Darkness Creeping: Twenty Twisted Tales

by Neal Shusterman

  This story helped me to explore the world of ghosts, and laid the early groundwork for Everlost.

  SOUL SURVIVOR

  What I tell you now you can never tell another living soul.

  It began as a dream—or what I thought was a dream. I was floating—rising higher and higher. Then, when I looked back, I could see someone lying in bed. It was a boy. Not just any boy—it was my own self, and I was lying in the stillness of sleep.

  This was one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming—where you have your whole mind, not just part of it, to think things through and make sense of everything. An out-of-body experience—that’s what they call it. And as it turns out, I picked just the wrong time to have one.

  The room I was floating in was bright and clear, because dawn had already broken, and light was pouring in through the blinds. Then I heard a noise growing louder. I should have realized something was wrong by the way it sounded. It grated against the silence of the morning, but I was so wrapped up in floating around the room, I didn’t notice until it was too late.

  There was a mighty roar and a shattering of wood and metal. Then something hot and silver passed through me, and in an instant it was gone.

  So was my body.

  So was the entire second story of our house.

  A moment later, the blast of a great explosion shook the air.

  When we had first moved to this house, my parents had asked me if I wanted the bedroom upstairs or downstairs. I had chosen upstairs. Big mistake. With the second floor of the house torn away, I could see my parents below in their roofless bedroom, screaming. They weren’t hurt. No, they were terrified—still not knowing what had happened, and not understanding why there was morning sky above them instead of their ceiling fan.

  But I knew exactly what had happened. A jumbo jet had taken off half of our house just before slamming into the ground two streets away.

  As for my body, well, I’m sure it felt no pain because it was over so quickly. Anyway, I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t there to feel it. Perhaps if it hadn’t happened so quickly, I might have been drawn back into my body to die with it, but that’s not what happened.

  Now I’m alive, but with no body to live in.

  Perhaps that’s how ghosts are made.

  I remember drifting into school the next day, going up to my friends and screaming into their faces that I was still here. But they couldn’t see me or hear me. I also remember hovering among the flowers at my funeral, thinking that being there was the proper and respectable thing to do.

  For many weeks after that, I drifted through the rooms of my uncle’s house, where my parents were staying now that our house was destroyed. I stayed there, sitting on the couch and watching TV with them. I sat on an empty chair at the dinner table, day after day, yet they never knew I was there . . . and never would.

  Soon my parents’ grief was too much for me to bear. There was nothing I could ever do to comfort them. So I left.

  You can’t imagine what it’s like to have lost everything. Losing your house, and your things, and your friends, and your family is all bad enough—but to lose yourself along with it—thatwas beyond imagination. To lose my thick head of hair that I never liked to brush. To lose those fingernails that I still had the urge to bite. To lose the feeling of waking up to the warm sun on your face. To lose the taste of a cold drink, and the feel of a hot shower. To just be, with no flesh to contain your mind and soul. It was not a fun way to be.

  I drifted to the lonely basement of an old abandoned building, and lay there for weeks, not wanting to go anywhere, not wanting to face a world I could not be part of. I just wanted to stay in that lonely place forever.

  Perhaps that’s how buildings become haunted.

  It was months before I could bring myself to look upon the light of day again, and when I did, it was like coming out of a cocoon. Once I could accept that my old life was gone, I began to realize that I did have some sort of future, and I was ready to explore it.

  I began testing my speed. I was just an invisible weightless spirit of the air, but I could will myself to move very fast. I practiced, building my skill of flight the way I had built my swimming speed in the pool—back in the days when I was flesh and bone. It wasn’t that different, really, except now I didn’t need muscles to make myself move, only thoughts.

  Soon I could outrace the fastest birds and fly higher than the highest jets. I could turn on a dime and crash through solid rock as if I were diving through water. These were times I did not miss the heavy weight of my body.

  And, wow—were there ever places to explore! I dove through oceans, and actually moved through the belly of a great white shark. I dipped into the mouth of a volcano, racing through its dark stone cap—right into red-hot magma! I plunged deeper still, beyond the earth’s mantle to hit its super-dense core. It wasn’t as easy to move through as water and air, but I did it. I did all these things.

  And each time I would slip into one of these great and magical realms, I would play a game with myself.

  “I am this mountain,” I would say. Then I would expand myself like a cloud of smoke, until I could feel my whole spirit filling up the entire mountain—from the trees at its base to the snow on its peak.

  “I am this ocean,” I would say. Then I would spread across the surface of the water, stretching myself from continent to continent.

  “I am this planet,” I would tell myself, stretching out in all directions until I could feel myself hurtling through space, caught in orbit around the sun.

  But soon the game lost its joy, for try as I might, I could never stay in the place where I had put myself. I did not want to be a mountain, immense and solitary, moving only when the earth shook. I did not want to be a sea, rolling uneasily toward eternity, a slave of the moon and its tides. I did not want to be the earth, alone and spinning in an impossibly vast universe.

