“When the borders between the worlds are thin.”
“Exactly. How do you know that?”
“From Thomas’s grandmother,” I say. “How do you?”
“From ...”
She hesitates, and my heart sinks.
“You’ve been talking to Christy,” I say, “and now we’re chapter three in his next book.”
“We might already be,” she says, “but, no. I was messaging with this woman who responded to an e-mail I sent to a fairy-tale site.”
“You told some stranger about all of this?”
“Yes. No. Not exactly. She doesn’t know our full names or anything. But she’s really up on all of this stuff, and I’ve learned a lot from her already. I printed out our chat to give to you.”
“How do you know she’s not some cyber-stalker?” I ask.
“I guess I don’t. But I find myself trusting her all the same.”
I have to think about this for a moment, but by doing so, I’m making Maxine anxious.
“Imogene?” she says. “Are you still there? You’re not mad, are you?”
“No, it’s cool. I guess we need help. It’s just ... I’m used to dealing with my problems on my own—you know, without dragging half the world into it.”
“I’m sorry. I should have asked you first, but I thought you’d say no, and I think we really need some help, and since you nixed the idea of talking to Christy, I just had to—”
“It’s okay,” I say, breaking in. “Really.” I hear a weird kind of honking sound from her end of the line. “Where are you anyway?”
“Almost at school. I’m walking up to the front door right now, so I have to go.”
“Okay. Say hi to nobody for me.”
“Can I tell everyone you’re all blue?”
I laugh. “No, only Barbie and Ken.”
“So we’re okay? About me contacting Esmeralda?”
“We’re always okay, Maxine. That’s the deal with being best friends.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
“Have fun at school,” I tell her.
“Don’t get too blue,” she says with a giggle, then cuts the connection.
I cradle the phone, smiling. Yeah, everything that’s happening is weird and freaky, but I’ve got Maxine and Thomas on my side. Hell, I’ve even got my mom. And maybe I did used to have to deal with the crap in my life by myself, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
My coffee’s gone cold, but I’m too lazy to zap it in the microwave, so I just take it back to my room to grab some clean clothes to put on after I have a shower.
And who’s waiting for me but my friendly neighborhood ghost, standing on the fire escape outside my window. He’s giving me a goggle-eyed look—picking up on the blue-skinned wonder that is now me, I guess—but I’m not feeling particularly charitable toward him at the moment.
I open the window and glare at him.
“So now you’re a perv, too?” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re peeping at my window—that’s what pervs do.” I can see I’ve struck a chord, and that really ticks me off. How often has he been skulking out there, watching me?
“That’s pretty low,” I tell him. “Have you been enjoying the shows?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever been here.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true.”
He’s acting so stiff and affronted that I find myself believing him.
“You’re blue,” he says.
“How observant.”
“Why are you so mad at me?”
“Well, duh. Could it be because you sicced some heavy-duty soul-suckers on me?”
“I didn’t,” he says. “At least I didn’t on purpose.”
“And the difference is?”
“I just wanted you to believe me. The fairies said they could make it so that you could see them. I didn’t know all of this would happen.”
“So now it’s my fault for not believing you?”
“You’re impossible,” he says.
“This from a ghost.”
He sighs. “I only wanted to be friends. For you to like me and believe me, but I screwed everything up.”
“No argument from me on that front,” I tell him. “So why are you here? What do you want?”
“I’ve found out a way that we can deal with the darkness—the things that live in there are called anamithim.”
“Yeah, I know.”
He gives me a puzzled look, but I don’t fill him in.
“Anyway, there’s a way we can call them to us,” he says.
He goes on to explain about the ring of salt and the offering of unsalted, sugary bread.
“And then what?” I ask.
“Then we convince them to take someone else in your place.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Oh, I know. It sounds terrible. But I don’t mean someone nice. I was thinking of Brent.”
“I hate to admit it,” I tell him, “but that’s almost tempting.”
“Look, the only reason I’m telling you is because I can’t make the bread or the circle or any of that. But I’ll be there with you.”
I don’t say anything, not because I agree or disagree with what he wants to do, but because it’s got me thinking. This would be my chance to come face to face with the soul-eaters, but they wouldn’t be able to touch me. Only then what?
“I wouldn’t ask you,” Adrian says, “but there’s no one else except for the fairies, and I can’t trust them.”
“Well, duh.”
“So will you?”
I shake my head. “Not to sic them on somebody else—not even somebody like Brent, though it would serve him right. But I like the idea of being able to summon the soul-eaters and them not being able to touch me.”
“Why? What would you do?”
“I don’t know. But there’s got to be some way they can be hurt.”
“I don’t think they can be. The only thing you can do is bargain with them, but you have to show them respect when you do it.”
“Everything should be respected,” I say, “unless they prove they don’t deserve it.”
“Like Brent.”
“Brent doesn’t deserve respect,” I say. “But he doesn’t deserve to have his soul swallowed up either. That’s just a bit too harsh.”
