‘Fine.’ I relent, and his face breaks into that huge, stupid smile that always takes me back to when we were kids.
‘I’ll call past yours just before eight.’
* * *
The rest of the shift passes in a blur, that comforting repetition of‘Confirm your date of birth…sharp scratch… all done,’whichseems so familiar whichever year or town or clinic I’m saying it in. It’s almost enough to make me forget everything.
That, and the frankly magnificent veins of my last patient of the day. She’s young, barely into her twenties, with perfect light-brown skin and the kind of body that looks meticulously trained.
I try not to stare as I track the swoop of the cephalic vein along her bicep, the way it takes on a green tinge as it travels under the thin skin in the ditch of her elbow. I know even before I touch it how bouncy it’s going to be, and I can’t stop the small sigh of satisfaction when I’m proven right.
‘This vein is a work of art,’ I mean to say in my head, but actually say out loud. As soon as I do, I hear a soft chuckle beside my ear, a familiar brush of cold sweeping past it.
‘That was an inside thought, Florence,’his voice says, in that same easy way that it always did.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I mutter in response, making awkward eye contact with my patient. I don’t even know if I was apologising to her, but from the way her smile seems shallow, stretched thin over a layer of terror, it’s probably preferable to the alternative: that I was saying sorry to a person who isn’t there.
I should probably explain.
I was in love once, the breathless, giddy kind. The kind that feels like your chest is swelling with so much warmth that there’s a risk it’s going to burst at any moment. I gave Josiah Quinn my whole heart, and then, before we’d even married, he had the audacity to go and die.
It was decades before I heard him again, faint whispers of his voice in my ear that I passed off as my imagination for more than a hundred years. But four weeks ago I moved back to Whitby– the place where I found and lost him– and the whispers got stronger.
Is it all in my head? I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that I hear him speak sometimes, somehow, and all I feel is gratitude that I still can.
Now let me be clear: I don’t believe in ghosts. I believe in science and in medicine and in double-blind trials and in universal constants. I believe in hard evidence and in observable facts, but the fact is that, a century and a half after his death, I still hear him speak, as clear and as close as if he were standing next to me.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t deny that there’s a chance I’m being haunted by one anyway.
After all, I didn’t believe in vampires until the night I became one.
I feel the echo of Josiah’s voice in my head long after I’ve forgotten the actual words he said, as I finish up with the patient with the beautiful veins, hand over to the next shift staff and gather my things.
And maybe I really am losing the plot because, as I head for the door, who do I see but my dead fiancé, sitting in waiting area B.
ChapterTwo
FLORENCE
The last time I saw Josiah Quinn, he was dead.
I’m talking no-pulse dead, rigor-mortis dead, sealed-in-a-coffin-and-buried-beneath-six-feet-of-earth dead. You know,deaddead.
He’d been warned about the dangers of working in the jet mines– I’d warned him myself enough times– but he didn’t listen. He was like that, Josiah. Not bullheaded like it sounds, just optimistic, sometimes to a fault. He was sucked into the wave of demand sweeping the country, the promise of riches, however modest, too tempting for him to turn down. He’d tell me of the places his earnings would take us, the life we’d share, the way he’d care for me till death did us part.
And in his defence, while he could, he did. How was he to know that death would us part somewhat earlier than either of us had anticipated, just weeks before we were due to marry. He was twenty-six when he was crushed beneath a collapsed mine shaft.
He was just about alive when they pulled him out, delirious and barely breathing. Cam came to fetch me, said some of the men who’d helped dig for him thought he might pull through, said there was a chance he’d recover, but once I saw him, I knew better. By then, I’d attended enough house calls with my mother to know a death rattle when I heard one.
He died right there at the foot of the cliffs, every whispered prayer from my lips falling away around us as my tears tracked bold paths across his dusty skin. Three days later we buried him in the churchyard on top of that same cliff.
So it was ever such a surprise to see him sitting in the clinic earlier this evening. So much of a surprise that I did the only thing I could think to do: I walked straight past him.
Though if I think back, it might not have been the first time. I’ve been seeing him ever since I moved back to Whitby. It was just fleeting glances before, vague brushes of awareness so easily written off as being my mind playing tricks on me. Even when I saw him at the clinic earlier, he was far enough away that there was a chance I could have been mistaken. But now I’m sitting here, not ten feet from that very same man, and I’m convinced.
ThatisJosiah.
He walked into this bar a few minutes after we did, sweeping round behind the bar like he belonged there. He didn’t stay long, though. Just grabbed a packet of dry roasted peanuts off the strip hanging from a pillar and carried on through a door at the very end of the bar. And all the while I sat, open mouthed, like there’s a chance that the long-dead love of my life is suddenly haunting a community blood clinic and a vampire-themed bar in twenty-first century Whitby. And, perhaps even more curiously, that he’s developed a post-mortem hankering for bar snacks.