Ghost, Running

by Richard Jenkins

CHAPTER 11

  Ben, Victoria, The Moof and Albert all hung suspended in a strange new space. Ben and Victoria were a metre apart. Albert and The Moof were twenty metres away from them, and from each other. All that separated them was dark, empty space.

  'What happened?' asked Ben loudly so that all could hear.

  'Where are we?' asked Victoria, quietly so that only Ben could hear.

  'We were becoming one!' Albert answered Ben.

  'What pushed us apart?' Ben asked.

  'The thought of being one!' Albert answered.

  'A mind fart!' added The Moof for all to hear. 'Fear it was. That blew us apart. At the thought of becomin' us.'

  'Repelled by each other, who could argue with that?' asked Albert.

  'Not them two! Though so much,' said The Moof pointing to Ben and Victoria. 'Drawn together. They's must 'ave liked bein' close!'

  Ben and Victoria looked at each other, embarrassed.

  'It's science!' Victoria shouted a reply. 'There's a perfectly good explanation. A scientific one!'

  'Chemistry?' Ben asked Victoria.

  'Physics,' she replied.

  'Look, the library!' said Albert looking up.

  They all followed his stare. Directly above them, pierced into dark formless space, was the Reading Room. It appeared as a disk - the roof, the floor, the bookshelves and everything else had been flattened and distorted into a two-dimensional space, and, as it looked, sealed behind a glassy see-through film. How big the disk was, indeed how far it was away, was impossible to ascertain as the lack of reference points resulted in a flat, unyielding perspective.

  'It looks sealed! How do we get back?' Asked Albert, a little panicked.

  'The book!' proclaimed Ben. 'Below us! It is! Is it? Is it?'

  Directly below them, as if embossed onto the surface of darkness, a reddish brown rectangle could barely be seen. In the space surrounding it, flecks of light burst into being, two or three a second, then helter skeltered down and around it until vanishing out of sight. As with the disk, the unyielding perspective, refused to hint at size or distance.

  'It's the cover!' Ben claimed.

  'Yes. How it could be,' replied Victoria.

  'But how do we get back? How do we leave?' Albert asked. 'We must know!'

  He propelled himself up towards the disk. Ben watched, but suddenly a thought sprung into his head.

  'I'm not falling!' he said to Victoria. 'Not drifting down.'

  'No. So what does that tell us about gravity here?' she replied.

  'Or my life, as it was. Am I properly a ghost?'

  She paused, remembering. Finally, she replied,

  'Gravity, I'm sure.'

  'It can't be reached!' cried Albert. And it, the dimension from which they came, could not. However fast Albert went, however far he travelled from his original starting point, the disk, to him, remained the same distance away. He stopped and looked back at the others. They were mere specs in the distance.

  'We can't get back!!' he cried, as loudly as he could not thinking the others would hear him, although they did, loud and clear.

  'We don't need to go back! We have the book!' Ben replied.

  Albert heard the reply, but it did nothing to soothe his panic. A part of him wanted to continue on towards the disk in a desperate rush to reach it, but instead he turned and raced back towards the others. He went at least as fast as he did when coming, but somehow the journey back took considerably more time. When he reached the others he found The Moof next to Victoria and Ben.

  'Come on,' Ben greeted Albert impatiently. 'We get to the book!'

  'Move through time! Try!' Albert said to Ben.

  'Why?' Ben Asked.

  'We have no escape!'

  'We have the book!'

  'Try! At least be curious! Shouldn't we know as much as we can about where we are? It can only help.'

  With a certain reluctance, Ben twisted to move through time but no past or future came before him, his only choice was the present. He returned to the others.

  'There is none! There is only now!' he told them.

  Albert believed him without any hesitation. It confirmed his suspicions and intensified a feeling of claustrophobia that he was increasingly in the grip of. Victoria, however, was far from convinced.

  'There must be.' she said.

  'There isn't. None. Only now.' Ben replied.

  'Us arriving here was the past. We remember it. It exists! It must!'

  'Maybe, but I have no means to reach it.'

  'We're trapped, completely trapped!' said Albert. 'Locked in here!'

  'We have the book! That is our portal to somewhere else!'

  'If that be the book that be. That what we want,' said The Moof.

  'Then lets find out,' said Ben.

  A burst of light drew each of them to look down below, where an expanding ring of electric blue light travelled rapidly up towards them. With the rectangle always at its centre, the ring, which remained a perfect circle, grew to a size that Ben thought to be several miles wide.

  'What is it?' asked Albert.

  No one returned an answer. The ring continued to rise, only now it began to contract, tightening ever smaller as it approached them, like a snare ready to trap them, thought Albert.

  'Run!' he advised.

  'To where?' asked Ben.

  Now close enough to fully observe, they could see the ring was a wave of densely packed forked lighting that crackled and sparked endless short-lived branches that, like tentacles, probed for grip, to fix then haul.

  'Is it electric?' asked Ben.

  But before anyone could answer, the ring passed beyond them to reach and become the same size of the disk above their heads, where it vanished.

  'I don't knows why. But I's wanna do dancin' now,' said The Moof.

  'Why did it expand and contract? Did it show the shape of the space we are in?' asked Victoria. 'A bulb, like one half of an hourglass?'

  'We must get to the book!' said Ben. 'Follow me!'

  He set off towards the rectangle below and reached it surprisingly quickly. He felt it had reared up before him as if it had raced to meet him halfway. Unable to come to a complete stop before reaching the rectangle, his hands pressed an inch or two into its hard, lacquered surface.

  'I still have weight.' he said to himself, as the others appeared behind him.