“Why is everybody so concerned about Brent’s feelings and Brent’s future?” Adrian asks. “You think he cares about anybody else’s?”
“Who else is concerned?” I ask.
“The angel who told me how to summon the darkness.”
“Well, maybe it’s not so much what Brent does or doesn’t deserve, so much as what it would mean for us. You know, our own karma for doing something like that to him.”
“So he can just push everybody around and beat them up.”
I shake my head. “He ever tries to lay a hand on me outside of school, and I’ll feed it back to him in pieces. Simple self-defense. But that’s not the point.”
“No,” Adrian says. “The point is I’ve doomed you, and there’s nothing I can do to make it up except ...”
His voice trails off. I can tell by his face that he’s said more than he wanted to.
“Except what?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says, and fades away on me before I can press him further.
“One day,” I tell the air where he might still be, invisibly watching me, “I’ll figure out a way to smack you in the head for doing the Invisible Man on me like this.”
There’s no response, but I’m not expecting one.
I turn from the window. I don’t feel like taking a shower now, not with a possible audience to follow the proceedings. Adrian can go to one of the peep shows on Palm Street if he wants to get a cheap thrill.
In my head, I can see the long day stretching out in front of me for what feels like forever. I suppose I could do some homework, or make a plan or something. Instead, I go into
the living room and switch on the TV. I flick through the channels and it’s all crap.
Sighing, I return to my bedroom. I can’t see Adrian, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still hanging around. Walking over to the closet, I open the door and call Pelly s name.
I think as I beat a hasty retreat from Imogene s window, all I ever seem able to do is annoy her more. But what was I going to say? There’s nothing I can do to make it up except sacrifice myself in your place? Considering the way Imogene feels about me, she’d probably say, “Please do. And could you get a move on while you’re at it?”
I look up and see her closing her window.
Even with her skin all blue, she’s gorgeous.
I turn away and start down the alley, wondering how it happened. For all I know, she did it on purpose. Tomorrow is Halloween, after all. She could be planning to go as Mystique from X-Men ...
I stop dead in my tracks.
Halloween.
How could I have forgotten?
It’s the one night when the dead can walk freely in the world, and supposedly sometimes even make physical contact. I don’t know the details—-it’s nothing that ever interested me before—but I know where I can find out.
So instead of heading back to the school, I go the other way, through a few blocks of old run-down tenements until I get to the crumbling stone walls of All Souls Cemetery. If I was alive, I’d have to use the old rusted gates of the entrance, or climb up the thick vines that almost cover the walls, but being a ghost, I can just walk through those old stone walls. And I do.
It’s a funny place—a scary place, if you want to know the truth, even in the daylight. Or at least it is to me. I’d never have gone there when I was alive and I don’t like going even now, when I’m dead and I know nothing can hurt me. It’s not like a normal graveyard—more like something out of a Southern Gothic novel, full of dead and dying trees, old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts, with paths of uneven cobblestones winding narrowly between them. There are regular gravestones, too, but mostly the place is one of those architectural follies, out of place in this time and age.
It’s probably been fifty years since anybody was buried here, and the only reason it still exists the way it does is that the Crowsea Heritage Society has stymied any potential developers with a wall of paperwork up at City Hall.
I’m here because this is where Bobby Novak was buried—the first ghost I met after I died. Bobby’s what they used to call a juvenile delinquent. These days a twelve-year-old gangbanger would make Bobby look like a pacifist, but that doesn’t stop him from channeling this James Dean attitude with his greased-back hair, white T-shirt and jeans, the pointy-toed black boots, and the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips.
When we first met, I asked him why he still smoked, because he couldn’t get anything out of it. He just laughed.
“I died with this pack of smokes,” he said, pulling them out to show me. “I had seven left the day I wrapped my Mustang around that tree, and there’s still seven here; doesn’t matter how many I smoke.”
“But what’s the point?”
“Well, I’m not going to get lung cancer.”
“But you can’t taste them.”
“Sure, I can,” he said. “They were with me when I died, so they’re part of what I am now. And besides, they give me something to do.”
And I guess it’s true. Whenever I see him, he’ll be leaning against some building, or sitting at a bus stop, smoking his cigarettes and watching people, this small, knowing smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Everything’s got a funny side in his view of the world.
I guess he was considered a hard case, and maybe he would be still, but it doesn’t matter. Alive, he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever have been my friend, and that isn’t changed by the fact that we’re both dead. But he tolerates me when we happen to run into each other.
There aren’t a lot of us hanging on to whatever echoes of life we can, because most people who die don’t stick around.
He doesn’t have a crypt or a building, just a stone in a far corner of the graveyard where this old rose bush has gone wild and turned into a thorny thicket that gives up a few flowers every so often—reluctantly, I always think. His stone has his name—Robert Novak—and his dates of birth and death. Lower on the stone, someone’s scratched “My Angel” inside a heart.
