There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (11 page)

"Zach, she's five years old. She can just barely read her own name."

Zach moved to get by me, but I blocked his way. "There's a point to all this, I imagine?" he said. "Would you get that thing away from me? It smells like something's burning or something."

Jackie and I looked at each other, because the book only smelled like dust, not smoke.

"The candles," Jackie gasped.

"Cinnamon," I gasped.

We ran into the family room, but there was no sign of Jackie's dog, and all of the candles were still upright on their plates, except that one had just sputtered out and was smoking, which was what we had smelled.

"Oh boy," Zach said with glee. "Mom and Dad are going to kill you when they see this."

"We were doing an exorcism," I told him.

He flung himself on the couch and reached for the remote control. "Well, you should have done it at Jackie's house," he said.

Jackie began blowing out the candles.

"Would you just look at the book?" I begged.

"I'd rather look at
Jerry Springer,
" he said. "Today it's 'Sisterhood of Crime: When Nuns Go Bad.'" He clicked the channel button. "What did you do to the TV? Did you exorcise that, too?"

The screen was all staticky, the way it looks when you put in a blank videotape.

"We didn't do anything," I protested.

He clicked the VCR button on, then off again.

Jackie looked up from blowing out candles. "I think I can make something out, real fuzzy, right in the center," she said.

"Oxygen deprivation," Zach said. But I thought I could see it, too, and he must have also because he fiddled with some more of the buttons. The sound hissed and crackled; the black-and-white static danced all over the screen.

"Maybe the cable's out," I suggested.

Zach switched to the regular stations and flipped through them. Still a lot of static, but now there was definitely something in the middle. Zach went back to cable. "I'd swear it looks like a person," he said.

My thought exactly. My stomach was beginning to feel all funny again, for the first time since last night.

Zach was saying, "But why the same thing on all channels? Unless it's the president announcing we're at war or something."

"Zach, turn it off," I said.

"Maybe the Ginna Nuclear Power Plant exploded," Zach continued as though I wasn't there. "And by tonight we'll all glow in the dark."

"Zach, turn off the TV."

"What's that channel they're always saying to turn to if there's a national disaster?"

"ZACH, TURN OFF THE TV!" I screamed at him.

That finally got his attention, but he just turned and looked at me like he couldn't believe I'd talk to him that way.

Over his shoulder I could see the person on the TV coming in clearer every second, walking toward us through the field of static, a dark silhouette in a long gown and bonnet.

Jackie took the remote control out of Zach's hand and turned off the power.

Zach opened his mouth to protest but didn't say a word. The screen stayed the same: black-and-white static with someone coming straight toward us.

With Marella's mother coming straight toward us.

Closer.

Closer.

Till her face filled the screen.

Till, with a flash of white smoke and silver sparks, her image burst out of the TV and into the family room.

We didn't even have a chance to duck. She swooped through me, a clammy tingle that left the taste of murky water in my mouth; then, before I had the chance to do anything—pass out was what I assumed I'd do as soon as I had a second—she swept through Zach, then Jackie, then stood there shimmering and hazy in the middle of the room, hovering an inch or two above the floor.

All things considered, she didn't look as frightening as I had anticipated. I mean, sure, I was scared stiff, but
she looked more sad than angry. Even her clothes, her long black dress and her bonnet, looked tired, hanging limply as though—I thought stupidly for a second—she'd been caught in the rain. And then I remembered what she had been caught in. I saw water dripping from the hem of the ruffle Winifred had added to her dress, dripping and never reaching the rug beneath.

Her voice came thin and scratchy, as if from an antique recording. "Canal," she said.

We all leaned closer. "What?" I asked, amazing myself that my own voice worked, amazing myself that I could even breathe.

"Canal," she repeated, becoming more see-through as though the effort of speaking cost too much energy. "Stop.
Stop.
CANAL."

The others didn't look like they were capable of saying anything. I managed to squeak, "I don't understand."

And then she did look angry.

She swept at me again, and I lost sight of her.

