When Macy got to the Door, she didn’t see Henry right away. Macy shined her flashlight around, and jumped when several little pairs of red eyes lit up in the distance. Probably deer or raccoons or something. There wasn’t anything bigger than that in town, like a bear or a cougar. She hoped.
“Henry?” Macy whispered, her teeth beginning to chatter. Her raincoat wasn’t very warm and she wished she had grabbed her down jacket, but that was still packed away in the garage with the other winter stuff.
She clenched her teeth together, looking around in the dark. Then she saw him. The ghost was sitting on a pile of broken bricks with his back to her.
“Henry.” She said again, a little louder. He turned, and Macy was amazed that she could see him, even in the dark. His body was like the fog—gathering the first haze of morning light and making it brighter. He wore the same old, plaid shirt, and he had his arms wrapped around his knees.
“You’re back? Is it tomorrow already?” His voice sounded brittle and far away.
Macy stepped over a fallen tree and walked around the twisted remains of a merry-go-round. She sat on the bricks next to the boy. “Almost.”
“But not quite?”
“No, I guess not. There’s still some time before dawn.” Macy looked where Henry was looking—out past the dark trees to the water that it was still too dark to see. She couldn’t wait a few hours. There was school soon, and besides, did a few hours really matter? There was never enough time, ever. Nothing she did today would change that fact.
Henry reached out his hand and Macy flinched as it passed through her arm. “I’m not real, am I?” he said. Macy thought of Pinocchio—the little doll who wanted to be a real boy. She didn’t know how to answer him.
“I remembered something yesterday, after you left. I remembered my car. It was brand new, and black. I washed it every day, and it smelled like . . . I can’t remember. I can’t really remember smells.” He held his legs closer. “Do you think someone else drove my car after I died?”
“I was supposed to get my brother’s car when he graduated, but he crashed it.” Macy didn’t mean to say that. She had intended to close her eyes and pull the pieces of Henry apart until he vanished. “My brother died.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“What?” Macy asked, startled.
“Being dead. It’s not so bad. I bet he doesn’t mind.” Henry was looking at his own hand, twisting his wrist to inspect the back of his hand and then the palm. “I don’t even mind this—not being able to touch things, I mean. It’s just that I can’t quite remember. I know it’s important, but . . . it’s like there are pieces missing. Parts of my mind are just . . . gone.”
“Do you remember . . . ” Macy paused, making sure she got the words just right. “Do you remember if there were others with you? When you were waiting on the other side of the Door? Were there other ghosts?”
“Like your brother?” Henry’s voice was lower, with an edge she hadn’t heard before. Like he was mocking her. But no, not quite mockery—more like he wanted her to know that he knew exactly what she was really asking. He wanted her to know that he had her figured out. It sent a shiver through her, deeper than the morning cold. Wasn’t he just an echo?
“Yes,” she said, trying to keep the desperation out of her own voice. “Did you see anyone else?”
“No. I was alone . . . wherever I was.”
“But what’s it like on the other side of the Door? How did you get out? Can you go back through?” She flung questions at him. It was getting lighter and time was running out. Soon she’d have to take care of him and leave.
Henry stood up. “Do you really want to know?” That edge was back in his voice.
She nodded. “Please. What’s it like through the Door?”
He smiled a small, sad smile. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It had been two weeks since the lake and in that time, Jackson and Sam had begun a kind of . . . competition. No, that wasn’t quite the right word. Maybe “conversation.”
Sam started the whole thing when she sent him a link to a website about local ghost stories. “Pick one,” she had texted. There were so many to choose from: a child who haunted an old hotel from the 1800s; the ghost of a woman who was supposed to have thrown herself from the lighthouse after she saw her husband’s ship crash on the distant rocks; a dead sailor who wandered the docks at night.
Jackson chose the lighthouse.
Sam didn’t think they needed to tell the others because the lighthouse ghost didn’t have a reputation for killing anyone. Jackson was also pretty sure Sam was still getting shit from her brother about jumping into the lake.
