“A TE CONVIEN TENERE ALTRO VÏAGGIO—” a silvery voice says.
I open my eyes. I’m staring at a corkboard ceiling and a fluorescent light. I close my eyes again and will this maze away.
“—se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvaggio,” the voice finishes, flourishing the final word as if casting a Harry Potter incantation.
I sit up, my eyes now wide open. A voice. A woman’s voice. An honest to god human voice. She’s found me, my Italian friend. I wasn’t expecting a woman.
I crane my neck to try and find her in the room. “Bastard,” I creak. “Give me back my—”
A girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, sits cross-legged against the wall behind me. She has my orange Bible propped open in her lap. She has my Stetson perched atop her pale hair. And she’s only half here.
I see her, then I see the wall through her. Were this a film, the effect would be comically cheesy. I’ve seen tutorials on how to layer videos atop one another, by recording an empty room and then the same room with someone walking through it. Simple smoke and mirrors. But that’s not what this is—this girl is see-through.
I wipe my eyes with a dusty, abused hand, hoping it might help. The effect lingers.
She looks up from the book. “Isn’t it sacrilegious to scribble in the Bible?”
I open my mouth, but no words come out.
“Or is it OK, because it’s in Latin?” She stares at me staring at her for a moment, and then shrugs. She tosses the Gideon New Testament down between us, so that it slides across the floor to rest against my foot. She looks down at it, then back up at me. She bites her lip. “That may have been sacrilege too.”
She wears blue jeans and a shapeless sweater striped with tan, orange and blue. The sleeves are too long, and she’s apparently formed a habit of gripping the cuffs in her palms. Her blonde hair, mostly obscured by my cowboy hat, is tied back in a ponytail.
I’ve been staring and she’s noticed. She leans forward to scrutinize me with similar intensity, only to recoil back. Her eyes grow wide, “Wait....” she whispers, and I catch an odd echoing quality to her voice. “I can—oh my gosh—you’re, like, transparent....”
“What!” I jump to my feet and begin to pat myself down, looking for any ethereal quality. “No, I’m not, I’m—”
“Are you a ghost?” she whispers. She leans over, breaking her cross-legged stance to study me. She reaches out a tentative finger and then hovers it over my heart.
“I don’t—what are you—” She plunges her arm into my chest and screams.
Her arm juts through me. I can’t see her fingers on the other side, but she twists her arm like a corkscrew between my ribs. I’m too startled to scream, despite the fact that there’s no chill down my spine, nor any hot and cold flashes. Indeed, I can’t feel her arm at all. Only my sense of sight confirms that she’s passing through me.
“Weird,” the girl says. “Like pins and needles all over my arm. I’m wiggling my fingers on the other side, but I guess you can’t see that. Or can you? Can you make your head do a one-eighty? Or is that only possessed people? I’ve never met a ghost before.”
“Wait,” I splutter, “I’m not the ghost. It’s you who—oh god.”
It strikes me that I haven’t been thirsty. I haven’t been hungry. But I’ve been wandering for at least a day or two now. I have no recollection of arriving in this maze. The laws of physics are clearly out the window, and ... and....
And the girl is laughing.
She removes her hand from my chest and sits back on her haunches, mirth bubbling from her lips. She pauses a moment to catch her breath, looks back at me, then laughs harder.
“What!” I shout. “Am I dead? Is that the joke?” I rise to my feet and stare down at her, a lump rising in my throat.
The girl doubles over, clutching her side and howling.
“I don’t understand!” I wave my arms, desperate to be let in on the joke. “What is this place?”
The girl holds up a finger, a motion for me to wait, but doesn’t look at me again until the last of her giggles have subsided. When she finally does look up, an impish grin paints her lips. “Heh, sorry.” She hiccups.
“What?”
“Pity I couldn’t hold it together longer.” She smiles. “I wanted to ask you how you died. See how you reacted to that one.”
My eyes narrow. “I’m not dead. You lied.”
Still sitting on the floor, the ghost gives me a mock bow. “I’m a ghost, not a saint.”
“You’re a ghost?”
She cocks her head. “The transparent look is really hot right now.”
“I—” My mouth snaps shut. I’ve just been voicing the first thoughts in my head, without pausing to form a real question.
The ghost, if she is that, has a sarcastic tone of voice and a tendency to stress at least one word every time she speaks. This whole exchange feels vaguely dreamlike. I try again, try to phrase a question that’s more than a simple voicing of whatever’s on my mind: “What do those words mean?”
The ghost gives me a look like I’m sour cream a week past the expiry date and she’s taken a dubious whiff. “Well,” she stretches out the word. “‘Transparent’ means that you can see through someth—”
“No, sorry,” I reorganize my thought. “In the Bible. The words you read. Are they instructions?”
“Oh!” The ghost’s expression softens. “Thank gosh, I thought maybe you had a concussion. No idea.”
“Sorry?”
“I have no idea what it means. I don’t read Latin.”
“Italian,” I correct her.
The ghost frowns. “How do you know it’s not Latin if you can’t read it either?”
“No, that’s not—why were you reading it if you don’t know what it means?”
She rolls her eyes. “I was nosy. And I hope I called you a loco savage and maybe an ultra vegetarian.”
“An ultra ...”
“Altro vïaggio!” the ghost shouts, pointing an accusatory finger at me. Self-satisfied, she stands and holds out a hand for me to shake. I look at the proffered hand, wondering if my fingers will slide right through it, but when I reach out to take it she feels solid enough.
“Name’s Willow,” she says. “A pleasure, et cetera. Looks like I’m your guide.”