The hooded shadow emerged from the larger, jagged shadow of the building and shuddered across the rough ground where the forecourt had once been laid. Megan glanced behind her, looking for its source, then shivered as she realized it was her own, made eerily penumbral by the spots they used for setting up the kit in winter, shining out above the broken walls. After this site they would shut the project down for the winter, analyze their data, see if there was anything worth reporting. “Maybe tonight’s the night,” she whispered to her shadow, and the sound of her voice in the lonely woods made her hair stand on end. “Come on out, you ghosts, I’m just another specter, just like you.” Nobody answered; the ruins brooded behind her and the woods talked only to themselves.
She kicked her way through the wet leaves; last season’s fashions cast to the ground to molder. Broken bricks and creeping brambles made the going tricky, but she didn’t want to use her torch. In the eighteen months they’d been investigating supposedly haunted sites, she’d never seen, heard, or felt anything that wasn’t easily put down to a draft or the shifting of ancient walls and staircases, but she wanted to hold onto that feeling: a ghost amongst ghosts, floating insubstantially through romantic, moonlit ruins.
Returning from the car with the thermos, she tripped on a fallen branch and sprawled in the open entrance to the old hotel. She cursed, brushing bits of twig off her old overcoat, and pushed her way into the thick, musty darkness of the hallway. So much for floating.
◊
She called out “Ho there” as she approached the ballroom door. Dan answered cheerily. She stepped into the light, picked her way across the remains of a parquet floor, and sat in a wobbly director’s chair under the small marquee they’d erected. She watched him working while she poured the coffee, and as she passed him a cup she read over his shoulder.
◊
“Not all buildings have a reputation for being haunted. For those that do, such anomalous experiences and events do not take place all of the time. Furthermore, when such instances do occur, not all persons present report them. These observations imply that there may be some critical dimensions or factors that distinguish such properties from other locations and differentiate certain observers from other individuals.”
Megan was one of the “certain observers,” recruited into Dan’s research project because she’d once awakened in the night to see her grandmother crawling on all fours along the hall ceiling. Her grandmother had been dead six months at the time. Megan had been eight years old, and nervously disposed. When she’d told the story at one of those round-the-campfire nights at Glastonbury, Dan had leaped on it like a hunting spider, asked all sorts of questions. They’d been last to bed, and he hadn’t even tried to kiss her.
“I’ll just go round again,” said Dan, standing up and stretching. They’d set up the MADS sensors already, and Megan had checked the alignments with the compass, but Dan liked to double-check everything she did. She’d long ago given up getting offended about it; he was that way with everyone. The lights picked out the active sensor in sharp delineation against the peeling wallpaper that clung to the broken walls, and Dan in his red anorak, hood pulled up around his face. She’d never yet tired of looking at that face, thin-lipped and finely boned, denim blue eyes always intently focused on something. Sometimes that something was Megan, but not often enough, and never in the way she wanted. She said nothing, afraid to push in case it killed their friendship. Her friends said she was crazy, and they didn’t even know the truth of it. The lies she’d told about the boys there’d been; there was never more than this, a yearning for something out of reach. A tingle of sadness at the back of her mind suggested that she’d probably tire of looking at him soon. Soon, but not yet, she decided, sipping on her coffee.
“Certainly one effective method for a contemporary field-based investigation of a haunting would be to evaluate (1) environmental factors specific to the location, (2) individual factors specific to the observer, and (3) factors specific to an interaction between the location and the observer. In the case of specific locations associated with numerous instances of anomalous haunt-type experiences, an evaluation of how the surrounding micro-environment could be responsible for inducing such an experience would seem crucial.”
