The Saint of Lost and Stolen Things by E.M. Linden
2400 words, 12 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
Jamie gets visibly agitated when we read from Early’s Guide to Ghosts. He grits his teeth. His hands clench. He looks away and sighs, like he can’t bear what he’s hearing. Sometimes he glares at me, like it’s my fault, just because I’m the one turning the pages.
Then he starts muttering. “This Early’s an eejit. A fool. Isn’t there anything better?”
“I told you, if I find anything, I’ll bring it straight down here.” I say.
Starfish Souvenirs, the gift shop in the village where I work on the weekends, doesn’t stock books–only greeting cards, seashell trinkets, and maps–and the nearest decent library is a forty-five-minute bus ride away. You’d think there’d be something. Even just one of those cheaply-printed local ghost story collections that all of the villages around here sell to tourists. Spectral dogs and phantom hands and so forth.
But no. I’ve looked. Early’s Guide is all we’ve got.
I smuggled it down to the cellar because if Mr Parsons saw it, he’d throw it out. If it weren’t for Jamie, I’d chuck it myself. The leather cover is cracked and water stains the pages. The cellar is full of junk: a locked, rusted trunk, a glass fishing buoy, a tangle of costume jewellery, and books even more mildewed than Early’s.
“Ghosts don’t remember,” I read. “They are the memories of places, but have no memory themselves. Only the place remembers.”
Jamie’s not impressed. “What does he know? Probably never even met a ghost.”
“Ghost bigot.” I agree, and close the book over my thumb.
I can be flippant because I’m not the dead one. I can leave the cellar anytime and go up into the sunlight. I can shake salt over my chips, jump in the sea, and carry my baby sister. I can learn to surf or to speak Italian. I can leave our tiny village. I can change.
Jamie can’t. He’s stranded, halfway between here and gone. If I linger too long, he flickers out. I repeat the same sections of Early’s every shift, because Jamie forgets. Death may not have wiped his hard drive, but some of his memory files are definitely corrupted.
•••••••••••••
I’m annotating Early’s Guide with Jamie’s corrections. We’re reading it because we want answers. He wants to know why he’s stuck in the cellar and, I want to know why, of all the dead, did he become a ghost at all?
Early’s Guide can’t explain it. “Ghosts haunt the places on which they imprinted during life,” I read.
Jamie scowls. “I never came here while I was alive, let alone imprinted.”
“The widow’s walk overlooking the stormy harbour, the conjunction of sea breeze and starlight on a midsummer hill. That hovel. That passage. The executioner’s yard–”
“Grim,” Jamie says.
“The luckier dead tarry in pleasant homes. A ghost could haunt a garden. Ghosts may make a temple of their lovers, and haunt that.”
Jamie makes a face.
“Grief, horror, love: these are the soils in which the seed takes–Grief, horror, love?” I prompt him. Jamie shakes his head.
He’s wrong. I don’t know about love or horror, but I’ve seen his grief.
Every Saturday, about twenty minutes into my lunch break, Jamie gets homesick. Ten to one–a time of day when the odds are stacked against you.
“I want to go home,” he says, and that’s how it starts. “I want to go home. Even just the once.”
That’s my cue, if I can bear it, to ask him which part of Ireland is home. His face blurs like a mist has descended over it. I think this might be how ghosts cry. He loses focus; his outlines distort as if he’s plunged into water and dissolving. A silent howl of grief goes right through the room. I feel it in my bones, and it makes my hair stand on end.
That howl keeps me awake at night.
Death’s erased the name of his home town. Even if we could figure out the other logistics – him: a ghost, trapped in a cellar; me: can’t drive, no friends except the aforementioned ghost, the only teenager in the UK with no smart phone–I wouldn’t know where to take him.
But if I did know–when I do–I’ll find a way.
•••••••••••••
That’s the other thing: Jamie doesn’t know how he died.
It bothers me, even though he thinks it’s none of my business. I’ve scoured old newspapers at the city library. Murders, suicides, accidents, combined with every James/Jamie/Jameson variation I can think of. He’s a year younger than me, we think, although when I met him last year, we were the same age.
