Dead Stop (2 page)

It was a hot summer day, completely lacking the mist-laden atmosphere required for an authentically funereal feel. The churchyard was bright, the grass vivid green, and the laughter of children younger than myself echoed across from a nearby primary school.

It felt inappropriately cheery, and it would have been easy to forget the bleak nature of the occasion if we weren’t all sweating our guts out in black suits, or in my case an ill-fitting hand-me-down jacket over my grey school trousers. Even inside the relative cool of the church, the vicar left a sweaty handprint on the top of the coffin after giving poor Uncle Gary a blessing.

I hadn’t known where to look for most of the service, my eyes avoiding staring at relatives with deeper grief than my own as they quietly sobbed, so found myself staring at the handprint, the liquid trace of skin contact, as it slowly evaporated on the varnished surface of the coffin, until I was just blankly staring at the wood itself.

The surface was slightly reflective, and I caught the image of a pale, distorted face.

I looked up to see the shade of Uncle Gary leaning over his own coffin, a man made from some insubstantial material like nothing I had ever seen before—a creamy, translucent mist with currents of blue-grey moving within it.

A ghost. I was looking at a ghost.

There was a brief pause as I took in what I saw, then I reacted in the only way appropriate for an adolescent male making his first contact with the world of spirits.

Reader, I lost my fucking shit.

T
WENTY-TWO YEARS LATER,
I found myself facing the prospect of encountering my first zombie with the knowledge that if I lost my fucking shit now, I would lose my fucking head and my fucking life immediately after.

So I kept my shit together as best I could, which was not very well at all.

Seconds after Melissa and I made our deal, there was a brief half-shout and a crash from the diner’s kitchen. We both jumped at the noise.

‘Shit,’ said Melissa, eyes locked on the serving hatch behind the counter. ‘I hoped we had more time.’ Her voice was what I suppose you’d call mid-Atlantic—a bit American, a bit clipped English, no recognisable local accent. She could have been from either country, or from somewhere else altogether and learned English as a second language.

Now didn’t seem to be the time to get her life story.

‘He could have just dropped something,’ I said doubtfully. The proprietor of the diner had disappeared into the kitchen after serving me. I had been informed before he went that I should ‘holler’ if I needed anything. There had been the sound of cleaning and clearing ever since, the occasional clank of a back door opening and closing—it was pretty late, so I guess he was taking out the trash and finishing up for the night.

Following the crash, there was silence. I contemplated hollering, but didn’t.

‘I’ll go check,’ said Melissa, clipping through the corner of the table as she stood up. A chunk of her hip dissipated and reformed as the table edge cut through it, but if she felt anything, she didn’t react.

Melissa didn’t even get halfway to the kitchen door. The door crashed open, and
it
came through.

N
OW, THE THING
about ghosts is that they’re both absolutely a presence and not there at all. Sometimes I wonder whether other, luckier, people really
can’t
see ghosts, or whether their brains filter them out as random, insignificant patterns, like heat haze or dust in the air, never making the connection that distinguishes the spirit as something real and distinct.

Whatever. All I know is that, like a graffiti tag you’ve never really looked at properly but which is all over your town, once you’ve seen one ghost you can’t stop yourself from noticing the buggers everywhere.

The day I saw Uncle Gary, I’d had to be dragged screaming and flailing from the church, and I could see that there were ghosts everywhere. There always had been, I knew that straight away; it was just that I’d never registered that they were there before.

Medieval ghosts standing on the worn tombstones that made up the church floor. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ghosts standing by the elaborate tribute plaques on the walls. Then, out in the churchyard, ghosts milling between the tombstones.

The restless dead, everywhere. There, real, but somehow not there at all.

Present but absent.

T
HE FIRST THING
I noticed about zombies, as opposed to the vaporous undead I was used to, the thing that shocked me even though it shouldn’t have: there was nothing
absent
about a zombie at all.

