Spiritdell Book 1 Page 8

  I shift my body, and the wood table wobbles, sloshing my tea. My hand is still enveloped in hers.

  Julie's rubbing her arm. “Can you believe this crap?” she asks me. “A bee stung my arm. Again. How did a bee even get in here? There are screens on all the windows.”

  James continues to sit rigidly in his chair, moving only to take another sip of his tea. If he's not in a trance, he's doing a damn fine impression. Julie doesn't seem to be aware of anything weird going on, so annoyed is she by her second bee sting in two days.

  My voice is hoarse as I whisper to Julie, “How long was I in there?”

  She glances up at the clock on the wall. “How odd,” Julie says. “It was about noon when we got here, but now it's ... two?” She picks up her cup of tea and takes a tiny sip. “Ice cold.”

  Across from me, Heidi's head sways and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Bees,” she mutters. My hand is still locked inside hers. She's just a little old lady, and I'm sure I can get away, but while she's locked in this state, I should really think about what I'm to do next.

  I look around her cottage, taking a thorough inventory. There are things on the walls you don't expect to see in a nice little old lady's house: stuffed and mounted crows, bleak-looking photographs of skulls, and a Hello Kitty calendar with today's date circled in red. In the middle of the table we're seated at is a large, crystal punch bowl, empty. I'm struck with the desire to hit her with it, a thought so violent, I'm shocked at myself. Something silver and metal is lying next to Heidi, and its shape keeps shifting.

  “Wasn't that a teaspoon a moment ago?” I ask Julie, still whispering. “Don't make any sudden movements, but I think James is in some sort of trance, and the old lady here may be trying to murder me.”

  Julie looks to her brother, then me, then the item on the table. “It's some sort of knife. A dagger,” she murmurs. “No, it's a spoon. No, it's a dagger. Holy crap.”

  “On the count of three,” I say.

  She gently shakes her brother, who blinks drowsily at her.

  “One,” I say.

  James spots the dagger on the table and jumps to his feet, knocking his wooden chair over. Heidi moans, low and rumbling like summer thunder.

  “Three! Run!” Julie screams.

  James doesn't ask questions, just bolts for the door, fishing his keys out of his pocket at the same time.

  A flash of light illuminates the room as Heidi opens her eyes. They're not the same as before—not filmy with bumps on them. They're empty. Utterly empty. She hisses and grips my hand tightly with one hand as she raises the dagger in the air with the other.

  Something's digging into my shoulders—Julie's hands—pulling me back. As my hand slides away from Heidi, she slumps forward limply.

  James swears at the complicated-looking padlocks on the front door. “We're locked in!” he cries.

  Julie rolls her eyes and points her thumb over her shoulder. “Let's go out the patio door, the way we came in, genius.”

  James lumbers across the room, all limbs and angles. With a thick-sounding thump, he collides with the glass door, then slides down.

  Heidi is still slumped forward, unmoving. My heart pounds and my pulse screams in my ears. Everything's brightly-lit now, and I fear that at any second she could jump up and bite my face off, but I equally fear she's dead, of a heart attack, and I killed her. The thing in her other hand is a teaspoon. It's just a teaspoon?

  “Julie, was that a dagger or a teaspoon just now?”

  “Zan,” she says. “I don't know what's going on here, but I think it's time we left. Come on, help me with James. When did he get so heavy? Stop standing there staring at a teaspoon, let's go.” Julie pries the vehicle's keys from her brother's hand as she opens the patio door.

  With the door open, James tumbles out, and Julie steps over him. “Come on.”

  I take one last look at the old woman, to check if she's breathing. At last, she twitches.

  I blink. In her hand is a dagger, not a teaspoon. Definitely a dagger. My cue to exit.

  I run outside to the back lawn, help James up, with Julie's assistance, and the three of us stagger to the Jeep.

  “You drive,” Julie says, throwing me the keys, then stuffing James in the back seat.

  I jump in the driver's seat, adjust the rear-view mirror, and put on my seat belt.

