The Sad Man. A Dani Lancing Story

The Time of Ghosts

The Time

of Ghosts

A Dani Lancing Story

P. D. Viner

Introduction

         I am writing this story to commemorate and celebrate a date that has become very important in my life. February 7th 1989. It is the date that the world, and most importantly Patricia and Jim Lancing, discovered the death of their daughter Dani Lancing. She was only twenty-one years old when she died… was murdered.

As I write this, on February 3rd 2014, I am just a few days away from the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. From that point in history, like a stone dropping into a lake, I am charting the ripples her death makes in the lives of her family and friends. I have planned three novels and five linked novellas to tell this story… but I had not considered the importance of this date on my tale and on me personally. So here is a short story. It is my gift to Dani on her death-day.

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She burns. She has no other word for it. Fire flows through what once were her veins, capillaries and arteries – a system that once allowed life to flow, now filled with darkness and loss. She tries to quell it; she eats up the air as she swarms through the park, hoping the movement might cool her… though she knows it cannot. The air can’t touch her dead skin. Had she forgotten that?

Overhead the moon is a fat fingernail gleaming on the wet ground below, the Earth sodden from a month of rain. Glossy mud smears the park all the way down to the Thames. It is wet and mild, just like a rubbish boyfriend. She looks to her left, over to the cityscape. Magnificent… and all so different now, so different from when she was alive. She remembers the excitement when Canary Wharf was being built, her Dad is an architect and he said it signaled the transformation of London…

            ‘We’re going to be like New York and live and work in the heavens.’

He was right… though she was dead before the final stone was laid. Dead and reduced to ashes.

Since then everything has changed – shards, domes, gherkins, cable cars and Olympic parks all now occupy the vista ahead. Little has stayed the same, merely a few constants in the tide, like the Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory. They have laid roots deep in the history of London and stand tall against the encroaching modernity. But so much that had seemed solid has shifted, even the Cutty Sark has moved and now floats in air rather than water. There are still no jet packs… but the world marches on as she forgets to age. Twenty-five years dead and still she looks just twenty-one, and… she hurts. What was once her skin burns, it feels like she wants to shed, to shuck off this non-mortal coil like a snake. But what would lie beneath?

‘Dani!’ She hears her father’s voice from behind her. ‘Come back.’

            She turns to him, he is little more then a speck on the edge of the park, searching for her, worried about her – just like always. She opens her mouth to reply as the heavens open and huge black twisting drops dive from the sky – they fall through her eyes, her mouth, her whole body, striking the ground beneath her and pooling together to make puddles and seas. If her father shouts anything else she does not hear it, the rain rips the words apart before they can reach her. The air seethes with water and any view of him is obliterated. She turns away and moves on; slower now. As she breasts the hill, she can see the majesty of the Royal Observatory rise up. She aims towards it as, around her, the rain turns to hail and the bullets of ice tear at her, scratching at the miasma that is her form, cutting little bits off her that turn to steam only to reform and attach back to her a moment later.  She reaches the closest and oldest part of the observatory and slides through the wall and inside.