The baseline sensor was located outside the building, collecting data they could use to compare the electromagnetic fields inside and outside. Tomorrow she and Dan would go through the data, looking for anomalies. If they found anything they’d go to step 2: interview the people who’d responded to Dan’s survey stating that they’d had supernatural experiences at this site. The ballroom was supposed to be the hotspot. She glanced around. It was large, the full width of the building, with three bay windows looking out into an enclosed courtyard, and three looking toward the road that led through the woods up to the main entrance. The windows were reduced to U-shaped openings in the brickwork, but in places the walls were still ten feet high. A decayed sofa lay on its side in the middle of the room, mahogany legs helplessly in the air like a great dead insect. The shadow it cast behind it in the hard light from the spots was even more insectile. Megan closed her eyes and tried to imagine the room as it must have been once. Bright and airy. Rather grand. She couldn’t make it happy, somehow, but certainly bright.
“Why did they close this place down?”
Dan turned to face her, smiled and waved a finger.
“How long have we been doing this? You know you don’t get the juice on the hospice until tomorrow.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
It was always the same story anyway. She didn’t know why he was so coy about it; she could have googled the place if she’d really wanted to know, and it would be some variation on the usual themes: unseen children crying in empty rooms, headless monks walking through walls, or women in white, killed whilst attempting to rendezvous with a forbidden lover. Still trying to make that meeting, failing for all eternity. Then there were the friendly ones, killed in disasters and for some reason bound to the spot trying to avert future accidents. She liked those stories better. Well, perhaps the sensor readings would show something in the morning and they’d be able to put the hotel’s ghosts to rest. Just naturally occurring electromagnetic fields, making mojo with your brain.
“I sometimes wish I didn’t know the science,” she said, pulling her tobacco pouch from her pocket and rolling up.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Dan, finally leaving off tweaking the sensors and sitting back down, long legs stretched in front of him. “You want to be scared shitless by random phenomena every time you walk past an iron deposit or an overhead cable? Don’t you have enough trouble sleeping as it is?”
She looked at him. Half his face was in shadow, half in the light; bright light and deep shadow like the face of the moon. Laughter lines were just beginning to crease the corners of his eyes. Her stomach turned over with desire. So long she’d yearned for him, sitting this close, closer, if she reached out she could touch his face, but then again she couldn’t. Yes, she longed for more tangible strangeness in her life. For something to actually happen, instead of all this pointless longing. As a child she’d populated her world with imaginary friends and fantastic beasts. Dryads in every tree, naiads in every pond. Too much reading, too much time spent mooning around on her own. Two years into a degree in psychology, she’d had most of the credulity educated out of her, but she liked the idea of a world with magic in it. Dan was a postgrad, and he didn’t believe in anything inexplicable.
She tapped the end of her roll-up against her knee.
“You make it sound so prosaic. But you know, maybe there is something there, too. We don’t know yet.” She lit her cigarette and inhaled, blowing a smoke ring out into the glare of the light. “All the factors have not been eliminated.”
“They will be,” said Dan.
“Many studies have carried out detailed surveys of such locations and revealed potential contributing influences from (1) contextual and situational specific factors, (2) diverse lighting levels, (3) drafts, (4) infrasound levels, (5) the localized distribution and changes in geomagnetic fields (GMFs), (6) time-varying electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and (7) transient tectonic events, to name but a few. All of these factors, either collectively or individually, could either induce a direct experience or facilitate an experience-prone state in certain observers and under certain circumstances.”
Megan clawed toward consciousness with desperation and regret. Sharks had chased her through murky waters following the scent of blood; this she knew although she wasn’t injured. When she’d reached the surface and walked out onto the dusty beach, she’d turned to see the Earth hanging in the sky, big and round and beautiful and impossibly far away. There was a terrible pain in her lower back and she turned to find a tiny shark, its jaws locked around her spine. She turned and tried to grasp its slippery body. The sense of dread she felt seemed disproportionate to the circumstances, and when she came to herself, pain wracking her sacrum where she’d slumped awkwardly in her chair, the dread didn’t pass. It was always the bloody sharks, even though she could watch Jaws all the way through now with barely a twitch of fear. You never shook off the six-year-old inside.