  'It is the cover. Is it?' said Victoria.

  It was, and a hundred metres square in size.

  'It's like cockroach shell,' she continued, referring to the material the cover was made from.

  'And the spine!' she said, now moving around the book to investigate.

  'Look at all the pages,' said Albert, 'How far they go down. For miles.'

  How far exactly, they could not tell for the book ran lost into darkness and distance.

  'There's no title!' announced Ben, somewhat disappointed.

  'Come! Look!' Victoria called to Ben. He looked at her urgently then began to move towards her. A fleck of light, now appearing much larger, fell away from her.

  'What are they? Ben asked.

  'Is it paper? Like pages, only smaller,' she answered.

  Another such page burst into being, unfurling as if birthed from a microscopic bud. It looked something like paper, thin enough and white, but it also glowed brightly as if lit from within by millions of tiny oscillating organic cells. It grew to be a rectangle, half a metre long, with a black one inch border, then plunged down to join the constant stream of other such pages that fell spiraling around the book.

  'Where do they go?' asked Ben.

  'To be added to the book?' asked Victoria.

  'But the pages in the book don't glow and are so much bigger.'

  'They have to come from somewhere.'

  'These are new pages? You think the book could still be growing?'

  Without an answer to give, she shook her head in wonder.

  'If it was a page, then it was blank, unwritten,' she said.


  'Who then writes?' asked Ben.

  'Or draws?'

  They looked at each, neither could give an answer. Albert came rushing towards them.

  'What is this book?' he asked. 'The book of life, of everything?'

  'No!' replied The Moof firmly, as he stood transfixed by, and completely in awe of, the book. 'It be better than that! This book 'ere. This one there! This book be the one and only book! This book be the book, 'Toast a million ways!' Finally! Behold!'

  'Toast! As crummy as your brains!' Albert sneered at him dismissively. He then turned to speak to Ben and Victoria.

  'Who wrote it? Who's it for?' he asked them.

  'It doesn't matter!' replied Ben, decisively. 'It's what the book can do! If we can use it, we have a portal to everything we need.'

  'Think of the knowledge, think of the power!' Albert continued. 'How it could answer every question we could ever ask!' said Albert.

  'Or nothin'! Think of that! Actually!' said The Moof, still hurt by Albert's insult. 'This 'ere could be the book of zero. Or nothin' much at all! Or of gibberish! Or of a writer with very, very huge handwritin'!'

  'Yes. Is it a folly? How, really, could this book ever be read?' asked Victoria.

  'We must try, somehow, to use it!' said Ben.

  He moved to the lip of the cover then tried to lift it up, desperately using all his strength. His attempt proved futile. The cover remained utterly still.

  'I can't!' he said as he gave up trying. 'But,' he turned with a sudden enthusiasm and spoke to the others, 'maybe you, proper ghosts, could travel into it!'

  'To get stuck!' replied Albert.

  'We don't know that.'

  'It isn't solid? It's just a shell?'

  'It's a portal! Maybe we have to travel into it, through it, to reach the other side.'

  'You try.'

  'I can't; I have weight!'

  'Of course, you can't. But try. You take the risk.'

  'Think of the power, the knowledge, you said. Think of what we could release or find.'

  'Or think of nothing, nothing changing, or of being trapped.'

  'We could follow the book down,' said Victoria. 'If this is the beginning of the book then here is the past, it's gone.' A new page birthed into being and unfurled in front of her, she gestured to it, 'If these form new pages to be filled and written then below us must be the present, and with it, life.'

  'But how far down can we travel?' Albert asked. 'I bet we will never reach the bottom.'

  'Why?' Asked Victoria.

  'I couldn't reach the top, the library. Even though I moved further away from you, I got no closer to the library.'

  'That doesn't make sense. We travelled this far down.'

  'Sense? You ask for sense, here, in this, a normal space?'

  'I'll do it!' said The Moof. 'Me. Here. I'll volunteer.'

  'To enter the book?' asked Ben.

  'To enter the book. By force. Or favour. Or furry charm.'

  'No! You can't!' demanded Victoria.

  'I've made up me minds. They's stuck!'

  'You may get trapped!'

  'That I may. But I faint easily with pain. Which I's always considered my advantage. If I'm stuck. It'll hurt. But I'll be constantly fainted. So what pains can I really feel?'

  'We should travel down first. If we can't reach the bottom or far enough down then you might try.'

  Victoria looked at Ben, wanting his support.

  'Yes. We'll travel down first,' said Ben.

  'This here,' said The Moof pointing at the book cover, 'is the beginning. So this 'ere is where I's start. I's never been late for a feast, party or funeral. Always got in early. Always stayed til last. Usually til I's been thrown out. Which bodes well, don't it? So the beginning's where I's start. And the end's where I's finish.'

  'Victoria's right!' said Ben. 'It's too thick.'

  'Too thick? It's full of knowledge. And look at me. I's got room for a lot of fillin'. I'm starvin'. In belly and mind.'

  'It's too dangerous.'

  'It was your idea!'

  'He's changed his mind!' said Victoria.

  'He's only got one mind. I's got two. So I's top trump. So I's goin' in. This very exactly now.'

  Without further deliberation, The Moof sped towards the book cover, and before Ben or Victoria could call out to persuade him not to, he passed through the cover and disappeared into the book.

  'He's gone!' cried Victoria.

  'Only for now!' replied Ben, hopeful that the power of the book would now reveal itself.

  A long, tentative pause followed. Their stares watched the book and each other, sharing and knowing each others hopes and fears. Albert was the first to break. He moved to the cover and put his ear against it.

