The town where we used to tease the ghost. A sad, windswept little place. I hadn't been there for over ten years.

It wasn't until two weeks after my mother's funeral that I found time to go back. I needed to look through her house and make an inventory of what I wanted to keep and what had to go. Alex was still living here, though, so I sent him a message asking if he wanted to meet up. He did.

I arrived in the early afternoon, alone, aching from a four-hour train journey. I had no trouble getting there from the station, and the keys the undertakers had passed along worked fine.

Inside: mustard yellow curtains, wallpaper laced with silvery flowers, bathroom retiled in white, grey chairs in the living room with arms spattered with cigarette burns. Not what I remembered. Of course it wasn't. What was I expecting? The whole place to have waited for me? Stupid. And yet it felt like the world had moved on without waiting for me, had left me alone, grown up yet still an angry, reticent little girl

I was having a hard time processing it. Second close family member gone; the last connection to my youth severed. If I went to another funeral after this, it would be for someone I met after going to university.

I wandered up into what had once been my room to find the old box that stored all the bits and pieces that had managed to avoid being thrown away.

A little wooden cat stature with one ear broken off. A geode (gift from my brother). A couple of toy rabbits. Pages and pages of embarrassing gel pen scribblings on lurid paper, from my early teens. Cutesy notes from Alex. A glowing letter from the headteacher. A little bone.

I took it out and rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, feeling the cool, grainy surface.

Not actually bone. Plastic, from an old classroom skeleton. A proximal phalange, a finger bone. We used to say it was real, from one of [i]her[/i] victims. 

That was the story they told me when I first went down to the beach: You can go out when she's about, you can see her in the distance, you can hear her wails. All good, all safe. But if you see her face-to-face, that's it. Yeah, you'll walk away fine, if scared. A few days later, though, and you'll be gone, and the only thing your family will have to remember you by is a small piece of you left under the pillow of a friend.

So don't let yourself get close enough to see her face.

Because the bone may have been fake, but the ghost is real.

[hr]

Back when I still had family. My early teens. Teasing the ghost. Sometimes, depending on how dramatic we were feeling, we called it The Game of Mists, The Moonlight Roulette, Dancing with Death.

There were about seven or eight other players, all of them from another school. I first sought them out after I heard rumours of something beyond, something more transgressive than fighting, than underage smoking and drinking and fumbling on the outer edges of the field. I'd been the good girl until then. No detentions, consistently good marks, that sort of thing. But when I heard about the Game played on a tiny beach all my friends and I had been warned to stay away from, I couldn't help myself.

So that weekend I sat in a circle in the town centre with my new not-really-friends, holding the bone “from one of her victims”, while Tom, the ringleader, explained the rules to me:

At low tide, you run along the beach towards the pier. You go barefoot. You run together, but you don't try and stick together. The idea is to try and become lost, alone in the mist. Not too hard when the tide's out and the mist is thick enough.

Then?

Maybe something will happen. Maybe it won't. If [i]she[/i] appears, “everything will go fucking weird.” Try and find her, wailing for her lost children. But don't get too close, and [i]don't get close enough to see her face.[/i]

I said if I got that close, I'd just close my eyes.

“No,” he said. “Never get that close. If she approaches, run.”

Then he said they were planning to go along that night, if I wanted to come.

I did.



It was just after dinner. The sun was still out, but clouds gave the world a vast, oppressive ceiling, and mist was starting to roll in from the sea. It was still thin enough the see the pier. Or what was left of it – parallel lines of wooden legs, decayed and soft, coated with stringy green slime and held steady by brown metal braces. A little while past it, the sand became shingles, then rocks, then at last cold cliffs that looked unreal in the thickening mist. In the dying light the ocean looked like ridged pewter. Chill wind sent my hair flying and brought in salt and the smell of rot.

I pulled off my socks and shoes, and set them beside the others. The sand was cold and soft beneath my feet.

“Ready?” Tom said. 

I wanted to shiver and pull my coat tighter, but didn't in case it looked weak. “Yeah,” I said.

“Alright. Go!”

And everyone ran. I started a fraction of a second later. Already the mist was so thick it nearly obscured the pier legs. Halfway there, we spread out. I took the leftmost route, closest to the ocean. 

Was I worried? Yes, but not in the way you'd expect. I was worried that nothing would happen, that we'd just be a bunch of near-teens running about randomly by the sea like a bunch of fools, who'd go back and congratulate themselves for being brave.

I guessed I should've reached the pier by now, but the mist had covered it. On a whim – Tom had said run in any direction – I turned a hard left and headed towards the sea. 