  And so I dared to do something I hadn’t found the nerve to do before. I began to move within the minds of human beings.

  Like anything else, it took practice.

  When I first slipped inside a human being, all I could see was the blood pumping through thousands of veins and arteries. All I could hear was the thump of a heartbeat. But soon I would settle within someone and begin to pick out a thought or two. And soon after that, I could hear all of that person’s thoughts. Then I began to feel things the way that person felt them, and see the world through that person’s eyes—without ever letting on that I was there.

  It was almost like being human, and this hint of being human again drove me on with a determination I’d never felt before.

  After many weeks of secretly dipping into people’s minds, I discovered I could not only hear the thoughts of these people but change those thoughts. I could make them turn left instead of right. I could make them have a sudden craving for an ice-cream sundae. Have you ever had a thought that seemed to come flying out of nowhere?

  Perhaps someone was passing through you.

  I moved daily from person to person, taking bits of knowledge with me as I went, taking memories of lives I’d never lived. I got to dive off cliffs in Mexico, experience the excitement and terror of being born, and I even blasted into space in a rocket, hiding deep within the mind of an astronaut.

  This was a game I could have enjoyed forever . . . if I hadn’t gotten so good at it. You see, I came way too close to the minds on which I hitchhiked.

  “Who are you?”

  The voice came as a complete surprise to me. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “And why are you in my head?”

  I was in the mind of a baseball player. I’d been there for a few weeks, and this was the first time he’d spoken to me.

  He was a rookie named Sam “Slam” McKellen—I’m sure you’ve heard of him. They called him Slam because of the way he blasted balls right out of the stadium at least once a game. I know because I swung the bat with him.

  “You’
d better answer me,” his thoughts demanded.

  McKellen was the first one to know I was there. I was thrilled

  . . . but also terrified.

  “My name is Peter,” I said, and then I told him about the plane crash. I explained how I had lost my body, and how I had survived for more than a year on my own. I must have gone on babbling for hours—it was the first time I had someone to talk to.

  McKellen listened to all I had to tell him, sitting quietly in a chair. Then, when I was done, he did something amazing. He asked me to stay.

  “We have batboys in the dugout to help us out,” he told me. “Who says I can’t have a batboy on the insideas well? Heck, I’m important enough.” He began to smile. “Sure,” he said, “someone to pick up my stray thoughts that happen to wander off. Someone to remind me when I’m late, or when I forget something important. Sure, stay, kid,” he said. “Stay as long as you want.”

  I don’t need to tell you how it changed my death. It’s not everyone who gets to live inside a major-league baseball player. I mean, I was with Slam every time he swung that bat, every time he raced around those bases, every time he slid into home. And when he came up to accept his MVP trophy that year—it was ourhands that held it in the air.

  When we went out to eat, sometimes he would let me take over, giving me total control of his body. That way I could be the one feeding us that hot-fudge sundae—and tasting every last bit of it.

  At night we would have long conversations about baseball and the nature of the universe—a silent exchange of thoughts from his mind to mine. In fact, we did this so often our thoughts were beginning to get shuffled, and I didn’t know which were his thoughts and which were mine. Pretty soon I figured our two sets of thoughts and memories would blend together forever, like two colors of paint. As far as I was concerned, that would be just fine.

  But then he offered to do something for me that I never had the nerve to ask him to do, and it changed everything.

  “I’m gonna write your parents a letter,” he announced. “I’m gonna tell them that you’re alive and well and living inside my head.”

  I should have realized how that letter would have sounded, but I was too thrilled by the offer to think about what might happen. So we wrote the letter together and mailed it. Then, three days later, the world came collapsing down around us like a dam in a flood.

  You see, my parents were never much for believing anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. When they got the letter, they called the police. The police called the newspapers, and suddenly the season’s star MVP was a nutcase who heard voices.

  Sam “Slam” McKellen became the overnight laughingstock of the American League. It’s funny how that happens sometimes . . . but it wasn’t funny to us.

  I tried to get him to shut up, but he insisted on telling it like it is, getting up in front of the microphones and explaining to the world how a kid was renting space in his brain. We even went to see my parents, and although I kept feeding him facts about my past that only I could know, my parents were still convinced McKellen was a madman.

  We were sent to doctors. Then we were put in hospitals and filled with so much medication that sometimes it seemed like there was a whole platoon of us in here, not just two.

  In the end Slam finally broke.

  “Peter, I want you to leave,” he told me as we sat alone in the dark, in the big house our baseball contract had bought. Our hair was uncombed and our face had been unshaven for weeks.

  “The doctors are right,” Slam announced. “You don’t exist, and I won’t share my mind with someone who does not exist.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

  “I order you to leave and never come back,” he said. “Never look for me. Never talk to me. Never come near my thoughts again.” And then he began to cry. “I hate you!” he screamed—not just in our head, but out loud. “I hate you for what you’ve done to me!”

  I could have left then. I could have run away to find someone else who wouldn’t mind sharing his life with a poor dispossessed soul like myself. But I realized that I didn’t want to leave.

