“She feels different from the other spirit?”
“Yeah, but I want all of them gone for my family’s sake.”
Eileen reached into her big bag, taking out a small device. She turned it on and lifted it up to Gavin.
“Do you mind if I set this recorder down on a table?” There was an antique white one by the door. “It’ll capture sounds, and I can replay the tape to see if this ghost is trying to communicate through channels that we don’t hear. And I have a few more I’ll put throughout the house. But I might be able to expel your spirit or spirits before we get any EVPs.”
“Electronic voice phenomena?”
He had been studying.
“That’s right.” She seemed pleased as she put down the recorder. Then she brought out a square, boxy thing that looked like the phones everyone was using. When she turned it on and waited, then slowly moved it around her, I guessed it must’ve been either a temperature gauge or something that read electricity in the air. Either way, I was screwed. But she still hadn’t seen me, so I guess that was good news.
“I’m getting a high reading,” she said. “Your spirits could be biding their time, watching us even now. I certainly feel their coolness. This happened in the other house I visited.”
“Constanza said you chased a ghost out of that one.”
“Yes. He was a sad man who’d overdosed. Helping him to move on was a blessing. I’m part of a group who studies these things, so we knew just what to do for him.”
Hell, she just might get to chalk up another ghost banishment tonight.
Gavin was finally coming down the stairs. “As far as these two spirits are concerned, there’s been one in particular that’s been at me. The other psychic who was here said it was a poltergeist, so I thought the dark spirit that we all saw fly out the window was it. But then I got to thinking—why didn’t it look like the spirit in Wendy’s pictures?”
“Constanza told me about the photos.” Her voice was sweet, and I imagined that she could get just about anyone to talk to her. Even screwed spirits. “May I see those pictures?”
“I’ve got them right here on my phone. I’ll also tell you about the experience I just had… and what’s gone on with one of the spirits before.”
He reached the bottom of the stairs, and I decided that it was now or never to attempt an escape.
The door was pretty tightly shut, but if there’s one thing I was learning, it’s that there’s always an opening, no matter how small. As a ghost, I recognized the wispy needle of light on the side of the door, where age had warped the wood and left an opening that maybe a microorganism could fit through.
I could change my shape, but would I be able to get that thin? And how long would it take me to get my entire, snaking essence through? God, why hadn’t I been an anorexic?
I didn’t have a choice about what I was or wasn’t now, because Eileen was walking toward Gavin, getting ready to stride straight through me, her heels clicking on the marble as she put that reader into her purse and Gavin handed her his phone.
The last thing I needed was to be stabbed.
I don’t know how I did it, but I rolled out of the way just as she stepped right where I’d been, her pump heel slicing down until it touched marble instead of me.
Have you ever been so damned sick that you had to literally drag yourself out of bed so you could throw up in a toilet? Charming, I know, but that’s exactly what it felt like as I didn’t look back at Eileen and made my eternal way to the door, keeping my gaze on the hairbreadth of light at the edge of it.
But the door seemed so high up, and with every passing second, I was getting weaker. It felt like it was a continent away.
What I needed was some death spot energy. Obviously, a few minutes on the power lines had only gotten me so far after that dark spirit had messed with me, and Gavin’s dream had sucked out more of my juice.
In the background, the cleaner and Gavin talked about the pictures, and I gathered everything I had in me, then eased up the door, sighting that slim line of welcoming light and nothing else. Don’t stop. Don’t get caught. Just go, go, go… .
When I got to the line, I shriveled into the tiniest thread I could, and that made me dizzy, even nauseated. But it didn’t matter. All I saw was that light from the lamp outside.
Gotta get there…
It was like trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans that didn’t fit anymore, but I was making it.
I didn’t know what I’d do on the other side yet. First things first. But at least I wouldn’t have a cleaner’s iron dagger in my belly.
I oozed through, slipping down the door on the other side, using gravity to pull me through the slit. An hour seemed to pass. Maybe one had passed. But I made it. I couldn’t move as I lay on the stoop and my essence sucked back into its regular form, yet at least I was out of that mansion.
Nearby, power lines stood against the night sky, but I couldn’t reach them.
Minute by minute, I waited for my energy to return, but I realized it wasn’t happening. I probably even looked as gray as smog. Hell, I could even feel myself flickering.
I tucked into a ball, not knowing what to do, until Louis the ghost’s words came back to me from the night of the party in the cabin.
“You’re rushing into haunting,” he had said.
Maybe I’d needed more help.
Louis, I thought, feeling drowsy, disconnected from the sound of the driveway’s fountain, the near-distant hiss of waves climbing back from the beach, the pound of new surf on the sand, each wave taking the place of the one before it.
He’d told me something else important. But what? Why was it so hard to remember right now?
But then I did remember.
“All you have to do is shout our names, and if we’re in range, we’ll hear.”
I wanted to cry. I didn’t have the strength to shout.
I was barely able to roll to my side, locking my gaze on the fountain and the water that played out of it. And there was a funny, cartoonish white car in back of it that resembled a bubble.
The future, I thought dizzily. Jetson cars, Logan’s Run, Star Wars Land Cruisers.
And I had hardly seen any of this future yet. I hadn’t gotten to live this second life that’d been given to me.
The thought shook me. God, I couldn’t let myself go back into a time loop. There was too much to see, so much to explore in this new chance at existing…
“Louis,” I moaned. “Twyla.”
Was she still on the beach, or had her ghost ADD carried her to another place way earlier in the day, after she’d left me?
I flickered brutally, my sight stuck on that strange car. Battery. That thing had to have a battery…
With one last zipt, my sight went still.
• • •
“Oh, this is some double doo-doo.”
In the gray matter of my mind, I heard a voice. Young. Worried.
Then another voice. Older. Wiser.
“She’s sure in a bad way.”
It took me a sec, but… Louis?
Whoever it was continued, his voice clearer now, and I’d never heard anything so wonderful.
“Give her some room, Scott.”
I groaned, trying to make my eyes work again. I barely could, only seeing the world through a frozen picture, like I was a zombie and I couldn’t move. But it was enough to see Louis come into my view in his ’forties factory worker uniform, plus Scott, the nineteen fifties greased-up kid. They both were bending down to peer at me while they kneeled.