The Apparition Phase

by Will Maclean

It looked less like a face than several faces competing for the same space.

It was a Thursday, a day crammed full of lessons I didn’t like. Music, which meant singing until one’s head ached; PE, which meant running around the hard, cold football pitch being shouted at; and Maths, which meant maths.

One thing that became obvious as the work of sanitising the attic progressed was that my sister and I had very little idea of the sort of things ‘normal’ almost-fourteen-year-olds liked. My sister had a record player, but used it primarily to play BBC sound-effects records and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which she seemed never to tire of. Similarly, I liked painting, but mostly enjoyed painting historical methods of execution.

‘You. I see you. I see the broken house, with all the broken people in it. I see it coming back for you. I see four halves and two quarters. I see it returning, and it will never let you go. It will always be with you. Twenty grins all grinning back at you, salt in the wound, and you break.’

In many ways this was worse than his dislike, as he harboured a staggering array of extremely right-wing views I always felt compelled to nod along to, out of some sense of misplaced deference and respect for my elders, and I was always terrified lest someone from school heard me agreeing with him.

It was curious I hadn’t heard of such a haunting before, but Britain, whilst not a big place, is an almost insanely detailed one, rich in superstition and story, and, as such, densely populated by ghosts.

‘Will you be joining us for the afternoon’s wholesale rejection of the Age of Enlightenment?’

And now the programme was back, the way all recordings come back, eventually, but Abi wasn’t recorded anywhere, neither in the stones of the house nor anywhere clearly enough in my mind, and she was only ever gone now.

Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is?

It was the first time I’d ever heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’, a song now, years later, rendered as meaningless and bland as a brick wall by constant repetition, but then, to me, utterly new.

As is so often the case with emotional trauma and the English, I found myself more worried with how Seb felt about this minor discomfort than I did about the fact my mother was gravely ill.

The past was traumatic, the future uncertain, but right now, there was this.

‘Did it ever cross your mind that haunted houses aren’t haunted unless there are people in them?’

Wine, it turned out, was to fruit juice – which I was expecting it to taste like – as chess was to noughts and crosses.

‘You know that quote from Haldane? “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than

If I had to characterise my life, the image that always sprang to mind was a slow descent, a narrowing of horizons and potential, missed chances and bad luck, funnelling downwards, always downwards, to the dissatisfactions of the present.