Chapter 2 Braiden
Every night this week I’ve dragged myself under this piss-yellow library light.
Hunched over stacks of rotting books and ghost stories that are getting me nowhere.
I’ve read every dusty myth of ghosts and unnatural beings until the words swim in front of my eyes.
Still, I’ve had no luck whatsoever in finding anything on my little ghost talker.
No trail, not even a half-rotted rumour. It’s as though she slipped out of hell itself just for me, a secret stitched into my bones that only I’m meant to find. It should make me feel special. Instead, it’s killing me. Every page I turn feels like another piece of my skin peeling off.
On the other hand, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, and it’s not about the stories at all. What if it’s the dead that keep her hidden because she’s too precious for the world to know about.
Fuck, I need to find a way in. There has to be a crack somewhere, a door left open.
I can’t give up. I won’t. If I stop looking, this hunger will eat me alive from the inside.
There has to be something somewhere, but where?
Where the fuck do I dig next? I’d carve the truth out of a corpse if I thought it would help.
Every night I fail, she slips a little further from my grasp, like smoke through my fingers.
The weight of it claws at me, relentlessly.
I swear on whatever dark thing that passes through my soul, I’ll find something.
I have to… because if I don’t, I’ll lose her and whatever’s left of me will go with her.
For now, I will watch her closely. So close that I can feel the ghosts clinging to her hair.
Then hopefully I might learn something. I've seen the dead slip through her like water through a sieve, and I need to know why. Why do they gather, hushed and reverent, when she thinks no one’s watching.
Why do they treat her like a doorway, like she’s the last thing they will remember before the dark takes them for good.
The last encounter I had with her; I watched her appear in a haze of black fog just as an old lady’s life guttered out.
One final breath, then her, slipping in like smoke, brushing her fingers across what was left of the woman's soul, as if she was collecting it.
A quiet thief of endings. My nerves burning like live wires, every inch of me sparking.
Astonished and aroused all at once, I ached to reach out to her.
However, in the fraction of a second it took to lift my arm, she was gone, before I could even taste the air she left behind.
It was as though she was never there at all, just a shadow with a heartbeat.
It was in that moment that I realised that if I want to see her, really see her, I need more dead people. Simple as that. As luck would have it, I wear the fucking scrubs. I hold the power in my hands every night I clock in for my shift.
I’m a nurse in the emergency department but even that won’t cut it anymore.
This town’s, too safe and too fucking dull.
There are a few car wrecks, a stroke or two.
But, that’s not enough. Not enough for her to reveal herself to me.
I need some fragile patients, who under my watch, come in breathing and leave cold.
Maybe I should switch to oncology? Or palliative? Or geriatrics? The old ones drop like flies if you just look at them hard enough. Just a little nudge here, a slow drip there. It wouldn’t take much… they’re already halfway gone.
Caught up in my own head, I stand up and pace the table.
Jesus. Fuck. Listen to me, my hands were made for pulling people back from death and now I’m dreaming about tipping them over just so I can see her again.
The thing is… I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop.
Maybe if I try hard enough, if I provide the perfect soul for her, she’ll finally turn around and see me.
When she does, geallaim nach ligfidh mé di sleamhnú uaim choíche. (I swear I’ll never let her slip away.)