Beyond

  So here’s what we figured out—

  Leo has been with me for a long time. Since I was little. Watching and waiting to take me down.

  But now he’s not hiding in my shadow anymore. I saw him at the clinic, heard his voice. I’m sure he was that thing breaking out of the cooler at the shop and scratching under the floorboards of my room.

  But who knows why he chose me to haunt for all these years?

  And I never really lost him, when they brought me back from the dead and I broke away. I didn’t leave him behind.

  It’s as if on my return trip to the living after I got nailed, the gate to the other side got left open a crack, setting him free. So he’s not just a shadow now—he’s a real ghost.

  And he’s gotten stronger. Before, my shadow would manipulate my body to make me hurt myself. But on the night of the landslide it stretched beyond the limits of my flesh, reaching out to where those remains lay buried, bringing the hillside crashing down.

  Then I realized something else when I was thinking about the familiar stretch of road that got buried in the slide. The place was so familiar to me because that was where Constable Granger found me walking the center line in my sleep. And that’s not the only time they caught me wandering unconscious on that road. It’s like I was always headed there.

  Everybody has a theory about why I’ve been sleepwalking. Mom thinks it means I want to run away. Dad calls it a death wish. The doctor says it’s a side effect of my brain injury. But they’re wrong—I’m sure of it now.

  It’s been my shadow all along. He led me to that spot, near his hidden grave. I just know it. Maybe so he could bring that hill down on me and bury me with him. Or maybe he was trying to get me run over on the way. But my shadow is behind my sleepwalking.

  It wants me dead. I just don’t know why.

  “Want some?” Lexi asks, offering me the bowl of popcorn she’s been munching on.

  “It’s not really popcorn kind of viewing for me.”

  “I know. It’s just that I eat when I’m nervous. Or freaked out.”

  “You’re freaked? I just found out a dead guy’s been haunting me since I was a kid.”

  On the screen, Leo’s laughing and wrestling with the family dog. I shake my head. That’s not the ghost I know—the dark thing he’s changed into.

  Watching him, I feel a familiar shudder squirming up my spine.

  Glancing back quickly, I find only empty air.

  But I can sense it right now. My shadow. Him. In the room with us. So close. Like he’s peering over my shoulder to watch these scenes from his life.

  “You okay?” Lexi asks.

  “No. I’m not.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s here. He’s here.”

  “Him?” Lexi frowns; then her eyebrows shoot up. She points to the guy on the screen.

  I nod.

  “Here in the room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Behind me.”

  “No way.” She gets up to take a look around, sees nothing. “So. What do we do?”

  I just shake my head. What can I do?

  “But it only ever hurts you if you piss it off, right? I mean, if you … cheat on it.”

  “I—I haven’t done anything like that.”

  I’m not telling just Lexi, but my ghost too. I’ve been playing by its rules. Why won’t it leave me alone?

  “Maybe it’s just trying to scare you, then, like it’s been doing lately. Just … here to haunt you or whatever. You ever try talking to it? To him?”

  “Just when I tell him to go away and leave me alone.”

  “How about if I give it a try?”

  “What for?”

  “Can’t hurt, right?”

  I shrug. “Okay, I guess.”

  “All right. How do I start?” She thinks about it a moment. “Um, Leo? You there?” She waits for an answer. “Can you maybe give us a sign you’re here? Anything? Flick the lights or something?”

  Silence.

  “He doesn’t do tricks,” I tell her.

  “Right. Okay, then. How about we get to the main question? What do you want?” She pauses. Silence. “If you want something, you’ve got to let us know somehow.”

  Not a whisper.

  I don’t like this. We should stop.

  “Why are you so stuck on Jane?”

  I’m about to say “Quit it” when my thoughts start to go fuzzy. There’s a buzzing in my head.

  No, stop! I try to speak, but my voice won’t work. Don’t!

  My head’s spinning, and I almost fall off the chair. He’s taking control. Can’t fight it.