  'Nothing. I hear nothing,' he said.

  'Then we know nothing. It could be good or it could be bad,' said Ben.

  'It's nothing worse than what awaits us all,' said Albert.

  'Only if we fail! Not if we succeed!' Ben replied sharply.

  'Then what now? How do you suggest we now succeed?' Albert asked.

  'We travel down! We find the end!'

  Ben looked at Victoria; she nodded her head and gave him her support. He held out his hand; she took it. Together they went, down into the abyss.

  The stream of paper lights drew them into its current, so they too descended while spiraling around the book. How far, and how fast, they travelled was impossible to know accurately, although Ben guessed, to himself, ten miles or more.

  A second ring of electric charge appeared below and rose up towards them. When it passed them, it had expanded to its widest point, which led Victoria to conclude they had reached the centre of the bulb-shaped space she thought them to be in.

  As they continued further down, so did the book - solid, massive and unchanging.

  A third ring of electric charge bolted from the disc of light. When it passed Ben and the others, it was still quite narrow. Victoria called for them to stop. They complied. The disk was now just a little smaller than the disk above.

  'We're near the bottom,' she told them.

  'But the book continues down, beyond that disc of light.' said Ben.

  'There must be another chamber. Think of an hourglass, two chambers joined by a narrow passage. The pages like sand falling through.'

  'Listen,' said Albert.

  A strange reverberating chatter could be heard - clicks and taps over a vibrating hum.

  'What is it?' Ben asked.

  'It's beyond the disk,' Albert answered.

  'Look at the walls. Are they walls?' Victoria asked.

  Ben looked, spinning a full circle. He could see, due to the light from the disc, that a wall or a mesh of hexagonal cells surrounded them. It rose high above them until dimmed invisible to black. It made him think of honeycomb and Victoria of a housefly's unblinking eye. The solid material between the cells was reddish brown and lacquered.

  'What are they?' asked Albert.

  'We must find the end of the book. Think only of that!' replied Ben. 'Come on, straight through the disk!'

  He once again took hold of Victoria's hand, and together they set-off towards the disk. Albert followed behind.

  To Albert's surprize, the light was easily reached, and they passed through it without restraint. As Victoria had predicted, they found themselves in a second chamber, however, here they were not alone. Without prompt, they all came to a stop. The vastness of the space they were in instantly jumped out, to bully, to smother. As far as they could see, hexagonal cells - billions, as if endless - defined the space they were in. Each one glowed gently as if lit from within. They arched down until distance took their shape from sight and merged their light into a single mist.

  The book continued downwards, like a road, without a visible end. The falling pages fell no further. Swarms of flying insects intercepted every page, plucked them from the air to carry them, by the black border only, towards the hexagonal cells. Ben, Victoria
and Albert looked on in wonder.

  'Ask no questions,' Ben said. 'I have no answers.'

  'But there must be,' Victoria said.

  'Answers?' said Albert.

  'Yes,' she replied.

  'Questions. How is this a portal? How do we connect and bring him back?' asked Ben.

  'Who?' Victoria asked.

  'Look!' said Albert.

  They looked in the direction of Albert's pointing hand and watched as a swarm of insects took the page they carried towards a nearby group of cells.

  'Follow them!' said Ben.

  'Wait!' demanded Albert. 'Are we seen? Are we known? Are we trespassers here?'

  Ben shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, unconcerned with the answer. He then moved in pursuit of the insects. Victoria and Albert followed.

  The insects were identical, like large cockroaches with reddish brown lacquered shells. Ben, Victoria and Albert watched as they, without fault or hesitation, and by only touching the black border, rolled the page into a perfect cylinder so that the two longest edges came together and touched. The cylinder was then inserted length-ways into the centre of an empty cell, where it hung suspended without any visible support. The light from the page made the cell glow. Once finished, the insects swarmed fast away.

  Ben moved in to take a closer look. All the cells he could see were identical, half a metre in diameter and deep enough to store a single page. The material dividing the cells, and which gave each cell a fairly thick border, was reddish brown and lacquered.

  The cell borders teemed with insects - much smaller than those that had carried the page, but in all other ways the same. They came, they constantly came, spewing out of small holes en masse before splitting into densely packed, orderly, fast moving single-file lines,

  In every cell that stored a page, a single-file line flowed in and out. It entered on the left-hand side, went down the inner wall to the base of the cell where it mounted the page, then, spiraling around it, moved to the front of the page where it looped once around before returning back along the page to the base of the cell. This caused the line to entwine and create a double helix. Having reached the base of the cell, the line left the page, went along the right inner wall, exited through the cell opening then continued along the cell borders in a downwards direction until it joined the throng of other such lines and vanished back down a hole.

  As Ben stared at the line, the insects blurred into one, and the line appeared to be a single length of wire through which a constant stream of pulses flowed. A memory flashed, how he used to stare at telephone wires and imagine spoken words pulsing down them, and how these voices made the wires live.

  'There's writing on this page,' said Victoria, looking into a cell.

  'Here, too!' added Albert, who was looking into a different cell.

  'And on this one!' said Victoria, now looking at a different page in a different cell. 'But smaller, tiny!'

  'On every page! Every page is being written,' said Albert.

  The inner side of every page contained a block of permanent text, from a few characters to a countless number of words. Following on from this, and filling the rest of the page, came an ever changing jumble of text, as if all words, and all combinations of words, were being relentlessly searched and considered. At irregular intervals, words at the beginning of the jumble fell still and so extended the block of permanent text. As this happened, the font used for the text reduced in size. Across all of the pages, the font size ranged from the very large to the microscopic. The text itself was of a strange alien language that seemed to have no punctuation. All characters were unrecognizable. Some resembled simple alphabetical letters, others were more elaborate, like logograms.

