"I'm Paula. This is Patricia, my sister. Can you help her, please?"

Jane watches where Paula exists for a long hush moment. Bites her lip. Points across the room to nothing where there might've been something. Probably nothing. Erie lines like shadow prison bars scrape an unnatural glow across Paula's face. Turns malachite gravity to where the portal was. Senses a total cave in somewhere on the other side. Senses the thump of a bone saw heartbeat somewhere under all the collapse of rubble rock. Someone who can't die trapped forever in a deep burial. Recognizes the heart as the beat from the little cabin in the living dark forest. Thinks about the art project skeletons on the front lawn. Turns eyes back to Paula.

"I'm Jane. I'm sorry, your sister's dead. Was that a portal?"

Paula nods. Tears. Turns her face toward where Jane points her thumb. Reverses smooth dusty debris crumbly hair countenance back at the mire girl.

"Yes."

Jane holds gaze upon the gaze of Paula; emerald eyes like phenomenal spectacles which search possible intention in the landscape of the tree torn oaken elm wreck. Paula lets Patricia go. Leans against the darkness of a root bulging wall with her knees close to her ghostly midnight clock of a face. Patricia's face thuds against the rustic slivery knot tree simulacra cabin floor.

"Jane? You look a lot like Terra Coal."

The mire girl smiles. Shrugs like a bouquet of ashes from a flaming silhouette which once licked the apparition of a funeral pyre.

"I'm her and I'm not her. I'm Jane. And I'm the Grand Ghost around here. And...I'm sorry about your sister. There's nothing I know of that I can do to help her. Anyone who could are long gone."

"Thanks. It's ok, Jane. Not your fault. Fucking Leonards. Grand Ghost, huh? And why are you as naked as the Judith?"

Jane blushes down, witnesses her body like Eve bitten fruit. Crosses her legs. Folds her arms over her breasts.

"I wasn't expecting anyone to be around here to see me. I was just..."

"It's ok, Jane. There's no shame."

The mire girl bites her lip. Focuses on the other woman who isn't moving but is making a soft silent sound in Jane's mind.
Silence crosses the moment like the bloodless body of a Roman criminal hammered by spikes upon a crucifix raised to the sky for evolved avian dinosaurs to pick with their beaks. Jane witnesses Patricia's broken mouth. Torn lips. Indent purple cheeks. Caved in chest. The woman is certainly dead. Her countenance cold. Empty like the husk of a stranded bomb vessel in the ice of an arctic winter. So, why does she hear the warmth of her heart? The thumping isn't coming from Patricia's chest. Jane moves closer to both sisters. Kneels down into the failure of her own epistemology. Catches a sliver in her knee. Listens, ear to ear with the corpse. The heartbeat is coming from Patricia's mind. Her body is dead but the noumenal representation of her mind is continuing somehow. Maybe Kant was right in a way.

Jane touches Patricia's forehead. Runs her fingers through disheveled crusty blood clot dark hair. Whiffs the scent molecules of miasma. Yet the woman's apparitional heart thumps pounds flickers like music in Jane's extraordinary senses. The depth of a solid kick drum contracts with a reverberating squeaky treadle which vibrates with each inner pendulum knock. A terse claustrophobic hollowness holds Patricia's organ like a tell-tale beating inside a buried coffin. Jane can distinguish the scent in Patricia's mind from the cadaverine of her body. The heartbeat smells like sweat caffeine vodka cigarettes swirling within a thick vanilla ocean. Her inner inners on the tip of scents tongue taste like a human in the spring of calendars and not the candy cane mint of winter portals which should always be avoided.

Paula sniffs. Exhales. Sighs of anguish.

"My sister died to save who she loved. I was too late to save her as she was once too late to save me..."

More tears stumble down Paula's cheek. Drip. Soak into her shirt. Jane notices the emptiness of atoms in the sister's silent mourning.

"I'm so sorry, Paula. You were killed, weren't you? And you came back, resurrected? And things aren't what they were. All that you know is gone. I know the feeling. The confusion and the anxiety of it. And the person you were hoping to have in your life again is right here and at the same time, lost to the universe. But your sister may experience the same event as you, maybe to the same extent. This may not be the epilogue of your sister's life because I don't think she's actually really dead. I think there's a simulation within her subconscious. I think she's alive in there. She's a type of revenant like me and you, so it seems, I think. Someone violated her mind and thoughts and left a door open. Or, the portal could have just appeared without any intervention. The portals seem to be like the weather, now."

