“I thought maybe you were on the phone,” she says.
“Just reading something,” I mutter, shrinking down a little to hide behind the screen. She accepts this with a shrug and closes the door. I sit there listening to the silence. Has anything changed? I can’t tell.
But when I finally set the computer aside and open the door to leave the room, something tumbles inward with a scrape and clatter, smacking painfully into my shins. I’ve jumped backward with a little scream before I realize what it is: one of the dining room chairs.
“Marianne?” Aunt Jen calls.
“I’m fine,” I say, my voice high. I give the chair a shove with one foot; it’s inert, ordinary. It must have been leaning against the door. Why would Aunt Jen put it there? I’m about to call down the stairs and ask, but cold doubt seeps in, rising in my throat. Am I missing time again? Was it me somehow? How could I have done that?
And then my phone chimes, signaling a text message.
Can you meet tonight? Ron writes.
I run downstairs to where Aunt Jen is singing along—badly—with ’80s show tunes as she chops up ingredients for the slow cooker. She looks up, startled, at my thumping approach.
“Aunt Jen”—I try to stay casual, but it comes out breathless—“is it okay if I go out? My friend just texted me.”
Aunt Jen’s eyebrows go up in an amused oh, really kind of way.
“My friend Ron.” The look deepens, and I rake my hands through my hair, disarranging pieces of it from my braid. “Rhiannon. Okay? Can I go?”
“It’s getting pretty late,” she says cautiously. “Do you think she could come here?” I roll my eyes, but turn away to tap out a return message to Ron, asking if she can come and meet me.
Sure, comes the reply, and I feel a smile stealing onto my face as I tap out the address.
“She’ll be here in twenty minutes,” I report in satisfaction. Aunt Jen tips some sliced mushrooms into the pot without comment, and I dash back up the stairs without waiting for one.
9
Aunt Jen doesn’t exactly stare at Ron when she shows up, but I can see her stealing little shocked glances. I hide a smile. She’s not dressed that outrageously—jeans and a creaky leather jacket that’s too big for her, albeit all in black—but it’s probably the makeup that does it, the black spirals around her eyes, the violently red lipstick. The front of her hair is slicked down into neat, red-tipped points on either side of her face, the rest of it caught up in a skull-and-crossbones clip, little bits of red sticking out like flames.
I close the bedroom door behind us; Ron slings her backpack to the floor, drops onto the bed.
“So,” she says briskly, “if we assume that my mother is not a hopeless fraud, our first task is to find out what it is that’s after you.”
“Well, it’s not a demon, according to Google.”
“The Necronomicon of the modern age. What makes you say that?”
“Well, that’s the sort of thing that comes up for ‘possession.’ And none of it fits.” Stumbling a little over the words, heat creeping into my face, I explain the tests I tried.
“What was the prayer?” she asks. I pull it up on the computer and turn it toward her. “No, no, read it out loud. I’m curious.”
I roll my eyes, but read it through.
“Huh.” She sits back thoughtfully. “I’d never heard that before. It’s pretty cool, actually.”
“I guess. It didn’t work.”
“Go figure. Mom would probably say you’re supposed to speak with authority.”
I make my voice deep, hold my hand out in a mock dramatic gesture. “‘Saint Michael the Archangel—’”
Ron snorts.
“No, no. Like, if you really believed in Saint Michael as your protector, and casting demons into hell, and all that. I’m guessing you don’t, though.”
I shake my head.
“Well. Stuff is getting thrown around, right? Like…assuming it’s real…what if the thing that’s after you is some sort of poltergeist?”
“What, like a ghost?”
“Kind of. A ghost that’s haunting a person instead of a place. This all started at your parents’ place, right? Not here? So it can’t be about the house, then. Or it would have started here. Or got better once you left. Right? Plus you fit the profile. Poltergeist victims are usually youngish. And they’re attracted to tension in the home.”
