Ways to See a Ghost (19 page)

She didn’t scream or anything. She just made this sound. “Uh.” Like all the breath had got pushed out of her. I mean, it just poured in. Like a freezing sea, down through her head, rushing inside her, on and on. There was no way it could do that, no way it could fit! But it did.

I shouted out, let go of her hand and stumbled backwards. I couldn’t help it! If you’d seen all that stuff, a thousand eyes and mouths pouring into someone, you would’ve too.

Of course, as soon as I let go I couldn’t see any more. It was a relief actually – in that second I didn’t even
want
to see. Now Isis just looked ordinary, like she was daydreaming or something, and the light in the sky was just
light again. Beautiful and swirling, like the other ones I’d seen with Dad.

I’d been excited back then, thinking aliens were trying to talk to us. Now I was just scared. And the light wasn’t the same as before, either. There were black specks floating on it, drifting and joining together, like oil slicks.

Even if I couldn’t see it, the ghost-eater was still there. I could feel the cold of it, and the light in the sky wasn’t growing, like the others had, it was fading.

On the ground, Cally groaned. She was flat out, blood trickling from her nose. Philip Syndal looked dazed or whatever, staring from Cally to his hand and the blood on his knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “It wasn’t me.” Then he started this snuffling and giggling, like he couldn’t stop himself. He looked at Isis for ages, his eyes so wide you could see the whites all the way round.

“I waited such a long time for someone else to come along,” he said to her. “It’s yours now.” He started giggling again.

I put my hand out to Isis, not quite touching.

“Isis?”

Nothing.

Something cold touched my other hand. This time I knew it was little fingers grabbing onto me. I swallowed down this horrible, shivery feeling, like all I wanted was to run away, and I put my hand on Isis’s. Fingertip to fingertip, that’s all.

She was the eye of a storm! Darkness was boiling up through her eyes, wriggling out of her like a swamp climbing into the sky, like it was made out of maggots. Teeth and mouths were everywhere, you could hear them chewing. I had to make myself hold on, because I nearly threw up all over myself.

Overhead, the trees of light were charring and turning rotten, their silver leaves crumbling into ash.

“Fight it!” I yelled at Isis, but she didn’t move.

Angel was tugging on her clothes, crying out, “Come back, Isis, pease! Pease!”

I took proper hold of Isis’s hand. Shaking it and trying to wake her up.

Philip Syndal stopped giggling. “Leave the girl alone.”

“Shut up!” I shouted at him. “Go away or I’ll
kill
you!” And I wanted to, I hated him so much.

I squeezed Isis’s hand, talking to her. But there was nothing in her, not even a hint. And the thing, the Devourer,
all the murk and slime, it just kept on swelling. Dripping up into the sky, oozing across the field, so all you could see was squirming blue-black muck and eyes drifting everywhere. And mouths.

It pulsed, you know? Like a heart. But it was colder than a freezer, and getting darker too. Now it was really ripping the golden leaves from the sky, tentacles whipping all over, never missing a single one.

“Wake up!” I screamed at Isis.

“I don’t know who you are,” said Philip Syndal, “but you’re really very annoying.”

I should’ve run then, because it was obvious he was mad, but I couldn’t just leave her. A second later his hands were around my neck, squeezing. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even gasp a word. And it really hurt. I was scrabbling at his fat fingers, trying to pull them off my throat. He was so strong though. Crazy-strong.

I thought I heard Mum calling my name, maybe I imagined it. I couldn’t have answered anyway.

Philip Syndal kept on throttling me. My head was bursting, my feet started twitching. I could see Angel and the Devourer too, even though I wasn’t holding onto Isis any more. Not so clearly, but they were definitely there.

It never happened like that any other time, I think it was… because I was nearly dead.

“After you die,” Philip growled, “it will eat you.”

Angel was hitting him with her tiny, not-really-there hands. “Let Gray go!” she cried. “You stink! You horrid!”

It didn’t make any difference, except Isis turned to look at her. Eyes as black as Philip’s had been, looking at Angel like she didn’t even know her.

“The bargain is ended,” she said.

Angel screamed as a slug-squirl snapped out and grabbed her. She was gone, into one of its mouths. As quick as that.