It didn't come. It felt like I'd crossed the beach's width twice over by now, and the water was still no closer. I slowed, listened. The soft rumble of the ocean was still there, but I couldn't pin a direction on it. I could hear the footsteps of my companions too, but they too were directionless, and seemed to fade and gain in volume.

Some emotion clasping at my throat. Fear? Joy? I couldn't say. I picked a direction and ran, just to see what would happen. 

I must've run like that for a minute, and by the end of it I still couldn't tell if I'd moved at all. My world was the sand beneath my feet and a wall of mist a few feet away.

Another sound came over the crashing waves: Sobbing, stifled at first, then growing louder, until it became more of an open wailing. You could tell it was borne of authentic grief and loss. And this time, I could tell where it was coming from.

I walked towards it, heart in my throat. And at last, there she was. A figure. The mist smudged all detail, making her seem like a silhouette, barely human, hunched, shuffling, wringing her hands. I approached slowly, trying to make sure it wasn't one of my companions poking fun. A few feet away, she turned, and raised her hands towards me.

I'm not stupid. I ran. I didn't scream, or anything like that, but I ran. I think I might've laughed.

It took a while to get out, with the beach changed like that. I kept on coming closer to her, or other figures in the mist. This time I stayed away, kept moving. Eventually, though, the mist thinned, and I found myself moving off the sand and onto the shingles. Thus oriented, I was able to follow the line up away from the water, and back round to where out shoes will still lined up.

It was dark now, and the cloud cover was retreating to give a view of a gibbous moon in a blue-black sky.

Over the next five minutes, my companions came back from various direction. They were all grinning. “I saw her!” I gasped, laughing again. “That was brilliant!”

“We all did,” said Tom. “You were lucky. She doesn't always come.”



And she didn't the next three times tried. We just ran about in the mist for a few minutes for a few minutes until it was obvious nothing was going to happen, then went home. The fourth go was a win, then came another string of failures. These attempts were the full extent of our social life together. We never tried to hang out anywhere else, and that was fine by me.

After a couple of months, sick of these failures, I started making notes on the conditions, seeing if there was any way to predict the arrivals. It didn't correlate with dates, or phases of the moon, or anything like that. Eventually, though, I succeeded. It was a fairly involved mathematical pattern taking the solstices as zero points. What pattern? My secret. Do you expect me to tell you everything?

I didn't tell Tom or the others, either. It was my secret, and I liked having it. It meant I got to visit her alone. And, once, bring someone else along. 

My friend Ella. 

A few months earlier, about the time I was getting into the Game, I was also taking part in a school competition. I won't try to bore you with the details. It was something to do with maths, and we had a week to work on it.

The day before the deadline, Ella called me up and asked to come over. I'd already finished, so I said yes. 

She came, we spent some time chatting about all the stupid stuff teenagers do, and she went home. Nothing unusual. 

Except in the morning, when I went to check through all my work before I brought it in, some pages were missing. I searched, and searched, and searched, until my mother started to yell about being late. In the end I had to hand in my work incomplete. I didn't win.

Ella did.

I didn't even know she was competing! But she won, using what I was sure was my method.

I congratulated her about the win. I pushed, subtly, to see if she'd admit what she'd done. She didn't. She apologised about not telling me she was competing: “I just never got around to it.” She told me was surprised I didn't win.

I tried to get over. I told myself it was nothing, really. People are like that sometimes.

Ella could see [i]something[/i] was wrong, but she had no idea it was because of what she had done to me. She even asked me once if anything was wrong.

“No,” I told her. “I have nothing against you.” I couldn't let myself admit I'd been affected so much. Not if she wouldn't admit the part she'd played.

My older brother saw something was wrong too. One evening he sat me down and asked.

Could I have lied to him? No, not to my brother. He was the person I looked up most to in the world. He was in his early twenties, and was trying to get into one of those overseas aid organisations. I lived in intermittent but strong fear that one day he would go off to one of the more ruinous parts of the world and –

Well, I don't want to talk about that. It's a digression anyway. The point is, even the full force of my natural reticence could not stand up to him.

I told him about what had happened with Ella, and how I couldn't get over my anger.

He listened. He didn't lecture me about the futility of revenge, or throw any other platitudes my way. He just waited for me to finish, then nodded and said, “What a bitch.” I grumbled about her a bit more, and he went on: “I hate to say it, but you're going to meet more people like that. But I know you're strong enough to win.” Other stuff, too, but that's the bit I remember.