I whirled around, but she wasn't there. I figured I was too scared to see straight. But then I felt her tugging and clawing inside my brain. She hadn't come out the other side. I was being smothered. "No," I managed to gasp. Blackness crowded the edges of my vision, closing in, closing in, until all I could see was darkness, except for one small area of brightness like light reflected off dark water. I concentrated on that brightness, figuring if I lost consciousness, that'd be the end of me. I looked at
the light, and looked at the light, and it became white bones, gleaming on the hillside.

"Stop it!" I'm not sure if I shouted it out loud or only said it in my mind. "Go away!"

And she did.

Once again she hovered in the middle of the room, but so faintly I could barely see her. She reached out to me. Her lips formed what may well have been the word
canal,
and then she faded away entirely.

I didn't pass out, after all.

If I looked half as bad as Zach and Jackie, I'm surprised they didn't pass out at the sight of me.

I wrapped my arms around myself, though the cold came from inside me, not outside. I remembered that Jackie had opened the back door and the windows, and it was good to have something—somebody—to blame the cold on. But the sliding glass door was completely closed, which none of the three of us had done. And then, finally, I noticed that, for at least the last couple minutes, I'd been hearing a dog barking outside.

At which point I looked out the door and saw that Cinnamon was standing at the edge of the canal ditch, barking like crazy.

I was too far away to see if her fur was standing on end, but my hair sure was.

Cinnamon backed up, backed up, but never stopped barking.

A hand grasped the branch of one of the bushes that grew at the edge of the ditch. The top of someone's head
appeared—someone climbing up out of the ditch. I thought that it'd be nice to be able to pass out at will.

"Vicki," Zach said in a voice little more than a sigh.

I heard Jackie release a breath and realized I'd been holding mine, too. Now I let it go. Vicki, and not Adah, and not a collection of walking bones bleached white by the sun. Vicki had sneaked out despite my telling her not to—it had to have been while we were in the living room letting Zach in—and she had nearly made me die of a heart attack. As I watched her walk slowly toward the house, I couldn't make up my mind if I wanted to hug her or strangle her.

Vicki must have seen us watching, she must be intentionally walking slowly to delay her punishment, for she just strolled, looking from side to side as though she'd never seen our yard before.

I forced my mind to stay with that thought—Vicki was trying to delay her punishment—and wouldn't let myself think of anything else, wouldn't wonder what she'd been doing down in that ditch where we'd never let her go by herself before, when she'd never shown any interest in the old canal before.

And I definitely wouldn't let myself wonder where Adah had gotten to or why Cinnamon wouldn't get near Vicki and yet wouldn't stop barking.

And then Vicki was at the door. Her shoes were all muddy, her hands were muddy—she even had mud splattered on her face. There was no way she could proclaim to be innocent. She put one muddy hand out and
touched the glass, as though a glass door was the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen. But then she got distracted and just stared at her hand. Finally, she cocked her head and looked at me, as though studying my face for an upcoming exam.

I slid the door open, and she just looked at me for several more long seconds before she stepped in.

By then the hair on my arms once again felt as though it was standing at attention.

Very slowly, very calmly, she said, "Hello, Theodore."

FIVE OR SIX SECONDS
passed before I could get my voice working. What I said, when I finally said it, was, "Hello, Adah."

Vicki smiled, a quirky smile unlike any expression I'd ever seen on Vicki's face before. "Don't be silly," she said in a voice which was perfectly hers, even though the tone wasn't. "Adah's dead." She glanced at each of the others. "Hello, Zachary. Hello, Jaclyn."

Zach and Jackie didn't do any better than I had. They just sat there on the couch with their mouths open.

Vicki gave a polite nod, another gesture totally unlike her, and walked through the family room and up the stairs. She wouldn't have fooled us for a minute, even if we hadn't seen what we'd just seen. When she got to her room, she closed her door behind her.

Zach finally managed to close his mouth. "What," he said, his voice quavering, "is going on?"

"If you stop and think about it," Jackie snapped, all bristly now that the crisis had peaked, "I think you can pretty well see what's going on. The thing we have to figure out is how to stop it."