“Dan,” she said, feeling as if she was still underwater. She couldn’t hear her own voice. “Dan,” she tried again. “What did you mean, hospice? I thought this was a hotel?” Although her pulse was racing as if she’d just run a mile uphill, when she turned her head to look at him, it was the motion of rock grinding against rock. He was sitting at the laptop, his back to her. He hadn’t heard. She tried to lift her hand, but it stayed resolutely still, resting on her knee. The other was the same. The left foot, the right foot; nothing was shifting. She felt her breath start to quicken and her chest constrict. It’s OK, she told herself. Sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Happens to people all the time.
She knew all about sleep events. They explained a lot of haunt-type experiences. Knowing about something didn’t make you immune to it, though. She closed her eyes and sent a message to whoever might be listening. When I said I wanted something to happen I didn’t mean a crappy old night terror. This isn’t any fun at all. Her breathing was still accelerating. She fought to regain control. Nothing to fear. You’ll fall asleep again soon. Won’t even remember it in the morning. She imagined herself at eight years old, with her mother’s arms around her, the old yellow blanket that always made her feel safe. She could almost smell it, but her heart still beat in her throat. The dread pooling in her stomach writhed and split into two and her awareness doubled: déjà vu. Had she been suffering from night terrors all along and just not remembered it? Was this a cycle?
She reached out to Dan with her frantic mind, begging him to turn around, please, please turn around and see that her eyes were open, and come over and wake her, take her in his arms and stroke her hair and make everything all right. He didn’t turn. Figures rolled across the laptop screen. In the blue light it cast, his hands quested across the keyboard, pale and unearthly like the albino lobster she’d once seen in a restaurant aquarium.
A clattering, scrambling sound echoed in the corridor outside the room.
In the corner of her eye she could see a blue-green glow quite like to the one coming from the screen, creeping misty through the empty doorframe and onto the parquet. An eternity of arrhythmic heartbeats and the battle for control of her rigid neck muscles brought Megan’s head around. The sounds stopped as the creature came to a halt in front of her. Silhouettes stretching in two directions were rendered faint by the creature’s own ethereal glimmer. It dropped its silver horn to the ground, flashed one eye at her, and spoke.
This shouldn’t be. Paralysis yes, a sense of dread, sure, auditory hallucinations, maybe. Something sinister in the room. The hag on your chest, the succubus stealing your breath. Not this. Not the complexity of dreams, not talking fantasies, not…for fuck’s sake. Unicorns. Breathe.
“Megan?”
Not a voice so much as an increase in the pressure in her chest, a prickling at the back of her neck. Still the snakes twisting in her gut. Still the déjà vu, never gone on this long, and she knew, knew for sure, that this could not have happened before.
“Aren’t you pleased to see me?”
Her eyes were watering. She choked, fought to swallow. The beast took a step toward her, and she could see that tears rolled from its eyes, too. She tried to cringe away from it. It stepped forward again, and she could smell its breath. Like summer afternoons. Its hoofs were silver, its coat was white and its mane and tail were lavender. A memory caught her, pulled her back twelve years, to an attic room, a yellow blanket on a high bed beneath an open window. Her collection of toy unicorns arrayed in front of her. Larha, her favorite. Porcelain, fragile, smooth beneath her hands, a gift from her grandmother, not one to be played with.
“Here I am, Megan. Won’t you stroke my neck?” It turned its head, presenting shimmering inches of silver fur. Something glistened gray, attached to its head just below the ear. Whatever it was, she couldn’t look at it.
“Wrong,” she whispered. This is wrong.
It turned to look at her again, and its tears were thickening, darkening, leaving dirty streaks on its face. “She kept me safe for sixty years. You had me for six. Unicorns can’t fly, Megan, didn’t you know?”
She’d known. Fly, she’d told the little china thing, fly to Granny. Shattered pieces on the patio. Her mother crying. Her mother, crying. Granny was my mum, Megan. I miss her just like you’d miss me if I had to go away and not come back.
The unicorn’s tears were taking off the fur where they passed.
