They all agreed that they had felt the same things, though probably not as strongly. To bring the subject back around to Justin and the field, I asked, "But doesn't Justin believe his brother is alive? Other people told me that tonight."
"Yeah, definitely," Chan said. "He doesn't think he hears his brother's ghost. He thinks his brother's voice reaches across the miles or something. I don't know what the terminology is for that, but that's the word on the street."
"You mean ... he speaks to his brother telekinetically?" I asked.
"Yeah. Like ESP. He swears to it. He says the Lightning Field is the only place where he's really happy, and when he's there alone, he can hear his brother's voice. He says Torey Adams is wrong. His brother's not in Texas, never was in Texas."
"And ... this isn't drugs talking?" I asked.
"I don't think drugs helped it," Katy said. "But he's been talking about his brother since right around Christmas. If he was doing drugs that early on, nobody knows about it."
I nodded, trying to put all this together. With the talk about Texas, Katy was referring to a response on Adams's website that had caused a big stir ... a lot of people posting that the letter might be from Chris himself. I even posted something to the effect of "the letter sounds like him, if you read the e-mail he left for Principal Ames and compare the two," not that many were listening to me in the reverb. The initial letter implied that Chris had run off to Texas to live with one of his mom's two sisters, both of whom hated his mom and would never have betrayed him. Adams himself wondered...
I shook the confusion from my head or tried to, having crossed the line between fact and hearsay many times. I was having trouble sorting what was newsworthy and how I would state the rest.
I felt distracted, off-center, pulled slightly toward the shadow behind Katy and Chan, and the distraction was why I couldn't organize my thoughts. Negative energy, big-time. I'm so good at sensing people's energy, I could have predicted the type of story that came next and would have loved to avoid it, but trying to be the good professional, I went for the trouble.
"Elaine, you haven't said a word. What do you think of all this?"
Her laugh turned over so deeply in her chest that it sounded like a thump. "Chris is dead. I think Justin knows it. He just doesn't want to face up to it. He's got this positive-thinking shit that he reads, and then he says his brother is not dead and he hears from him."
There you go: Someone who puts "positive thinking" and "shit" in the same concept can inspire some serious eye-rolling if you're the type who works at keeping your thought-life healthy. Hooray for dark glasses.
"And?" I asked.
"And he's manic-depressive," she said dismissively. "Any idiot ought to be able to see that. When he's manic, he thinks he hears his brother telling him he's alive. When he's depressed, he just lies there and stares at the stars, tells everyone to shut up, he's got a headache. The truth is, one night when Justin wasn't around, a bunch of kids saw Chris Creed out there in the field. He was surrounded in white light. Like, not as somebody living would appear."
Fortunately, I had just covered a'séance held in the dorms as a feature story for the weekend section of the paper. I had experience in not laughing in people's faces. It's not that I don't believe in the supernatural, but there's a difference between believing in an intelligent and affectionate Source behind the universe and believing that dead folks wander around down here, lost.
"Tell me about it."
"A bright light appeared out of the trees and when you looked at it closely, you could see it was Chris," Elaine said. "No question. Just like a holograph. It was definitely Chris."
"Sounds like a third-generation story. A pass-it-down-the-line deal," RayAnn put in skeptically. "Like somebody pointed a flashlight against a tree as a gag, and by the second or third time the story was told, it was a holograph image of Chris Creed."
I could feel Elaine blustering. "That's why I've known ever since that he is dead. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. He came straight at us, staring at us, and then simply evaporated. I can introduce you to the kids who were with me. They saw it, too."
The silence was broken only by a giggle from Mrs. Hayden, and as she picked right up with some sentence about her workout at the gym, I gathered they weren't eavesdropping. I liked the couple.
"But ... your friends here don't believe you, apparently," I said. Katy and Chan had a rebuttal to this story, or they wouldn't have told me in the beginning that Elaine thought he was dead but they didn't.
