Afterworlds (16 page)

“What? That shit-ton of razor wire I’m going to have to climb over?”

“No, behind that. Behind
everything
.”

I squinted into the darkness, but couldn’t see anything except the rusty yellow tops of school buses. “Sorry.”

“Here.” She took my hand, and a trickle of death traveled up my arm. Over the past week I’d gotten good at crossing over, with or
without Mindy’s touch. But there was always a shiver of reluctance just before, as if I were about to dive into cold water. Something inside me didn’t want to cross over. My body knew the scent of death.

But I needed to practice using my powers, which meant getting over the whole death-is-scary thing.

I hadn’t called Yamaraj again. I didn’t want to be some floundering girl, needing him to show me the ropes. I wanted to demonstrate that he didn’t have to be afraid for me, that I belonged in his world, even if I didn’t know what to call myself yet. “Soul guide” sounded too wimpy. “Psychopomp” too psycho. “Reaper” too grim. I was still looking for something better.

As I crossed over, the moonlight shuddered around us, and the taste of metal filled the air. The sky above went from velvet black to flat gray dotted with red stars. Mindy’s hand grew solid in mine.

“See it now?”

I nodded, still breathing hard. Rising up behind the fence was a terra-cotta roof against the gray sky. The building was much smaller than my high school a mile up the road. Parts of the roofline were sharp and clear, but other sections had faded into translucence, like old paint wearing away.

A ghost building.

Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past.

“Come on.” I headed across the street. As we drew closer, the fence grew fainter, almost transparent. It hadn’t stood there in the
old days, I guess, so it was only a ghostly presence here on the flipside. I walked up to the chicken wire and reached out. . . . My fingers passed through, then dipped into the wood behind.

“Sweet,” I said.

This was my first time using the flipside to pass through something solid, at least since Yamaraj had led me through the metal gate at the airport. Mindy ran by me like it was nothing, straight through the fence and across the school grounds. The school buses and city trucks, parked so tight they were almost touching, offered no resistance to her.

As I followed, the fence tugged at me, like a thornbush catching my clothing. But then I was on the other side, the school yard growing clearer before me, the buses and trucks fading.

It was like going back in time. The parking lot was tiny—I guess kids didn’t drive themselves to school back then—and there were no white lines, just hand-painted signs for a few teachers’ spaces. The ghost playground looked dangerous, with its ten-foot-high jungle gym over hard asphalt. Mindy climbed to the top, hooked her knees over the highest bar, and hung there, upside down and facing me.

The building itself looked more like a mansion than a school, with its tiled roof, stucco walls, and long front porch. The windows just looked wrong. They were empty rectangles, black pits that didn’t reflect the streetlights.

“Are there ghosts in there?” I asked.

Mindy swung her arms, her pigtails swaying. “Might be.”

“Isn’t that the point of ghost buildings? For ghosts to live in?”

“Don’t be stupid.” She reached up to grab the bar, unhooked
her knees, and swung down to land on her feet. “Ghosts live in normal places.”

“Like my mom’s closet?”

“Closets are nice.” Mindy stared at the school in silence for a moment. “But a lot of ghost buildings aren’t. I don’t go inside them.”

“You don’t have to come with me.” I took a slow breath, tasting rust in the air. The ghost building shimmered before me, as if uncertain of its own existence. “But I need to know how this flipside stuff works.”

“It’s okay.” She took my hand and pulled me forward. “I’m not scared with you here. Just don’t leave me in there.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

As we got closer, the school grew less shimmery. The front steps felt solid beneath my feet, and I knelt to place one palm flat against the painted concrete. It felt cold, just like stone on a cool night.

“It’s so real,” I said.

Mindy had stopped, unwilling to venture ahead without me. “That means everyone remembers this place. Maybe something bad happened here.”

“
Or
maybe everyone totally loved it.” I rose to my feet and climbed the stairs. “Whoa. How am I going up like this? I mean, these steps aren’t here anymore. So does that mean I’m levitating?”

“The steps
are
here,” Mindy said. “But the flipside is a here that livers don’t see, except for pomps like you.”

