above the ash and beech trees that surrounded us, the threat in my young mind very real that they would not let us leave when it was time to. He didn't ask me if I wanted to come with him and I didn't offer. I had finally become warm in my place on the small living room rug, surrounded by my felt pens like a makeshift barricade, the colouring book I was working on open in front of my crossed legs. I had managed to colour in four pages since our arrival at the cottage, and I was sure that I would be able to finish the next page that very day. I had already made a start on the sky, doing my very best to stay inside the lines. Mrs Prentice would be really proud of me if she had seen it, and I made a mental note to show her when I was back at school.

I don't think I ever did. Mind you, I don't even recall bringing the colouring book back home with me. Mother and father didn't like to bring too much “clutter” back home they said. I wonder if I was upset at leaving it. I wonder if I noticed. Some things are clearer than others.

My father left, nodding his head towards me, the ghost of a smile on his face. I think he might have asked me then. I'm sure, in fact, that he intended to but saw how content I was with my book. Nonetheless he murmured a goodbye and took his heavy barbour coat from the stand in the hall, throwing it over his shoulder and opening the door, the cottage sucking in the wind greedily til it was abruptly cut off by a curt slamming of the door. I shivered and continued my colouring, hearing my mother in the kitchen next door. She was preparing lunch and I could hear her humming to herself, a tune I recognised that she used to play on the piano, although I think by then she had stopped playing. She would start again later, but everything she played would sound sad, as though it was intentionally played in the wrong key.

My fathers newspaper was lying sprawled over the single hard-backed tartan chair in front of me, on the other side of the small wood-burning stove. The kitchen door was closed, my mothers humming punctuated by the crackle of the gas oven igniting. I stood and stealthily moved over to the chair, not daring to touch the newspaper at first. It was as though it held an authority all of it's own, like anything of my mother and fathers, I expected them to become aware if I was so much as harbouring thoughts about touching anything.

A month or so before, I had decided to try on my fathers wellington boots, loving how they felt on my feet as they warmly enveloped my legs up to and above my knees. I took a few unsteady steps in them, the scent of autumn walks and warm plastic on my tongue. But he knew, even though I'd put them back as close as I could tell to where I had found them, he knew. He reprimanded me, but seemed almost disinterested as he did so. I remember his face, his voice lacking it's former power. That was worse than if he had shouted at me. Not that I thought I deserved a row, but I realise now he felt he had to say something, to throw a stone in the river to form the beginnings of a bridge. But it was all wrong. It came out all wrong.

I thought about his wellingtons as I stood before the newspaper, my hand gingerly turning over page after page, trying to find all on it's own what my father didn't wish to discuss in front of me. Mild curiosity, nothing more, and my right hand was the bravest part of me then.

The photograph leapt towards me from the page. Low on detail (a combination of the poor picture and large newspaper screen) yet that made it worse. It burned itself into my eyes and I took a step back, the small headline making a lesser impression but by proximity to the photograph, it carbon copied itself into my brain. I backed off from the paper, even my right limb, formerly so brave in venturing forth, couldn't summon the strength needed to close the paper. That face.

His face.

My father came back then, by sheer fortune the wind bodily inviting itself in and doing what I could not and I watched in silence as it closed the newspaper for me, obscuring that face and returning it to the way it had been when my father left. His face was ruddy with the effort of walking in the high wind and he stood there panting as he took his barbour coat off and kicked his wellingtons under the coat stand,  thick as they were with dark mud and something else, something I just caught sight of before he shut the door as he entered the living room.
 
I understood some of the headline, my reading at school was doing well and I was enjoying it, I would just need to ask mother or father what the word vagrant meant. The rest was clear enough, and after looking at my fathers wellingtons, I wondererd if he'd been along the road like he said, or if he'd crossed the peat towards the beach.

LOCAL MAN TURNED VAGRANT. BODY FOUND ON EAST BEACH.

That tide mark on his wellingtons. The thick black peat muck and above, the faint remainder of a notion.

A thin line of sand.

It's time I told you about this ghost.

Ghost Machine - NaNo 2016 Day 2

They loved me as well of course. Didn't they? I mean, surely they did?

I thought as much then, as I trailed behind them, picking up the occasional smooth, flat stone to skip into the waves. I'd never so much skipped more than three times before the projectile sank under the large waves that rolled towards me hungrily. The beach was mainly sand, and the availability of suitable candidates to throw was sparse, so I found it difficult to work up enough energy to stave off the biting wind as it skated over the water, over the heads of the waves, even hungrier for me than they were. It was always colder, my father said, when it came off the north sea. That was when he used to speak to me, to delight in filling my young head with information, however small. He used to love teaching me new things.

Not so much after...well. Not so much by then.

