📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 3
In which a spectre lights up the night, and a shot is fired!
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Jake Thorne watched Gus slowly chew on the flakes of tender roo meat in his mouth. His plate was full of the choicest cuts. Jake knew how hungry Gus was; they all were. Gus was closing his eyes and relishing the taste of every mouthful, controlling whatever urge he might have felt to eat fast and quell his hunger.
“How is it, Gussy?”
“Delicious!”
“Well it ought to be, for you especially.”
Jake watched his son grin with pride in himself, as he pulled a chunk of gristly cartilage from the thigh bone of the kangaroo and tossed it to Nimrod – their beloved Bull Arab dog.
Nimrod was a large dog capable of great savagery when needed; a skilful hunter in his own right. He had been with Jake since before the children were born. He was a newborn pup when Emily and Jake originally took him in, and he was part of the family. He protected and defended them from snakes, from natural pitfalls, and - occasionally - from strangers. He was getting old, but he was still of great use. Sometimes the only game caught in a hunt came from Nimrod’s jaws, and he never ate it until he had returned it to his master, Jake, for inspection.
Jake upheld an important tradition in their family: that whoever caught or killed the game was the recipient of the choicest cut. This did not exclude the dog, though Jake had learned over the years that Nimrod’s preferred cuts differed from that of humans. Jake and Nimrod were the best of friends and Nimrod rarely stayed home during a hunt.
Today’s roo hunt was different though, as a creature that large would likely be more sensitive to the smell of a dog, and it was a prize they could not afford to lose. Nimrod obediently stayed behind, and when Jake and the children arrived back at the barn, drenched from the rainstorm, and carrying large cuts of roo flesh over their shoulders and in their hunting packs, Nimrod leapt towards them. He was unable to control the excitement bursting through his hind legs and jumped up on Jake licking his face all over. Jake had laughed and commanded him down, then they started up a fire and prepared the meat to cook.
This was the biggest roo they had caught all year, and the first large game in a month. The last creature Jake had shot - with the invaluable assistance of Nimrod - was a small wild pig, which had fed all four of them for two days. The nourishment it provided them had needed to last another four days until Jake, in desperation, had chased down the puny turkey.
Jake had shown Gus how to mount the chunks of roo meat and whole limbs onto the steel rods he had fashioned into spit poles, while Maisie had rubbed salt into the smaller cuts of meat to smoke over the fire later, for future consumption.
Jake watched tears silently roll down Maisie’s cheeks as she ate. She too chewed slowly, but Jake knew this was not an act of sensual enjoyment, but rather her appetite was subdued by the pain and confusion she was feeling.
“Eat up, Maisie. You need your strength.” Jake didn’t really know what to say to her.
The encounter with Emily today had been deeply disturbing for them all, though it had not been the first time for Jake. She had come to him in the night once before, seeking an audience. He knew what she wanted. He had heard it from her parents, and he had heard it from her as she cried and pleaded with him to come with her on the night she first left them.
He too had pleaded that night. He had been reduced to a beggar, sprawled on the dirt, screaming after her to stay. He could not force her to stay if she didn’t want to, nor could he convince her. Her mind had been made up, and she had left that night.
The next time she appeared to Jake she was like an apparition out of the darkness. He had wanted to run, but he was unable to move, unable to believe what his eyes saw. It scared him like nothing else had in his violent, desperate life of bare survival.
She had sat with him, and laid out her arguments for why she knew she had made the right choice, and why Jake and the children should join her. Jake had looked at her, tears streaming down his face as he’d resisted the urge in his heart to convince himself that this really was Emily.
His eyes saw her hair, her lips and her sharp intelligent eyes. His hand felt her warmth, and he could even smell her skin as he had always known it. But his senses were deceiving him, and his rational mind knew that every word she uttered to him was a dangerous deception with a most deadly consequence. He knew, by everything his mother had lived and died for, that this was not Emily. This was a luminescent reverse shadow of her. A mere echo. A mirage.
He let her say everything she meant to. When she asked for his answer he had simply said to her: “Leave this place, and never come back. I never want to see you again. And if I ever find you approaching my children, you will be sorry.”
Her face had fallen grim at his reply, and as quietly as she had come, she softly waded back into the blackness of night. That was two years ago and today was the first time he had seen her since.
Why now? he wondered.
Maisie’s tears had stopped, and she had put her tin plate down to pull out a small piece of paper from her hip-pouch. She stared at it intently as Jake watched her.
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
She looked up with a jolt, as if surprised she wasn’t alone. “Oh, it’s… it’s the picture of Mama.”