  And I didn’t want to share anymore, either.

  “I’m not leaving,” I told him. “You are.”

  That’s how the battle began.

  A tug-of-war between two minds in one brain is not a pretty sight. On the outside our face turned red, and our eyes went wild. Our legs and arms began convulsing as if we were having an epileptic fit.

  On the inside we were screaming—battling each other with thoughts and fury. His inner words came swinging at me like baseball bats. But I withstood the blows, sending my own angry thoughts back like an iron fist, pounding down on him. Yes, I smashed that thankless baseball player with my ironfisted thoughts again and again, until I could feel myself gaining control. This was my body now. Not his. Not his ever again.

  I pounded and pounded on his mind and filled his brain until there was no room for him anymore. But try as I might, I could not push him out. I could only push him down. So I pushed him down until the great baseball player was nothing more than a tremor in my right hand.

  I had control of everything else . . . but even that wasn’t good enough. As long as any part of him was still there, he could come back, and I didn’t want that. I had to figure out a way to get rid of him—for good.

  That’s when I remembered the dolphins.

  In all my travels through air, land, and sea, there was only one place I knew I had to stay away from.

  The mind of a dolphin.

  I came close to the mind of a dolphin once. I had thought I might slip one on for size—but the place is huge! A dolphin’s brain is larger than a human’s, and its mind is like an endless maze of wordless thought.

  When I had first neared a dolphin, I had felt myself being pulled into that mind, as if it were a black hole. I resisted, afraid I would get lost in there—trapped in there, wandering forever through a mind too strange to fathom.

  And so I had turned away from the creature before I had been caught in its unknowable depths.

  But now I had to find a dolphin again.

  With the baseball player’s spirit still making my hand quiver, I made a two-hundred-mile trek to Ocean World—a great marine park where they had countless dolphins in captivity. The whole time I didn’t dare sleep, sure that the baseball player would fight his way back in control of my new body.

  I arrived at midnight, on a day when a full moon was out and the empty parking lot was like a great black ocean.

  With the strong body of the athlete I possessed, I climbed the fence and made my way to the dolphin tanks.

  The plan was simple—I had worked it out a dozen times on my way there, and I knew that nothing could go wrong. I was stronger than the baseball player—I had already proven that. All that remained was getting him out of this body forever. Then, and only then, would it truly be mine.

  I held on to that thought as I dove into the frigid water of the dolphin tank. Then, as I began to sink, I let Slam climb back into my mind. He was crazed now, screaming in anger and fear. He did not know what I was about to do, because I had kept my thoughts from him.

  Suddenly there was a dolphin swimming up to us. It appeared to be just curious as to what was going on in its tank. As it drew nearer, and nearer still, I waited. Then, when it was right up next to us, I blasted the baseball player out of my mind.

  Though I’d tried many times to do that, this time it wasn’t hard at all. In fact, it was as easy as blowing a feather out of my hand—because thistime there was a place for his spirit to go. It went into the dolphin . . . and there it stayed.

  But the dolphin clearly did not want that kind of company. It began to swim around the huge tank, bucking and twisting as if it could shed this new spirit that had merged with its own. But the dolphin’s efforts were useless. Slam was now a permanent resident in the dolphin’s mind.

  And as for me—I was free! I was the sole owner of this fine bo
dy! All I had to do was swim back to the surface to begin my new life.

  All I had to do was swim.

  All I had to do . . .

  That’s when I discovered that this strong athletic body, this body that had hit a hundred fastballs over the right-field wall . . . had never learned to swim.

  Slowly panic set in. I moved my hands, I kicked my legs, but the muscles in my body had no memory of how to behave in water. They thrashed uselessly back and forth, and my lungs filled with the icy water. Meanwhile the dolphin swam furiously around the tank, not caring about me or my new body, but trying to rid itself of the foreign spirit that had entered its mind.

  I felt death begin to pound in my ears with the heavy beat of my slowing heart, and I knew that if I didn’t leave this body soon, it would be too late.

  I had to leap out of it. I hadto give it up. If I stayed in this body a few minutes longer, I might not have been able to escape it—I might have been bound to it the way normal people are bound to their bodies. But my will was strong, and my skill at body-jumping well honed.

  And so I tore myself from my new body, letting my spirit float to the surface like a buoy . . . while there, at the bottom of the dolphin tank, the soulless body of the great baseball player drowned.

  I don’t know what happened after that, because I left and didn’t look back. I have heard tales, though, of a dolphin that leaped out of its tank so often that they had to put a fence over it. But who knows if stories like that are ever true?

  And that brings me to you.

  You see, I’ve been with you longer than you think. I’ve been sitting on your shoulder watching what you do, what you say, and even how you say it. I know the names of your relatives. I know your friends. We’ve already shared several hot-fudge sundaes together.

  And if someday very soon, you wake up only to find yourself walking toward a dolphin pool in the dead of night . . . don’t worry.

  Because I know you can swim.