Darkest Hour

  I tried calling my dad. Not on the phone or anything because, of course, my dad can’t be reached that way, being dead. I tried calling to him wherever he was, out there on the astral plane.

  Only of course he didn’t come, either. But then, he never does. Well, sometimes he does. But rarely, and not this time.

  I just want you to know that I don’t normally freak out like this. I mean, normally, I am very much a woman of action. Something happens and, well, I go kick some butts. That’s how it usually works.

  But this…

  For some reason, I couldn’t think straight. I really couldn’t. I was just sitting there in my hunter green lounging pajamas, going, What should I do? What should I do?

  Seriously. It was not good.

  Which was why I did what I did next. If I couldn’t figure out what to do myself, well, I needed someone to tell me what to do. And I knew just the someone who could.

  I had to talk quietly because, of course, by that time it was past eleven, and everyone in the house but me was asleep.

  “Is Father Dominic there?” I asked.

  The person on the other end of the phone—an older man, from the sound of it—went, “What’s that, honey? I can barely hear you.”

  “Father Dominic,” I said, speaking as loudly as I dared. “Please, I need to speak to Father Dominic right away. Is he there?”

  “Sure, honey,” the man on the phone said. Then I heard him yell, “Dom! Hey, Dom! Phone for you!”

  Dom? How dare that man call Father Dominic Dom? Talk about disrespectful.

  But all my indignation melted when I heard Father Dominic’s soft, deep voice. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed him, not seeing him every day over the summer like I do during the school year. “Hello?”

  “Father Dom,” I said. No, I didn’t say it. I’ll admit it: I wept it. I was a basket case.

  “Susannah?” Father Dominic sounded shocked. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. All right, not said: sobbed. “It’s not me. It’s J-Jesse.”

  “Jesse?” Father Dom’s voice took on the note it always did when the subject of Jesse came up. It’d taken him a while to warm up to Jesse. I guess I could see why. Father D. is not only a priest, he’s also the principal of a Catholic school. He’s not supposed to approve of stuff like girls and guys sharing a bedroom…even if the guy is, you know, dead.

  And I could understand it, because it’s different with mediators than it is with everyone else. Everyone else just walks through ghosts. They do it all the time, and they don’t even know it. Oh, maybe they feel a cold spot, or they think they’ve glimpsed something out of the corner of their eye, but when they turn around, no one is there.

  It’s different for mediators. For us, ghosts are made up of matter, not shrouds of mist. I can’t put my hand through Jesse, though anyone else could. Well, anyone else but Jack and Father Dom.

  So it’s understandable why Father Dom’s never been too wild about Jesse, even though the guy’s saved my life more times than I can count. Because whatever else he is, Jesse’s still a guy, and he’s living in my bedroom, and…well, you get the picture.

  Not, of course, that there’d been anything going on—much to my chagrin.

  The thing was, now there never would be. I mean, now I’d never even know if something could have happened. Because he was gone.

  I didn’t mention any of this to Father Dom, of course. I just told him what had happened, about Maria and the knife and the bugs, and about Clive Clemmings being dead and the missing portrait, and how they’d found Jesse’s body and now he was gone.

  “And he promised me,” I finished, somewhat incoherently, because I was crying so hard. “He swore that wasn’t it, that that wasn’t what was holding him here. But now he’s gone, and—”

  Father Dominic’s voice was soothing and controlled in comparison to my hiccupy ramblings.

  “All right, Susannah,” he said. “I understand. I understand. Obviously there are forces at work here that are beyond Jesse’s control and, well, beyond yours, too, I might add. I’m glad you called me. You were right to call me. Listen, now, and do exactly as I say.”

  I sniffled. It felt so good—I can’t even describe to you how good it felt—to have someone telling me what to do. Really. Ordinarily the last thing I want is to be told what to do. But in this case, I really, really appreciated it. I clung to the phone, waiting breathlessly for Father Dominic’s instructions.

  “You’re in your room, I suppose?” Father D. said.

  I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, and said, “Yes.”

  “Good. Wake your family and tell them exactly what you just told me. Then get out of the house. Get out of that house, Susannah, just as quickly as you can.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the receiver as if it had just started bleating in my ear like a sheep. Seriously. Because that would have made about as much sense as what Father Dom just said.

  I put the receiver back to my ear.

  “Susannah?” Father Dom was saying. “Did you hear me? I am perfectly serious about this. One man is already dead. I do not doubt that someone in your family will be next if you do not get them out of there.”

  I know I was a wreck and all. But I wasn’t that much of a wreck.

  “Father D.,” I said. “I can’t tell them—”

  “Yes, you can, Susannah,” Father Dominic said. “I always thought it was wrong of you to keep your gift a secret from your mother all these years. It’s time you told her.”

  “As if,” I said into the phone.

  “Susannah,” Father D. said. “The insects were only the beginning. If this de Silva woman is taking demonic possession of your household, horrors such as…well, horrors such as you or I could never even imagine are going to begin—”

  “Demonic possession of my household?” I gripped the phone tighter. “Listen, Father D., she may have got my boyfriend, but she is not getting my house.”