I would’ve screamed too if I could’ve. I knew no one was going to help me, not in time, and I could feel myself going. The world was turning dim, and the Devourer was getting clearer. This energy came to me then. Out of fear, you know? I started really struggling, kicking at Philip Syndal, trying to get free. He grunted, glaring at me eye to eye, but he didn’t let go. Then Isis… I don’t know, she shouted or something, and Philip jumped in surprise. His hands slackened on my neck, just for a millisecond.

I threw myself backwards, using all my weight. My neck scraped out through his fingers and I flung myself as far away from him as I could get, which wasn’t far. I had the worst
sore throat ever, but I could breathe! Gargling and making these really weird noises, actually. All wobbly and weird too – I could hardly stand, let alone run. I only managed to get a few steps before Syndal grabbed me again. I made this raspy shrieking noise, as I tried to scrabble away from him.

“Won’t you just die?” he hissed, grabbing me.

I had to do something, so I head butted him.

CRACK
. It hurt like
anything
, like getting a hammer put through your skull. I saw stars and everything. But Philip made this ‘oof’ noise and fell backwards. I stared down at him, not quite believing it for a minute. I’d knocked him out!

I staggered in a little circle, trying not to fall over too.

“Isis!” I croaked. “Isis!”

It was totally dark by then. Clouds had moved into the sky and there was nothing to see by. I couldn’t see her anywhere. It was like she’d vanished into nothing, into the night.

“Angel!”

She ran, pushing her way through the plants, her hands brushing the feather-heads of wheat, her feet catching on the rough soil. Clouds blew in across the sky,
charcoal-smudging
the night.

Where was Angel? Where
was
she? Angel had been trying to make Philip let go of Gray, she remembered that. And she’d just stood and watched. An empty shell, filled with bad dreams and hunger.

The bargain is over.

She’d heard the words in her mind, and spoken them out of her mouth.

Then a writhing coil of darkness, coming out of nowhere,
wrapping around Angel and lifting her screaming. It had shocked Isis out of her trance and started her fighting again, but too late. Angel was gone before Isis had even moved. She couldn’t bear to remember the rest.

It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be! This had to be one of the Devourer’s mind games.

“Angel!”
Isis shouted for her moonlight-sister, running further into the crop. Swathes of cold darkness travelled with her, clinging to her mind, as claws still clung to the sky and the last particles of light. Shadows bulged and washed around Isis, unconcerned by her distress.

She stopped running.

“Angel!” she sobbed. She felt turned inside out. She understood at last, what Cally had gone through all these years. Grief, with nothing to ease the pain.

And still the creature kept its hold. In her mind, relentlessly, every meal she’d ever eaten was being played back with gloating satisfaction. Chips, sausages, fish fingers, ice cream, toast, porridge, chicken curry, spaghetti bolognese, apple juice, Easter eggs, birthday cake… on and on, every mouthful as if she were eating it all at once, gorging herself, shoving food in by the handful, not caring as it slid back out of her mouth through her fingers.

She retched, but there was nothing real inside her.

“Gray?” she called weakly. Come and save me.

The Devourer gave her an image of him: dangling from Philip Syndal’s hands, head lolling and body limp.

He is part of the feast.

“No!” she sobbed, trying to shake the Devourer out of her mind. But her head weighed a hundred tonnes, and her skull was being pushed outwards, the bones cracking and splitting apart with the pressure of the creature inside.

“Get out!” she screamed, clawing at her hair. She ran a few paces, pushing at the creature with her thoughts, managing to squeeze a tiny space for herself in her mind. Still it bubbled around, like cold lava, poking and trying to get back in.

She remembered Philip Syndal crying.

“Cally?” she called. “Gil?” But in the inky blackness of the field, she could only see the vaguest shapes of anything. How could anyone help her anyway? She’d been lost from the moment she’d blinked at Cally’s seance.

Tears trickled down her cheeks. She hadn’t done anything! She’d just watched it take Angel!

She turned back to face the sags and folds of the
ghost-eater
.

“You can save us!”
That was a true memory. Mandeville had said that.

But how?

And she remembered Angel, just before she was taken.
“You bite it!”

Isis looked down at her hands, barely visible in the dark. At her fingers, topped with short, bitten nails. She turned her hands over, peering at the padded flats of her palms, concentrating on every crease and line, every hair and freckle.

No
.

