He thought of his sister, and folded his cards.
"I'm hungry," Ethan said. He slipped away in shadow, fumbling around and causing a loud crash.
"You all right?" Ross swung the beam of the flashlight toward the pack of junk food they'd brought, but that entire corner of the room was empty.
Ethan spoke from behind him. "I'm here," he said, his voice shaking. "That, uh, that wasn't me."
He plastered himself up against his uncle's back. "Let's just take a look," Ross murmured. Everything was quiet, now, and there was no evidence that anything had fallen. "It could have been a brick outside, or a rat." He slipped an arm around Ethan's shoulders. "It could have been anything, Ethan."
"Right."
"Why don't we sit down so that I can whip your butt this time around?"
Ethan relaxed a little. "As if," he said, dredging up the courage to peel himself away and take a seat again.
Ross dealt the cards, but his eyes kept scanning the dark. Nothing unusual, nothing that captured his attention. Except the lens cap of the video camera, hanging down on a black cord from the side of the apparatus, which had begun to swing back and forth.
Although there was no breeze in the room.
From outside came the sound of a hollow thud--a tree falling, or a person landing on all fours. "Did you hear that?" Ethan whispered shakily.
"Yeah." Ross walked toward the broken window and peered out into the woods that edged the back of the property. A flash of white caught his eye--the tail of a deer, a shooting star, the eyes of a barn owl.
There was a rustle of leaves, and two distinct footfalls. A hitched wail, like the cry of an infant.
"We may just take a walk down there," Ross murmured.
Ethan shook his head hard. "No way. I'm staying here."
"It's probably just a raccoon."
"And what if it's not?"
Ross smiled slowly. "What if," he said.
Shelby was not in the habit of allowing her son to do dangerous things; it was hazard enough for him to live in this world. But Ethan had a nine-year-old's sense of adventure and wanderlust. Believing he was part of Ross's mission--well, maybe it would be good for both of them.
She walked into his room, picking up his Game Boy from the floor, as well as a few cartridges that had fallen beneath the bed. A Red Sox game schedule was on the wall, along with the textbooks Shelby used to home-school Ethan, and a haiku he'd written last year as part of a unit on Japan.
Deep in the darkness
I wake to make the night day.
How does the sun feel?
Shelby sank onto his bed. She wondered if Ross was keeping Ethan safe. She wondered if Ethan missed her, just a little.
She stared uneasily at the computer. The last time she'd decided to check up on her son, she'd hacked into his e-mail account to discover that he'd acquired six pen pals--all kids around his own age, all from different parts of the world. At first, Shelby had found this encouraging. For Ethan to have found a way to make a connection to other children seemed healthy, if not downright inspiring. But then Shelby had started to read some of the mail, and realized that Ethan had not represented himself quite accurately. To Sonya in Denmark, he was a sixth-grade preppie on the math squad. To Tony in Indianapolis, he was a star batter for a little-league farm team. To Marco in Colorado, he was an avid mountain climber who trekked every weekend with his dad.
In none of these letters did he mention his XP condition. In none of these letters did he seem any less than an average, athletic, normal American boy from a happy two-parent family.
In short, Ethan had turned himself into everything he was not.
With a sigh Shelby left Ethan's room and started down the hall. Passing Ross's door, she hesitated. She was eight years older than Ross; it seemed she had been taking care of him all her life--from diapering him as an infant to sitting by his side after his suicide attempt to worrying for his safety when he did not call her for months. Mothering had always come easily to her; when their parents had died years ago, she simply stepped into their shoes and took over.
She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel girder the Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it all could be snatched away.
Which brought her right back to wondering when Ross would bring Ethan home.
She pushed open the door and began to clean in there, too. She made Ross's bed. She lined up his toothbrush and his hairbrush on the dresser. She put his shampoo, nail clippers, and toothpaste into his toiletry kit and zipped it shut.