Paula wipes her eyes. Shakes her head. Places her hand on what's left of Patricia's cheek.

"How is she a revenant? How am I? How are you? And where can I find the portal to the simulation in her mind?"

"We were all a means to an end for those in power. They discarded the categorical imperative and utilitarianism and all type of ethics and forced a capitalism of death upon all of us. Necropolitics. The Leonards thought that everyone existed to die at their hands and for their benefit. And I've no idea where to begin to look for the portal you seek."

Paula frowns. Smirks with angry clench teeth. Somber blinks glow off and on. Shakes her head in grief. They're silent for a moment as Paula wraps her arms around her legs. Places her chin on her knees.

"Are you sure about not really being Terra Coal? You have her knowledge and vocabulary."

"No. I'm me."

"Ok, Jane. Thank you. And just so you know, Grand Ghost, the first reality has fallen. The Factory of that world is destroyed. The Ghosts are all dead."

Jane takes the context of Paula's words. Nods. Pivots in her mind to change the meaning of the word "Ghost." The thought echoes against the cliff of the reflective bright depths of her abyss of knowledge and memory. Thoughts finds words carved into fossils of other thoughts. A megalodon tooth protrudes from the tangles of Jane's subconscious world like the tethers of a torn language. Ghosts. Corporeal. Fading away and becoming clearer.

"If a ghost dies, does that mean it becomes alive?"

~*~*~*~

Jane and Paula hold Patricia as they swim slowly across the choppy whitecap lake. Waves splash into Jane's eyes and mouth while she holds up the dead sister by the torso. Can still witness the echo memory of Patricia's translucent heartbeat.

Paula swims naked on the opposite side of Patricia. Clothes in the tight wrap of an old blue buoyant tarp to keep dry. Such is attached to her right wrist with a shoelace. Apparently Paula hates wearing wet clothing. Jane doesn't mind. Feels less shame and anxiety about her own naked discomfort now that Paula has shown herself in such a way. Feels that she can trust this sister. Turns her on. Feels she'd have an erection if her body was such. Thinks of Rist. Let's the thought of fucking Paula disappear.

As they swim closer to the other side, Rist becomes visible. Waves both hands at them. Jane waves back as best she can while swimming and towing Patricia. Paula spits water from her mouth. Stops for a moment. Continues.

"What's up, Paula? Did something grab you from beneath? Or did you notice something? Did a ghost whisper "boo!" into your ear?"

"Oh, you like jokes? Very funny. Yeah, I'm definitely looking at a ghost. Who is that? She kinda looks like my friend, Lord."

"That's my better half, Rist."

Paula slaps the water. Makes bubbles with her mouth. Spits more leaden murk through her teeth.

"These simulations are insane. They're just so...confusing. In my world, her name is Lord and her middle name is Rist. My..."Rist"...went to find Terra in the first reality and that's the last I saw of her."

Jane's Rist is clothed in black patchwork. Stands at the edge of the beach watching them. Has a Burreta in her right hand and a skull mask in her left. Notices a very serious expression upon her lover's face. Realizes she's not waving hello. She's motioning to hurry up.

"Rist! It's ok! We..."

Jane notices a short womanly Ghost walk out from behind Rist. Stands beside her. Silvia. The Ghost who she left in charge while the two Queens took a vacation. Notices other Ghosts climb like awkward skeletal shadows out of the black and wretched tangly forest from behind Rist and Silvia; white glowing osteal faces brighten in the dimming sunlight. And other people are with them wearing only slips and ropes. The Ghosts are roughly dragging such people through the trees and onto the beach. Pull them to stub toes and scrape flesh upon the hard fossil branches and boles. The Ghosts are very rough in their tugs. The prisoners have their hands tied behind their backs and the tugging ropes are around their necks. A connection of one throat to another in a line.

Jane watches. Angers. Feels Silvia has a lot to answer for. Finds that one of the prisoners looks beyond badly beaten. A woman. Has tattoos of eyes and mouths on her legs. Scar fangs like vampires. Jane witnesses a memory. The question in a single word,"capeesh?," crunches its two syllables like a bloodbath from the depths of the mire girl's recollection.

"What the fuck?!?"

Before her eyes in the sun setting silhouette is the woman who tried to have her killed in the fair ground initiation so long ago. The woman who her inner monster decapitated. The backstabbing traitor. The former Grand Ghost. Janice.