Chapter 10 #2
Swinging an arm over my shoulders, he cups my head in his hand, bringing my cheek to rest against his shoulder.
For a girl without a heartbeat, my pulse figures out how to hammer in my ears anyway, bonfire face burning.
I hide my face in his hoodie, but not before he sees it—I catch the edge of his smug as shit grin, the ass.
He knows exactly what he’s doing. And right when I need to concentrate.
Sucking in a deep breath, I lean backward out of my body, somersaulting into the hall.
Through the rising pressure, living people mumble like a radio stuck between stations.
Staticky prayers overlap an argument, a news broadcast, crying.
I ignore them, heading down the hall and concentrating on the static itself. Where is it coming from?
With the power off, shadows fill the hallways. The stairwell gapes like an open mouth, a throat endlessly swallowing. I barely make it to the landing before I see them.
Before they see me.
Ghosts don’t remember. I pick apart the outlines of their shapes, searching for claws and teeth and fast legs, so I can remember for them.
But these ghosts—they don’t need that from me.
Today, they all remember. A head turns my way, recalling the exact contour of her mouth, shaping something like a sound turned inside out—a residue of sense, a sensation of a name.
She remembers her hand, all five fingers distinct as she reaches toward me, pulsing with undead life.
She remembers a cuffed sleeve, an embroidered blouse.
Behind her, galvanized by her lucidity, several more remember themselves.
I catch a business suit, track pants. I close my eyes, try to snap myself back into my body—
But the world jars around me and nothing happens.
The ghost opens her mouth again. A noise unlike sound spills out.
Scrambling backward, I leap up the stairwell.
Fast as my un-feet can carry me, I lunge down the hallway, stumbling, careening into walls.
The ghosts follow, unhurried but gaining, no longer constrained by the memory of feet.
I squeeze my eyes shut—doesn’t work—force myself to forget my shape.
I’m a ghost, I can do what I want. Rules don’t apply to me.
Exploding forward, I blast through the hallways as a current of light and not today, Satan, slamming through the wall and back into my own body.
The force of my return sends me rolling forward, palms slapped to the gritty linoleum, gasping for air.
“What is her damage?” someone demands, but I only have time to deploy a middle finger. Before the girl even finishes speaking, someone knocks at the door.
A bucket of ice water sluices over my head. My stomach spasms, horrified.
They followed me.
God, what was I thinking? I shouldn’t have gone out there. But I didn’t think—the living never see me, even when I’m in my own actual meat. I thought I could go without anyone noticing, but I should have known better. The living never see me, but the dead always do.
I swallow hard. The news broadcast cuts off. The room falls silent, wide eyes staring at Mr. Snider.
Quiet as a mouse, someone ventures, “Is it a teacher?”
Grim, Mr. Snider shakes his head. “It is not. Turn off your phones. Anything with a battery, shut it down. If there’s nothing for them to eat, they’ll leave.”
He’s wrong. They won’t, I know it. They’re too solid, too purposeful. They’re not shambling memories—they need something.
They need me.
Knock-knock-knock.
Dizzy, I struggle to climb to my feet. Bas rolls to his, hauling me up by the elbow.
“But we are what they eat,” a boy says. “They suck the life out of people. Last year in Boston—”
“Quiet,” a girl hisses, “they can hear you.”
Knock-knock-knock, louder now. The door jumps with the force of each rigidly patient blow, something out there pretending very hard to be human again. Knock-knock-knock.
The crucifix barricade shudders at the force, bouncing in its slot.
With little more than two arms of a bike rack holding it in place, it slips farther out of joint with every blow.
No one really thought it would come to this.
No one could have tested for this kind of concentrated effort.
Another knock-knock-knock and the wood hops sideways, rattling loose.
Mr. Snider leaps forward. Stone-faced, he jams the barricade back into place. But I reached through a railroad-spike-studded foundation for a taste of a ley line—this is a gap of maybe five inches. Touching the wood closes the loop that began with a ghostly fist on the outside of the door.
Mr. Snider seizes, color draining, and crashes to the floor.
