I close my eyes as I approach a puddle so I do not have to see my reflection in its dark surface. 

The cold makes the scar on the right side of my head ache; even after two years  the nerves are still raw, the skin new.  And it itches.  I scratch gently at it, but this only makes the itch worse, drives it deeper under my skin.  I scratch harder and a wave of pain floods into the sensitive tissues. 

I should be dead.  Everybody tells me what a miracle I am.  God was with me, they say, because I was the last survivor pulled from the rubble.  They tell me how lucky I am. 

But they don't see the things I see. 

When I first regained consciousness I thought I was dead, that I had awakened in Hell or purgatory...somewhere.  Then I felt the pain and I knew that I had to be alive.  But all I could see was decay, dead things, things that were rotted away, tissues decomposing, flesh riddled with insect life and hanging from wet, meaty bones. 

Everybody around me was dead. 

Then I saw my own reflection. 

I looked the same. 

I was rotting too.  Rotting from the outside in. 

I was never a socialite even in my best of moods, but the isolation I am forced to live in now is unbearable.  I seldom leave my small apartment.  To open my eyes every day is a horror.  I dread being stopped by a stranger in the street to ask what time it is, or having a charity box rattled in front of my face for a donation - how can I explain these haunted eyes?  Could they even possibly imagine that what I see when I look at them is a vision of what lies ahead for them?  Perhaps what they think when I look at them is even worse than the reality.  Maybe they imagine I can see inside them, that I'm staring at an as yet undetected cancer, spectating as it devours them, or that I know a deep and dark secret they harbour in their black hearts, and that I can expose that secret. 

But there are worse horrors in my new world than the shallow, maggot-infested empty eye sockets of the living. 

From that day forward, the world itself had changed for the worse. The sun no longer seemed to shine - it had been replaced by ever present shades of grey that dominated my vision.  Black clouds hung in the moody sky, a sky painted in shades of dark. Only in my dreams - my only escape - did I see the world of the living in a glorious and much missed rainbow of colour. 

And worse still were the spirits of the dead who replaced the living in numbers; everywhere I looked I saw them, leering knowingly at me as they stood otherwise unnoticed amongst the crowds. Their appearance should have been pleasant to me - their skin was flawless, perfect - as though they had bathed in warm milk - creamy, pearly, with roses in their cheeks.  It was a far cry from the decayed living things that surrounded me. The dead looked like the living and the living looked like the dead. 

The world, my world - everything - had changed.  These beings that seemed so normal were extremely sinister with their all-too-white skin and pale eyes - their irises were coloured but it was a washed-out colour, washed-out and rung-out and some of the colour had dripped away.  They ignore the living around them, yet seemed to look right into me as if they fed upon the fear and wonder in my heart and mind. 

I knew soon after the disaster that the seemingly normal people I saw were dead, ghosts and spectres and wraiths that haunted the air I breathed.  They looked like flesh and blood, they looked the way people should look - but there was something not right about them - something I could more feel and sense, than see. 

At first their oddity was just a notion, until the first time one of these spirits walked right through my body.  The sensation made me scream.  Although they were not as humans are - not flesh and blood, therefore they had no substance - having one pass through my body caused me intense pain.  I could feel them slipping through the nerves and fibres of my body, rushing through my blood and my bones. 

They know it hurts me. 

They laugh as they pass through me. 

I wanted to shout at them, but the scream in my throat died before it was emitted - I realized that the corpse-like living around me would take me for a madman shouting at the sky.  I felt like beating the 'watchers' - that’s what I called them - with my fists, hurting them like they had hurt me, but I could not hurt that which was not physical; clenched knuckles would only flow through them effortlessly and painlessly while the maggot-infested living onlookers would jeer and point at me thrashing about in an uncontrolled fit of rage against the air 

But the old pain I felt after the disaster would come again - and not from the scars, nor even from the dead who knowingly played the trick of passing right through me and tearing my tendons and nerve endings asunder, but from the stabbing knife of the isolation, of witnessing the phantom cancers that were growing inside of each and everyone of us. And only I could see them festering there within the living, and the horror of all my greatest horrors, I also saw that cancer devouring myself every time I had the displeasure of accidentally viewing my own fatal reflection in a muddy puddle of water, mirror or a store window. But these tumours are not knotted up in the physicality of us - they are in our minds, our hearts, our souls, and in our apathy and sophistication that renders us unable to take pleasure in a simple splendour. 

