"Time Could Have Stopped And Nobody Would Have Noticed"

[Rebecca Clare Smith]

The moonlight sliced through the room like a million silver blades, hitting objects and splitting into yet more stabs of pale light. The room was clothed in silence and felt icy to the touch. This room held no heat. The bare boards of the landing floor groaned as though somebody had stepped on them… but nobody was there. A mouse skittered along somewhere beneath the floor, its claws clattering in the soundless void. Time could have stopped and nobody would have noticed. A spider dangled from the frosty web that it had spun what might have been a century before. Its legs were curled up. The sound of clattering stopped leaving only the eerie silence. An echo of laughter bubbled up and died on the stairs, as though it was but a memory hollowed into the decaying walls. The door to the landing was ajar by no more than an inch. A shallow shaky breath expelled as if it had been held for a long time. There was only one large, rather solemn, object in the room. It was quiet and austere, covered in a blanket of dust so deep that one could have mistaken it for snow on the white surface. Everything about the room was colourless except for the worn wooden floorboards that were as bare as bones.

The rasp of shallow breathing stopped as a lower lip was bitten. There were no noises outside of the house. There was no wind and there was no rain. The only presence was that of the ever watchful moon, guarding all through the passage of the midnight hours. Another shaky exhale filled the air of the empty room. The door creaked, slowly opening, and the breathing stopped. Time did not count the century that passed in that moment. It simply waited for eternity to begin again. There was a hand upon the door handle. The fingers were almost transparent. A brown eye retreated from the gap left by the doors of the solemn wardrobe, not wanting to see any more. Silence echoed mournfully through the old building. There was a hurried swathe through the thick dust upon the wardrobe door, as if somebody had scrabbled to get inside and find someplace to hide.

You don’t believe in ghosts… do you?

The hand pushed the door open a little further and the mouse beneath the floorboards ran, squeaking in terror before he was too far away to be heard. The dead spider dangled loosely from its web though there wasn’t a breath in the room to move it so. The partially transparent figure stepped into the room, graceful and elegant in all of its eerie beauty. The brown eyes in the shadows of the wardrobe blinked and a breath was dispelled, misting the icy air. The strange figure in the room, bathed in the silken strips of silvery light, did not seem to mind the forbidding cold. It took a step towards the wardrobe, grey eyes centered on the small gap between the doors. Brown eyes widened, staring back at the being in the silvery light with the wings that looked like they were made of frosted spider’s webs.

I’m not going to hurt you…

A small hand pressed against the inside of the wardrobe. The texture of the wood registered in the mind of the brown-eyed child as the ghostly figure evaporated into nothingness in the same instant. Clouds shifted across the moon, blinding its protective gaze and dampening the friendly light that had coldly cheered the room. Time had started again. The door creaked, slamming shut. There was a shallow, nervous breath from inside the wardrobe. Something clicked in the lock. The girl hiding in the wardrobe ran out and slammed herself against the door, brown curls scattering about her shoulders as her little fists found the rough wood. There was a wheezy bout of laughter outside the door. The floorboards creaked on the landing as the key keeper moved away up the stairs. The small girl slumped against the rough wood, staring around her at the room. There was a bed with sterile blue sheets in the corner that hadn’t seemed to have been there before. A small bedside table stood beside it. On the table was a plastic cup filled with water. Some small white tablets sat next to the cup. She hadn’t taken them yet.

They thought she was insane. She thought she was insane. There was no such thing as ghosts, right? She had repeated it to herself almost a million times. The tablets were supposed to help her. They were supposed to stop her from seeing these things, these ghosts, these people, but they didn’t. They made her sleep and gave her nightmares. And because of the nightmares the people who ran the house would restrain her and inject her with this stuff that made her feel sick to stop her from screaming. They said she had to be quiet or she’d wake the others. She didn’t know who the others were. She just knew that she didn’t want to meet them. She was staring at the bed when it started to disappear again.

The moonlight was flickering out from behind the clouds, dousing the house and the room in sliver light. The girl shivered as the shards of moonlight touched her skin. A figure faded into existence. It was the woman from before, her wings fluttered slightly as she sat on the window ledge, her slender, almost transparent legs dangling off the side. She was ignoring the little girl, watching the dead spider as it hung from its web. A willowy finger reached out and touched the spider. The dead creature shivered, its legs flexing outwards before it climbed back up its thread and started to weave its web, ignorant of the years of dust that lay upon it. The ghost began to hum, lightly, like the little girl’s mother once had. They had taken her away from her mother, though. They had said that her delusions needed to be controlled.

