Re: [capital pawnshop: hannah & david]
The ghost of Amy said she wasn't dead, and David didn't believe her. It didn't matter that he'd heard the whole story - about the woman who looked like Amy and talked like Amy, and who disappeared after Amy's body was found in a flowerbed. He knew the history, but it didn't surface here, in this moment. That history was confused and complex, and that mystery woman being alive, being here, looking just like a dead woman, that didn't connect. David understood ghosts. He understood death, seeing the dead, and seeing things that weren't real. She was warm and pleasant and unconcerned with the sights and sounds of a man kneeling on the cold earth at the head of a child's grave, pissing himself with fear.
Henry didn't have answers for her, or he was too far gone to respond. His mouth worked when she asked for her mechanical boy, but he gave her nothing. The whites of his eyes showed bright, his pupils blown wide with terror. Did she mean the boy in the ground, or the others? The calculation showed on his face, and he glanced to the grave.
David nudged the edge of the shovel with the tip of his boot, and David grasped it as if it would tether him to the planet. "Okay - okay," he whispered. There were tears streaming down his face. Slowly, stuttering, he began to dig.
The ghost touched. She was warm. She had flesh. "I died," he told her, though of course she must know. She was a figment of his imagination, but he could play out the dialogue. "Shadows," he murmured, looking back at her. In front of them, Henry dug deeper, and the shovel hit soil with a repetitive ring. "They swallowed me," he said, with a small, it's all right smile. She quoted to him - a Brontë, he was almost sure - and he had a moment to doubt whether she was just an sliver of his fevered brain before her skin touched his skin, and he saw something of her.