“We don’t have cameras in churches, either,” I added. It was Boz’s weirdest rule.
“Yes. We allow privacy in the presence of the Maker,” Boz said, like that explained it.
“Not that a lot of Scrooges like to hang out in churches,” I pointed out, which was why I found the rule so completely weird. “Though we did have this one a few years ago who was a church deacon. He was the you’re-all-going-to-hell type. But then he used to swipe money from the collection plate. A total cliché.”
Boz coughed. I realized I was getting off topic.
“Anyway.” I gestured around the room. “This is how the company knows what’s happening with the Scrooge.”
“Indoors, that is,” said Dave. “We never have great coverage outside. But most Scrooges are homebodies anyway. So it works.”
Stephanie and I walked around from monitor to monitor and peered into the rooms of Ethan’s penthouse apartment (his bedroom, the kitchen, the multiple living and dining spaces, and the elevator), his school (several classrooms, the library, the dining room, the main foyer, and the stairs), and another building I wasn’t familiar with.
Ethan was in the school gym at the moment.
He was playing tennis, wearing black gym shorts that hit him about six inches above the knee and a simple polo, and he was sweating a little.
Thank you, universe.
I watched as he gracefully backhanded the tennis ball at his opponent, his biceps flexing, his legs shifting position in sync with his arms. He raised his non-racket arm and wiped the perspiration from his perfectly shaped forehead, and I could have swooned.
Gorgeous. Everything about him. Spectacular.
“You can tell he’s not very nice,” Stephanie commented, her nose wrinkling. “He’s trash-talking the other player—watch how his lip curls up. He’s sneering at him.”
Dave pressed another few buttons on the remote, and suddenly we could hear him.
“This is an all-boys school, Murphy,” Ethan panted as he moved across the court. “No girls allowed.”
“Shut up, Winters,” his opponent huffed, and swatted the ball back to Ethan’s side.
“Except your mother,” Ethan continued without missing a beat. “We all know an exception gets made for her around here.”
Dave muted it again.
Okay, I could concede that Little Dorrit was right about Ethan being not very nice. Not like that was a big surprise. I mean, he must be the Scrooge for a good reason. But boys trash-talk when they play sports, right? That’s just what they do. And seriously, he was so insanely attractive it was hard not to forgive him everything. It was not lost on me that I’d be inside Ethan Winters’s bedroom at least once or twice a week for the next six months. Sifting through his dreams, his memories. Hovering over him as he slept.
“Are you quite all right, Havisham?” Boz came up to me. “You look feverish.”
“Oh, I hope you’re not getting sick,” said Stephanie with genuine concern. “There’s a bad bug going around at NYU. Don’t you live near there?”
I didn’t get sick, of course. Another plus that came with being technically deceased.
“I’m fine,” I murmured. “It’s just warm in here.”
Boz followed my gaze to the screen and Ethan. “He’s a novelty, I’ll admit, not the normal selection, but I think he has real potential.”
Yes. Hot, hot potential.
But there was more to it than that. From the moment they’d tacked Ethan’s picture to the Board, I’d felt a zing of recognition. He was the first Scrooge I’d ever encountered who was anything like me, younger than fifty and at the start of his life, totally unaware that it was all about to go up in smoke. I found the very idea of Ethan fascinating—would he do what I’d done? Would he doubt, would he laugh it off, would he refuse to let it get to him? Or would he do what I should have done? Would he change?
“So, er, Dorrit,” Dave jumped in with his usual jovial voice, breaking me out of my introspection, “how are you finding your time at Project Scrooge this year? Enjoyable, I hope, and not too overwhelming.”
“It’s been everything I could have possibly imagined and more,” Stephanie said.
Kiss-up.
“And Havisham here is treating you well?” Boz prompted.
I glanced up and met her eyes. Now would not be the best time for her to tell him about all the stupid errands I’d been sending her on.
“Best boss I ever had,” she answered.
Total kiss-up.
