This is probably just horrible and crappy and juvenile, but it's a little ghost story for you all since it's Hallowe'en.
Perhaps
I looked over my shoulder, which was a perfectly normal, human thing to do. And, like the perfectly normal human I endeavour to show myself as to those too wrapped up in modernity to think outside the box, I swept my eyes across a crowd of people on the other side of the exhibit. Between those people, and myself, a model of the baths that had once stood here spread out; tiny model Romans, poised in space, wandered between the hot thermal baths and the temple whose very real ruins were somewhere below this tiny mockery of their existence.
An eye in the crowd caught mine, and I turned. It was a dark eye, not quite of the rich chocolate colour that an African might sport, or the tired mud-brown of an Afghan street urchin, but an olive. Perhaps a little like my own eyes, though I must regrettably inform the interested reader that mine, despite having the correct mix of colours for a beautiful olive hue, still manage to end up looking like raw sewage. But those are matters adiaphora, or at least they were compared to the rather striking beauty of that eye.
It was a girl, it was hard to tell how old. Her face spoke a little of the Italianate, but without the hard angularity that characterises the busts of the Emperors. Dark hair just tumbled gently down onto her shoulders. I think she wore blue, with a scarf, but I find it hard to remember. I was never blessed with a photographic memory, and even when I turn away from those very dear to me I find myself wholly unable to conjure their faces in the back of my mind.
I wandered on down the steps, to the next part of the museum. I assumed that that would be that, and that I would browse the remainder of the artefacts and the rather enchanting creature I had seen would do so too.
I looked over my shoulder, which was, of course, not abnormal. The person I had just seen was no longer there. Perhaps she was moving more slowly. I took a few steps back to peer round the corner of the aforementioned exhibit. Nada. Zip. Nil.
Perhaps she had gone the other way. No, that made no sense; it was a one-way exhibition. Perhaps she had already passed me?
This puzzled me; the remainder of the crowd she had been part of were walking past me, and had she moved fast enough to outrun them I felt I would have seen her. I heard the patter and tread of their feet, the low buzz of their English (with, as all major tourist attractions must have by unwritten law, the occasional excited interjection of Japanese from somewhere behind an over-sized camera lens), and the hiss of audio guides just loud enough for the sybillances to be heard. If I had been able to conjure a snake into that room, I suspect it would have wondered where its fellows were. I cannot stand audio guides.
It was a little hot underground, standing as we were above a hot spring, and the hissing made me feel a little light headed. I was now doubly confused, having discounted the two most obvious theories. My mind (as minds such as mine, being more excitable than those drained by a diet of too much of the Present, are wont to do) began to – if not race – at least canter.
Had I seen someone who wasn’t there? If so, did that make me mad? I had long known I was comparatively mad of course, this being one reason why I am not busy with normality and have sufficient drive and time to write this narrative for you. The prospect of things breaking the laws on which the world, by and large, runs did unnerve me a little.
Perhaps I had mistaken her in the light, and she was in the crowds that I was being swept along with. Damn my lack of a photographic memory!
Perhaps she was Minerva, or Sulis, or even an embodiment of both, looking at the damned young man wandering around her temple and thoroughly enjoying the confusion I was in. My mind span a little, and I sat down on a bench in the exhbit hall probably intended for someone far older than I was. The eyes still looked at me, somehow.
Perhaps it was all a message from my subconcious that I had become too wrapped up in the modern world of science, and that my consideration of the supernatural in this way represented a re-opening of my horizons. It is, after all, hard to think outside the box, simply because the box encompasses a wildly different set of items at every turn. Your new idea today will be old news tomorrow, have been largely superseded by the weekend, be obsolete by next Thursday, and will have won you widespread acclaim a month later. Or if you commit suicide first, it will win you acclaim as soon as you do so. Perhaps someone else is already making money from this story as I type it.
I, as ever, welcomed the supernatural into my mind, poured it a drink from Russell’s ever-handy teapot, then sat back and argued it into submission. Job done. Perhaps this had all been rather silly, and I would stop feeling light-headed soon. I could already barely remember what she looked like.
Perhaps heading on round the museum would be a good idea.
I headed onwards, past pewter jugs thrown to ancient goddesses, tablets of writing whose very language has been lost to time, statues and pigs of lead and gemstones and gorgons. I did not see her again. My head cleared eventually. I read a book on the way home.
Perhaps she had gone the other way.