Jake nodded and smiled at her, sympathetically. He could see she was forlorn. In her innocence she probably could not fathom the reason for his violence towards the woman that she believed to be her mother. But Maisie had not seen her mother since she was three years old. This photo was likely the only image she remembered of her, until today. Jake watched Maisie unconsciously twist a strand of her blonde curls around her finger as she looked at the woman with the same hair in the picture.
“Why…” Maisie started, her voice faltering.
“It’s okay sweetheart, ask me anything.”
“Why did you make Mama go away today?” she asked, looking up at Jake with eyes full of tears again. Jake had never seen Maisie upset before, except over superficial injuries. He knew how to ease her pain in those situations, but he had no idea where to begin to put her at ease now. Maisie seemed to have no quarrel with their way of life in the woods. Living in filth and squalor, without another human in sight besides himself and Gus, and without any friend other than Nimrod, was normal for her. It was the life she had grown into, and human civilisation was but a distant shadow of a faint memory buried in her genes.
Once Emily had disappeared back into the woods today, Maisie had contained the sounds of her sorrow, but Jake had seen her crying, silently, while they butchered the kangaroo. Jake wondered if the weather gave her some comfort; that she could cry as many tears as her heart would offer up, in the privacy of the heavy shower that fell upon her face. He felt almost as if the sky understood Maisie’s misery, and was crying for her, and with her.
“That wasn’t your Mama, Maisie,” was all Jake could think of to say.
“It was!” She sounded frustrated now, and the tears began to flow again. “Look!” She turned the piece of paper around, and showed it to him.
Jake’s stomach turned at the sight of Emily in the photograph. She was so young there, exactly as she had appeared today. When Jake had finally accepted that she was never coming home, he had discarded the portrait, hoping to never see her face again, to never feel the pain of his loss.
Jake accepted his daughter’s painful logic. The image on the paper was her mother, and it looked exactly like the creature they had seen today. He watched Maisie cry for a time. The tears shone like fireflies scrambling frantically down her face, each disappearing with a spark as they met the dirt floor in front of her, one by one. Jake looked into her eyes and knew it was time for an explanation.
“Kids,” he began, solemnly, “I loved your mother from the moment I met her. She and I were just children. I’d met a few other girls my age out in the forest and on the farms I grew up on, but no one like her.” His solemnity turned to a reminiscent joy. “There was something about her hair that captured me. That colour. Brownish in the dark, but bright as wheat fields in the right light. The way her locks danced around when she walked. At night her hair would reflect the firelight and it would sparkle like these flames right here.” He threw a small twig he had been scratching the dirt with into the fire, and they all watched it explode into a flurry of sparks and lapping flames, then disappear. “She was something to see.”
The children sat in silence for a moment, daring not to ask a question, waiting for him to go on.
“Your mother left us two years ago. She thought she could trade in this uncertainty for permanence. She thought that the way we live, the constant search for food, the dirt, the cold... she thought it wasn’t necessary. She was wrong though, kids. And she died for it.”
Maisie’s eyes let loose a torrent of pain. Her lips remained silent, but trembled.
Gus simply listened, and nodded slowly. “It looked just like her, Papa.” He said, his tone unchallenging.
“It did. But it wasn’t her.”
“So what was it, then?”
“What you saw today, kids...” Jake began again, desperately grasping at the empty space in his mind to find the right words to explain the truth to his children without doing more harm. “...what you saw was a ghost.”
“What’s a ghost?” Gus chimed in immediately.
Maisie sidled up to Gus and Nimrod followed her, groaning affectionately as he nuzzled his snout back into her lap as she took her new seat under the arm of her beloved brother.
“What’s a ghost...?” Jake breathed deeply, drawing the heat of the fire into his chest as if to ignite some hidden furnace inside him, and give him courage. He remembered a story his mother had told him one night as a child, as they sat by a similar fire. Her words echoed in his mind, and like an electrical circuit closing, a connection was made, and the current of consciousness flowed, instantaneously bringing his thoughts together. “Nobody really knows what happens when we die. Nobody’s ever come back to tell us what they saw, what they did, who was there, what it felt like. And I believe the reason for that is because there’s nothing after we die.