  'What language is it written in?' asked Victoria.

  'Not one we can ever understand,' relied Albert.

  'We must be able to understand it!' said Ben.

  'Why, so that we can read every page?' asked Albert, dismissively.

  This silenced, Ben. He had no answer. He looked at the page in the cell he was next to and, as if lashing out, punched an open palm towards it. His hand connected; it went into the page and vanished - the thin sheet of material the page was made from seemed to have an extra, hidden, depth. Shocked, Ben hesitated, resisting the urge to yank his hand out. Was this a way to access the portal, he wondered? Was this a means to reach his Dad? With his other hand, he prodded the area of black that bordered the page, but the border remained solid and true. He plunged his arm further down beyond the page then pulled it out and examined his hand. It dripped with blood. His stare froze. Was it his own? No. How could it be? But then whose or what?

  'Look!' Victoria cried out.

  Ben turned to her. Albert too. She was pointing towards a darkened cell.

  'The light went out,' she continued.

  Ben shook his hand frantically then wiped it against a wall as he tried to clear the blood away while the other two looked elsewhere.

  A swarm of flying insects seemed to pounce from nowhere. In an instant, they removed the darkened page from the cell then carried it away, spiraling down and around the book.

  'Follow them!' Ben called out. 'We need to go down, all the way.'

  'Wait! I touched a page and my hand didn't go through. It's like, I wasn't a ghost.' said Albert.

  'You are a ghost! We all are. Now come on. We must follow them.'

  'What if the book doesn't end? What if it goes on forever?' asked Albert.

  'Nothing lasts forever.'

  Ben hurried away. Victoria and Albert followed. Ben looked back at the cell and the page that had bloodied his hand. The cell went dark. He stopped. Victoria and Albert followed his lead.

  'What's wrong?' Victoria asked.

  'Nothing. Another cell just went dark,' replied Ben, as he watched a swarm of insects enter the cell to retrieve the page.

  They travelled down, as fast as they could go. Insects carrying darkened pages overtook them every second or so. Finally, the chamber began to narrow, and the end of the book came into sight. They stopped. All around was movement and noise, like a storm thrashing sea and air. From the disk at the base of the chamber, a vast fountain of insects gushed up towards them. From the crown of the fountain insects either gusted away in great clouds or flew away in thousands of perfectly straight, densely packed, lines that extended spoke-like to the surrounding walls.

  Fifty metres above the fountain the book stopped to a temporary end. It hung in space, without any visible support.

  The darkened pages were dive-bombed into three deep pools of insects, each a chaotic mix of competing eddies. Once submerged beneath the dark, unyielding surface, some hundred or so of the pages must have been stuck together to form a single, book-sized page as a page of this size regularly emerged from the pools to be flown to and added to the book.

  'And now?' asked Albert.

  Ben looked around, struggling for an answer. Suddenly he had a thought.

  'The book, it's going to end,' he said.

  'How do you know?' asked Albert.

  'It's nearing the end, the bottom of the chamber. It's running out of room. It must be coming to an end! And with an end, there is always a beginning!'

  'It grows one page at a time. Slow enough for us to get lost in the wait.'

  'If indeed it will ever end,' said Victoria.

  'You think it doesn't?' asked Ben.

  'I think the space we are in expands as the book expands.'

  'What? It can't!'

  'It makes sense to me,' said Albert.

  'How?' Ben asked Victoria.

  'Look.'

  She led them to the very end of the book. A swarm of insects flew in a book-size page and added it to the book, gluing it to the spine with a substance secreted from their mouths. Once secured, the page stiffened to rest horizontally, like the billions of pages above it.

  'The book gets no nearer the end of the chamber,' Victoria told them.

  'How can you tell?' asked B
en.

  'Trust me. Or wait and see for yourself.'

  'Look at the writing,' said Albert, who was now underneath the book looking up at the exposed, newly added page. 'It's all permanent and still.'

  Ben and Victoria joined him and studied the page. It consisted of a hundred darkened pages, each discernible by their different sized text, joined together in a ten by ten grid.

  'If only we could read it,' said Victoria.

  'We can't! If knowledge is power,' said Albert. 'we are ignorant slaves!'

  'We'll have to work out what it says!' said Ben, as he scoured the writing desperately looking for a clue.

  'But if one page is a mystery, what together is every page?' asked Victoria. 'Can we ever truly know what it has to say?'

  'Look out!' warned Albert. Another page was heading towards them. They moved out of the way, just in time. The insects paid them no attention.

  'Does nothing see us? Are we invisible, irrelevant?' asked Ben.

  'Utterly,' Albert answered.

  'See us!' Ben cried out, as he turned to address the great unknown space before him. 'Hear us! We are here to do good! At least to try! Help us!...Dad! Dad!'

  His pleas elicited no response, not even the faintest echo. He turned and lunged towards the page being added to the book. His hands swiped numerous insects aside then pressed against the page forcefully. He hoped they would penetrate hidden depths, but they sank less than an inch, typical for a ghost that still had weight.

  'What have you done?' Albert asked Ben, alarmed. 'Look!'

  Ben and Victoria followed his stare. A dense wave of insects plunged towards them, like a net thrown to trap them. Instinct propelled them away, into the path of another such net. They dodged its grasp, but several more nets exploded towards them. A moment later, they were held in complete darkness.

  'Victoria!' Ben called out.