The chair was piled high with her brother's rumpled clothes. With a sigh she lifted one soft shirt and creased it neatly, set it on the edge of the bed. She balled together a pair of socks. She stacked boxers and tees and finally shook out a spare pair of jeans. As she began to fold them with military precision, something fell from the pocket. Shelby leaned down to pick up what had dropped: three pennies, dated 1932, which she set on the dresser where Ross would be sure to see them.
Ross turned and waved up at Ethan in the window, then cautiously approached the spot in the woods where he'd last seen the flash of white. He had left Ethan with the Maglite, which meant Ross fully expected to plunge headfirst over an exposed root. Although he couldn't see more than a foot in front of him, he could still hear the sounds of someone--or something--scrabbling around.
Ross shivered; it was colder out here than he'd expected it to be, and he wished he'd brought his sweatshirt. He could suddenly smell wild roses, as if there were a field of them underfoot, and he knew from Curtis that this, too, was a way a ghost might make its presence known. Show yourself, he thought.
But any hopes he had of encountering his first apparition died as he came upon a young woman, crouching as she tried to dig into the frozen earth.
She was wearing a flowered dress, and her pale hair was wild around her face. The white flash Ross had seen was a lace collar. She was feverishly busy, intent on her task. And she was as real as the ground beneath his feet.
Clearly, she had not heard him approach, or she would have realized she'd been caught in the act of . . . well, whatever she'd been doing. Ross found himself tongue-tied--not only wasn't she the ghost he'd been hoping for, but she was young, and pretty, and uninvited. He seized on that, if only to have something to say. "What are you doing here?"
She turned slowly, blinking, as if surprised to find herself in the middle of the forest. "I . . . I don't know." Glancing down at her hands, dirt caught beneath the nails, she frowned.
"Did van Vleet send you?"
"I don't know Van Fleet . . ."
"Vleet." Ross frowned. Maybe it was only an unlikely coincidence that the night he began his investigation, an insomniac would come wandering onto the property. There were other homes in the vicinity, and stranger things had happened. He found himself wishing that he hadn't started this conversation on the defensive. He found himself wishing she'd glance up at him again. "What are you looking for?" he asked, nodding toward the hole she'd been digging.
The woman blushed, which lit her from the inside. When she shook her head, he could smell that floral perfume again. "I have no idea. The last time I sleepwalked, I wound up in a neighbor's hayloft."
"With or without the neighbor?" Ross heard himself ask, and the woman looked so mortified that he immediately wished he could call back the words. He dug his hands into his pockets instead, trying to make amends. "I'm Ross Wakeman," he said.
She looked up, still discomfited. "I have to go."
"No, see, where I come from, the appropriate response is: Hello, I'm Susan. Or: Hey, Hannah's the name. Or: Howdy, I'm Madonna."
"Madonna?"
Ross grinned. "Whatever."
A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth. "I'm Lia," she said.
"Just Lia?"
She hesitated. "Bea
umont. Lia Beaumont."
Every line of her body was poised for flight. Then again, coming across a stranger in the middle of the woods when you were sleepwalking was bound to be upsetting. If possible, she seemed even more unsure of herself around Ross than Ross felt around her. She nodded, still awkward, and started to walk off. Ross was filled with an unaccountable need to keep her from leaving, and tried to think of one thing to say that would keep her here, but all the words dammed up at the base of his throat.
Suddenly, she turned back to him. "Were you sleepwalking?" "No, actually, I'm working." Ross wound the thread of conversation tight around himself, an anchor.
"Here? Now?"
"Yeah. I'm a paranormal investigator." He could tell the term didn't ring a bell for her. "Ghosts," he explained. "I look for ghosts. In fact, I came out here because I thought your collar was . . . well, anyway. You're not quite what I was expecting."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
She tipped her head to one side, studying him. "You really believe people can come back after they die? Like Harry Houdini?"
"Doesn't everyone?" She wore sorrow like a hangman's hood; it shrouded her delicate features. "Who knows?" he teased. "We may even have company right now."
