Falling (18 page)

“No I didn’t!” she shouted, getting angrier.

“Fine,” I told her, not having the energy to argue. “You want me to heat you some up?”

“Yes,” she hissed, and slammed herself down into her chair.

I rolled my eyes and pulled the leftovers out the fridge. She didn’t eat much, seeing as she had just gotten done eating dinner, but it made her happy so I didn’t say anything.

Getting her to bed that night was a nightmare. She was copying recipes out of her cookbook into all the little blank spaces of a fishing magazine. Finally Linc convinced her she had more magazines with bigger white spaces up in her room and got her to go with him. Changing into pajamas and brushing her teeth was out of the question and I cornered Linc in the hallway as he came out of her room.

“You think it’s okay to go to sleep while she’s acting like this?”

He looked back into her room. “I think so, she’s pretty occupied. And we have to get some sleep. What do you think is wrong with her?”

I shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know. You think this is just part of the Alzheimer’s maybe? I mean, I know it gets worse as time goes on, but I didn’t think it went this fast.”

“Maybe you should get her a doctor’s appointment?”

I shook my head. “They gave me a hard time last time I took her in myself. We’ll have to wait until Dad is home for a few days.”

“Right,” said Linc. “Cause he’s so helpful with taking care of Grandma.”

“Right,” I repeated dully. “Hey Linc, you really don’t remember anything else after looking for you phone in the car?”

He looked hurt. “What, you don’t believe me?”

“No, no!” I protested. “I just meant, you had all those bad dreams at first. Were they just bad dreams, or maybe part of remembering something?”

Linc shrugged uneasily. “They didn’t have anything to do with car accidents or wandering around a city. They were just … like being locked up in the forest and something bad lurking around. Just dreams I guess. I don’t know,” he ended abruptly and pushed past me to go down the stairs.

“Sorry,” I called after him, but he didn’t turn around.

Despite my worry for Grandma and for Linc, I was totally exhausted. I lay in bed, snuggled under my quilt, my window open a crack, practically begging for sleep. But every time I drifted off, a noise from Grandma’s room brought me back. Twice I got up to check on her and both times she was rearranging everything in her dresser drawers. Sleep continued to evade me as she banged and shuffled in her room.

Sometime after midnight I fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up in the general store. I looked around in surprise.

How long since I had been to Nightmare Town? I thought back and couldn’t remember. The store was closed, the lights off and only the hum of the coolers to be heard. “Abe?” I called, just in case. No answer.

I let myself out the doors but couldn’t figure out how to lock them behind me. Finally I just left. The dusty road leading down to my house was bright enough with the moonlight but totally deserted. I let myself in the side door where Linc could usually be found playing video games but he wasn’t there either.

I wandered back outside, stumped. Where was everybody?

Determined to find them, I took off down the dusty road again. I could see the glow of lights from the downtown area through the sparse trees. The stores were all closed but had soft light illuminating the displays in the windows. Clothing stores, a candy store and toy store lined the block I wandered down. At the far end was the glow of neon light from a high set window and thumping base rattled the metal door in its frame. Curious, I let myself in.

It was a bar, half filled with people. I let the door shut behind me and found myself in darkness illuminated only by the glow of lights over the neatly lined bottles of liquor. At the end of the dark wooden bar was Abe with a few other townies I recognized. No one looked up when I walked in the door and no one was talking, even though the music wasn’t nearly as loud as it had seemed from outside.

I half expected the bartender to tell me I was too young to be in there but she just glared at me and continued wiping out shot glasses. Uneasy, I walked over to where Abe sat. “Hey, how come you’re not at the store?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light.

“What’s the point?” he snapped. “If you’re not going to do your job why should I do mine?”

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant but he just waved me off. Hurt, I looked to other townies I recognized. They wouldn’t meet my eyes, just glared off into the distance.

“Okay,” I muttered, looking around for a familiar face.

At one tiny table at the other end of the room sat Lincoln.

He didn’t look up as I walked over or even when I sat down. “Linc?” I finally asked.

He turned his face towards me and I was shocked. He was thin and pale with dark, angry smears under both eyes.

“Hey Bixby,” he said dully.

“Linc, what happened to you?” I asked. “In real life you’re doing so much better.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Oh yeah? Does he know what happened to us?”

Dream Lincoln had never even conceded there was another version of him. “Yes,” I said cautiously. “He remembers Cory now—”

“No! Everything! He has to remember everything! Because I do.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly chilled. “Okay. Well, he remembers Cory being in the car. He just doesn’t remember the car accident or how he got to the shelter or anything. What is it so important that he remembers?”

“Is he having dreams?”

“Yeah …”

Lincoln nodded savagely. “Then he knows what happened. His dreams are as real as yours.”

“But he said in his dreams he was trapped, or locked up by something.”

“In the woods, in the fog, with a demon always on the perimeter,” he filled in.

His description raised goose bumps on my arms. “What happened to you guys?” I asked, feeling sick.

“Ask your boyfriend,” he spat in my face.

I COULDN’T SLEEP THE REST of the night, too afraid Grandma would get up on her own, too afraid I would wake up and be back in Nightmare Town, too afraid I would be back to Jordan.

School was torture. I fell asleep sitting in the cafeteria during lunch and was positive I was going to do it again in my first class after lunch. After a test I was sure I failed, our teacher started in on the next unit.

“All right, this week we’re starting our local history section,” Mr. Higgins said, passing out thin books to each of us. I gave it a cursory glance and stifled another yawn. “We’re going to start with a really neat area just thirty miles south of us with a town called Singapore.”