But when they walked all the way out to the lighthouse—skipping last period so they would have plenty of time before it started to get dark—Jackson had to take Sam’s word for it that there was no ghost. He probably wouldn’t have been able to see the woman even if she had actually existed.
On the way back, Sam dispatched the ghost of an old lady whom Jackson couldn’t see either. But it wasn’t the right ghost. Jackson wanted the famous one—the tragic woman from the story. It was rather disappointing, but there were so many ghosts on Sam’s list. There had to be another one that was real.
Jackson was also starting to wonder what the big deal was about the Door. If having a Door just meant was that there were a few extra ghosts wandering around, then why had crazy Lorna been so freaked out about it in the first place? Did she really have to murder a bunch of students in the 1960s to keep it closed?
It seemed like the payoff wasn’t really that great, considering the cost. And Dom was finding out jack shit about closing the Door. He had mentioned a ritual in Arizona, where some guy had killed a few women, but there weren’t any solid facts. And how did that actually help them close the Door, if there really was a ritual? Was Dom really going to start offing random people to close the Door? Somehow Jackson couldn’t picture the little guy slitting people’s throats. Sam, on the other hand . . .
When it was Sam’s turn to choose from the list, she picked the child in the hotel. “What if it’s like in The Shining,” Sam had said, “and the kid’s all like ‘Red Rum, Red Rum!’”
They actually found a ghost that time. Sam and Jackson walked into the hotel lobby one Saturday morning, and when there wasn’t anyone at the front desk, they just started poking around the hotel by themselves.
Jackson was a little sorry he hadn’t told Macy, because she would have loved the old building with its creaky hardwood floors. It smelled ancient—a kind of musty, peeling paint smell. But he liked hanging out with Sam without any of the others. Being with her was kind of like having a majestic bird—maybe a bald eagle—land on the hood of your car. You weren’t going to fucking move.
When Sam found the boy in an upstairs bathroom, Jackson saw something, but it just looked like the old flower-print wallpaper was a little blurred by the sink. He would have thought it was just something in his eye if Sam hadn’t knelt down and held out her hand.
“Hey, little guy,” she said, with a voice that hardly sounded like Sam at all. It was so soft, and calm. Then she stood up abruptly, looking a little pale.
“Did you do it?” Jackson asked, squinting his eyes at the blurry spot. “Is he gone?”
Sam shook her head. “Nah. Let’s just leave him. For now.” Then she looked at Jackson, narrowing her eyes. “But don’t tell the others, okay? They don’t need to know about this.”
Jackson nodded, but wondered why it mattered. It was just a little kid.
For Jackson’s second choice, he went with the dead sailor. On a Tuesday night he and Sam walked down to the docks after the moon was high in the sky. It needed to be that night because legend had it that the sailor only came out after dark and only showed himself on clear nights. They had to go before it started raining again.
It was fucking freezing beneath the wide open sky. The stars felt like little shards of ice pressing down on
his skin, and Jackson could see his breath. Somehow he had missed the beginning of fall. It was summer, and then suddenly it was full-blown fall-almost-winter with leaves piling up on the sidewalks and pumpkin spice lattes everywhere. Before he knew it, November would be back again, and then it would be a full year since his mom had died. He had heard the expression that time flies when you’re having fun, but this year had been shitty, so that didn’t explain why the months were zooming past.
When they got to the harbor they found that the ramp to the docks—which was high above the beach at low tide and almost flush with the water at high tide—was locked. “What the fuck?” Sam said, rattling the metal gate that blocked their way.
“We could climb it,” Jackson suggested, though he wasn’t actually sure that was a good idea. It had a row of those spikes on the top of the gate that were supposed to keep birds from perching on it. Could be pretty painful if they slipped. “Or we could swim around and climb on the dock from the water?”
Sam snorted. “I think I’m done with swimming for a while.”
“Pick the lock?” Jackson wasn’t serious about that one (or, to be honest, the swimming idea). The only time he had been in actual trouble—like, with the law—was when he and Macy tried to shoplift a jumbo-sized pack of M&M’s in sixth grade. The bag had torn open under his coat and candy went everywhere. Macy pretended that she didn’t even know him and had just walked out of the store.
