Chapter XX Loren #2
And – oh, there he was again. Ghost-Loren.
Older now, shoulders a bit broader, but his hair still hung long, cascading unbraided down his back.
He wore the toga of a lawyer or senator.
He was happy, too, face split in a wild grin, arm looped through that of a faceless figure.
A man’s figure. Loren drank himself in, a Loren in a future with no vineyards, no marriage, just him and his lover in a crowded city.
He tracked their path as they moved between playing children and stray dogs until they were lost. But he hadn’t seen his fill.
His sandals slipped on loose gravel as he skidded down. His pulse quickened. A bit closer. He passed through other ghosts, invisible. His ghost-self’s hair swung with his stride, beckoning him forward. A burning trail. A promise.
He stumbled to the top of the mound of the crater’s centre and stopped short.
On the other side sprawled a dense field of poppies, sheer white but for their bright red caps waving him on.
The people had vanished, except – there.
At the far end of the field. Loren squinted.
A boy, curls tousled, stood with his back to Loren, but he’d recognise his form even here, at the edge of the earth.
‘Felix,’ Loren breathed, then broke into a sprint. Sharp grass stung his legs, and his lungs burned with sour vapor. Poppies erupted into bloody showers of petals when he batted them aside. Felix took a step forward, away. Loren panted. ‘No!’
The word shattered the spell. He blinked, and the visions vanished. Gasping, Loren slowed, whole body shivering. An illusion, but his stomach ached for—
Felix spoke from behind. ‘Stronger men than you have lost their minds chasing ghosts.’
Loren spun, daring to hope.
His hopes were dashed. The boy staring from the mound, translucent and frayed, face twisted bitter, wasn’t his Felix at all.
This was a phantom. Something cruel and haphazard, pulled apart and stitched together wrong.
Fumes flooded the space between them, shifting and blurring the ghost into a haze.
‘Bring him back. I want to see . . .’ Loren stopped in a ragged choke. The Felix at the far end of the field. He wanted – needed – to see if . . .
‘If it was me,’ Ghost-Felix finished .
Loren’s fists clenched. ‘Not you. Him. Mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘You’re a murderer. I’ve seen you. Dreamt you.’
‘You think your Felix wouldn’t do the same?’ Ghost-Felix’s lip curled. ‘Sweet. Loyal. You’ve known us for, what, three days? We must have won you over somehow.’
‘Stop.’ Steam seared his face.
But the ghost only began a slow descent of the slope, carving a path to where Loren stood frozen, then paced an unhurried circle.
The lazy spiral of a hawk before it dived.
‘Tell me what we did. How we listened. Said what you wanted to hear. Pretty words in the dark. Did we make you feel like we could be your home?’
He paused behind Loren’s shoulder. Loren didn’t dare glance back. The ghost said, ‘Tell me how we kissed you. Touched you. Made you beg for more, always more—’
‘ Stop. ’
‘Always hands on our skin, never clean. Years and years of it.’ His voice slipped into an earworm of a mutter, creeping into the gaps in Loren’s body to wriggle him apart. ‘How desperate were you for a friend?’
The words were to him, but the inflection had turned inwards, leaving Loren wondering who, exactly, was being accused. Slowly, Loren turned to find Ghost-Felix cradling the abandoned helmet, tender despite the acid dripping from his mouth.
‘It always comes down to this,’ the ghost said to empty sockets. ‘Us. My helmet. The mountain. She understands me. She knows how it feels to hold something in.’
‘What are you?’ Loren whispered, skin crawling.
‘I am the Felix who didn’t forget.’
The image rang too familiar: Felix gazing at the helmet like it held answers he couldn’t grasp alone. Felix, vulnerable but guarded. Aching to be known but fearing anyone who dared tread too close. An impossible puzzle. My helmet .
The mountain, the one constant.
‘He said he had trouble remembering,’ Loren said cautiously. ‘That his memories come and go.’
Only that made it sound like the casual ebb of the tide, not most of a life lost to time.
‘Not lost,’ said Ghost-Felix.
‘Stay out of my thoughts.’
‘But they’re such a nice respite. So little going on in your mind, it’s almost peaceful.’
‘Good one. Yes, Loren is dim. Very original.’ Loren breathed to cool his temper. Rancid air left a tang on his tongue. ‘If his memories aren’t lost, why can’t he take them back?’
‘Exactly like you to assume he had a choice. That either of us did. They meddled with our mind. Took it away. Told us it was for our own good.’ Ghost-Felix stepped closer, voice hissing sharp as the steam shooting between jagged black rocks.
He flickered in and out, as if tethered by an unsteady connection.
