Authors: Jeff Noon
The guards packed up their belongings, the production team followed.
The skeletal remains of the Dome looked desolate and bleak in the darkness.
~~~
The days fell away.
Nights grew colder, the moon waned
and grew again.
Melissa’s body was examined, probed, the skin peeled open. All things were normal: her heart seemed to have slowed of its own accord, fading in gentle rhythms to a stop. A few days later she was buried with as much dignity as could be managed, whilst hundreds of reporters and photographers and well-wishers and Pleasure Dome fanatics crowded the streets around the cemetery.
George stood at the graveside, Christina beside him.
Their hands were linked together.
Two weeks went by.
The production team had long since left the site to its own devices. The area seemed smaller now, hardly capable of containing human dreams. Now and again a few curious people turned up, to walk slowly around the circle of miscoloured earth where the Dome had once stood. Some of them combed the ground with gardening forks, metal detectors and divining rods, uncovering a number of items: a lock of bright pink hair, a gin bottle, a playing card, a blue button, coins, ticket stubs and the like, but nothing of any real worth. Nothing connected to either the Dome or its final occupant.
Programmed nature took over, covering the ground with autumn weeds and dead leaves.
Three weeks.
George Gold sat quietly in his shuttered rooms. No matter where they rested in the house, all of his many visionplex screens were draped with black cloth, unwatched and unloved. George supped his whiskey and stared at his collection of vinyl records, occasionally playing one of them. But his missing daughter seemed to hover in the tunes, the lyrics, in the space between the notes, in the grooves even. It was too much to take, and so he silenced the turntable and sat alone, drinking, tapping his fingers on the armrest of his favourite chair.
Christina waited at the door, hoping for a sign.
Four weeks passed.
~~~
The first sighting was made.
It took place during the recording of the Deedee Baxter Chat Show. One of the guests had made an outrageous comment about the behaviour of the new wave of immigrants, and a member of the audience had shouted out in angry response. The camera panned across the rows of seated spectators to reach the heckler. A couple of days later, when the programme was aired, a strange discovery was made. As the camera moved along the row, the figure of Melissa was briefly seen in passing.
Row J, seat 12.
She was sitting perfectly still, relaxed, smiling to herself. Melissa Gold. Once believed lost, passed away and buried, now found. Or else a woman who looked very like her. But there was no evidence of this person having actually arrived at the studio, and none of her leaving. She was missing from all the security footage. When questioned, the audience members in the seats on either side could remember nothing at all about their neighbour. In fact, no ticket had been issued for that particular seat.
The visitor was a mystery.
When the tapes of the show were closely examined there appeared to be some kind of fault in the recording. Melissa’s outline was a little fuzzy, her face had a blurred quality to it. She could neither be placed, nor calculated. Her features could not be enhanced, nor brought to book, nor tendered. She could not be focussed upon, not fully.
A recording was delivered to George Gold. In his private rooms he uncovered one of his screens. Here he dared to watch the incident. Over and over and over. His hand reached out to caress the glass where his daughter’s beautiful and hazy face appeared. He could not believe that he had made this young woman, this being, from his own flesh.
He whispered to her, he pleaded with her.
He drank and cursed.
Fingers hitting the remote buttons:
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Melissa’s image jumping in time and space.
He cried out at her:
Come back to me.
Melissa. Come back.
George sat there alone. He waited.
Once a day Christina arrived to administer a kind of rejuvenation rite: cleaning his face, applying moisturiser, spooning food to the pulpy mouth, moving his hand to sign documents and memos. Paperwork, fleshwork. She took pride in this, a cruel but tender-hearted pride. Here was her new charge. The man himself, the once upon a time King of the People’s Music, now sitting still and quiet whilst a wet sponge was wiped across his brow and cheeks, and his lips were dabbed with balm.
Two days later Melissa appeared again.
Once more on the screen, this time sitting in the crowd at a live sporting event. More and more appearances were noted: the young woman’s image wandering across the rear office space during a news broadcast, or else standing amongst the crowd at a fashion show. Once she was spotted in an old film, a desert war drama first made in 1952, where she stood out against a shimmering backdrop of sky. Nobody could predict when or where this apparition would next appear. A few times she was seen in police documentaries, an indistinct figure at the edge of motorway accidents and murder scenes. Her eyes were unfocused, half hooded; she barely glanced at the aftermath of violence.
