I did die, didn’t I? The circumstances of which aren’t really important, and I would not like to go into them right now because they are kind of traumatic. No, I don’t want to remember them. After all, I really was dead, and most deaths are not a pleasant thing to happen. If you make me sit on a witness stand and ask me to swear upon a holy book and describe the circumstances as to how I died, I’d probably lie. But the fact remains that I did, definitely, die.

The more interesting bit is how I … UNDIED? What do you even call the process of coming back to life from the dead? Resurrection. Ah, yes. But that was not exactly what happened.  There was no crucifixion, no three-day reset timer counting down my hours for me to come back from the temporary setback of achieving the status of death. There was no Dracula, beckoning to me after my undeath achievement was unlocked. There was not even some summoning circle where virgin blood was sacrificed by some evil demon whatever. What do you even call what just happened? I wish I had a word.

It felt like lots of gears clicking into motion. The chugging rhythm of a distant steam engine moved them, lulling me to sleep with its unending beat of rhythmic smoke. It was like a painting of Dali – with time stretching itself so thin on my skin that it broke and shattered into thousands of little pieces. Like mountains stretching themselves to the ends of the sky.

Yes, I know. I know. That either feels like the rambles of a rather hipster kid, or a rather whacked out human. But, sometimes, there can be no single word, or even a hundred and forty, to express an experience this complex.

Then, there was darkness. I felt my lungs fill with ash, and chains that bound me break and disintegrate into lifeless strings. And I could crawl, then stumble, and finally, move.

Where I woke up wasn’t a strange place at all.

It was a library. Surely, you would call such a place nothing else. Filled with books and tall bookshelves that competed for the barest of wall available. Some of the shelves were a little empty, and some had cobwebs – signs of negligence. There were other things inside as well: pedestals and trunks and objects that seemed to have moved out of a very busy person’s memory.

I felt fine for someone who had definitely died. My joints ached a bit, but I would say that is a very good trade-off, isn’t it? I mean, surely death didn’t leave much room for consciousness. I could move, and feel cold, but didn’t shiver or feel uncomfortable at all. I could smell the smell of old books and leather covers. Even something strange which then stirred a memory of what wax candles smelled like. My eyesight was sharper, and even though the whole room was windowless and dark, I could still see things. Certain things. The door seemed to glow in its own soft starlight.

What was this place? It was no strange place of course, just … interesting. A library. No machinations, no steel table lorded over by Dr Frankenstein, not even the holy light of God’s angels shining down on you, recounting the sins of your past life.

But then undeath wasn’t really a genre God favoured much, I guess.

That’s how I was undeadified. And for these reasons I wouldn’t call it either a reincarnation or a resurrection.

And undeath didn’t come with clothes. I was stark naked, and though the cold didn’t bother me, the thought of having to explain to whoever was the owner of this rather neglected library about the circumstances of finding not just an undead person, but a naked undead person, in their house or castle or keep, was rather frightening. And for the love of my life, I couldn’t explain this.

But then, I had most definitely died, so what do I care?

So, I walked out of the door. The corridor was dark as well, but thankfully, the source of the soft lighting of the door was nothing but the full moon rising in the east. There was a large gothic window at the end of the corridor that would have possibly not been out of place in Dracula’s castle. The silver moonlight streamed through it, stretching along the corridor like a carpet, the light bouncing off the stone floors into bare walls. I looked out, pushing my face into the glass to feel the cold. And it was snowing. Surprising, given that there was not even a single speck of cloud in the sky.

Where was I, you wonder? A castle, I thought. I was up at least five floors from the ground looking out to the edge of a large forest. There was something like a path that was sketched in the empty unkempt grounds. The clearing of trees stretched across a bit till I couldn’t make it out anymore in the moonlight – and grounds this large could only belong to estates set apart from the rest of the world. The trees looked rather upset, and felt like they too were dusty and neglected like the library, but perhaps my mind played too many tricks on me and it was just me thinking too much about the snow on the branches that bounced the moonlight into my eyes.

I turned back to the corridor that lay in darkness, which hugged the bare stone walls. Sconces that hung gave no light. And doors after doors lay locked with only dirt touching their handles.