‘They – he – stripped it from him, not realising doing so created me to hold it. All the memories, and all the anger they contain. Wasn’t that monstrous? ’
‘Who? Who did it?’
‘Keep up,’ he snarled. ‘Our – my father, he’s mine, only I remember him. I’m the one who suffered when we were wrenched apart. To protect us, Da’ said.’
None of this made sense. The ghost spoke in riddles.
Protect Felix from what? What good would tearing memories from him do?
Suspicion thickened in Loren’s mind, fear that his brutal, bloody visions weren’t warnings.
They were threats. Somewhere, dormant deep inside Felix, was a power or plague, raw as the paint Loren smeared on the walls as a child.
Something others felt best locked away .
Loren stared at the ghost with fresh horror. Despite the slow roasting of his skin, the realisation cast cold water through his blood. ‘If he remembers, he’ll become you.’
‘I am not what his memories make him,’ Ghost-Felix said. ‘But I’m angry at being trapped alone with no way to reach him. I’ve held this on my own since we were eleven. When he learns, it will be his turn to hold the anger. It would remake him.’
Or unravel him . Bile rose up Loren’s throat. ‘I want to help him. Tell me how.’
‘You won’t. You’re afraid.’ Sneering, the ghost turned his cheek, hugging the helmet. ‘By now you’ve realised there are pieces he won’t recall, and there are pieces he cannot, and his line between them blurs. But wouldn’t you want to remember? To have that choice?’
‘I want to help him,’ Loren repeated, weaker than before.
‘Then you understand what I ask.’
Loren wanted to scream that he didn’t, that the ghost hadn’t said a single helpful thing, that he’d been trying to help Felix all along, but the ghost stood in his way.
But his eyes dropped to the helmet, held by pale, familiar hands.
My helmet , the ghost had said. And Loren understood.
Whatever memories Felix couldn’t access, the helmet must be strong enough to destroy what stood in the way.
‘He thinks coincidence drew him to Pompeii,’ said Ghost-Felix, ‘but a far greater power called him here. I cannot say the role he’s to play.
It’s not my grief to share. But I can tell you yours.
Days ago, you told him never to put the helmet on, and he won’t, unless you say otherwise.
You are as much a part of this as he is. ’
The role he’s to play . Nonna’s warning crashed through Loren’s mind, that the wielder of the helmet was doomed to be a pawn.
Fear burned away until Loren had nothing left but fury.
‘Felix resists control at every turn,’ he snapped, impatience bursting. ‘He won’t play a role he doesn’t want to play. I’ve spent my life having my words dismissed. They have no power. That he hasn’t put it on has nothing to do with me.’
‘Then you’re more oblivious than I thought. Everything has to do with you. Destiny demands you be together when he comes into his power. Our fates have always been tied.’
‘I am not part of the destruction. I won’t let you twist me into a villain. Let me go if I worsen your situation. For years you’ve haunted me, not the other way around.’
‘You think I wanted this? You are the only one whose mind is open enough – or empty enough – to receive me. You say you’re cursed, but I’m cursed to be stuck with you to hear. Hear, but never listen.’
‘Then let Felix go.’
‘I don’t want him, either,’ Ghost-Felix seethed. The ground jolted, shuddered, and Loren fought for balance against the sudden quake. ‘I hate him. I am him.’
‘You are not’ – Loren panted – ‘him.’
Ghost-Felix coiled tighter, and Loren glared him down, anger shooting sparks to his fingertips. If he wanted a fight, Loren could give him one. Stones rocked, a cacophonous groaning in the mountain’s belly. Scalding jets of air bit and scratched.
No lunge came, no lash fell. Loren stood his ground.
Instead, the ghost crumpled the way all unloved things did.
He folded his body in, made himself small, bracing for a blow that, though dreaded, would not be unexpected – as if the ghost feared Loren’s swing.
Sizzling gravel crunched when Ghost-Felix dropped to sit, knees pulled close.
The helmet rolled away, freed from loose arms that came to cover his face. The ground stilled.
Loren’s ribs ached. He hated that he felt even scraps of pity for this phantom after so many years of torment.
But as he stared down his nose at the boy on the ground, chest heaving, for the first time he struggled to separate this Felix from his.
His eyes stung. He couldn’t stand to see any version of Felix so shattered.
His brain screamed to run. To claw his way from the crater and leave the ghost huddling alone.
But Loren wasn’t in the business of listening to his head over his heart.
He stepped forward, sandals sliding. Sweat rolled down his neck into his already-drenched tunic.
Stepped again. Knelt. Tiny rocks nipped his skin.
Waited.