“My mum used to tell me that a lot of people in the world believed in God. God was this man, maybe a giant, maybe a scientist, but he was this person who made everything, and everything that happened in our life was part of his plan. But I’ve never seen him. And I know that everything that has happened in my life has happened through my eyes and my thoughts. Everything that has kept me breathing, kept me fed, kept me fighting, has been because I’ve thought to do it, and I’ve done it. Gus, today - that roo. You did that. You took its life, and we all butchered it together, and now we are all choosing to eat it. The inside of our body works without us having to think about it - don’t ask me why. But our hands, our legs, our mouths, our words; we choose what happens with these. So I have never believed in a God. I’ve never seen anything to make me believe it.
“My mother told me that in the cities, those big places I’ve told you about, far from here... when she was a child, people in the cities had book after book after book about thinking, about how we think, why we think, how we know what we know, and what we should do. I’ve never read those books; I only have my life to guide me. What I do know is that if I stop thinking, I die. And if I die, my eyes won’t be here to see, my ears won’t be here to hear, and my hands won’t be here to make sure you kids know how to keep yourselves alive too. So I choose to live, and every day is a choice to keep living.
“Your Mama made a different choice. She chose to end the struggle, and it ended her life. So... what is a ghost...?” He gathered his thoughts back to the question posed. “Some people thought that humans are just some kind of flesh-and-blood machine that carries our spirit, and that our mind - the thoughts we think - is our true spiritual self, and our body is just the vessel. That what our eyes see just gets passed along to what our mind thinks, but our mind is not part of our body. That after our body dies, our mind leaves it, and goes somewhere else. I’m no scientist, but to me that just doesn’t add up. Some people used to tell stories though, about spirits that leave the bodies of their dead loved ones, but the spirits don’t want to leave this world, so they come back - or maybe they never left.
“I never saw God, I never saw any spirits walking around, and I never saw any living creature that is smarter or more powerful than a human with a mind. But... you need to understand... we’re not alone out here.”
A cold wind blew through the crack in the barn door and sent a shudder down Gus’s spine. “What do you mean, Papa?” Gus scooped the warm air from the fire towards him as he drew his arms around himself.
Jake sighed as a wave of exhaustion washed over him.
Without warning, Nimrod pounced to his feet and turned to face the barn door. A low growl rumbled in his chest and the hairs on his shoulders stood up. The children were startled by this and without hesitation Jake was on his feet, grabbing his rifle and pulling back its bolt. Taking aim at the door, he stepped around the fire and knelt down next to the trembling children, not taking his eye off the object of Nimrod’s anxiety.
“Up in the loft, now!” he snapped in a whisper to the children, who obediently scrambled across the dirt floor and made their way up the long step ladder.
Nimrod remained frozen, rumbling a barely audible growl into the night, and Jake began to see a faint glow emerging through the cracks of the barn door. He nudged Nimrod with the side of his leg and commanded, under his breath: “Nimrod, upstairs, git!”
Nimrod’s vicious demeanour melted instantly into a pouting glance at his master, then he rapidly shot across the room and followed the children up the tilted step ladder, feeling his way cautiously, each paw graceful as they ascended into the dark room above. Gus pulled the ladder up behind them by the long rope it hung on. When the door of the loft snapped closed, Jake took two long strides forward and kicked the barn door wide ajar.
There before him stood Emily once more, glowing in the dark of the night. It was a bright, unnatural glow. Rather than reflecting the dim and dancing light of the fire as Jake’s body did, she seemed to emit her own luminescence, and in the cool mist of the evening the light appeared like an aura floating about her body in matching colour to her clothing, her hair, her skin. In this setting, with her body lit like a torch in the dead black of the night, outshining the stars that glistened above them, there was no fooling Jake.
Tonight he would not be seduced, like he almost had been in the daylight. In the darkness of night her nature was revealed in its full horror and not a shred of Jake could believe that this apparition was his wife.
“Jake...” she began, pleadingly.
“NO!” he shouted, “I TOLD YOU!”
“JAKE!” Her voice rose, and cracked as if in despair.
The emotion in her voice seemed real, but to Jake it felt more like a projection of a likeness captured long ago, than a real person standing before him.
“There’s not much time. I need you to listen. The children...” She tried to appeal to his emotions, but he refused to hear her.
“SHUT UP!” Jake heard the children shuffle to the edge of the loft, where, in the dimmest edges of firelight, he knew they were watching. “You will not speak to or touch my children. GET OUT!” he shouted again and fired a round from his rifle into the air.
The bullet whistled past her ear, cutting the mist like a blade through flesh. Jake looked over his shoulder to check on the children. Maisie began to sob again and Gus reached around her and covered her mouth gently with his hand. He too was crying now.
The rifle round echoed rhythmically off the trees and distant hills, and diminished to a dull rumble, then to nothing. Emily took a step towards Jake, her hands open in a gesture of peace.
