Prom Dates From Hell

  “Brian’s a pretty good player, isn’t he?” I watched as he took off his hat again, and wiped his face with his arm.

  “Well, I think so. But the scouts from the University of Texas must agree. They offered him a full scholarship.”

  “That’s great!” I tried to smile naturally while a chill spread through me. Anyone who has ever seen a movie—ever—knows that nothing dooms a character quicker than a bright future: pregnant wife, farm in Montana, baseball scholarship…. All the same to cinematic irony.

  My eyes searched the grounds for Old Smokey. Though the shadows around the field were lengthening, they weren’t deep or dark enough to hold the phantom as I’d last seen it, and I didn’t smell anything but peanuts and popcorn.

  Out on first base, though, Brian swayed on his feet. He put his hands on his knees, but it wasn’t the usual wait-for-the-pitch stance. Even from the stands he looked green.

  “He doesn’t look well,” I said, stating the obvious.

  Grimly, his dad shook his head. “He’s been feeling bad all weekend. At first we thought it was because of his friend. You know, Jeff.”

  The coach called for a time out. He walked to first base and talked to Brian, as if telling him not to be a macho idiot. Or maybe that was what I would tell him, if I were out there. Finally, the coach signaled another player in from the dugout.

  Halfway off the diamond, Brian’s legs folded up under him. Mr. Kirkpatrick yelled in alarm and ran to the fence. “This way,” I said, and led him to the gate behind the home-team’s bench. We ran out onto the field, ignoring umpires, players, and the confused and concerned murmur from the stands.

  Mr. Kirkpatrick dropped beside his son, putting a hand to his face, then placing his fingers against the pulse in his neck. I crouched by them. “Is he all right?”

  Brian opened his eyes, blinking at the worried circle of faces that gazed down at him. “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” I said. Pained embarrassment crossed his face, and I remembered that his teammates were clustered around us. “I mean, passed out. Uh…took a header.” What was the macho term for “swooned like a girl”?

  “Did you lose consciousness?” his father asked, looking into his eyes. I wondered if he was actually a doctor, or had just watched a lot of ER. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Three.” It was the wrong answer.

  “Can you squeeze my hand?” Apparently the answer to that wasn’t good, either. “Raise your head? Move your legs?” He could, but with trembling effort, as if someone had tied sandbags to his limbs.

  “Do we need to call an ambulance?” the coach asked.

  Brian protested. “No, Dad. Let the guys help me up.”

  Dr. Kirkpatrick—I felt pretty sure about the profession—sat back on his heels, and his son’s frightened gaze followed him. “You need to get checked out. Now. And I’m not taking any excuses.”

  “I promise. We can go straight to the emergency room, if you want. Just let the guys help me off the field.”

  Men.

  I stood back as his teammates hoisted him up, his arms over their shoulders, and half-carried him off the field while the spectators clapped their encouragement.

  Dr. Kirkpatrick went to move his car closer. On the field, play resumed, as Brian sat on the bench to wait, leaning wearily back against the surrounding fence. His hand caught mine and weakly pulled downward. I obliged the silent request and sat beside him.

  “What’s going on, Maggie?”

  “Your dad is taking you to the emergency room, I think.” The school should get a discount rate.

  “No.” He shook his head, then swayed woozily, grasping my hand to steady himself. “I mean, first Jeff, then Jessica, and the other Jessica. What’s going on?”

  His voice was so weak, I didn’t think his teammates could hear. Still, I leaned closer, clasping his hand between my own. “I don’t know, Brian. Something bad.”

  “You have to figure it out, Maggie.” He met my worried gaze, his eyes vivid blue in his pale face. “It’s all of us from that day, isn’t it? From the day with Stanley.”

  He’d figured it out more quickly than I had. “Yeah. Except Karen.”

  “Why didn’t you give the pictures to Halloran?”

  It took me a moment to realize what that meant. “You told Halloran about the pictures? Why?”