“I’m sorry.” She wanted to cry, but terror was stronger. She wanted to reach out and comfort Larha, but still she couldn’t move. She wanted to leap from her chair and run, drive through the night to her parents’ house in Clapham, hurl herself onto her mother’s bed. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. And—don’t leave me.
The tears were cutting furrows in his skin. Scarlet mixed with the black droplets and dripped onto the floor.
“Dies,” he said, kneeling on the ground and laying his chin on the ground. “Everything dies. Why did you let go of me?”
Larha collapsed onto his side. A collection of broken bits laid on a blue silk scarf. Her mother, her hands still supple, folding the cloth over. Wordlessly putting the bundle away in a drawer in the sideboard. She turned toward Megan and stepped through the cone of light shining on the active sensor. Her hair was long and loose, and she wore a brown cotton dress that left her tanned arms bare.
Megan still couldn’t breathe properly. She felt her eyes trying to roll up into her skull, and yet could not draw them away from the impossible vision of her mother walking gracefully toward her.
“Megan?”
“Mum?”
“Hello, muffin,” she said, smiling and bending down so her face was close to Megan’s. She smelled of shampoo and Chanel 19. “I hear you’re still having trouble sleeping. Do you want me to tell you a story?”
Suddenly Megan felt terribly tired. The fight went out of her limbs, and they no longer felt trapped and rigid, but heavy and useless.
“Once upon a time,” said her mother, seating herself on the floor, “there was a beautiful princess.”
“Is the story about me?” Megan whispered without meaning to.
Her mother hesitated, and frowned. “It was always about you, wasn’t it? My youth, devoted to your happiness. You and your father.” The frown became a scowl. Looking up at Megan, she drew back her lips and bared her teeth. They were tiny arrowheads set into her gums, a row of chipped flints she flicked her tongue across. “Everything you touched you broke. And you abandoned me here! Tied up and forgotten! A hundred years of isolation. A hundred aching years.” She moaned. “Chaos. Terror. You don’t understand Megan, you’ll never understand.”
It was true. She didn’t understand, had always shied away from understanding. She woke in the night with fragments of understanding scurrying away from her conscious mind like cockroaches from the light.
Her mother lay back on the floor. Her moans became shrieks of pain and fear. Megan had the idea that if she tried to move, she’d be able to now, could go to her mother’s side and help her. But she couldn’t try. Her face was still wet with tears, but the flow had stopped and she longed to be able to cry again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to break him. I didn’t know what would happen.”
Hands bunched and released the fabric of the cotton dress that now clung to her mother’s skin, sweat-soaked. Something squirmed beneath the fabric. Her legs began to thrash, then spread wide and, from beneath that chocolate-colored canopy across her knees, the something emerged. Through bloody mucus she could see gray flesh, slick and alien. Like the leech-thing on Larha’s white neck, only bigger. It fought free of the placenta and uncurled; a head, a body. Fins. Tail. Teeth. Her mother still sobbed. As the shark-baby moved up her body, another came, and another. Four sharks swam over her, and where they passed her skin sagged. Muscle melted away leaving bone and sinew. They traveled along her limbs and positioned themselves at her joints, opened tooth-filled jaws and bit down. At the ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, her mother was divided. There was no blood.
When they bit into her throat, the screaming stopped.
The sharks swam away into shadow, but their presence filled the room. The body on the floor was a pile of broken bits. I didn’t mean to let you go.
The lassitude still wrapped her mind and body in poison, but she found she no longer minded not being able to breathe. The pain, the paralysis, even the fear; she understood that they were deserved. She was exhausted, though.
She blinked slowly and looked around the room. Susurrations away by the walls let her know the sharks were still out there. The upturned sofa still loomed evilly to one side of her, and Dan’s hands still worked the keyboard at the other.
“Dan?”
Her voice was shaky, but came out more or less like a real voice. He turned from the screen. “Megan? What’s up?”