  Father Dominic sounded tired. “Susannah,” he said. “Please, just do as I say. Get yourself and your family out of there, before harm comes to any of you. I understand that you are upset about Jesse, but the fact is, Susannah, that he is dead and you, at least for the time being, are still alive. We’ve got to do whatever we can to see that you remain that way. I will leave here now, but I’m a six-hour drive away. I promise I will be there in the morning. A thorough administration of holy water should drive away any evil spirits remaining in the house, but—”

  Spike had padded across the room toward me. I thought he was going to bite me, as usual, but he didn’t. Instead, he trotted right up to my face and let out a very loud, very plaintive cry.

  “Good God,” Father Dominic cried into the phone. “Is that her? Is she there already?”

  I reached out and scratched Spike behind his one remaining ear, amazed he was even letting me touch him. “No,” I said. “That was Spike. He misses Jesse.”

  Father Dominic said, “Susannah, I know how painful this must be for you. But you must know that wherever Jesse is now, he’s better off than he’s been for the past hundred and fifty years, living in limbo between this world and the next. I know it’s difficult, but you must try to be happy for him, and know that, above all, he would want you to take care of yourself, Susannah. He would want you to keep yourself and your family safe—”

  As I listened to Father Dom, I realized he was right. That was what Jesse would have wanted. And there I was, sitting around in a pair of lounging pajamas when there was work to be done.

  “Father D.,” I said, interrupting him. “In the cemetery, over at the Mission. Are there any de Silvas buried there?”

  Father Dominic, startled from his safety-first lecture, said, “I—de Silva? Really, Susannah, I don’t know. I don’t think—”

  “Oh, wait,” I said. “I keep forgetting, she married a Diego. There’s a Diego crypt, isn’t there?” I tried to picture the ceme
tery, which was a small one, surrounded by high walls, directly behind the basilica down at the Mission where Father Dominic works and I go to school. There are only a small number of graves there, mainly of the monks who had first worked with Junipero Serra, the guy who’d founded the Carmel Mission back in the 1700s.

  But a few wealthy landowners in the 1800s had managed to get a mausoleum or two squeezed in by donating a sizable portion of their fortunes to the church.

  And the biggest one—if I remembered correctly from the time Mr. Walden, our world civ teacher, had taken us to the cemetery to give us a taste of our local history—had the word DIEGO carved into the door.

  “Susannah,” Father Dominic said. For the first time, there was a note of something other than urgency in his voice. Now he sounded frightened. “Susannah, I know what you are thinking, and I…I forbid it! You are not to go near that cemetery, do you understand me? You are not to go near that crypt! It is much too dangerous….”

  Just the way I like it.

  But that’s not what I said out loud. Aloud I said, “Okay, Father D. You’re right. I’ll wake my mom up. I’ll tell her everything. And I’ll get everyone out of the house.”

  Father Dominic was so astonished, he didn’t say anything for a minute. When he was finally able to find his voice, he said, “Good. Well…good, then. Yes. Get everyone out of the house. Don’t do anything foolish, Susannah, like call upon the ghost of this woman, until I get there. Promise me.”

  Promise me. Like promises mean anything anymore. Look at Jesse. He’d promised me he wasn’t going to go away, and where was he?

  Gone. Gone forever.

  And I’d been too much of a coward ever to tell him how I really felt about him.

  And now I’d never get the chance to.

  “Sure,” I said to Father Dominic. “I promise.”

  But I think even he knew I didn’t mean it.

  chapter

  nine

  Ghost busting is a tricky business.

  You’d think it would be easy, right? Like if a ghost’s bothering you, you just, you know, bust its chops and it’ll go away.

  Yeah. Doesn’t work that way much, unfortunately.

  Which is not to say that busting someone’s chops does not have therapeutic value. Especially for someone who, like me, might be grieving. Because that’s what I was doing, of course. Grieving for Jesse.

  Except—and I don’t know if this applies to all mediators or just me—I don’t really grieve like a normal person. I mean, I sat around and cried my eyes out after the realization first hit me that I was never going to see Jesse again.

  But then something happened. I stopped feeling sad and started feeling mad.

  Really mad. There I was, and it was after midnight, and I was extremely angry.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to keep my promise to Father D. I really did. But I just couldn’t.

  Any more than Jesse could apparently keep his promise to me.

  So it was only about fifteen minutes after my phone call to Father D. that I emerged from my bathroom—Jesse was gone, of course, so I could have changed in my room, but old habits die hard—in full ghost-busting regalia, including my tool belt and hooded sweatshirt, which even I will admit might seem a bit excessive for California in July. But it was nighttime, and that mist rolling in from the ocean in the wee hours can be chilly.

  I don’t want you to think I didn’t give serious thought to what Father D. had said about my telling my mom everything and getting her and the Ackermans out of there. I really did think about it.

  It’s just that the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. I mean, first of all, my mom is a television news journalist. She simply is not the type to believe in ghosts. She only believes in what she can see or, barring that, what has been proven to exist by science. The one time I did try to tell her, she totally did not understand. And I realized then that she never would.

