A Private Haunting by Tom McCulloch

trespassing. This is my house.’
    â€˜No it isn’t.’
    Jonas felt suddenly lightheaded. ‘Is that right?’ He noticed a brown envelope on the couch.
    â€˜That’s right. People probably think you bought this house. Why wouldn’t they? It’s that perspective thing again. If you’ve never come across a squatter, why would the idea cross your mind? Know what I mean?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I think you do.’
    â€˜I’m going to ask you one more time.’
    â€˜To leave?’
    â€˜Yes. Leave.’
    â€˜But you haven’t asked me once. How can you ask again?’
    â€˜For crying out – ’
    â€˜Go on then. Ask me.’
    â€˜Get the fuck out of here!’
    The stranger picked up the envelope and tossed it across the floor. ‘Have a read of that.’
    Jonas stared at him. ‘Who the hell are you?’
    â€˜Read it.’
    Jonas picked up the envelope and hurried to the kitchen, trying to leave the stranger behind. But he followed, watching him read. Halfway through the last will and testament of Archibald Hackett, just after the section leaving the property known as End Point to my grandson , Adam Fletcher , Jonas sat down at the table. The name on the title deed was the same.
    â€˜What now?’
    â€˜Well, Jonas. Now you leave.’
    On the table, his mobile began to ring. Jonas looked from Fletcher to the phone, staring dumbly, as if trying to remember what it was. When he picked it up the caller began gabbling. He told the voice to slow down and realised that it was Eggers. Eggers never phoned. He was asking if Jonas had seen the news, if he’d switched on his TV, because she’s disappeared.
    â€˜I don’t have a TV. Who’s disappeared?’
    When he put the phone down Fletcher had turned to face him. His gaze was intent, interested.
    Jonas had to speak. It was what you did in situations like this, even with a stranger appeared in your home. ‘A girl from the youth club has disappeared. Lacey. Hasn’t been seen since Friday.’
    â€˜How old is she?’
    â€˜What does that matter?’
    â€˜It matters.’
    This wasn’t happening. This was another day, a better day, any day before a crumpled Saab in the pouring rain. Jonas thought of Lacey, the end of another world, feeling vertigo in a place he’d come to call home. He was the dream-man, falling into a beautiful morning from which everything had vanished but this inevitable, silent stranger and all that he brought.
    â€˜How old is she?’
    â€˜Fourteen.’
    The stranger blinked a few times. A troubling in the eyes that looked away before Jonas’s imagination could spark, a swift exit from the kitchen that just held back from a hurrying.

    She as old as you were. Perhaps you had similar toys. A doll, a one-eyed doll as she had , left behind that day you stained Sangin red. Splayed like an x, a cliché of death, bang, bang you’re dead, fifty bullets in your head. Except it wasn’t fifty bullets, just five, a short burst before my trigger finger lifted into the death both yours and mine, the death that will be called collateral damage, of course. I lie beside you in the dust while the firefight goes on and bullets nick my helmet, my left boot, your eyes locked on mine, a horizontal gaze along the ground , your throat bobbing once, twice and then you are gone and there will be no more memories of childhood and no woman to be, no more winks from that older boy in the bazaar, your mother’s hand instinctively tighter on your shoulder even though she has not seen him . Because somehow she knows, as mothers always do, as your mother will grow old with the despair of this perfect morning and the perfection of your death as all deaths are. In dreams I search for you, as I search for my little sister in another landscape untouched by war , a rural arcadia of scudding cloud and drowsy summer so perfect and so empty, no