I moused to the search field, deleted the words, then sat there, fingers poised over the keys, every muscle tensed, as if bracing for an electric shock.
What was I afraid of?
Finding out I really did have schizophrenia?
Or finding out I didn't?
I lowered my fingers to the keys and typed. A. R. Gurney school arts Buffalo death custodian.
Thousands of hits, most of them random matches to A. R. Gurney, the Buffalo playwright. Then I saw the words tragic accident and I knew.
I forced my mouse up the screen, clicked, and read the article.
In 1991, forty-one-year-old Rod Stinson, head custodian at Buffalo's A. R. Gurney School of the Arts, had died in a chemical explosion. A freak accident, caused by a part-time janitor refilling a container with the wrong solution.
He'd died before I'd been born. So there was no way 1 could have ever heard about the accident.
But just because I couldn't remember hearing about it didn't mean 1 hadn't caught a snatch of it, maybe someone talking in class, and stored it deep in my subconscious, for schizophrenia to pull out and reshape as a hallucination.
I scanned the article. No picture. I backed out to the search page and went to the next. Same basic information, but this one did have a picture. And there was no question it was the man I'd seen.
Had I seen the photo somewhere?
You have an answer for everything, don't you? A "logical explanation. " Well, what would you think if you were seeing this in one of your movies?
I'd run to the screen and smack this silly girl who was staring the truth in the face, too dumb to see it. No, not too dumb. Too stubborn.
You want a logical explanation? String the facts together. The scenes.
Scene one: girl hears disembodied voices and sees a boy who disappears before her eyes.
Scene two: she sees a dead guy with some kind of burns.
Scene three: she discovers that the burned custodian is real and died in her school, just the way she saw it.
Yet this girl, our supposedly intelligent heroine, doesn't believe she's seeing ghosts? Give yourself a shake.
Still I resisted. As much as I loved the world of cinema, I knew the difference between reality and story. In movies, there are ghosts and aliens and vampires. Even someone who doesn't believe in extraterrestrials can sit in a movie theater, see the protagonists struggling with clues that suggest alien invasion, and want to scream "Well, duh!"
But in real life, if you tell people you're being chased by melted school custodians, they don't say "Wow, you must be seeing ghosts." They put you someplace like this.
I stared at the picture. There could be no question —
"Is that who you saw?"
I spun in my chair. Derek was there at my shoulder. For someone his size, he could move so quietly I'd almost think he was a ghost. Just as silent . . . and just as unwelcome.
He pointed to the headline over the janitor's article. "A. R. Gurney. That's your school. You saw that guy, didn't you?'
"I don't know what you're talking about."
He fixed me with a look.
I clicked off the browser. "I was doing schoolwork. For when I go back. A project."
"On what? 'People who died at my school'? You know, I always heard art schools were weird. . . ."
I bristled. "Weird?"
"You want something to research?" As he leaned over to take the mouse, I caught a whiff of BO. Nothing flower wilting, just that first hint that his deodorant was about to expire. I tried to move away discreetly, but he noticed and glowered, as if insulted, then shifted to one side, pulling in his elbows.
He opened a fresh browser session, typed a single word, and clicked Search. Then he straightened.
"Try that. Maybe you'll learn something."
I'd been staring at the search term for at least five minutes. One word. Necromancer.
Was that even English? I moved the cursor in front of the word and typed "define." When I hit Enter, the screen filled.
Necromancer: one who practices divination by conjuring up the dead.
Divination? As in foretelling the future? By talking to dead people . . . from the past? That made no sense at all.
I skipped to the next definition, from Wikipedia.
Necromancy is divination by raising the spirits of the dead. The word derives from the Greek nekros "dead" and manteia "divination." It has a subsidiary meaning reflected in an alternative and archaic form of the word, nigromancy (a folk etymology using Latin niger, "black"), in which the magical force of "dark powers" is gained from or by acting upon corpses. A practitioner of necromancy is a necromancer.
I reread the paragraph three times and slowly deciphered the geek talk, only to realize it didn't tell me anything more than the first definition. On to the next one, also from Wikipedia.
In the fictional universe of Diablo 2, the Priests of Rathma . . .
Definitely not what I was looking for, but I ran a quick search and I discovered a role-playing game class called necromancers, who could raise and control the dead. Was that where Derek got it? No. He might be creepy, but if he'd misplaced the boundary between real life and video games, he'd be in a real mental hospital.
I returned to Wikipedia, skimmed the rest of the definitions, and found only variations on the first. A necromancer foretells the future by talking to the dead.
Curious now, I deleted define and searched on necromancer. The first couple of sites were religious ones. According to them, necromancy was the art of communicating with the spirit world. They called it evil, a practice of black magic and Satan worship.
Did Derek think I was involved in black magic? Was he trying to save my soul? Or warn me that he was watching? I shivered.
Aunt Lauren's women's health clinic had once mistakenly been the target of a militant prolife group. 1 knew firsthand how scary people could get when they thought you did something that crossed their beliefs.
I flipped back to the list of search results and picked one that seemed more academic. It said that necromancy was another —older—name for mediums, spiritualists, and other people who could talk to ghosts. The meaning came from an ancient belief that if you could talk to the dead, they could predict the future because they could see everything—they'd know what your enemy was doing or where you could find buried treasure.
I switched to the next site on the list, and a horrible painting filled my screen —a mob of dead people, rotting and hacked up, being led by a guy with glowing eyes and an evil grin. The title: The Army of the Dead.
I scrolled down the page. It was filled with stuff like that, men surrounded by zombies.
I quickly switched to another page. It described the "art of necromancy" as the raising of the dead. I shuddered and flipped to another. A religious site now, quoting some old book ranting about "foul necromancers" who committed crimes against nature, communicating with spirits and reanimating the dead.
More sites. More old engravings and paintings. Grotesque pictures of grotesque men. Raising corpses. Raising spirits. Raising demons.
Fingers trembling, I turned off the browser.
Thirteen
I STEPPED CAUTIOUSLY FROM the media room, expecting to find Derek lurking around the corner, waiting to pounce. The rumble of his voice made me jump, but it came from the dining room, where he was asking Mrs. Talbot when Dr. Gill would be ready to see him. I hurried into class. They weren't done with math yet, and Ms. Wang waved for me to take the seat next to the door.