I think I was six that day on the beach. Less than a year since...well. I reckon you'll want to know that too.

I was alone on that beach really. My parents were there but there for each other. Not there for me or so it felt, and I soon lagged further behind. It was as though I unconsciously slowed my pace, willing them to notice I wasn't right there. Willing them to turn, their expressions anxious as they worried about me. So I stopped, examining the crushed remains of razor shells or pretending to write something in the sand. Making it appear as though I was merely just lagging behind because I was too busy doing something. I would glance up, heart beating a little faster, hoping to see them looking at me and waiting for me to catch up, perhaps even a smile across my mothers face as she watched me.

I glanced up and they had retreated further towards the horizon, a mere etched line between the sand  and the sky. Their silhouettes in stark contrast to the disinterested world around them.
I wasn't disinterested.

I wanted their attention.

So they walked, and my stomach solidified. My lips tightened in that obstinate shape only a child's mouth can form. They would miss me, I thought, if I was...well, I'm not ready yet. That part is difficult. I will get there. You just have to have patience.

Please.

(how's the coffee?)

So I hung back further and further. Resentment growing within me like ivy, spreading through my body, taking firm root in my brain and causing me to run towards the dunes with no more hesitation. This time, I thought, I didn't want them to turn around. I didn't want them to notice me as I ran the ever widening width of sand, the tide behind me clawing frantically at the beach as it retreated. The hissing serpent of each breaking wave beaten down by the howling wind as it fought for my attention, the crown of my hair pushed towards the front of my skull despite my forward trajectory. I reached the dunes, glancing towards the twin charcoal fragments as I did so, neither motioned as if to turn around. I had made it.

The beach and dunes were deserted, ours was the only car in the car park, that much I remembered. I had seen no one else since I set foot on the sand behind my parents. Who else would venture out to face the bracing north on a day like that? Only us. Only we so foolish. So that it was then that I was alone in the dunes, with only my beating heart and ragged breath for company. The wind stung less, my goose-pimples retreating only slightly, my face hot with the exertion. I would chill again, but that point I was oblivious to the cold air as it ducked and weaved it's way through the dunes around me.
I made my way past the first few sandy hills towards the centre of the range, climbing up one nearby dune and settling myself low on a stubborn tussock of reedy grass, the blades hard against the relatively soft skin of my knees, scarred as they were by childhood exertions earlier in the summer. Falling off my bike, my skateboard. A tree swing poorly constructed in a lonely clearing, unable to take even my sleight weight. All those marks on my knees like a map of my lonely summer. A map that should you follow it would lead from the earliest sleights – and the happiest times – in a straight trajectory through whorls of ever increasing isolation to where I then crouched alone on a dune in a gray painting, watching the shadows of my parents become ever less defined as they walked away from me.

This wasn't the first time I saw a ghost.

It was, however, the first time I discovered that there was something worse than loneliness.

I was too intent on watching my parents. The ivy within browning and losing it's grip inside me as my my expression softened, the hostility I felt succumbing to heartache. They still hadn't noticed I wasn't there behind them. Or worse. They did notice I wasn't behind them, they just didn't care.
The world grew darker momentarily as shadow fell over me, barely perceptable in the half-light that passed for daytime in the north of Scotland in autumn. I didn't notice, so keen was my eye to the slight slowing of my parents pace, the panic rising in my throat with the taste of warm and sour milk. My limbs tensed, my body ready to run, to launch myself through the dunes as the wind scraped my tears back across my face, a strangled sound escaping my lips. I would have then as well. Right at that moment, as my will broke and I suddenly longed for their embrace. However distant it would be, at least the distance would not be physical. At the tender age I was then, that was worse, and I readied to run.

A bitter smell enveloped my nostrils then, carving it's way through a wind that fought to push it back from me, such was it's strength. It was the smell of old leaves. It was the smell of the autumn before this one. The smell of underpasses and black bags with unidentifiable soft matter within. The smell of what happens at night when I sleep. I recoiled in disgust as it's ethereal tendrils wrapped themselves around me, turning around sharply to identify the source.
He was there. Standing right behind me.

Not a ghost. A man. Yet a man that would haunt me.

He leaned into me, his rancid breath rattling from his throat and exploding before his ripe face, the eyes half shut yet at the same time bulging from their sockets. An arm outstretched. Fingernails bitten to the quick; brown, yellow, black. The stains of a life discarded. So much detail in those fingers, that hand, as it wavered towards my face, time slowing down to a yawn, my heart beating a drum in the cavern of my skull. I saw the fingerless glove, full of holes and loose threads. It was dark and wet., slick with fluid of the kind I did not know. The skin was pale yet mottled, like the surface of a distant planet. Those stains. The fingertips so close to my face.