“STOP!” he shouted, chambering another round with a swift and violent clack on the rifle’s bolt. As the ejected cartridge bounced on the ground, he widened his legs to demonstrate his seriousness and held the gun pointed at her face. This morning she had not flinched at the sight of his rifle. Tonight she did. What’s changed? he wondered.
She stopped. She looked at him blankly for a moment, then turned her head upward, to look towards the loft.
Jake had a sudden realisation that she didn’t want to be shot in front of the children. Why? What would it reveal? “Don’t even think about it," Jake said as he thrust the rifle towards her.
She ignored him. “Gussy, Maisie,” she cried to them, “come on down. I’m going to take you…”
Time froze for Jake as he pressed down with his trigger finger, and drew in a deep breath faster than he knew possible. His rifle recoiled in his hands, and Jake spun backwards fearing a counter-attack. In that instant he caught sight of Gus now covering Maisie’s eyes with his hands looking on, horrified.
The bullet tore through the air and collided with the side of Emily’s face, shrieking a cacophonous howl as it ricocheted and flew off into the forest. The skin of Emily’s right cheek, her eye, and her ear shattered into millions of tiny sparks. They flew outward and backward, trailing the trajectory of the rebounding chunk of lead, and for an instant they resembled the embers that leapt from the fire. Then they briefly slowed to a halt, reversed their direction, and sprung rapidly back to their original position on her face.
As the sparks reorganised themselves, Jake noticed another texture beneath them. It was darker, not emitting its own glow like her strange layer of faux skin, but instead reflecting the light of the fire sending a few sparkles in the direction of his eyes. Its dim glow was not unlike that of his rifle shaft. It was metal.
By the time Jake had noticed it, it was gone again, the swarm of tiny embers flashing random colours for a second or two, then returning to the now undamaged face of Emily.
“You’ll have to get through me first!” He spat the words at her as he pulled the bolt again, and she watched the second cartridge align in the chamber, down the long steel tube that formed a straight line from bullet to eye.
She spoke calmly, flatly. “I won’t hurt you, Jake. I want to save you. I want to save my children.”
“GO, DAMN IT!” he screamed, and with that she turned and walked off back to the line of trees, lighting her own path.
Jake lunged forward and pulled the barn doors shut. He turned to Gus and Maisie. “Stay up there, kids. Sleep there till morning. I’ll keep watch. At first light, we’re leaving.”
“Where are we going, Papa!?” Maisie cried.
“I don’t know, but we’ll collect the cache at the bottom of the valley, and we’ll get out of here. We need a new home now. It’s time to rest. Get some sleep.”
Gus lay awake in the loft next to his sleeping sister.
Why can’t I sleep? I’ve been lying here… so long. Gus wished he had the concepts to describe the passage of time, but without clear sight of the stars, or sunlight to cast shadows, time was a meaningless blur to him.
The roof above him was solid, without a single hole, and the heat of the fire surrounded them and penetrated his skin and bones. Maisie had fallen asleep almost instantly, while Gus stroked her hair and tried to soothe her sobbing. But Gus was restless. He was trying to make sense of what he had seen.
Papa shot her! Shot… it. And its face fell off, but… came back on. What was that I saw under its skin? Why is it following us? Why does it want to take me and Maisie?
After a couple of hours of turning these questions over and over in his mind, Gus gently lowered the ladder, let Nimrod crawl down first and then followed. The dog ran straight to his master and lovingly licked his hands and neck. Jake sat in a scuffed wooden chair facing the door, his rifle positioned across his lap.
The fire blazed low and dull, making the light of the now-risen moon that peeked through the cracks in the door sway and shimmy through its rippling heat. Gus approached his father in the chair. Jake moved the rifle to one side, and Gus climbed into his lap. Jake wrapped his arms around his son and, for a time, they wept together in silence.
“What was that, Papa?”
“It was a machine, Gussy. It was a machine called a ghost.”
“A machine? I don’t... I don’t understand,” his voice quavered.
“I’m not totally sure how to explain it to you, son, you haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen. I’ve tried to keep that world away from you. I really hoped you would never see what you saw tonight. I hoped she would leave us alone. I don’t know what to tell you. Let me think on it. After we find somewhere to stay, I will tell you everything. Both of you.”
Gus snuggled closer. “Okay, Papa”.
Jake leaned in and whispered. “Happy birthday, kid. I love you.”
Gus said nothing, but smiled. Moments later, he was asleep.