“Because of my parents?” I say blankly. “That doesn’t make any sense. People get divorced all the time.”
“It makes about as much sense as this stuff ever does. I don’t know, maybe you’re special.”
My turn to scoff. “Right.”
“Come on, what kind of paranormal investigator are you? We’ll ask. Here, see, we can use that.” She gestures at me and it takes me a second to figure out that she’s talking about the necklace. “Give it here for a sec.”
I hand it to her. “I thought you said this was for protection.”
“Well, yes, but we can use it for this too.” She holds the necklace by the ribbon in one extended hand. It swings slowly back and forth. “See, it’ll always move a little bit, even if you’re holding your hand still. If it moves side to side this way, that means no. If it moves side to side this way, that means yes. And if it just goes around in circles, it’s not sure.”
“I guess,” I say dubiously. Ron grins.
“Here, you hold it.” She draws a breath, straightens up, and says in a commanding voice, “Are you there?”
The pendant drifts slowly to a stop. It seems heavier. Is it my imagination? I keep my hand as still as possible, but my fingers tremble.
“Are you there?” Ron repeats, a little louder. My hand is definitely shaking now, but the pendant doesn’t move, except to turn very slightly on its axis. And to sink a little lower as it drags my hand down.
And then it’s pulled out of my fingers, like I’ve lost my grip on a huge weight, and the little clink it makes as it hits the floor seems out of all proportion to the relief in my arm. Ron and I both stare at it.
“Well,” she says, letting out her breath, “that was weird. Ouch!”
She had gone to pick it up, but lets it fall with a clatter, cradling her hand to her chest.
“It’s cold.” She gives me a stricken look, all her wry irony vanished. “Really cold. Like, liquid nitrogen cold.”
The wind mutters at the window. My voice is almost steady when I speak.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
Ron scowls at the pendant and snatches it up by the ribbon, dropping it on the bed, where it bounces a little and lies glittering in the light of the lamp.
“Bullshit. I mean, that could have been you. Right?”
“It wasn’t me,” I say faintly. Ron waves this off.
“That’s the problem with this stuff. I thought about bringing a Ouija board. That’d be a lot more specific than a pendulum. But it’s the same problem, it’s way too easy to manipulate. What we need is something objective. Something you couldn’t do by yourself.”
“Like what?” I pull my shaky hands inside my sleeves; I’m freezing.
“I don’t really know. We could go for the most dramatic option and try to summon it directly. But it might not listen to us if we don’t know what it is. I don’t think poltergeist is specific enough. You’ve never seen it, right?”
I shake my head.
“Dreamed about it, maybe?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe once.” There was that figure standing over me in the dark. But it looked like my mom, and that doesn’t make any sense. “It’s the water I keep dreaming about.”
“Aha!” Ron exclaims, and sits forward a little. “So maybe it’s something from the water, then. Something that latched onto you somehow.”
“D’you think? Why me?”
“I don’t know. Do you spend a lot of time by the river?”
“Well, you can see it from our house.” And from here, I guess. “But so can lots of people.”
“And you haven’t had any, I don’t know, special affinity for water, or dramatic near-death experiences in it, or anything?”
“I used to go to the beach here sometimes with my parents, but I don’t think that counts.”
Ron taps her fingers pensively against her lips.
“I don’t know why it didn’t use the pendulum, though. If it’s really there. I mean, why would it be making all this fuss, if not to get attention and be heard? What does it want? There’s something, obviously. ‘This is mine,’ right?”
She’s talking about this like she’s diagnosing a cold or solving a puzzle. Nothing unusual, nothing uncanny. Nothing that should turn the world dizzy and unreal or make my insides crawl. Is she simply humoring me? Playing along?
But the necklace… She wasn’t faking that.
“Do you think there is something there?” The question comes out timid. Shaky.
“I suspend my disbelief, remember?”
“You just…seem to know a lot about this.”