I sighed. “Pretty much every word of that answer was annoying.”

“Well, maybe you’re asking annoying questions!”

I bit back my reply. Mindy was gradually becoming my friend, even if she was a little odd. She was helping me learn about the afterworld, so I wouldn’t be as clueless the next time Yamaraj and I met.

I still hadn’t told Mindy about him, though. No point in scaring her off.

“Sorry,” I said as we climbed the stairs. “I’m just nervous. Never been in a ghost building before.”

“But you’re a pomp! Ghosts should be afraid of
you
.”

I smiled down at her and stood straighter, trying to conjure up some psychopompish bluster.

The front doors of the school were already open, as if welcoming us in. Locker-lined hallways stretched out, empty and dark, and a hand-painted sign pointed the way to the main office. There were no posters on the walls, no loose papers on the floor, not even dust in the air, as if the transient details had been worn away by time. But the murmur of children’s voices lingered at the edge of my awareness.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

Mindy nodded, closing her eyes. “Those aren’t ghosts. Not of people, anyway.”

“Of what then?”

“Of this place. Of its sounds.”

I looked at her, suddenly doubting whether “ghosts” was the right word for all this. “Memories. These are memories, aren’t they?”

“That’s what I keep saying! As long as people remember something, it never completely disappears.”

I reached out to the nearest locker and ran a finger across the air vent. The
tick-tick-tick
of my fingernail against metal sounded real.

“So we’re standing in memories?”

“I guess so,” Mindy said.

“Maybe this isn’t about ghosts at all. What if us pomps are, like, mind readers? We see other people’s memories as if they were places and things and . . .”

Mindy was glaring at me. “And
people
? You think I’m just a figment of your mom’s imagination?”

“I don’t know.” As the words came out, I could hear how unkind they sounded. Mindy wasn’t a memory—she was a person whose existence depended on being remembered. There was a difference, maybe. “I was just thinking out loud. I don’t understand any of this, really.”

As we stood there in unhappy silence, a sound drifted down the hallway, a child’s voice singing . . .

“Come down, come down, whoever you are.”

“Um, okay,” I said. “Is that, like, the ghost of a song?”

“No.” Mindy reached up and took my hand, squeezing hard. “There’s someone down there, Lizzie.”

“Okay . . .” The song repeated, distant and forlorn, and sparks of fear kindled in my veins. “Are they going to come up?”

“I hope not,” Mindy said.

We stood there, frozen for a moment, me trying to slow my breathing. The last time I’d panicked on the flipside, I’d popped back into the normal world right in front of Special Agent Elian Reyes. That wasn’t something I wanted to repeat in the middle of a
vacant lot surrounded by razor wire, especially with a creepy ghost-song leaking out of the ground.

The singing cut off. Mindy and I stared at each other in the awful silence.

“Okay,” I said, taking a step backward. “Let’s just try to—”

“Look,” Mindy whispered, her eyes on the floor.

A darkness was spreading down the hallway, like spilled ink rolling toward us. It blotted out the tiles of the floor, pure black against the soft grays of the flipside. Like the rivers of oil I’d glimpsed in the desert, it moved with intent, a living thing, and it carried the same thick and sugary scent.

The singsong voice called out again.

“I can heeeear you up there. Why don’t you come down and play?”

“Maybe we should just get out of here,” I whispered.

“Yep.” Mindy turned and ran.

“Wait for me!” I shouted, setting off after her, out the school door and down the stairs. As I ran across the playground, my heart galloped, pushing warmth outward into my arms and legs.

Life was surging through me, and the world began to shift. The playground faded, and stars shone through gaps in the flat gray sky, as if a vast fabric were tearing overhead. I wondered whether to stop and regather my grasp on the flipside, or try and run to the fence in time.

“
Please don’t go!
” the voice sang from behind, which pretty much made the choice for me.

I ran harder, catching up with Mindy and passing her, my feet pounding the asphalt as hard as they could.