Behind the hand, a face – a grin so wicked.

II

So I ran. I ran hard, my trainers filling with sand (something that would normally force me to stop, to go no further as I emptied my trainer of every last grain) as I tumbled down the dune and threw myself around the next, my arms grabbing fistfuls of sand and throwing it behind me. He was behind me, this shadow on my back. I could feel him. It. It could feel it on my back but I kept running, even as I caught the tip of my toe on a large piece of driftwood that had been washed or dragged into the dunes. My trainers were too big. Such it was becoming more and more that my clothes and footwear didn't fit right. I never got asked to try anything on, not any more. Clothes laid out for school – a jumper too small (last years), a t-shirt too big (and washed out, bobbly already, where had it come from), odd socks and shoes that hurt my big toe when I ran in the playground. These trainers were too big, but I liked them anyway, they had fighter planes on them, a white contrail whooshing around the sides, making me run faster. I was thankful for them normally, yet I cursed them only in that moment as I fell, barking my shin against the wood.

A bubble of blood erupted from my skin. I didn't care. It hurt later but I ran on then, the shadow was on my back. Yet I didn't turn around, just looked straight ahead as I picked myself up threw more sand behind me, forcing more momentum as I drew around the last dune that lay between me and the open beach. I didn't belive in god (how could I?) but I threw a meek childish prayerr to the sky as I ran on over the sand, stumbling and lurching until I hit the compacted shoreline, my feet finding better purchase as the tide hissed loudly beside me, remind me that it had not forgotten about me. It was retreating then but it would be back in.

Oh yes. Sure as a sure thing can be, the tide would be back in.

Back in for me.

But I had other concerns then, as I raised my head and breathed deeply, my arms and legs like pistons, my small body a shape in flight just below the horizon. I imagined a contrail of my own (I had asked my teacher what the lines coming from the planes on my trainers were called, the wooshes, and she told me – I liked the word, happily repeating it over and over on the way home that day), blazing behind me. I was a jet plane, and my parents were my target. They grew ever nearer as I ran soundlessly. Nothing expect my breath on the wind. I didn't cry out. Not earlier, not then, and not after. My panic was action. Screams and shouts would have done nothing for me earlier, as the hand moved inches from my face.

The shadow was on my back, but now my parents were close. Now they turned, saw me. I saw a flicker of concern upon my mothers face, my fathers unreadable, even from that close distance. I was expecting him to show confusion, fear perhaps. I expected him to run towards me. To run past me and assail the shadow that followed me. Yet he stood there, one arm around my mothers waist.

I flung myself into my parents embrace. Feeling that cold distance, but caring little.

I looked behind me. Sweat running from my neck down the valley of my spine. There was nothing but the horizon.

Ghost Machine - NaNo 2016 Day 1

I

The first time I saw a ghost was when I was nine or ten.
Although if I were to be perfectly honest, I'm not altogether sure. I could have been a couple of years younger than that or a couple of years older. My memory is vague. It's not as it was.

Nothing is as it was.

Then again, you know that.

It's your fault in a way, but I'll tell you what you want to know. I'll tell you everything and then you can judge me for yourself. I know that's why you are reading, and I hope that your preconceptions have not already formed from what you've read about me in the brown manilla file that is no doubt resting on the desk at which you sit. Just beyond the reach of your right hand. Beside your mug of coffee (or tea – but I like to think that you have a mug of coffee, for I think you are going to need it). On that manilla envelope are four words, and I know what they are. I saw who wrote them and I know why they were written. Those words probably didn't – and still don't – mean anything to you just now. They will be meaningless for quite some time, but by the end you'll know what they mean and, like me, you'll know why they were written.

That will come in time. I don't know about you, but I have all the time there is. All the time in the world. In fact, thinking about it, I do know about you. I know that you don't have as much time as you would like. I can emphasise. But things are different for me now. Have altered quite dramatically since I've been in here.

Funny really. For most of my life I never felt that there was enough time. Minutes, hours and days seemed to escape my grasp like I was clutching at smoke. As soon as I thought I was in control, I was out of time. Never enough. So much still awaiting my attention as darkness fell and my eyes grew heavy with sand. I would cast a resigned glance at the piles of work left unattended, cursing my lack willpower as my body grew increasingly leaden. It would be with a sigh that I would lift myself from my chair and tread wearily to bed, resenting every forthcoming hour I would spend chasing the shadows of my dreams. The next day, I would not awaken refreshed and relishing the hours ahead.
I would wake suddenly. Fearfully.

I would immediate try and grasp hold of the unobtainable. Time itself. Willing it to bend to me, so I may master it. Even for that one day alone. To be in control.