So I tried to get on with it. I doubled down on my anger, held it under. It became a tiny, white-hot flame that refused to be extinguished, no matter how much I tried to stifle it. It was still there months later, when I figured out how to predict the visitations.

And then something occurred to me.

On a day my companions weren't playing, I took Ella down to the beach to see the ghost. She knew something was going on down there by that point, of course, and she was interested in seeing what I got up to, but I didn't tell her what to expect.

I kept her hand in mine, of course. I didn't want to risk her actually [i]seeing[/i] the ghost's face. The Just getting lost in the tiny beach and hearing that awful sobbing would be enough. And it was: When we came out half an hour later, having avoided getting anywhere near the ghost, Ella was crying.

I played innocent. I acted scared. I told her that had never happened before, that I'd heard about the haunting but thought it was a myth. 

Later, at home, thinking about this cruel trick I'd played, I couldn't help but feel a surge of satisfaction. 



Ella and I drifted apart. Growing up, I suppose. It didn't matter, though, because new people came into my life. 

He came up to me while I was leaning against wall, holding a plastic cup of some violently sweet and violently colourful drink that I'd had foisted on me. He had a broad grin which he wielded with worrying effectiveness and a sort of chattiness which quickly got through my defences

His name was Alex Thyme, I learned. Smart, but not shy. We talked at some length about the overseas organisation my brother was applying to, then some uncool schoolwork which we both found interesting. I went home with his number, and we started meeting up so often that I even had to cut back my visits to the beach.



For two years I went on visiting [i]her[/i], either alone or with my companions. It was my refuge, my escape from all the dreary, grinding bits of teenage life, uplifting in a way even Alex couldn't be.

On a Saturday morning, at the tail end of a weak and pathetic summer, my mother called me into the living room. It was in the tone of voice that made it obvious something big was waiting for me. And as confirmation of that, when I traipsed in, I found my brother sitting there too, providing backup.

And with him there, there was no way I could let myself evade the questions to come.

My mother, using my full name, asked me to sit down. I did. She paused to crush the end of her cigarette and light another. Then she asked me: “How long have you been visiting the ghost on the beach?”

I don't know why I was so surprised. If there really was something down there, people would have known about it before me, wouldn't they?

I told her honestly, and answered a few more brief questions while the smell of smoke thickened. 

Eventually, seeming bored by this line of questioning, she leaned forward and said, “We think Thomas McAlister is dead.”

Tom.

We'd had a successful visit a few days ago. And Tom … hadn't been grinning like he usually did afterwards.

Oh.

“We think, anyway,” she went on. “We know how it works. There's not … there's not enough left to be sure. 

She was blurry about the details, but I later found out that as far the official records are concerned, Tom went down as a missing person, and that was that.

“Promise me you'll never go down there again,” my mother said. “I couldn't stand to …” The cigarette in her hand trembled. “ … lose you.”

The choice was obvious, really. I promised, and I kept my word. And I wasn't the one she lost.



I want to say I was scared straight, but that wouldn't be entirely true. I was scared, yes. But another part of me felt Tom's death added to the allure, confirmed the danger, added an extra frisson to the notion of going out there again.

But life caught up. Growing closer to Alex – I never told him in any detail about what happened down there.. Even rebuilding a sort of friendship with Ella. Schoolwork, relationships, all the other stuff. And eventually, once that dreadful letter arrived, I stopped thinking about the beach entirely.

[hr]

It was getting dark outside. I wondered once more through the empty, alienating house, retrieved the plastic bone from a mantlepiece that hadn't been there when I left for university, considered putting it in my pocket, then dropped it in with the rest of the bin.

One final reunion to go. I pulled my coat around me and left the house. Clouds formed a roof of pale grey, closing the world in, save for one ragged hole in the distance which was lit into a dozen shades of golden orange by the setting sun. Closer, sickly yellow street lamps were already on, smudged slightly by a thin mist, making the pavement look otherworldly and too-small.

I stuck my hands deeper in my pockets and pressed on through the cold air, down to the beach. I stood on the shingles, feeling the stones grind against each other beneath my feet and looked out at the horizon. The sea grumbled, streaked with whitewash. The pier legs were a line of black stumps in the distance, smaller and even more pathetic than I remembered.

Presently there came footsteps, someone calling my name. Alex, standing on the road behind the beach. Now sporting a beard and deeper-set lines around his eyes, but there was still that broad grin I remembered, the sort of thing to trick you into thinking he could do no harm.

