The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,67
see where the poor abalone hunter was ripped to shreds, thirty years ago. I fear what’s coming next. I’ve seen it before. The ghost flower, a white spear standing tall above the other snapdragons in the garden, has gone gray and black. The puckered mouths of its blooms are shriveling and falling to the ground at the feet of Ellen, Pratt, and the old woman. It’s telling them a crawler is near. About to surface and find us.
A dream-crawler isn’t a ghost. It’s a pitiful creature trapped between body and spirit. It’s a thing that can’t find air or light or hope. It has nothing to do with me. It’s a soul that was buried in a place where it didn’t want to be buried, and so it tunnels through the dark, with the worms, until something speaks, beckons to it. Then it rises. Wailing.
Pratt stands in front of the women, protecting them. The carcass of the crawler has begun prying its rotting fingers out of the roots. Its neck and spine hump, showing. It strains to break its hips free from the tide of dark soil under the flowers. Deep gashes, the marks of the rocks, scar the dead man’s bones.
Ellen is trying to move Mrs. Fanoli, who can neither speak nor move.
“Get her out of the way. Now! ” Pratt says.
Ellen lifts her—I don’t see how—as if she’s suddenly much stronger than she’s always looked.
Pratt takes a single step away from them, forward, and then another and another, coming closer to the crawler. It breaches and falls to the path, pleading.
I had hoped to be elsewhere, it groans.
And why is it hope, I want to cry back, that causes more pain in all this world than such a sweet thing should?
The corpse rubs its thick, clotted skull against the gravel, writhing. Ellen and Mrs. Fanoli are scrambling away. They don’t see, as I do, from high above, that Pratt has bared his arm. The silver band with its black marks now gleams. Is that weapon, I wonder, a thing that came out of all the wars? Some button that can be touched, some gas launched, some sickening taint?
I remember Pratt’s words: Not a human being, but the mold of something that once held a human being … Yet the mold of a thing can only hold so much … Is that what it does, then? Fills a spirit with so much, it can hold no more?
I will not lose heart.
It takes heart to stand and stay with a spirit when a hunter comes to turn it to ash. It takes will not to turn away, to look and see what a hunter does. And so: I stay. I stay as long as it takes to watch Pratt raise his arm and ball his fist and then extend his fingers in a reach that looks like it might be kind, answering the cry of the pleading spirit. But it isn’t. I hear screaming through the red beam of light, and I smell the burning in the air and I back away, away and high, far up, as far as the Welcome Cottage—though I know there is no welcome, anywhere, for those of us who challenge such horrors. But I won’t look away, and I won’t lose heart. I watch as Pratt steps forward to make sure the crumbs of the man are cooling under his feet, crouching down to touch the pathway, patting it gently, and I know this much: we must never make peace with the thing that is trying to kill us.
The cottage is filled with bright postcards and packets of seeds and bulbs waiting to be planted. It seems a terrible, thoughtless, heedless place to me now. Mrs. Fanoli puts her hand to her throat, looking through the window.
“Come away,” Ellen says, strangely calm.
“I can’t help myself. I need to remember this. If only I could see better. I need to see, so I can remind myself, when my time comes, to lie myself down flat in my grave and not give any hunters a chance.”
“Come sit down.”
“I know what that was. I recognized it. It was the picture in my head, the man from my dream, my memory. He’s killed the man from my dream. What is Mr. Pratt doing now?” The old woman squints, anxiously.
“He’s coming back toward us. He’s finished.”
“What a shocking thing. We all choose our lines of work, don’t we? But I don’t know. Why choose that one?”