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Usually, Max knows where his ghosts have come from, and why they torment him. Usually, it's pretty damn obvious. Some of them do come and go, and sometimes it's hard to remember where the older ones came from, so that he almost has to squint at the livid, wispy faces and try to recall what he did to them. Even the oldest ones look familiar, though. Even when their skulls show through their faces or their eyes bulge and roll.
(Angharad's spirit is particularly distressing, quiet and accusing, leg torn and bulging belly leaking blood and amniotic fluid. 'Why do you care?' She asks him. 'You'd have left us to die in the first place.' And he has no answer for her.
The Keeper of the Seeds is less cruel, but she laughs at him a lot.)
This one, though. This one he doesn't know, and at first she looks at him like she doesn't know him either. That makes him wonder just how crazy he's gotten. He's pretty sure he'd remember her, this old woman with wild snowy hair and tattoos all over her skin. Her dress is yellow with a border of faded blue gingham. It's a tiny remnant of the old world, even if it's stained all over with her blood.
He doesn't speak to her at first, out there on the Road with her hovering, watching with thoughtful blue eyes. And she doesn't speak to him either. It's like they both know they're stuck with one another, but neither wants to make the first move. They haven't been properly introduced, after all.
After a few days, he starts trying to read her skin. There are symbols and words and whole phrases. On her face, and on her hands, one sentence is repeated over and over: "They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."
It sticks in his head, once he reads it, coming out in his dreams in staccato patterns, breaking and connecting and reconnecting:
(…wind. THEY have sown. reap the whirlwind. they have sown the wind. whirlwind REAP. they. they shall reap. wind wind WHIRLWIND. they have sown the whirlwind and reap the wind sown the whirlwind, they...)
He wakes shaky and sweating, and has to look over his own hands, touch his face to make sure the ghost hasn't written on him in his sleep. He has enough tattoos on him, scrawled down his back. He wonders if she got hers the same place as he did--except why would they write about the wind?
In the morning, he looks at her again, and on the inside of one elbow she has something written backwards, something that looks like it should be familiar: inilavuv.
This time he can't stop staring, trying to work it out, and at last she chuckles, a sound like the leaves of a book rustling together. "She told me all about the Many Mothers, when I knew her. I wrote them down so neither of us would forget."
He shouldn't speak to this ghost. He doesn't even know this ghost. But he knows who she means by 'her', and that's...enough. He clears his throat, swallows, and rumbles softly, "Furiosa?"
"Furiosa. She was my student, and I was hers. Happened like that with a lot of the girls."
"Mm," he acknowledges, and chews on it for a moment. "Did I kill you?"
"No. Organic killed me," she snorts. "You looking for more reasons to run? Apparently you've got enough of 'em now."
He's a little stung, but not surprised. His ghosts are never comforting; this one has no reason to be any different. "Heh."
He says nothing more for the rest of the day, trying to ignore her.
The next morning he wakes to the sound of her singing, a sweet contralto with only a hint of elderly querulousness on the high notes. He's never heard the song before. Doesn't understand the words. It still makes him wish he remembered how to cry.
"What do you want?" he asks as the last note fades, exhausted despite a solid three hours of sleep--as much as he ever gets.
"To be remembered," she says. "Same as all the others."
"Picked the wrong man," he tells her, tapping his temple with battered, crooked fingers.
"So go get some help," she tells him, and then she fades into the desert with a smirk, the last sign of her a yellow shaft of sunlight. "Go tell some stories."
Go get help? He stares at the spot where she was, and where she may still be, invisible, and he thinks until the sun sears the back of his neck. He's been heading North, away from the New Green Place, taking the plague of himself--what he is, what he does--as far away as possible. Because he breaks things, destroys them, walks away from the ashes, and the New Green Place needs to survive.
Except a lot of the time he does remember things, and a lot of the time he writes them down in symbols, blood on old linen. Maybe they need that. Maybe he needs to share that.
He changes direction. He's a good six days out in the Wastes now. Won't be an easy journey, but he has reasons to make it resting in his head, in his pocket, and in the heart of him--way down deep where he's not ready to acknowledge it.
He'll make it. He always survives.