A Ghostly Restoration

At the stroke of midnight, I am woken by a sad shrill voice echoing from every corner of the old house.

"Help me, I'm all alone in here."

It sounded like the voice was coming from inside the house, every facet reverberated, and from every wall came another echo, it was as if they were chasing each other from room to room, even the ceilings and the floors were calling out to me.

Instantly, a mass of piton sized goosebumps erupted on my forearms, raising my hair follicles to new heights. All I wanted to do was pull the duvet over my head, pretend it wasn't happening and fall back to sleep. But even though scared half to death, I faced a moral dilemma, and against my better judgement, chose to rush in where angels fear to tread. Full of fear, like a scaredy-cat, I slowly put on my dressing gown and slippers, before silently tiptoeing from the bedroom.

"Why would I behave like this in my own home, what am I, a man or a mouse?"

You could cut the air with a knife, and I was terrified, been like this all my life, couldn't even stand up to the trouble and strife. I always felt insecure, especially after she just packed her bags and disappeared one night. Strangely it was about the same time of year, when unexpectedly, she left without a word, never to be heard of again. I reported her disappearance to Missing Persons, but that didn't help, they assumed I was just another loner. I was, going out of my mind, and it only got worse when they couldn't trace her, her family, or anyone who knew her, which included all of our friends, who thought I'd gone insane.

The police began to question whether or not she'd ever existed and concluded, she was just a figment of my imagination. It became stranger and stranger, as I could not find anything in my home related to her, there was no evidence to support that she'd ever existed, let alone lived there, everything pointed toward my insanity. Every last trace of her was gone, even the text messages on my phone, emails and telephone numbers had just vanished, only my memory remained, or so I thought.

For, as my toes touched the cold floor I had a flashback, recalling the night she disappeared. She was in front of me, being chased by an apparition, and ran horrified and screaming, across the landing, toward the stairs, where in desperation, she lept to protect herself and vanished into thin air.

"Why had this memory remained hidden from me until now?"

Even though draped in my dressing gown and wearing slippers, I was feeling cold, which was odd as it was the middle of July and the height of a scorching summer. I tried to switch on the light as I neared the door, but needless to say, nothing worked, and was about to light a candle when I stumbled on my torch, and although not fully charged, it was brighter than a flickering candle, mind you, a candle might have helped warm my freezing fingers.

As I stepped across the bedroom threshold onto the landing, my trailing waistband became trapped beneath the door, and the next thing I know, I'm face down on the floor, my only source of light, the torch, is bouncing down the stairs, one step at a time. After bouncing down far more stairs than existed, I wasn't counting but it seemed like fifty or more, before like my wife it vanished.

Racked with pain and shivering, I clawed my way back to the bedroom door, and with considerable effort, fumbled in the dark, released the trapped waistband, I don' know why, but this simple act gave me an unexpected sense of self-achievement.

Somehow, I managed to clamber to my feet, but not without the help of the frosted door frame. The house had never seemed so dark it was near impossible to make out my fingers as I wriggled them right in front of my eyes. There was a presence I couldn't see but knew it was there, it was covert and blended as one with the darkness. I felt its icy touch as it moved through the cold sweat on my face, and like a pencil, it etched lines on my freezing cheeks.

I stood in a stupor, not knowing what to do next, I was losing the will to live, and barely had enough energy to move, it would have been easier to curl up and die. The shrill voice had gone, only to be replaced by a simpering cry, it had no words but could sense it was calling out my name.

In desperation I forced myself forward, with nothing more than willpower, my skin began to whiten, it was luminescent and freezing, loose glowing flakes drifted away like drifting snow, it felt like I was climbing butt naked, toward the summit of Mount Everest, and with each step toward the stairs, it was deteriorating.

I made it to the summit, which was, only the top of the stairs, reaching out for the null post, I leant forward, only a fraction, but it was enough to tip the balance. The sound of my cracking limbs was horrific, crystalline tendrils began ripping me apart, icy fragment by icy fragment, hurling them like snowballs from the top of the stairs.

My shattered remains, fell like a hailstorm down the stairs until they were swallowed by a void where the stairs had parted and then plummeted into what at first appeared as a bottomless pit, but the hailstorm of remains was soon crashing into an opaque ellipse, spanning the void.

They were travelling faster than a speeding bullet, and on impact burst into clouds of white dust, that settled and formed a sugar icing like coating, across the surface of the ellipse, which began to melt, even though still freezing. Like cloudy white treacle it drained toward the centre of the ellipse, which now resembled an eye, it seeped through the eye's enormous pupil, which was porous and behaved like a filter, only allowing passage to the bits of me it wanted to keep, what remained, was reprocessed by the ellipse, or discarded by an Arctic wind, that sweep the unwanted waste from its surface, leaving the eye spotlessly clean, gazing intently back into the void.

All that remained were gooey, slimy stalactites, hanging from the underside of the eye, there were hundreds, if not thousands spread across the width of the void, it was not a pretty sight.

I can't logically explain how I can recall the sequence of events, as I quite clearly had no recognisable human form, such as ears or eyes.

There was no sense of time passing, but my consciousness was still intact, and somehow it kept track of what was going on, however with no bodily limbs or organs a subconscious mind was of little use to me, I had nothing to control, only my soul.

At some indefinable point in time a shape began to coalesce in the darkness of the void, at first it looked no different than your average stalagmite, but it became a gelatinous bubble, within which an embryo was developing, unlike human embryo it grew from the base, legs first. The transformation continued asynchronous until it was clearly a baby. But the regeneration continued, rapidly the baby became a child which quickly progressed to puberty and adolescence and wore a familiar enigmatic smile, it was like some sort of distorted fairy tale, as the teenage child, took on the image of my missing wife.

There were no words spoken, as her translucent image, reached up and stretched the bubble until it touched the spot from where I appeared to be viewing her transformation. I could sense her touch, it felt reminiscent of an electric shock, as it surged through the gooey slime, connecting every molecule. In response, the slimy stalactites began to merge and move toward her finger, and where they touched, the slime was instantaneously absorbed by the bubble, and in just a few seconds, the underside of the eye was sucked clean.

Simultaneously two entities coalesce into one, to form a homogenous version of each other, and for want of better description, we had become kindred spirits or soul mates, we were no longer alone, we exist as free spirits bonded together for eternity, coexisting as an androgynous life form, that neither man nor woman may put asunder.

The bubble burst and we became the first of the 'Ecstasy Generation', human life would now exist without the need for x and y chromosomes, you might argue, this wasn't a ghost story, but divine intervention, the next step of evolution.

Strange as it may be, as we kiss, we still taste the sweetness of each other's lips, delight in the touch of each other's skin, living life in perfect empathetic bliss.