Ways to See a Ghost

distantly, Isis could hear the shrieks and laughter of the teenagers, still in their otherworld of bright sunshine and shops. The creature roared in a breath through many mouths, like a storm bending a forest. Angel jerked almost out of Isis’s grasp, and she gripped harder, feeling her nails bite into her palms. But Angel’s substance was falling away, Isis was losing even the shape of her. All she had left were their tight-held hands as they desperately clung to each other.
    “Isis!” Angel’s thin wail fell upwards. “Mummy!”
    “Angel!” Isis’s tears turned to ice on her cheeks. Angel was unravelling into spider silk, her scream a breathless whine.
    “I can’t hold her!” Isis cried out, but no one came to help. No one could even see what was happening. The only reply was mocking laughter, from somewhere beyond the flickering ocean of blue.
    Isis felt her fingers get warmer, as Angel slipped through them.

That girl was right, Isis did look mental. Holding onto nothing, yelling. She had tears rolling down her face, and she was screaming, “Angel! Angel!”
    Everyone sitting at their tables, drinking coffee, they were all staring. The gang of kids were laughing their heads off.
    I guess I would’ve thought she was mad too, except for what I’d seen before, in the field. She’d said there was a ghost, and there was one. So now, if she said something was in the shopping centre, I believed her, you know? The trouble was, I couldn’t see what she could. I didn’t know what was happening.
    I ran over. “What? What do I do?”
    She looked at me and her eyes were blown pure black. She was freezing too. “Help me hold her,” she said, and her voice sounded miles away. “Help me hold Angel.”
    How do you hold a ghost?
    I swiped my hands through the air, flapping them about until they hit cold. Ice in the air. That was Angel, the shape of her, frozen out of nothing. Like, you know when you’re holding something, your hands make the shape of it? Well if you took away the thing, and left your hands in the right place, that’s what holding Angel was like.
    The gang started shouting stuff at me too, but I didn’t care, because as soon as I got a grip on Angel, everything changed.
    Like a dream got laid over my eyes. Or the world was a dream, and I woke up.
    Out of nowhere, there was this… monster. I mean, really, a monster. It’s hard to describe, because it didn’t exactly have a shape, but it was a deep, dark flickering blue, like the bottom of the ocean, or a shadow at night. It filled up the top of the shopping centre, oozing into everything, pushing right up to the roof. And even while I could see it, right there, I could see all the people just carrying on, like it wasn’t.
    It had teeth all over – thousands, millions – but no mouth. Then sometimes it would flicker, and it was nothing but mouths. It had hundreds of eyes as well, all over, and when it flickered the eyes all crunched together into one. Like a whirlpool spinning into its body. Every time that happened I thought I was going to fall in, just go down and down. I stared at the monster, with my brain going,
“You’re
not seeing this!
You can’t be!”
    I think I screamed.
    And Isis headbutted me.
    Not hard or anything, just enough to get me out of those whirlpools.
    “Don’t look in its eyes!” she cried.
    I managed to pull my eyes off the monster, to what we were both holding. Isis had a grip on one of Angel’s hands, and it turned out I had hold of Angel’s shoulder. I nearly let go then, nearly screamed again, because Angel didn’t look like this plump little ghost-girl any more. She was all stretched out and up, with these hands on her everywhere, pulling her into the monster. Her feet were already stuck inside it. Around her ankles, the blue watery stuff was rippling and sloshing, trying to suck her in further. Her eyes were open, and she was saying,“Mummy, Isis, Mummy, Isis,” over and over.
    “Take both her hands,” cried Isis. “I’ll get hold of her waist.” In the weird blue light, she looked like a photo, like all the shape had been taken out of her.
    To get a decent grip of Angel’s hands, I had to let go for a second.
    And everything went back to normal.
    No monster, no Angel. Only me and Isis, on the top floor of the shopping centre, screaming and holding onto air. The gang were still laughing, everyone was staring.
    No wonder.
    I hardly even noticed though, I just felt for the cold, and grabbed