THIRTEEN

After that, I don't know if it was 'cos of the news article or what have you, the house was found. I never saw my mother again after they took me away. She died a few years later. I don't know how I feel about it now. It was foster homes and group homes after that, but none of them were like the corpse-house. They didn't trust my taste. I remembered all the little deaths from the corpse-house and began my own string of... little deaths, I guess. The cutting started young. I was never caught or 'owt. The first suicide attempt was when they realised what I had been doing. The first time was a slashing. It was always gonna be. You never forget your first. I had been cutting for years already, so graduating it to be the killing stroke was obvious. When I did it, it didn't hurt, but then again, it had never hurt, so I didn't really expect it to. I had it in my mind to film it. I had the idea that I could send it backwards as a tape to the corpse-house and give everyone something interesting to watch. That I could be as infamous and loved, or as calming, as some of the videos the needles watched to soothe themselves into the high. When the carers found me, I was sent away to the hospital for a bit. They asked me 'why?' so many times and I still don't have a good answer- to be honest, it just seemed like the thing to do.

Even after discharge, the cutting didn't stop. Why would it? There were other things on the horizon. A new secondary school. I had missed a shit ton of school, and even when I went, I didn't see what all the fuss was about. I was smoke in those places. Everyone avoided me. I didn't mind too much. Sometimes I could get through the full day without talking. The second time was a hanging. At this point, they were keeping a close eye on me anyway, so I knew it was a doomed endeavour. Still, I went through the motions, just for something to do. Actually, I got further than I thought. The mark was on my neck for weeks. I loved the way it looked but it had faded before I was even out of the hospital. An old friend of my mother tried to visit once, I was told, but wasn't let in. I would come to know her as Bertha. She had been at the corpse-house a few times, I think, but she had never stayed the night. My carers wouldn't tell me 'owt about her, so I made up stories in my head. I never told her any of these when I eventually met her, by the way. School started, and it was shit, as always. There was one teacher there who tried to get us all interested in Shakespeare, the way teachers have to. It was pretty interesting. All ghosts and gore, rules and systems and witches. I liked most of it. I was something of a pet to him, I guess- Newmaker. Mr. Newmaker. Sir. He let me hang about in his classroom before school and after, during the breaks too. He would try and get me to read more, or would ask what films I had been watching. He would ask for written reviews, stories from the perspectives of the characters. Things like that that he would keep. I'm guessing he's burned 'em all now. No skin off my back- half of them probably weren't very good.

I was dreaming bigger, and imagining the next little death. The third time, I jumped. No one could have survived that fall. The rest of the students were sent home early as the ambulance came to get me. That fucking beast was there, holding my hand and whispering to me as the paramedics fussed and the other teachers stared at us. He was saying stuff to me that I couldn't hear: garbled stuff. It sounded like he was underwater. I ignored him. I was thinking 'maybe next time, I'll drown'. He got weird with me after that, Newmaker. He would ask to see me more and more, and ask why I wanted to die. I had to explain, like I'd told the doctors and carers, that I didn't really- just kind of wanted to half go there and come back. Like travelling or a holiday. Besides, their ideas about death were so warped and drastic that even if I had died, I wouldn't have gone where they thought. It frustrated him to hear me say this, and even back then that made me laugh. We had our entanglement for a while. Never at school. I went round to his house. He would bring me things, like tapes and movies, and we would watch them. I didn't mind it at all, but I didn't love him either. I tried to compare what we had going on with the love in films, and I knew it wasn't that. I wasn't stupid either: I knew it was wrong, and that he was some sort of creep. I knew he would get arrested if anyone found out. What's worse is that he had a heavily pregnant wife who I met one or two times as well. I didn't care. When I kissed him, or got kissed by him, I thought about the fourth time, or what I would do after graduation.

