TWO

 

 

Everything changed for me one warm spring day. I had decided to walk up the trail toward the summit, going to visit the three who lived in the ghostly image of an old hotel that used to stand at the crest of the trail. One girl there is my age, and I enjoy her company on warm days, even though she seldom talks. My parents told me I did not know her when I was a human. She died before we came to the valley.

I still like her, like her plain blue dress, her scuffed black shoes, her smile, when she does smile.

I am halfway up the trail, at a point where it crosses a rockslide, when a human hiker with a large blue backpack stops just ahead of me and stares.

On my left the slope goes almost straight down for a thousand feet into the trees around the stream below. On my left, the rock slope climbs very steeply, too steep to hike up, for almost two thousand feet. There is still snow on the top ridgeline, snow that feeds the streams below.

“You can’t be here, too,” she says.

I am used to humans talking even when no other human was around. This young human, a woman who was younger than my mother, is dressed in very short shorts and a soft shirt of some kind that was loose at her waist. My mother would have called her clothing indecent, but I have grown used to the way the few modern humans dressed who came to the valley in the summers.

My parents never understood why I even paid attention to the humans, but decided I was just being a normal, curious boy and after twenty or so years, they didn’t bother to even comment on my habits.

I step up the slope, just off the narrow trail, and stop to wait for her to pass. I have never liked having a human walk through me, and decided that if I could help it, I would not let that happen. It felt like walking through a fire, from what I could remember of the heat of a fire. We did not often feel much of anything. Feeling seemed to be a human experience that ended with death.

She does not continue forward, but instead stares at me, seeming to talk to me.

“Is there not any place on this planet you ghosts do not roam?”

My father had used the term ‘ghosts’ a few times to describe us, and every time my mother had hushed him, telling him we were not ghosts, we were simply waiting for the next stage of life.

“I do not know,” I say to the young woman. “I live in this valley with my parents and others.”

“I had so hoped,” she says, pulling off her heavy pack, dropping it on the narrow trail, and sitting down on a large rock. Then she breaks into tears, something I have seldom seen humans do over the hundred years. I remember I used to cry when I was alive at times, but had never cried since I had left being a human.

“Hope what?” I ask, moving closer to her, but stopping within ten feet.

She looks up at me. “Hoped to find a place where there are no ghosts.”

“Then you can see us?” I ask. It is an obvious question, but one that I needed to ask because in my experience humans could not see any of us.

She nods and the tears keep coming, even though now she seems to be looking out over the narrow but beautiful valley at the steep hillside beyond. “I started seeing you after an accident last spring. There are far more ghosts than there are humans in some places, did you know that? Even here.”

“I can show you where there are none of my kind,” I say, wanting to ask her more questions, but deciding not to at the moment.

She looks directly at me. “You can? Where?”

I point back toward where my parents are. “There is an old town named Roosevelt under a lake down the hill. A stream comes in near the lake. If you follow the stream up the hill, in about a half-day’s hike, you will find an old gold mine. There are none of my people there and we have no reason to leave this valley and go there.”

She jumps to her feet, clearly excited. “Will you show me the way?”

“I will,” I say.

She bends over, grabs the strap of her clearly heavy backpack and swings it up on her shoulder. The weight makes her stagger, her foot slips on the loose rock of the trail, and she goes over the edge of the trail with a scream, pulled by the heavy weight of her pack.

I watch as she tumbles down the rock slope, gaining speed until a thousand feet below she crashes into the trees, followed by a small avalanche of stones following her. Her screams had stopped long before she reached the bottom.