She checked herself. The faintest whisper of the sharks slithering over the asylum’s detritus at the very edge of hearing. No bodies on the ground. Residue, that’s all it was. The residue of a dream.
“Nothing. I fell asleep for a while there. Dreamed about sodding sharks again.” She tried a laugh. “I’m OK, a bit stiff is all. Anything on the sensors yet?”
“There’s regular pulse event the same as the one we had at the castle last month. Nothing else obvious. Are you sure you’re OK? You look a bit wiped out. Maybe you should go back to sleep.”
Megan’s pulse fluttered.
“No, I’m fine, honest. I’m wide awake now.”
Tentatively, she wiggled her fingers. The results were promising. She couldn’t quite bring herself to stand up, but Dan surprised her by getting up and coming over to her. He crouched down, in the same spot where—but there were no remains there now, no sign that anything had happened.
He reached out one long finger and stroked her damp hair back from her face. The touch sent her blood pressure soaring once again. He rested his hands on her legs and sighed.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Does it have to be about anything?” one of his hands stroked absently up and down the outside of her thigh. She could barely feel it through the heavy wool of her overcoat, and yet every pass sent tremors through her that threatened to become cramps.
“You look so tired, that’s all. I feel bad for dragging you out here and keeping you up all night. I know you have a lot to deal with at the moment.”
“Nothing I haven’t been dealing with for years already, Dan.”
He took one of her hands in his, turned it over and kissed her palm.
“I’ve been alone,” he said softly. There was a note in his voice she’d never heard before. “That is, I’ve been lonely. I mean—I mean it would be lonely here without you.”
His eyes were lost in the shadow of his hood, leaving his mouth as the only focus of her attention. Something about his teeth made her shiver, and for a second she caught herself listening for shark bellies slithering in the dirt. She pushed back his hood to expose his face fully. His eyes crinkled as he smiled. God, he was beautiful.
“You want this, don’t you?” his intonation was somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. All Megan could do was nod. He pushed himself forward, weight pressing through his arms and down onto her thighs, and pressed his lips to hers. His tongue pushed into her mouth and this time she heard it for certain, the whisper of unseen things moving in the building, rubbery flesh over rotting leaves, communicating with one another through strange scents and the poetry of half-light. Peeling wallpaper shivered like leaves in a breeze she couldn’t feel. Her arms froze at her sides again and her neck stiffened. She tried to push his tongue away and close her mouth, but her pushes were without force, without effect. He probed deeper, his weight pressing against her chest now. When he finally pulled back and looked at her, the laughter in his eyes had gone; they were onyx marbles set in skin the texture of linoleum. Merciless.
He pulled her hips forward and knelt between her knees. She was entirely paralyzed again, but for her heart, which beat furiously, filling her ears with the rushing of her own blood, mixing her blood with the whispering song of her fear. And mixed with the fear was lust. She did want this. Her lips, as soon as his left them, felt the grief of loss, the agony of unfulfilled desire.
“Do you fear it?” asked Dan, whom she was no longer sure was Dan at all.
She nodded.
“You won’t break,” he said, through teeth as sharp as knives, “even if you bleed. You’re not a china doll. You’re meat, just like the rest of us. You want me at arm’s length so you can imagine I’m perfect, don’t you? So we won’t break one another? But I’m meat, and you can cut meat and you can make it die but we all die in the end. You have to touch something in your life, and you have to risk watching it die. Everything dies. Look.”
He stood up and pulled off his anorak, and his sweater with the University logo on it, and his blue T-shirt. Then he bunched the skin at his waist between his fingers, and pulled. A seam opened from his throat to his navel and he peeled the skin back to reveal the musculature beneath, and the soft glistening organs.
“People are just walking steak and liver, same as cattle. I—we suffer. Does that stop us needing one another?”
Black eyes bored into her.
He undid his belt buckle.
“Say you need it.”