No, there was nothing I could do to retaliate against them - or myself.  All I could do was stare mortified at the thing in the mirror that dead-eyed me; its bleak eyes became clouded with the brine of puss that should have been yellow but was grey to my eyes, while the putrid insect life of this world played hide-and-seek amongst the craters of my pores.  With time, I learned to close my eyes, to not admire the beauty of my own face as I once had, and learned to live knowing my appearance was dishevelled and unbecoming - the price of vanity. 

There is one ghost I keep seeing over and over; this was very strange as I have never seen any of the malevolent spirits more than once.  She never comes near me, does not pass through me like the others do.  But she does stare at me.  She stares and stares and then looks away suddenly when I gaze directly at her. 

I walk away and she follows me - I take a route to nowhere in particular, dodging and slinking down dirty lanes and alleyways. I am going to places that I would never usually go - dangerous places.  She follows on behind me no matter where I lead her. 

She is still behind me. 

Close. 

Closer. 

 I can hear her quickening breath close behind me, the thrill of excitement coming from inside her in rapid gasps. 

I have to know why she follows me.  I stop abruptly and spin around too fast for her to halt and I brace myself for the pain of her body surging through me, grit my teeth in anticipation of the assault. 

She ricochets off me and stumbles backwards;  she lands on her backside in a cold, muddy puddle of rain and piss. 

Ricochets off me. 

She is real. 

My God, she is real, as real as me, and she looks the way she should, the way that pulsing, living beings used to look to me.  There is no decay in her flesh, there are no infestations on her skin and no sightless sockets in her skull from rot of the eye. 

She is real. 

I have to touch her. 

I reach out and push her shoulder with the tip of my index finger.  There is barely any give beneath my fingertip, save the suppleness of the soft, pink skin on her shoulder. At the top of her scapula  I can see a cruel scar edged in a row of criss-crossing indentions in her flesh that brings back memories of metal implants in bone and steel staples in my suffering flesh. . And she has more scars - a gouge that has left a cleft on the side of her chin, and a thick line of cut-branded, slightly paler flesh running long ways down her exposed forearms. 

She mirrors me; repeating my own motions she runs her soft fingertips over the skin of my right cheek, tracing my scar with the tip of her index finger as her stare bores holes into my eyes. 

There is so much to say, so many different things that it may take a lifetime to get them all out, take a millennium to stop them spilling from my lips, but I cannot utter a single word.  A lump of painful emotion has tightened my throat and I swallow hard; I watch her and she does the same.  So many things are racing through my brain and yet I am speechless. 

Has it been so long  since I left normality, reality, that I no longer know how to interact with another human being?  Surely not.  Surely the skills of social intercourse will come flooding back to me at any moment. 

But we do not need words, not right now, not at this moment.  Feeling the curve of her fingers in my palm as she takes my hand is enough.  Looking at her, seeing pink, healthy skin bereft of rot is enough.  My God, even the damaged and scarred flesh on her body is beautiful.  It shows me that she is alive, that she is a survivor and although her body is slight and appears fragile, breakable, I know that she is robust of heart and spirit and mind. 

We walk in silence now, comfortable silence - and we embrace it.  I do not hear the taunting of the dead things that have haunted my every waking hour since the day of the tragedy, the day that a dark and distant menace attacked this great city. 

But I see the light again, the light at the end of the tunnel and I revel in the strangeness and the wonder of having somebody here by my side, someone I can turn to now and ask a question and have them answer me, instead of having to ask myself and answer myself as I used to - lest I forgot entirely what speech was. 

They are still with us - I don't think that they will ever leave us, ever fade - but they are not so bright and shining as we are.  They cannot destroy us, our hearts, our souls inside, they cannot take the light from us, the light that we love, that we need, in our lives, the light that comes from inside us all. 

© Alex Severin / Kailleaugh Andersson 2003 
 
 

If you like this ghost story, the anthology GHOSTBREAKERS - NEW HORRORS features Automatic, a ghost story by Kailleaugh Andersson and Alex Severin.  Click on the cover for details!