There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "This is getting to sound like vampires again," I muttered.

  "Just get some," she said. She picked up the backpack and dumped the rest of the contents onto the floor. Candles. Lots and lots of candles. Ever since the ice storm that left the entire city of Rochester without electricity for a week, everyone always has candles.

  I got the mirror from the vanity brush-and-comb set Zach and I bought Mom for Christmas last year, and the mirror from by the front door in the living room, which has a sunset painted on it. That wasn't enough to close the circle—and meanwhile Jackie had gotten dishes from the kitchen cupboard and was busy setting lit candles on them, making an outer circle beyond the one with the mirrors, which made me nervous with Cinnamon sniffing and poking around—so I hurriedly pulled the entire medicine cabinet Zach had made in shop off its hook in the powder room.

  "There," I said.

  "Good," Jackie said. Apparently it was the first thing I'd done right. "Now put on the tape."

  Mercifully, the stereo was in the living room. But Jackie called, "Louder." And, "Louder." And again, "LOUDER." Till I could feel the bass rumbling in my bones.

  Back in the family room, Jackie had opened all the windows and the sliding glass door.

  "Jeez," I said, hugging myself for warmth and shouting to be heard over Luciano Pavarotti, "it's only March, you know. It's forty degrees out there." Dad hadn't even put in the screens yet.

  "We have to leave an exit route for the ghosts. Cinnamon, get away from there."

  I grabbed Cinnamon by the collar before she could make it outside, and slid the door till it was open only a couple inches. I didn't use the screen panel because Cinnamon is just dumb enough that I was afraid she'd jump through it. "Here," I said, knowing we had to make a diversion for Cinnamon and knowing that she had a thing for socks. I pulled off my sock, tied a knot in it, and tossed it into the kitchen.

  She went skittering after it, her nails clicking on the floor.

  Jackie put the back of her hand to her forehead, like one of those old-time actresses in a black-and-white movie. "That's disgusting," she said.

  "Yeah, well, let's get going before she comes back."

  "Come into the circle," Jackie said, "and sit back-to-back with me."

  But just as I was shifting balance to step over the double circle of candles and mirrors, she said, "Bible."

  "'Bible' ?" I repeated.

  "One of us will sit on the journal," she said, indicating it on the floor next to her, "the other on the Bible. That way, we and the journal will all be safe. You do have a Bible, don't you?"

  "Sure." I considered. "Somewhere."

  Jackie sighed. "Never mind, then."

  "No, hold on." I ran to the kitchen desk, where the mail, and grocery-store coupons, and all sorts of papers accumulate. I brought back a stack of church bulletins. "Is this close enough?" I asked.

  Jackie sighed, but she took them to sit on, because they were less lumpy than the journal.

  As soon as I sat down, she stood up, holding the bottle from Lourdes. She reached over the mirrors and the candles, then dribbled the liquid out in a third circle.

  Holy water better not leave a stain, I thought, or Mom's going to kill you.

  Jackie sat down again and reached behind, for my hands. "Close your eyes and concentrate," she said, but she didn't say what to concentrate on.

  "Aren't we supposed to be sitting around a table?" I asked. "So that the ghosts can bang out messages on the wood?"

  "Don't be more of an idiot than is absolutely necessary, Ted. This is an exorcism, not a seance." Then she called out in a loud voice, "Oh, spirits that haunt this house, we call you by name, Adah and Marella, and we say unto you, get thee hence."

  "'Hence'?" I said.

  Jackie dug her fingernails into my hand.

  I squirmed but she wouldn't let me go.

  "And again, we say it unto you," she repeated, shouting for dramatic effect, I guess, or maybe just to drown out Pavarotti, "Adah and Marella, get thee hence. Three times we name you, Adah and Marella, and three times we command you, GET ... THEE ... HENCE!"

  By chance or design, her last words coincided with the last notes of the aria that was currently playing on the tape. Good timing. Because if it hadn't been for that moment of silence, we never would have heard the sound of banging.

  CHAPTER 15

  Our TV Tunes in a Channel Nobody Else's TV Gets

  THE NEXT BIT OF operatic dish-rattling began, but by then we were listening for it: a definite knocking on wood. I tightened my grip on Jackie's suddenly sweaty hand. The sound seemed to be coming from the living room and, for the moment at least, it didn't seem to be moving closer to us in the family room.

  "Now what?" I asked, my throat so dry I was surprised I was able to get the words out.

  I could feel that Jackie was shaking, but she kept her voice steady. "That depends on what she's saying."

  "She's angry," I said, which was obvious enough from the loudness and speed at which the banging occurred, and the fact that it kept on and on.