Boz nodded. “I’m so glad to hear it. I knew that you and Havisham would hit it off.”
And then they were all smiling weirdly. God.
“Apparently this is Dave’s last year as the Clock,” I said, to change the subject to something that wasn’t me. “So you’re lucky to be here to get to witness him in action.”
“Your last year, wow,” said Stephanie softly. “I bet you’re going to miss it.”
“More than I could ever express,” Dave replied.
“What do you think was the best part about the job?” she asked.
“The people,” he answered immediately. “I will miss my coworkers. Some more than others.”
They did that weird smile thing again.
“So it looks like we’re all set,” Boz said. “We’ve got eyes on Ethan Winters.”
I turned my attention back to the monitors. Ethan wasn’t on any of them anymore; he’d finished his match and gone into the locker room, where tragically there were no cameras allowed.
“Almost,” Dave corrected. “I have a few bugs to work out, and a few more places to set up a feed, but then we’ll be ready.”
“Ready for what?” asked Stephanie.
“Ready to break inside Ethan’s head,” I said with a grin.
For once, I couldn’t wait to get started.
FIVE
“TESTING. ONE. TWO. TESTING.”
I pressed the receiver deeper into my ear and instantly regretted it. “I can hear you, Grant. God. You don’t have to yell.”
“Righto, boss,” he said, softer but still annoyingly loud. “We’re almost ready for you.”
“Wow. This is crazy.” Stephanie was practically jumping up and down, she was so excited. “Grant’s just going to push that little green button, and then this door”—she gestured to the shiny metal door that stood by itself in a frame in the center of the Transport Room—“this perfectly normal-looking door, is going to open up into Ethan Winters’s bedroom?”
“That’s how it works,” said Grant. “Neat, huh?”
“The neatest!” Stephanie gazed at him admiringly.
“If we can ever confirm the guy’s asleep.” Marty sounded uncharacteristically irritated. “What is taking so long, Grant?”
“We’re waiting for his heart rate to drop to the appropriate levels,” Grant informed him, watching the set of monitors that showed a darkened bedroom from several different angles.
Right on cue, Ethan began to snore.
“Oh, come on, he’s sleeping!” Marty said. “Let’s do this already!”
“It has to be a deep sleep, moron. We don’t want him to wake up in the middle, do we?” Grant retorted.
I sighed and walked back and forth across the Transport Room, stretching my arms and legs. I’d been in the minds of five Scrooges in my time at PS, week after week, month after month, year after year, more than a hundred memory sifts, if I stopped to count, but this time, this first time inside Ethan’s head, it felt different. I had butterflies flapping around my stomach.
Get a grip, I told myself. He’s just another Scrooge.
“Are we there yet?” Marty complained.
“Shut it, Marty.” Grant was sure taking his sweet time with the monitors. Then finally he smiled. “Okay, Holly. We’re live in five. Four. Three. Two.”
He pressed the green button.
The gateway door started humming, and then glowing.
I zipped up the Hoodie.
“Holy wow!??
? Stephanie gasped. “Holly?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t even see you at all!”
“That’s the point.”
She reached out toward me blindly and caught my arm. She gasped again. “You’re completely invisible! Neat!”
I sighed. “Stephanie?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got to let go of my arm now. And get back so I can, like, open the door.”
She released me, and I stepped up to the silver door and put my hand on the knob. It had a kind of electric energy that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Lights going out,” Grant said, and the room went black. “Now everybody needs to be absolutely quiet while the gateway is open.”
“That means you, Stephanie,” I added.
She didn’t answer. It was too dark to tell, but she was probably making that zipped-lips motion.
“Let’s do this,” I whispered.
Very, very slowly, I turned the doorknob.
There was a tiny click, and then the door swung silently outward, revealing Ethan’s bedroom. Another step and I’d gone from 195 Broadway to Sixty-Fourth Street, almost a hundred city blocks in the blink of an eye.
In other words: neat.