The creature before me was very much there, a physical presence, flesh and stench and twisted limbs more aggressively real and organic than the subdued presence of a living human being.

The zombie who crashed through the door was a man in a blue-grey boiler suit, and he entered with a shockingly inhuman lurch, limbs smacking forward in great, twitching, imprecise motions, feral lunges untamed by the sensitivities of an active brain.

Its skin held no deathly pallor, but instead the purplish darkness of a bruise, tinged with black around the extremities.

Its lolling mouth was an unhealthy blue-red, eyes yellowish white with wide, slack-looking pupils.

And it
stank
, a smell of illness, bile and decay that hit me like a physical extension of the zombie itself, a stench so powerful it felt invasive, a preliminary attack reaching across to crawl into my nose and pores.

It was probably that stench that saved me. My brain was still in shock and I initially stood there gawping like a twat instead of turning and running, but the horror of the thing’s stench overcame my paralysis and caused me to physically recoil.

As I jerked back to try and escape the smell, a clawed hand passed through the air where my throat had been seconds before. The creature’s entire body weight seemed to have been thrown behind the lunge, and it followed through on the blow, the momentum causing it to stumble past me.

Reprieved for a moment, I looked for an escape route.

K
IDS ARE RESILIENT.
They say that, don’t they, when some poor little sod loses their parents or suffers some terrible illness or injury? Kids are resilient. They bounce back.

Maybe I was resilient, or maybe I was too bloody stupid to ask for the help I needed, but after my first contact with the dead I somehow edged back to normal without ever explaining my erratic behaviour or falling into the mental health system.

I was seeing things that everyone else would consider impossible, but that first outburst was written off as the results of grief for Uncle Gary, and after that my family were too busy dealing with wills and estates to question that first judgement. As far as my doctor, school and any other authorities were concerned, providing I was back at school by next term, and there were no further public displays of raging shit-loss, it was case closed.

Poor boy, they were very close, give him some time and he’ll be fine.

I wasn’t bloody fine at all but, for better or worse, I dealt with it myself. The funeral had been at the end of my first year at secondary school, so there were no important exams to miss, and I had the whole of the summer to work out what was happening to me.

I hadn’t made many friends that first year, which had pissed me off at the time, but now I was glad of it, because while adults were delicate enough to not ask any questions, kids my own age wouldn’t be so tactful. For now, I was glad to be alone.

It took three weeks for me to work up the nerve to leave the house. There were no restless spirits in our crappy new-build home on a crappy identikit estate, so I got to go out and see my next ghost on my own terms.

The first was a couple of streets away, just an old lady standing on the pavement, staring at a post box.

She didn’t see me, mainly because as soon as I saw her I turned and ran straight back home.

I stayed in my room and didn’t so much as open the curtains for a whole week.

‘B
ATHROOM IS CLEAR
,’ shouted Melissa, and I turned to see her emerging from a closed door in the corner of the diner, thankfully in the opposite direction from where the zombie was slowly turning around. ‘There’s a window.’

I ran for it, the battered trainers I wore for travelling slipping on the scuffed linoleum floor. Melissa disappeared back through the door before I slammed into it, my head nearly bumping into the stylised male and female figures stencilled there.

I slammed the door shut behind me, and closed the chunky red plastic lock. I had no illusions that the locked door would hold out against even a couple of serious blows, but at least I had given myself a second to breathe and think.

I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, taking in the blandly unpleasant smell of a well-maintained public toilet, the scent of cheap cleaning products overpowering anything nastier. Compared to the rank stench I’d just experienced, the low-level chemical stink was reassuringly normal.

But nothing was normal, nothing at all. Not even by the standards of my stupid life.

B
Y THE TIME
autumn term came around, I was faking normal quite well.

Looking back, at that age the average teenager is pretending to know so much they blatantly don’t—about sex, booze, drugs, all that adult stuff you’re painfully aware of but so far away from—that throwing in one more self-conscious distortion isn’t that much of a stress.

