~o~
Emily woke again in her own little world. Since her encounter with the stranger things had become different. Emily had been pressured into confronting her situation by the brief conversation with the stranger. She needed to clarify, for her own peace of mind, just what was happening. She pushed her hands against the membrane as hard as she could and felt a slight softening of the resistance. But it was still far from yielding.
She listened and could hear something. It was a sound which made no sense to her a rhythmic pulsing with an overlaid regular beeping. But there were voices and now she could make sense of some of the words. There was a woman's voice, a stranger, and she was talking about something important in a soft and quiet voice. Emily realized that the woman was talking to her. But it was not directed through the membrane, the woman was talking to her as if she was somewhere else. On the other side of the membrane. Emily heard the disjointed words and struggled to make sense of them: "Just another... and your halo will... there, that must be easier... it's really time you woke up sweetie... before... too late."
Emily spent a long time in contemplation of what she had heard. She paced around her garden as the darkness slowly fell. She had to talk to someone about this and there was only one other person in her universe.
Time had little meaning for Emily in her strange world and as she crossed the garden and went into the cottage she realized that it was already late. Her stranger was already asleep in bed. She had prodded him before in his sleep before they had spoken but she had not managed to rouse him. Now she really needed to talk.
Alexander was dreaming and the insistent stabbing against his cheek was incorporated into his dream; it was the peck of a seagull, a seagull with a girl's body, a perfectly normal thing to experience in a dream. In a dream the most bizarre of situations are rationalised into normality But as the pecking intensified he was suddenly awake.
"Wake up, stranger, I need to talk."
"Oh no Jane, not at this time of night." Alexander's mind slowly came back into focus and he realized his mistake and was stopped dead at the realisation that Jane was gone. He turned on the light and the other woman was back; sitting weightlessly on top of him.
"Who is Jane, Is that my name?"
"No... You are definitely not Jane, I'm sorry... I'm not awake yet... what is it... are you a ghost?"
"No I am not a ghost...but I might be an... an angel! An angel with no halo."
Alexander sat up. He no more believed in angels than he did in ghosts.
"Why have you woken me up at this god awful hour with more of your nonsense?"
"I need to find out who I am, what I'm doing here."
"Can't this wait until the morning, we need our sleep."
"I get plenty of sleep."
"You can only sleep when I do..."
"No, no, no... You don't still believe that I'm part of you imagination do you?"
"Give me a better explanation."
"Give me time and I will. But I need, really need to talk."
Emily looked and sounded troubled. She spoke with such passion and longing that Alexander was suddenly gripped by an unaccountable feeling of compassion for the troubled creature that was sitting uninhibitedly astride his waist.
He fumbled on the bedside table and found his glasses. He sat up quite unable to believe any of what was happening.
"Very well angel, talk to me." He said.
Emily finally had someone she could talk to and she unburdened everything that had happened to her in a continuous stream of emotional outpouring, gasped the last few words and then sat on the edge of the bed like a wide eyed school girl waiting to be given the answers to her questions.
Her story was told in such a way that it sounded, if surreal then also, so almost feasible. Alexander realized that he really had no option but to be drawn into Emily's strange world. Perhaps his own sanity depended on it. Whether Emily existed outside his imagination or not, he felt that his own salvation now rested on solving this angel's problem. In the moment still fogged by sleep and emotion, he decided that he would treat this entity as a real person, accept that there futures were inevitably entwined... until his sanity finally left him completely and they took him away to the sanatorium.
He inched his way up the bed and adjusted his pillow.
"OK let me sum up what you have told me, it looks as if you have recently arrived in your world which is just the garden and cottage but there is some sort of portal to another place. In the other place someone or maybe more than one person talks to you as if you are with them. But you can't talk back to them. You have memories which are vague, but getting clearer, of a life before the one you have now. Is that more or less right?"
"Yes, I can see that for one like you, who lives in a larger world, it must sound strange. Believe me, it is strange for me as well. You see I have a vague understanding of things outside of my small world, as if I had experienced them in a past which is now lost to me. The very fact that I can speak to you in English means I must have had a life before when I learned to speak. I can read, but in my world I have never learned to read."
"There is of course the answer that you exist only in my mind, so obviously you would have all my experiences to draw on. It would mean that you don't actually exist except in my thoughts."
"I cannot accept that, I just feel that I am real, separate from you. I was here before you came. What I think is: I must have had a normal life, like you, but have been split in two. Part of me is here, this is the place where I want to be. Part of me is beyond the membrane..."
Emily stopped short having suddenly had a revelation.
"Wait... my body, the normal me, is beyond the membrane but my... spirit, for want of a better word, is here in my cottage. This is where I want to be and somehow I am disembodied here a... I don't know what... some kind of a spirit being."
"OK angel, what you have just told me, is an exact account of what a ghost is; your body is dead, somewhere else, and you are here in the place you loved but now as a ghost."
"I don't believe in ghosts..." and suddenly pulled up short. "How do I know that?" She said.
"Now you're asking me to psychoanalyse my own imagination... This is becoming weirder by the minute."
"No no no... I am not part of your imagination. I am real, not a trick of your mind and certainly not a ghost they are just a mythology left-over from our pre-scientific, superstitious past."
Alexander could feel her becoming agitated. Whatever she was, real or imagined, he wished her nothing but kindness.
"OK let's accept what you say for just a moment... Can you come up with a more convincing explanation of the facts than the ghost hypothesis?"
Emily stared at her companion her ghostly eyes flooded with tears.
"No... no I can't... I'm sorry to have disturbed you stranger, I had this vain hope that we might have become friends, it's been lonely here on my own for so long."
"Whatever the truth turns out to be, I can say angel that I welcome your company. I have been alone for too long myself. Now dry your dusty tears and... go away, I need to sleep. But Angel... come back tomorrow won't you... Please."
Emily withdrew to the corner of the room and sat for a long time watching her stranger, he had brought her no answers but he had brought her a little contentment by finally listening to her. Already she had already half convinced him that she was real, just another half to go.
As Alexander fell back to his sleep he still could not be sure whether the woman was real but knew that if she permanently disappeared, he would certainly miss her.
Comatose Page 19