  "What else?" she asked.

  "What do you mean, 'What else'? How am I supposed to know?"

  "Isn't it Morse code?" she asked as though that were the next logical question.

  "I don't know," I stammered. "I don't know Morse code."

  "Oh, well, that's great," she said, like it was all my fault. "I thought all boys knew Morse code—dot-dot-dash and all that nonsense."

  "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," I said. "And even if I knew Morse code, what makes you think ghosts automatically know it, too? And, besides, this doesn't sound like Morse code; it just sounds like a lot of angry banging."

  "Well, now we'll never know, will we?" Then, as I tried to pull my hand out of hers, she hurriedly said, "Don't let go. You'll break the protection spell."

  "I take it back," I said. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard." But I didn't pull away. "Maybe she's angry about the music. That would explain why she's in there and hasn't come in here. If she knocks down the shelf with the tape player, my dad is going to go through the roof."

  "Ted," Jackie said, "from the sound of her, if she wanted to knock down the tape player, it'd be down by now."

  True. "So what do you think she's doing?"

  "Maybe she's banging on the walls, trying to get out," Jackie said. "Maybe she doesn't know we've got the door and windows open in here."

  "She's never had trouble going through walls before," I pointed out.

  Jackie ignored me. "Once the tape ends, maybe she'll come in here."

  "How long's the tape?"

  "Sixty minutes," Jackie said.

  "Forget it." Our hands were so slick with sweat, I slipped loose of her grip. "By then we'll either be dead of fear or totally deaf."

  "Ted, don't break the circle!" she cried, trying to keep me from standing. "I don't have any more holy water."

  "Then you stay in here." I tucked the journal in my belt and stepped over the ring of mirrors, and then over the ring of candles. My one sockless foot landed right in the ring of holy water.

  Jackie sighed. "Once the circle's broken, it's useless."

  All in all, she must have decided it'd be best to know what was coming, for she followed me to the living room.

  I took one hesitant step in, but two real quick ones back, which of course landed me on Jackie's feet. But she'd seen it, too, I could tell, and she moved back without complaining or making snide remarks. There was a big black shadow, human-sized and vaguely human-shaped, hovering on the frosted glass of the front door.

  "She's trying to get in, not out," Jackie hissed at me. "And you broke the circle!" She pinched my arm.

  But that wasn't it. Now that we were in the living room, with Luciano Pavarotti battering our eardrums and the banging turning our knees to Jell-O, I could hear something else.

  I could hear Zach shouting from the wrong side of the door, "Ted, you stupid little toad! Once I get inside, I'
m going to flush you down the toilet!"

  Which was probably not the most convincing argument he could have used to get me to let him in.

  Still, I couldn't see that delaying would do anything to improve the situation.

  "It's Zach," I said, shoving Jackie in front of me. "You let him in. He's less likely to hit you."

  To my amazement, she actually did what I told her.

  Not that it helped. As soon as she'd unlocked the door, Zach gave a great shove, which flung the door entirely open and pinned Jackie behind it smack up against the closet door.

  Which left me facing Zach, alone.

  "You little..." he started. But it wasn't brotherly compassion that stopped him. "What," he demanded, "are you listening to?"

  From behind the door, Jackie said, "Luciano Pavarotti—Live on Stage."

  Zach pulled the door back so he could see her. "You're both crazy," he said. "You've got bad taste and you're crazy. And you're going to blow the speakers." He hit the stereo's eject button, cutting Pavarotti off midsyllable. "What could you possibly have been thinking of?"

  "Ghost-repelling music," I said.

  "What?"

  "Ghost-repelling music," I repeated. "Tell him, Jackie."

  Jackie just shrugged, as though it had all been my idea.

  So I went on without her. "Listen, Zach—"

  "I don't want to hear it."

  I pulled Winifred's journal out from under my belt and waved it in Zach's face.

  He took a step back and smacked my hand away from him. "Ah, that stinks. What is that?"

  "Great-Great-Grandmother Winifred's diary," I said. "And it proves that Vicki and I haven't been making things up. Winifred was helping runaway slaves, and one of them was a little girl named Marella who died in the canal just behind our house. And her mother died there, too."

  "I didn't even know we had a great-great-grandmother Winifred," Zach said.

  Leave it to Zach to pick up the one least important thing that I'd said. "Wake-up call for Zach Beatson," I said, waving the book under his nose again. "Don't you think it's a coincidence that Vicki chose for her so-called imaginary friend the same name as that of another five-year-old who just happened to die here almost a hundred fifty years ago?"

  "Maybe she read the book and that's where she got the name."

  "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.