Soldier and Soldier (A Ghost Story)

That morning, still half asleep, he felt the merest sliver of someone else’s skin inject itself into his and undulate like a fish with no bones through his body just below the surface. It pulsed its way to the top of his head and he felt it escape through him in a thin mist, and he started to wake fully as it evaporated. He stirred and rolled over and a white dusting was left on the pillow, but he didn’t see this.
Only you saw this.
When he awoke properly, he was freezing and he couldn’t move his head from the neck. But he felt no pain.
Only you felt the pain.
Something compelled him to shake the pillow, as if it were to blame for his inability to move his head without swaying from the shoulders. The dust was thrown to the air in the room and never landed.
Only you saw this.
As the day wore on, the stiffness in his neck eased off but he then found that he couldn’t move his eyes without moving his neck. Every time he visited the bedroom, he was driven to sneeze and when he did, it felt like his youth was draining from him.
Only you saw the white motes bob in the air, multiply and thicken.
By the time he came to go to bed, he could move his eyes, but his brain felt fused to the underside of the top of his skull and now there was an ache that filled his head, an ache that had no pattern, no ebb and flow, no hemisphere. He stretched out in bed, on his back, in the dark, and found that he couldn’t close his eyes. His toes started to tingle, started to throb and burn. Pain splinted up his shins. A slow linear paralysis swelled the length of his body and killed the pain in his head.
Only you could now feel the pain; it was now yours.
Dust fell. On the floor, a paper outline, crumbling into parchment fragments, its edges slowly lifting in the wind.
Of course, you knew this would happen. And only you knew this would happen. And now you turn, pockmarked still by your battlefield scars, wrapped around someone’s stolen pain that you have added to your collection, and you waft through the bedroom wall like a cold wind from the north east and leave for ever, because forever is the constituency you inhabit. And behind you, the body on the bed starts to crackle and settle, settle itself apart, bone and liver and brain separating from each other then crumbling to powder, as the outline on the floor fills out, absorbs dust and acquires moisture from the air, swells and lengthens, becomes supple and lubricated, rises to the day and follows you though the wall to the next place, leaving only traces of absence behind.