She thought of her mother, wasted to a skeleton, limbs shot with phantom pain and real spasms, confined to a hospice bed for years, and the light leeching away from her smile and the words leaking away from her mind, and she found herself surrounded. Fluorescent light flooded the room, shining down from strips fitted to a high, ornamented ceiling. The sofa by the wall was upright and cushioned. Two more sofas and several huddles of armchairs were arranged to give views out of the six bay windows. Everywhere, there were people. Sick, dying, broken people.
None of them were looking at her and Dan, but she felt their emotions pressing up to her like a tide, like the jellyfish carried by that tide, slapping into her mind and trailing their stinging sorrow across it. Abandoned people. Trapped people. Alone with only the phantoms their own minds had created.
“Say you need it.”
Images and sensations overwhelmed her; needles reaching for her naked skin, cuffs around her wrists, bitter medicines, unrecognized faces, voices in her ears telling her she was a bad, bad person; Gerry is a bad person; she mouthed it helplessly, knowing that it didn’t belong to her, and that it did.
“Say it, Megan.”
She couldn’t speak. Her tongue was swollen and the poison coursed in her veins, veins she was acutely aware of, carrying envenomed blood around her body. Meat, yes meat, but mind too, and the mind was all too brittle. The Dan-thing was lying to her. But she needed it even more, knowing that.
When he—it—unzipped its fly she wasn’t surprised to see something there that wasn’t pink, but gray.
Its teeth ripped through her clothes and into her body. She saw fins sliding inside her, the powerful tail slapping against her legs as it drove further in. Dan was holding her by the shoulders and looking at her.
“I won’t let you go, Megan. Wherever you go, I’ll be with you.” Jaws lined with tiny arrowheads closed around soft flesh deep inside her, and she felt blood soaking her thighs.
Her fingertips flexed with remembered feeling. Without moving, they traced the hard curves of a porcelain figurine. The waves of a mane, the cool planes of belly and flanks, the slender legs.
“Won’t let you go.”
Three days after the unicorn had failed to fly, Megan’s mother had collapsed. The diagnosis had taken another month to come in, and by that time Megan was quite sure it was her fault. She kissed Larha’s perfect curves with her mind.
She let go.
“With respect to magnetic fields, researchers are proposing that perhaps some aspect of these fields have “experience-inducing properties”—even more so if observers have shown a degree of increased neuronal hypersensitivity and susceptibility to these fields. The general hypothesis from this is that such Experience Inducing Fields (EIFs) could be present at reputedly haunted locations and may well underlie a number of reports ranging from nebulous and ambiguous sensations to extreme and complex hallucinations.”
“Ow,” she said, stretching and rubbing at the sore spot on her back. A dull cramp radiated through her sacrum and into her abdomen.
Dan turned from the laptop and gave her a half smile. “Morning, gorgeous. You’ve been out for hours.”
“Have I? My back hurts.”
“I’m not surprised. These chairs weren’t meant for kipping in.”
“I had this dream. I was swimming in the sea and there were these sharks after me. It was pretty scary.”
“Did they catch you?”
“No—I don’t know. Loads of other stuff happened I think, but all I remember at the end is I was standing on the beach looking up at the moon, only it wasn’t the moon. It was the Earth. Are there any sandwiches left?”
“Half a ham one; I saved it for you.”
“Gosh, thanks, I’m honored.”
She stood up gingerly. Her legs were half-dead from being in the chair. Dan picked up the sandwich from the trestle table and handed it to her. Their fingers brushed together as she took it from him, and the wobble in her legs grew momentarily worse. He turned back to the screen and pointed at the lines of scrolling data. She controlled the wobble, but still felt slightly strange.
“There’s definitely something here,” Dan said. “The readings from the active sensor are far more complex than the ones from the baseline sensor. There are three spikes of activity, here, here, and here.”
Growing evidence suggests that crucial EIFs are characterized primarily by their complexity rather than overall field strength/amplitude. Only small windows of frequencies seem to have potent consequences for neural activity and anomalous consciousness, and these can generally be described as being within the spectrum of the human brain. The low-amplitude, low-frequency, complex nature of these fields seems important in order for them to be integrated into, and alter, the overall current perceptual gestalt.