The knocking stops. The room falls cold.
Slowly, like someone learning how, Mr. Snider stands back up. Face slack, he stares around the room. Transfixed, barely breathing, I stare back. His eyes glitter strangely behind his big aviator glasses, glassy and white-glazed. His hair loses its color, a washed-out gray seeping from his roots.
“Oh my god,” the scratching girl whispers. “He’s possessed.”
“That’s a thing?” her friend demands. “That’s not supposed to be a thing!”
Everyone recoils against the wall, huddling together, unceremoniously shoving the kids who got bits of the ghost kit to the front.
The scratching girl bears her lighter like a sword.
The sage thief lights his bundle off it.
Someone else catches a palmful of lavender seeds on fire and tosses them, smoking, to the ground in front of my boots.
Mr. Snider doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even see them. He never looks away from me—or from Bas at my side—opal eyes flickering between us. Hair entirely gray now, his mouth works with difficulty, voice breaking in and out, distant and strange.
“It’s you,” a woman’s voice says.
“You…gone.” A man’s voice. “Searched. Lost.”
A child: “Found you. Please. Please.”
Doubling over and over, at least a dozen voices, saying, “Please, please.”
Solemn, Bas steps in front of me, holding out a hand.
I try to warn him, open my mouth with don’t already on my lips but I can’t get the word out.
My vision doubles, guttering, threatening to fail.
The pressure rises, swallowing me, and it’s not the ocean I hear, but a vast black river.
The ghosts inside Mr. Snider fall still.
“Don’t.”
“Understand.”
“Have.”
“Nothing.”
Perfectly calm, Bas says, “Check your pockets.”
One hand flops like a fish at the teacher’s side. With difficulty, he turns his pockets inside out. His wallet tumbles from his khakis, slapping to the floor. Bas crouches down to get it, tugging open the zipper on the side.
He says, “How many of you are there?”
“We—”
“We?”
“Us…” Confusion warps their voices further. The ghosts turn inward, speaking to each other. Mr. Snider’s body struggles to contain their agitated thrashing. They pull on his seams, distorting his face. His lips go dark. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, bruising welling up in the sockets.
“That’s fine,” Bas soothes. “Don’t worry about it. How about we call it seven? That’s a good number, right?”
“Seven,” the ghosts agree with obvious relief. “Seven.”
Reaching forward, he cups Mr. Snider’s hand. Students gasp, bracing for the inevitable ghost-drain transference, but none comes. Bas simply tips the change out into his bulging palm. Shifting quarters aside, he points to a nickel.
“Then I’ll take this. Call it a group discount.”
“Payment,” the ghosts chorus, overlapping in their eagerness. “Yes, payment. Payment for the Ferryman,” and lurch forward.
Bas takes the coin.
The world shifts. The pressure in the air changes. The coin catches in the fluorescent light, in the pale ghost flame burning in Mr. Snider’s haunted eyes—just for a second—and between his fingers, it’s not smooth and silver but lumpen gold.
The ghosts shift their attention. Hands outstretched, they creep toward me. It feels like one half of a promise. It feels like gravity. Like responsibility.
I step forward, drawn by a tide I don’t understand, by the current of the river in my ears—
(wood creaking, solemn figures lining the shore, golden obol safe beneath their tongues.)
They stare at me with that gauzy multiplicity, pleading, and in that second, I know them. I know all of them. I know who they were, how they lived, how they died. I know their suffering. I feel it in my bones—they’re suffering, and they came here for me.
Driven by a deep and reckless instinct, I reach for them. I gather them to me, plucking out each dead flicker from around the bonfire of Mr. Snider’s living light, cupping their many faces in my hands.
“It’s okay now,” I tell them. “I’ve got you. You’re home.”
And I press my lips to their foreheads. Electricity sizzles, a caffeinated migraine burning me down. I hear the rush of waves against a black sand beach, taste midnight-blue raspberry, bitter and deep. My promise echoes heavy in my mouth, in my soul—
(home, home, home)
Mr. Snider crumples.
And I tumble backward into an endless, star-spattered sky.