We don’t all have wings, Anima…

Anima slid to her feet, using the door as a prop. She had already seen plenty of these strange, half-transparent people to know that this one was the only one that she had seen that had wings. Her brown eyes were on the spider busily spinning more of its web. She was so sure that it had been dead. Perhaps it was…

No. It’s not a ghost, Anima…

The girl looked up at her, hesitant but not as afraid as she had been. The ghostly woman had grey eyes. She was all grey, though. It was as if… It was as if she was made of shadows. “What is it, then?”

It’s a spider…

“It was dead.”

I brought it back to life… You know the question that you should be asking…

Anima blinked her huge brown eyes. She took a few steps closer as if drawn by the moonlight. Perhaps that was all this was. Perhaps everything she had seen was just a trick of the moonlight. The only time she could see these ghosts, these shadow forms, was when the moon was shining. She wet her lips, switching her gaze from the celestial orb to the strange, grey woman sitting on the window ledge. “What are you?”

Your guardian angel. Only you can see my wings…

Anima allowed the information to digest. Wouldn’t a guardian angel have protected her from all of this? Wouldn’t a guardian angel have saved her from this place, these people and those pills? Maybe they were right. Maybe these were delusions. They had sat her in a room in restraints. They had asked her questions for hours about the ghosts. They had tried to convince her that she didn’t see them, but she did. She saw them every time the moon shone. They had tried to get her to make one of them appear so that they could talk to it. She couldn’t. How could she? There had been no moonlight and the figures only appeared when they wanted to. It had all been so confusing and the only thing that she had been able to think was that it was all some kind of conspiracy. They were keeping her prisoner, making her take tablets, but she didn’t know why. It had to be against the law.

I can help you… That’s why the others sent me… You’re special, Anima…

The girl took a heavy breath, her brown eyes digesting the grey woman. What if she was lying? Why should she trust her? Maybe it was a way out. It was the only way out. “How can you help me?” she asked tentatively.

I’ll open the window for you… You can climb out…

“The windows are locked.” She had already tried to open it and to climb out. The seal had been tightly jammed. Anima was too weak to break the glass panes and so it was not a logical possibility to escape that way. Her guardian angel smiled at her, kindly, moving her hand to the bottom of the window. Her ghostly palm pressed against the bottom of the rickety frame, not making the smallest impression upon the peeling white paint. The window shuddered before jerking roughly upwards. The night air coolly washed over her face. There was a soft rustling noise as a breeze started up, brushing its fingertips against the dark forest of plants in the overgrown garden below. The sound of the whispering shrubs was the only sound to break the silence. The ghostly woman stepped up onto the ledge and held out her hand, smiling at Anima.

Are you coming, Anima…?

Anima looked at the woman’s face and then carefully studied the ledge. It was sturdy and would definitely support her light weight. She stepped up, refraining from taking the ghostly woman’s hand. The spider had stopped spinning its web. Anima felt like it was looking at her. It was watching her, anticipating that something was going to happen. It was. She was going to escape. She wasn’t going to have to take those tablets any more. A deep breath vibrated in her chest. What if she really was mad? What if this was just part of what was wrong with her? If it was madness, then she wouldn’t have been able to open the window. She wouldn’t be standing on that ledge watching the plants below swaying like some kind of silvery river. The moon had dressed her in that same silver, adding a tinge of grey light to her brown eyes and her curly brown hair. She shivered, her small white nightdress rippling in the slight breeze. Leaning a little further out, she dared to have a better look of the garden below.

The outer ledge was slippery when she put her foot down. Anima tried to grab something as she slid, but it was her guardian angel that she reached for. The woman rushed to grasp hold of her. Their hands met… but that couldn’t save her from falling. Anima’s fingers fell right through the partly transparent ones that she was offered. Her pale face disappeared into the shadows, the moonlight faltering as she dropped down into the dark, entangled garden. Time seemed to stop as the lone figure lay there on the only patch of bare grass in the garden. Silvery light crept over her face as the clouds shifted from the moon once more. The grass was black and smattered with forming dew. The little girl on the grass didn’t move. She could almost have been sleeping. Her lashes were closed over her brown eyes and her soft curls were thrown about her face. The breeze had stopped blowing. Everything was still. Nothing moved. The plants didn’t murmur. The dead spider dangled from the web it had made years before, its legs curled up, its threads covered in dust and moonlight. Anima had escaped and nobody had noticed…