We don’t even know which decade he died. He hasn’t heard of the Second World War, but that doesn’t mean much, because he also doesn’t recognise the words rain, sunshine, sky, birds, or flowers. He still knows train station, family, brick, Manchester United, and prayer. And he’s pretty good at picking up details of my life: latte, podcast, xenophobia, homework, baby sister, ace/aro, and detention.
And he knows friend.
•••••••••••••
The only breakthroughs come from Jamie himself. Strong emotions–like homesickness–help him remember. I ask questions he can’t answer, and he gets fuzzier and more distressed until he blurs, like white noise made visual, giving off particles and waves of agony. I end up crouched in the corner, sobbing, crushed by a grief that isn’t mine. Papers fly in a maelstrom, the dust rises, doors and windows slam throughout the whole building. A storm trapped in the room with us. In my head, I can make out words, fragments–
poisoned, poisoned–
–blood in the mouth–
And a language I don’t understand. I think it must be Irish.
The chaos rises to a scream. I cram my hands over my ears so hard that they hurt, and my head feels like it’s going to explode. Everything is lost, except for one barely distinguishable word:
HOME.
HOME.
HOME–
–until I can’t bear it anymore. I scramble up the basement steps, and I lock the door behind me with shaking fingers.
Jamie scares me then.
Upstairs, Mr Parsons flicks the lights on and off. “Another power-cut!”
The light-bulb explodes in a shower of glass, and Mr Parsons mutters about dodgy wiring and fire risks and once, under his breath, “I swear this damned shop’s haunted.”
Jamie never remembers.
I know one thing though. Something terrible happened to Jamie.
Blood in the mouth, he said. Poisoned.
•••••••••••••
I take Early’s Guide home in case it can tell us how to free Jamie from the cellar. It has chapters we’ve never read: Banishment, Apparitions, Haunted Objects, Malevolence. Afterword is printed at the end, but only blank pages follow it.
I slip it inside my algebra textbook and read at the kitchen table. Dad smiles at me fondly and goes back to spooning mashed pumpkin into my baby sister’s mouth. Mum isn’t fooled at all.
“What are you reading?” She plonks my dinner down. “Put it away, wash your hands, come for dinner, and afterwards you can concentrate on real algebra instead of whatever it is you have hidden there.”
She’d make a ruthless detective. When I was bullied my first year at high school, she winkled the truth out of me in one conversation. Of course, then she marched me to the headteacher’s office, and my classmates found out, and everything became a thousand times worse. I got better at hiding things, but I’ve been out of practice since I met Jamie.
I show her Early’s Guide. “It’s for history.”
“Ghosts?” She wrinkles her nose. “Ghosts are history now?”
“Local history. I’m trying to find out about this guy, Jamie someone. He lived in the Starfish Souvenirs building and was about my age. You have to pick a real-life person–not somebody famous–and write about them.”
Over dinner, Mum interrogates me. She’s always intensely interested in my homework. “Have you tried the church records? The cemetery?”
“Yep.” I’d traipsed around every headstone. “I don’t really know much about him. Just that he was Irish.”
“Irish? I thought he had to be local?”
He must be, he haunts Starfish Souvenirs. I just shrug. But after I’ve washed the dishes, she pushes an atlas of the British Isles and Ireland into my hands.
•••••••••••••
I take Early’s Guide up to my room. It’s getting dark. I start the chapter on Malevolence, and wish I’d skipped it. I turn to the chapter on Haunted Objects instead. Apparently, ghosts can haunt things, not just places. It’s hardly less disturbing. Lots of murder weapons and cursed lockets.
Nothing new, nothing useful. As dusk becomes night, I pick up Mum’s atlas instead, but I have no idea what I’m looking for until I realise I can read the names out to Jamie. Maybe he’ll recognise one. Clever Mum. I skim the index myself. It stops me dwelling on what I’ve read and the darkness outside.
And then I see it.
An Gleann Neimhe. The Poisoned Glen.
Poisoned.
•••••••••••••
When I read ‘Poisoned Glen’ to Jamie the next day, he goes very still. When he’s distressed, he seems poised to fly apart, a storm of static. This is the opposite. He solidifies. His outline sharpens.
“Home,” he says.
•••••••••••••
But I don’t know how to get him there. I fret for a week before the penny drops. Haunted Objects. If ghosts can haunt objects, then maybe Jamie can leave the cellar, and if Jamie can leave the cellar, then anything’s possible.
