Misguided Ghosts

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Seven – Ed

I sat on the roof, smoking. I knew I shouldn’t have been smoking, but the packet of cigarettes that I’d swiped from Liam’s bag at work when he wasn’t looking looked so tempting. I needed something to do with my hands and calm me down. However, the consequences of stealing Liam’s cigarettes had yet to make themselves apparent, which meant that I would be getting yelled out next time we were on a shift together. How could I get out of it? Say it was for the greater good? I was simply doing it to protect his lungs, looking after him like I always had done?

But there was something else. There was something wrong with Tay. The last time she’d been that distant from me, covering herself up, disappearing in the early hours of the morning and throwing up, her body was covered in cuts. She had retreated into herself, so whenever she was standing in front of me, she wouldn’t be there. She would be hiding in the deepest recesses of her own mind, doing her best to disappear when she was her own worst enemy.  

I ran a hand through my hair, stubbing out the cigarette on the roof before flicking it into the traffic below. I frowned as it tumbled through the air. When would I get my Tay back? The girl with the bright eyes and dark hair, who would look at me with shining wonder and who would rest her head on my chest while I read to her until she fell asleep. I remembered the days where we would sit in the evening sunlight throughout the summer, browned by the sun; the smell of barbeque wafting through the air; her arms were wrapped around my stomach and her cheek resting on my shoulder-blade; lighting a fire in the chimaera in Char’s back garden and sitting around it, roasting marshmallows. I longed to go back to those days, where everything was so carefree and the biggest problem was Tay’s parents.

Shimmying back across the roof, I slipped through the skylight in my bathroom and dropped to my feet. I decided that sitting on the roof was a good thing to do, because I was technically going outside, but it wasn’t really outside. From there, I could watch, and maybe understand humans. Even though I was human, not having a soul kind of made things hard. I didn’t understand them.

But then something flashed through my mind, making my head hurt and whirl. I stumbled, pressing the heels of my hands against my forehead, unsure of whether I was trying to make the pain go away or pull towards me whatever it was that I was trying so desperately to remember. Tay’s distorted voice rang in my ears, but I knew it was her. She was trying to tell me something, something that was important. Something that I’d stored away for further reference. But why bring it up now? What great importance did it have to me?

“It’s called theosophy,” At my blank look, she’d rolled her eyes and carried on. “In Helena Blavatsky’s theosophy, the soul is our field of psychological activity, so thinking, emotions, memory, desire, all that kind of stuff, as well as so-called psychic phenomena like out-of-body experiences. But she said that the soul is only the middle dimension of a human. She said that higher than the soul was the spirit, which is considered to be the real self: the source of everything that we call ‘good’, so love, happiness, harmony, peace, compassion, wisdom, all that kind of stuff. Your spirit is eternal and incorruptible, but the soul is not. The soul simply acts as a link between the material body and the spiritual self.”

What was my brain trying to tell me? What was Tay telling me? Did she know about what had happened to me?

I rubbed my head again, trying to figure it all out. Even though my soul was gone, I still had my spirit. That much made sense. But what was a spirit for? And what good was it, seeing as my centre of emotion had gone? How could it possibly improve my situation?

“Come on, brain,” I muttered. “Help me out,”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, delving into my inner library, my mind skimming through every book I’d read. Pages flickered before my very eyes, words forming a blur until I found what I was looking for. Theology, theology, theology. I’d read that word somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where? Where, where had I put away that tiny bit of information that I’d absorbed? Pages, pages, more pages. I’d been reading it with Liam, when we were laughing at the New Age books. But then my mind came to a halt. I was standing in front of the New Age shelf in the shop, the shelf extended to the ceiling, the spines seeming infinite. But there it was, right in front of my eyes. As if sensing that it was the book, it floated off the shelf and fell into my outstretched hands, falling open at the right page, the exact passage highlighted in a bright, pulsating green.