Drowning yourself is difficult. Worse than that, it's boring. I had a pocket full of stones and I was really bored that day when I walked into the sea. I got pulled out by a couple of dog-walkers and was coughing water everywhere as their Labrador licked my face and they tried to pull it off me. I lined the stones up in size order on the windowsill of my hospital room, and they made me write a thank you card to the dog-walking couple. They set me up with a job at a grocery shop and kept me in a halfway house. I only saw Newmaker two times after school. He wished me all the best the last time I saw him, but I think he was glad to be ride of me. The last few times we'd fucked had been awkward. I never pushed to see him, either. The dreams started. I couldn't remember them when I woke up, but I knew they were bad news. I started to see things that no one else could. Things that no one else understood. There was always the pause after I'd finished describing them, and the look of puzzlement. Whatever. I felt like something bad was bound to happen, and that I would be the cause of it. The first time I sought out Newmaker, I found him completely by accident. I had been thinking about him idly, and then he walked into the shop I was working at. He had his wife with him, the little girl in a pram, maybe a year and a few months old. Cute kid. He didn't say 'owt to me, actually ignored me, and I did likewise. I got the sudden thought of sending them all back in time to the corpse-house and picking something for them to watch. The sight of the kid gave me immense pause in a way I couldn't describe. Something bad. You understand that, right? I knew something bad would happen to her, and that I would be linked in some way.

I skived the rest of the day off work and went deep into the woods.

Self-Immolation. I wanted to explode. I wanted to burn to ash and feel every flame. I wanted to be destroyed for what I had done and the things I would do. The first three matches sputtered out and died. The next caught and suddenly I was ablaze, and the woods around me were ablaze. It didn't feel like anything. I took a few steps forward, the man on fire, and with every footprint behind me there was a new fire. I couldn't see because the fire was in my face and in my hair, so when I fell in the ditch, I didn't see it coming, but the flames had been extinguished. I lay face up in the ditch and watched the world burn above me. When I pulled myself out a few hours later and made my way back into town, I realised that I had lost my phone. This was one of the funny ones. They didn't believe that it actually happened, so I didn't get sent back to the hospital. Save for the smell of smoke, I was completely unharmed. Can you imagine that?

I cut my hair and changed my name, but apart from that, time ticked on and I was bored again. There wasn't much left to do after the attempted overdose and the attempted gassing. I was really having to wrack my brains. It had been a long period of nothing in my life, so that's where I got the idea from. Nothing, absolutely nothing. No food, no water. I sat still on that park bench for close to fifty hours before anyone came to get me. It was another ten hours before they had me on the drip. This time, they kept me in the hospital. They said it would be semi-permanent. All white walls and half-dead roommates. In a way, it was a lot like the corpse-house, so I felt uniquely settled. That didn't stop further games, though. There's more than one way to die. Bertha came to see me, and she was nothing like the stories I had told myself when I was younger. She signed for release and suddenly I was living with her above her video shop. I knew she was a witch or something, like in Shakespeare. How else would she have conjured up an exact replica of one of the rooms from the corpse-house for me to live in. It was a small chunk, separated from time, perfectly preserved, right there above the stacks of tapes one floor below. I loved her for that, and she had such interesting stories, great friends and customers who all loved me. She set me to work burning tapes, creating new copies. In the back room, she kept an old camcorder and she let me take it out to film little things. She wasn't like the doctors and the carers. She didn't fuss about where I was, didn't ask questions. She used to look at me with her one red eye and I knew that she understood. I loved her for that too.

I made little films for her, the same way I used to write things for Newmaker. Unlike Newmaker, she never kept these for herself. She put them in her shop, and they sold well. I made a film about Newmaker for her, and this was an uncomfortable period, because although I knew she understood, she had questions. She had more than that- violence. She wanted him dead. She told me that if I wanted, she could open the front door of the shop, and we could go through and be in the front room of his house. She would kill him, and I could film it. I declined. "Think about it," she said.

I thought about it. The dreams were still there, and the patterns, and a pain, like a tugging, in my head which had gotten really bad the past few months. It was as if I was being pulled by the temple to someplace else. I was here, in the real world, and yet being here, severed from wherever I was meant to be, was killing me. I had an idea, and I planned it for months. I didn't know how Bertha would react, so I didn't tell her. I bought the drill. I went to the service station and locked myself in the bathroom. It was cordless. It was fully charged. I swept the hair from my forehead and pressed the drill-bit to my temple. I was staring in the mirror. I felt nothing. My finger tightened on the trigger, and the drill whirred to life, finding a nice place in my skull. The blood spray was immense. It felt hot, pressed right there against my brain. I realised it was the closest I had ever come to death. I passed out pretty quickly after that.