"Um ... they were dropping acid," Chan said. "Don't print that, please. Or if you do, you didn't hear it from Katy or—"
"Acid, schmacid," Elaine said. "So, somebody spiked my soda. I'm not a loadie, okay? I haven't done it since."
"It just cuts into the ... believability of this tale." Katy turned to me, putting a hand on my arm. "We just don't talk about this. Or, not very often."
This Elaine had a "little" voice, if I had to describe it. Not childlike, not breathy, just with hardly any power. All her energy came from her sarcasm.
"I don't care whether other people believe me or not. Five people saw it. Justin missed the whole thing, then started threatening the screamers in school on Monday."
"I don't suppose he likes people talking about his brother as if he were a, uh, spook. That's understandable," I said.
"Yeah, but people will never stop talking like that around here. And word sure gets around. I don't know who told him. Justin believes what Justin wants to believe. I believe in the truth. Think of it. Acid can make you see things that aren't there, surely. But they can't make everyone see the same thing, can they? We all saw the same thing."
The silence broke with Mrs. Hayden's chair pushing back, and her form moved to a funny posture in front of the window. "...seeing stars now. I think of those poor drenched officers out there, all day long, and now that their work is almost done, we see the stars."
Mr. Hayden's voice chimed with my own: "Bad frequency."
I needed this next move like a hole in the head, but I wanted my fame and writing glory enough to swallow my anxiety. I couldn't think of an educated response to Elaine's suggestion that a mutual hallucination is not a hallucination.
"Can you take us to the Lightning Field?" I asked the girls.
FOUR
OUT IN THE PARKING LOT I gave Lanz the remainder of _ Mrs. Hayden's meat loaf along with a Ziploc bag full of dry dog food from my luggage. We waited for the three girls to get their takeout order, which Katy said they would eat in my car.
RayAnn seemed less perturbed about going to the field than going to the woods where the corpse had been. She leaned against the car, describing the bright moon as an almost perfect gold circle with one piece sliced off the side. I turned and found it, smiling a little. It was big enough that I couldn't see it all at once.
"I can't think of any way to leave Elaine out of this," I said. "She means no harm. But I'd rather be punched in the gut than go around with someone like that. Take your pain all at once."
"People who ... are not warm? Who break down your good mood?" she said, trying to vocalize it.
"Yeah, and they're not satisfied until you feel as bummed out as they do. What am I trying to say...?" I reached down to pet Lanz, who bumped his cold nose affectionately into my hand while chewing his food. "She'll try to ram that story down our throats about seeing Chris Creed's ghost out there. I just don't buy that stuff."
"About Chris being dead, or about ghosts in general?" she asked.
"Both, but mostly that second thing," I said. "Put it this way. I think if someone came back from the afterlife, it would be either to say something profound or do something significant. For someone to come back just to scare the crap out of a bunch of tripping, high school ne'er-do-wells ... that's a problem for me."
"How do you explain them all seeing the same thing?" she asked. "That's a hell of a story. She sounded so ... adamant."
Rather than bust my nerves trying to a
nswer that, I shoved my mind into another subject, some school reality: "I'll need to borrow your laptop sometime tonight or tomorrow morning."
"I expected nothing less," she said, but sighed anxiously. "I can't believe you sold your laptop just before you've got a huge research paper due."
"Journalism first, school second," I said, knowing no self-respecting newspaper would care about my GPA if I had a year or two of good published stories under my belt. "Besides, I might get Claudia to publish some of my findings somehow. It's a paper that should write itself."
RayAnn knew about my research. I'd actually gotten participants off ChristopherCreed.com by posting in the "Bullied2" forum. She recited the assignment I'd posted for them because it had intrigued her: "Think of times you've been bullied. Then make up a person who is kind, merciful, and was there to see it. Write the story of what happened to you from his or her eyes instead of from your own."