I was never in control. I would begin the day behind, struggling to keep my head above water. Aware of each passing second as my hair grew grey by degrees, my skin sagging with each passing hour. I was so afraid.

This fear, you see, is because I knew my best days were behind me. Ambition had been replaced with resentment. Passion with dust. Lust with sand.

So much sand.

I could practically hear it behind the walls. The soft cascade. Soon the walls would bow and bend, the wallpaper splitting, the plaster cracking. The room I was sitting – be it my classroom; the staff quarters; any room in my own house; my parents house – would be consumed by sand, marking the end of my days, entombing me and all I possessed in it's suffocating embrace.

My mind wanders. You want to me to tell you everything and my attention has saw fit to journey towards my own selfish converse. I began to think on time you see, and how I feared it, yet no longer do. I was remarking how much time I now had. How little you have. I am being selfish. I am goading you into perhaps skimming much of what I now say. But you daren't. You see, you want to know what I know. You want to know all that I can tell you and because of that, you dare not skip one word of this account.

Funny. I feared time, my lack of control over it and now things are very different indeed. I control the flow of this narrative. I control the pace at which the information is imparted. I control your attention.
Take a drink of your coffee. I think it is getting cold.

You're still thinking about the ghost. The first one, and how it all ties in. You're thinking about the words on that envelope and now, despite yourself, your thinking on time, and how little you have left. You don't drink your coffee because you don't want me to be right, that it is beginning to cool, that it will soon be lukewarm and not to your tastes. You resent me and the time I am taking to begin my story.

That's fine. I can live with that. Or rather, have lived with that.

When I was young, my parents took me to the beach. Nothing unusual there, Except it was a cold day, late October or early November, and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I was so cold my flesh goose-pimpled in huge aenemic boils, my teeth chattering so loudly that I couldn't hear the voices in my own head. My father drove, my mother beside him reading the road atlas and giving him directions on where to go, for we had never been to this particular beach you see, thirty or so miles from the cottage that my parents were renting for the two weeks that my father had got off work.
I am unsure why they elected to take their summer holiday at that time of year, as I am unsure about their insistence to visit the beach that day, but being young and well-mannered, I didn't think it my place to question either of them and in fact was rather excited at the prospect of missing two weeks of school, being as it was outwith the official school holidays. Thinking about it now, it was obviously the only time my father could get the time off work, although he had never taken any time off before, and in fact took very little since.

But there we were, the three of us and our luggage crammed into the white Vauxhall Astra that my father was still paying off to the finance company more than five years after first collecting the vehicle (I knew this due to overhearing many a heated argument rising through the vents to my bedroom from the living room, although I did not know at the time what they were arguing about, being too young to understand the concept of money and the word finance being as alien to me as the prospect of my own adulthood). The drive was long and I was quite bored, having read all my Commando comics more than once, and drawn beards on every single character in my Dandy annual that I received on my birthday a short while before. I had drawn an especially large and full beard on the version of Desperate Dan that adorned the cover (his smile huge yet not reaching his dead eyes, I long thought of Desperate Dan to be quite an enigma, and in fact favoured the Beano more than the Dandy), enough to cover most of his face and trail down into the large steaming cow pie that he had rested on his immense thighs.

My parents talked little, preferring instead to argue over directions, or listen to the tennis commentary - occasionally cloaked in static – emerging from the car radio. I soon resigned myself to looking forlornly out of the window, wondering when we would ever arrive at our destination.

We didn't go straight to the house that we were renting for the fortnight. No. My mother became quite emotional upon catching sight of the beach she had not visited since she were a child (and if she had said that once, she had said that a thousand times) and insisted that we park up behind the dunes and walk through the network of paths and detritus from the previous summer's campfires and spend some time on the sand. I had become quite hot in the car and so had discarded my long sleeved top and jumper, also requesting in my own unique way (I whined excessively) that I would like to wear my shorts when we stopped at the services a couple of hours earlier. Punishment perhaps for my earlier crying, my parents locked the car before I could notice that I was not wearing adequate clothing for the season. They were already arm in arm almost out of sight in the dunes before I realised that I was too cold.

I began to speak, to decry my goose-pimpled flesh once we reached the open sand and caustic wind, before a glance from my father put pay to my intentions. So I remained standing there, shivering on the sand, watching a storm roll in over the horizon, dark clouds meeting the slate grey of the sea and enveloping more and more of the sky in a dark wash.

I walked behind them for quite some time, unable to catch most of what they said to one another but hearing the inflection in their voices, hearing it even now. They were happy then. That place. The disparate combination of poor weather, a complacent son and a childhood memory somehow causing my mother to draw herself close to my father, closer than I had ever seen them before.

Or ever saw them since.

It's important you know that. That my parents loved each other. Although that was the first time I ever truly noticed how much.