  'Here! Albert?' she replied.

  'Yes, here too!' Albert replied.

  'Just go you two! You can travel through them,' said Ben.

  'But how thick are the walls?' Victoria asked.

  'And where is there for us to go?' added Albert.

  'We may have nothing to fear,' said Victoria.

  Above them, thousands of tiny electric-blue lights began to glow, each an illuminated insect tail. The light revealed the space that held them, a perfectly round room sealed by a ceiling and floor. All, of course, was a seething, matted mass of insects.

  A large section of the wall started to bulge. From this formless mass, the insects sculpted the head of a young man. Once complete, it looked briefly innocent, like the bust of an ancient boy king lost and forgotten by time, but then the eyes blinked, the mouth stretched open, forced by a silent groan, and the entire head shook violently as if trying to shake off a heavy weight of numbness. And then, in an instant, stillness and focus, a cold, severe intent all locked onto Victoria, Albert and Ben.

  'You! One, two, three we see! Unwelcome, troublesome, meddling!' The Insect Head spoke in a voice that hissed through a high pitched whine to sound strangely metallic. 'State why, why you have come!'

  Ben, unafraid, replied:

  'To find the book. But what is the book? Tell us! What is it?'

  'The book of you, of every single one of you. Every page describes a life.'

  'How?'

  'With every new life, a page is born - together, entangled, forever - and as a life does live the page does live, each is alive with the chaos of all that is possible. And what you take from the chaos, your life as you dare to live it, this is what the page records. We the Insects serve the book. We tend each page and feed it information. Facts about you, every single one of you, as you fall through the chaos grabbing at life. We the Insects are watching you, every single one of you, inside and out. We watch, we know, you can never escape us!

  'You spy on us?' asked Ben.

  'We sense all that there is about you!'

  'I knew it! I always thought you insects were up to something, conspirators!'

  'Correct, you did. We read your page. We found it brief and unexceptional.'

  'I haven't finished yet!' replied Ben, somewhat offended.

  'Correct. Not, quite, finished. See, your page.'

  A page, with a terribly faint glow, appeared through the wall next to the Insect Head. It hung like a jaded poster, its content too slight to be seen or read.

  'That's my page?' Ben asked.

  'Yes. Dim, faltering and weak,' The Insect Head replied.

  'Why do they go dark?' Victoria asked, although she already knew the answer.

  'Dead. Certain. Booked! An unalterable record of another life lived.'

  'But for who?' asked Victoria.

  'We have no answer.'

  'You must!'

  'We must. Yes. We must. We do. Don't we? We do! We must do what we have always done! The now repeats the past! The now repeats the past! There is only the one! Only the now! Now! Now! Now!'

  'Now!' another voice, the same as The Insect Head's, came from behind them. They all turned instantly to look. A Second Insect Head, which was exactly the same as the first, loomed large from a section of wall.

  'Now!' another identical voice, this time to the left of them. They looked. A Third Insect Head had appeared. This process continued in rapid succession, another head followed by another cry of 'Now!', each time more demanding, more tormented until over a dozen such heads filled the walls. Finally, all the heads spoke in unison.

  'Now end this!'

  'No! We need to talk!' pleaded Ben.

  'Question us! No!' said The Insect Head. 'We cannot tolerate this being, this your human mind! Too much past, too much future! We are the now!'

  'How do you become it, a human mind?' asked Ben.

  'We have burrowed inside, tiny and unnoticed. Oh the space, the horrible space! We feed on your current. Billions of us crawling inside a single human mind!'

  'Why? What are you? What are you for?'

  'The book!'

  'Which is for what?'

  'For now! Forever now!'

  'It must have a beginning, a past, a purpose!'

  'None seen or wanted by us!'

  'But the book is full of history! For who? Who reads it?'

  'Not us. We have no need for history.'

  'Not even your own?'

  'We do not indulge ourselves. We wish only the now!'

  The Second Insect Head reappeared, 'destroy his page! Now! Instantly! It is right!' it demanded.'

  'No!' Ben pleaded. 'Change it! Could I change the writing, change the life?'

  'No.' answered The Insect Head.

  'Can you?'

  'We would never!'

  'But you could? You must! I must free my Dad!'

  'We make no choice. We add no chaos. We do, do, only what we know!'

  'You can make changes, you must! You must help save the world, more than that, everything!'

  'Our code deems you a violator so here, now, we can enact a change. We will destroy your page.'

  'Yours!' said the Second Insect Head.

  'Now!' said the Third Insect Head.

  'You can't destroy my page!' said Ben.

  'It, therefore, you!' said The Insect Head.

  'But why? I'm here to do good. To try and save us.'

  'Then you fail.'

  'Including you, stupid! To save you too! There's a threat to us all, nothing can survive!'

  'The insects will always survive! We will always be, now, in existence!'

  'No, you won't! You can't! You don't know what threatens us! You must know what's possible, the end of everything!'

  'We know now. We know what we must do.'

  Three other insects heads appeared, 'and now is the time to destroy his page!' they said in unison.

  'You can't destroy my page! You have no right to! It's my page! Give it to me! I want it! It's my page!'

  'One of billions,' said The Insect Head. 'Alone you are powerless, pointless. When gone, you will not be mis
sed. And we have but ourselves to judge us!'

  'You're slaves! Worse! You don't know why, or even who or what for!'

  The three other heads all cried, 'destroy his page!'

  'Why only Ben?' Victoria interjected. 'We two are also here, at his side, standing with him!'

  'A page that is bound, as yours are, can never be altered. His page can and will be destroyed, his life erased,' The Insect Head replied.

