Misguided Ghosts

Chapter Fifty-Six

Fifty-Six – Ed

By the time that the police turned up, I was numb. As it turned out, one of the neighbours had called the police when they saw a boy that they didn’t recognise walking up the drive and simply pushing open the door.

I was sitting…somewhere, with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders while people buzzed around me, all of them trying to figure out what happened.

I rolled Tay’s necklace through my fingers, trying to figure out why that had stayed and she had gone. Why hadn't it been taken off me? They'd already started impounding my car. But what evidence did I have that Tay had been there? The word of an apparent schizophrenic and the fact that she hadn’t come home. I told them to ring Jared and Char, but I had no idea if they’d actually done it. Voices were muffled and nothing made much sense.

Without even thinking about what I was doing, I grabbed the wrist of the next person to walk past me.

Caleb’s face leered at me from under a policeman’s hat a malicious grin painted across his face.

I screamed, falling backwards, the blanket slipping from my shoulders. Strong hands gripped my shoulders and I fought against them, hitting at any part of exposed skin I could. Caleb had taken Tay. Maybe if I let him taken me, then I could be with her. But part of me still struggled, my survival instinct kicking in.

“I need some help over here! He’s hallucinating!”

That definitely wasn’t Caleb’s voice. Caleb’s voice was deeper. I forced myself to look whoever it was in the eye, willing Caleb’s face to fade away. I blinked, hard. A woman’s face swam into focus, with warm brown eyes and light hair. Brown eyes just like Tay’s.

“You’re going to be okay, kid,”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We called her friends and neither of them have seen her. Do you know where she went this evening?”

“Pool,”

“Okay, we’ll get right on that,”

After that, not a lot made sense. All I could really remember was broken into fragments. The police asked me all sorts of questions. Had I taken anything from the house? What was I doing there? What was my relationship to Taylor Woodson?

Part of me thought that they’d got everything in the wrong order, that they should have been questioning me before they started being nice to me, but for all I knew, my brain was filing things in the wrong order. But that wasn’t right. I never got things in the wrong order.

Caleb’s face was pasted onto the face of every officer. I didn’t know what was real anymore. What was going on? Why was he doing this to me?

I curled into a ball, wrapping my arms around my knees and rocking backwards and forwards. Humming to myself, I hid my head behind my knees and tried to make myself as small as possible. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines. Ding dang dong, ding dang dong,”

Someone was talking to me, trying to coax me out of my shell. They pulled at my arms, doing their best to get me to unfurl, to talk to them and explain things again.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

Those words became a mantra to me as I was loaded into the back of the police car.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

I was getting out of the car, not really taking in where I was.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

They had taken me into some kind of reception. Their voices washed over me as I gazed at the receptionist with a blank look. What was I doing there?

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

I was taken into a separate room, where I was suddenly bombarded with all sorts of questions, and I tried to answer them as best I could, but they weren’t making sense. They told me what I was doing there, but none of it mattered to me. Nothing mattered without Tay there.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

I didn’t know how long I was there. But the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room on my own. My clothes had gone, only to be replaced with a simple white t-shirt and blue scrub-type trousers. My feet were bare. I was sure they’d given me some kind of shoes to wear.

For the umpteenth time that day, I muttered to myself. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,”

I glanced down at my wrist, where the medical bracelet was fastened, right next to the Bro Band that I’d begged them not to take off. Mentally unstable.  Those words felt like a slap to the face.

How long had I been there? Did my parents know that I was there? Was Rodent okay? I wrapped my arms around my middle. I missed Clara. I missed my books. I missed playing the piano. There were books in the institution, but they weren’t the same as my books at home.

Institution. It was fine using that word when thinking about Liam. But using it with reference to myself? The word suddenly became abhorrent.

I knew Liam was somewhere in there as well, but I rarely got to see him. I spent a lot of my rec time sitting in the corner of the room, humming to myself to block Caleb out. He wouldn’t leave me alone, to the point where he was everywhere. There were days when he didn’t stop talking. Then there were the days where he decided to be an opera singer. Sometimes he would pass comment on everything that happened, and then there were other days where he would sit silently in a corner while I was desperate to hear what he had to say.  

I turned to the apparition in the corner, which was singing Bohemian Rhapsody. “Shut up,”

He smirked. “Make me,”  

“You’re not real,”

“We’re going to have a lot of fun together, you and I,”