Go For Stories

She didn’t look like his wife. Any semblance of her had been wiped away through years of apparent decay and misery. What stood in front of him was a shadow, a being of memory. It couldn’t be his wife, yet he felt it, he felt her presence coming from the spirit before him. He didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed earlier in the hall. She stood, still cloaked in darkness, with her hands out to him, begging.

“No,” he muttered. “No, it’s not you. Please. Leave me alone.”

“Nigel,” her voice was a whisper from a thousand miles away. “You returned to me.”

He staggered back against the door. She floated forward on legs disconnected from this world. Her bony hand reached for him and her empty eyes pleaded.

“Hold me, darling.” The words tugged at his soul with their gentle caress.

She brushed a rotten fingertip against his arm. Nigel wanted so bad for it to feel good. He wanted it to heal her and make her whole again. He longed to pull her into an embrace that lasted until the end of time.
Fire burned at her touch.

“Ow.” He pulled away from the devil before him. “What do you want? Why are you torturing me? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Nigel, I’ve waited for you.” There was pain in her voice. “I waited for this day. We can be together again.”

“How?” he asked, pleading for a simple answer. Wanting nothing more.

“I can come through. I can be whole again.”

“But, you’re not alive. You’re not…” He turned his gaze from the chunks of decomposing flesh hanging from her broken jaw.

She reached for him with the gentlest of movements.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Look at me, Nigel. Not with your eyes. Look with your heart.”

She brushed a single, burning finger across his cheek. He winced and turned towards her, thinking of all the times they had shared. Summoning forth all of the happy memories of their life together. He forced himself to recall the love he felt for a wife he thought never to see again. She leaned in, showing how she had healed. And she had too; at least partially.

Her eyes had filled in and bugged out of skinless sockets. Her soft smile became a tortured, toothy grin half way across her face, flaps of skin dangling past her exposed gums. Her hair, beautiful and full, flowed past her shoulders, but gave off a dank, musty smell. She leaned closer still. He could see the tattered tongue rolling in her mouth and the bugs crawling in her open throat.

“I can’t.” He slipped past her and moved to the other side of the room. This was not his wife; it couldn’t be. His wife was gone. “You’re not Julia, you’re not her.”

“But I am. I am her. Look at me. Look.” She stepped closer, backing him away. She surged forward, arms outstretched. “Please, Nigel. You have to believe me.”

He ducked under her arms, feeling a wave of deathly cold coming from her, and ran for the door. As she turned, he grabbed the handle, tugging it open. Beyond, he could see Bec standing over the ghost-white corpse as Milly stood by. Jacob was out of sight. They did not react to his movements and there was a feeling of distance between them, as though separated by a glass bubble.

“NO!” The spectre shouted. “NIGEL, NO!”

A shock of wind slammed into his back, tearing the door from his grip. It crashed shut and he fell into it, opening a cut on his forehead. Warm blood trickled into his eye. He spun to face the changeling.

“What do you want?” he asked, fighting the overwhelming urge to pass out.

“Why are you here?”

“I want to come back, Nigel. I want to be whole again. I want to feel.”

“Julia would never act like this. Who are you, really?”

She rolled her head and it let out a ferocious cracking noise, the sound undampened by the burden of skin. Behind that noise was an eternity of rage and despair, pent up and looking for release anyway it could.

“I am Julia.” Her voice, though almost silent, was sincere. “I am the parts of her that couldn’t rest. The parts that could not move on without you.”

“You are a piece of her, then? The negative aspects?” Nigel wiped his face with the back of his hand. He ignored the blood that covered his arm and focussed on the ghost before him. The ghost of his past life.

“Not the negative, no. I’m the lonely parts. The parts that death couldn’t handle.”

“Where is …” he lowered his head and blinked back tears. He wasn’t sure if he had the strength to ask the question. The answer was likely to destroy him, but he had to know. “where is Mads?” His voice broke at the name and the tears escaped from his eyes, rolling down his cheek. “Where’s our daughter? Is she here, is she stuck in this place? Please, I need to know.”

Julia Astley held out her arms. “I don’t know. Maybe she went ahead. She was too pure to hold on. Too sweet.”

Nigel fell to his knees. She had moved on. His little girl was not trapped in this awful world of disease and rot. Wherever she was, she was safe from this hell. He held his face in his hands and cried. For nearly a decade, he had tried to forget about them. The pain was too much for him to bear. He had fought to erase them from his mind, knowing it would never work. Yet, he tried. Now, it had all come back. With this being before him, his pain and despair had returned. Blood and tears mingled together and fell from his face in a dance of agony, twisting and curling around each other before the brief courtship culminated as a lifeless pool on a bathroom floor.

“Why?” he asked through his sadness. “Why did you come to me? What do you want?”

“Isn’t it obvious, darling? I want to be free of this place. I want to live again.”

“At what cost?”

She paused for a while. He removed his hands from his face and looked up at her with stinging eyes. Her image shimmered behind the tears, but her gaze was intense. She studied him. How much did he suspect?

A lot.

“Yes,” she whispered at length, “I need a vessel.”

“A vessel?”

“A body. If I had a body, we could be together again.”

He pulled himself to his feet, never taking his eyes from her. “And whose body do you intend to take?”

She shrugged and the decayed bones in her shoulder cracked and popped.
“I saw two decent candidates through that door. The blonde looked tough, but I think you’d prefer the black-haired one, wouldn’t you?”

“You will not touch them,” he said, so quiet that he could barely hear it himself. “You will not turn them into one of those demons.”

“Demons? I don’t …” Realisation dawned on her and she laughed, a crackling, soulless laugh. “No, not one of those. I am more than that. They are mere, I don’t know, spooks, I suppose. Part souls looking for the first ride out. We are more complete than that.”

“Wait, ‘we’?”

Her grim, half-dead smile faded.

“You didn’t think it was just me, did you? I’m not the only one here looking for freedom.”

“How many of you are there?” He shuddered at the thought. At first, this was an outbreak, the start of an epidemic. Now … now it was a potential invasion.

A sudden wave of nausea washed over Nigel and he quivered at the knees, only just staying on his feet. A look of panic flushed over Julia’s face, or at least the parts that could show emotion. Nigel blinked hard and shook his head, fighting to stay upright. His head spun.

“Get out,” Julia said, looking around with nervous, lidless eyes. “Go, now.”

“Why, what’s …”

He took a deep breath and cleared his head long enough to see the colossal, black wings unfurl from the ceiling above him.