I took a bow with a chuckle. I'd gotten five respondees. Three said things like "This didn't help me. It's too hard to see the world from somebody else's view, especially when writing, which is hard." Two, however, wrote of shifts in their thinking that were "amazing."
One girl said her "kind person" now exists almost constantly in her mind, and reminds her how to view a situation every time someone makes fun of her. Another high school senior said it helped him so much that he was going to rewrite his entire life from his kind person's point of view. I'll never forget his words: "There is something very cool about writing your worst memories through someone else's eyes. You start to see what happened to you... almost as if it happened to somebody else. Especially if that made-up person is nice, it's a great exercise because there are many mean people in this world."
The kid had gone on about how we automatically take our self-esteem cues from mean people, which I felt to be somewhat true. But I was transfixed by his statement about looking at your life as if it had happened to somebody else. That was precisely what I'd been looking for, because that was how I'd survived my own break with my family: I viewed it as a him and me thing. I often said as much to people who knew I'd left an unhappy home life, but most of the time they didn't get what I was talking about. RayAnn seemed to.
"One out of five isn't bad," she said. "You'll write that paper up an hour before it's due and ace it—your usual."
I didn't care about the grade so much. "I'm thinking maybe I could give the exercise to the Psych Department and they could actually research the therapeutic value of it. You can't get the money to form a microcosm for research when you're broke."
RayAnn nodded thoughtfully, supportive as always. "It's a shame you can't get Chris Creed to contribute. I know you think that's how he stayed away so long."
"That little cuss had it too easy. Torey Adams did the writing as his 'kind person.' All Chris had to do was click and read. Most people are not lucky enough to have someone else do the writing."
"You really think Chris Creed has read Torey Adams's website?" she asked with a glint and a smile.
People seemed to find that concept interesting, though I felt it was logical. "I don't think he's dead or electronically challenged. My question is, how could he miss it?"
"Unless he's living in the Congo, with a plate in his bottom lip and spearing fish in the Amazon for his daily intake." RayAnn smiled.
I pulled her up to me by the back of the neck and kissed her. "You're funny. It's one of the reasons I adore you."
"Oh, you adore me," she said. She was a much faster mover than I was. She wanted the L-word. She wanted to be sandwiched between me and my dorm mattress. I wasn't stupid about that. I was stupider about why I'd been telling myself "tomorrow" for more than a month.
Fortunately the screen door creaked open, saving me from spiraling into the confusion I loathed. The three girls came down the steps, and as it turned out, RayAnn and I didn't have to do anything to lose Elaine.
"You guys are crazy," she announced. "I wouldn't go back out there for a million bucks. Straight or otherwise. Have fun."
"We will," I promised. I held my hand out behind my back and RayAnn 'fived me as Elaine's departing footsteps tromped across the parking lot stones. I can get lucky some times.
Chan and Katy said nothing as they piled into the back seat, and I promised them Lanz would neither bite them nor drool on their burgers. Their forced giggles made me suspect they too were having second thoughts. They ate their cheeseburgers and fries in silence as RayAnn drove.
We had to leave the bay area and head up Route 9 another mile and a half, then turn back toward the bay again. I was laying a picture in my head. There weren't a lot of side streets in these woods, and if you wanted to get from one place to the other that was close to the water, you had to either go by boat or drive west to Route 9.
"Get ready to walk," Chan said as RayAnn finally slowed the car and cut the engine.
As I opened the door, the air smelled densely of earth and forest, and the only sound was the drip, drip of raindrops still falling from the trees. I figured I would take Lanz this time. RayAnn mentioned that no other cars were parked here.
"No bikes," Chan noticed as the engine went silent. "Unless they're hidden in the brush from cops. But I've heard this about the Lightning Field lately—ever since Justin took off, people are afraid to come back here without him after dark."
"Why?" I asked. Did he carry a ghost buster shield and a silver stake?