  'But we are as guilty as he!' Victoria continued.

  'We care nothing for guilt or innocence, only the code that drives us. We will destroy his page and erase his life.'

  'So we will never have known him?' asked Albert, enthusiastically. 'He can never have led us?'

  'Correct!'

  'But don't ghosts live?' asked Victoria. 'We think and make choices. So why can't our pages continue?'

  'You, a ghost, are of no consequence. Your page is bound and dead.'

  'We'll prove you wrong!' said Ben. 'Give us a chance, help us! All the people, the billions of people who no longer live, we can take their page and make them be something again, even as ghosts, as something that could join the fight!'

  'The book is not what you believe it to be. You may dream and wish desperately, but you find yourself in an alien world where your dreams and wishes are meaningless.'

  'It's a portal! The book is a portal!'

  'No!'

  'It must be!'

  The three other insects heads asked, 'how, why, imagine that?'

  'A portal from where a life can come back, one strong enough to hold,' said Ben.

  'No!' said The Insect Head.

  The three other insects heads asked, 'how, why, imagine that?'

  'But all the possibilities alive on a page, aren't they everything we can dream?' asked Ben.

  'No! Nothing can break the code,' said The Insect Head.

  Ben, numbed, fell silent. Albert looked at him and spoke,

  'So, no shield of great power, no portal to another world.'

  'Now destroy his page!' Demanded the other three insect heads. Ben gave no reply, showed no further emotion. Victoria felt desperate.

  'Wait!' she said to The Insect Head. 'If you destroy his page you save him from a worse, more horrid fate. You punish him less!'

  'Less? I've been punished enough! I've been alone enough!' Ben snapped. Victoria looked distraught, he softened. 'Here, that was meant to end.'

  'We care only for what we must do,' The Insect Head said.

  'Let me see my page,' said Ben, 'just once, before you destroy it.' He began to move towards his page.

  'Now. See it now, then see it destroyed.'

  Ben faced his page. The writing that covered it was in a large, filling font. A life laid bare in a language beyond his comprehension. It meant nothing he thought, the words and his life. At the end of the page, a single flash of living text switched between just two simple characters, both looked to be little more than punctuation. Their meaning struck Ben hard, dead or alive but dying.

  'Is that it?' he asked. 'Is that me? And is that all that remains possible for me?'

  'Pages that must be destroyed are destroyed by consumption. A special breed of insect, born of the page and us, eat them.' said The Insect Head.

  A swarm of ghost-like insects - a shimmering, virtually transparent, blue - burrowed through the wall and surrounded Ben's page, poised to commence their feast.

  'They eat the page. We eat them. We waste no energy here,' The Insect Head continued.

  'Is that all that remains possible for me?' Ben asked again.

  'As the ghost you are, you will feel no pain. Now watch, as we watch.'

  'Wait!' Ben pleaded. 'Just one more thing!' He turned and looked at Victoria. 'A kiss, goodbye.' He rushed towards her.

  'A kiss?' she asked.

  'Yes.'

  'We can't.'

  'Try, please.'

  'Permit the end, now!' The other three insects heads demanded.

  'No. Watch them. Know them. This is them now.' Replied The Insect Head.

  'Quick. A kiss goodbye,' said Ben to Victoria. She hesitated briefly then leaned towards him, to kiss him on the cheek. As her lips neared their target, he moved his head towards her so that their heads came together. Now merged, as he had been with The Face of War, he quickly told Victoria his plan. Once done, he pulled away to free her head from his.

  'What chance of that?' she asked.

  'Every chance,' he answered. He looked at Albert. 'We must try, to come together.'

  Before Albert could reply, Ben turned and began to move back towards his page. Victoria feigned the need of a comforting embrace and twisted into Albert. Once merged, she passed him the plan with all the speed and silence that thought alone could allow.

  'Now, let me watch,' Ben said to The Insect Head. 'My friends, too.'

  As he reached the page, he glanced behind. Victoria and Albert moved towards him.

  'Let them hold me, then do as you must,' Ben continued.

  Victoria and Albert drew up beside him.

  'Do, we must!' said The Insect Head.

  'No! He plans to escape!' Albert blurted out. 'Straight through the page with us inside him.'

  'How could you!' cried Victoria.

  'He's not our saviour!' Albert replied.

  'I don't claim to be!' said Ben.

  'You lied!' said Albert to Ben. 'The book is not a portal or a shield! It's nothing but a dead-end, quite literally, a dead-end!'

  'Why would he lie?' asked Victoria.

  'To give himself hope, a dream, a fantasy.'

  'Watch them. Learn. This is them,' said The Insect Head.

  'Now let me take something that's real.' Albert continued, as he turned to The Insect Head. 'I gave you Ben. Now reward us, Victoria and I.'

  'Not I! You! You!' said Victoria.

  Albert looked at her defiantly, 'fine!' he said. He then turned to address The Insect Head. 'Then destroy my page, my page alone! Destroy it!'

  'We cannot. We would not,' replied The Insect Head.

  'You can! You must! You must have the power!'

  'Liar!'

  'Failure!' added Ben.

  Albert looked at Ben and spat, 'they still get you! I will be free from you! No guilt by association!'

  'See how many they are.' said The Insect Head.

  'See who we are!' said Ben.

  'Cowards!' said Albert. 'What do you expect?'

  'For people to be themselves, and you have been just that, a cowardly, weak, pathetic man.'

  Albert paused, unable to form a reply. Desperate, he turned to The Insect Head and continued to beg.

  'Give me something, anything! I helped you! I could have escaped!'