But his words made Lia glance behind her wildly. "If he finds me . . ."
Who? Ross wanted to say, as he realized that this woman's skittishness was not about being discovered by him, but being discovered by someone else. Before he could ask, an earsplitting scream curled from the house. "Uncle Ross!" Ethan shrieked. "Uncle Ross, come back!"
Ross looked up at the window, where there was no longer any residual light from either the flashlight or the video camera. The blood drained from his face as he imagined what Ethan might have seen. "I have to go," he said to Lia, and without any further explanation, took off at a dead run.
From the New York Times:
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE
NIGHT?
by Kerrigan Klieg
Comtosook, VT--The residents of Comtosook, a small town in the northwest corner of Vermont, are eager to tell tall tales. There are stories of maple sap running in the dry summer months, of flower petals falling from rain clouds and of ground freezing solid in the middle of August, of cars that suddenly can only move in reverse. Yet the strangest part of this gossip is that it happens to be true, and these odd occurrences are just the tip of the iceberg. Experts at the nearby University of Vermont in various fields have not been able to explain the numerous events, but residents have their own ideas about what's causing the commotion: a spirit, a restless one who doesn't want to be moved.
Weeks ago, Comtosook was a bucolic Vermont town. Then the Redhook Development Group struck a deal with an elderly landowner to acquire a small tract of property. Immediately, a local band of Abenaki Indians began to protest, insisting the land was a native burial ground. Archaeological testing done by the state has not revealed any human remains, although that is incidental, says Az Thompson, a local Abenaki leader: "I wouldn't expect some flat-lander real-estate group to know where my ancestors are buried, but I sure didn't expect them to tell me I'm lying about that, either. Who gave them the privilege to rewrite my history?" Adds Winks Smiling Fox, a fellow protester, "Enough has happened here lately to prove that as much as Redhook wants in, there's something else that doesn't want out."
He refers to the growing list of oddities that have begun to wear down the general public, even those who live miles away from the disputed property. Abe Huppinworth, proprietor of a local general store, has become used to sweeping rose petals off the porch. "They fall all night long, like snow. Three, four inches deep when I come in to open up. And there isn't a rosebush within three miles of here." Ava Morgan took her two-year-old son to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington when he awakened one morning speaking Portuguese, a language with which none of his family was familiar, much less fluent. "The doctors couldn't tell me what happened, either. They tested him forward and backward, and then one morning it all just went away, and Cole was back to saying Mommy and milk." Not all residents are as complacent, however. Over six hundred signatures filled a petition that was given to Rod van Vleet, project manager on site for the Redhook Group. Mr. van Vleet declined to be interviewed, but has previously dismissed all claims of paranormal activity on the property as preposterous.
Reports allude that van Vleet may not be as confident as he asserts. Sources say that the Redhook Group has commissioned an investigator to explore the property.
To the townspeople, however, both the hidden intents of a real-estate developer, and the angry fury of the Abenaki, are equally unimportant. "All I know is, this is wearing me out," says Huppinworth, at a pause in his endless sweeping of petals. "Sooner or later, something's got to give."
It was an established fact of the universe that Meredith was never going to meet a decent man. At work, she was too smart, and therefore too intimidating. Blind dates didn't prove any more successful. The last one she'd been on was with an actor her grandmother had met in the park, who'd arrived at the restaurant dressed as Hamlet. To leave or not to leave, Meredith had thought, that was the question. Since that debacle, her grandmother had presented her with the phone numbers of a mortician, a vet, and a chiropractor, but Meredith had conveniently lost each one. "I want a grandchild before I die," Ruby said, on schedule, every two to three months.
"You have one," Meredith would remind her.
"One with a father," Ruby would clarify.
Meredith had finally caved in, when Ruby told her that this one spent his free time doing volunteer work with senior citizens. So now, Meredith was sitting across from Michael DesJardins, trying to convince herself that this wasn't nearly as bad as it seemed.