We experiment: I carry junk up from the cellar. The fishing float, the mildewed books. The locked chest is too heavy, but when I take a double handful of costume jewellery up the steps, there’s Jamie, hovering by my right shoulder.
“Outside!” he says, like an eager child. “Outside! Outside!”
Mr Parsons glances up. I spread the jewellery out on the counter, to show him I’m just sorting it. I pick out a little medallion with a Jesus figure on it. It’s warmer than the rest.
“Not Jesus,” Mr Parsons is interested despite himself. “That’s Saint Anthony. See the lily? He’s the saint of lost and stolen things.”
“Yes! Saint Anthony, yes. Outside!” Jamie urges.
Mr Parsons can’t see or hear him, but he shivers and rubs his arms.
“Can I buy this?”
Mr Parsons shrugs. “Just put a quid in the lifeboat fundraiser for me. It’s not worth much–it’s only tin.”
“Thank you.” I slip it into my pocket. “Can I finish my break outside? I’ll just put this lot back.”
I sit on the back step in weak sunlight and watch Jamie vibrating over the daisies that push up through the concrete.
“Beautiful. Outside,” he tells me, as if he’s temporarily lost the ability to form sentences. “Outside. Beautiful, beautiful.”
Seeing him, a suspicion that I had barely acknowledged disappears. There’s no way that someone like Jamie, transported with joy over a handful of daisies, could be kin to the malevolent entities discussed in Early’s Guide.
Jamie’s right. Early had probably never even met a ghost.
•••••••••••••
I hang the Saint Anthony medal on a ribbon and wear it everywhere. Jamie only appears briefly each day, but his world is big again. Unbounded. I walk him through sea-spray. He can’t feel it, but he shimmers and laughs. He stands, arms outstretched, in a whirl of autumn leaves, hair and jacket untouched by the gusts that propel them. He sees the sky.
I’m helping him, but I don’t think he’ll ever know that he’s helping me too. I was lonely before I met him.
I use the school internet to make some bookings. I persuade Dad that a holiday is a great idea. I pretend I’m going with friends and he looks relieved, so happy for me. He even gets Mum on board.
It takes me months to save and plan. Finally, when exams are done, we get on a bus, a plane, a bus again. To the Poisoned Glen.
•••••••••••••
I stammer like Jamie: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
The immense sweep of the Bearnas rockface, Mount Errigal, the tumbling tawny water. The wind tears the map out of my hands, and Jamie laughs as I race after it. Even bog water in my trainers doesn’t spoil my mood. Jamie and I wander long into the afternoon, and he doesn’t disappear.
In the golden hour of evening, when Errigal shines, I place Saint Anthony on a rock. “Do you want to stay?”
In answer, he smiles and turns his face up to the sky. His ghostly jacket billows, catching the wind. It never did that before. He was never solid enough, never here enough, for the wind to touch him. Jamie fades into the landscape. A few faint words hang in the wind, in his voice. I pick up the medal, and I know he is gone.
•••••••••••••
I’m glad, now, that I never found out how Jamie died. I’d have had to tell him what happened over and over. He’d have howled himself into his silent frenzy of pain and grief, then the next day he’d ask me all over again. Sometimes knowing isn’t better, especially hearing it fresh, day after day. That’s not closure; it’s a constant wounding. He must have forgotten for a reason. He must have chosen not to know.
•••••••••••••
I don’t believe in saints, but Jamie did. He told me on the bus. “Afterwards, keep the medal. Saint Anthony will help you find it.”
The saint of lost and stolen things.
“Find what?”
He just smiled and shrugged. “What it is you need to find.” He was only a ghost, not quite there all the time; all he knew was that something was missing. “You’ll find it.”
•••••••••••••
After Jamie has gone home, I remember how hard loneliness is, but I also remember the day I walked into the cellar and met him for the first time. There was nothing to distinguish that morning from any other; by that afternoon, my face hurt from laughing.
When I ask myself if it was worth it, I remember the voice in the wind. The only Irish phrase I ever learnt in the most beautiful place I’d ever been. I remember my friend.
Go raibh maith agat, he said. Thank you.