"Yeah?" Zach said, obviously stung by her tone but unable to come up with a suitably cutting reply. "Yeah?"

I jumped in before they could get sidetracked with taking shots at each other. "What I think Zach is trying to say is, How are we going to stop it?"

Despite the fact that Jackie was sitting and I was standing, I had the distinct impression she looked down her nose at me. "Obviously," she said, "we need another exorcism. The circle will be stronger with three of us in it. In the meantime, I'll relight the candles. Zach, you need to stand guard by Vicki's door to make sure she doesn't try to escape. Ted, you can bike over to the church and steal some holy water from those little containers by the doors."

"We're going to sprinkle Vicki with holy water?" Zach asked.

"No," Jackie and I answered together.

"It's part of the magic circle," Jackie explained, "to make sure Adah's ghost doesn't come out of Vicki and into one of us."

"No," I said again. "Jackie, the exorcism couldn't have had anything to do with it. We saw Adah after the exorcism was over."

"Yeah," Jackie said, "and the instant Adah disappeared, Vicki popped out of the ditch."

"But she'd already gone down there on her own. And come most of the way back up."

"I can't understand any of this," Zach said.

"Neither can I," I admitted. "And Jackie's only bluffing her way through."

Jackie gave her shocked-and-amazed-that-anybody-could-say-such-a-thing look, but she didn't deny it.

"So what's the next step?" Zach asked. "Am I supposed to get the holy water, or what?"

"
Ted,
" Jackie corrected him. "Ted is supposed to get the holy water.
You're
supposed to guard Vicki's door."

"I knew that," Zach said. He started up the stairs.

Meanwhile, I was working real hard at trying to ignore the gnawing suspicion that I knew what the next step might be, and that it wasn't what Jackie thought it was. But I couldn't ignore the memory of what it had felt like to have Adah working at my mind, trying to claw her way in. Was Vicki still inside her own head somewhere, pushed aside and held down, frightened and thinking she was alone and maybe wondering if any of us could even tell that it wasn't her looking out through those eyes of hers or if she would be kept prisoner where she was forever?

I blurted it out. "Whatever happened to Vicki, it happened down by the old canal."

Zach and Jackie just looked at me.

I thought of Adah trying to claw into my head and how I never wanted to feel anything like that again. But then there was Vicki.

I said, "I think I need to go down there."

The two of them exchanged a worried look.

Jackie sighed. She gulped. She momentarily shut her eyes. "All right," she said.

"Does that mean I get the holy water and you guard her door?" Zach asked Jackie. "Or does that mean you get the holy water and I guard the door?"

"Nobody's getting holy water," Jackie said. "We're going with Ted."

"No," I said. I knew it was ridiculous for all of us to walk into that danger, but it would have been nice to have to argue with them a bit. "You go ahead and guard her door, Zach. We can't lose track of her now. Jackie ... you do whatever you think needs to be done."

"I'll come with you," she whispered.

It was such a welcome relief, I hesitated, and she added, getting steadier with each word, "Yeah, yeah, I know. But if we sent you down there by yourself and you tripped over your shoelace and broke your neck, how would we ever know?"

"Uhm, well, thanks," I said.

"Guard the door?" Zach said, sounding guilty and relieved and guilty-to-be-relieved all at the same time. "You're sure?"

"Guard the door," Jackie and I echoed.

Zach nodded and planted himself in front of Vicki's door, his arms crossed in front of his chest like Mr. Clean.

Whatever happened now, I'd asked for it.

I got my sneakers from the mudroom, off the kitchen. The sock Cinnamon had been playing with was all slobbery, so I ended up putting my sneakers on with one socked foot and one bare foot. I told myself there was no time to go upstairs for a fresh sock, but the truth of it was I didn't want to walk past Vicki's room. Much as I dreaded going down to the canal, I had to admit to myself that I wouldn't have wanted Zach's job, either.

Outside, the air was chilly, though the sun made it seem warmer than it really was. The trees were still bare from winter, the grass all flattened out and brownish from the snow that had melted away only last week.