I shut the door carefully behind me. My heart was pounding in my ears. I always felt like a total criminal when I was in a Scrooge’s bedroom for the first time. A cat burglar. I loved every minute of it. Call me an adrenaline junkie, but the memory sifts were like the only time since I’d been dead that I felt truly alive.
Moonlight was leaking through the window, enough that I didn’t need the night-vision goggles I always wore around my neck. I crept toward the sleeping figure on the bed.
Hello, Prince Charming, I thought as I stared down at his peaceful face. Although right now he was technically more of a Sleeping Beauty type.
“Do you read us?” I heard Grant’s small voice in my ear.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Ethan was sleeping on his back, but he wasn’t snoring anymore. I took a small aerosol can out of my pocket and sprayed the air around his face. It smelled like lavender air freshener, but it was actually a mist that would make him sleep more deeply. Just in case.
“His heart rate’s still good,” Grant reported. “Proceed with the mind meld.”
I dug into my other pocket for the transducer, a delicate line of thin, almost translucent wire attached to a small silver electrode. This I stuck gently to Ethan’s forehead.
“He lives here all by himself,” Grant said. “Not even a goldfish. Now that is sad, in my opinion. Everyone needs a pet or something. Remember that little spaniel that Elizabeth Charles had? She freaking loved that dog. I had a good feeling about how things would turn out for her, seeing that. Nobody can be all bad if they like dogs.”
I didn’t like dogs. I wasn’t much of a pet person of any kind. Early on after I’d become the GCP, when the isolation of the whole thing was killing me, I’d gone to a pet shelter. I thought I might get myself a cat.
Cats, as it turned out, are not too fond of well-preserved zombies.
“It was a really cute dog,” Grant said, and I got the idea that he was talking to Stephanie, not me. “White with tan spots, big floppy ears, huge brown eyes. What was its name, Marty? . . . Oh, that’s right. Berkeley. The dog’s name was Berkeley. Which was funny because Mrs. Charles’s ex-husband was a Stanford man.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I am trying to work here,” I hissed.
“Roger that,” Grant said. “Sorry.”
Carefully I unspooled the wire until I reached the other electrode, which I placed against my own temple. Then I took Ethan’s hand in mine. That’s how it worked. I needed the electrical impulse and the skin-to-skin contact.
Science and magic.
His hand when I took it was warm, his fingers long and slender, nails neatly trimmed. I leaned closer. God. Even in the dark, he was wildly attractive.
Focus, Holly. I closed my eyes, and almost immediately I was sucked into his dream.
He was dreaming about . . . swimming?
I knew from Dave’s reports that Ethan spent most of his free time at the New York Athletic Club, swimming and playing racquet-ball and squash, fencing and boxing and running around the track. There’d already been an argument inside Project Scrooge about whether it was ethical to videotape the inside of what was essentially a gym, which was only a step up from a bathroom in some people’s—cough, Boz’s—prim and proper eyes. In the end it’d been decided that there would be no video in the athletic or dressing areas of the club, just the dining and sitting rooms. It wasn’t likely that Ethan was going to be doing anything significant or exciting in those off-limits places anyway, Dave had reasoned. He just went there to work out.
We’d never had a Scrooge who’d been into fitness before. Usually they tended to stay at home and count their money.
Anyway, in his dream, Ethan swam up and down lane three of an old-fashioned indoor swimming pool. I could feel him in the dream, the water sluicing off his body, the coolness of it, the light wavering under the surface. It was like that when I was connected with the Scrooges. I saw what they saw. I felt what they felt. I could feel the way Ethan used swimming to quiet his thoughts, pushing himself relentlessly through the water, one stroke after another.
As dreams went, it was pretty boring stuff. It was definitely time to move on. I squeezed his hand gently, strengthening the link between us, and guided his consciousness away from the dream and into the storehouse of his memory.
For the first few seconds I was swamped by the sudden onslaught of sensation—tastes and smells and sounds popping up everywhere, images flashing through my mind.
A giant, long-necked dinosaur made of bones.
