He watched as she wound her way up the path. It was perfectly dark, but still he saw her. She was drunk. She still had a bottle of cider hanging limply from one limp hand. Her mascara was smeared like a mist across her cheek. She was beautiful.

She came at the pace of a haggard old woman, though she was no older than nineteen. He was more than twice her age now, but he didn't look it. As she came nearer, he briefly considered if he was being creepy, standing watching her there in the night. But he was right out on the path, and he couldn't exactly go anywhere else.

Then she went right through him and wobbled to a stop by his headstone and dropped her jeans. He turned away quickly before the knickers came down too. The pervs would love being a ghost, but a perv he was not.

There was the sound of liquid pouring into the grass. No, a whole jetstream of it. He wanted to tell her to have a big glass of water when she got home, so she didn't feel like crap at eight in the morning when the shift at Asda looked like it would go on for ten years rather than eight hours. But he couldn't. Maybe she didn't need to be up in the morning at all. But a glass of water would help anyway.

He was thinking of a way to block out the sound (he didn't want to be an auditory perv either) when another, louder sound did it for him. It was the sound of his headstone crashing down onto the turf, and, judging by the wet squelch that accompanied it, something was in the way.

He spun round. The young woman had gone. Gone in the sense his grandmother had meant every Sunday lunchtime when she'd had half a sherry and started talking about the long-term security of her treasures, which apparently consisted of a porcelain cat and a still life of a teapot. When I'm gone. It was a nicer way to put it than squashed into a pile of wet bits by two tonnes of marble after a night on the lash down the Bongo.

She was gone for two whole minutes before she rose from the stone. Like the sword, but more aesthetically pleasing.

He'd stood there staring at the mess all that time. He felt like he should have done something but there was nothing to do so he thought it best to look concerned at the very least. Now, as she crouched there looking wildly around the graveyard like she'd been hit on the head (which she had), he decided it was time to act.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She brushed her fringe out of her staring eyes and regarded him like a rabbit caught in a trap.

"Sorry for what?" she asked, in a voice that was small and bewildered as befitting the recently and unexpectedly deceased.

He considered a moment. "For having a solid block of nonsense rather than a nice sensible flat stone that no-one could die under. I always liked the idea of a proper tomb. Delusions of grandeur, Sophie said."

The woman had stopped listening at a rather alarming word close to the end of the first sentence. "Die? What are you on about?" She swung her head back to the bend from whence she staggered. "I was just going down the road... and then took the shortcut... and then..." The wide eyes traced their way along the path and looked down at the grey marble which was currently bisecting her pale neck. "Oh."

"I'm sorry," he said.

She flashed a look of menace at the witness, which is not any sort of doggerel. Her eyes actually flashed. "Will you stop saying sorry," she snapped, "and at least help me up."

"Sor-" He caught himself just in time and rushed towards his grave. He found her hand and pulled. He remembered all of the circumstances just before her lower half came back into view, but luckily she'd managed to get herself decent before being unceremoniously smashed to a pulp.

She looked really good in those jeans too.

"I'm Simon," Simon said.

"Yeah... Chloe." She was swaying her hips and swinging her arms and looking across the hillocked lawn of the dead. "Huh. Weird. I don't feel drunk any more."

"You wouldn't," Simon babbled. He couldn't stop looking at those curves beneath her thin blouse, at the way the sleeves of her leather jacket came adorably up to her palms, even at the Minnie Mouse socks poking up above her Vans. He hated being so disgusting, but when your neighbours were a swarthy marine from 1889 and an insurance broker called Barry who had Europe's biggest collection of cigarette cards that hopefully hadn't been broken up by those ignorant next-of-kin nieces, he thought he might have a free pass. Just for a minute.

"Why not?" Chloe said. She was looking straight at him, not five feet away. Her eyes were blue. Of course they were. She was all blue, like a lone shaft of moonlight on a blanket of night.

For one awkward moment he forgot what he'd been telling her. Then he decided to continue the awkwardness for the foreseeable future. "Well, you know, alcohol inhibits, you know... some inceptors or something, so it's a bodily function." Chloe folded her arms. Simon looked into the bush on his left. "And you're not bodily any more."

Amazingly, beyond all chance, she laughed. "Receptors. You're not in biology, I take it?"

He looked doubtful. He was also in a suit so didn't exactly look a picture of scientific wisdom. "I took it at A-level. It was just-" He hesitated, looking anywhere but at her. "It was just a long time ago. I've forgotten most of it. I was actually looking into Biochemistry for a bit. The cancer got in the way, in the end."

Chloe looked alarmed, raised her palms to what would have been rapidly flushing cheeks. They might have gone a tad turquoise, actually. "The- the cancer? Shit." She took a deep breath, took another look around the graveyard. "I think I am still drunk, you know. I just think the adrenaline's keeping me going. Can you believe it, for a moment, I actually forgot the whole... dead thing."

For a moment, Simon had too. For a moment, while she spoke, he felt more alive than in the last two years of his real life. He did his best to ruin it. "Not sure about the adrenaline thing. Bodily functions, remember?"

He blinked violently, silently cursed himself, now he knew hell didn't exist. Give yourself a break, he told himself a second after. He hadn't had much of an opportunity to talk to girls, no matter how much he had wanted to. They didn't make a habit of hanging round hospital beds. Until Sophie, of course, but by then, there hadn't been much time for conversation.

He didn't believe in hell any more, but perhaps miracles were still allowed. Because the girl called Chloe was laughing again.