“Hey, if I’m going to be a paranormal investigator, I need cred, don’t I?” Her teasing smile becomes a pensive look. “It’s osmosis, mostly. I used to think my mom was the real thing, when I was little. Like, I don’t know, like Gandalf.” She scowls. “You can imagine how well that went over at school. I held out for a long time, but there’s only so long you can insist there’s a Santa Claus when everyone’s laughing at you, you know? And I…well, I had a really bad year last year. And she never figured it out. She barely noticed. She says it’s harder to read people you’re close to.” Ron hugs her knees, her shoulders hunched. “I told her I was meeting my friend Tristan tonight. And she huffed and puffed a little because she doesn’t like him. I guess she figured out he was getting me the cigarettes. But she didn’t catch on that I was lying. I should probably be glad. I mean, it’d be pretty inconvenient if she was the real deal.”
“So…disbelief.”
“Damn straight. It’s a cheat. Just stupid theatrics. And seriously flaky people. Do you know how she signs forms and stuff? Like, for school? Niobe. No last name or anything. I mean, for God’s sake. That’s not even her real name. I guess Joan is just too mundane. And she has to put ‘psychic’ down as her occupation, she can’t just write ‘self-employed.’ I don’t know how people don’t see right through her. She’s such a fake.” She hesitates, glances my way. “But you’re not. And now I don’t know what to think.”
“Is that why you’re helping me?” I ask, and then I’m afraid I’ve insulted her, but her smile returns, wry and crooked.
“Maybe a little bit. But mostly you just seemed so shell-shocked, the other day. I felt bad for you.” Of course she did. I knew it. “And you hate Farrell. That was definitely a point in your favor.” Her smile broadens momentarily, then fades. “If it’s real, I just want to know, I guess. That’s all.”
“Her reading was pretty hit and miss,” I offer. “She said I brought this on myself.”
Ron’s scowl returns. “Exactly. See? She’s full of shit. Who says that to someone?”
“It didn’t make any sense to me,” I concede, but I’m more relieved by her reaction than I want to let on.
“Right? I mean, what could you have done to make this happen, buy a cursed antique? Although come to think of it… You haven’t bought any antiques lately, have you?”
“Seriously?”
“C’mon, why not? While we’re entertaining the idea. These stories have to come from somewhere, right? Seriously, though, no antiques, nothing you inherited?” I shake my head. Her eyes narrow thoughtfully. “Well, there’s plenty of ghost stories around Ottawa. Maybe you picked something up somewhere.” She reaches for my laptop. “Here, look.”
We spend a few minutes bent over the computer, Ron’s shoulder a comfortable weight against mine, looking through local hauntings. But they’re all downtown or out in the boonies, places that are either hopelessly ordinary—the nature museum, for instance, which I’ve been to on class trips—or that I’ve never visited. I’ve never even heard of the Bytown Museum.
“That doesn’t really make sense anyway,” Ron says eventually, sitting back on her heels. “I mean, otherwise you’d think everyone who went on that haunted walk tour would have this problem. Somehow I don’t think that would be good for business.”
“I hate this,” I burst out. “I’m so sick of it. What if it hurts somebody? What if I hurt somebody?” I stumble to a stop at that and drop my head down onto my outstretched knees, hugging my legs. Mom’s words, almost the same ones, seem to whisper in my ears. “I don’t know. Maybe this is ridiculous. The simple explanation is that I’m hallucinating. Maybe we should just go with that.”
She’s silent; when I look up at her, she’s watching me, her eyebrows up, and I sit up, suddenly self-conscious.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…flexible much? Holy crap.”
“What, this?” I fold myself down again and grab my feet. She nods. I shrug, heat prickling in my cheeks. “Not really.”
“Are you kidding? Here, watch.” She stretches her legs out and reaches for her feet, but she’s barely past vertical before she stops, wiggling her fingers uselessly at her toes.
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
“I’m dead serious! This is as far as I go. I promise.”
