All The Way Here

When Veronika Bajic was four years old, she wondered at the tears of the child beside her. Marica sobbed out that her staramajka, her mother\'s mother, was gone to Jesus, to be an angel in Heaven. That was clearly incorrect. The elderly woman was standing right next to her! Veronika told her so, but Marica started screaming and that brought the aunties over to check on the situation. "You are bad, Veronika! How dare you make Marica cry! Have you no compassion." Veronika had pointed toward\'s her friend\'s staramajka, crying out that she was right there. It was at that moment that something in the little girl\'s world had shifted. It was how she learned that other people didn\'t see Them. It was how she realised that she was different. No-one likes to be different.



"Veronika is very devout." Members of the Mothers\' Union muttered approvingly at each other, as they polished the pews and changed the flowers on the altar. The fifteen year old girl ignored them. The beads clicked as they passed through her fingers, the litanies rolling with practiced ease from her tongue. Her mind though rose in desperate beseechment, praying, pleading, begging Mother Mary to take it away from her. To carry her petition to the Lord of All. \'Equally cursed and blessed\', a Roma crone had once called her in the market-place, touching her arm and scaring the teenager half to death. What once had been normal now fed into a world transformed into nightmare.



When Veronika was eighteen, a film had been released and she had eyed the trailer in disbelief. Waiting impatiently for a version to emerge with subtitles in her native tongue, she sat with friends to watch it. \'Sixth Sense\' broke her heart. At the point where the little boy was placed in the cupboard, Veronika cried so hard that the DVD had to be paused and her friends exchanged meaningful glances. Goosebumps rose on everyone\'s arms, a prickling sensation at the backs of their necks. Tereza held her, but the words that she whispered in consolation dripped like poison into Veronika\'s ear, "There\'s no such thing as ghosts, ljubav, it\'s just a film."



Veronika confessed. She told the holy father everything, how the people came with their eyes like china dolls, both animated and dead at the same time. How could she describe those eyes? They were the thing, more than the freezing air, more than the crawling of her skin, more than the strangeness of their aspect and dress, the eyes were the thing that separated the dead from the living. Eyes that stared, sparking flight or fight in those they beheld; eyes in which there was something wrong. No words in her vocabulary had been invented to convey how they looked. \'Sixth Sense\' had got it wrong. They didn\'t come bloodied in walking re-enactment of their deaths, they came as you or I, only with eyes that reflected no hope. Father Peter had told her that such things came from the devil. The supernatural was evil. She must repent and hope that God could find it in His heart to forgive her witchcraft. Veronika felt something slip away to die inside. She left her rosary in the Confessional and walked away.



It began as a hammering on the door. Veronika had just fed the cat and was considering going to bed. One more glance through her e-mails and she really would have to crash. She froze now, staring at her front door. The knocking was frenzied, urgent, and became accompanied by a panicked voice, shouting, "Veronika! Open up! Open up! You\'re needed!" She straightened, took a deep breath and approached the door. Terrified notions, half-strangled in her mind before she could fully grasp them, beseiged her. Was it someone in her family? Had someone been hurt? Was it her mother? She dashed forward, unbolting all the deadlocks and turning the key, before the lock was free to open. "You have to come! Such things!" Her hand was grabbed before she could protest. She had to struggle to pull back just long enough to close her front door to.



They ran, down two streets, into the brightly coloured terraces overlooking the old town. Veronika had made little sense of the garbled explanations coming from the woman dragging her along. Talk of items moving on their own; a deep chill; doors banging; a sense of the other. Then Veronika realised with a clanging, falling sensation of both dread and wide-eyed longing, why she was here. She looked at the people standing outside one of the houses, all of them church-goers, one of them the mother of her friend, Tina. In a town that had denied her visions, that had called her a liar, or insane, or evil, she was now being called upon. They had secretly known?! They had believed her, at least on some subconscious level, and let her grow up believing herself to be a freak?! They had taught her to be afraid of her gift and now they wanted her to enter a house possessed. Her very soul shrank from it.



She had no choice. They gave her no choice. Though she turned to run, she was surrounded by people. Well-meaning enough, yet none of them touched her, perhaps afraid too that this thing was contagious. That they would all be damned as she was. Veronika growled and marched forward, anger fuelling the momentum, towards the gaping blue door. She entered the house alone, yet not alone. The very air was laden, her skin screaming with a thousand pricks, like icy needles everywhere. She wanted to flee; to keep running and never come back. She jumped at the slightest shadow, though every room was lit. No-one held her hand. No-one stood between her and this, because no-one saw or felt or heard as she did. She knew They were here, but she couldn\'t locate Them.

Then she turned and saw it.