“Ellen Sue did that,” he told me. “She was my steady, and I suppose my dying broke her heart.”
Bobby’s sitting on the steps of a nearby mausoleum when I reach his gravestone.
“Hey, four eyes,” he says.
Yeah, we definitely would never have been friends.
“I was wondering if you could help me with something,” I ask.
He shrugs. “You never know, so try me.”
So I ask him if it’s true that we can actually interact physically with the world of the living on Halloween, and if it is, how do you do it.
“You’re just checking into this now?” he says. “Christ, kid. It’s the only day of the year we can go out to get drunk and laid.” Then he laughs. “But I guess those aren’t exactly going concerns for you, are they?”
“Funny.”
“I thought so.”
He lights a cigarette from the one he was smoking and flicks the butt into the dry grass, but it disappears before it touches the ground.
“So it is true,” I say.
“Oh, yeah. Just make sure you’re at the exact place you died when the moon comes over the horizon tomorrow. That’ll be at two fifteen in the afternoon this year.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugs. “How do you not?”
“What if there’s no moon?”
I’m thinking of nights when the sky’s dark except for stars. He laughs again. “There’s always a moon, kid. You just can’t see it some of the time.”
“So when it sets, we go back to being ghosts?” I ask. “Nope. We’re good until the dawn. Moonrise to sunrise.”
“Which this year ...?”
“Is seven fifteen, sharp. Nice tidy numbers. Though I’d show up early anyway, just to be on the safe side. Something like this you don’t want to miss because your watch is running late. Do that and you’re screwed. You’ll have to wait for another whole year.”
“Right.”
“So what are you planning on?” he asks.
“Maybe I’m going to get laid.”
He breaks out laughing. “Yeah, right.”
I want to tell him off, but even though I know he can’t hurt me, I’m still too chicken. Instead I just thank him for his help and try to leave before he thinks up some new witty put-down. But with Bobby, that’s never going to happen.
“Don’t forget a rubber!” he calls after me.
I pretend I didn’t hear.
I wait until lunch hour before I go to the thrift store to look for doll and children’s clothes like Imogene asked me to. I don’t have much luck with doll clothes—mostly what they have is much too frilly and girly, more suitable for Mom’s doll collection that she pretends she bought for me—but there are lots of choices in the baby and toddler clothes section. I’m not sure how many fairies we’re outfitting, so I get enough for ten of them: T-shirts, regular shirts, vests, jeans, and two of the cutest little pairs of overalls.
Back at the school, I stuff my buys into my locker and look at my watch. I have just enough time to check my e-mail. The good thing about never being tardy, never really missing any school—when I get sick it’s almost always on a holiday or the weekend, which is totally unfair—is that I didn’t get in trouble for coming in late this morning. And I’d probably be okay if I was late getting to my first afternoon class, too, but why push it?
There’s a machine free when I go into the computer lab, so I quickly log on.
Yes, there’s a message from Esmeralda:
Date: Thurs, 30 Oct 2003 12:23:16 -0800 From:
[email protected] Subject: Re: The dark side of Faerie To:
[email protected] yahoo.com
Hello Maxine,
I’ve had some luck tracking down more information on the anamithim for you. It appears that they aren’t fairies—or at least not exactly fairies. Apparently they can appear in many forms and have been here since the dawn of time—though I think I already mentioned that this morning, when I explained the enmity between them and the first people and their descendants.
The most recent information I uncovered is that they’re also known as the Adversary—and not simply the way Christians refer to Lucifer. They were the snake in Eden, the Titans banished by Zeus and the other young gods, the unseen terrors that waited just beyond primitive man’s campfires ... .Well, you get the idea.
The only useful thing I’ve found so far is that the shine or light that attracts them to people such as your friend Imogene can also be used to repel them, although how that’s accomplished I’ve yet to discover.
I shall continue my research and hopefully, if we can chat tonight, I’ll have more concrete information to share with you.
Yours,
Esmeralda
I hear a bell and realize I’m going to be late for my next class, so I respond with a quick “Thanks, I’ll talk to you tonight,” and sign off, gather my books, and hurry down the hall.
Jerry Fielder appears out of nowhere near my math class—flying solo, without his ever-present hero Brent at his side. He tries to trip me, but I do a deft sidestep that surprises both of us and make it to my class in time and in one piece.
I don’t catch my breath until we’re five minutes in— boring math, though only boring because I’m about ten chapters ahead of the rest of the class. I haven’t run into any of the problems that some of the other students obviously have, because most of our time is taken up with Ms. Rice explaining stuff that I figured out a couple of weeks ago.
So I tune them out and sit there with my textbook open on my desk. I think about Imogene with her blue skin and the weird creatures that live in her closet. I think about the anamithim and how the shine might be used to repel them. I also think about Jerry Fielder and wish I was big enough and strong enough, not to mention brave enough, to give him a taste of his own medicine.