Chapter 20
TWENTY
Emma
The woods were the same, and also wrong.
I saw it in the slouch of Daniel’s shoulders as he walked ahead of us.
The trees hung close together, arms knitted like pale old women at a funeral, branches bowed against the weight of fog that never quite lifted.
My brother stuck close to Alice, his steps careful on the mushy ground, and Beth hummed behind me, half singing, half talking to herself, or possibly to the plants.
We followed the ghost, who seemed less like a dead man than I expected.
He had grown more real as the day dragged on, hair thickening, teeth less pronounced, his shirt no longer tattered but just old.
I wondered if that happened to all ghosts.
Did they slowly become the people they used to be, or was he an exception?
Cody, the ghost, kept looking over his shoulder, checking that we were still there.
He would pause now and then, as if to make sure he hadn’t lost us, though I doubted he needed to worry.
If the path we were taking existed on any map, I’d eat my own driver’s license.
Only the wet sound of leaves and our ragged breathing filled the gaps.
Daniel stopped at a heap of lichen and old twigs.
I saw then that it was not a pile, but a person, or what remained of one.
The bones had sunk into the soft ground, ribs poking up like the skeleton of a sunken boat.
Shreds of denim still clung to a femur, and the skull had a puckered hole in the side, a wound so old it almost seemed to smile.
Daniel crouched, sniffed around with a seriousness that would have been funny if the smell wasn’t so sharp.
“Heavy on the mildew,” he said, turning to us. “Little bit of wet dog, too. But nothing I can use.” His nostrils flared, but he shook his head. “Too far gone.”
Beth stepped forward, arms crossed, and stood for a long minute with her eyes shut tight.
She muttered under her breath, something about sight and memory, and snapped her fingers.
The air quivered, then nothing happened.
She tried again, this time dusting a powder onto the bones.
The dust was yellow, maybe turmeric or just pollen, and for a moment it seemed like the bones shimmered.
Then it was gone, vanished into the rot.
“Well, that’s a letdown,” Beth said. She gave the skull a sorry glance. “No offense, but you’re a stubborn one.”
Alice sidled up, not caring about the mud on her jeans, and knelt beside the body. She touched the ankle bone, as gentle as if it might still bruise. “It’s sad,” she whispered. “He just wants to go home.”
Henry wrapped his arm around her shoulders, clumsy but comforting. “We’ll help him, right? That’s what we do.”
I said nothing, mostly because my mind was a tight, clamped fist, searching for any stray clue.
I tried to remember what I’d read about old bones.
Sometimes, they just wanted someone to bear witness.
Sometimes, they were traps, little time bombs of grief.
I closed my eyes and reached out with my Karma.
The push and pull of what needed to happen. Nothing answered.
“Maybe it’s just sad,” I said. “Maybe it’s supposed to be.”
The ghost, who had been standing off to the side, looked down at his remains with a complicated expression. He bent, reached for the skull, and passed right through. “That’s weird,” he said. “You’d think I’d remember dying. But I don’t.”
“I can try something else,” Beth offered, and started rummaging through her bag.
She produced a handful of dried herbs and a lighter.
I watched as she muttered another spell.
She lit the herbs and waved them in a circle, breathing in the sweet, sharp smoke.
The fog pulled back for a second, then rolled in thicker than ever.
“I am not on my game,” Beth sighed. “Sorry, Cody. My magic’s off today.” She looked at me, hopeful. “Got any of that karma stuff in your back pocket?”
I shrugged. “I can try. But I think it works better on the living.” I crouched near the bones and closed my eyes.
I pictured every moment that had led to this one: my parents’ accident, the years of Henry needing me, all the times I’d watched other people’s lives go sideways.
Maybe, if I could make sense of those, I could do something for Cody.
I pushed out with my mind, the way I did when waiting for justice to fall, or for the world to even itself out. Reaching for my karmic powers, and feeling them there, strong as ever. I tapped into them, connecting with the dead man, and I felt something. A tingle. An awareness of my magic.
But when I opened my eyes, there was nothing. No crackle of energy, no invisible hand rearranging the pieces. Just… nothing.
The silence stretched, and Alice started to cry in a way that was soft and helpless, not the dramatic kind. Henry just held her, rocking her in a rhythm I remembered from when we were kids. I’d rocked him that way.
I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans, and saw a tree that caught my eye.
Moving as if pulled by an invisible force, I walked toward the tree.
The bark was old and furrowed, like an elephant hide, but there was nothing special about the tree.
I glanced down, then up, then down again.
That’s when I saw it: a black camera, half buried in the roots, lens pointing up at the sky.
I knelt, pried it loose, and wiped off the worst of the mud.