  “Really?” Julie says. “Seat belt? Drive! Let's blow this taco stand.”

  My hands shake as I put the keys in the ignition. Truck's not going to start, I think, but it roars to life. The truck starts! I throw it in gear, stomp on the gas, and back up into a tree. The pine tree sways, then falls over.

  “Dad's going to kill me,” James grumbles from the back seat.

  Something moves—just a flash—near the side of the gas station. I squint to make out what it is, but whatever moved is obscured by a cloud of dust that's come out of nowhere. I don't want to know. The voice is back in my head. Drive, she says.

  I get the Jeep into the proper gear and hit the gas, pulling out onto the road, right in front of a big Mack truck.

  The big truck on my tail is honking. Honking. And that's fine by me, because the driver's right—this is an appropriate time to honk, because this is indeed an emergency situation.

  I push the gas pedal to the floor. People always talk about pushing the pedal to the floor, but I've never done it. You'd think the pedal would increase in tension, like a spring, until you couldn't push any further, but the truth is, you get to the bottom and there's nothing but air, like when you think you're at the bottom of a set of stairs, but there's one more and you're lurching down.

  Julie's screaming, her scream mingling with the honking to form a terrible, unmusical chord. For the second time in one day, I think, This must be what it feels like when you're dying. The grill of the truck behind us fills the rear-view mirror. The fasten-seat-belt light comes on in the dashboard. Bing, bing.

  The little Jeep's engine roars. My foot is still punched through into nothingness, but I can feel the acceleration in my body. Bing, bing.

  “Fasten passenger seat belt,” says the nice lady's voice.

  Julie buckles up.

  The truck grill in the rear-view mirror gets a bit smaller. Just a bit.

  I don't let up on the gas until we're over a hill and out of sight of the truck. I can't stop checking in the mirror, not even with a mile of distance, so I pull over to the side of the road and wait for him to pass. The truck roars by, loaded with two tanks bearing a gas station logo.

  “I may need a new pair of pants,” James says from the back seat.

  “Really? You crapped your pants?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I figured now would be the perfect time to say that particular line. Can you guess what movie it's from?”

  “Nobody cares what movie except you,” Julie snaps.

  I check the gas gauge, which shows a full tank of gas. “When did you get gas?” I ask James.

  “When we stopped at the gas station,” he says.

  “Didn't you go running after me?”

  “Not right away,” he says. “Julie had the situation under control, so I ... got gas, and then I came after you.”

  “Can you hand me a soda?” I ask as I put on the blinker and look very carefully, both ways, before I pull back out onto the highway.

  “All we have left is Orange Crush,” James says.

  “Better than nothing,” I say as I hold my shaking hand out for the can.

  * * *

  On the drive back to town, we don't talk about Austin, or any sort of brain tumor. Julie attempts to comfort me, once, and I beg her to never speak of Austin or cancer again.

  We talk, instead, about the mysterious events of the afternoon. Julie's not entirely clear what happened back at the cottage, between the serving of the tea and the moment the bee sting snapped her out of her trance.

  “I told you bees were good luck,” James says. “We're lucky that bee got you when it did. I cou
ldn't move, but I was aware of everything that was happening. I was locked in, like a person in a coma, in a horror movie.”

  “Do you think she really would have killed me?” I ask.

  “I don't know. Let's not overreact,” Julie says. “Are we going to phone the police and tell them a little old lady tried to murder you over a cup of tea?”

  “Don't forget the spit,” I say. “She rubbed her spit on my face with her dirty handkerchief. That's got to be assault.”

  James catches my gaze in the rear-view mirror. “Zan, I think she was a witch. This power stuff just got real.”

  “Witches are real,” Julie says.

  “Would you call me a witch?” I ask. “I have a power, just like her. It might not even be so different. I've never actually tried reading palms.”

  “I'm decent with a Ouija board,” Julie says. “A bunch of us girls went through this phase, when I was at summer camp, where we used our own home-made Ouija board every night. It's weird, you lose all sense of time.”

