The Weight of Souls

I took a breath. “You heard?”

Justin said nothing. I didn’t dare step forward to look at him in case I was knocked into the road, but his back was stiff as marble. “I guess you did.”

Slowly he started to shake his head. His hair flipped around his collar as he moved faster and faster.

He was about to run. Without thinking I touched his sleeve with my fingers. A businessman standing next to me moved sideways with a frown. I ignored him. “It had to happen some time. Someone had to find your body.”

“No.”

Terrified I was going to lose him again I closed my hand around his forearm. “You knew you were dead,” I murmured.

“Not like this. Not…” He fell silent. Then he shook his arm free of mine. The traffic screeched to a halt and the green man started to flash. “Let’s go.”

We crossed the road and Justin carried on walking.

“Where’re we going?” I scurried to keep up with him and adjusted my bag.

“Princes Gardens, it isn’t far.”

“Right.”

We turned the corner and I disturbed two pigeons pecking at a discarded McDonald’s wrapper. My looming shadow made them jerk back, but they kept pulling at the manky bun with frantic beaks, as if their heads were on elastic.

I shook my head and tucked my hands under my armpits. Then the boy’s words came back to me: his crew. Maybe Justin hadn’t been on drugs, but he hadn’t been alone either. I thought about the last time I’d seen him alive.

“Were you with Tamsin?”

“Huh?” Justin’s eyes when he turned to me were red-rimmed.

“You’re in your uniform. You must’ve died Friday night.”

Justin turned his head to watch the pecking birds.

I was about to push him further when my palm tingled. I clenched my fist and the shadows beneath a Kensington-monogrammed bin caught my eye. I shivered; right at that moment there was nothing passing to make those shadows move, yet they were twisting as if caught in a trap.

15 REMEMBERED AS AN IDIOT

A breeze lifted my hair from my ears as I did a quick scan of Princes Gardens. It was filled with gasping grey-tinged trees choking in the polluted London air. They weren’t dead enough to bother me.

Apart from Justin and myself, there was only an old guy slumped in the shade on a bench next to a building marked “The Goethe Institute”. His hat was pulled down low over his ears; who knew how long he’d been there.

Satisfied that the place was safe for me, I sat with my back against a tree and wriggled between its roots until I was comfortable.

Justin looked as if he wanted to lean on the tree himself but it had too much life-force to support him.

He stretched out on the grass. “I can’t even feel this.” He went to pluck a blade and his fingers came up empty. “It’s like lying on cardboard.”

He fidgeted and rolled until my glare pulled him up short. “Did it go down like those boys said?” I asked.

“That I was climbing scaffolding?” Justin rolled until he was staring at the cloud-pocked sky.

“Were you?”

His head lolled towards me, his expression such a blend of defiance and misery I knew what he was going to say.

“Yes.” He cast his elbow over his face. “I’ll always be the stupid waster who killed himself climbing wet scaffolding. That’s going to be all anyone remembers about my life. What a legacy.”

I shrugged, scraping my shoulder against bark. “At least you’ll be remembered.”

Justin jerked.

“I mean it.” I inhaled and the scent of shorn grass relaxed me. “Sometimes I have to look people up, find addresses, that sort of thing, and when I start asking questions no one remembers the dead guy. It’s like he never lived. That must be hard to find out. For the ghost, I mean.”

Justin thumped the ground. No dirt puffed under his fist. “I’ll be remembered as an idiot.”

I shrugged. “If it helps, I would have remembered you as an idiot anyway.”

He inhaled sharply and I raised my hand. “Sorry, let’s not do this again. Can you talk about what happened now?”

Justin exhaled. “OK.” He continued to stare up through his crooked elbow. “It’s all blurry, like a bad dream.”

“That could be because of the trauma,” I shrugged. “Or maybe you haven’t really accepted what happened. Most of the dead that track me down have been that way for years. They’ve had time to get used to it, to dwell.” I scraped my scalp on tree bark as I shook my head. “Just tell me what you can.”

“I still don’t think I was murdered.”

There was nothing left to say. I glared and Justin’s lower lip disappeared under his teeth. “Fine, OK. I don’t really know where to start.”

I twitched and anger started to fill me again as if I was a waiting jug.

“No, listen, there’s stuff you don’t know. Background. It's important.”

Across the path the trees shadows lengthened as if the sun had jumped across the sky. I held my elbows and watched the movement closely. It stopped.

“Go on then,” I sighed. “Tell me everything.”

Justin rolled onto his stomach and rested his chin on his palm. For one tiny half-second with the scent of grass in my nose and the feel of the tree at my back, I forgot to hate the boy lying in front of me.

It didn’t seem so bad that he’d called me Godzilla, or that he was now one of the hounding dead. It felt like a normal moment with a boy from school, something I hadn’t had for years. Five years.

Then his dark eyes looked inward and he gave a sort of shrug. “It started on my first day. James made me play Truth or Dare. You told me to take the dare.” His eyes narrowed. “You had to have known how bad it would be.”

My jaw slackened. “How could I have known?”

His glare intensified. “You knew James. I didn’t.” He shook his head. “I had to make Mrs Pickard cry. On my first day I told her she smelled and made the whole class laugh. Dad went nuts.” His own jaw tightened. “James thought it was great.”

I nodded. “The Truth or Dare thing was a bit of a craze for a while.” I tried a smile that felt uncomfortably like a too-tight mask.

As Justin’s face hardened my breath stopped. His eyes suddenly seemed darker than the tentacular shadows cast by the tree branches. “You thought the game went away?” His voice was bitter as dark chocolate.

“Well, yes. It was banned,” I frowned. “Oz smoked that whole pack of cigarettes one break and had to go to hospital.”

Memories swirled like fudge in the recesses of my mind. That time was kind of a blur for me. Back then it was as if school had stopped being real, as if my life only happened when the dead forced me to dance for them.

“The game didn’t die.” Justin shook his head. “It went underground. It evolved.”

“You make it sound–”