  My left hand moves in my lap. I look down, watching it like it belongs to someone else. Then its shadow stretches up, reaching over to Lexi’s desk, dragging my fingers along with it. I don’t know what it’s going for till it grabs a pen. There’s a spiral-bound notebook beside the keyboard. My hand comes to rest on top of a page of Lexi’s notes.

  Holding the pen tight in my fist, my hand starts scratching at the paper.

  “What are you doing?” Lexi’s standing right next to me, but she sounds so far away.

  Something’s taking shape on the page. The rapid strokes are sketching a dark figure in black ink.

  “Jane, you still with me?” She passes her hand in front of my eyes, but I keep drawing. “Don’t screw around.”

  I can’t answer.

  “What is that?” Lexi leans in to look. “A bird?”

  A bird? Yes. That’s it. Coming into focus now—wings stretched out, a curved beak, the feet ending in claws. Maybe a crow.

  “Jane, come on. Say something.”

  My voice is lost. No words will come.

  “Leo?” she tries. “Is that you?”

  I lean on the pen too heavy, ripping the paper as I slash three lines beside the crow, making a Y.

  “Y? Yes? Is that a yes?”

  I retrace the letter, tearing deeper.

  “Hold on.” Lexi lifts my hand so she can turn to a new page.

  I start filling the fresh paper with a rough square, sketching a shallow triangle on top. I dig at the page, darkening the outline, then making a small rectangle standing inside the square. Like a door.

  “A house?” Lexi guesses.

  My hand pauses, then slashes another Y.

  “Your house, Leo?”

  N

  I go back to the sketch, drawn cartoon-simple, and start inking it in. Turning the house black. I add something on the top, scrawling curved lines sticking up from opposite sides of the roof, each ending in a point, making what looks like horns.

  A house with horns.

  “Whose house?” Lexi presses. “Did something bad happen there?”

  Y

  My strokes are getting more agitated with her questions, tearing through the page. She lifts my hand again and turns to a fresh one.

  “What happened? What bad thing?”

  My fist is shaking, the knuckles gone white.

  “Is that … where you died?”

  I carve three long slashes across the page. Then I go over them, making them deeper. Deeper.

  Y

  Y

  Y

  Ripping and shredding through. A wild swipe sends the notebook flying off the desk. “Okay, enough! Stop it!”

  But I can’t. I keep going, scraping into the desktop.

  Y

  Y

  Y

  “Jane, wake up now. Wake! Up!” I feel Lexi shaking my shoulder. “Snap out of it!”

  Lexi makes a grab for the pen. But I’m too quick. I watch my fist pull away from her, rising up high and then plunging down. Stabbing the pen into my right wrist.

  I feel only a faint sting through my numb haze. When my hand pulls up again, blood spills out of the hole I’ve made on the inside of my wrist. I try another stab, but Lexi catches me. We struggle, and our skulls crack together. I lose my grip on the pen.

  And it’s l
ike the lights come back on inside my head, burning off the fog. The pain hits me then.

  Blood runs down my palm, dripping off my fingers. Deep red.

  “Jane? You there?” Lexi stares at me like I’m a stranger.

  “Yeah,” I gasp through my teeth. “I’m here.”

  My blood spatters the notebook lying on the floor, staining the pages.

  Painting that black house red.

  Down in the basement, I’m doing laundry. Just trying to keep busy and act normal, as if nothing’s wrong, like that will make it true. But it does calm me a little, this everyday stuff.

  Our basement is a jungle of old junk. Boxes stacked high and forgotten. The ground-level window above lets in a gray wash of light from the stormy day.

  I’m tossing the load in the dryer. I try to do it one-handed, with my right wrist still stinging from where I stabbed myself.

  Lexi freaked at all the blood and wanted to get me to the emergency room. But the wound wasn’t that deep. And I’m so sick of hospitals. Besides, that would mean too many questions. How was I going to explain it? So we got me cleaned up, carefully, and Nurse Lexi bandaged my wrist. I just have to stick to long sleeves for a while and hide it from my parents. They can’t help me with what’s happening anyway. Can’t protect me.