  “Does time slow down?” I have to put the Jeep on cruise control, because I can't keep the speed up and people are aggressively passing us. Try as I might, every time I'm not entirely focused on road and the speedometer, my foot pulls back from the pedal, as though I'm afraid to get where I'm going. Maybe I am afraid. It's not too late to turn back and go to the lake, stay there the whole summer, eating hot dogs and marshmallows at the bonfire. I could have random girls stick their pierced tongues in my mouth every night.

  Mibs pops into my head with a pitiful meow. He would miss me, of course. Thinking about him makes me homesick. Krystal will be taking good care of the big guy, but when I walk in the door, he'll tell me all sorts of stories about neglect, and demand extra treats. The little master of manipulation!

  Julie's still talking about the Ouija board, saying time does seem to move at different speeds, like it did when we were in Heidi's cottage. “I'd swear we were only on the Ouija board for a few minutes,” Julie says, “but hours would pass, and we'd only get brought back to reality by the sun rising.”

  “Julie, you know I don't like you messing with that evil stuff,” James says.

  “Hey, whaddaya mean evil?” I say to James, who's resting comfortably in the back seat, his feet up between me and Julie. “Do you think my power is evil? Do you think I am?”

  His feet twitch. “No.”

  Julie says, “Anyways, boys, the next day after using the board, my neck and shoulders ached from being held so long in the same position. It was the strangest thing, like a paranormal workout.”

  “Do you still use the board?” I ask.

  “Gosh, no. The board started, um, asking for blood sacrifices, so we burned it on the stove. Set off the smoke alarm, too. We scattered the ashes.”

  “Wait, you burned a piece of wood on top of a kitchen stove?”

  “No, it was just cardboard. We made it ourselves, using felt pens for the alphabet letters and whatnot. They say spirit boards are more powerful when you make your own. That's the proper name for them, by the way. Ouija's a brand name, like Kleenex.”

  “You made a spirit board out of cardboard?” James asks. “That doesn't sound very demonic.”

  “I know,” Julie says. “One of the other girls played a mean trick and made another identical one and left it out on the table.”

  “Which one?” James asks. “The girl you call Sadmachine? That's Claire, right? She'd do something like that. Just to bum everyone out.”

  “I don't know,” Julie says. “Nobody would admit to it. Half of them thought it was me.”

  My arms feel cold, and I'm suddenly terrified I might forget I'm driving a vehicle, accidentally veering into the oncoming lane. This thought sends a chill through me, and I break out in a cold sweat. I'm usually okay with driving, but sometimes I get scared, like now. Life can be so fragile, and one simple mistake can ruin everything.

  “I'm tired of driving. Does one of you wanna take over?”

  “I only have my learner's permit,” Julie says.

  “I have two black eyes,” James says. “I can barely see.”

  Julie and I say, “What?” in unison.

  James explains that when he tried to run out the closed patio door, smacking into the glass, he punched himself in his good eye. I turn to check, and indeed, James has two bruised and swollen eyes.

  Laughing at his predicament relaxes me enough that I feel confident about driving the last of the way home.

  Julie stops giggling long enough to say, “Next time you see Facepuncher, if she wants a fresh bruise, she'll have to hit you on the mouth, or the nose.”

  “Hey, what was Facepuncher's name?” I ask.

  “I don't recall,” James says grumpily.

  “Facepuncher it is,” Julie says.

  * * *

  When we get back to town, I drive us straight to James and Julie's house. I'm planning to pick up my camera equipment and walk straight home.

  Julie gets out of the Jeep and grabs the bags from the back. “Zan, I think that old lady did just have a teaspoon after all. Our imagination must have been playing tricks on us. I've heard of people experiencing shared hallucinations. I think they call it mass hysteria. Hysteria. That word always seems a bit sexist to me.”

  “So, you don't think anything witch-y was happening? Nothing ... supernatural?”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” Julie says.

  “The old lady was nice. I liked the cucumber sandwiches,” James says, his eyes focused on some faraway point. I consider telling him there were no cucumber sandwiches, and he's had some sort of forgetting spell put over him, but I realize I'd love to forget all the events of today, if I could.

