Ways to See a Ghost

and turned off the light. Then she’d kissed Isis on the forehead and said sadly,
“I am so hungry.”
    Her mum had never said any of that!
    “Get out of my mind,” hissed Isis.
    Then how will we converse?
    Isis winced, trying to drive away a sudden memory of Cally, singing these words to her as an eerie lullaby. She glanced towards the exit. Was Gray outside now? Was he running through the sunshine, holding an invisible Angel?
    Your sister.
    Her mum, younger and happier. Sitting in a neat hospital bed and smiling down at a tiny baby, wrapped in a pink blanket. This was a real memory – Isis had gone to visit them with Dad, after Angel was born.
    “You can’t have Angel,” Isis whispered now.
    But in her memory, her mum looked up from Angel’s sleepy, red-squashed face.
“She is already dead.”
    “Cally never said that!”
    The creature shifted. Without moving, it had got closer. Isis forced herself to stay still, keeping herself between the creature and the way out.
    All around her, people were carrying on with their shopping, or milling about in the crowd. Men, women and children, ambling between the stores, squinting in the bright sunshine, passing in and out of the twilit body of the creature. None of them noticed it, none of them even shivered.
    “What are you?” she whispered. “What do you want?”
    I am hungry. I want to eat.
    And now Isis remembered hunger. Those days upon days when Cally had been too depressed to buy food, driving Isis to search through every empty cupboard again and again, so hungry she’d even eaten dry pasta pieces scattered in a dusty corner, crunching them between her teeth in desperation.
    “That never happened!” she cried. “Cally always made sure I had something to eat.”
    The creature rippled a hundred heads. Was it sighing?
    Isis’s mind filled with memories of food. Slices of toast she’d had for breakfast, the iced bun Cally had bought, the spaghetti they’d had for tea last night. Fish and chips Dad used to buy on a Friday, Angel’s second birthday cake. Angel eating an apple in tiny bites, Angel with ice cream smeared around her mouth. Cally spoon-feeding Angelfrom a bowl of mashed banana. Food and Angel, Angel and food.
    Isis clenched her fists, stopping the flow.
    “You can’t have her!” she whispered, glaring at the creature. She opened her fingers, and put her hands out in front of her. They were trembling.
    “I can hold onto ghosts, hurt them even,” she whispered. “Maybe I can do the same to you?”
    Laughter ripped through her life, a mocking soundtrack to every memory.
    Was Gray far enough away by now? Were he and Angel safe? Could she run now?
    A sudden pressure, a cold poking at her thoughts.
    Where?
    She took a step backwards, bumping into a woman overloaded with shopping bags.
    “Watch what you’re doing,” said the woman.
    Isis opened her mouth for an automatic sorry, but what came out was, “I live at Flat 2b—”
    She slapped a hand over her mouth. She backed away, not from the frowning, head-shaking woman, but from the huge, bluely invisible creature, stalking her like a cat.
    Where?
    She pressed her hand even harder against her mouth, trying to stop herself from screaming out her address. And now she wanted to run away even more, run straight home without stopping…
    Something else. She had to think of something else.
    One times seven is seven.
    Two times seven is fourteen.
    Three times seven is Flat 2b…
    The creature grew a long, impossible neck, weaving it through the shops, encircling Isis like a snake.
    She jumped to the names of the planets.
    Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Wentworth Ro…
    “No! I won’t.”
    The creature roared soundlessly, rising up into a straddling arc of violet-blue, a dark rainbow. Its eyes collected into a single whirling orb – a black hole sucking in the sunshine, pulling every gleam from the shop windows.
    Desperately, she thought of anything she could, panicking her thoughts through random jumps. Grandma Janet’s house. Going with Cally to the Welkin Society. Walking in the woods with Gray. Gil and his UFO hunting. Walking out into the night-time field, and the lights rising up into the darkness. She remembered having wings andseeing all those birds. She wanted to be like them, to fly away!
    A soundless flash, the crack of an unseen whip. An eye leading to infinity, right in front of her face. Fists everywhere, slamming, thumping and smashing onto the floor tiles.
    Tell me!
    Isis