The night deepened, and the moon rose higher into the sky. We came to another break in the trees, and before us ran long thin dirt-trail that cut through another cornfield of withered, worn-out cornstalks. We followed it awhile to the crest of a hill, and there the ghost stopped. "Let us rest here," she said, and motioned toward the base of a tall beech tree with thick, sweeping branches. I made no inquiries regarding the resting habits of ghosts, and walked toward the tree and sat.
Spirit stared at the stars as I sat, and for a while said nothing. Then, as I felt my eyes growing heavy, she asked, "Who was she?"
"Who was who?" I asked, even as I knew too well what the apparition meant.
"The woman who showed you this place?"
"How do you know it was a woman?"
She smiled at that, and turned her bright, glimmering eyes toward me. "I may be the transparent one between us, but your mind is more like a ghost than you realize."
Well, how does one argue with that? "Fair enough," I said, and with a shrug concluded that nothing could be kept from this most-discerning of spirits. "She was a friend of mine, who grew-up in the town nearby. I knew her for a long time before she showed me this place."
"But no longer?"
"No, she's since moved away," I said, a cornucopia of images flashing across my mind--a long bridge...a bar of chocolate...a circle of stones...
"I'm sure she's happy where she is," Spirit said.
"Aye, she seemed it, when last I saw her," I said, and closed my eyes. A tear inexplicably formed in the corner of my eye, which I blinked away. The ghost seemed not to notice, but I would bet much that she did.
"Maybe she will come and see you here," Spirit said, running a pale hand through her ghostly locks.
"That is...unlikely," I said, choosing my words with care.
The ghost did not seem surprised by my words, "Oh, but you are a foreigner, and she a native, and your friend. Why would she not come and see you?"
"I'd rather not speculate, Spirit. Her home is many hours away now, and for all I know she's busier now than a beehive in spring."
"Something happen between you?"
I mislike this line of questioning. "Meaning no disrespect, Spirit, but that is between her and I, and you need know nothing more than that I hold her as a friend in high regard."
"And does she hold you in the same regard?"
My mouth opened, but no words came forth at first. "I--that is--no, I cannot say. I'm sorry."
"Cannot? Or will not?"
My eyes hardened at that, and said more harshly than I meant, "Tell me, Spirit, were you turned into a ghost for asking too many questions, or did you only get that way after haunting the forest for too long?"
Immediately I regretted my words, as the face Spirit assumed then carried with it a burden of anguish that seemed as heavy as the world itself. "No," she said, almost at a whisper. "I did not ask many questions while alive, so that when my fiance left me I was the only one surprised. And when I finally asked him why he left, he refused to give me any answer." She turned from me then, gazing toward the full moon with upturned eyes and hands clasped as if in prayer. "I asked again and again, hoping for something to help ease my loss--that the time was not right, perhaps, or that he had met someone prettier. But he would not say, and never answered my letters." She floated over to the beech tree where I sat, and stared mournfully towards the canopy. "I grew frantic--desperate to get his attention, and with it maybe some closure to what our relationship had been. And so one day I wandered into the Boserup Skov, and on a night like this, with the moon full overhead, I stopped beneath this very tree, and drawing a rope from my pack--"
There was a flash, and instead of Spirit before me I saw a young girl--barefoot and dressed in white--swinging lifeless from the branch above my head. I cried out and fell to the ground, eyes wide with terror, my hands shaking as they covered my head. And then the tears came, a sudden flood of them that drenched my cheeks and sent shudders through me so powerful that I felt them even in my fingernails. The shock of it hit me in a thousand ways, and so potent was the dose that I knew I would never be the same after that moment. There I was on the ground, for how long I could not say; a nervous-system gone completely and utterly out of control. But when the tears had finally subsided and I managed a peak through the slits of my fingers, the moon had moved far across the sky, and the luminous form of Spirit had returned. She was speaking quickly in a language I recognized but could not understand. She whispered awhile longer, and then turned her own tear-soaked eyes upon me.
"It was the only way I could speak to him anymore," she said with a smile that faded as quickly as it had appeared. "And it worked, so far as it goes. Later he confessed to my mother that he had been seeing another woman in the capital, but that he could not bear to tell me about her. He was a good man, but not so good at describing how he felt. And I--well, I did not always help matters. I insisted that we get engaged quite early, for fear of losing him to someone else. But he wasn't really ready to make that commitment, and hinted as such on several occasions. But I did not listen--did not understand the clues he left, as others did. And at some point the strain must have become too great, and he left me without giving a single reason why."
Had Spirit not been a ghost, I might have given her shoulder a pat, or at the least an encouraging squeeze. As it was, nothing of the sort was possible given her condition, and so I stood there like an awkward idiot feeling as though something like this had happened once before. What could one say to a ghost suffering from such melancholy?
No comments:
Post a Comment