I found a flight of stairs. Old stairs. The stone edges softened by many thousands of steps. The moonlight still found its way here, but from where I could not tell. The stairwell went up, but I realized it would be better to walk down to the ground floor where I could possibly find answers to my situation. One flight down, it was still the same. Dark, stark stone walls. Sconces without a torch. This was some gothic medieval castle, right? There would be torches, right? Nothing. No suits of armor, no large tapestries, no weapons on the shelves – in fact, no dents on the stone walls of any kind – and no large paintings of its residents.

But I did find a window with a curtain.

It was a bay window, with semi-circular seating made of the same stone flooring. A beautifully bunched curtain hung up there on the windows, shading the moon from flooding the corridor that connected to it. I tried prying the curtain down, but it was filled with dust so ancient I could hear the mummies of Egypt speak to me through it. Oh well, naked men can’t be fashion conscious.

The curtain came flying down after a few tugs and I whipped it. The dust hung in the air like a spectral after-image, scattering the moonlight, and then dispersed. Ghosts before an enchanter, fleeing.

I put the curtain over my shoulders and wrapped its ends around and over. A lot of the dust rubbed around over my body, but then I seemed to already have more than enough of it on the account of my body lying inside a dusty old library. I don’t like dust. But, at least, I wouldn’t have to explain my nakedness.

To whom exactly?

There was no one, not a single human soul inside this place.

There was not a single human soul inside this place! Yes! There was no one to tell me what to do. Look! If I stretched out my arms holding the curtain it could very well be my own cloak.

“I am Dracula!” I said with a flourish to my shadow cast in the moonlight. “Or should I be Alucard?” I could be anything I wanted.

I turned back to the rising moon, now bright pale blue, dazzling the bay window, and said, “To infinity and beyond!” Buzz Lightyear it is.

It was only then that I realized that even in the bright moonlight and cold cloudless night, I didn’t make a single vapour of mist. Nor did my breath make a spot on the window. It was as frozen as the snow outside.

That was not a good thing, but then I suppose heat was a thing peculiar to living things. And didn’t I tell you I did definitely die?

I walked on around the empty castle corridors, finding more rooms, more stairwells, and windows that looked down into a large quadrangle. The moonlight could only show the weeds on the lawn and the overgrown shrubbery around a large circular fountain that I assumed had not been playing for a while.

But I would not have noticed it unless I had stopped to look at the fountain. A sound. Of something other than my footsteps. A click and a clop. A tick and a tock. No. That was not it. I am very sure it was a Ping and a Pong.

I followed the sound, past locked doors, down two flights of stairs to the bottom floor, walking on captivated by this alien sound. It was so familiar. The ping and the pong followed by the thonk of the puck going past the paddles. Then, the service resumed with the ping.

To my great surprise, the corridor ended short. It had led me to a great hall, or that is what I assumed it was. It was a big space, and although I saw a fireplace, and most of it was as dark as the rest of the castle, for the only two sources of illumination were the moonlight faintly falling through frosted windows on one side.

The other was the floating screen.

Yes, a floating screen in the middle of a set of sofas arranged like a rectangle around a fireplace. A floating screen on which the ancient arcade game of Pong was being played, the source of the mysterious sounds. The kind of thing you would definitely expect inside a medieval gothic castle.

But that wasn’t as strange as the player.

A glassy-eyed girl lay on the sofa opposite the screen, her head resting on a pillow which was almost as large as herself. She had a comforter behind her. Her legs and feet were bare, and she seemed almost as neglected as the house itself. She was wearing a dusty short, with a cloth of an indifferent brown wrapped around her chest, leaving her midriff bare. Her hair could have been any colour from light platinum to dusty golden. It was difficult to tell. What was not difficult to tell was the fact that she was thoroughly wrapped up in the game.

Even though I had moved close behind her, she did not move her glassy eyes from the floating screen. Her hands were busy holding what seemed to be a Super NES controller.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned around to stare at me with her large eyes, which caught the diffused moonlight and shone like two misty pools of milk resting inside a dark lacquer bowl. Her irises were dark grey.

“Hi”, she said, in a very sweet voice, as if everything was perfectly normal.

“Are you playing a game of Pong?” I asked.

“Yeah”

“Do you play this often?”

“Yeah”

I stood up to look at the floating screen, which I then realized was more like a projection of a screen on to air. There was nothing physical present there.

