Dead Men's s Boots

Three steps tog ohree stok me on into the living room, and I stopped dead, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking in a scene of devastation and ruin. Most of the furniture was overturned. The television lay in the corner like a poleaxed drunk, staring blindly up at the ceiling: three deep dents scarred the screen, a fish-scale pattern of fracture marks spreading out from each one. Broken glass crunched under my feet.

And then a framed photo of John and Carla smiling, arm in arm, leaped up from the broken-legged dresser and shot through the air, spinning like a shuriken, to explode against the wall just inches from my head.

With a muttered oath I dodged back around the angle of the wall and turned to stare at Carla in dazed disbelief. She gave me a curt nod, her face bitter and despairing.

Despite his faults, most of which I’ve already mentioned, John had always been a pretty easygoing sort of guy. But that had been when he was alive.

In death, it was painfully obvious, he’d gone geist.

2

Some apostle not noted for charm or tact once told an appreciative audience somewhere near the Sea of Galilee that the poor would always be with us. He could have said the same thing about the dead. Of course, back in Jesus’s time there were only maybe a hundred million people in the world, give or take, but even then they were heavily outnumbered by the part of the human race that was already lying in the ground. The exact ratio wobbles up and down as we ride the demographic roller coaster, but these days you could bet on twenty to one and probably not lose your money.

Twenty of them to one of us. Twenty ghosts for every man, woman and child living on this planet. But that was an empty statistic until just before the turn of the second millennium. Until then, most of the dead were content to stay where they’d been put: in the words of a million headstones, they were ‘only sleeping’. Then, not too long ago, the alarm clock went off and they all sat up.

"Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Even now, a whole lot of people die and stay dead – trek off across the undiscovered country, or dissolve into thin air, or go and sit at God’s right hand in sinless white pyjamas, or whatever. But a whole lot more don’t: they wake up in the darkness of their own death, and they head back towards the light of the world they just left, which is the only direction they know.