  'Only life can pass through the page and there is none of that in you,' replied The Insect Head.

  'I helped you keep your code! I stopped his escape! Doesn't that count for anything?'

  'None now, nothing! You are alone. You are just one. Now, destroy the page!'

  The page eating insects fizzed into life and began to devour the page. Victoria lunged towards it, grabbed it with both her hands and ripped from their jaws. She turned to Ben, a desperate look in her eye, pleading 'what next?' but before he could think, let alone speak, a great tornado of insects had overwhelmed and encased her. Her outstretched hand pierced the wall that trapped her. Ben, driven by instinct not logic, reached for it, but his speed was no match for the insects which piled in to thicken the walls. Her hand vanished, sunk. Ben continued forward punching and kicking his way into the wall. He screamed, demanding her release. The wall strengthened, as it grew ever more dense. His arms and legs could wade no more. Now useless, they fell trapped, embedded and unable to move.

  The Insect Head looked on, as did dozens more. All, in unison, gave a command to those that were charged with destroying Ben's page.

  'Now! Now! Now!'

  Ben knew that his fate was sealed. He could do no more. A bubble of certainty contained him, but suddenly the bub
ble burst. All the insects, those that formed the heads, the walls and Victoria's tomb, exploded up and away.

  He felt the chill. It plucked his spine and snapped his head to look above. A single, massive The... in terminal free-fall, like a vast body of water which had itself burst free of a containing skin, plummeted towards him. All available insects, now triggered to attack, flew in to meet the threat.

  The... contracted to form a perfect mirrored sphere, the book threaded through its centre. In an instant, it stopped and hung dead-still in space. A thousand filaments struck out from the sphere, like arcs of electric, each to invade a cell then spear through a page, to hook and return a living man, woman or child, who, once before the sphere, this single mirrored eye, were threshed then thrown, crushed and vanished.

  Vast waves of insects dive-bombed the sphere.

  'They're attacking,' said Albert.

  'It's futile. They are but ghosts to each other,' replied Victoria.

  She could see that insect and The... were removed from each other, split by a dimensional divide.

  The... ballooned in size to become a great swirling cloud of black particles from which an electrical storm thrashed and raged - the lightening bolts, its tentacles, weapons to snare and slash. In a frenzy of destruction, thousands more people were extracted via their pages to be crushed and thrown into an infinite torment. Cells darkened. From gashes, torn briefly into the dimensional divide, the book was ripped and vandalised. Broken pages littered space. The insects continued to attack, for they could not concede, targeting individual particles with crazed, pointless bites and stings.

  Albert turned to Ben.

  'You must take us! Try to move through time again!' he pleaded.

  'With you? You ask me that after what you just did?' replied Ben.

  'No.' Albert said, a great sadness about to overwhelm him. He looked at Victoria with an honest, shameful eye. 'Not with me. Go, alone.'

  He turned and sped away, to vanish amongst the chaos.

  'Is that all you are?' Ben called out to him. 'Is that all you dare to be?'

  'Let him go,' Victoria said. 'You go, too. You alone.' She showed him his page, which she continued to hold. 'Escape through your page.'

  'I won't leave you.'

  'You must!'

  'I won't!'

  'It's what you would have done.'

  'I didn't know that. I thought I could take you with me.'

  'But you couldn't! I was destined to remain, left behind.'

  'And I was destined to find my shield but I didn't!'

  'Then look elsewhere!'

  'With help, with you, I could. But alone?'

  'Yes, alone! All alone until you can look no more!'

  Darkness enveloped them. Only their ghostly haze and the light from Ben's page fought against the black. But before their shock could dissipate light emerged to reveal they hung suspended, dead-centre, inside a mirrored sphere. Ben's magnified, distorted reflection bounced from every direction, but Victoria remained unseen, unwatched.

  'What is it?' cried Victoria.

  'Go! Through the wall! Risk it!' said Ben.

  They hesitated briefly, but as they looked at each other, they knew they had to try. They sped away, hand-in-hand. The sphere, however, matched their movement, so in effect they remained stationary. As they realised this, they rapidly changed direction, went up, down, left and right, but to no avail. They remained fixed, dead-centre.

  Through the wall a hand came - that of a man deformed and rotting. All was black and grey. The long, oversized fingers had grown beyond the peeling flesh and made the hand appear like a spider probing the air for prey. Its arm was nothing human, more a fat wriggling worm. The hand crept towards Victoria, ready to clench her throat.

  'It's not a real hand! It just wants to scare you!' said Ben.

  'It succeeds and will as a hand, too!' replied Victoria. 'Go! You must go!' she pleaded with him.

  'I can't!'

  He moved to place himself between Victoria and the hand. The hand vanished and reappeared on the opposite side of the sphere where it continued its, unobstructed, passage towards Victoria's throat.

  'It will take me!' she said.

  'Why not me? What's it planning for me?'

  'Look around; it watches you.'

  His reflection was all around - no Victoria or even the hand.

  'But what more can we know of its reason?' Victoria continued. 'Does it save you til last, the last ever ghost, if not the last thoughtful thing?'

  'But why?'

  'If only we knew; we may have hope.'

  'Come into me!' An idea filled his mind. 'If I am to be left, with you inside me, it will have to leave you too.'

  'No! It may take us both!'

  'You don't know that!'

  'No. But this.'

  She moved inside him. Only her hand, which continued to hold his page, extended out beyond him. They spoke by thought alone.

  'The insects lied. I know they lied. We can both go through,' she told him. He disagreed.

  The hand continued to move forwards, now towards them both, just metres away.