The eyes. The eyes that gazed back stopped her heart. Her body drenched in icy dread. Her mind recoiling. Her feet already running away back towards the door. Clairsentience screamed, she needed to get out. She reached the front garden and, with half the street\'s population watching, vomited the entire contents of her stomach into the roses. The neighbours were all watching her, as Veronika stood and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Was this how it felt to be before the mob? They were all silent. No-one dragging her to the stake, as the old stories told, but suddenly it felt like it was a possibility. Already doomed, Veronika balled up the courage inside her and held it tight. She recalled something that she had read on the internet and repeated it now, in lieu of a litany for the God that had forsaken her, "I am a child of the universe; free from the promise of Heaven and the fear of Hell. I am a child of the universe." She stepped back into the house.



It was still there. Staring. Dead eyes like a porcelian doll, animate, without soul, but with feeling. So much feeling. She barely acknowledged that this was an adult male; those eyes filled her whole consciousness. The first time Veronika spoke, her voice failed and she had to swallow and start again. The second time, her voice sounded clear and true, breaking only on the final syllable. "Who are you and what do you want?"



The apparition rasped out. "Where\'s my Mama?" He yelled at her suddenly and Veronika took a step backwards, close to fleeing again. "She should have been here! We lived here! Where are my Mama and Papa? I\'ve waited sixteen fucking years to see them!"



"Mello." A second voice rose up from a being unseen in the kitchen. It spoke in the English language. "We\'re going to find them, ok?"



Veronika\'s mouth dried painfully. She could feel her own heartbeat in her ears. Her voice cracked, but she plunged on. "You are dead. I am sorry to be the one to tell you, but you died. This is not your house. This house belongs to Emerik and Zlata Kobak. You do not belong here."



He took a step forward. She saw that she was wrong. Sometimes They did come back in the guise of their own dying seconds. Half of his face was burned, but his eyes still blazed, trained upon her. He shouted, spitting words like bullets. "Where are the Keehls?"

There was a movement in the doorway behind. Another of Them stepped into view, but Veronika could not see his eyes. Red hair fell like a veil over them and yet he was no less frightening for it. He reached out and manhandled the ravaged blond, turning him away. At his touch, Mello crumbled, falling to his knees, devastation erupting in a cross between a scream and a sob. His hands were clenched into fists beneath leather gloves. "I need them, Matty! I need them!"



"I know, angel. I know." The redhead sank too, holding him close. "We\'ll work out what\'s happening and where we are and we will find them. If I have to spend the entire of my afterlife looking, I will find your parents for you."



Veronika found that she was holding the edge of the front door behind her, her back pressed against it. Two, maybe three, steps and she could be out of this house. "You are dead." She repeated. "This is not your house."



The redhead turned to face her. "Do you speak English?"



"A little." Veronika spluttered. She read more than she spoke, though her adrenaline fuelled mind was sparking out the meaning to his words now. She doubted very much that she could maintain a conversation in it, especially not as wrought as she felt right now.



"We know we are dead. It\'s all good. We\'ll be leaving soon." He kissed the back of the blond head being comforted against his shoulder. "You can see us? Nice. Clairvoyant. I owe your kind an apology. I thought you were all cranks when I was alive. Sorry."



Veronika caught about five words of it, but gained a general sense of conciliation. She mined her memory for the English to tell him what he needed to hear. "You are not belonging here."



Matt nodded. "I know." He rocked the man in his arms. "Mello, they aren\'t here. Let\'s go somewhere out of this lady\'s hair, because she looks about ready to pass out. Minds like ours? We\'ll solve this puzzle. Trust me."



The blond\'s voice rasped up, muffled, but thankfully speaking in Croatian. "I apologise if we startled you. We are leaving now. God bless and keep you."



They were gone. It wasn\'t like they faded or even popped out of existence. It was that one moment the whole environment buzzed with their presense and the next it was as if they had never been. Veronika clutched at her mouth, eyes wild in searching for what she knew had passed. It took several long minutes before she felt safe in releasing the door to step outside. She called out from the doorstep. "Did a family called Keehl ever live here?" There were several nods, most from the old-timers. "Does anyone know where they are living now? Someone needs to tell them that their son is dead."



"Then he will have to tell them himself."



Veronika nodded. She walked down the path to the street and turned. No-one stopped her. She held her head up and did not run. They all watched her do it. As if she wore the mark of Cain, no-one touched her, spoke to her, reached out to her; but she understood it now. They believed and that made all of the difference. She waited until she was around the corner before she allowed a smile to grace her lips. Beyond fury and terror now, there was only relief. She knew that that had always known; they had believed her.



In the days that followed, Veronika asked around and learned more of the Keehls; the tragedy of the couple\'s deaths and the orphaned son disappearing into the system. She entered the graveyard, ironically one of the few places in this town not teeming with Them. They rarely knew that they were dead and so this place, so stark with the evidence of Their passing, acted as a sanctuary to her psychic sensibilities. She could be normal here. She found the grave, untended without family to see to it; so she did it for them. She scrubbed the marble and laid out flowers, as she told them, "Your son is looking for you." There was no response but, as she left, she liked to think that they had heard her anyway and so they knew.