  “Crisis of conscience, I guess. Too afraid to stand up to them alone, but didn’t want them—us—to get away scot-free.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “I guess we’re not.”

  “Don’t give up.” I squeezed his hand. “I’m working on it.”

  He smiled. “I feel better already.” His expression seemed almost shy. Or maybe that was his weakness. “Can I call you to ask how it’s going?”

  “Sure.”

  When his dad reappeared, Brian had regained enough strength in his legs that it only took one teammate to help him to the car. I followed behind, distant enough to ask Dr. Kirkpatrick if he had any idea what was wrong.

  He shook his head, not quite in denial, but in disbelief. “I know what it looks like, but it’s impossible for it to progress this fast.”

  Impossible had become a relative thing in my life. “What does it look like, then?”

  “Well, it looks like MS. But he’s never had any symptoms before. This is like a year of deterioration in a matter of days.”

  Multiple sclerosis? Didn’t people with MS end up in wheelchairs?

  I watched them drive off, then stood in the parking lot, unsure what to do next. I had failed to save anybody. Events had been escalating from mildly amusing to life-altering. As a ghost hunter, I was a total failure. I wasn’t much of a detective, either, since I still didn’t know exactly what the Shadow was or how to stop it. I’d even managed to lose my best ally. So far it was Powers of Darkness six, Maggie Quinn zero.

  Time to face facts. I sucked at being a superhero.

  22

  by the time I’d finished two cups of tea and a piece of chocolate cake, I’d also caught Gran up on my extraordinary lack of success.

  “I thought Karen was going to be okay. And the first two Jessicas, what happened to them was kind of funny. But then there was the car accident and Karen might have brain damage, Jessica Prime might be on psychtropic drugs for the rest of her life, and poor Brian may end up in a wheelchair.”

  “That’s not certain, dear.” Gran refilled my cup and pushed the sugar bowl my way. She had just come home from her retiree’s dinner group at church, and was dressed in a fashionable skirt and top, her short red hair styled with a casual flair, much too mod to be pouring tea.

  “I’ve screwed everything up. I haven’t made any progress, and things are getting worse instead of better.”

  “Things always get worse before they get better. And I think you’ve made a great deal of progress. I think it was very clever of you to have that…what did you call that ghost goo?”

  “Ectoplasm?” I sighed. “I watch too much TV.”

  “And I would never have thought of a curse potion.”

  “It’s just a theory.” I sulked into my tea. “And to top it off, I argued with Justin, so I’ve lost my best ally.”

  Gran set her cup in her saucer with a clatter. “Now that is stupid.”

  “Thanks for your support.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “Something that seemed important at the time.”

  “Well, it can hardly be more important than your overall mission.” She gestured to the phone on the kitchen counter. “Call him up.”

  “Oh, Gran.” I slumped back in my chair. “He said he doesn’t want to help me anymore.”

  She rose and got the handset herself. “Of course he said that. Men have to save face. What’s his number? Never mind. It’s on the caller ID.” She beep-beep-beeped through the recent calls while I made weak protests. Truthfully, I wanted to talk to him, but if he hung up, or told me to get lost, it would hurt. A lot.

&n
bsp; “Hello? Is this Justin MacCallum?” Gran’s accent always deepened on the phone. “I hear that you’ve had a bit of a row with my idiot granddaughter.”

  “Gran!”

  She waved me silent. “Right. No, I wouldn’t expect you to tell me what it was about. But she’d like to apologize.” I held out my hand for the receiver. Gran ignored me. “Where would you like her to meet you? Well, where are you studying? At the library? She’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Gran put the handset back into the cradle and turned to me expectantly. “Maybe you should freshen up a bit before you go.”

  “I could have just talked to him on the phone.” Rejection would be a lot easier with AT&T as a buffer.

  “Making up after an argument is better done face to face.” She hauled me out of my chair. “Go powder your nose and comb your hair.”