I roll over onto hands and knees and sink down into a frog stretch, knees sliding out to point to either side, toes touching, hips and stomach flat against the floor. “Try this one.”
Ron obeys, grimacing, but only manages to sink an inch or two toward the ground before she collapses awkwardly out of the stretch, sprawling on the floor. And now we’re both laughing.
“Not fair. You’ve probably been doing that since you were, like, three years old.”
“That’s why I picked it,” I protest. “It’s what you do when you’re a little kid. You know, basic stuff.”
“Oh my God, that’s basic? Show me something hard.”
I shouldn’t. I’m showing off. She’s going to think I’m something I’m not. But it’s been so long since anyone was impressed by me. She grins and makes a gesture that says well?
So I get up, lift one leg behind me through arabesque into a back split, reach up to clasp my calf in both hands, point my toes toward the ceiling. Then I stretch up, pushing roots down into the ground. Steady. Steady.
Her gaze meets mine; the silence stretches. Isn’t she going to look away? Should I close my eyes? Something tightly coiled lurches in my chest, and I tip out of balance, stumble back to the ground.
“I thought you said you weren’t very good.”
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed, avoiding her gaze. “That’s nothing. Seriously.”
She clears her throat. “Well. Anyway. Ghosts.”
“Yeah. Ghosts.” I twist my fingers together. “Or delusions.”
“Well, like I said, you’re taking the meds. We’re just, you know, doing due diligence.”
“I guess. Only…if I can’t trust what I remember, how do I tell the difference? How do I even know what’s real?”
“Well, you know I’m real, at least, because I kicked Farrell’s ass. Right?”
I can’t help smiling at that. “Right.”
“So that makes me a witness. If something happens, I’m right here to see it too. And if I don’t see it…well.” She looks at me, considering. “You were just going for a walk, the other night, when all that weirdness happened. Maybe we should try that. You know, together.”
I hunch my shoulders.
“But what if…what if we can’t get back this time?”
“What do you mean? Get back
from where?”
I have to think about that for a second; I’m a little taken aback by my own words. “I don’t know, that just came out. It just felt like a different place. I didn’t really look around.”
Ron considers this, and then slaps her hands on the floor, all decisive.
“We should,” she declares. “We totally should. Come on, let’s go.”
“But—”
“It’s a fact-finding mission. Reconnaissance.” She softens a little bit, seeing my expression. “I’ll be with you the whole time, I promise. And look, see, I brought some provisions.”
She rummages in her backpack and pulls out what looks like a little bundle of gray-green twigs, tied up with purple string, and a cardboard box, which she hands to me.
“Salt?”
“Yep. And sage. Let’s take all the protection we can get, right? Good paranormal investigators come prepared. Put this back on.” She hands me the necklace by the ribbon. Gingerly, I obey, trying to avoid touching the stone. “And here, take your sweater off.” She takes it from me and reaches into the sleeves, pulls them inside-out. “Put it on like this. It makes you invisible to spooky things.”
I make a face. “Maybe you’re just on a secret campaign to make me look like an idiot.”
Ron wrestles with her own sweater, pulls it back over her head with the pilling fuzzy lining facing out, black seams running down her arms. She stuffs the sage and salt back into her bag, zips it up.
“Only because I love company,” she smirks. “C’mon, let’s go hunt some ghosts.”
10
Aunt Jen raises her eyebrows when she sees us trooping down the stairs, but doesn’t ask about the inside-out clothes.
“Are you going out, Mare-bear?” she inquires mildly.
“Aunt Jen,” I groan. “Please.”
“That’s right. I’m sorry, I keep forgetting.” She flashes an apologetic smile at Ron. “She’s been Mare-bear to me since she was about two. There was a song I used to sing to her, you know the one about the teddy bears’ picnic?”
I drag my hands down my face, but Ron grins at me.
The Dark Beneath the Ice Page 10