Texas Gothic

  Then I stood, looked around, and found myself utterly alone.

  Logic said the others weren’t far, maybe just over the hill. But for all I could see of them, they might have vanished to another dimension. I was pretty sure this was against the buddy-system rule.

  Something brushed the back of my head, like a hand catching on the strands of my hair. My heart banged against my ribs and I spun to see—

  Nothing. A tarp lay like a dark pool over the now-empty grave by the river. The stakes and cord that Mark had measured out looked like faint, shadowy facets on the diamond-shaped field.

  The caliche road ran down the hill like a silver-gray snake. The calcium carbonate makes the dirt roads pack down hard; it’s very white and very dusty, and it gets all over your car and your clothes. It rises up in clouds when you drive on it, catching the moonlight like a spectral fog.

  Like it was doing now.

  An eerie paleness hung like smoke over the field, as if swept up by the breeze that swirled around me. It lifted the hair on the nape of my neck and crept up the cuffs of my jeans and the gap under my shirt, and my skin prickled at the chill.

  Fear took a white-knuckled grip on my vocal cords. This wasn’t comfortable hearth magic or cozy Uncle Burt in his rocker. There was a wrongness about the sickly mist coiling into a column in front of me, a fierce foreignness that arrowed straight into my self-preservation instinct.

  An intangible hand sculpted moonlit fog into the translucent form of a man. Not tall, but straight and slender, somehow youthful, though the details of hair and clothes were obscured by the unearthly glow.

  The eyes were shadowed but no longer hollow. They bound my gaze, and I couldn’t tear myself free.

  There was something in my hand. The voice recorder. My joints ached and cracked as if frosted over, but I managed to move my thumb, fumbling for the on switch.

  Drawing a breath was like breathing ice. I had never been so cold in my life. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, but I made my numb lips form a question.

  “Wh-wh-what d-d-do you want?”

  With slow, forced effort, he raised his arm. His hand grasped at the air between us, and his mouth worked in futile desperation to speak, but only shaped soundless syllables.

  Only my choked gasps broke the eerie silence. I couldn’t breathe. Frigid fingers reached into me, squeezing my lungs. My insides felt brittle with ghostly cold, as if I might shatter. The dark night was growing darker, and sparks danced on the spreading blackness.

  I was going to pass out. If I was lucky.

  Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the others running back. I felt them through the ground.

  “Amy!” Phin called.

  And then another voice I didn’t know. “Miss! Miss, come back here.”

  I spent the last of my strength in the effort to call out, then hit the ground and curled into a ball, and wondered how anyone would explain my death by hypothermia on a July night.

  My vision went black, like someone had flipped a switch. For a moment I thought I was dead, or unconscious, but my skin still hurt and I could smell the beer in my hair.

  The apparition had … disapparated.

  I heard a scrabble of feet on dry ground, and then Phin’s voice, and the others. Then a flashlight was shining right in my eyes.

  “Amy! Are you okay?” asked Phin, owner of the flashlight. “Say something!”

  “Ugh. Light. Eyes.” That was all I could manage through my chattering teeth, and I sounded like a three-pack-a-day smoker, but I could talk. Yay. I took a quick inventory. A deep breath filled my lungs with wonderful, warm air. I still thought I might pee ice cubes, but I could feel my fingers and toes.

  Jennie put her very warm hands on my face. “Good grief. She’s freezing.”

  “I’ll b-b-be ok-k-kay.” That would have sounded more convincing if my teeth weren’t rattling my brain.

  All their flashlights were on. I guess we weren’t worried about ghosts or preserving night vision anymore. Mark turned to—oh hell—a uniformed man and said, “Aren’t you supposed to have a Thermos of hot coffee or something? Isn’t that a stakeout requirement?”

  The young officer—who was not, thank God, Deputy Kelly—said, “Wait right here. Do not move.” And took off at a jog.

  “Who was that?” I asked, more or less, through the chattering, and tried to sit up. My joints mostly cooperated.

