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.In that instant, he was visited again by that sudden and overwhelming melancholy, a stabbing pain that seemed to have neither source nor reason.He looked up, almost expectantly.He stood and hurried across the tree-fringed square, convinced that he’d seen something, some small twist of movement in the distance.He came to a sudden halt.Perhaps five metres before him, staring at him through the ice-cold night, was Eloise.She was as he remembered her from all those years ago, wand-slim and as pale as a wraith.She had the fragile, large-eyed beauty of that actress from way back: was it Faye Wray? He’d seen a movie called King Kong in his childhood, and more than fear at the monster he had experienced wonder at his sister’s resemblance to the star.She was dressed in a short white smock, and even though Halliday knew he was hallucinating, some irrational part of his mind was concerned about the unsuitability of her clothing in the freezing night air.‘Eloise?’She smiled at him.Then, to his amazement, she spoke.‘Hi, Hal.How’s it going?’‘I.’ She appeared so real to him that he looked around, as if to confirm that others beside himself could see the child.A few refugees were staring at him while other citizens hurried across the square, avoiding eye-contact with the fool talking to himself.He took a step forward and halted.She looked so real, so substantial, her short blonde hair arranged in neat curls about her head.She placed the heel of one red shoe against the toe of the other and stared down at them, from time to time peeking up at him with massive blue eyes.He wanted to rush up to her and sweep her into his arms, but he knew that that would be to exorcise her image.‘Why are you here, Eloise? What are you doing?’‘You know that, Hal.You called me here.’‘I.I did? How?’She giggled into cupped fingers.‘I don’t know how, silly.You did it!’He stared at her.He had been twice her age when she died, fourteen years old - almost a man, according to his father - and close to his twin sisters.They had been young enough not to be his rivals, old enough to be impressed by his knowledge of the world.‘What happened, Eloise?’ he said in a whisper.‘You mean the fire? What happened in the fire?’He nodded.He recalled the fire.He could see in his mind’s eye the appalling conflagration of the family home with all within it that meant so much to him, but he could not recall the specific incidents of that day.He knew that they were the key, the memories he had suppressed of that fateful day all those years ago.‘I can’t tell you that, silly,’ Eloise carolled.‘I can’t remember, can I?’ She stared at him, suddenly serious ‘You’ll have to ask Daddy and Sue, won’t you?’And with that she turned and skipped away.He followed, gave chase.It was as if he were unable to run, his progress retarded as if in a dream.As he watched, the ghost child accelerated away with magical speed and turned around the trunk of a tree.Halliday ran forward, stopped - but she was gone.He stood in the freezing square, reaching out in a futile gesture of entreaty.He was aware of the hostile stares of the homeless.He turned, looked for the car.As he made his way across the square, he wondered if he was going mad.He slipped into the driver’s seat and turned the heater up to full, warming himself.Something had happened to his head in virtual reality.Something had reached in, dislodged a memory buried deep in his subconscious.He considered what the phantom had advised.He started the Ford and drove, found himself heading across town, and then accelerating across Queensboro Bridge to Long Island and taking Highway 495 through Queens.Kilometres to the south, JFK airport glowed like an old pinball machine in the night.Above it, the lights of approaching planes formed a vast corkscrew holding pattern in the darkness.He stayed on the highway for an hour, his the only vehicle in sight, accelerated and sat back as classical music played softly on the radio.It was years since he had last been this way, and when he had visited his father he’d arranged to meet in a restaurant in order to avoid the house.It wasn’t as if the house was the original, either: it had been re-built, to a different design, in the same lot, soon after the fire.Halliday had never liked living there after that: the new house seemed an impostor, with none of the charm of the original; the new timber possessed by creaks and groans as it settled, which Halliday had ascribed to the movement of a restless ghost.He turned towards the coast on Highway 97 and, twenty minutes later, slowed as he passed through Blue Point and the row of grand sea-front mansions to his right.His father lived three kilometres further along the coast road, in a wild tract of marram grass and dead trees backing onto the dunes of the foreshore.Halliday practically crawled the last mile or two, as if his conscious self was reluctant now to go through with what his subconscious had set in motion.The house appeared, suddenly, to his right.His first thought was that this gaunt, dour building could not be the home in which he’d spent the last three years of his youth.It had burned down again, surely, and been replaced.It seemed much smaller than he recalled.He halted the Ford across the street and sat staring out at the house and, beyond, the dead copse where he had played with his sisters.The sky was paling towards the east as the sun rose over the sea, throwing the house into stark silhouette.Halliday waited for some sign of life from within.His father had always been an early riser, conditioned by a lifetime of military service.At six, a small rectangle of orange light appeared in a downstairs window.Halliday waited five minutes, then another five, before at last forcing himself to leave the car.He walked across the unfenced lawn and moved around the house, rather than ring the bell on the front door.He would sooner appear at the kitchen door, as if this might make his visit less formal.He paused at the corner of the house and stared along the length of the back garden, to the oak tree which he had climbed as a boy.He had loved the tree, had felt close to some essence within it - a feeling beyond his power to express in words and which, therefore, he had kept to himself.The oak was dead, now.He approached slowly, like a mourner to the grave of a friend.It still towered over him, majestic in size if nothing else, but its trunk had split and many of its branches, pulpy now, had broken off and fallen to the ground.He had vivid memories of hiding in the leafy boughs of the oak, while Eloise and Sue had danced around the garden and tried to find him.Eloise had always been his favourite, for no reason he could recall, and to his abiding discomfort to this day.They were twins, though not identical: Eloise had been fair and tall for her age, Sue dark and small.He had wanted to like them equally, but was always, inexplicably, drawn towards Eloise, even though he was distressed by Sue’s pain at his bias.He was startled by a shout‘What the hell are you doing out there in the freezing cold?’ It was his father’s peculiar ability to be able to disguise even concern in admonition
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