"They say it's just ... eerie. When he's back there, talking about how wonderful the place is, people can actually get to feeling that way. When he's not around, people say, it just feels like a vortex. You can't have any fun for being creeped out. The only one I know who enjoys it out here without Justin is Kobe Lydee. He's in our grade. He thinks he's a ghost chaser and he'll make a gazillion dollars off getting Chris Creed's ghost on tape."
I found the moon and paused for a moment, making sure I appreciated what people were saying about Justin Creed. Apparently the kid wielded a lot of influence, and his self-assurance—which may just be a synonym for my word, energy—must have been off the charts. Somehow, I didn't feel it was his corpse we just saw, and it was something beyond the female undergarments. Gut instincts, I guess.
FIVE
WOULD YOU PREFER NOT TO GO?" RayAnn asked Katy and Chan as I got out with Lanz. "Because Mike and I can—"
"We'll go," Katy said, giggling nervously. "I just can't promise we'll go with you all the way into the Lightning Field, or how long we'll stay."
The trail was marked with bright splashes of glow-in-the-dark white paint on the trunk of one tree after another. It would be hard to get lost even if RayAnn's flashlight were to give out. We walked along in silence, and I tried to see something beyond the splashes of neon in RayAnn's flash light beam. I relied more on Lanz than I ever had before. But he kept going slower than I wanted him to, and after ten minutes, I felt like I was half carrying him by the harness. My arm hurt, and he was whining.
I finally stopped, rubbing my tricep. "What's up, buddy?"
He stood rooted, his legs slightly trembling, so that I could feel the vibes against my thigh. They had said at Seeing Eye that a dog can sense your mood and become nervous simply because you are. But I didn't feel nervous. I felt a little tired, as jet lag was starting to set in, and a little annoyed that RayAnn's friend who'd "rented" us her car hadn't owned a Jeep so RayAnn could blaze this trail. My legs were tired, but my brain was curious. I wanted to get a feel for this place that Justin Creed called holy and everyone else called hellish.
Lanz let out some short whines.
"Can't pets, like, feel everything?" Katy whispered. "He senses something ... dark. Let's go back."
"He'll follow me." I ignored her premonitions, dropping the harness handle and stumbling ahead. My tunnel vision could get worse in the dark, but I could make out a break in the trees coming up by standing still and moving my head slowly, allowing my brain to process the scene in frames. The large moon now painted a jagged glow, separating
the dark sky and the ultra-black treetops. Moonlight struck the wet and shining ground at the edge of the forest, revealing an open space as big as a football field. Sure enough, Lanz came after me, whining and panting, and the girls followed to get closer to him.
We came into the clearing, and I stood there, taking it in frame by frame, not knowing what to make of this place.
"It's ... full of tree trunks," RayAnn reported to me in a whisper. "There are a dozen or so ... scorched, pointy, hollowed-out tree trunks."
"They're black?" I asked, and felt her staring at me as I whipped off my glasses, blinking away a dozen twinkles.
"They're kind of, like, petrified, the trunks," Chan whispered. "They turned a grayish white over the summers instead of staying black."
White burned tree trunks? Lanz whined and nudged my hand for comfort, so I dangled my fingers and stroked the top of his head, taking in frame after frame. He wasn't buying into the idea we were safe, probably because we were in a petrified forest. Will somebody explain that, please?
"How do burnt tree trunks turn white?" I asked.
"The only thing known to do that is lightning—if they were struck by lightning before they burned," Katy said. "Somebody brought up the question in science class, and that was the only answer Mr. Kingsley had."
I took in the six or seven tall, shimmering trunks point ing jagged fingers up to the sky like skeleton ghosts. "Must have been a hell of a lightning storm."
Lanz did his best to guide me around larger rocks, stumps, and budding baby trees, but his mind was elsewhere. I finally let go of his harness again and stumbled close to one tall, shining trunk. I put my hand out and touched it. It felt like crystal or like wood depending on where my fingers were.