  So how could I possibly go busting into her bedroom and tell her and her new husband that they have to get out of the house because a vengeful spirit is after me? She would be on the phone to her therapist back in New York, looking for communities where I could go to “rest,” so fast you wouldn’t believe it.

  So that plan was out.

  But that was all right, because I had a much better one. One that, really, I should have thought of right away, but I guess that whole seeing-the-skeleton-of-the-guy-I-love-being-hauled-out-of-a-hole-in-my-backyard thing really got to me, and so I didn’t think of it until I was on the phone with Father D.

  But once I’d come up with it, I realized it really was the perfect plan. Instead of waiting for Maria to come to me, I was simply going to go to her and, well…

  Send her back from where she came.

  Or reduce her to a mound of quivering gelatinous goo. Whichever came first.

  Because even though ghosts are, of course, already dead, they can still feel pain, just as people who lose a limb can still feel it itching from time to time. Ghosts know, when you plunge a knife into their sternum, that it should hurt, and so it does. The wound will even bleed for a while.

  Then, of course, they get over the shock of it, and the wound disappears. Which is discouraging, since the wounds they, in their turn, inflict upon me do not heal half so fast.

  But whatever. It works. More or less.

  The wound Maria de Silva had inflicted on me wasn’t visible, but that didn’t matter. What I was going to do to her certainly would be. With any luck, that husband of hers would be around and I could do the same to him.

  And what was going to happen if things didn’t work out that way, and the two of them got the best of me?

  Well, that was the coolest part of the whole thing: I didn’t even care. Really. I had cried out every last ounce of emotion in me, and now, I simply didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It really didn’t.

  I was numb.

  So numb that, when I swung my legs out my bedroom window and landed on the roof of the front porch—my usual form of exit when I didn’t want anyone inside to be aware I was up to something—I didn’t even care about the things that normally really mean stuff to me, like the moon, for instance, hanging over the bay, casting everything into black-and-gray shadow, and the scent of the giant pine to one side of the porch. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  I had just crossed the porch roof and was preparing to swing down from it when a glow that was brighter than the moon but much weaker than, say, the overhead in my bedroom, appeared behind me.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I thought it was Jesse. Don’t ask me why. I mean, it went against all logic. But whatever. My heart gave a happy lurch and I spun around….

  Maria was standing not five feet from me on the sloping, pine needle-strewn roof. She looked just as she had in that portrait over Clive Clemmings’s desk: elegant and otherworldly.

  Well, and why not? She isn’t of this world, now, is she?

  “Going somewhere, Susannah?” she asked me in her brittle, only slightly accented English.

  “I was,” I said, pushing my sweatshirt hood back. I had pulled my hair into a ponytail. Unattractive, I know, but I needed all the peripheral vision I could get. “But now that you’re here, I see I don’t have to. I can kick your bony butt here just as well as down at your stinking grave.”

  Maria raised her delicately arched black eyebrows. “Such language,” she said. I swear, if she’d had a fan on her, she’d have been using it, just like Scarlett O’Hara. “And what could I possibly have done to warrant such an unladylike tongue-lashing? You’ll catch more flies with honey, you know, than vinegar.”

  “You know good and well what you did,” I said, taking a step toward her. “Let’s start with the bugs in the orange juice.”

  She reached up and coyly smoothed back a strand of shining black hair that had escaped from her side ringlets.

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought you might like that one.”

  “But killing Dr. Cle
mmings?” I took another step forward. “That was even better. Because I imagine you didn’t have to kill him at all, did you? You just wanted the painting, right? The one of Jesse?”

  She made what in magazines they call a moue out of her mouth: You know, she kind of pursed her lips and looked pleased with herself at the same time.

  “Yes,” she said. “At first I wasn’t going to kill him. But when I saw the portrait—my portrait—above his desk, well, how could I not? He is not even related to me. Why should he have such a fine painting—and in his miserable little office, as well? That painting used to grace my dining room. It hung in splendor over a table with seating for twenty.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “My understanding is that none of your descendants wanted it. Your kids turned out to be nothing but a bunch of lowlifes and goons. Sounds like your parenting skills left a bit to be desired.”

  For the first time, Maria actually looked annoyed. She started to say something, but I interrupted her.

  “What I don’t get,” I said, “is what you wanted the painting for. The one of Jesse. I mean, what good is it to you? Unless you only took it to get me in trouble.”

  “Wouldn’t that be reason enough?” Maria inquired with a sneer.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Except that it didn’t work.”

  “Yet,” Maria said, with a certain amount of emphasis. “There is still time.”

  I shook my head. I just shook my head as I looked at her. “Gosh,” I said, mostly to myself. “Gosh, I’m going to hurt you.”

  “Oh, yes.” Maria tittered behind one lace-gloved hand. “I forgot. You must be very angry with me. He’s gone, isn’t he? Hector, I mean. That must be a great blow for you. I know how fond you were of him.”

  I could have jumped her right then. I probably should have. But it occurred to me that she might, you know, have some information on Jesse—how he was, or even where he was. Lame, I know, but look at it this way: On top of the whole, you know, love thing, he was one of the best friends I ever had.