  “Thanks for the fun trip to the lake, guys,” I say, deciding to let the ordeal be forgotten by the twins.

  “It's weird I was in such a rush to leave that nice lady's cottage,” James says, rubbing his newly-reddened eye.

  “How did you manage to pop yourself?” I ask. “Patio glass is flat. How did a flat panel of glass get in your eye?”

  “Had my hand up, like this.” He holds up his left fist and, in slow motion, recreates the incident, effectively punching himself in the eye.

  I ask James, “Before I head back to my house, can I take your portrait? With the black eyes?”

  “Are you kidding?” he asks, his voice charged with excitement. “Take lots. I look so bad-ass right now.” He growls. “I look like a bad lieutenant. The Harvey Keitel one, not Nicholas Cage.”

  Julie rolls her eyes. “Boys,” she says.

  I run up to his room and get my camera equipment, then get him to pose for pictures in front of the house. Julie poses for a few too, showing off the two bee stings on her arm.

  “Weird, I don't remember getting stung twice,” she says.

  We go inside, looking for food, and find pink cupcakes on the kitchen counter.

  “You'd look so tough eating one of those,” I say to James, joking.

  “Good idea. Contrast,” he says, not picking up on the joke. He poses for some photos with the glittery, pink cupcake near his mouth, and then with a big chunk in his mouth. “Ptooie,” he says, spitting the cupcake into the sink after the shot. “Meatcake.”

  His mother comes in and says, “It's not meatcake. There's a little butter in the icing is all.”

  “Grr,” he says.

  “Are you biting and spitting? Stop wasting food,” she says.

  After his mom leaves the kitchen, James gets serious and asks me what I'm going to do about Austin, even though I've asked him not to bring her up.

  “I don't know,” I say. “What's to do? She's going to die soon. Maybe it's better to not get attached.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You should forget her and move on.”

  I hear his words, but I don't think he means what he's advising.

  “You're right, I'm going to forget all about her. I'll wipe her from my mind, right now.” I wave my hand in front of my face. If only it were that eas
y. I'd wipe her from my mind if I could. Anything to ease this aching sadness I feel all over when I think about Austin.

  CHAPTER 12

  One week. It's been one week since we got back from the lake. I've slept in my empty bed seven times, had microwaved pizza for breakfast seven times.

  Sensing impending malnutrition, James and Julie have dragged me out to the mall today. They've also been trying to get me hooked up with a summer job, painting houses with them, but climbing up and down big ladders sounds like way more effort than I can muster.

  “Arcade?” James asks.

  “Food first,” I say, so we head to the food court, straight to the place where you choose your own meats and vegetables and they fry everything up for you.

  As soon as I touch the broccoli and fresh little cherry tomatoes with the tongs, my mouth waters. “Guys, I think my stomach is asking for vegetables,” I say.

  They exchange a look, the meaning of which I cannot fathom, but I imagine they're concerned about my depression. I've assured them I don't have clinical depression, but a perfectly natural response to ... grief, I guess. Can you have grief over losing someone you never had?

  Julie fills her tray with cauliflower, sprouts, carrots, and thinly-shaved slices of lamb.

  “That's Bambi,” James says to his sister.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pot, calling the kettle black. Cow-eater,” she says right back to him.

  “What?” I ask.

  James says he'll tell me when we're seated, so we load up our trays, pick our sauces, and give our food to the man at the grill. We all opt for pineapple chunks and heaps of seasame seeds.

  I spot Raye-Anne Donovan, across the food court, talking to some shifty-looking kids. I excuse myself and run over to her as fast as I can, practically knocking slow-moving people out of the way.

  “Oh, hey, it is you,” I say, catching my breath in a manner I hope appears casual.

  The other kids skitter away like cockroaches.

  “Zan! I never did get my palm read,” she says.

  “Doesn't matter, it's all a joke. I don't have any special powers. I mean, look at me, do I look like a wizard?”