  I bowed to fate. Easier to simply suffer the slings and arrows of my outrageous grandmother.

  The sun had gone down, but streetlights kept the campus well lit. So close to finals, there were a lot of people coming and going from the library, and probably would be for hours yet.

  The west half of the building was built early in the last century; the other part dated back only to the eighties. Justin waited for me in the east lobby, on the far side of the theft prevention gates. The fluorescent lighting made his unsmiling face look forbidding, sculpted the lines of his cheeks and jaw too harshly.

  A trick of the light. I hoped. I lifted a hand in tentative greeting. “Hi.”

  He cut right to the chase. “I don’t want you to apologize just because your grandmother made you.”

  My eyes narrowed. “I don’t do anything just because someone tells me to.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “True enough.” Unfolding his arms, he jerked his head toward the stacks. “Let’s get out of the lobby.”

  I followed him up some steps and through the rabbit warren of the humanities section. The tables and carrels were filled with students, heads diligently bent over their work. I’d used this library for school research, but I hadn’t been to the enclosed meeting rooms before. Justin had one to himself; he’d spread his books out over the football field of a table, clearly not inviting company.

  “Did you get your paper finished?” I warmed up with some banal small talk.

  “Almost.” He didn’t invite chitchat, either.

  “I won’t take up too much time then.” My nerves were balled up in my stomach, like a wad of Christmas tree lights when you get them out of the box in November. His resolutely blank demeanor gave me no clues how I’d be received. I took a deep breath and plunged into the frigid waters of apology.

  “I’m sorry we argued,” I said sincerely. “I don’t know why I blew things so out of proportion, but once I got going I didn’t know how to back up.”

  His shoulders relaxed; the air in the room seemed to palpably warm. He paused long enough to acknowledge the dodge in my phrasing. “I’m sorry we argued, too.”

  I took a relieved step forward, my heart lightening. “Thank goodness. I do need you, Justin. Your help, I mean.”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. That was progress. “I know what you mean.”

  “I shouldn’t blame you because I wanted so desperately to think that someone knew what was going on.” I laughed a little too loudly. “I know it’s not me.”

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shook his head. “Your instincts are good, when you listen to them. You knew to throw the salt on the Jessica-shadow.”

  Sighing, I sank into one of the heavy wooden chairs. “Half of my brain still rejects this as impossible. You were right about that, too.”

  “No wonder you got so angry.” I slanted a suspicious look up at his too-bland tone. He smiled crookedly and sat beside me. “To defeat this thing, you are going to have to commit your left brain, too, Maggie.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. “I’m failing, Justin. Two more of the Jocks and Jessicas have fallen.”

  His hand brushed my shoulder, briefly comforting but not coddling. “Tell me.”

  “You need to work on your paper.”

  “It’ll wait. Tell me what’s happened.”

  I told him about the picture I took, about Stanley’s humiliation, and the clique of six. I described Jessica Prime’s breakdown, and Brian’s collapse.

  “Brian, the guy I met at your house?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t help fishing a little. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  I also told him my theory, which I didn’t get to explain on Saturday, that the spirit became more developed, more real, with every victim. I saw the telltale tightening of his jaw when I described the thing lurking in my yard.

  He rubbed an irritated hand through his hair. “Why do you wait so long to tell me these things?”

  That was a complicated question, and probably rhetorical anyway, so I went on. “Do you think it could become solid?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a sign of its growing power.” He shifted through the papers on the table. “I was doing some work yesterday, and I found something. Does this look familiar?”

  He set a Xeroxed photo in front of me. Color pictures never copy well, but I could still make out the wide, flat bowl with etchings along the rim. “That’s the thingy from my dream! Where did you find it?”

  “In the catalog of the university’s archives. The brazier was found on an expedition to Mesopotamia back in the sixties.”

  I picked up the paper to study the symbols more closely. I had to squint. “Where is Mesopotamia, exactly?”

  “It was between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.”