She imagined all her blood, all the heat of her body, pumping into her fingertips. Just as she did when she needed to hold Angel, or drive back the ghosts who mobbed her at Cally’s performances. The way she’d pushed away the ghost with the sliced-open throat.

No
.

The vast, enveloping bulk of the monster loomed around her, inside and outside her mind.

No
.

Its eyes were pinpricks in its slick and bloated flesh. It rippled with strange reflections of the night-time clouds, like a threatening storm.

“I won’t let you take me over,” Isis whispered to it, her voice shaking.

Do not do this.

“I never made any bargain!” she shouted.

She plunged her hands into the creature’s body, forcing them into its flesh. A breathtaking, staggering cold washed over her, pushing the air out of her lungs. Like walking into a snowdrift, or diving into an icy lake. Her breath turned to ice-crystals, frost crackled inside her nose. Shaking with uncontrollable shivers, thinking only about her hands, she managed to grip hold of the creature’s formless skin.

“I can fight you!”

She ripped her hands apart, tearing open a hole, looking through into charcoal-soft darkness, flashing with distant glimmers. She cried out in triumph. She’d hurt it!

And then, pain.

Cally slapping her cheek. Her dad pouring scalding tea onto her arm. Falling down a flight of stone steps, slicing her skin with a knife, wasps stabbing stings into her face. Real memories layered with false ones, each vivid and searing. She was hit by a car, her hand blistered in a fire. She was paralysed, panting with pain.

I can fight you back.

Her leg broke, and she screamed in agony. She was dying from the pain, it was ripping her to pieces…

… and everything was quiet. She was standing in dappled shade by a roadside, a bird singing in a nearby tree.

It was that road.

Angel was lying on the warm tarmac, her legs grazed and dirty, her dress torn and bloody. Her head was twisted the wrong way, her chest lifting and falling its last tiny movements. She turned her head on a broken neck and said,
“I still here…”

Isis gasped back into torture. Her fingernails were tearing away, her scorching skin gave off a stench like bacon.

But she’d seen Angel! She was caught, somewhere deep inside the flesh of the Devourer, using its link with Isis’s memories to speak. How long could Angel last in there? How long before it melted her into nothing?

Isis clenched her blistered hands into fists and took a breath. Shaking, shivering, she pulled herself up and punched straight into the creature. Its shriek echoed soundlessly above the field, and two circles were stamped in its flesh.

Stop.

“No!”

Her fingers crumbled into dust, her arms ending in the white of protruding bone. She screamed, staggering backwards, trying to see past this vision of powdered bone and reveal her hands. But she couldn’t.

I was stronger than the foolish ghost who found me, stronger than the lonely boy, I am stronger than you.

Her teeth started chattering. Her body was going into shock, instinctively trying to shut itself off from the horror at the end of her arms.

She heard a distant thudding: feet running over dry earth, the rustling of wheat stems.

“Isis!”

“Gray?”

And there he was. Face in front of hers, a cut on his forehead dribbling blood down between his eyes, with a bruise like an egg puffing up around it. She wanted to laugh, or maybe cry.

“Isis, are you… you again?” he asked nervously. She nodded, and he grinned with relief.

“I knocked Philip Syndal
out!
” he said. “And your mum’s okay, she’s looking for you. Everyone is, I think. But they’ve gone the wrong way – I heard them shouting
our names right at the other end of the field. Come on. I think I can find the way back… Are you all right?”

She couldn’t answer, unable to take her eyes off the bloody stumps where her hands had been.

It was just an illusion. It felt more real than she could bear.

“Come on,” said Gray, reaching out to take her hand. The Devourer would only let her see Gray’s fingers curl around the broken bone of her arm. She shrieked, wrenching away from him. He jumped back.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“It’s got me,” she cried. “It took Angel.”

“I saw,” he said. “I think I was nearly…” He paused. “Now I’m okay, I can’t see any of it.”

The Devourer rippled around them, smothering the countryside, only visible to Isis. Gray looked up at the sky.

“The light should’ve come back by now. The other times there was a massive explosion of light, then it went off into space.”

“The Devourer swallowed everything,” said Isis.

Gray stared up at the night. “Is it… big?” he whispered. “It’s so cold everywhere, I wasn’t sure…”

“It’s all around us.”

He turned back. “You’re okay though?”

