It was during a work trip to England. I was at a party, thrown by an Irish family, old friends of my mother’s. I just made a beeline for Morag, as if drawn by some invisible force. I think I actually frightened her with my intensity.

When I’d calmed down, we got along fine. With a strong streak of Irish in her, she was witty, bright, funny. Even her job was interesting. She was a bio-prospector; she spent her time searching for new species of ascomycete fungi, a key source of antibiotics. It turned out she was actually a friend of John, whose legal career had taken him in a similarly “modern” direction, as he made money from the great shifting of wealth and population caused by the climate change. In some ways Morag had more in common with John; after all at the time I was turning myself into that old-fashioned beast, a nuclear engineer. But Morag was always “greener” than John; later I always thought that side of her had carried on to Tom.

And with that flame of strawberry-blond hair, she was beautiful.

As our relationship developed, she quickly became herself to me: Morag, not the fleshed-out version of my personal ghost. During the years of our relationship I didn’t see any of my apparitions. After a time, and especially after Tom was born, other, more real concerns crowded into my head. I began to dismiss my visions.

I never told Morag about them.

I always meant to. I just never really figured out how to say it without spooking her. How are you supposed to tell your wife that she has haunted you since you were a kid? In the end, as the visions receded in memory, the thought of even trying to talk about it came to seem absurd, and I put it all aside.

Then she died, and it was too late.

And the hauntings began again. The first, cruelly, was in a bleak hospital corridor where I sat with Tom, just moments after we had learned we had lost her, and the baby.

They were infrequent at first, maybe once or twice a year. They still didn’t frighten me. But after I lost her they became unbearably painful.

In the last year or so, in the months leading up to Tom’s jeopardy, they had been more frequent. Just in the last few days I had seen her on the beach in Florida, and even in my VR trip to Siberia. It felt worse than ever to be haunted. Maybe it was my shock over Tom that did it. A lot of stuff, deep disturbed emotions, had come welling up out of the frozen depths of my mind like Tom’s methane burping from its hydrate deposits.

So I’d decided to do something about it before I had to face Tom in the flesh.

The journey was only a few hours. The train was smooth, clean, comfortable. We shuttled through Peterborough and Doncaster and Leeds and a host of lesser places whose names I knew from similar journeys in the past, but about which I knew little or nothing.

The countryside had changed since the last time I made this trip, though. In the vast fields of swaying wheat and rape and gen-enged biofuel crops there was hardly a tree or a bush to be seen; I saw more robot tractors than birds or animals. The biodiversity of countries like England flatlined when I was a teenager, and isn’t likely to recover any time soon.

And then there was the water.

You could see it everywhere, abandoned roads now permanently flooded to serve as drainage channels or as canals, and artificial flood plains that served as makeshift reservoirs. Much of South Yorkshire was now covered by a new lake. As we crossed it on a raised levee, the water receded to the horizon, and the waves that scudded across it were white-capped; it looked more like an inland sea. I could see the roofs of abandoned houses, the foliage of drowned trees, and the unearthly shape of the cooling towers of dead power plants looming above the water line. The sun was setting, and the water glimmered, reflecting the sunlight in gold splashes. It was all so new the lake didn’t even have a name — or maybe giving it a name would somehow confirm its reality. But geese flapped across the water in a neat fighter-bomber V formation. The geese, at least, seemed to know where they were going, and didn’t seem spooked by this new geography.

I glided across that drowned landscape in smooth silence, as if we were riding on the water itself, as if it were all a dream.

By the time we reached York it was growing dark. I joined a line at the rickshaw rank outside the rail station, and soon I was being hauled around the outskirts of the city by an unreasonably athletic young woman. In this post-traffic era, in their wisdom the city authorities had repaved many of the streets with cobbles. It might be fine for pod buses, but by the time we reached my hotel my ass felt like tenderized steak.

The hotel was where I remembered it. It is a small place just off the A-road that snakes south from York toward Doncaster, overlying the route of an old Roman road. The hotel itself is old, some kind of coach house, eighteenth century I think. Because it’s within a reasonable walk of the city center it’s stayed profitable where many similar businesses have folded. It’s modern enough, but there’s nothing glamorous about it. Friendly place, though; the only security check I had to go through was a DNA scan verified by Interpol.

The room I was given was just a bland box with the usual facilities, a minibar and a dispenser for drinks and a big softscreen showing muted news. I couldn’t remember which room we’d taken, back then. Anyhow the interior looked to have been knocked around since those days, nearly thirty years gone. Maybe our room didn’t even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense.

Of course the staff here didn’t know anything about me. I was just some guy who’d called to make a reservation from Heathrow, and I wasn’t about to tell them why I’d come back here, why I remembered the hotel so well: that this was where I had stayed, with Morag, at the start of our honeymoon.

I sat in the one big armchair, with my suitcase sitting unopened on my bed, and meaningless news flickering on the wall. It was late evening, but to my body it was the middle of the afternoon, Florida time. I felt restless, perturbed. I didn’t want to face anybody, not even a room service robot.

Why was I here? For Morag, of course. I had come here, on impulse, to our honeymoon hotel, a place of great significance for the two of us. Fine. Here I was. But what was I supposed to do now?

On impulse I placed a call to Shelley Magwood.

I brought up her image on my big plasma screen. She was in the middle of her working day, but to her eternal credit she took time out to talk to me, a confused loser in a hotel room in England. But as I sat there, awkward, inarticulate, unable to broach the subject that was dominating my mind, she seemed to grow faintly concerned. Her background shifted around her; I saw that she had moved to a private office.

“Michael, I think you’d better come clean. I can see something’s on your mind. So you’re in York, because you had your honeymoon there. Right?…”

I told her about our wedding day. We had married in Manchester, to be close to Morag’s family, and most of my mother’s, too. But her parents were both dead, and only one of her two siblings showed up. On my side my mother was restless; she always felt confined by England, by her past. Uncle George had turned up — but not my mother’s other sibling, my aunt Rosa, whom I’d never met. Still, the day had gone well; weddings generally do, despite the family bullshit that always surrounds them.

And at the end of the day Morag and I headed off to York to begin our honeymoon, a couple of weeks of hopping around some of Britain’s historic sites.

Shelley said cautiously, “I don’t know anything about York. Nice place?”

“Very old,” I said in a rush. “It was a Roman city. Then it was the capital of the northern kings who dominated Saxon England for a while. Then the Vikings came, and this was the last of their kingdoms to fall, as England finally unified politically. And then—”