  'We must believe! We can go through together!' she continued.

  'We can't!'

  'We can! Dream with me, dare to! Life is magical, it is! I believe it, Ben. I really do believe it!'

  'How can we? Why can we?'

  'Because of all the possibilities alive on a page. They, are, all we can dream! You must take them with you!'

  'With us!'

  'Yes! With us!'

  'You really believe?'

  'I do!'

  'Then I believe in you!'

  'Enough to take me? To promise me you will find your shield?'

  'Yes!'

  'Bring the page, pull it through, make it safe but quickly! Save us!'

  She released his page. It hung there flat. The hand moved no faster but was less than a metre away. Ben jumped above the page, Victoria embedded inside him, then plunged feet first into it. As he went through, he took hold of the page, grabbing the border at one corner so that he might pull it through after him.

  Ben, the barely living boy, at peace in bed. Ben, the ghost, rose, thrown from the body as if expelled from his own living flesh. The sight of his lifeless body repulsed him. He jumped off the bed and away from himself. He called for Victoria while searching the room with a fevered stare. He knew, too soon, he was there alone.

  He carried his page, pinched at the border between finger and thumb. He pushed his free hand against it, but the page yielded no depth. The living text continued to switch between just two simple characters.

  His escape, he felt, had trapped him. Blood, he thought. There was none on his hand or anywhere else. Was there none to take, no life left to be?

  He looked at his body, numb on the bed. The eyelids were closed near fully, although beneath them some form of attraction glowed. He rushed to them, opened them, felt nothing of himself. In his eyes, beyond them, was the space he had left behind. Victoria, seen clearly, was held, throttled by The Hand, which then shook her around violently. The eyelids snapped shut. Ben swiped them open. His eyes were mirrors, the eyes of The...

  'Are you the last? Am I? Am I the very last ghost?' Ben cried.

  The eyelids fell shut. Ben moved to open them. The Hand punched through the body's face. Ben reflexed away, twisting off the bed. His stare, only briefly, lost sight of The Hand, which, in that time, clenched to form a fist. As Ben stood still, a finger sprung from the fist. Ben counted one, then two, as a second finger joined the first.

  'Two? There's only two?' Ben asked.

  The Hand withdrew back through his, the body's, face. Ben dived under the bed, an instinct to hide, to be away from it all. He listened hard, but no sound dared the faintest breath. No wind, no cracks or creaks. No humans, no monsters, creatures or things. He wished his mind, his spirit, could be as numb as the body above - alone, content, unthinking.

  Why, two? Two of them? Two of him?
Was he the very last ghost? The final, weakest, barricade left to stop The... from ending it all?

  He looked to the wall, through which his companions had first appeared. A twist of moonlight drew his eye. The Pendant, discarded, was once again found. It lay on the floor just a metre away. The cold light of a full Moon made it glisten. He rolled away, as if repelled, out from under the bed. Without a pause, he fled the room.

  The page, now rolled, was held as a sword ready to defend or attack. Let it deliver all that it was, he thought, life or death in every blow. Its faint illumination helped free a path from the black of night for all the house was dark.

  The living room felt, as it always did, empty of life. He looked at the calendar and the mantelpiece clock. The night was still sealed, unbroken by day - only three hours had passed since he had risen, expelled, a ghost. He travelled back in time to a minute before ten o'clock, and the sound of the church bells that had greeted his ghostly self.

  His bedroom door stood ajar, his stare fixed through it, waiting on the wall through which his fellow ghosts had first arrived. Their light would rise above the dark. He would see them from the landing, he would know them once again.

  Time went by, silent and still.

  'Come...come,' he pleaded in a voice that did not dare rise above a whisper. 'Come...some...any.'

  Time ever onward, but the church bells made no sound.

  He returned to the mantelpiece clock. Enough time had elapsed. His friends, he knew, were gone. He felt he was the last of them, the very final ghost, and yet he felt a haunting, that of solitude.

  He remembered The..., the first he had encountered, would it come to his bedroom as it previously had? Was it still in time? Oh, let it be, he pleaded. Let there be more than one, than two. Many more. Let there still be time!

  Back in his bedroom, primed ready to flee, waiting for The... to return. The silence forced a question, what had deadened the church bells?

  Time brought nothing. He knew the moment had passed. He continued watching, waiting, until, in an instant, the light from the Moon went out. He flinched, cowered and shrunk to the floor. He glanced at the window; the pane was black. A cloud? How could it move so quickly?

  He looked away. The pendant, lit by the light from the page, caught his stare. He hesitated, briefly, then snatched the pendant from the floor.

  'Give me madness!'

  He cried with the pendant held to his face, gripped in both hands as if attempting to throttle it.

  'Make me mad, make me not care, make me desert, make me object, or, more impossible, make me understand! Because half of forever is no time at all!'

  He looked beyond the pendant into the blur of darkness that filled the space behind it. This void drew his anger, made clear his thoughts.

  'But do I, understand?...He was gone forever...You could find no hope.'

  He lowered the Pendant and caught sight of the page, which was laid out flat on the floor. A great chunk of text was alive on the page - a chaotic jumble of changing letters, characters and words which transfixed and bewildered him, as he knew life itself often should.

  'Hope, save it for me; pass it here, now, to me. I can dream for both of us. I can find him again. I know where he is, where all that is possible lives, for real, on a page. And never selfishly, but freely, for us, and for all of us!'

  He knew he had to return to Oswald's library, where the spirit of his Dad had once been his shield, where the books he had read had freed and empowered him. Where else could he feel complete? Where else could hope be found?