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.