“Just,” I said to her, standing beside what I could only call a hologram, “can you please tell me what this is? How does it work?”

She lost the game, and with a frown turned towards me and said, “Magic.”

To me, at the time, that seemed like a sufficient explanation.

“So, you hold that NES controller, and just, what, play the game?”

“Mhmm”, she said, nodding her head in exaggerated motion.

“I’m sorry, but do you live here?”

“Yeah,” she said. It seemed single word answers were the best type of answers. You, dear reader, would probably have loved to have had her narrating this story, wouldn’t you?

“Oh. Well, I just happened to wake up in one of the rooms of this Castle just now. Isn’t that strange?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Hmmm,” she lifted her large glassy eyes up to the ceiling. She almost seemed like a surreal puppet made by a wicked artist.

“I guess,” she continued. “Because you go to sleep in a room, right? So, you will wake up in a room, right? So. Not strange.” She sat up straight, and perhaps now thoroughly annoyed by my existence in her important task, stretched her legs and her wings and started a new game.

I looked again. Behind her. Wings?

Only when she sat up straight did I notice the two little black leathery batwings behind her sprouting from her lower back. Ah, so that’s why the bare midriff.

And, I will not lie, had I been alive I would have freaked out. But I was not. I felt perfectly calm, in fact I would assume such things would cross my path when I was quite dead myself.

Things. Ah. That was cruel. She was very much a girl. Perhaps in the middle of her teens. Who knows what befell her?

“You are not human, are you?” I asked her.

‘No,” she said, as she conceded a point. She looked at me in concern and said, “and neither are you.”

Well, I guess my verbose self had firmly established that fact.

“I was human. But I think I am dead now,” I told her. “Guess I’m just dead man walking, right?”

“No.”

I waited a bit for her to start talking again. But single words had returned to the menu.

“I’m not dead?” I egged her on.

“No,” she said. “Dead things don’t talk.” She turned to look at me, her look curious, either afraid or disgusted, I could not tell. “You are one with no name.”

“My name…?” All of a sudden, I felt a deluge of visions swim through me. A laughing man. A window looking out into an orange streetlamp. A witch, and the eye of the pharaoh. Needles and a cushion with pins. Sitting alone in an empty room. And that awful, awful aftertaste of the contents of my stomach coming back up.

I choked. I fell to my knees. Were they my memories? Wait. I could recall a lot about myself. For example, I knew that what video games were. What Xbox was. That the Dark Knight by Nolan was the best superhero trilogy that was ever going to be made. I remembered Pink Floyd, and the Dark Side of the Moon. I knew what a hologram was. I knew what Dracula was and what Buzz Lightyear was. But for the life of me, I could not remember my own name.

I felt dizzy for the first time. I felt uncomfortable. The body I had didn’t feel like mine own.

And my throat felt like it had swallowed a handful of ash.

“Girl, can I get some water?” I managed so say.

“Yes. In the kitchen, through the door.” She said two sentences? I looked up from the floor to see her legs up from the floor to the sofa, her knees near her chin, and the NES controller held near her ankle. Her finger pointed towards a large archway in the side of the dark walls. And, although she thought I didn’t see it, she quickly moved her gaze from on me to the Pong game on the screen.

Then, the game continued. And the almost monotonous sounds of the dot bouncing off the bar of pixels and the walls began again.

The kitchen was, as expected, large. Just outside, there seemed to be a wide veranda that led to a garden facing south. Perhaps because the moon was perpendicular to the length of the kitchen, the light here still left more than half of it in shadow. Still, I could figure out many different doors and archways leaving for the rest of the Castle.

Thankfully, beside the window I found an earthen jug, which I determined to be the one filled with water. Not being able to find a glass, I took the jug back to the drawing room.

“This?” I asked her in my flaky choked voice.

She nodded.

As I drank, I felt my aching throat soothe.

She was back to her reclining state, with her wings folded behind her, and her glassy eyes fixed to the holographic screen.

“Hey, you have a name?” I asked her.

“Finora” she answered, without taking her eyes off the game. She won a point.

“Finora. And you live here alone?”

“No.”

“So, who owns this place?”

“The wizard Echolocus.”

Wizard? Did I pop into some Dungeons and Dragons universe?

“So, you live with … him?”