  I remember taking Dad’s self-defense course for women over at the community center. It was a police outreach kind of thing, where he showed us all the moves—kicks, punches, eye gouges, scratches, how to stab with a nail file and claw with your keys. I know how to fight back, but I can’t hit something that isn’t even there.

  Lexi’s feeling so guilty, like it was her fault because she tried interrogating my ghost, making him mad. She’s texting me every ten minutes, checking to make sure I’m okay. And we’ve been trying to figure out what it all means. Piecing together my vision of the bald man and the crow with my drawings of the bird and the black house with horns.

  I slam the dryer shut and set it for a half hour. As it starts up, the lights dim. We get a lot of brownouts during windstorms.

  I can hear it gusting outside now. Looking up at the small window, I feel a draft brush past me with a hushed sound.

  I turn to go.

  Someone’s sitting on the stairs.

  It’s him! The hood of his sweatshirt is pulled up, shadowing his face, so all I see are his eyes, shining amber.

  I back up into some boxes and grab for whatever I can use as a weapon. I find a golf club and hold it out in front of me.

  “Get away from me!”

  He doesn’t move. Just watches. He looks so real and solid sitting there.

  “What? What do you want?”

  He stares into me, those eyes burning bright.

  You.

  I recoil at the voice in my head. He’s ten feet from me, but it’s like his lips are pressed to my ear.

  “Why? Why me? What did I do?”

  There’s a long silence, with nothing but the rumble of the dryer and the drum of my heartbeat.

  It was always you.

  “Leave me alone. Go! Away!”

  He just sits there blocking my escape.

  My sweaty palms are slick on the handle of the club. I’m so scared, and so sick of being scared. I have to try something.

  “I know who you are. Leo Gage.”

  Those eyes flare with yellow fire.

  “I know something bad happened to you.”

  He steps down the stairs to the basement floor.

  “M-maybe if you tell me, I can help.”

  No!

  What am I doing? I don’t want to make this thing angry. I know what it’s capable of. But what else can I do?

  “Just try. P-please. Tell me … tell me about the bald man with the bird.”

  SHUT UP!

  His voice is deafening inside my skull. I try to back away, but I’m cornered against the boxes.

  His eyes blaze so bright it hurts to look at them.

  Come with me. I’ll make it quick. Then we can stay together.

  I’m shaking so badly I can’t even speak.

  I feel him reaching out to me. Into me. And—

  A squealing sound cuts through the air. The basement door opens above on its creaky hinges and a stream of light spills down the stairs.

  “Jane?” Mom calls. “You down there?”

  I gasp like I’m waking up, sucking in a deep breath.

  Spinning around, I scan the basement. Nothing. I’m alone.

  “Jane?”

  It takes me a second to get my voice back. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “Phone for you. It’s Lexi.”

  My rubbery legs barely hold me up.

  “You coming?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t forget we have a doctor’s appointment later.” Mom walks away, and I want to yell, Wait for me!

  I move while she’s still within earshot. Quick! Before he comes back.

  Stumbling up the stairs, I trip, but don’t fall. I slam the door shut behind me, leaning against the wall and stare at the doorknob as if it’s going to start turning any second.

  When it doesn’t, I go down the hall and pick up the phone with trembling hands.

  “Lexi?”

  “Hey, Jane, I found it!”

  So good to hear her voice right now. Something to hold on to. I take a steadying breath.

  “Found what?”

  “A house with horns.”

  The nail has to come out.

  Dr. Simon, my neurologist, just broke the news. Me, Mom and Dad sit facing him in his office.

  “The risk factors of not extracting it are too great,” he says, showing us why on his computer. “The main concern is blood flow. The nail is lodged here in the cerebrum, right next to the medial occipital artery and a number of smaller blood vessels. While it hasn’t shifted, the surrounding scar tissue continues to build up, putting pressure on these vessels. Even a minor blockage could be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?” Mom asks.

