Un Lun Dun

43. Flickering Streets

The giraffes bleated hungrily in the distance as Hemi led Deeba through the unstable streets of Wraithtown, past shops and offices clouded with their own remembered selves. Most of the spectral entourage dissipated. There were only a few flickers of ectoplasm as a curious dead or two flitted around Deeba.

“I cannot even believe,” Deeba said again, “that you’re taxing me for this.”

“Um, excuse me!” Hemi said. “This ain’t my business. And the way you’ve been talking about us, I think you’re dead lucky I’m helping you at all.”

“ ‘Help,’ ” Deeba muttered bitterly. “Half my cash…”

“Yeah.” Hemi grinned. He fanned himself ostentatiously with the out-of-date currency he’d insisted Deeba pay him before he’d escort her. “Pleasure doing business.”

“I am out of here the second we’re done,” Deeba muttered.

“Oh boo hoo,” said Hemi. “No, please stay.” They eyed each other.

“I know, I know,” Hemi said occasionally to one or another wisp they passed. “It’s alright, she’s with me.”

“We’re not used to heartbeaters in Wraithtown,” he told Deeba.

They passed phantasms of streetlights, in old styles, where illuminations had been and had gone. Little groups of ghosts gathered at street corners. They stood— or wafted, their legs disappearing— in costumes from throughout history.

“When you talk about them, you keep saying ‘us,’ ” Deeba said. “But you’re not like the rest.” Hemi looked away. “Someone told me that you’re half…How come I can hear you?

Plus…” Deeba reached out and shoved him.

“You’re solid.”

Hemi sighed.

“Mum was a Londoner like you,” he said. “Born two hundred years ago, died a hundred and sixty-five years ago. Dad wasn’t dead at all. He was an UnLondoner, came to Wraithtown out of curiosity.

“Mum tried to spook him. So she was all floaty sheets and woooo! and wooaaah! and so on. But he wasn’t scared. The way they told it…he just fell for her, right then. And so one thing led to another.”

“But how? If she wasn’t even…solid…”

“Some ghosts can get physical. A bit. A few. She was one.” There was a silence.

“Problem was,” he said glumly, “his family didn’t like it, and her friends thought she was sick. They managed to make everyone angry.”

“You the only one?”

Hemi shrugged.

“I dunno,” he said. “Never met any others.”

“So you live here with your parents?”

“Mum went to Thanatopia when I was ten. Dad said she tried to stay, but when that tide takes you…Dad disappeared a bit later.” Hemi spoke briskly. “Some locals didn’t like him living in Wraithtown. Maybe they scared him out. Or worse. Or maybe he did what he had to to be with Mum again.”

“Sorry,” Deeba muttered, shocked.

“Don’t matter,” he said, perhaps too brightly. “There are some great people here. Even if there are some dead who don’t like me because I’m half-alive, that’s not all of them. It’s the living who really don’t like me around, ’cause I’m half-ghost. I can look after myself. Full ghosts don’t eat, but I do. Luckily my ghost half makes it easy to, ah, go shopping out there.” He winked.

Before them was a building and its ghosts. It was a cement office, enshrouded with the specters of a Victorian house, a tumbledown Georgian structure, and a medieval-looking hovel. They shimmered around it and each other. Over its front door was a printed plastic sign, ghosted with an older hand-painted version, that read: WRAITHTOWN COUNCIL.

Hemi pulled the front doors open for Deeba, and the ghosts of all the earlier doors went with them. Deeba entered many layers of history.