“No. He’s dead.”

“So, he lives here with you, while he is undead?”

She finally turned towards me, while the pixel puck was in the middle of being transferred across the screen. “No. He’s dead dead. Dead things that don’t talk dead. So, I do not live with him, silly.”

She lost the point. And that was a lot of words.

“I’m sorry, I just am trying to figure out where I am; what is happening. You’re the only one here. But you say you don’t live here alone?”

“Mmmh. I live with my big sister.”

God, I wish she added a little information.

“Where is your big sister right now?”

“She is out hunting. For dinner.”

“Oh. So that is how you live in this large castle? Interesting. Well, I hope you don’t mind me living with you. I thought I was dead, but I have no choice.”

“You’re not dead,” she told me again.

“Hmmm,” I said. “By the way, do you know you can pause the game? I see you constantly trying to look into the game. But you’re now losing thirteen to seven.”

For a brief moment, she didn’t quite understand what I said. Then, her eyes grew wider.

“WHAT!”

“You see those two buttons in the middle? Yes, those ones. Press the one on the right.”

She did. The pause menu popped up. I guess even in a universe which had wizards, some rules did maintain themselves. And pushing the start button should always pause the game – that just had to be one of the fundamental laws of the Universe.

Her jaw fell open. No matter what type of non-human sentient being you were, the knowledge of pausing an encounter must have seemed revolutionary.

“That is so awesome.” She looked at me in the most childlike amazement. “How did you know that?”

“I,” I said, “have played that game before!” I am dramatique.

“Wow. Mister with no-name – you might just be cool.” She put her hand on her chin to gauge the factor of my coolness.

“Indeed, I am.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “You would be, if not for that window curtain on you.”

Ah. “Ah, well this is … this was an emergency. I don’t have any clothes. I woke up without clothes, you see. Do you have any clothes that I can wear?”

“We only have girl clothes. Because we are girls. You don’t seem to be girl.”

I should have figured that out. “I guess I’ll just have to keep myself wrapped in this curtain.”

She paused for a bit, probably processing our conversation through her head. Then, she lay back down and said, “Sister will know. Ask her.” And resumed the game.

“Do you actually enjoy playing Pong? Do you not get bored of playing this?”

“Yes. It is classic.”

“Yes, a classic game. But sometimes classic is too old. Is that the only game on there?”

She nodded.

“No way. I’m sure there would be more there, wherever that is. How does it even work? Does the screen get projected from somewhere?”

“Magic.”

“You said that before. That doesn’t help.”

“No. Magic. It is what you are made of. Like you are, the game also is.”

That didn’t make any sense.

“Still. I think if you like this, you’d love Mario. But, first things first. I need to know how I got here, and where exactly I am.”

“I told you,” she said, as the game ended. “You are in Echolocus house. Many things that are not, are here. Many things that will not be, are also here. This is my house. It’s where I grew up.”

She kept the controller down on the table in front of her. And, lo and behold, the screen vanished, leaving only the mysteriously diverted glow of the moonlight to illuminate the room.

“You got bored of the game?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Looking towards the Kitchen. “Sister is home.”

I looked to the large door that I presumed led to the entrance of the house, but it was not there that the sound came. From outside the Kitchen, I could hear the thump of heavy footsteps across the wooden veranda floor. Finora got up on from the sofa, her little batwings stretching after a long gaming session, and she trotted in to the side of the Kitchen that was wrapped in darkness.

I followed her. She went to a door across which a beautifully transparent glass showed the lawn lit in moonlight.

And there was a Moose. A dead moose. I could tell. The way its limbs hung, and the way its head rolled on without restraint of any kind. You could tell as it walked that it was most unnatural. The heavy footsteps moved from the veranda to the inside of the Kitchen. And then, it collapsed.

Finora smiled, very excited. “Nice catch!” she exclaimed, and gave the dead moose a thumbs up.

Almost like she had melded in the shadow, a muscular yet slender woman emerged from the door. Her hair was short, but tangled this way and that. In the darkness the only thing I could make out were large red irises in the eyes. As if they were themselves radiant like a cat.

And I saw them move fast. A blur. The eyes closed the gap between me and the door really fast.

The last thing I saw as my head hit the floor were claws that bore down on me.

Everything swirled to black.