The fence in my path was looking more solid every second.
School buses loomed around me now, and I swerved to thread my way between two of them, not wanting to solidify inside a mass of metal and rubber.

The fence was right in front of me, and I launched myself at it, covering my face with both arms. The chicken wire pulled and sucked as I went through, like a thick spiderweb, sticky and reluctant to let me pass. But the tension broke with a
snap
, and suddenly I was on the other side, stumbling into the living world . . . and the street.

Headlights flashed as I skidded to a halt, the shriek of a swerving car screaming in my ears. I fell and dropped into a fetal position as the machine whooshed by, so close that I felt engine heat in the wind of its passage. But the scream of tires turned into the fading blare of a car horn, and the car flashed past and kept moving.

I uncurled myself and sat up, looking both ways down the street—no cars in sight except for the red taillights, accelerating now. I guess the driver hadn’t been too keen on investigating black-clad figures popping out of thin air.

“Whoa.” Mindy jogged up beside me. “That was close.”

I stood up gingerly, swallowing when I saw skid marks curving around me. My right knee was throbbing and the heels of both hands were raw. The pain felt sharp and real after the gray flatness of the flipside. My scraped palms pulsed with my heartbeat, but it was wonderful, being back in the real world.

I limped as we crossed the road.

“Are you okay?” Mindy asked.

“Yeah, great. But next time, let’s try a ghost building with no fence around it.”

“Sure.” Mindy looked back at the vacant lot, her eyes wide. “And maybe . . .”

I nodded. “Without anything scary in the basement.”

“I don’t know what that was. Sorry!”

“Going inside was my idea.” I touched my right knee. My jeans were ripped, but not bloody. “Anyway, thanks for showing me how this works, Mindy.”

She looked up at me. “Really?”

I nodded, still buzzing from the chase. Crossing the barrier between life and death was getting addictive.

We headed back to my house—
our
house, as Mindy kept reminding me.

On the way around to the back door, we checked in front of the Andersons’ yard to see if Special Agent Reyes had reappeared, but he hadn’t. His car had been gone the last few days, so I guess his boss wasn’t worried about me anymore.

I’d looked up the Movement of the Resurrection online, and it seemed as though they had bigger things to worry about than me. After the Dallas massacre, all sorts of investigations had been opened up, from illegal weapons to tax avoidance. The Feds were closing in on them.

Not being a terrorist target was fine with me, but I kind of missed waving to the FBI on my way home.

Back in my bedroom, I pulled off my jeans, sat on the bed, and sprayed antiseptic on my palms and knee. The sting started my heart pounding again, but tomorrow I would be all bruises and aches, without the adrenaline of basement monsters and near car accidents to distract me.

When I looked up, Mindy was watching raptly.

“Never seen blood before?”

“I don’t really feel pain anymore.” She shrugged. “Everything is kind of soft over here. I’m mostly bored, and kind of restless.”

“Sounds like school.”

“It sucks. I never feel anything
real
.”

“Except when you get afraid.” I felt a smile on my lips. “I mean, you ran away much quicker than I did. And you should have seen your face when we heard that song!”

“Of course I get afraid.” Her eyes flashed.

“Sorry.” I’d almost forgotten how Mindy had become a ghost. Even if she was beyond suffering now, her last hours were something I could never imagine. “You know I won’t let any bad men hurt you, right?”

“I know.” But she didn’t look convinced.

“Listen, Mindy. Maybe he died a long time ago. Maybe he’s already faded into nothing.”

She looked away from me, toward my mother’s room and the closet, where she always went when she got scared.

No matter what promises I made, she remained certain that the bad man was out there, still alive. That he would die one day, and then wander the earth looking for her.

Maybe it was better to change the subject. “So what do you think that was, down in the school basement?”

She started tracing the pattern of the bedspread with one finger, not much happier. “I don’t know.”

“But it was the ghost of something, right?”

Mindy only shrugged.

“You must have
some
idea,” I said. “Is there anything out there besides ghosts? I mean, what about vampires and werewolves?”

A laugh sputtered out of her. “Don’t be a dummy. Those are just make-believe!”