We Are Here (36 page)

“But how does that relate to Lizzie and her friends?”

“They’re ghosts,” he said. “People who died in the city but haven’t moved on.”

“Lizzie is
not
a ghost,” Kristina said. “She’s
there
. Her friends are, too. I spent two hours with them stealing drinks off people in bars, for God’s sake.”

“Nobody said ghosts can’t interact with the physical world,” Jeffers said. “There’s all the stories about them passing through walls and vanishing at will, but the ability to disappear is just about whether you’re
noticed
or not. Real people can do that too. And for every story like those there’s another about poltergeists—spirits that
can
manipulate objects, however crudely—or elves or pixies that take things and move them around, or phantoms that run cold fingers across the back of your neck.”

“You’re saying these are all the same thing?”

“The same
kind
of thing. We’re able to see some of these spirits, once in a while, in the right conditions. With others we only experience their effects, but that holds true of normal life too. If someone claps their hands together out of our sight, we still
hear
the event; we don’t need to see it or suffer the hand smacking against our own body to prove it. Just as there are many types of human, with different abilities and ways of being, so it is with souls, too.”

I couldn’t work out whether the guy was serious or if this was some weird priest metaphor that I was too tired to get. “So
why
are these spirits still here?”

“Unfinished business. Or because there’s someone still alive, refusing to let go, maintaining a relationship that is too strong for the departed to progress according to the natural order of things.”

I remembered giving the priest’s address to Lydia earlier that evening—an event that felt like it had taken place about two weeks ago—and wondered if that had been such a smart idea after all. “But how would that
work
?”

“Strange,” Jeffers said. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a staunch defender of science.”

“I’m not. That doesn’t mean I’ll believe any old crap. Seriously. How
would it work
?”

“Do you know how love works? Or hate? Or hope? Yet you wouldn’t deny their existence or power to change human behavior.”

“Those are emotions, not states of being.”

“I’m aware it’s a category error in the minds of a philosopher, but they’re seldom the most practical of thinkers and I’m not sure there’s a big distinction in the real world. The universe is a different place to someone who’s in love than it is to one who is withstanding grief—different worlds that exist side by side, brought into being by emotion. If emotion can structure reality then why shouldn’t it enable an individual soul to persist beyond its intended span?”

I shook my head, knowing there were a million flaws in this but not being able to nail them.

“It’s not a permanent state,” he said. “It’s unstable, precisely because it relies upon emotion. Some of their number, the ones they call Hollows, they’re closer to moving on. They retreat from the world, often settling in graveyards, as if they dimly remember the circumstance of their interment and wish to rejoin the process of transition. There are others who appear not to even realize they’re dead—the Dozenos. On the other side of the spectrum, the strong and self-actualized dead, there are Fingermen, who possess a poltergeist-style ability to manipulate objects. There are especially restless spirits called Journeymen, who have no desire to remain near the person holding them here, and there are Cornermen, who remain stationary for long periods—as if tied to one particular locale—and pass messages among the other ghosts. There are more of these souls on the loose than there ever used to be. The dead have always been with us. There have always been spirits that lost their way. But now that our society has taken down the signposts it will happen more and more.”

“Surely it doesn’t matter if we pull the plug on ways of understanding death. Doesn’t
God
call them home?”

Jeffers looked at me as though I were a member of a Sunday school class who, having previously shown promise, had revealed himself to have understood nothing at all.

I wanted a cigarette but couldn’t face the four-floor trek downstairs to the outdoors. I felt exhausted and in pain. But I wanted to understand.

“So according to you, Reinhart has built himself a team of
ghosts
to help him steal shit?”

“Yes. These souls, or ‘friends’ as they tend to call themselves, are in moral danger. Many may still be here as a result of shortcomings in their lives. To encourage them to engage in further acts of turpitude is to damn them forever. I am not prepared to let that happen.”

“Speaking as someone with recent experience in the field,” I said, “you may not have a lot of choice over what Reinhart does. Unless you’re prepared to get biblical on it in ways different to the ones you’re accustomed to.”

Jeffers reached to the desk in the corner, opened the drawer, and pulled out an ashtray. “Another leaving from my predecessor. Open the window, please.”

I stared at him. “How did you know?”

“People’s feelings and desires are often visible, sometimes even tangible,” he said. “That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“What I still don’t understand,” Kristina said, “is why some of the friends work with Reinhart.”

“His main contact among them is this Golzen person. Every now and then one of these souls tries to raise themselves above the others. Usually that’s been a positive thing. But Golzen has … a different take.”

“Different how?”

“More militant. There’s a widespread misapprehension among the friends about their state of being. This ‘imaginary friends’ delusion that Lizzie told Kristina about—unfortunately, she believes it. A great many of them do. Golzen has exploited this, along with legends and stories that have gained credence over the years, including one concerning a promised land.”

I laughed. “Dead people have their own
myths
?”

“Gather three individuals together and by the end of the evening part of their relationship will rest upon something supposed, rather than demonstrably true.”

“But what if they
are
imaginary?” Kristina said. “Are you
sure
they’re not?”

The priest stood. “I’ve told you what I believe. I have a spare room. It’s never been used, so I daresay it’s rather dusty, but you’re welcome to it.”

Kris and I looked at each other, and knew that given the chance not to have to go back home, we’d take it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“They’re dead,” he said flatly. “Don’t believe it if they tell you differently. Sometimes the dead lie.”

David sat with his back to the wall. He could smell clean carpet—Dawn had gone ahead and vacuumed around the boxes that evening, not pointedly, but the point was still made. He couldn’t see much. That wasn’t because it was the middle of the night and the spare room was dark. It wasn’t that there wasn’t much to see in the room even during the day.