He was drooling. All right, so it had to do with dental surgery he'd had that day, but it wasn't particularly appetizing for Meredith. "So," he slurred, "you work in a lab? What do you do . . . feed all the mice and stuff?"
"I do PGD. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis."
"I'm in the catering business."
"Oh?" Meredith folded her hands in front of her, watching him butter an entire slice of bread and stuff it in his mouth. On the bright side, it did mop up his excess saliva. "Are you a chef?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact."
She'd always harbored the fantasy of a man whisking her to a cozy apartment, where a fabulous gourmet meal had been prepared for her enjoyment. "I guess being in a restaurant feels like work, then."
"This is a cut above my place, actually . . . you ever go into the Wendy's on Sixteenth Street?"
Meredith was saved from responding when the waiter approached with their entrees. Michael began to cut his entire steak into little quarter-inch cubes. It made her think of the meals they served in mental institutions.
She smoothed down her napkin and looked down at her chipolata sausage, nestled on a bed of polenta. The silver lining, she told herself, is that I'm going to get a good meal out of this.
Michael pointed to her dinner with his knife and laughed. "Looks like a Great Dane did his business there." A line of drool dribbled down his chin.
I will stand up and excuse myself to go to the bathroom, Meredith thought. And then I just won't come back.
But if she did that, Granny Ruby would accuse her of deliberately ruining another date. So Meredith began to think of ways to make Michael want to leave of his own volition. She would ask for crayons and start to color on the fancy linens. She would sculpt with her polenta. She would lick her plate and offer to lick his. She would communicate only in mime, or Pig Latin.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Michael said. "Are you ovulating?"
"Excuse me?"
"It's just that these days, when I look in the mirror, I see Daddy." He grinned and pointed to his forehead, as if the word had been tattooed there.
Meredith wished for many things in that moment: her grandmother's head on a pike, patience, lesbian tendencies. Volunteer work with senior citiz
ens, she remembered. She stared at Michael's plate. "Are you going to eat that?"
"The steak?"
"No, the bone. I wanted to bring it home to my grandmother." Meredith leaned closer. "She's in her seventies, practically dead, and it's cheaper than feeding her."
Michael choked on his sip of water. Then, recovering, he raised his hand and signaled for the waiter for the check. "You're finished, aren't you?"
Meredith folded her napkin on the table. "Oh, yes."
Ethan now knew what fear felt like: your forehead, being pressed in from all sides, although there was nothing around you. All the hairs on the back of your neck, rising one by one like dominoes in reverse. Your legs going to water, and shaking so hard you had to sit or fall.
"It wasn't like I was afraid," Ethan insisted for the hundredth time since yelling out for his uncle the night before. "I mean, it was just weird, you know? To be in the dark all of a sudden?"
Ross sat beside him in the living room, his infrared video equipment hooked into the TV. The picture was grainy and dark, the edges crackling. Plus, since it had been mounted on a tripod, it was boring as all get out. Ethan didn't know what on earth was interesting about staring at a wall for three hours of tape. In spite of the fact that this was apparently a Very Important Element of paranormal investigation, he could not keep from yawning.
That was something else Uncle Ross had taught him: When you're in the presence of ghosts, they wear you out.
His uncle was being cool, especially since--well, if he wanted to be honest, Ethan had to admit he'd freaked out when the flashlight went dead and the video camera just shut itself off. The camera, it turned out, had only run to the end of its tape. The flashlight's batteries were shot.
Now, his mom frowned at the picture on the TV. "Am I missing something?"
"Not yet." Ross turned to Ethan. "You know what I think? I think it was in the room with you."
Ethan couldn't help it; he shivered. Could a ghost hitchhike home with you? Could you catch one, like a cold or the measles? He felt his mother's arms come around him and he leaned back, lock to key. "I . . . I thought you went outside because you saw something there."
"No, that turned out to be someone." Suddenly Ross hit the pause button on the remote. "See those?"