Everyone thought Macy was Little Miss Perfect, but she was actually kind of a bitch sometimes.
Sam shined her flashlight at the lock. “Yeah, I could probably manage it.”
Before Jackson could decide if he should tell Sam he was kidding—or just go with it as per his agree-with-everything-Sam-said plan—he saw something move beneath them. Someone was walking along the beach below.
It was low tide, so a wide expanse of seaweed- and barnacle-covered rocks was exposed below the ramp. The ghost wore ripped jeans that hung loosely off his skinny body—so low that Jackson could see where his hips jutted out. He had a patchy beard and a heavy coat that looked like army surplus. He was holding a bottle of something and was swearing to himself.
“I can see him,” Jackson whispered to Sam, feeling both stunned and a little proud. Maybe all his practice had paid off. “It’s the sailor.” The ghost didn’t really look like a sailor, but Jackson was just so excited to actually see a ghost that he didn’t stop to think about that part.
Sam stared open-mouthed at Jackson for a few seconds. Then she said in a low whisper, “You do realize that’s just some dude, right? He’s alive?”
“Sure—just joking. Ha, ha.” But Jackson hadn’t been joking. Not at all.
He was suddenly a bit relieved, for the first time, that he couldn’t see ghosts. What if he couldn’t tell the difference? What if he had walked up and stabbed this (homeless?) man in the neck with something like Macy’s sharp little butterfly knife because he couldn’t tell a real live person apart from a ghost?
CHAPTER TWELVE
That’s when they decided to just scrap it and go back to Sam’s house. It was still early, only about nine p.m., and when they got to the house they found Trev and Dom at the kitchen table playing a drinking game. The object of the game was apparently to see how many shots Trev could drink, while Dom just watched Trev get wasted because he wasn’t supposed to mix painkillers and alcohol. Trev was winning, according to Trev.
Jackson was just going to drop Sam off and head home, but then he noticed Macy sitting next to Dom. It didn’t look like Macy had seen Jackson yet, and for a moment he felt like walking back out the front door. Then Sam took his hand and pulled him along with her into the kitchen. Sam took the shot glass out of her brother’s hand and tipped it back. She coughed. “What’s this shit?”
Trev held up a bottle of peach schnapps. “Macy brought it, ’s terrible,” Trev slurred.
Macy grinned her I’m-pretending-to-enjoy-myself grin. “I found it in Nick’s room,” she said.
Jackson could always tell when Macy fake-smiled because she held her eyes open too wide and looked a little crazy. Ever since her brother’s funeral Macy had been acting really weird. And not just the regular “seeing ghosts” kind of weird—a whole new level of moody shit. Whenever Jackson tried to talk to Macy, it felt like only part of her was in the room. He wondered if it had anything to do with Dom. Were they actually “doing it like rabbits,” like Trev had said earlier?
As far as Jackson knew, Macy hadn’t done it with anybody yet. But then, Macy didn’t know about the girl Jackson had sex with when his parents sent him to summer camp after ninth grade. Courtney, with long black hair. She showed him how to put on a condom and they did it in the empty cabin that everyone said the counselors were using to hook up. He never told Macy about Courtney. Maybe he would have told her if she was a guy. But he could just picture the way Macy would have fake-smiled while pretending not to be hurt. And then she would have looked at Jackson differently. But he hadn’t felt any different. He was still himself.
Jackson sat down next to Sam, grabbed the bottle, and took a long swig. The sweet liquid burned on the way down. “What was Nick doing with this shit?”
Macy apparently wasn’t drinking the peach stuff, but she did have a beer. “I think it was for one of his girlfriends. He probably kept it around for when she came over, and they, you know.” She wrinkled her nose and took a sip of her beer.
Jackson took another long gulp of the schnapps, then passed it to Sam.
“Hell no,” she said, passing it along to her brother, who poured himself another shot.
