Keeper

by Kim Chance

  I sat up slowly, trying not to exacerbate the pounding in my temple. I glanced around to make sure I was alone and then managed to pick myself up off the ground, crawl inside my car, and push the door lock down before completely losing it. The bloody woman’s face was seared into my eyeballs; she was everywhere I looked.

  Tears poured down my cheeks, and my chest ached as I gasped for breath. I gripped the steering wheel, if only to still my shaking hands. I panted for air but couldn’t get enough. Black splotches dotted my vision.

  You’re having a panic attack. The voice inside my head was calm and matter-of-fact. The rest of me, however, was in complete freak-out mode.

  Breathe! my brain urged, but my body was less than cooperative. My arms and legs were so heavy I could barely lift them.

  It wasn’t real, the voice whispered to me. Calm down. It was just a figment of your imagination. It wasn’t real.

  “It—wasn’t—real,” I wheezed. Breathe. Just breathe.

  In my mind, that soothing voice of reason repeated those words over and over again. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Just breathe.

  After several agonizing minutes, the tightness in my chest lessened. Relief flooded through me, though my entire body was still trembling.

  “It wasn’t real,” I whispered. “It wasn’t real.” But the words sounded strange. My lie was hardly convincing.

  When I finally got my breathing down to a normal pace, I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand and blinked away the remaining tears.

  “Okay, Lainey, calm down and figure this out.” I gulped down a breath of air and began methodically going over the details in my head, trying to objectively look for something that might explain what had happened. There has to be a logical explanation for this.

  “Step one, look at the evidence.” I shivered as I pictured the woman, the feel of her icy skin against mine. “Step two, form a hypothesis.”

  The scientific method had never failed me before, and already my nerves seemed a bit calmer. “Probably just a bad combination of stress and exhaustion,” I continued. “People see weird stuff like this all the time, right?”

  My hands still gripped the steering wheel, but at least they weren’t shaking anymore. My breathing had evened out. The more I talked myself through it, the more I could—

  almost—start to believe it was all just some joke, just a dream or a hallucination my overworked brain had conjured up in the heat of the moment.

  Most of the remaining pain in my body had started fading away, dulling into a more manageable ache. My left arm, though, was throbbing.

  I glanced down—and yelped. Right above my elbow, in the very spot the woman’s fingers had wrapped around my skin, was an angry, red handprint. The mark, raised and puffy, was the exact silhouette of five slender fingers, not much bigger than my own. I prodded the skin gently with one fingertip and hissed through my teeth; the spot was tender to the touch. It looked and felt like a bad burn, but the pain radiated much deeper.

  A fresh layer of goose bumps covered my skin. All former thoughts of reason and logic evaporated. The voice inside my head began its calming mantra once more—It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real—but this time it lacked the confidence and conviction it had before.

  There was only one thing I knew to do.

  Tearing my eyes away from the handprint, I pulled out my cell phone and tapped the first picture on my list of favorites.

  “Hey Styles! What’s up? Did you make it home okay?” Maggie’s cheerful voice on the other end of the line was so comforting, I nearly burst into tears again.

  “Maggie,” I breathed into the phone. “I’m so sorry, but I really need you. I’m freaking out. Can you come meet me?”

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  I bit my lip, unable to hold back the tears any longer. “No,” I whispered into the phone. “I’m not.”

  The playground was deserted. Even with silver patches of moonlight filtering through the trees, the place was dark and a little eerie without a bunch of noisy kids running around.

  I hadn’t wanted to stay at the comic book shop, and I couldn’t go home, considering the state I was in, so Maggie had suggested the old playground near my house. It was familiar and soothing in a way. Yet every time a squirrel moved in the trees overhead or the swings squeaked in the wind, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  I sat shivering on the edge of the sandbox and gripped the worn plywood edges.

  “God, Maggie. Where are you?” I grumbled, checking the time on my phone. The playground was only a few miles from the coffeehouse Maggie had gone to with Heath.

  “Lainey!”

  Maggie’s curls swayed side to side as she hurried toward me, her brow furrowed. A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed hard, but it barely budged.

  “What happened?” She plopped down beside me and reached for my hand.

  It took everything I had not to start crying. “Just promise me you won’t say anything, okay? Not to anyone.”

  Maggie nodded and drew an X across her heart with her finger. “It’s rule number one in the best friend handbook.”

  I took a deep breath and scoured my vocabulary for the perfect words. Ironically, despite the hundreds of flashcards I had made, I was drawing a blank. “It doesn’t make any sense, not even to me.”

  “Just tell me, Lainey. We’ll figure it out together.” She squeezed my hand.

  “I think I might have witnessed some kind of crime.”

  Maggie’s shoulders stiffened. “What?”

  “I was walking to my car.” My voice cracked. “It was really dark and there was this woman. . .” My hands started to shake. “She was covered in blood. So much blood!”

  Maggie was frozen beside me, her eyes wide.

