The Vermeer Ghost

  In amongst the oils and acrylics, portraits and landscapes, hundreds of people mill around. Many spend their nights crying in pain or sobbing in anger at what has passed, days before even the stone they walk on was laid down. They mourn for a time before they were mourned - grieving over life.
    They are the deceased. The rambling rooms of the National Gallery are filled with their shadows, who families sobbing underneath Seurat or crying out beneath Canneletto. Plagued by the plague. Nobody can hear them though,nor do they care to hear each other; their laments landing on dead ears.
  Much like the pictures which the rooms contain, the dead come from many eras and backgrounds and for them time has become irrelevant. What does a clock matter when you are dead? It is for this reason that they did not notice the girl.
She was not like the rest of them. She does not utter a word, or ignore the world. The girl drags herself from room to room, still weighted by the distended stomach of pregnancy ,a frown of determination forever etched on her forehead. She had died in childbirth but it was not leaving the land of the living which was to be her last journey.
  Across land, across sea, she had walked hundreds of miles, tirelessly and lifelessly from the Netherlands through the Netherworld. As she begins the final part of her journey, through the dark streets of London, orange street lights wash over her, cars run through her - things which she had never known and never really would.
  Sometime afterwards she reaches her destination. They stand either side of her like the gates of heaven. She slumps down in the chair, staring into the mirrors of her life. "Girl Standing at a Virginal" and "Girl Sitting at a Virginal". Finally she sees the last glimpse of who she used to be. No, the deceased at the gallery did not notice the girl, but someone else did...