Phantom touch

She passed on the twentieth of November, 1816.

‘Passed’ isn’t the correct term of course, because it soon became apparent to me that, while she had died (that much was painfully, excruciatingly clear) she had not left, not ‘passed’ anywhere.

I had never bothered with such nonsense before, having more than enough to do in the one world we have all been fated to inhabit. My life is devoted to the pursuit of chemical philosophy, so I know there are more than enough questions to answer about the very things we can see, before we can turn our attention to the invisible.

These very specific circumstances, however, left me no choice.

At first I attributed it all to the heavy melancholy that had me by the throat since the moment I lost her. I regret that I have never been the most organised type, but then my mind was consumed by the awareness of her absence. Cobwebs started heaping in all nooks and corners. I forgot to eat. Damnation, sometimes I even forgot what I was doing while I was doing it, which of course led to some momentous setbacks in my research.

So, naturally, despite the fact that when I got up in the morning to find a few of my vials and bottles shattered on the ground I was immediately reminded of her clumsiness, my rationality still attributed the accident to a fault of my own. And when I woke up at night, shivering because all the blankets had been hoarded on the far side of the bed, I thought I was suffering from troubled sleep.

It was when the rug was forcefully dragged aside under my own eyes while I sat perfectly motionless at the desk that I, ever the paladin of the sciences, could not deny the evidence any more. I think that the sight was too much for my frayed nerves, and I’m ashamed to say I jumped up and stumbled to the door. Out I ran, into the fields bordering my house, and wandered there in a dazed state until farmer Crosby spotted me and started bellowing at me to ‘get the hell away from me crops’.

So I did just that. Summoning every last scrap of dignity, I walked back inside the cottage, all too conscious of Crosby and his dogs eyeing me with suspicious looks that weren’t new to me. As I stood in the living room, what was left in the wake of the initial shock was a chilling certainty: she was still there, in the house, with me. I simply knew it. What would I have given to see her, to touch her again! I could not, would not believe it to be impossible. If she was still there, against all odds… Then being able to see her, to perceive her, was merely the next logical step.

My boots pushed soft clouds of dust as I walked to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and selected the tomes that could hold the key to this mystery, my fingers dancing on the spines like pale spiders as I searched. When I settled down at my desk again I felt a sense of peace descend upon me - but it came not from the familiar pages open before me, nor from the warm candlelight illuminating them.

It was the knowledge that she was in the room with me, watching.

I flung the book across the room. It went crashing against a wall and fell in a messy heap, broken.

“Damnation!” I cursed through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry, Lily. It’s just not working.”

Three weeks had passed - three weeks of interminable reading, of failed experimenting with reagents and herbs. The results lay in dark patches on the wooden floor, and I had lost count of the toxic substances I had ingurgitated in the hopes of seeing my greatest friend again.

“You have to understand,” I said, almost a plead, “this has never been achieved before. Communing with the deceased… If Paracelsus couldn’t figure it out, how could I?”

I had scarcely finished speaking before the desire to hurl the next book at the wall surged up in me. This time, however, I did not allow myself to lose control.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, standing up. “I’m so sorry, but I cannot”.

The stale air that only weeks of solitary confinement can produce had suddenly become unbearable, so I donned my coat and hat, slipped on my long gloves and stole out of the house like a thief. The bleak midwinter awaiting outside came as a shock, due to my having become unaccustomed to the cold and the unflinching ocean of grey sky. This too, I could attribute to the loss of her, for she had always been much of the reason for my leaving the house.

The wind wiped the tears clean off my face as I trudged my way in the snow up the path to the village. Walking by the old ivy-covered church and its decent little graveyard I thought of how they hadn’t let me bury her there, how they’d said that wasn’t the place for someone like her. I scoffed: if there is a god, no one deserves a spot next to him more than her.

It was as I was lost in my thoughts that my eyes fell on the stump of the giant oak behind the graveyard and an idea hit me like lightning.

There were stories about that old stump, stories that terrified the town’s children - but not me, never me. Hundreds and hundreds of years before, when it was alive, the massive oak had been home to a murder of crows. The clever birds belonged to the tree as much as its leaves, and generation after generation of them was born, raised, and died on its reassuring branches. But when the church needed rebuilding after a fire, the first tree they turned to with their sharpened axes was that old sturdy oak. For the glory of god they turned its body into pews, altar, pulpit, lectern… And the crows weren’t seen again.

But that was not the end of their story. Indeed, the raucous calls of the birds never ceased and, though nobody could see them, every villager for three hundred years could swear they’re still sitting there, on the branches that once were. The ghost of a tree, for ever a perch for the ghost of its murder. Oak and crows, together, on some other plane.

By that point, an hypothesis had taken shape in my mind.

I rushed home, stumbling in the snow. As I slammed the door behind me and hurriedly removed my coat and gloves, I paid no heed to the ripped curtains on the floor or to the overturned lamp in the corner. Instead, I stormed into the kitchen, the small square room barely lit by the sky’s iron-like light.

“I’ve got an idea,” I called out. “I think I know what to do!”

My voice echoed back at me in the apparently empty house. I pulled open a drawer and caught a glimpse of my own dark-ringed eye looking back at me from below, reflected on the mirrorlike surface of a cleaver.

I picked up the knife.

“Don’t you worry, Lily,” I said, crouching by the kitchen hearth to light a fire. “It’s no different than the oak and the crows. Only a stump remained for the living to see, but it was the missing part of the tree that could be with the birds. Invisible to us, but nonetheless… still there.”

I observed my left hand, holding it up in the grim grey light.

“Really, it’s no different.”

I tied a rag around my arm, tight as I could. I heated the sharp knife in the fire, until it was red hot. Then I braced my arm on the kitchen counter. My ears reverberated with a frightful ruckus, very much like the furious barking of dogs, but I had made up my mind.

My fingers twitched one last time as the cleaver fell like a guillotine upon the wrist.

I came to on the sofa. It was bright outside, the pale early morning sun showering me with light, the ripped curtains wrapped around me like a blanket. My eyes followed a rusty trail on the floor that marked my path from the kitchen, but I immediately acknowledged that the bleeding had stopped after soaking the bandage, and that there was no sign of fever or infection. My training in the medical arts had not failed me, not even in the direst of situations.

But all medical concerns faded in the background when I finally realised what had awakened me: a nudge to my fingers. The phantom fingers of my left hand.

“Lily?” I said, voice shaking.

My eyes welled with tears when she pushed her head against my invisible hand. It was a feeling I had given for granted for so long, and that I had feared I’d never experience again: the fur of her ears soft between my fingers, the truffle-like nose leaving a hint of wetness on my skin. Yes, for although I couldn’t see my beloved dog with my mortal eyes, my phantom hand was in the same realm she inhabited, acting like a bridge between her world and mine.

I leapt up, smoothed down her long fur over and over again, and I had no need of phantom ears to guess the excited clicking of her feet on the floor as she jumped around, unable to stand still. My Lily, my dearest friend, the one even death could not take from me. And while I well knew that a man’s life is but a blink in an endless night, I could not have stood going through it without her.

“We’ll be reunited soon, my dear,” I whispered to her, tears streaming down my face now. “But in the meantime… In the meantime let us go for a walk.”

And like that, ghost fingers resting on her velvety head as she once again walked beside me, I pushed the door open and we stepped into the sunlight.