He jabbed at a blank space next to the big lake on a hanging map. “So Singapore was right here—”

“There’s nothing there,” the girl next to me pointed out.

“Right, keep listening. So, Singapore was settled in 1836 by a man named Oshea Wilder who wanted it to become a large port town like Chicago. He was successful and the town grew. It had mills, general stores and even the state’s first school house. Then in the winter of 1842 a devastating storm blew in, causing a forty-day-long blizzard.”

“Is that why the town’s not there?” the girl next to me asked. “Cause they all died in the storm?”

Mr. Higgins sighed. “No, actually they all survived. How about you let me lecture and save the questions for afterwards? So, with what has to be one of the most fortuitous coincidences ever, a ship called the Milwaukie wrecked right off the shore of the town. The people were able to retrieve food and supplies from it to last out the storm. Then a few years later, the man who founded the town left and it was bought up by another man who then sold it to his brother. This man was named Artemas Carter and he was responsible for the building of a very large schooner that transported lumber from West Michigan to Chicago. It was hugely successful and the town grew to hold several hundred people.”

I discreetly rubbed my eyes and checked the clock again.

“But that was almost part of the town’s downfall. All the lumber that was sent to Chicago was used to build new buildings and in 1871, when the cow kicked over the lantern and started the famous Great Fire of Chicago, it swept up into lower West Michigan. The town was spared but the woods around it were not and because of the deforestation the town became eroded by sand blowing in off of Lake Michigan. It was abandoned in 1875 and completely covered over by sand.”

“Well it not must have been that big of a town to get covered up just by sand,” one of the guys said.

“Oh, on the contrary,” Mr. Higgins said, hitting a button on his computer, causing a picture to come up on the screen. It was an old black and white photo of an old town. A dirt road ran between two rows of one- and two- story buildings. It looked familiar and I wondered where I had seen the picture before. “That building on the left is one of two of the town’s banks,” he said, then clicked to the next picture. “Here is the schooner built to transport the lumber,” he said of a massive ship docked in a large wooden port. “And this, this is one of the general stores. You can see it was converted from an old barn and we all know how large barns are. Imagine this being completely covered by sand in only four short years.”

I glanced up at the picture and felt my heart completely stop.

It was Abe’s store. It was a perfect, exact picture of his store with the only thing different being the absence of the unused gas pumps. My chest continued to constrict painfully.

Shakily, I raised my hand. “Is that, um, you say that is a real place?”

Mr. Higgins frowned at me. “Of course. Well, it was. I imagine the store is probably still there under one of the dunes, although it’s probably in pieces.”

“Can people still get to the town?” I willed my hands to stop shaking.

“Oh yes,” he said. “People still visit the area where the town was. It’s one of Michigan’s most famous ghost towns.”

“Is it haunted?” someone asked.

“Well, local legend says that it is. There was a dark side to the town. Being such a large port far away from the prying eyes of Chicago authorities, it was a haven for mobsters. They smuggled all kinds of things through the port and town and even used it as a vacation spot. They brought with them the crime and violence they perpetrated in Chicago and it rubbed off on the town. People say now you can see ghosts moving through the trees around the dunes over the town or hear weird noises or see unusual lights in the sky, akin to the northern lights.”

I couldn’t look away from the picture. I scanned it inch by inch, looking for any detail that would prove it wasn’t the same general store I had been dreaming about for years. I flipped through the book Mr. Higgins had handed out and scanned through the black and white photos in it. In the very beginning was a detailed map showing were the town had been and how to get to it. I knew then I wouldn’t be attending the rest of my afternoon classes.

It was a gorgeous drive down there and I saw almost none of it. My mind kept jumping back to the picture of Abe’s general store and I could barely concentrate on steering. Following the map and setting my odometer, I finally arrived to where the town had been. Pulling over on the side of the road suddenly made me fearful and I had to make myself get out of the car. Trees grew tall overhead and let in dapples of sunlight. Birds chirped and squirrels knocked cascades of crunchy leaves to the ground. The lake was a faint rushing.

Book in hand, I set off on a faint path that led up the dune. Cresting the hill and finally breaking through the trees, I could see a huge expanse of sand rolling down to the water. I stood, catching my breath, and took it all in.

Finally it hit me and with tears starting to flow, I had to sit. Somewhere beneath me was the actual building I had been dreaming about for years. It was real, perhaps all of it was real, and I didn’t know if that made me crazier than I already was or not crazy all.

“I suspected you would finally make it here,” a voice said from behind me.

I scrambled to my feet, sand flying everywhere. Behind me stood a man dressed unusually with large scarf wrapped around his head and swept across his face. He seemed to be staring out towards the water. I took a few slow steps backwards, all too aware he was between me and my escape to my car.

“I hadn’t even suspected it, not until Jordan finally told me how he first found you, in your dreams.” That stopped me. I looked the man over again, took in his broad shoulders, his enormous size.

“David?” I asked. Then, “Oh my God, oh my God, this is all real.” The shaking in my knees took over my whole body and I had to sit down again. Even my shadow on the sand was quivering.

I couldn’t see his face, just barely his eyes as he glanced at me. “Of course it is. You of all people should know that. And you of all people should know why you and Jordan can’t be together.”

“Why? Why should I know that—why should I know anything?”

David sighed. “You really don’t know? How can you not? How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” I answered, confused by the question.

He sighed again. “Your mother must be dead.”