Ways to See a Ghost

to investigate how he kept something so large inside his head. He’ll probably be with them for a long time.

“Angel!”
    She ran, pushing her way through the plants, her hands brushing the feather-heads of wheat, her feet catching on the rough soil. Clouds blew in across the sky, charcoal-smudging the night.
    Where was Angel? Where
was
she? Angel had been trying to make Philip let go of Gray, she remembered that. And she’d just stood and watched. An empty shell, filled with bad dreams and hunger.
    The bargain is over.
    She’d heard the words in her mind, and spoken them out of her mouth.
    Then a writhing coil of darkness, coming out of nowhere,wrapping around Angel and lifting her screaming. It had shocked Isis out of her trance and started her fighting again, but too late. Angel was gone before Isis had even moved. She couldn’t bear to remember the rest.
    It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be! This had to be one of the Devourer’s mind games.
    “Angel!”
Isis shouted for her moonlight-sister, running further into the crop. Swathes of cold darkness travelled with her, clinging to her mind, as claws still clung to the sky and the last particles of light. Shadows bulged and washed around Isis, unconcerned by her distress.
    She stopped running.
    “Angel!” she sobbed. She felt turned inside out. She understood at last, what Cally had gone through all these years. Grief, with nothing to ease the pain.
    And still the creature kept its hold. In her mind, relentlessly, every meal she’d ever eaten was being played back with gloating satisfaction. Chips, sausages, fish fingers, ice cream, toast, porridge, chicken curry, spaghetti bolognese, apple juice, Easter eggs, birthday cake… on and on, every mouthful as if she were eating it all at once, gorging herself, shoving food in by the handful, not caring as it slid back out of her mouth through her fingers.
    She retched, but there was nothing real inside her.
    “Gray?” she called weakly. Come and save me.
    The Devourer gave her an image of him: dangling from Philip Syndal’s hands, head lolling and body limp.
    He is part of the feast.
    “No!” she sobbed, trying to shake the Devourer out of her mind. But her head weighed a hundred tonnes, and her skull was being pushed outwards, the bones cracking and splitting apart with the pressure of the creature inside.
    “Get out!” she screamed, clawing at her hair. She ran a few paces, pushing at the creature with her thoughts, managing to squeeze a tiny space for herself in her mind. Still it bubbled around, like cold lava, poking and trying to get back in.
    She remembered Philip Syndal crying.
    “Cally?” she called. “Gil?” But in the inky blackness of the field, she could only see the vaguest shapes of anything. How could anyone help her anyway? She’d been lost from the moment she’d blinked at Cally’s seance.
    Tears trickled down her cheeks. She hadn’t done anything! She’d just watched it take Angel!
    She turned back to face the sags and folds of the ghost-eater .
    “You can save us!”
That was a true memory. Mandeville had said that.
    But how?
    And she remembered Angel, just before she was taken.
“You bite it!”
    Isis looked down at her hands, barely visible in the dark. At her fingers, topped with short, bitten nails. She turned her hands over, peering at the padded flats of her palms, concentrating on every crease and line, every hair and freckle.
    No
.
    She imagined all her blood, all the heat of her body, pumping into her fingertips. Just as she did when she needed to hold Angel, or drive back the ghosts who mobbed her at Cally’s performances. The way she’d pushed away the ghost with the sliced-open throat.
    No
.
    The vast, enveloping bulk of the monster loomed around her, inside and outside her mind.
    No
.
    Its eyes were pinpricks in its slick and bloated flesh. It rippled with strange reflections of the night-time clouds, like a threatening storm.
    “I won’t let you take me over,” Isis whispered to it, her voice shaking.
    Do not do this.
    “I never made any bargain!” she shouted.
    She plunged her hands into the creature’s body, forcing them into its flesh. A breathtaking, staggering cold washed over her, pushing the air out of her lungs. Like walking into a snowdrift, or diving into an icy lake. Her breath turned to ice-crystals, frost crackled inside her nose. Shaking with uncontrollable shivers, thinking only about her hands, she managed to grip hold of the