Panic – they still hadn’t come back?
Anger – they still hadn’t come back?
Sadness – they still hadn’t come back?
I made a move to get up. Something fell out of my pocket and on to the mattress with a soft thud. It was the glass vial Jill had pressed into my hand.
She’d called it a sleeping potion. ‘You’ll wake when anyone walks through the front door. In the meantime, the worst of your loneliness will pass you by.’
On the front was a faded handwritten label.
Sweet Elixir of Unconsciousness for the Not Quite Dead. Reduce painful waiting time, take a break from inertia, and wake up refreshed, revitalised and raring to face the yawning existential void of the afterlife once more!
Underneath that it said: One drop on the tongue. Spell will be broken in the presence of other people, dead or alive.
I took another look at the label. One drop on the tongue.
What did I have to lose?
I unscrewed the cap, feeling a stab of joy that, on this object at least, my hands worked, held the dropper over my tongue and let go. The liquid was bitter but bearable and within seconds it had dissolved.
I sighed with relief as drowsiness overcame me, welcome as a warm bath.
And when I woke up, surely the faces I’d see would be theirs.
My eyes closed. I just had time to wonder, Can ghosts dream? before my brain, mercifully, went quiet, and all my questions finally disappeared.
JINGLE. JANGLE.
Mutter. Mumble.
Groggy with confusion, I tried to open my eyes. Hang on. I couldn’t open my eyes. I was blind! I was dead and now blind?
Jill hadn’t said anything about this.
I touched my eyes with shaking hands. They met with a layer of something cold and velvety. I rubbed it off, shuddering, and it fell away.
Had Mum and Dad’s bedroom always been so dark?
I stared in confusion at the soft grime I was lying in.
Oh please, oh please don’t say my skin is coming off my body. I don’t want to look like one of those medical illustrations in my lift-the-flap What’s in Your Body? book.
Oh.
It wasn’t skin. It was dust. All over me, thick as a duvet.
And there was an alien, a mass of writhing limbs, climbing in through Mum and Dad’s window. It had wrapped itself around the bed and those tentacles were pressing down on my legs. I tried to scream, but my throat felt dry and out of practice.
Stand down.
It wasn’t a spidery alien.
It was a bramble.
A massive blackberry bush had sprung up overnight outside the house, pushed its face up to Mum and Dad’s window and decided to break in. That would explain the broken glass all over the carpet. It filled the entire window frame and blocked out the sky. Its tendrils had crept across the carpet and grown over the chest of drawers. The bed itself had practically disappeared under the knotty network of its thick vines.
Then I heard that noise again and realised that there was something more important to think about.
I had been startled awake out of my blackout by noises.
Human noises.
Jingle.
Jangle.
Mutter.
Mumble.
‘You’ll wake when anyone walks through the front door,’ Jill had told me.
Which could only mean one glorious thing.
THEY WERE HERE! MY FAMI LY HAD RETURNED!
I leapt up off the bed, and my throat worked again, and eventually I managed to force a rusty shout out. ‘Hi!’
In return, faint voices.
I stumbled along the top landing – on a grey slippery carpet I’d never noticed before, but I didn’t care about that right then and there. I’d just reached the top of the staircase when there was the beautiful sound of a key unlocking a lock.
And the front door opened.
MUM AND DAD were in the doorway, gasping and laughing. I joined in. Mostly out of shock at how different they looked. They’d gone completely white-haired, and wore shapeless brown boiler suits, which smelt quite strongly of mushroom soup.
Then they both walked into the hallway properly and my welcoming smile died on my lips.
It wasn’t them at all. Just a pair of men I’d never met in my life, standing in my hallway.
They didn’t just look and smell weird. They were also being weird. This is what they were doing: wincing with pain while smiling joyfully at the same time.
One took out an electric lamp from his bag and placed it on the floor. In its dim light, I realised they were blotting beads of blood off their faces. They didn’t seem bothered.
‘Worth it though,’ said the man with the straggly ponytail as he roughly swiped at his skin with a hankie. ‘I’d have fought off a dozen hammerhead sharks just to get in this place.’
‘Toadly,’ said his companion, a round fellow with a pink face. ‘A few nicks and scratches are a small price to pay, really. Tent udder.’
He flicked on the head torch strapped around his forehead and began to dart it around the hallway.
Hammerhead sharks? Tent udder? What were they on about? Then again – what did it matter? That elixir had been next to useless. What was the point of waking up if it wasn’t to my family coming back?
What I needed, at this point, was what Mum and Dad in their ongoing attempt to refocus my anger had called ‘an alternative thought’. Break the thought pattern that isn’t serving you, Frankie, and try to think in a new way.
It was as hard and slow as walking up Legkiller on a muggy day, but with an effort I wrenched my thoughts upwards. Maybe they weren’t here yet, but perhaps my family weren’t too far behind. These men might be able to help me find them. Or tell me what I was meant To Do anyway.
‘Hi,’ I rasped. ‘I’m Frankie. I’m dead. Are you
