Chapter 10
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Wonderboy” by Tenacious D
They pack every kid in the building into the second-floor classrooms, thirty bodies to a room, sorted by last name.
Up here, the classrooms all sport iron runners on the walls, bars on the windows, and every state-sponsored semireligious talisman a nondenominational public school could afford dangling by acrylic yarn from the drop ceiling.
Bas and I slip into the first room to get away from the nurse still yelling my name and the teacher screaming his.
The L’s and G’s aren’t even in neighboring rooms and we can’t risk getting separated now.
We tuck ourselves into the corner as Mr. Snider rushes around closing the windows, metal venetian blinds clattering against the iron-hashed windows.
Plotting his trajectory, I slip over to the last window on his route.
It looks over the far side of the building, opposite the road where the ghosts broke through, but even here, the grounds glow like a rave in the uneasy dark and roiling sky, ghost lights burning through the shadowy woods.
Lightning slices the clouds. I can’t hear the answering thunderclap. I can’t hear anything. My head throbs, my whole body and soul bending toward the eyes watching from the trees.
A hand lands on my arm, turning me away from the window.
I jump, but Bas snarls, “Don’t touch her,” before I can find my mouth, snagging me from Mr. Snider with a tight spin that tucks me into his side.
Instinctual. Moths riot in my empty rib cage at the way his calloused fingers span my shoulder, the fluorescent lights playing oddly in his dark eyes, painting them with an almost golden shimmer.
He looks like a stranger in that moment.
He looks more familiar than anyone I know.
Mr. Snider purses his lips.
“Keep away from the windows,” he barks, spinning off to deal with the next impending crisis in a roomful of panicking teens. I barely hear him. My ears crowd with voices, living and present. Dead and otherwise.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I smash my palms into my ears, but even with all the iron blinds down, and boxed inside an iron-locked room, the pressure still threatens to grind me into paste. My head screams like a whistling kettle, boiling water about to burst.
“How many are there?” Bas asks, his lips so close to my ear I feel them brush my skin.
“So many,” I whisper. “How are they here? Why now? What are they looking for?”
Did my mother expect this? Is this what she was tracking in her basement lair, marking every remnant flare and ghost sighting?
Was she waiting for a travesty? A ghost storm this big, with all her equipment—she must have seen it coming.
So why send me to weather it here? Is hiding her government toys really more important to her than her own daughter?
My stomach turns. Thunder rattles the building. The lights flicker to a chorus of screams.
“It’s just the storm!” Mr. Snider yells, hands lifted in a quiet down gesture.
It’d be more convincing if he looked like he believed it.
Instead, his jaw clenched like a man headed to the front lines, he strides to the closet and chucks out everything he lays his hands on.
An old projector gets wheeled aside, sun-bleached paper decorations flutter to the linoleum.
A couple old first aid boxes land in a pile, followed by a single ghost kit.
Piranhas descend in a flurry. Plastic cracks.
A couple meaty punches land with wheezy grunts.
Wrestling kids corkscrew the lids apart until the plastic whitens and shatters, guts spilling out on the floor for others to scavenge.
Ghost spray and iron salts and dusty handfuls of lavender burst like an artery.
A mean boy wins the bundle of sage, but after a short scuffle, the sobbing girl who scratched my arms earlier displays a willingness to bite that wins her the lighter.
Meanwhile, two big football players join Mr. Snider at the closet, helping him to heave out a massive, iron-banded crossbeam.
Shaped like a crucifix, the thing stands taller than the door, etched with a ton of symbols, bible verses sketched in shorthand, runes and Celtic knots and other marks I don’t recognize.
Between the three of them, they lift it into place across the door, slotting it into the waiting joists at either side.
I watch in a dull kind of horror. It won’t help them. I know it in my bones, deeper than my missing heartbeat. After all—an entire room of ghost traps and iron couldn’t stop me, only left me sore and irritated, popping ibuprofen in the morning.
Somewhere in a knot of kids, the local news blares from cellphone speakers. A perfectly manicured voice tells us not to worry, that ghosts feel nothing and know nothing and want nothing. That they’re only caught in the eddies of an electromagnetic tide, and when the storm passes, so will they.