She shook her head, holding up her bone-stump hands. He looked down at them, frowning.

“Angel’s survived inside it, I know she has,” said Isis. “And I think I can hurt it. I can use…”

BE QUIET!

The words were shouted at her by every teacher she’d ever had. Her lips glued themselves shut, stinging and tingling. She had to force them open again.

“I can free her,” she mumbled.

“Come on then!” said Gray. “How?”

She nodded at where her hands used to be. The Devourer pressed in closer, working its tendrils up her legs, binding her with twines of what felt like freezing seaweed.

“My hands,” she said. “I can push through ghosts, make holes in them. I already made a hole in the Devourer’s side. If I widen it, I could reach through to Angel.”

Gray’s eyebrows shot up. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Isis didn’t answer, because her arms were crumbling further. Now there was nothing past her elbow, only the bony joints, dangling with threads of dry flesh.

no hands no hands no hands no hands

“Go on then,” said Gray.

She tried to see past the ghost-eater’s illusion. But she felt nothing, she couldn’t even remember what her fingers looked like. There was only an aching numbness where her forearms had been.

“I can’t!” she cried. “It won’t let me see my hands.”

She held up her arms, and he squinted at them.

“Like there’s nothing there?” he asked, not quite believing.

“I can only see bones,” she whispered, trying to stop herself wobbling into tears.

Gray pressed a gentle finger onto what looked like a patch of air. “They’re still there, you know.
I
can see them.”

He looked at her with a smile. After a moment to understand, she was smiling back.

“Over there!” she said, pointing with nubs of bone.

I’ll hurt you.

“It won’t be real!” she snapped, holding out her arms.

“What won’t?” asked Gray.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Gray nervously took hold of the space beyond her stumps, where she knew her hands should be. A slight frown crinkled his brow.

I’ll HURT you.

Instantly, her arms were agony, pure fire burning up her arms. She yelped in pain, and Gray’s hands flew off.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said, gritting her teeth. “It’s not real.” She lifted up her stumps, so Gray could take hold of hands she couldn’t see. He nodded, getting a careful, uncertain grip. To her eyes he seemed to be holding nothing but air, and yet he pulled her forwards a couple of steps.

“Where am I going?” he asked. “Where is it?”

The Devourer surrounded them in slimy piles, darkly glistening except where Isis had torn a hole in its skin. Around the wound its flesh was shivering in tiny waves, trying to heal itself.

“There,” she said, directing him. Gray moved his hands and hers, pushing them into something he couldn’t see. Isis tried to focus on her invisible fingers and they waded into the vast, blue-black body wallowing around them.

“It’s f-freezing,” gasped Gray, instantly shivering, his breath suddenly steaming.

“We’re inside it now,” said Isis. He nodded, looking as scared as she felt. “Move my hands a little to the right. There.”

He push/pulled her nothing hands straight into the gash in the Devourer. Memories flew into Isis’s mind, and in every one of them Cally was screaming, begging her to stop.

“This is crazy!” said Gray, with a high-pitched laugh. “All I can see is me holding your hands in the air.”

“Well it’s here,” Isis whispered.

“I know.”

The rip in the Devourer was widening around their arms. She was shoulder deep now, tearing through the slug-coloured jelly. Inside its body small flashes glittered distantly, like fish in dark water.

“Do you want to k-keep going?” asked Gray, his teeth starting to chatter. Isis nodded.

I AM STRONGER.

She screwed her eyes shut against its shouted thoughts. Her eyelashes froze together, and she had to wrench her eyelids apart to open them.

“We need to make it wider!” she said.

Gray moved his hands away from each other. The rip opened further, the grey-black ooze peeling back in curls.

“Angel!” she shouted into the darkness.

“Can you see her?” Gray asked. She shook her head.

“Angel!” she called again.

“
I still here.
” A tiny voice, impossibly distant.

“Angel!” Isis cried, tears freezing onto her cheeks. Gray’s face split into a grin.

A tiny hand, candle-bright, reached towards her out of nothing.

Do NOT touch her!

Cally, her dad, Grandma Janet all screeched in Isis’s memory. The Devourer rolled its huge body, trying to crush her, snapping at her with sudden teeth-filled mouths. Tentacles whipped from nowhere, poking like fingers into her head, searching for a way back into her mind.