“I found something,” I called, and the others shuffled over. The camera was heavy, old-fashioned, the kind that belonged in a tourist’s fanny pack. I pressed the power button. Nothing. The screen stayed black.
“Try the card,” Henry said, reaching for it. “They always use SD cards. Even when the battery’s dead, the card still holds everything.” He fumbled with the little door, hands shaking, and popped out a sliver of blue plastic.
Beth lit up. “We can use mine! It takes the same kind of SD card.” Beth dug through her bag, produced a digital camera, and slid the card inside. It beeped, screen glowing faintly.
Beth grinned. “Oh, it’s got video.” She thumbed the controls, scrolling through images of the woods, a man’s dirty nails, blurry shots of the sky. Then she hit play on a shaky, dark clip.
She muttered something, and the image jumped, suddenly projected onto the side of a birch tree. The rest of us crowded in, watching as the movie flickered to life.
Onscreen, Cody stumbled through the trees, panting.
The angle was weird. He was clearly pointing a camera at himself from an arm’s length away.
The forest was wilder, thick with shadows, but you could see he was being careful, not running but picking his way through.
He talked as he walked, but the mic didn’t pick up most of it.
The timestamp in the corner ticked forward.
Then the camera lurched, and Cody fell. The lens went crazy, showing only brown leaves and flashes of blue sky. He must have dropped it; the picture steadied on a tangle of branches. There was a scraping, a groan, and then a close-up of Cody’s face, smeared with dirt and terror.
“I don’t know where I am,” video Cody whispered.
“If you find this, tell my mom I’m sorry.
I was just planning to explore a little.
To spend some time alone in the woods with nature, but I took a wrong turn, or maybe there’s something wrong with these woods, I’m not sure. I just can’t find my way back. I–I–”
He crawled away from the camera, but still in perfect view of it, dragging a leg behind him.
The video jumped ahead in little bursts.
At one point, he tried to stand, failed, and screamed.
The sound cut through even without the volume.
His hands moved to his ankle and came back up, covered in blood.
He curled into a ball and just lay there, breathing ragged, until night fell.
A raccoon snuffled the camera. Its beady eyes reflected the light, then it toddled away. In the background, we could see Cody, still not moving. His shirt was covered in blood, but there was no dramatic attack from a predator, just a slow, inevitable sinking into the ground.
The last shot was of him still laying there, but he was still, deathly still, and then nothing.
We all just stood there for a minute, watching the frozen image of clouds.
Beth was the first to speak. “That’s it? He just died? There’s no murder, no secret?”
The ghost watched his own movie, lips pressed tight. “I didn’t remember,” he said, and for the first time he looked like a person I could have known in real life. “I always thought I was killed. But I just got lost.”
Daniel grunted. “Happens more than you think. Nature’s not very forgiving.”
“I can go, then? My business is finished?” the ghost asked, almost to himself. “It’s okay?”
“You said you’d help us find Alice’s grandma,” I reminded him. “You keep that promise, then you’re free to go wherever.”
He nodded. The light seemed to change around him, softer now.
Daniel circled the remains, big hands brushing the tree bark, the ground, the air. It looked random, but I knew him well enough to see the pattern. “I’ll tell the sheriff where to find you,” he said to the bones. “Somebody will bring you home.”
The ghost gave a thin smile. “Thanks.”
He led us deeper into the woods, past a gully and a stand of pines that looked exactly like every other stand of pines in this part of the country. We walked for a while, nobody saying much, the mood like after a funeral where everyone’s waiting for sandwiches and cake.
Finally, we saw a structure. A shack made of tin and tar paper at the edge of a clearing. Alice stopped, breath coming in little hitches, and Henry squeezed her hand.
The door opened before we could knock. A woman stood there, older than I’d expected, her hair in a wild halo. She wore a patchwork robe, and her eyes were milky, but sharp. She saw Alice, and her face broke into a thousand wrinkles of joy.
“Alice!” she shouted. “Is that you?”
Alice ran to her, and they hugged tightly. The woman petted Alice’s hair, kissed her cheeks, said her name over and over.
We hung back, not wanting to crowd the moment. Daniel stood guard, arms folded, while Beth wiped her eyes. Henry grinned at me, sheepish.
The ghost hovered near the porch, watching. His edges were already blurring, lightening at the corners.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding to me. “For helping me remember.”
The fog was gone. The trees didn’t look haunted, just regular old trees with leaves about to drop for the season. The weight I hadn’t known I was carrying melted away, replaced by something lighter.
“That’s what we do,” I said. “We help people find their way home.”
I watched as the ghost drifted, growing thinner, until only the memory of his smile remained.
And then we all just stood in the sun, waiting for someone to say what came next.