2. No Ghosts Here
No Ghosts Here
It took me three days to realize I wasn’t dead.
For three days and three nights and a handful of hours I was convinced I had somehow died out in the woods, and that it was my ghost begging to be heard and seen.
Maybe I’d fallen and hurt myself and froze to death in the snow. I wouldn’t be the first person to succumb to that manner of fate. Such was life in the Borderlands.
Or perhaps a bandit’s arrow had found and put an end to me. Not an unrealistic prospect.
Perhaps I fell through an ice pond masked by snow. Another possibility.
Whatever the circumstances, I grimly accepted that I was a ghost walking and talking to my family, pleading with them, begging for them to answer me—to see me, to connect with me across the veil that separated the living from the dead.
In those very first few moments when I returned home, stepping in from the cold into the warmth of my family home, I thought they were playing a cruel hoax to teach me a lesson for my earlier tantrum.
Ultimately, I came to realize that was just a desperate, clawing hope. An elaborate ruse involving the entire town to simply teach me a lesson? No. They wouldn’t go to such lengths. I wasn’t that important. I didn’t matter that much. So that left me with only one conclusion.
I was well and truly dead.
Gone from this life, even if I had no memory of the moment I perished. A blessing, perhaps, to not remember. My end must have been sudden and violent. Why else was it a void in my mind?
For three days and three nights and a handful of hours I assumed I was a wraith walking among the living.
As everyone threw themselves into the hunt for me, I screamed my throat raw, jumping up and down in front of everyone, waving my hands before their faces, calling out, begging, crying for them to see me.
There must have been someone out there who could.
Somehow, I had died.
Was dead.
It was a frightening realization. The fear so profound it made my stomach sour and pitch. I’d gone to that place my mind never touched on for it was too remote a possibility.
As dangerous as life was in this time of unrest and war, I was young. And the young never considered their own mortality. I never had before.
And yet now I did.
I’d been dragged to that precipice, fallen over it, and now I was drowning in a deep, dark maw of blinding fear.
I was young and strong. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Yes, life was hard, but this? How? How could I have gone from pushing for more freedom one moment to having no life to fight for whatsoever in the next?
Wasn’t a pathetic existence better than no existence at all?
Clearly, something had happened in those woods.
Something had turned me into this—a ghost, forced to remain among the living. I could not imagine a greater misery.
This world was dangerous, especially in the woods that surrounded Isstad. Everyone was always saying that, warning me not to wander off. Me and all the other children. I’d never listened.
And now it was too late.
The entire village searched for me, pressing through slicing wind and pelting snow. I was there alongside them, watching with stinging eyes, feeling their fear, their panic, their grief, continually speaking into their deaf ears.
My family and friends scoured every thatched-roof cottage, every shop, every building—as though I could be hidden somewhere beneath their noses, tucked behind some piece of furniture, stashed beneath a blanket like I wasn’t a person at all, but a child’s forgotten toy.
Naturally, the search stretched beyond the village. Residents of Isstad searched the snow-swathed landscape, winding through trees stripped bare of leaves, oaks strong and tall, withstanding and weathering the elements.
And yet with every hour, every moment that passed, I observed their resolve ebbing. I saw it fading from their eyes, read it in the droop of their shoulders, the dragging pace of their movements. The determination waned from their gazes right alongside my withering hope.
At some point the search shifted.
It was never spoken aloud, but it turned from a rescue mission to a recovery mission.
They thought me dead and they were looking for a body. A body they couldn’t find.
I searched alongside them as they pounded the snow, wondering how I would feel if they uncovered me, if they unearthed me and I spotted myself, face blue, eyes vacant and glassy with lifelessness. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that, to see me that way, and yet I knew I couldn’t stop looking.
I followed them, drinking in their words. Henrik reminded everyone that there had only been light snowfall and a waxing moon since my disappearance. My body (or remains) should have been found.
Eventually, he waved a hand at the towering trees. “We’ve covered every inch of the woods. We should have recovered her.”
“Maybe she was dragged deeper into the forest, far past our search perimeter,” offered the grizzly faced shopkeeper who Meya suspected cheated customers by pressing his thumb on the scales when he measured out flour.
“Wolves work fast. They could have carried her far from here to their den. She was a wee lass.”
“Or battle boars could have taken her,” someone else chimed in.
I felt sick, watching, listening to these scenarios. They were talking about me. About my death. A brutal death caused by wolves or boars or who knew what. It was strange and unnerving to be discussed in such a way.
I stared into the trees, visualizing the hidden things no one could see—all the sharp fangs waiting to devour hapless, wandering souls. My corpse . . . out there somewhere, my body picked over, torn to bits by hungry teeth, scraps of me scattered by predators.
Perhaps in late spring the rains would come and wash my bones bare, wind and sun feasting and bleaching the hard remnants of my skeleton clean.
I shook my head slightly, willing my queasiness to subside. Frowning, I looked to each of the faces in the search party, lingering the longest on the grim lines of my brother’s features.
Henrik was right to think it wasn’t wolves.
I would have remembered that. I would have remembered being stalked and attacked.
They didn’t operate in stealth. I would have heard their howls, their circling hunt of me.
When they pounced, there would have been warning.
I would not have died quickly. That first bite, the first split of my flesh beneath teeth would have burned through me, impossible to forget. No, it wasn’t that.
I distinctly recalled falling to my knees, indifferent to the cold ground as I raged and spit out those terrible words, casting them like swirling embers into the wind. That was what happened. My words. I wish I could just disappear.
Regrettable words I could not rescind. They were out there. Permanent. A brand on the skin.
And that was when I knew.
When the truth hit me like a stinging slap.
I remembered it so distinctly, a memory buried deep in bone: me, picking myself up and marching out of the woods and back to town with angry resolve, straight into my house, into the midst of my waiting family. The family that would wait forever.
I was no ghost. I was still alive.
I wasn’t dead.
I was something else.
There were other clues, too, as the days passed.
Even with all the stress and chaos, I functioned as a person.
A body. A corporeal form. I did all the normal things required of a body.
I ate when I was hungry. Drank when thirsty.
Slept, at least a little, when tired, when the exhaustion hit me so profoundly that I could not keep my eyes open for one more moment.
I even developed a blister on my heel from my endless treks through town and the woods.
I felt the sting of it as it popped and oozed fluid.
I was not dead.
There was still hope.
Somehow, I would find my way out of this. This was only temporary. A dark tunnel I must pass through on my way out into the light.
It wouldn’t be forever. It couldn’t be.