Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

“Oh. Right.” I said. I kept walking. “Yeah, I was thinking about that before. What if other people in there actually are, but nobody’s paying any attention to them? Jesus, that would drive me nuts.”

“Maybe it’s drove them nuts.”

“The thing that got me,” I said, “Is that it was floating towards her room instead of away from it. Like, I don’t know, maybe it was a guardian angel or something.”

“I don’t know.” Harry said.

“You said you had seen things too?” I asked. “In the quiet room?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you see?”

“Oh, well, I once seen a ghost, a pale figure in uniform, some sort of army uniform, pass through a wall. It just came through one wall towards the other and went through that one as well. It didn’t look at me or anything. Some people call it a time warp.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, supposedly it’s when a part of history repeats itself. Time is different in the fourth dimension, as physics says, and through that fourth dimension, I don’t know, things just happen like that. People see horses and carriages, world war two planes in the sky, ghost trains, dogs, people in Victorian dress, all sorts. What I want to know is why nobody has seen a dinosaur or somethin? Why is it all just restricted to the last three hundred years? Nobody ever sees any cavemen. What’s it all about? And if some people are lingering in between worlds, which some people think, then after so long do they just accept themselves or get accepted then move on to where they’re going?”

“What about the Loch Ness monster?” I joked.

“Hm, that’s probably bollocks, just a tourist hoax. But then how do we know? The thing is, these people are fucking it up for everyone else. These hoaxers who fake ghost shots and play alien pranks and make crop circles- they’re holding back all of humanity! Like I was saying before about the truth at all costs, when people start to fake these things it takes all credibility away from it and nobody knows what to believe. All of science balks at the idea of ghosts and aliens and UFO’s and all that stuff, but if so many idiots hadn’t held everyone back, we could be getting somewhere. Why do people fuckin lie?”

“Was it see-through, that ghost you saw?”

“No, but it was pale. And it didn’t walk, just kinda floated. There were no footsteps.”

“So that’s what you think it meant? A time warp?”

“I dunno. It was in my old mate’s house back in Wales. Apparently his house was built on an old battlefield of some sort. It wasn’t scary anyway. It might have been just revisiting a scene from its past.”

“So, you think we’re free to come and go when we’re dead? Come back and re-live memories and experiences?”

“Yeah. I think so. Pretty much every traditional culture says that we are surrounded by spirits, a spirit world. It’s all intertwined. Heaven isn’t some place up in the sky with a man with a goatee floating about, it’s all in another dimension, right next to us. And everyone just has different names for it. Spirit world. The other dimension. Heaven. The afterlife, whatever.” He sort of chuckled. “You ask a lot of questions. That’s good.”

I smiled. “What about the other time? Have you seen anything else?”

“Hm. Erm… I don’t like to talk about that.”

“What? Go on! Tell me.”

“Well…me and a couple mates did a weegie board once. Again it was in a field where this guy was meant to have died in the war. That was in Scotland, someplace else that was supposedly haunted. Well, the four of us did it, out in the pitch black, in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or buildings or people or lights. No trees. Just an open field with some low bushes for about three miles around. We stood in our circle and we asked him to come forward. The person who supposedly haunted the area was called George Stewart. He had died in the second world war. I don’t like to say how he died. I don’t even like talking about this. But we kept repeating his name, asking him to come forward. To show himself to us. And after about a minute, from nowhere, came this horrible… blood-curdling scream. I couldn’t pinpoint it, it seemed close but from a distance at the same time and it came from all sides. It was terrifying. We all just fuckin ran, ran back to the lights of town, where it felt safe. Scared the shit out of us. We were all looking at each other, thinking what the fuck was that? No-one could have known to do it at that precise moment, we were totally alone for miles, and our phones, old shitty Nokia ones, were in our pockets. So we couldn’t have phoned anyone. And afterwards we all swore that we hadn’t set it up. There was no other way to explain it.”

I didn’t say anything. Our footsteps sounded on the road as we walked side by side.

“Do you believe in heaven and hell then?” I asked.

“Hm, not really. That’s too simplified. Maybe there’s different planes or something. I don’t know.”

“What about God?”

“Yeah, I definitely think there’s something. What about you?”

“Definitely.” I said. “No doubt about it. Like you were saying about simplifying everything. Evolution and science just doesn’t explain it all. I mean, look at that,” I pointed up at the half-moon, “Everything happens just so, it’s like someone’s taken a knife and split it right down the middle. It’s so…symmetrical. The earth keeps rotating around the sun, three hundred and sixty-five odd days every year. The earth is positioned in the exact distance between the sun to be warm enough without being melted, and the moon