  “Apparently, they’re keeping an eye on this area because of the recent activity,” said Dwayne. “Are you okay?”

  “A warm drink will help get her core temperature back up,” said Jennie. She felt my face and hands again. “But she’s warming very quickly.”

  “I’ll be f-f-fine.” The shivering was letting up a little, too.

  “Holy moly,” said Phin, sinking to a seat as if weakened by her reaction. “You scared the life out of me. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to Mom.”

  I was so touched by her concern that I told her, “You should take a Kirl—a corona—a picture of that spot right there.” I pointed.

  “The apparition?” she said, excitement restoring her strength. “Again?”

  “Quick!” I said. “Before the deputy comes back.”

  She jumped to it while Dwayne and Mark and Jennie stared. “An apparition?” Jennie asked. “As in, you saw the Mad Monk?”

  “Again?” echoed Dwayne.

  “Shhhh.” I was much more worried about the deputy than what the three of them thought just then. I heard the officer coming and gestured Mark closer so I could whisper, “Tell him you came out to check something on the site, and we tagged along. Just don’t tell him we were ghost hunting.”

  Mark gave me a doubtful look. “I’m good, chica, but I’m not sure I’m that good. Everyone here thinks you’re a—”

  “—Goodnight. I know.”

  “I was going to say bruja. But tomato, tomahto.”

  He’d just called me a witch in Spanish. I watched him walk to meet the officer, and penciled Mark Delgado onto the things-to-sort-out-later list.

  “Look!” said Phin, holding her camera out to me. In the dark, the images on the display screen were very vivid. Not footprints, like ours, but bright, hot swirls, like a slow exposure of a neon-lit sky.

  “That’s so cool!” said Jennie, and she and Dwayne oohed over the pictures for a moment. “That’s the afterimage of the ghost on the grass?”

  “Close enough,” said Phin. I couldn’t believe she’d foregone the lecture, until she turned to me and said, “I don’t suppose you took any EMF readings.”

  I wasn’t quite up to rolling my eyes. “Before I passed out from hypothermia, you mean?”

  She sighed. “That’s what I thought. I suppose it’s forgivable under the circumstances.”

  Jennie and Dwayne were like a pair of excited puppies with a new toy. “Can you describe it? Did it say anything?”

  “It was a pale figure, there—” I pointed. “Where Phin’s standing.” A chill prickled my neck, but it was only a memory, a ghost of a ghost. “It pointed at me, and was mouthing …”

  “What?” Jennie breathed, on the edge of her figurative seat.

  I really didn’t want to say it, but I was too frazzled to come up with anything but the truth.

  “ ‘Boo,’ ” I admitted with a cringe. “It was saying ‘boo.’ ”

  15

  deputy Martinez was a very nice young man. I didn’t know what magic Mark worked on him, but he read us the riot act and sent us on our way without making any kind of official report. What unofficial reports would be circulating, I didn’t want to know. But Martinez seemed like a skeptic—which was probably why he’d been chosen for the duty—so I was hopeful that tomorrow’s headline on the Barnett Herald would not read “Goodnight Girl Caught in Scandalous Hookup with Mad Monk.”

  Mark had driven us to Goodnight Farm in his Jeep, and Phin made strong, hot tea, since the Goodnights weren’t big on coffee. Not when one of our major family businesses was a
tea shop. And Aunt Iris’s Study Session Tea (“For when you absolutely, positively have to be up all night”) was as effective as any espresso.

  I huddled under a quilt on the couch in the living room while Phin loaded her pictures onto her laptop. Dwayne and Jennie sat with her on the floor around the coffee table, talking excitedly about the ghost hunt.

  Mark sat on the couch with me, looking askance at his teammates. They were a bit annoying in their enthusiasm, and it was kind of weird how only Mark and Phin seemed to remember finding me in a shivering heap on the ground.

  I found myself assuring him, “The excitement will wear off when you head back to your motel.” The Phin Goodnight Effect was making tonight seem like a game, nothing weird. Outside of her bubble of influence, they would wonder what they were thinking and have a good laugh. “Everything will seem normal in the morning.”