  Those were names I’d heard on the news. “Where Iraq is now?”

  He nodded. “My adviser, Dr. Dozer, did some expeditions there, before the last regime made that impossible.”

  “So on the edges here—Is that writing between the hatch mark things?”

  “Yes, but the hatch mark things are letters, too. Cuneiform, one of the most ancient forms of writing. The squiggly looking bits are the language that replaced it. Kind of a proto-Hebrew.”

  I scrunched my brows in memory. “In the dream where I saw this, there was a big, biblical-looking village in an oasis. Some wild animal had killed a young man.” I traced the picture with my finger. “But maybe he was the victim of the same curse. Someone cast it then, like someone is casting it now.”

  “Well, quinine hadn’t been discovered yet. But everything else had.” He pulled forward another book, flipped to a page he’d marked. “Most cultures have some notion of an evil spirit, something to blame for the random tragedies of life. The ancient Babylonians had a demon for everything—bad crops, bad weather, bad health.”

  He showed me a picture of a very ancient worn statue or fetish. “Is that one of them?” Just barely man-shaped, the thing reminded me of the quasi-human form the Shadow had taken.

  “Possibly. This statue represents a personal god. They were supposed to serve an individual’s interests, so I guess benevolence and malevolence could be relative.” He reached over and tapped the photocopy. “What if this artifact actually invokes someone’s demigod or demon?”

  I rubbed my hands over my arms, my T-shirt completely inadequate for the air-conditioning. “Can you read the letters? Or do you know someone who can?”

  “Not from that photo.”

  “What about from the actual artifact?”

  Justin gave an ominous sigh. “I got permission to go to the archives, but the brazier wasn’t there. Just a ‘removed for cleaning’ card.”

  My fingers fiddled with the copied page. “I wrote down what I remembered from my dream. Not the cuneiform—I thought that was just decorative. But I think I got the others right.”

  “I can find someone to translate them,” he said with more excitement than I felt.

  “Not Dr. Dozer.”

  Justin sat back in his chair. “You can’t honestly think she might be cursing her son
’s classmates.”

  “No.” I framed my suspicion obliquely. “But I know how much I pick up from my dad, just living in the same house.”

  “You didn’t even know where Mesopotamia was.”

  “I knew it was in the Middle East somewhere, smarty-pants.” I pushed out of the chair and started pacing. “It’s too much of a coincidence that Stanley is connected to all the victims and the brazier.”

  “Well, you can’t just march up to him and accuse him of cursing his classmates.”

  I paused to imagine the scenario and admitted, “Okay, I guess I can’t. Not with only circumstantial evidence, anyway.” How could I find out if he’d bought wormwood or quinine? You could get just about anything off the Internet, but unless I had either his computer or a Dozer-family credit card number, I was at an investigative dead end.

  Justin watched me, reading the thoughts on my face; I’m not exactly Ms. Impassive. “Maggie.” His eyes were sober, his tone cautious. “If it is Stanley, you should be careful not to let him know you suspect him. It would be easy for him to set the demon on you.”

  My hand crept up to clasp my necklace. “I’m not in the picture. I’m not part of the pattern.”

  “But you are. You’re behind the camera.” I blinked in shock. I hadn’t thought of that. Were we back to Karen taking my place on the diving board?

  He seemed to regret pointing out the connection I was too close to see. “I’m sorry. But I want you to be careful.”

  I tucked my hair behind my ear in a determined motion. “I’m not trying to antagonize it. But it’s hard to try and stop a thing without making it, you know, a little pissed.”

  “I realize that.” He rose and took my fidgeting hand. “I’m not trying to be overprotective. But it’s hard to know you’re in danger and not be able to do something about it.”

  How strange, that a little thing like a hand could be the center of so much feeling. The nerves on the back of it where his fingertips brushed, in the palm securely wrapped in his, fired like sparklers. The sensation rushed up my arm and alighted, fizzling, in the middle of my chest.