The feeling of strangeness passed, and work took over.
When they’d packed the equipment into Dan’s rusty Escort and set off down the road through the woods, dawn was still hours away. In a service station café somewhere off the M6, Dan gave her the background on the hospice.
“It was closed down 16 years ago, as you know. The main reason it was closed was because the people who came here mostly seemed to get worse instead of better. Oh, I should tell you—it wasn’t a hotel, until late on; it was a country house, and then a sanatorium, and then a hospice. Quite a history.” He waved his fork and a bit of egg slid off and onto the tabletop. “So of course it took them a long time to work it out because that’s always been pretty normal for mental hospitals. You know, deterioration. Specifically, people with hallucinatory symptoms reported more severe symptoms than they’d come in with, and people with no hallucinations—depressives, what-have-you—started to experience them. What makes it interesting is that the staff sometimes saw things too. The place got a reputation as being haunted by the ghosts of earlier inmates.”
Megan huddled down into her overcoat and made “I’m listening” noises. Dan took a sip of coffee and rattled on.
“So then they closed the sanatorium and opened it as a care hospice, but things didn’t quiet down much. Finally it was turned into a hotel and health spa. The survey data’s skewed though, I expect, ‘cause most of the responses we got were from folk who stayed in the spa. Didn’t last long. People went away disturbed. The reports cover all sorts of things; night terrors, children crying, figures walking through walls, unaccountable sense of dread, all the usual stuff. Nearly half the people who filled the survey out said they still have haunt-type experiences quite frequently since having one here, even when they’re not in a common haunt location.” He looked delighted.
“Mm-hm?”
“Yeah, and that’s way above average. I was thinking about what you said about all the factors not being accounted for.”
“Really? I said something worth thinking about?”
Dan raised his eyebrows at her playfully. A cold shiver ran up Megan’s spine. Damn, he really was something. So much for getting tired of looking at him. She sighed.
“Well, it does happen from time to time. Anyway, it struck me that you could almost make a case for there being something there. It follows on from a paper I was reading last night; remind me to email you the reference. But listen, if the gestalt of your consciousness exists in an EMF, maybe other kinds of EMF are inhabited by other kinds of consciousness. It’s a stretch, but it’s an interesting idea. Or there could be some interaction between the place and the person, such that traces of one are exchanged with traces of the other.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Of course not. Hey, I was up all night, while you were snoring prettily in your chair. I had to entertain myself somehow.”
“Sorry,” said Megan.
“Don’t be,” said Dan. “You needed your sleep. How is your mum, anyway?”
◊
She looked away from him, and instead carefully inspected the plate in front of her that had lately held an omelette and chips. As she did every waking moment, without even thinking, Megan forced her feelings down and away into the corners and corridors of her mind. She’d had years of practice at it.
“About the same. You know how it is; it mostly doesn’t change from day to day.”
Her stomach cramped again and for a second she thought she heard whispering at the very edge of her hearing. Some vague feeling gnawed at her, something she didn’t want to think about. She looked at Dan’s fingers curled around the white china mug. An image of it shattering in his hand flashed across her retinas. On an impulse she didn’t recognize as her own, she reached across the table and touched his wrist.
“Actually, it’s been pretty rough lately. They—I think she’s kind of given up on it all. Life, that is. You know, I could use some decompression time. We could—would you like to go out for a drink tonight?” She smiled, felt it come out lopsided. Tremors shook her. Dan set down the mug and twined his fingers into hers, and his eyes crinkled as he smiled back.
I won’t let you go. Something screamed and tore inside Megan, and a multitude of voices with a single face—her own face—darkly rejoiced. Every nerve was alive. The captivity and the freedom of the meat. The trapdoor of death was still a door. She ran her tongue across her teeth, enjoying their sharpness.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dan, pathetically.
“It’s OK,” said Megan. “Everything dies.”