  “Will it?” he asked, sounding unconvinced.

  “Yes,” I said, because my job was to appeal to reason, make the abnormal seem sane even after the Phin Effect had faded. “Think how easy it is to turn a random light or the flare of a camera lens into something unearthly. Or someone falls, and imagination gets the better of everyone.”

  Mark studied me for a long moment, a skeptical smile touching the corner of his mouth. Then he said, as if letting me off the hook, “Okay, chica. We’ll pretend we both believe that.”

  I blinked. He’d called my bluff. The spin-doctoring wasn’t a total lie. It was easy to turn a spooky setting and a little adrenaline into a ghost. But I was fooling myself if I thought tomorrow I would feel any less abnormal.

  Mark was more insightful than his amiable grin and laid-back good looks implied. “Why did you call me a bruja before?” I asked. “In the field.”

  He shrugged, with a little more warmth. “I call it as I see it.”

  The thing about the supernatural was, if you believed in it, you saw it, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. For the true skeptic, no amount of proof could convince them the world wasn’t black and white, real and unreal. And for the true believer … well, they sometimes saw unicorns when there was nothing but horses.

  But most people fell somewhere in the middle, accepting the paranormal in their lives in selective ways: lucky charms, superstition, ghost stories, aromatherapy, chakra energy, transitional meditation … brujería.

  Mark had clearly picked his side. But I did set him straight. “Phin is the witch. I’m just …” I trailed off, because I couldn’t seem to think of a word for what I was.

  “A ghost whisperer?” Mark asked, with a touch of his usual grin.

  Oh no. Not that.

  “I’ve never shown any kind of supernatural ability,” I evaded.

  “But the rest of your family … ?”

  Glancing at Phin, and the Kirlianographs on her laptop, a lie seemed silly. With a sigh, I admitted, “The Goodnights aren’t exactly average.”

  “I knew that as soon as I met your sister.” He was taking this completely in his stride. Really, and not because of Phin’s influence. “So you really are all witches?”

  “And psychics,” I confirmed. Might as well. He’d made up his mind about us already. “Some are talented one way, some the other. It’s sort of like the arts versus sciences.” I paused, then warned him, “Don’t get Phin started on the differences between them unless you want an earful.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Phin insisted that what she did was all chemistry and smarts, but the lines were more fluid than simply magic versus ESP. The Goodnights were supernaturally talented, like some families were gifted musically. Most of us had at least a tiny psychic sensitivity—even I got hunches—and most of us could follow a recipe for a spell. (Yes, me too.) But each had some specialty. For the psychics it was an ability they developed.

  For the magical ones, they gravitated to some type of spell, like an artist chose paint or clay or marble. Mom called it an affinity. Phin was a little odd, even for our family. Kitchen witchery—a combination of cooking and chemistry experiments—was her closest fit. But she was really all about the science and the gadgets. Like some kids take stuff apart to see how it works, I think Phin wanted to take magic apart and put it back together again. Better, stronger, faster.

  Maybe being the gatekeeper was my affinity. The paranormal touched people’s lives, even if they didn’t realize it. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad, and mostly the Goodnights tried to make sure it was good. I needed to run interference for them so they could do that.

  At least, that was what I told myself. But I never got as excited about anything as Phin did about her gadgets … or Mark did about old bones. Considering how long I would have to be in school to be a doctor, maybe that was an important realization.

  “You okay?” asked Mark. “You look like you’ve just seen a … well, you know.”

  I laughed, reluctantly, and pulled the quilt up closer to my chin. “Just thinking.” I changed the subject so he wouldn’t ask about what. “Did you see anything when you ran off after the sound? Any explanation?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but dark. Then the deputy found us—he’d heard the noise, too—and that was that. Until Phin suddenly dashed back to you, without any reason we could see.” He slid a glance her way. “Is that a Goodnight superpower?”

  “When it works, which it doesn’t always.” He’d done it again, gotten me to admit more than I would have with anyone else. “We, uh, call it the heebie-jeebies. Doesn’t every family have that?”

