Welcome to Friday Fiction: a place where I share extracts of writing (my own and that of published authors). This is a link-up, where you can add your own work, read others’ and hopefully get some feedback and ideas (see the Blue Frog below to add your link).

Here is an extract of mine that I would like to share this week. In honour of Halloween it has a ghostly element, and I do love a ghost or two!

I left Sophie to have some time with her mum and went for a walk. The hospital was enormous: built to replace the previous ancient one. It was supposed to be high tech and modern, but to me it felt like an airport terminal. The pure white walls and fluorescent lighting made it feel clinical and depressing. There was nothing welcoming or reassuring about the place at all.

I had no idea where I was wondering. I turned a corner away from the crowds and suddenly I was the only person around. I thought about going back, but noticed there was a chair with a discarded newspaper on it. I decided to stay and bide my time.

It was the previous day’s newspaper and on the front cover was a picture of two girls, both murder victims. The police were investigating a possible link between the two deaths. I read on. One girl, Sally, was in her twenties, the other, Rebecca, was a middle-aged woman. They didn’t have any connection to each other, but their bodies had been found lying on top of a stone table at a Druid ruin, as though they had been offered up as some kind of sacrifice.

I shuddered as I felt goose bumps appear and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I was about to get up and go back to the ward where Gina, Sophie and her mum were when I found that I couldn’t stand, or even move. My eyes locked on the image of the younger girl and I could feel myself losing all conscious thoughts as I drifted down, deeper and deeper into a blackness that I recognised. This girl was there and she was trying to connect with me.

I had no power to fight the connection, but I knew that the initial roller coaster feeling wouldn’t last long. I held on, hoping not to black out completely and when my head finally stopped spinning, I realised I was slumped on the floor, on my knees. I put my hands down to steady myself and found that I was staring at a pair of bare and dirty feet.

I looked up, anxious about what I would see; about what could have happened to this girl to mean that she needed my help. When I saw what was before me I gasped. There were holes in the girl’s hands and feet and there was a strange mark scratched on to her chest. It looked like a round holly wreath, with two wooden sticks placed vertically across it.

‘Sally?’ I gasped. ‘What happened to you?’ The girl knelt down before me and I knew what was about to come. Sally was unable to speak to me. I didn’t have the power to connect with someone that way. Instead, all she could do was to let me in to her mind so that I could see all her thoughts and memories for myself. I would be able to feel her emotions too, so I braced myself for what might be to come.

As Sally looked at me and our eyes locked, the clinical white walls around me melted away and the room filled with thousands upon thousands of images. I stood up and walked around, passing ones that didn’t seem relevant. I saw pictures of Sally as a young girl, with her family and with her friends. She looked happy. Then I saw an image that made me stop. There was two of her. I realised that Sally was an identical twin. I stepped back, looked again at the previous images, and saw that in every one of them the two girls were always together.

‘This girl, the one on her own, is that your sister after you died?’
Sally shook her head. She motioned me closer to her and pointed to her face, at a mole on her cheek.
‘Look,’ she mouthed and pointed to the picture of the girl on her own. This girl also had a mole on her cheek, on the same side that Sally did. I looked again at the image of the two girls together.
‘You are the one on your own,’ I said. ‘So where is your sister in all these other memories?’

I looked at Sally’s face and I already knew the answer.
‘She died didn’t she?’

Sally nodded and a tear ran down her face. Then suddenly her head snapped around in alarm. She had heard something. And with that she was gone.

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