  “But when I tried to get help,” I continued, the words rushing from my lips, “There . . .” The words stuck in my throat. “There was no one there.” My voice came out as a whisper, but the words seemed to hang thick in the air as if I had shouted them.

  Maggie was still unmoving, her face a mixture of confusion and awe. I could almost see the wheels turning in her brain as she tried to process the information. I sat still and tried to let her make sense of what I told her, but seeing her speechless was really freaking me out. What if she doesn’t believe me? What if she thinks I am completely crazy? What if I am crazy?

  Finally, she took a steadying breath and asked, “No one else saw her?”

  “No,” I squeaked.

  Maggie nodded slowly. “I think you better go back and tell me the whole story.”

  I went back to the beginning, right after I walked out of the comic book shop. I rehashed every single detail—the woman’s appearance, the strange connection I’d felt, her sudden disappearance, and how I had run for my car and seen her behind me.

  “Oh my God,” Maggie said when I stopped speaking. “That’s—”

  “Crazy?” I finished for her, letting out a huff. “There’s more.” I pushed up the sleeve of the hoodie I’d thrown on in the car.

  “Holy crapkittens, Styles!” She yanked my arm forward to get a closer look. “Does it hurt?”

  “It feels better now than it did half an hour ago, but it still stings.”

  Maggie’s already wide eyes practically bugged out of her head. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  “So she just grabbed you, gave you the Dr. Doom treatment, and then you passed out?”

  “Well, yes. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  I hesitated, but finally spit it out. “I heard her voice in my head. . . . She knew my name. It was like she was trying to tell me something.” I looked down at the ground. “But I couldn’t understand.”

  “You’ve been working really hard lately, staying up lat
e, studying a lot.” Maggie was chewing on her bottom lip. “Is it possible that . . .”

  “That I made it up? That it was just some weird mind trick?” I gripped the wood beneath my fingers even tighter. “I don’t know, Mags. I don’t know what to think.” Heat rippled through me. “I keep looking for a logical explanation. Maybe it was an early Halloween prank or some figment of my imagination. But the voice in my head and this.” I thrust my arm out. “There’s nothing logical about it.”

  Maggie paused, thinking. Then she took a deep breath. “Well, we have to start thinking a little less logically, then.” She pulled out the comic book she had shoved in her back pocket and tapped the cover. “I’m sure Peter Parker was as confused as you were when he suddenly woke up with superpowers.”

  “You can’t compare what happened to me to a comic book,” I scoffed. “It’s not like I got bitten by a magical spider.”

  “First of all, that spider was radioactive, not magical, but you’re missing the point.” She pointed to the cover again and rolled her eyes. “Maybe there are things in the world that you can’t explain and you just have to believe they’re possible.”

  “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “Try to stop being . . . you for a second,” Maggie said, ignoring me. “Throw logic and reason out the window.”

  I scoffed. That was like asking me to stop breathing. Yet, she had a point. If logic couldn’t explain it, then there was nothing left to turn to—except, of course, the impossible. I sighed.

  “Do you think . . . maybe it was a ghost?”

  “That makes more sense than anything else.” Maggie’s face lit up at the suggestion. “And you know, small towns are known for paranormal activity. Wasn’t Mr. Reinhard saying just the other day that Sherman burned down most of Lothbrook during his march through Georgia? I bet—”

  “It was just a thought,” I broke in, fighting the urge to laugh. “A stupid idea, really. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “Don’t do that,” Maggie said. “Don’t play it off like it’s nothing. It can’t hurt to explore all the possibilities, right? Now, think. Is there anything else you can remember about her that might help us figure out who she is and why she attacked you?”

  “No,” I said. “I told you everything.”

  “Hmmm, okay. Well, I’m sure we can figure it all out.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  “What about the census records at the library? You said it looked like she was from the olden days. Maybe there’s some kind of record of her or her family.”

  “It’s possible, I guess, but I don’t even know her name. And it’s not like we can look up ’the dead girl who attacked me’ in the index,” I countered.

  Maggie pushed the hair from her eyes and leaned forward. “Well, you know, if we could somehow figure out where this gal is buried, we can salt her bones, burn them, and—”

  My mouth dropped open. “Are you serious right now?”

  “What? I’ve been marathoning Supernatural. There was this one episode where Sam and Dean—”

  “Wait. Supernatural? Seriously, Mags?”

  She pursed her lips. “Don’t start with me, Styles. That show is legit.”

  I groaned and dropped my head in my hands.

  “Okay, fine. No bones, no fires,” Maggie said, yanking on my arm. “That means the first step should probably be to try and contact her. This woman obviously reached out to you for a reason. Don’t you want to find out what that reason is?”

  “Of course I do. But I seriously doubt a TV show is gonna help us.”

  “You underestimate the sheer awesomeness of the Winchester brothers,” Maggie said with a dreamy smile. “But look, we could try a more classic approach.”