“Remnants no longer retain the means to process outside stimuli,” the newscaster recites. Like clockwork, the usual refrain, so deadpan it must be government mandated: “Everything they appear to experience is only an echo of their own life.”
My head throbs louder, pressure increasing by the second, and even my knuckles grinding into my temple can’t abate it.
They’re wrong. God, they’re so wrong—can’t they see?
Why didn’t I see it? I’ve been fighting with iron all my life, slipping out of my body and into trouble, flouting security alarms and breaking down doors.
I should have known. I should have done the math.
We’ve only been safe this long because the ghosts let us believe it. Because we had nothing they wanted… yet.
They clearly want something now. The lights brown again. This time, they flicker out to a chorus of gasps, a collective inheld breath, the only sound in the sudden silence the tinny phone speakers droning out local traffic—
And, very distantly, the sound of an alarm blaring. The Klaxon screams twice, strong and confident, before choking off in an electronic wheeze.
“The new girl was right.” Hollow-eyed, the girl with the lighter stares at me. Throat tight, she whispers, “They’re inside.”
Suddenly a whole lot of kids spin to stare at me, the lit match of their horror burning quickly into anger. Screw them—I don’t have the spoons to mitigate their assumptions and expectations. I can’t take this throbbing in my head anymore.
Turning away, I lean my body in the corner, press my forehead to the wall facing the hallway outside, and slip into my party trick.
I bend through the wall, scanning the hall.
A glacial pressure crashes against me, immense as an ocean, floodwaters swelling, filling up the building and my head.
It almost sounds like muffled voices, like a name I can’t quite hear.
I have to grit my teeth to concentrate, to hear past the sound of…
begging to the footsteps pounding down the corridor.
The nurse rounds the bend, hand pressed to her ear.
“Building breached. Target lost. All students secure,” she says, unreasonably calm, all things considering.
“Focus unclear but confirmed within the building—repeat: the remnant’s focus is inside the building.
” She swings into the emergency ghost shelter, tucks herself in beside a mop bucket, and slams the door.
Target? She can’t mean me, right? And what is a focus?
Does she know what’s drawing the ghosts here?
I start to step out of my body, meaning to follow her.
Maybe I can hear the rest of her strange conversation if I stick my head through the door, but behind me someone screeches, “Oh my god, is she possessed?”
My attention fragments.
“It’s called praying, dipshit,” Bas snarls. “Maybe you should try it if there’s a god out there who’s not sick of your mouth.” Distantly, I feel his shoulder bump mine. My half-occupied body shivers. “What are you doing, by the way?”
Closing the projector, I snap back into my skin. Slumping against the wall, against Bas, I tangle my fingers in the sleeve of his hoodie and drag him down beside me.
I need to tell him. I can’t see a way around it. I need to go down there, need to see what’s going on, what’s calling me, but if I leave without warning, he’ll think I—I don’t know—died.
Moths flutter in my throat so thick I want to gag. I swallow hard, over and over, but it doesn’t help.
“So I’ve got this thing,” I blurt, barely louder than a whisper. “I call it my party trick. I can kind of… leave my body? I know it sounds fake, but it’s a thing, I swear. Astral projection.”
Bas tips his head. I scan his face, scouring the exact curve of his mouth, the arch of his eyebrows—does he think I’m crazy? Is he going to laugh at me? Pull away?
But he just asks, “The thing hippies do with mushrooms?”
God, I can barely look at him. I swallow hard, scanning the room, digging my fingernail into the ragged cuticle of my thumb. We’ve lost the attention of the class now that I’m not actively being weird and I almost miss the distraction.
“Yeah, except I don’t need the mushrooms.” I peel back a hangnail rather than glance at him, concentrating on the itchy-sharp pain instead. “I just need to concentrate.”
Bas reaches over, stealing my hand and soothing my restless fingers.
“You pass out now, everybody’s gonna freak.”
“I know. But I…” I don’t know how to explain to him what I can’t even explain to myself. This demanding summons, this burning need to witness, the bone-deep surety that I have a responsibility. And I know that doesn’t make sense. I know it sounds crazy. “I have to. I have to see it for myself.”
Shrugging, Bas smiles, small and sweet and just for me.
“All right, I’m game.”