She made no sign that she’d heard me. I stepped closer and tried to touch her. That’s when the awful truth I’d been trying to hide from myself couldn’t be pushed away anymore. My hand went through her. No. What I felt was my hand going through her. But there was nothing to see. I had no body. I was just some kind of disembodied spirit.

Del had killed me. Turned my body into a mess of forest debris on the floor, and all that was left of me was a ghost.

I turned to him. He still leaned against the door jamb, still grinning.

“Now do you see what happens when you don’t listen to me?” he said to Jilly.

Her tear-strained face slowly lifted to face him.

“Guh—go ahead and k-kill me, too,” she told him.

Her brother just laughed. “What? And spoil all the fun? We’ve got forever to get reacquainted, little sister. We can’t come up on the finish when the good times are just starting.”

She charged at him, but all he did was wave his hand again and her trajectory took her crashing into a wall. She collapsed on the floor.

I went after him too, except in my case, I went right through him and found myself out in a hallway that was as run-down and derelict as the room I’d just quit.

“You just think on that awhile,” Del told Jilly in the room behind me. “I’m going to play with my new friend outside and when I come back, I want to see a whole change in your attitude. You got me?”

I drifted back into the room to see Jilly still lying where she’d fallen.

Del banged the heel of his boot on the floor. “I said, you got me?”

She lifted her head. Her cheeks were still wet with tears, but her eyes were dull as she gave a slow nod.

“That’s my girl,” Del said.

He went back into the hall, banging the door closed behind him.

I went to Jilly and crouched down beside her.

“Jilly,” I said, trying to touch her, wanting to hold her.

But I couldn’t give her any comfort. She didn’t even know I was there. Her gaze went to the small man-shaped mess of mud and debris on the floor, and she began to cry again.

Timony Twotot

When Geordie vanished, Timony blinked in surprise, then quickly tried to follow the fiddler. But instead of crossing over as Geordie had, the doonie ran up against the impenetrable shell that enclosed the small pocket world he’d been so abruptly cast out of earlier. It would no more allow him entry now than it had before.

“Well, that’s that then,” he said to no one in particular.