He just wasn’t seeing anything outside his own head.

When he got back he’d tried to work, of course. Nothing had come of it—of course. He’d read more of Talia’s book and glumly accepted that the further she’d gotten into her stride the better it became. Her writing possessed authenticity and directness and a simple pleasure in the act of creation, something he doubted he’d be able to replicate. For him it was always going to be more complicated. Talia was a real person and made things up for fun. For him the act of imagination was more deep-seated. It was who he was, and that made it harder; if you’d made your own self up, written yourself, reality will always seem compromised.

At dinner he and Dawn talked of inconsequential things. She seemed distracted but when asked said she was fine. It could be concerns about the pregnancy, he supposed, or wondering how his book was going but not wanting to ask because she knew it would stress him out to have to admit it wasn’t going well. It could more likely be that David was finding it hard to mesh with the world, and as a consequence everything seemed off balance and skewed—even positive things like going to an ATM and knowing there would be money in their account. After such a long time where they’d been scraping by, being solvent made the world strange.

The thing with Maj was the same. He’d tried to forget about it, to run with the idea it was something he didn’t need and could thus be excised. It didn’t work. It was like trying to put a looming tax bill out of your mind. You keep pretending it’ll be okay and think furiously about other things—about anything else at all—but it’s there in the twist in your stomach and in the way you hold your shoulders.

As he got into bed with Dawn, David finally decided to try to talk to her about it, tell her about the stranger who’d come to visit and what had happened in New York. He couldn’t keep burying it, and he knew himself well enough to realize that when he had something on his mind he behaved awkwardly—and it might be this that was making Dawn quiet.

He lay next to her trying to think of a noncrazy way of bringing the subject up, but took too long; her breathing settled into the rhythms that meant the god of sleep had gathered her in his arms. So he lay there, mind spinning faster and faster, stomach cramping, until he decided he may as well get up.

As he padded out into the hallway, he passed the door to the spare room. Maybe he could use the time to sort through the stuff, if he did it quietly—at least get one positive thing out of the day. He went in and shut the door. He didn’t bother to turn on the light. There was enough moonlight coming through the window.

He pulled the lids of the boxes open and took everything out, arranging it around where he sat. It was the same stuff he’d seen before. Nothing surprising. Nothing he’d forgotten about. No big reveals. A few souvenirs of once having had parents, books that a much younger version of himself had loved. The only interesting thing about these was the authors. Ray Bradbury. Philip K. Dick. Stephen King. These were the kind of stories he’d enjoyed and yet he’d gone on to sell a literary novel. He knew why that was—but what next? Did he carry on pretending to be that guy when he had no right, or should he to try to find a route back to who he was? Was there even anything left to return to?

The books felt like they belonged to someone else. The house felt like it did, too.

There was a noise from downstairs.

He walked quietly out onto the landing. The noise had seemed to come from directly beneath the spare room. The kitchen. A scraping sound.

He went to the bedroom and poked his head around the door to check that it wasn’t Dawn waking and going downstairs to see what he was up to. She was fast asleep. So what did he do now? Stay where he was, at the top of the stairs, and wait to see if someone came up them?

He started slowly down the staircase, carefully lowering each foot, using years of familiarity with the house to stick to the outside of the treads so as not to set off any creaks. He hesitated before turning the corner at the return, listening as hard as he could. All he could hear was the sound of rushing in his ears.

He quickly took the next step, bending at the waist so as to be able to see down into the hallway right away. Something was off about the light. He couldn’t tell what, but he knew now that he hadn’t imagined the sound.

He waited, motionless, expecting to see a shape or shadow crossing the hallway. Nothing happened.

Very slowly, holding on to the banister to help him get around the corner soundlessly, he started down the lower flight. By the time he got to the bottom it was obvious what was unusual about the light in the hallway.

The front door was open.

Knowing now that he was dealing with a very real situation, David stopped. The door was open. Only nine inches or so, but open is open.

But did that mean someone
was
inside, or
had
been inside? You had to work on the assumption someone was still inside, surely.

So … did he creep back upstairs, use the phone in his study to call the cops? What if the intruder came up the stairs when he was doing that, or before the police arrived? Presumably they’d left the door open to make it easier to escape. Would it be better to make as much noise as possible now, in the hope of scaring them off?

The front door closed.

David blinked at it. It looked like a hand had pulled it shut—from the outside. That’s all he’d seen—a hand pulling the handle.

The hand hadn’t been there, and then it was.

He waited, poised awkwardly with his feet on two different stairs, strain settling into the muscles in his legs. Nothing else happened.

He walked down the last two steps. He crept over to the tall and narrow window next to the front door. He kept well back in the darkness, craning his neck to see if there was anyone out there on the path.

He couldn’t see anyone. He turned his head and checked the sidewalk down on the street. No one there either. He waited and heard nothing.

So he reached out for the door and opened it.

Cold air came in, along with moonlight, the factor that had keyed him in to the door being open in the first place. He went out onto the step. The stone was very cold underfoot. The street was silent, dead, and empty. He looked left and he looked right. He saw no one.

He did not look up, and so he did not see the three tall, thin people lying on the roof, their faces hanging over the edge, grinning down at him.

When he had the door shut behind him again David stood in the hallway. He didn’t know for sure that the house was empty, of course. The fact that (he thought) he’d seen a hand pulling the door from the outside didn’t prove there was no one left in the interior. It didn’t
feel
like it. He realized that while he’d been on the stairs he’d
known
there was someone in the house. He could feel it.

He could
then
, anyhow. Now it felt otherwise. Was he prepared to trust that intuition?

He walked to the sitting room, took a breath, and slipped his head around the door. An empty room, looking staged, as they did in the night, familiar objects and furniture turned into sets.