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nodded. Grimly. Working her witchy work.
    â€˜Out of cookie dough, huh?’
    Another solemn nod. ‘You glaze them. And bake them in the oven,’ she said. And with another sorcerous glance my way: ‘That’s what turns them real.’
    â€˜Uh huh.’ I saw what she meant. They did have a quality about them. Shiny, pliant-looking; made you want to touch them. ‘I’m no good at art. If I made them, they would all just be …’ Doody with arms, I wanted to say, but I was a gentleman. ‘Lumps with arms,’ I said.
    At that, she surprised me by letting out your standard issue giggle – and then immediately kneaded her grin back into the wrinkled mask.
    I plucked up courage, reached for the soldier. ‘Can I see one?’ She didn’t stop me. I picked it up. Examined it appreciatively. No gun, mind you, but a very promising barbarity about the mouth and eyes. ‘Man, you could sell these,’ I said. ‘You just gonna let that one float away?’ Actually, the girl figure was caught now in the roots under the bank a short way down. ‘It looked good.’
    â€˜It was good,’ she said softly. ‘I told you. It was my sister. Lena.’
    â€˜Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m an only child.’
    Slowly, she turned her spectral gaze downstream. ‘So am I.’
    Right. That called for another reassuring glance upriver at the big folks. Uncomfortably enough, the light seemed to have faded some around them since my last look. They were dappled shapes now, gesturing at each other against the grainy vista of naked trees and burbling water. Their faces, in-leaning, were laced with branch shadows, and Mrs Sole had one of Dad’s hands clapped in both of hers – as if she were trying to slow him down so she could get a word in.
    â€˜I thought you said you had a sister,’ I said to the girl again. I handed back the soldier. She took it from me with tiny girl fingers that brushed against mine. She lay it in the basket. Picked the others from the earth and bedded them down too.
    â€˜I do,’ she said.
    â€˜Well, what is she, like, imaginary?’
    â€˜No. She’s not imaginary.’ More eyes, half-whispers, sorcery. ‘She’s a ghost!’ And back she went to the figures in her basket with much mysterious maneuvering, voodoo passes of her hand. ‘She died before I was even born. She’s a ghost now.’
    Well, I reckoned it was getting late: just about time for me to run screaming for my life. With a casual grunt, I stood out of my squat. Stretched. ‘Yeah, well, you know, ghosts aren’t real. Or anything,’ I told her. ‘There aren’t really any ghosts.’
    I do believe she’d been saving this last glance of hers. It was something out of a horror movie. She turned it up at me from where she knelt. Blasted me with a couple of campfire eyes, a grand smile of insane knowing. ‘That doesn’t mean you don’t see them,’ she told me. ‘You have to see them. Ghosts. They’re like the sky. The sky isn’t real. There is no sky. It’s just particles that make us see the blue in the light.’
    â€˜Yeah. So?’ I said. ‘I knew that.’
    â€˜But you have to see it. It’s not like other things, other things that aren’t there. Like dragons or … or monsters or something. You can’t just say it’s not there and stop seeing it. You have to see it. So it is there. Like ghosts.’
    â€˜Well, yeah, but … I mean, you could go up through the sky with a rocket, so it isn’t there really,’ I said desperately.
    â€˜Yes,’ she answered, ‘yes.’ And she finally got that face off me, turning back, motherly, to her basket of creatures. ‘Yes. That’s what makes it so strange.’
    Whatever else I was going to say, I swallowed it, glug. Things were spooky enough already. It made me feel dizzy, in fact, this