Dead Stop Read Free Page A

worked. It would have continued to work, if the ghosts had just kept ignoring me.
    I didn’t even know they could become aware of me until it happened.
    It was the ghost on the playing fields that fucked up my sterling plan. It was summer, we were playing rounders out on the field, and the bastard was standing right between second and third base.
    Still buried up to the waist—I knew by then that the school was built on reclaimed marshland, so perhaps he was at the old ground level?—he was just there , incomprehensibly grumbling to himself, staring at nothing, his muddy face slack and listless. His clothes were ragged and hard to identify, but I’d come to think of him as medieval, a farmer or a poacher or something.
    When it was my turn to bat, I tried to just get struck out so that I wouldn’t need to go anywhere near the ghost, but in my nervous state I managed to lash out and actually hit the bloody ball with my stumpy bat, whacking it with sufficient force that the ball ricocheted straight between two inattentive fielders and bounced off across the field.
    I had no choice. I had to drop the bat and run until the ball was thrown back and I was caught out.
    And as I ran past second base, the ghost was right in my path.
    I knew that this ghost, if it was real at all and not just a product of my brain, wasn’t solid. Apart from the fact that he was capable of moving around with his bottom half embedded in solid ground, I had seen kids earlier in the batting line-up run through him without any problem, just as I had been seeing the living walk through the ghosts I saw since this whole problem began.
    Difference was, they couldn’t see the ghosts, and I could. And being able to see a ghost ahead, I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t run right through him. It was the sensible thing to do, mainly to not blow my cover as a perfectly sane human being, but I could not do it—my instincts forced me to swerve around the ghost.
    The laughter of the other kids, the muttered insults involving disparaging terms for the disabled, that was fine. They just thought I couldn’t run straight, just another way I was shit at sport. I could handle that.
    What I couldn’t handle was this medieval ghost, this long dead yokel who had presumably been wandering this ground bewildered for centuries, noticing me avoiding him.
    ‘Ye cunte-beten chirl! Wol I cutten youre balan of!’ he shouted as I dodged past. His words were incoherent, but I thought I recognised at least one word in there, and his surprise and outrage was clear enough.
    Struck with fear, I kept running, past third base and then back to the batting position. There was a muted, mocking cheer, but oh, shit I hadn’t been caught out yet, so I needed to keep going.
    Where was that fucking ball? I hadn’t hit it that hard.
    ‘I caughte youre moder by the queynte.’
    What was that about my mother?
    As I ran towards the ghost for a second time, I saw with growing horror that he was beginning to pull himself up out of the ground, as if my observation of him was connecting him to the world as it was, rather than the world as he remembered it.
    ‘Ye saucefleem shit! What kynde heer shape have ye!’
    Well, the rest was garbled but I knew what a ‘shit’ was.
    A couple of years later I’d learn about how the observation of a phenomenon can actually change it, which didn’t make the fact that it happened—and would keep happening in the future—any more pleasant, but was kind of interesting.
    Thank you for that, Mr Heisenberg. You may not have intended your theories to cover the undead, but they do.
    In that moment, I could barely think, a ghost was staggering towards me babbling swearwords like a very drunk, very angry Chaucer, and then I was stumped out and I ran like fuck, away from the field and straight out of the school gates, medieval swears following behind me along with the more modern curses of my teammates.
    It wasn’t the best school day.
     
     
    ‘N OW ,’