  “My mother sure did,” he said. “Mostly when I was misbehaving. She just called it motherhood.”

  “Hey, Amy.” Phin got my attention from the floor by the laptop. “What did you do with the voice recorder?”

  Good question. A quick search revealed I’d stuck it in my pocket at some point. I handed it over, and she immediately noticed the scratches on the case.

  “You dropped it,” she accused.

  “See if it still works,” said Jennie eagerly.

  Dwayne grinned at me. “See if the ghost really said ‘boo.’ ”

  Oh, he was a laugh riot. As if I hadn’t had enough disbelief and teasing when I’d confessed that.

  Phin fast-forwarded the sound file all the way to the clatter of the recorder hitting the ground, when it went dead for a bit. When it came back on, for a few seconds you could hear my breathing, with labored rasps. Then finally, my voice, quaking with cold, “Wh-wh-what d-d-do you want?”

  Then silence. No one spoke in the room, either. The terror in my voice was clear, even through the chattering, full of visceral fear that twisted my vitals in memory.

  The dogs, who’d been sleeping around the room, started barking. I was relieved to have something to do, to calm my nerves as I calmed theirs.

  Phin ran the recording back to listen again. But there was nothing after my question but more harsh breathing, until it stopped entirely.

  Finally Jennie spoke. “I guess it didn’t get any voice.”

  “EVPs aren’t always audible until you amplify and filter the recording.” Phin plugged the recorder into her computer and loaded the file.

  “What’s an EVP, anyway?” asked Dwayne while we waited. “All these initials are hard to follow.”

  “An electronic voice phenomenon,” said Phin, in a lecturing tone, “or EVP, is when a voice can be heard on an audio playback that wasn’t audible during the live event.”

  Jennie giggled. “ ‘Live.’ Heh. That’s funny.”

  It was so silly, even I laughed. Phin gave her an I-don’t-get-it frown, and when Jennie explained, “Because it’s ghosts,” she raised an eyebrow, Mr. Spock style which made Jennie—and me—laugh harder.

  I felt punch-drunk. It was almost two in the morning, and the night had passed “surreal” a long time ago. I’d talked to Mark about my family. I was laughing at ghost jokes. I’d fallen so far off the fence, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back up.

  Jennie and I composed ourselves as Phin turned
the computer so we could see the sound-mixing program. She turned up the volume as a vertical bar moved across the time line, leaving spikes where my ragged breath lurched through the white noise of the maxed-out speakers.

  And then a new sound stabbed through the silence, leaving a buzz of white on the screen. The others jerked when they heard it, then got intently still.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Dwayne. “It did say ‘boo.’ ” On the computer playback it was clear.

  Mark frowned in concentration. “Play it again, Phin.” His shoulders were stiff, his elbows braced on his knees as he leaned forward. His tone took the levity out of the air.

  Phin obliged. I held my breath as the five-second clip played again, and again the ghostly word hissed through the silence. But this time I heard what Mark had before.

  “There’s more,” I said, the fingers of unease crawling up my spine. “After the ‘boo.’ ”

  Phin pointed to the sound wave on the screen. The “B” made a big spike followed by two trailing points. “Three syllables. They fall off, but they’re distinct.”

  “Shhh,” said Mark. He slid off the sofa to sit next to Phin, shoulder to shoulder by the laptop speaker. “Play it again.”

  Three syllables, emerging from nothing, an auditory specter taking shape in the air between us.

  “Búscame.” Mark spoke the word aloud, bringing it out of Neverland into the room with us. “It’s Spanish.”

  “Búscame,” I repeated. I’d taken Spanish in school, and even remembered some of it. “As in buscar?”

  My brain supplied the word, but meaning lagged behind, and implication trailed even further.

  “ ‘Look for me.’ ” Mark’s warm and human voice hung over the electronic whisper like a curtain over smoke. “It’s saying ‘Look for me.’ ”

  16

  at least I knew what it wanted. I hadn’t decided if that improved things, though.