  “Such as?”

  “What about a spirit board?”

  “A Ouija board? We used to play with those at all our old middle school sleepovers. They never worked.”

  “That’s because we were too chicken to ask it anything important. Come on, Styles. I know we’re totally outside your comfort zone, but you have to try. Why are you fighting this so much?”

  I chewed on my bottom lip for a few seconds before answering. “I guess I’m just a little . . .”

  “Scared?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I’m used to relying on books for everything. Concrete facts, hard evidence—things that can’t be disputed. None of this makes any sense, and I don’t do well with . . . with stuff like this.”

  “What? You?” Maggie interjected, feigning shock. “I never would’ve guessed that.”

  “You know what I mean. I just have a feeling that this, whatever this is, is big. And it makes me really nervous.”

  “I know it’s kinda freaky, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Maybe something incredible is about to happen. Hell, for all we know, you could be turning into some kind of ghost-

  seeing mutant with special powers.” Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

  I cracked a small smile. “Well, when you put it that way . . .”

  “I have one more idea,” Maggie said. “And this one doesn’t involve a television show or a board game.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “What if you talked to Serena?”

  I thought of my uncle’s girlfriend, with her long skirts and tarot cards. “Absolutely not.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because she’s completely nuts, that’s why.” I’d known Serena my whole life. Hell, she was practically family, but I’d never been able to buy into all her talk about the worlds outside our own. She marched to her own beat, and I was cool with that, but asking me to learn the rhythm? That’s where I drew the line.

  “All I’m saying is it couldn’t hurt to talk to her. Weird is kind of her area of expertise.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Maybe we should just try the library after all.”

  Maggie sighed. “Fine. We can go and look in the archives for old newspaper photographs or something that might help us figure out who this woman is and what she wants.”

  The whole thing still sounded crazy, but what other choice did I have? I glanced uneasily at the handprint on my arm. My fingers were itching to tug my sleeve over it and pretend it didn’t exist, but a wave of determination washed over me. I ground my teeth and glared at it instead. There had to be an explanation for what had happened to me, and I was going to find it.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  It didn’t take long for the calm I’d felt while talking to Maggie to evaporate. As soon as I left the playground, my mind began to hurl questions at me—questions with no answers. By the time I arrived home, my nerves felt like I had been running over them with a cheese grater.

  I pulled myself from the car and turned to see my uncle Gareth sitting on the front porch. He was holding a book in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. Considering the late hour, it could mean only one thing.

  “Oh, come on,” I groaned as I stomped up the steps and plopped down in the chair beside him. “Again? She just did one last week.”

  Gareth smiled sheepishly but didn’t look up from his book. “She had a feeling. You know the drill.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why can’t you date someone normal?”

  He ignored me, but he did reach over to give me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “She brought cookies, if that helps.”

  “Snickerdoodles?”

  “They are your favorite, aren’t they?”

  I nodded and let out a sigh. Serena might be bat-shit crazy, but she was a hell of a baker. “Fine.”

  “That’s my girl.” Gareth grinned at me, the glint in his eyes making him look much younger than his forty-two years.

  We don’t look much alike. Gareth is tall and brawny with honey-colored hair, tan skin, and dark chocolate
-colored eyes. I’m on the short side with long, wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, and a fair complexion. I look mostly like my mom, but I have my dad’s smile.

  Gareth’s and my mannerisms are the same, though, and we have the exact same sense of humor. We can even finish each other’s sentences. Serena jokes that we share a brain. I guess that’s what happens when your whole family consists of a single person. Gareth took me in after my parents died, and it had been just the two of us—and his kooky girlfriend, Serena—ever since. Our relationship had always been more like friends or roommates than uncle and niece, but I liked it that way. Life with Gareth was easy.

  I leaned my head against the back of the wicker chair and sighed. Sitting beside Gareth on the porch, listening to the soft slithering sound of his pages turning was peaceful, but my mind still flashed with images of the woman, or ghost, or whatever it was. The handprint on my arm stung under the fabric of my hoodie.

  “You okay, kid?” Gareth was looking at me over the top of his book.

  “I think I’m just a little stressed about the SATs.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  “You’re going to do great,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “You’ve been studying for months.”

  “I know. I guess I’m just. . .” I bit down on my bottom lip. “I’m just worried.” About more things than one.

  “Everything will work out exactly as it’s supposed to. You can’t control what happens to you, only how you react to it.” He smiled at me. “Besides, you have nothing to worry about. You asked for a dictionary and a set of encyclopedias for your eighth birthday. I’m pretty sure you’re gonna kill it.”

  The memory made me laugh. Though the encyclopedias had passed on, I still had that same worn-out Webster’s sitting on my desk in my room. “Thanks. You’re right. I just need to relax a little.”

  “Exactly.” Gareth turned back to his book. “Now, why don’t you head in for some of those cookies? Serena should be finished up by now.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I’m right behind you.”