Ways to See a Ghost

creature’s formless skin.
    “I can fight you!”
    She ripped her hands apart, tearing open a hole, looking through into charcoal-soft darkness, flashing with distant glimmers. She cried out in triumph. She’d hurt it!
    And then, pain.
    Cally slapping her cheek. Her dad pouring scalding tea onto her arm. Falling down a flight of stone steps, slicing her skin with a knife, wasps stabbing stings into her face. Real memories layered with false ones, each vivid and searing. She was hit by a car, her hand blistered in a fire. She was paralysed, panting with pain.
    I can fight you back.
    Her leg broke, and she screamed in agony. She was dying from the pain, it was ripping her to pieces…
    … and everything was quiet. She was standing in dappled shade by a roadside, a bird singing in a nearby tree.
    It was that road.
    Angel was lying on the warm tarmac, her legs grazed and dirty, her dress torn and bloody. Her head was twisted the wrong way, her chest lifting and falling its last tiny movements. She turned her head on a broken neck and said,
“I still here…”
    Isis gasped back into torture. Her fingernails were tearing away, her scorching skin gave off a stench like bacon.
    But she’d seen Angel! She was caught, somewhere deep inside the flesh of the Devourer, using its link with Isis’s memories to speak. How long could Angel last in there? How long before it melted her into nothing?
    Isis clenched her blistered hands into fists and took a breath. Shaking, shivering, she pulled herself up and punched straight into the creature. Its shriek echoed soundlessly above the field, and two circles were stamped in its flesh.
    Stop.
    “No!”
    Her fingers crumbled into dust, her arms ending in the white of protruding bone. She screamed, staggering backwards, trying to see past this vision of powdered bone and reveal her hands. But she couldn’t.
    I was stronger than the foolish ghost who found me, stronger than the lonely boy, I am stronger than you.
    Her teeth started chattering. Her body was going into shock, instinctively trying to shut itself off from the horror at the end of her arms.
    She heard a distant thudding: feet running over dry earth, the rustling of wheat stems.
    “Isis!”
    “Gray?”
    And there he was. Face in front of hers, a cut on his forehead dribbling blood down between his eyes, with a bruise like an egg puffing up around it. She wanted to laugh, or maybe cry.
    “Isis, are you… you again?” he asked nervously. She nodded, and he grinned with relief.
    “I knocked Philip Syndal
out!
” he said. “And your mum’s okay, she’s looking for you. Everyone is, I think. But they’ve gone the wrong way – I heard them shoutingour names right at the other end of the field. Come on. I think I can find the way back… Are you all right?”
    She couldn’t answer, unable to take her eyes off the bloody stumps where her hands had been.
    It was just an illusion. It felt more real than she could bear.
    “Come on,” said Gray, reaching out to take her hand. The Devourer would only let her see Gray’s fingers curl around the broken bone of her arm. She shrieked, wrenching away from him. He jumped back.
    “What is it? What’s the matter?”
    “It’s got me,” she cried. “It took Angel.”
    “I saw,” he said. “I think I was nearly…” He paused. “Now I’m okay, I can’t see any of it.”
    The Devourer rippled around them, smothering the countryside, only visible to Isis. Gray looked up at the sky.
    “The light should’ve come back by now. The other times there was a massive explosion of light, then it went off into space.”
    “The Devourer swallowed everything,” said Isis.
    Gray stared up at the night. “Is it… big?” he whispered. “It’s so cold everywhere, I wasn’t sure…”
    “It’s all around us.”
    He turned back. “You’re okay though?”
    She shook her head, holding up her bone-stump hands. He looked down at them, frowning.
    “Angel’s survived inside it, I know she has,” said Isis. “And I think I can hurt it. I can use…”
    BE QUIET!
    The words were shouted at her by every teacher she’d ever had. Her lips glued themselves shut, stinging and tingling. She had to force them open again.
    “I can free her,” she mumbled.
    “Come on then!” said Gray. “How?”
    She nodded at where her hands used to be. The Devourer pressed in closer, working its tendrils up her legs, binding her with twines of what felt like freezing seaweed.
    “My hands,”