  “It could possibly cause a stroke, or brain-cell atrophy if the area is starved for blood. And because this region is part of the visual cortex, her sight could be affected.”

  The image on the screen is from my latest scan. It shows my brain colored in bright blues and greens, with a small area of orange. The nail itself is black and has these dark streaks radiating out from it, as if it’s shining with some black light.

  “Why does the nail look like that?” I ask. “What’s with those lines sticking out of it?”

  “Metallic objects can cause a distortion in the imaging. This is called an aliasing effect. It’s what gives the nail that glow. The darker blue around it is the scar tissue, which has grown incrementally with each new scan we take.”

  “And this orange patch here.” I lean over to point it out. “Does that mean anything?”

  “That just indicates a spike in brain activity during the scan, in your visual cortex. Could be caused by a bright light.”

  No, it wasn’t a light. That’s what my brain looks like when I’m seeing him. When I had my freakout in the scanner.

  “How soon can we get this done, then?” Dad asks.

  “I’ve already consulted with a neurosurgeon. He’s available later this week, and the operation can be performed right here at Mercy.”

  Dr. Simon runs through the operation with us. Real horror-movie stuff. Sawing off a portion of my skull to dig the nail out, cleaning away the scar tissue. The whole procedure takes about eight hours.

  Mom’s taking notes. She and Dad grill the doc. I’m not really listening to all the details. Don’t tell me how, just do it! I’m ready.

  I know, my haunting started way before I got nailed. So I’m not fooling myself that this surgery is going to cure me of my ghost.

  But I’m hoping it might put Leo back to sleep. He left me alone for years between the train and the nail gun. He let me live.

  But with the nail in me he seems stronger somehow. I can see h
im, hear him. It’s almost like that sliver of metal is keeping the gate between this world and the great beyond open.

  So cut it out. And slam that gate shut. Send him back to hiding in my shadow and buy me some time to figure out how to get rid of him permanently.

  There must be a way. Now that I know who he really is—or was. If I can find out what happened to him, maybe I’ve got a chance. We’re getting closer, me and Lexi. She found a house with horns.

  Not a house, really. Lexi says it’s what they used to call a trappers’ hut. From early in the last century, when the Raincoast was just wilderness. The first settlers were animal trappers and fur traders who built these huts out in the woods. The horns are actually chimneys made from cans and tin drums welded together, with smaller cans on top. In the historical photo she dug up, they do kind of look like horns, thinning almost to points at the top.

  So now we’re trying to find out if any still exist. There must be one. That’s where Leo died.

  “Jane?”

  I snap back to see Dr. Simon staring at me.

  “What?”

  “Do you have any questions?” he asks.

  I look over at my brain on the screen, the nail shining darkly.

  “No. Let’s just do it.”

  “Are you afraid?” my psychiatrist asks.

  I stare back at Dr. Iris.

  “Afraid of what?”

  My life has turned into a multiple choice of horrors. Pick one.

  “You’re going in for major surgery,” she says.

  “Well, yeah, that’s scary stuff. But I kind of want to get it over with. Can’t keep walking around like a ticking time bomb. Then I think, what if something goes wrong and when I wake up—if I wake up—I’m not me anymore?”

  “There’s always some risk involved, but these operations are very precise. Neurosurgeons take every precaution. You’ll be in good hands.”

  Easy for her to say. She’s not having her skull sawed open.

  “But it just takes one wrong twitch of the surgeon’s fingers and I’ll be a drooling vegetable. What if he sneezes when he’s cutting?”

  “It might be best to focus on what you can control,” she tells me. “Like lowering your stress level.”

  Right. I can’t even control my own body. The bandage on my wrist is showing a little, so I tug on my sleeve to hide it.

  I’m sick of being stared at—here, in class, across the dinner table. I get up and walk around the room, avoiding her eyes.