A little girl in a tiara.
The sensation of being small and riding on a man’s shoulders through a crowd.
Watching my parents ice-skate at Rockefeller Center.
The sound of a phone ringing.
The feeling of a crisp hundred-dollar bill in my hand.
A policeman at the door, frowning.
An old man with cold blue eyes.
A man with warm blue eyes I didn’t want to think about.
A diamond bracelet in a velvet box.
A ring.
I struggled to keep us separate through it all—what was Ethan and what was me—but it was hard. It was always hard, especially at first. You could get lost in the other person’s mind, forget where you ended and the Scrooge began.
Find a Christmas, I reminded myself. Get your bearings in his life.
When I first started working on the Project I couldn’t understand what Christmas really added to the situation. Why the Ghost of Christmas Past, I wondered? Why not just the Ghost of the Past in general? But five years of sifting memories had shown me that a person’s memory was keener on special occasions. It didn’t matter if a person loved or hated Christmas (and I for one still hated it); their emotions always ran deeper that time of year. And when you’re rummaging through thousands of memories, it’s easy to pick out the Christmas trees and the twinkling colored lights and the stupid Christmas carols, and that’s how you can mark the progression of time, one Christmas after another.
Plus, there was that whole “spirit of Christmas” thing that Boz was always going on about. Which I didn’t buy.
The first Christmas I picked up with Ethan was one when he was very young. At first all I could see was his snow boots. I felt them, too, on little-kid Ethan’s feet as he ran along some sort of path through a blanket of fresh snow. There was snow in the air. The path was lined with a wire fence and black lampposts every few yards, each post adorned with a red bow to celebrate the season. On the other side of the fence was a forest of leafless trees, their branches black and snow-laden. It was almost dark, the way it sometimes gets during a storm, and the sky and the ground were both muted shades of blue.
I could feel Ethan’s nose like it was my
nose—it was cold, and his legs were tired, but it felt good to run after being cooped up so he didn’t care—he loved being the first person to make tracks in the new snow. He was smiling as he ran.
“Hey, buddy, come back!” came a voice from behind him. “Don’t get too far ahead.”
He stopped and turned around, breathless. Two figures came toward him up the path—a man in a gray wool jacket with a red plaid scarf and a girl in a puffy purple coat.
The man was his dad, I felt. He was the man with the warm blue eyes.
The girl was . . . Jack—that was the name Ethan labeled her with in his mind. His sister. She was older, maybe ten or eleven. Her cheeks were rosy, and her eyes were blue, too, bright with mischief. She reached down and grabbed a handful of snow and lobbed it at their dad, who roared in good-humored outrage and bent to scoop up his own snowball.
“Oh, you are going to pay for that,” his dad panted, and then he tried to tackle her, but she danced out of the way, laughing, and Ethan joined in the fight.
They went on playing in the snow—running and dodging and hurling snowballs at one another, completely destroying the serenity of this winter wonderland. The blue of the sky grew deeper. Suddenly the lamps went on, and then the trees lit up, too, each tree along the path wrapped in thousands of tiny white lights, like entire galaxies of stars against the backdrop of the snowy park. For a minute, Ethan and his dad and sister just stood there, spellbound by the sight. Then from somewhere in the distance came the muted sounds of a Christmas song played on a saxophone.
Ethan’s dad put his arms around his children and sang along. The words of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” almost seemed to float in the air around them.
Jack checked her watch.
“We should go, Dad,” she said. “Mom will be wondering what happened to us.”
I knew through Ethan that they’d been at the Museum of Natural History all afternoon. Ethan had liked the dinosaurs more than anything else. And his mom had promised to make spaghetti for dinner. His favorite.
“All right, we can go home,” his dad fake grumbled. “Let’s get you warmed up.” He tousled Ethan’s hair and pulled him into his chest. Ethan remembered exactly the way his dad had smelled that day—the mixture of deodorant and shaving cream and wet wool from his snow-sodden hat. That smell reminded him of happiness.