So along with all the other things I was pretending about, I pretended I wasn’t seeing ghosts.

Again, I was blessed by the gods of shitty cheap post-war building programmes. The comp I attended was less than two decades old, and hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate too many ghosts. I’d had a summer of slowly exploring my limits, learning the places to avoid—cemeteries, obviously, but also hospitals or very old buildings—and dealing with encounters with the odd wandering spirit. I could handle the ghost of the kid who died of an asthma attack seven years ago (who I’d heard of from teachers as a cautionary tale about mislaying inhalers, but had never realised was a real kid), and even the mumbling muddy medieval guy who drifted around the playing fields. The latter was a bit tough to avoid when on the football field, but I was shit at sports anyway and never got picked, so the problem rarely arose.

I was twelve going on thirteen, and I treated the dead like any other problem I had at that age.

I ignored them as much as possible and avoided looking them in the eye.

It worked, for a while. It was nothing but denial, but for a couple of years it worked.

W
INDOWS, ESPECIALLY WINDOWS
which open out on to the deserted lots behind commercial properties, are generally designed to allow air in and out without also allowing people to go through them. Property owners kind of like it that way. Like ventilation ducts the size of a subway tunnel, toilet windows that can easily be hopped in and out of are just something you see in the movies.

Thankfully, I wasn’t a burglar, and I didn’t have to be quiet about effecting an exit, which is why I found myself standing precariously on a toilet, using the porcelain lid of the cistern to smash bits of wooden window frame. The open window hadn’t been nearly wide enough to slip out of, but if the whole window and frame were knocked out of the wall, then I’d be able to squeeze through the hole.

‘Don’t drop down when you get out there,’ said Melissa. ‘Grab the gutter and get onto the roof as fast as you can.’

‘Zombies?’ I asked.

Melissa gave a little shrug.

‘A few,’ she said. ‘But not as near as that one.’

She nodded to the door, where the blackboard-squeak of fingernails scraping restlessly against cheap wood could be heard. That door wasn’t going to hold for long.

‘I’ll get out there and shout when they’re furthest away,’ said Melissa. ‘I don’t think they can see or hear me.’

Don’t
think
, she had said.

Well that filled me with confidence. Thinking and knowing had always been miles apart, in my experience of the undead.

B
Y MY MID-TEENS
I thought that my condition, as I’d come to think of it, was under control. I believed that the ghosts were some form of hallucination, a symptom of mental illness, but I was too shit scared of being locked in a hospital for the rest of my life to admit what I was seeing to anyone. I continued to ignore the ghosts I saw. It was a simple tactic, but it worked. It would have continued to work, if the ghosts had just kept ignoring me.

I didn’t even know they could become aware of me until it happened.

It was the ghost on the playing fields that fucked up my sterling plan. It was summer, we were playing rounders out on the field, and the bastard was standing right between second and third base.

Still buried up to the waist—I knew by then that the school was built on reclaimed marshland, so perhaps he was at the old ground level?—he was just
there
, incomprehensibly grumbling to himself, staring at nothing, his muddy face slack and listless. His clothes were ragged and hard to identify, but I’d come to think of him as medieval, a farmer or a poacher or something.

When it was my turn to bat, I tried to just get struck out so that I wouldn’t need to go anywhere near the ghost, but in my nervous state I managed to lash out and actually hit the bloody ball with my stumpy bat, whacking it with sufficient force that the ball ricocheted straight between two inattentive fielders and bounced off across the field.

I had no choice. I had to drop the bat and run until the ball was thrown back and I was caught out.

And as I ran past second base, the ghost was right in my path.

I knew that this ghost, if it was real at all and not just a product of my brain, wasn’t solid. Apart from the fact that he was capable of moving around with his bottom half embedded in solid ground, I had seen kids earlier in the batting line-up run through him without any problem, just as I had been seeing the living walk through the ghosts I saw since this whole problem began.