"Whatever. This is crazy." She flapped her arms, tried to touch a tree stump, watched in fascination as she failed in spectacular fashion. "Like, legitimately crazy. It's like something out of a Stephen King book."

"Nah," Simon said, shaking his head. "Not so exciting. There's no demonic spirits, no stand against an unimaginable evil stalking the streets of Castle Rock."

"What is there, then?" she asked.

He looked up as the clouds drew back to tease a sliver of silver moon. Sharp, twisting branches cut across the light like tributaries of a river on a map.

"Nothing." He sighed into the night.

He didn't look down as Chloe approached. She stood right by him. Beneath him, almost. Then she turned. She peered up into the night sky and watched the bats flitter by, twittering for blood.

They talked a bit more about Stephen. Then they went on to other things. She had the same taste in music as him, although she thought AC/DC were better than Whitesnake. Simon informed her that that was sacrilege. Chloe only laughed, and looked out across the headstones with her arms folded across her chest.

When they got back to books, Chloe started quizzing him on Joe Hill, and the game was up.

He didn't know how much time had passed, lost in words and glances, and in whatever that time was, he'd brushed aside a dozen references to things beyond his stretch of the mortal coil. But she wouldn't let this one go. She was telling him, in equal parts of genuine shock and mock disgust, that he couldn't like Stephen so much and not Joe. The last book from the King family he remembered coming out was Insomnia. He had to say something.

"I might have been, you know, a little bit dead by then."

She stood there, not an inch from him, staring blankly. Then she burst into tears.

Smooth move, dude.

Without thinking, he reached out and held her, there on the grass by the stupid smashed grave. He gazed down despairingly behind her, her golden hair (well, golden-blue, you know what I mean) tickling his chin. His mother should never have indulged him. The last time she'd been to visit, she was still in clothes that he remembered from before. But somehow, she'd afforded this monstrosity of his dreams. And look what it had done.

He held her gently, and then more fiercely, as she let it all in. He imagined everything: the friends, the family (but NOT the boyfriend, he sincerely hoped), the hectic nights and sunny days that followed, the houses, the films and books, the laughter and years and food and drink and holidays and jobs and life she would never have, and mourned with her. Lord knew he'd had time enough for himself. He stroked her hair while she wept. An owl swept by, shrouded in silence.

Then he held her back and looked at her at arm's length, because he could feel a different ghostly appendage growing and he didn't feel this was an appropriate time for a full-on boner. There were enough bones around here for her to come to terms with, for the time being.

"You'll be alright," he said. It was just something to say, to break the silence. But it seemed right. He meant it. He was. Wasn't he?

The tears had stopped. They'd never been there at all, really. It was just an image, light on light. They were both images, reflections on something that had once been. The real them weren't so pretty any more.

Chloe looked down. She was radiant in her sadness. She'd have been radiant anyway, Simon corrected himself, but, you know. One lock of hair had fallen across her cheek. He brushed it back against her neck. She was way out of his league.

"It's crazy," Chloe said again, her voice sweet and thin and vulnerable, “that I’m actually dead. I thought there’d be a tunnel of light or God. Or at least a bit of pain. But I’m just...here, alone in the middle of the night. My parents are gonna kill me when they find out.”

“No they’re not,” Simon said. “And you’re not alone.”

“Are you?” she said. She looked down the path towards something that might have been footsteps or might have been a branch falling in the gathering breeze. Blue clouds were racing; grass shivered against graves. “I mean, do you have family? Friends?” A flash of light from her eyes. One moment. “Girlfriend?”

He wanted to do so many things. He wanted to draw her close, pretend to feel her warmth against his. To tell her that there had been Sophie, but Sophie’s parents had wanted her in a neat little ceramic jug on the mantelpiece, and even if they hadn’t they were from South Shields anyway. And that his parents did visit, sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon but it had been kind of a long time ago now and they’d had a long time to prepare, and these days there was couples’ Scottish country dancing lessons on at the town hall for a fiver on their one day off together. And that you sort of got used to being pretty much alone when you were bound within thirty steps of your remains.

But the sound that might have been footsteps or might have been a branch had turned out to be footsteps after all. And there were Chloe’s friends, in matching uni hoodies, fretting this way and that, frightening the owl from her perch and frightening Chloe from the moment. Then someone spotted a suspicious foot poking suspiciously from under a stone, and the business of dealing with finding a dead body began. There were shouts and screams, and a lot of milling about. Someone phoned an ambulance. Someone phoned the police. The soft moonlight was replaced with the cold, unfeeling blue of the law.

Chloe stood about, watching and looking concerned. There was not much else she could do.

Ten feet back, Simon watched too. He couldn’t do anything either. And he couldn’t be upset, really. All things considered, seeing everyone you know wailing and crying while your mangled corpse gets dragged out of a cemetery is the sort of cockblock you can’t expect to get out of.

He had the moment. And he’d have it for all time.

When Chloe had drifted away with the ambulance and the commotion, the marine came out from his hiding place behind the sycamore and asked who he’d been talking to. Simon told him a gentleman never tells. The marine laughed and winked. The insurance broker arose then, wanting to know what all the fuss was about. The young man who would forever be a young man informed him sincerely that he hoped Europe’s largest cigarette card collection had been put in the recycling where it belonged. Then he stalked away, as far as his bonds would allow.

It was lonely being a young man. Forever lonely. But he’d had one moment. And perhaps, as he played it out in his mind until the sun’s first light burned away the lunar glow, perhaps it had been two.