It was pitch dark down there, absolutely black. I could bring my hand within inches of my eyes and still not see it. I sat on the floor just behind the boiler, staring, blind, feeling sorry for myself. More than half an hour went by. All the while, I could hear the screams and giggles of my friends upstairs.
Finally, I heard the basement door open. A flashlight beam shone on the cellar stairs. Jonathan was the Ghost Hunter. He’d already collected all the others. I could hear them murmuring to each other.
“He must be here. Where else could he be?”
Laughing nervously, they came thumping down the stairs behind the flashlight beam. When they reached the bottom, Jonathan swept the light across the pitch darkness. It went over me once, then, a second later, snapped back to pick out my face.
“There you are! I see you!” they shouted together.
Someone — Rosemary, I think — said, “I’ll get the lights.”
The basement lights came on. And the next thing I knew, Rosemary let out a high, ragged, terrible scream. I lifted my eyes, following her horrified gaze. Then I started screaming too.
There, just above my head, Amanda’s corpse dangled in the air, one end of a rope tied around a heating pipe in the ceiling, the other end pulled tight around her neck.
She had been there, right above me, the whole time I was sitting in the dark.
2. She Haunts Us
The aftermath of Amanda’s death was ugly, especially for me. The coroner had no trouble deciding she’d committed suicide and he also had no trouble figuring out why. I was forced to tell the police the whole story: the pregnancy and our awful argument. This got back to Jonathan and the others, of course. I won’t say they blamed me or anything, but they didn’t exactly forgive me, either. After that, we’d see each other around campus from time to time, and we were always pleasant enough with each other, but their underlying coldness toward me was unmistakable. To my great sorrow, the days of our true friendship were over.
When I graduated, I moved to New York City. I didn’t see any of them again for a long time.
Seven years went by, in fact. Some hungry times, a lot of hard work, then I started to make some progress. My first couple of books came out. I scored some movie sales. I hit some bestseller lists. Things began to go well.
But all the while, I was aware that, in some way, what happened with Amanda continued to cast a shadow over my life. I had never been close with my family, but now I cut off communications with them altogether. I had girlfriends from time to time, but I never established another long-term relationship. Most of the people I called friends were really just casual acquaintances. Somehow, after Amanda, there was always a part of myself that I kept in reserve, that I was never quite willing to share with anyone else.
One day, in early December, I came home from a party to find a message on my answering machine. The message was from Jonathan Wilson. He said he was in New York and he wanted to meet with me. You would think I’d be surprised to hear from him, but the truth was, I’d been expecting that call — expecting it for as long as I could remember.
The next evening, Jonathan and I met at my local tavern, McGlade’s. It was a cold, drizzly day. I stepped into the bar and stood brushing the damp off my overcoat as I looked around for him. At first, I didn’t see him. That is, I must have passed over him without recognizing him. Then I did. He was seated at a table in back by the brick fireplace. He was staring into a glass of red wine. He was a shocking sight. Only seven years had passed since I’d last seen him, but he seemed to have aged decades. He was thin and sallow and drawn.
I sat down with him. Ordered a drink. Before the waitress even returned with the glass, Jonathan had begun to tell me his story. Things had gone badly for him since school, he said. He’d been ill off and on. He’d abandoned his composing. Gone from job to job until he finally ended up at his father’s investment firm, where he was doing only moderately well. The same was true of the others, he told me, the other three who’d been at his parents’ house with us that Christmas. Rosemary had struggled with drugs and alcohol. David had been through an ugly divorce that left him depressed and nearly broke. Lucy had gone through a series of abusive relationships, including one that ended with her in the hospital with a couple of broken ribs.
“It’s about her somehow,” Jonathan told me. “It’s about Amanda. We all feel it. She haunts us. She won’t let us move on.” Then, after a pause, he said, “I read about you in the papers all the time. You seem to be doing well.”
It felt like an accusation. I was the one most closely connected to Amanda’s death, after all. If anyone was responsible for it, obviously it was me. And I had my problems, as I said, but basically he was right: I was doing well. And I said so.
Jonathan stared into his wine a long, silent moment. Then he looked up rather sharply and said, “We have to go back. We’ve all agreed. We’re going to meet up at the house in a week. We’re going to spend Christmas there again.”
“What’s that supposed to accomplish?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. None of us knows. We just have to do it. Will you come?”
I said I would think about it. And I did think about it, all that night. And I thought: That time of my life, even that Christmas at the Wilson house before the tragedy — those were the happiest days I’d ever known. For all the success I’d had, nothing else had ever come close. I thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe if we could go back, if we could capture some of that spirit, lay our guilt about Amanda’s death to rest... maybe we could be happy again.
I called Jonathan in the morning and told him I would drive up to the house next weekend.
3. A Voice in the Storm
I left the city on a gray Saturday morning and headed upstate. When I was about fifty miles north of Manhattan, it began to snow. Pretty soon, the grass by the side of the highway was dusted with white.
I pressed on. The snow kept getting heavier and heavier. The traveling wasn’t all that bad as long as I was on the thruway, but once I got past Albany, once I got off the main roads and into the back country, the conditions deteriorated fast. Soon, the snow was falling so thickly I could barely see — and when I could see, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, all I could make out were the vague hulking shapes of the surrounding forest. The roads here had not been ploughed. They wound perilously through narrower and narrower passages between higher and higher drifts. I probably should have pulled over someplace, tried to find a motel and waited out the storm. But the idea of this reunion had captured my imagination. I didn’t want to get there late. I didn’t want to miss anything.
I turned on the radio, hoping to hear the weather — news — any sound of civilization. Nothing came out of the speakers except a steady hiss of static. I hit the search button. The digital readout spun from number to number without stopping. A murmur of voices rose and faded. A whisper of music died beneath the unbroken windlike sough.
Then, after another moment or two, the tuner seemed to catch hold of something. For several seconds, I could hear — soft beneath the interference — the wistful sound of an acoustic guitar. It was playing a sad, lilting melody I had never heard before. A woman’s high, clear, sweet, and mournful voice was singing.
“I wait for you,” she sang. “I wait for you.”
I turned from the windshield and stared at the radio. That voice... It was far away, riddled with static... but I recognized it...
Just then, the car went into a skid. I faced forward — but too late. I had lost control and was sliding, blind, through the whiteness.