Other programmes, other times.
Her face clad in shadow, or bleached white by the wash of studio lighting.
Melissa was reaching out. George knew this. He could feel her, he could sense her desperation, her need. Hour by hour he stared at the screen. He fell asleep in the armchair, with the set still playing. He took his meals with the glow of the screen upon him, the few morsels he could manage.
Waiting. Only waiting. Come to me...
The appearances increased in number and measure. Melissa’s image moved from set to set, stage to stage, programme to programme. Visionplex fanatics claimed that Nola Blue was obviously involved in this haunting of the screen, that she was the carrier signal. Countering this, social media experts claimed the manifestations were nothing more than wishful thinking, a woman somehow conjured into being by the audience’s intense desire for reflection and completion. Indeed, the spectral figure seemed to take on more life each time she appeared, as though feeding on the camera’s gaze, on the ravenous eyes of the spectators. Her face was by now highly detailed, her eyes bright and fierce.
It was her, there was no doubting that.
Sometimes she laughed, other times she cried, depending on the particular show’s content.
But who was watching whom?
She was a spirit of the airwaves and cable, a voodoo image.
Zombie Glitch. Interference smear.
Ghost.
She was given many names, her body surrounded by theories and explanations.
Only transmission felt her truly.
Now the figure appeared fully formed in a costume drama, dressed in regal attire, a gown of scarlet cloth dotted with fake pearls. This was a character that had never been scripted, never acted out, never filmed. And yet here she walked through a realm of mist and noise, a battlefield. Moving silently, slowly, unarmed as the guns fired around her and the earth burst open black and fiery.
Sancta Maria...Mater Dei...
George Gold awoke suddenly. Something had pulled him from sleep, something in a dream.
A spoken word.
Now...
His eyes blurred, trying to open.
The screen buzzed with colour, with dots of light.
George leaned forward in his chair.
A face filled the screen.
He stared at this.
It was her.
My child...
Melissa’s face.
Her body.
Her hand, reaching out.
There...
George could hardly move. He dared not move, for fear of disturbing her, of curtailing the moment.
Then he touched the screen. He could not resist. His palm on her palm.
Warm...warm flesh...
This was her final appearance.
So warm.
Other realms awaited her. The figure was merely something that stirred in the wires, a presence that drifted across the circuits for a while. A digital shadow set to tremble
and activate itself at a bare touch,
a murmur of instruction:
Click. Click, click.
Click, click.
Click.
The screen murmured.
The ghost spoke in code, in whispers, in a voice made of numbers, of darkness,
of fading colours,
electrons, motion itself,
fading
memories,
traces...
..........................>*..................................
........................contact?\..........,*(...?\...........
.......................tv/
waiting
>\...........................
..................../0>1(*)
eyes
>..............................
....................(my skin is/my...\..........\.............
...................Skin isdrift.\...ing;....................
....................By which roads..\.......\...........\.....
.................... should I............\\.\.................
.....................
travel
?>...\.\...........................
.......................tick/..................................
...............///tock>clock>/10110........^.1................
............../”!//^MERGE programmes............1....0........
.............>100((,>//
............../////<%
drifting
>
broken
^>,\......................
>.heat..........too late now. too early\\£....................
...blur............It’s so cold:*(@’out here>.................
............/.so cold>//the moon is falling...................
...........^/SIGNALS broken:/,my name is......................
........,.my
name
is...broken/011011/n/o^>?(la/\\>............
........In Spirit Flicker city............10/,
.........../////I lay down and wept............../011.........
..............for thee, TeleviZION:/\\1.............#/^011<...
...............(Waiting now///&^C%?/\>\0......................
............
soft black
eyes
..............................
.............
watching
me>///.................................
........./*~parasight//too far, too...........................
...............close
............/< who is that? voices>\\”................,.>\....
.........///no. nobody//10/@~#................................
......memories//ether
mist
^..................................
.....
traces
011101>no//>la^^>?.............\\.........\...\...
.......Channel ghostSKIN.<....................................
...01//<<1/chrysalis
Data pulse
..........\..........\.........