“Actually, changed my mind, ’s good.” Trev’s head drifted lower to the table as he lifted his hand, so his lips met the shot glass somewhere in the middle.
“So,” Jackson started, as though it was a natural transition, “Dom. Did you find out anything today? Any closer to getting that Door closed?” The bottle came back to Jackson, so he took another long drink. Trev was right. After the first few drinks the peach started to taste kinda good—sort of like a peach cobbler.
“No, man. Nothin’ today.” Dom rubbed his eyes, like it was such a huge effort just to sit there, talking. What a prick.
“What about the ‘ritual’? Anything going on with that?” Jackson asked.
Dom looked over at Macy, then back to Jackson. “No. Nothing new. Well, I did find another possible case, but it was really old. From the 1950s. Another set of four murders, right next to a Door.”
“Wait . . . how do you know about Doors from the 1950s? Didn’t you just start researching this stuff a few years ago?”
Sam put her hand on Jackson’s arm and handed him the bottle again. It was almost empty. “Jackson,” she said. “You don’t think we, like, discovered the Doors, do you?”
Jackson thought about it for a second. He actually didn’t know anything about what the three of them did or didn’t do before they got to Grey Hills. “Of course not,” he said. “Because . . . ” He took another sip. It started to taste bad again—like Jolly Ranchers. “Well,” he continued after he swallowed, “Lorna knew about Doors, so others must have already known about them. Unless you’re also time travelers.”
Macy perked up. “That’d be an awesome movie, right?”
Jackson nodded, “Totally!” For just a second, it felt like the start of one of their old conversations where they just talked about movie shit—both actual movies and movies that should have been made. Back when Macy actually used to talk to him. Then her face seemed to close up again and she took another sip of her beer.
“You know,” Jackson began, “I don’t really get what’s so bad about the Door. I mean, what’s really happened since it opened? Like, a few ghosts wander around town, just haunting up the place? They don’t seem to really be doing anything that bad.”
Macy started to scrape at the label on her bottle with a fingernail. Jackson tried to meet her eye, but she didn’t look up from the beer.
Then Trev piped up. “Hey
sis, we should just tell them, right?”
Sam frowned. “You need a glass of water, bro. And then you need to lie down.”
Trev shook his head. “Nope. We should just tell them.” He turned to Macy. “Sam doesn’t want people to know what happened. But she doesn’t get to make the plans anymore. I get to make the plans because she jumps in lakes and smells like duck shit. So I get to decide.”
Trev wasn’t really making sense anymore. Jackson wondered how full the bottle was when Macy brought it over. Pretty damn full, based on Trev’s wobbly head and watery eyes. And who knows what he had been drinking before she got there.
“Okay . . . ” Macy said, leaning slightly away from Trev as he swayed in his seat.
“Dom, you wanna do something here?” Sam said, scooting her chair out like she was going to stand up. But she didn’t. She just held the bottle tighter. Dom shrugged, then placed a hand over his hurt shoulder. Like he had to keep reminding them that he was the one who was shot.
Trev continued. “You know where we got all of this from? Maps and shit? Our dad. And you know where he is now?” Then he stopped talking and waited for them to answer.
“Um . . . dead?” Jackson finally said. “And that’s why you can see ghosts? Like the rest of us?”
Trev shook his head in wide, sluggish motions. “Wrong! Dad’s not dead. Dad’s,” he did a little flourish with the shot glass, “in jail.”
“Stop it,” Sam said. The blood had drained from her already pale face, and her hands were shaking. “Just stop it.” She looked almost as bad as when Trev fished her out of the lake.
“You know our dad killed our mom? And our little brother? That he beat them to death with his bare hands? Yeah. That’s what they told us, anyway. That’s what the papers said. That he killed her and our brother. They said he ‘snapped.’” Trev tried to make air quotes, but just managed to drop the mostly empty shot glass he was still holding. “But it wasn’t him. That’s the part they won’t tell us. It wasn’t our dad. A ghost got inside him. That’s what went wrong with his head, ’s why he did it. A fucking ghost burrowed its way into Dad’s brain.”
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