Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 5

            ‘What brought you back?’ he asks, grinning. ‘This is my favourite bit.’

            ‘W-what’s going on?’ I reply. ‘You can see me? Are you…?’

            ‘Dead? Yes,’ he says, like he’s saying he had eggs for breakfast. ‘No one with real warmth in their chest, or blood in their veins can see you anymore.’

            I’m crestfallen like I didn’t already know.

            ‘Don’t look so down, son,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’

            He leads me away from the road, leaving the screams of the woman, still trapped in the delivery van behind.

            The grassy verge is soft and wet between my fingers as we sit down. He sits with a groan, the image of an old man.

            ‘The name’s Benjamin,’ he says. ‘Now tell me,’ he goes on, setting down a walking stick with an ivory handle I hadn’t noticed before. ‘Before you say anything. What brought you back?’

            ‘Back from where?’

            ‘Pick your brain off the floor, boy,’ he snaps and I’m being rapped with the cane.

            ‘Hey, hey!’ I say, rolling back onto the wet grass.

            ‘Spirits these days,’ he says with a small smile. ‘Don’t know what they teach you.’ He sighs. ‘The Edge.’ I give him a blank look. ‘The moment you died. You saw your life, every second of your life all at once. Makes me shiver to think of it. I never thought I’d be out of there.

            ‘The Edge? You give it a name?’

            ‘Course we give it a name,’ he says. ‘Things are scary when they don’t have a name. Give it a silly name like the Edge and suddenly I'm not quaking quite so much.’

            ‘I heard a beat, like a drum, and I just saw darkness,’ I reply, feeling warm in remembrance. It obviously shows in my face.

            ‘Sounds mighty terrifying to me, son.’ He laughs. ‘I’m surprised you’re not still in there.’

            ‘But It felt so…content,’ I say after a moment of searching for the right word.

            There’s a moment of realisation in those wrinkly brown eyes. ‘You know they say we escape the Edge by finding a moment of such happy contentment that we can’t do anything but settle, like we’re a deadly, volatile mixture and a handful of memories are the only things which keep us from going over.’

            ‘What do you think I saw then?’ I ask. ‘I think I’d remember.’

            ‘Of course you don’t remember, not consciously anyway. But some would say memories are indestructible, even the ones we don’t realise are there in the first place. When was the first moment you were awake, and so happy, you turned the dark into wonder?’