I waved and walked over to meet meet him. We hugged awkwardly, unsure of the appropriate level of intimacy.

“How're you doing?”

I shrugged. “Alright, I suppose.” What else is there to say?

After a few more fumbling bits of smalltalk, he looked at the beach, and searching for something halfway interesting to say, came out with, “This is the place where you used to … ?”

“Yeah. Nostalgia, I guess.” I shivered. “Is there anywhere nearby we can get a drink?”

“Sure. Just up the road here.”

As we were walking up to the pub, I noticed he had a slight limp.

“Yeah,” he said. “Work friend got married recently. I was enough of a fool to try white water rafting on the stag do.” He gave me a self-deprecating grin. “Got a metal plate and everything in there right now.”

[i]You still get the chance to – [/i]

I laughed. “Of course you did. Anyone else injured?”

“Nope.”

“Every stag needs its fool. I'm sure the everyone else was glad you could take the mantle.” This wasn't funny, but he laughed anyway.

The pub was reasonably warm, with a low, uneven ceiling and soft orange lighting. I watched Alex dither over a selection of ugly-sounding local ales before ordering us both something stronger. I drunk mine slowly.

“Thanks for calling me,” he said near the end of the first pint. “I was actually a bit worried, you know, that after what happened, you kind of blamed me,”

“No,” I said slowly. “I have nothing against you.”

What happened. He tried to get into it a bit more, but I didn't want to talk about it. I pushed through onto easier, more immediate things. How did the funeral go? Oh, well, you know, the officiant was … 

And so forth, until he'd finished his second pint. I continued to sip at mine.

Then we move onto the nothings. How my accent is changing. How his isn't. Work, new friends, life in Bristol, politics, everything.

At the end of his fifth pint, it was dark outside; the windows were just mirrors showing me and Alex as spectres enveloped in darkness. I suggested we make a move, and together we headed out into the night.

We walked along the empty, poorly-lit road by the shore. Above us, you could tell there were holes in the cloud cover, but couldn't make out which was open sky. The moon was out, but reduced to a diffuse patch of brightness.

By the time we reached the beach, my eyes had adjusted enough to see the mist coming in.

“How's your leg?” I asked. “Think you could walk on the sand?”

“Sure. Sure. No problem.” A pause, then: “Why?”

“The game.” I grin at him. “Why not? It's been a grim couple of days. Why not have some fun?”

He smiled back. “Alright. What do I do?”

“First, we take our shoes off here …”

I explained what to do, and told him that the fun was getting disoriented and lost in what seemed like a tiny beach.

“I'm already pretty disoriented,” he commented.

We walked briskly, rather than ran, across the beach. Soon the thickening mist swallowed everything: Pier, sea, sky Alex. I was alone, with nothing by the cold sand beneath my feet and the wall of mist pressing in around me.

Everything else in this town had moved on without me, or else shrivelled and retreated into something pathetic. But this hadn't changed. This was as powerful, as wonderful as it had ever been. I savoured it, wandering, stopping, running. I heard her sobbing over the distance sound of lapping ocean and followed it. Three times I saw her hunched silhouette wringing its hands and stumbling across the sand, came as close as I dared, and retreated.

Eventually I felt stones beneath my feet and found myself by the water's edge. It was over. I turned and headed back across the beach. It was still hard to see well, but I recognised Alex by his limping form. I realised I was still smiling, stifled it, and walked over to him.

“The hell just happened?” he asked as I led him back towards our shoes.

I shook my head. “No idea. Weird …” 

He glanced back at the beach. “That certainly was disorienting.” We sat down on a large stone to put our shoes back on. He continued: “I thought I saw …”

I froze, turned to look at him. “What?”

“Well, I thought I saw you at first, but it was someone else. I …” He shrugged. “No idea. Mind must be playing tricks on me.”

“Maybe” I said.

He was too tired and too drunk to want to continue further, so we headed back to his place in silence.



The next day, I thanked Alex for letting me stay over and gently probed about last night. Has wasn't sure what had happened, but wasn't inclined to dwell on it. What were his plans for the next few days? Going to see friends. That was good, I said, and asked him to keep in touch.

After finishing the work at my mother's old house, I took the train back to Bristol.



A couple of days later, I woke with something under the covers pressing against the back of my hand. It was cold and hard. Parts of it were slick and greasy. I sat up and pulled the covers aside.

A flat piece of metal, a few inches long. Squarish at one end, ragged at the other, like it had been sheared in half. A few smears of red lay down one side.

A surge of satisfaction.

I took it into the kitchen and threw it in the bin.