In the hospital, all I could think about was my camera. The pulling sensation had gone. So too had the unease at patterns and things I could see and not understand. For the first time in my whole life, I felt great. They explained the complexities of my wound, but I didn't listen. I knew that what I had done to myself was a bit more intricate than what they thought. Because I knew something they didn't- I knew when they would die. Not always how, but when. I could see, clearly, certain deaths, down to the time, date, clothes the person would be wearing. Newmaker had told me that trepanation was used to exorcise ghosts and demons, but I think the opposite is true. Everything that had been pressing against the glass-panes of my life, cold-fingered, watching but not invited to the party, was now inside me, in the warm. The ghosts had found a home. I knew there would be no more suicide attempts, because I was already where I was meant to be. I was the corpse-house's showrunner again.

I relayed this to the doctors. They didn't fully understand, but they didn't care about the minutiae, only that I seemed to have taken a positive step-forward. I was let out shortly afterwards. A woman in a red-dress would fall from her balcony window in thirty minutes. A few seconds after that, a cyclist would be hit by a car and succumb to his injuries in the same hospital that I had just been released from. Later that day, a security guard would have a heart-attack while on the job. He would be in the bathroom. He would fumble for his radio but would be unable to reach it. Overdoses and accidents. People shuffling off in their sleep. I could see it all. But as I went to warn the first woman, the one in that beautiful red dress, the strangeness didn't stop. She couldn't see me. I waved at her to stand away from the edge, shouted as well, which drew a few odd looks from passers-by, but most of them ignored me, smoke once again. It was the same for others. When I spoke to them, they ignored me, and moved right on as if I wasn't there. I tried to pass them messages, but these were never received. For whatever reason, there was nothing I could do that would change their fates. I never did figure out whether this was because I was now truly, in some fucked up way, invisible, or because people just didn't want to hear it. People ignore. People don't want to be told things they'd rather ignore. People want to go about their business as usual, because then that means nothing is wrong. It can't hurt to pretend.

The catalogue began because I wanted to show-off my new skills, kind of, to Bertha. She got it. She didn't even seem surprised that no one paid attention to me. The ghosts came shortly afterwards. This wouldn't have shocked her either, if I told her. But I never did. I dealt with it in my own way. They didn't fully believe that they were dead. I guess it can hurt to pretend, sometimes. It's a hard thing to reckon with, being gone from the world. So, I showed them the movies I made about them. You could spend years agonising over life's big questions- love, death- but a film gives you a neat answer in a short narrative package. That's why I had liked films, in any sense. All the people in the movies have a purpose, they're written that way. No one is inconsequential because they help the story tick on in some way or another. Death is easy to reconcile with when it's on tape. I don't know if there's another way to make the ghosts settle. If there us, I've never tried it. Why would I? My life's been in the movies. That's my way of doing things.

I still don't understand why I can see the things I do. It's not by my choice, but by God's. And I don't mean the various Christian flavours of God, or G-d, or Allah, Waheguru, any Norse, Greek, or Roman figure. Any Zodiac animal. I mean the God that is luck and coincidence that helped you meet your first love. The God that is in music and art that you like- the feeling you get when you look at them. The God of things not fully understood. The God of bad things that happen without reason. God of 'why did my husband have to die when he was a good person, and so many bad people live?'. God of violence and making sure coin flips always land the way they're meant to. God of hidden places. God that makes the rules that vein through the world but make no sense is God, not a being, but an ever-present energy that keeps things in some sort of order that only makes sense to itself. Humans don't understand vampires and witches and ghosts and monsters and call these things supernatural. But we don't understand this type of God anymore than they understand us. Maybe there's more out there that even God doesn't understand, and that I've never thought of. Something that would make a human mind leak out through the ears. I'd like to film that.

What's weird is that when I knew you were going to kill yourself in the bath, and travelled down the country to hopefully catch some of it on film, you saw me. I think you'd seen me coming for a while. I was kind of surprised. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to talk to someone, really talk to them. I'm embarrassed about some of the things I'd said now, but I was out of practice for what you would call normal conversation. You're gonna ask how you could see me if no one else could, and I don't have an answer for you. Sorry about that. Truth is, I don't know much more about how these things work than you do. No one does. Probably no one ever will. Is that scary? It's not really scary to me anymore. It's just one of those things you learn to live with.