Except then he changed his game. I’d like to think it was because I was being so impressively strong that he realized he couldn’t win against me, and chose a more vulnerable target. But whatever the reason, he went after Sherrie. I heard her groan and wondered whether he was burning her. I couldn’t stop the incantation to ask her if she was okay, but I caught her eye and tried to give an encouraging, almost-there kind of nod. She was shaking. The match she’d been holding fell to the floor.
Come on Sherrie, I thought. Only four more lines. You can hang in there for four more lines, can’t you?
She couldn’t. To this day, I don’t know what Jeffrey did to her, but Sherrie screamed and ran. Then the room was filled with wind, and the heat grew, until it felt like a hurricane of fire all around me. That awful laugh rose up, as if it was itself the storm.
The fire went out.
There was no ignoring Jeffrey now. I finished the incantation, but it didn’t matter. Jeffrey stood across the table from me, the now extinguished bowl between us. He shouted again, the same word as last time. But he didn’t stop there. I stood stunned—and I don’t mean surprised, I mean actually unable to move—as Jeffrey Litauer began reciting an incantation of his own.
There was a strangling pain as my locket twisted around my neck, then flew off into the bowl. I watched it sink into the water and felt an indifferent sort of calm. My thoughts were sluggish and distant, mildly curious maybe, but not alarmed, not afraid. The fire was lit again, and this time it was black.
I’ve never seen black flames before, I thought. Weird.
Jeffrey’s voice rose.
I was wrong. That’s not my language. It’s similar but just a little off, like how French and Italian sound the same but different.
His words got faster and faster. They came at me in a rush, then blew past, fading again, like a train going by. He shouted something like ka-rosh, and that was the last thing I heard before my ears seemed to simply close. They hurt. Everything was getting blurry.
Hell is empty, I thought.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe either. The whole world seemed to be bearing down on me. I couldn’t take the weight.
Hell is empty and
I felt my mouth open, trying to scream, but I had no idea whether any sound was coming out or not.
empty and all
And then, with shocking suddenness, the pressure released, and I was falling. I tried to open my eyes, then realized they were open already. I was falling endlessly through blackness.
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
I’d been banished through the canteen.
FOUR
* * *
I hit bottom with a bone-rattling crash that yanked the wind out of me. Getting it back again wasn’t easy. I was wondering whether any second Jeffrey would follow and drop right on top of me, and that was not a thought conducive to relaxed breathing.
Just breathe, Lydia. Don’t worry about anything else yet. Shrink your thoughts down to this one point, just your breath. In through nose, out through mouth. Just like the lady with the nose ring taught me in that yoga class I went to three times.
Twelve breaths, fifteen, nineteen. And still no Jeffrey. I knew he wasn’t coming, that he was still back in Sherrie’s house, laughing in his snorty way over what he’d done to me.
I had no idea why I failed to banish him. There had to be more to it than a couple of bad remnants, because that wouldn’t explain how Jeffrey had managed to banish me instead. Maybe that book had never been his. Maybe it was some kind of cursed thing, and Greta Litauer had tricked me into using it.
I could speculate all I wanted, but that didn’t change the fundamental issue: what had just happened was impossible. You couldn’t banish a live person.
Unless of course you’re not a live person.
I did not like that voice in my head. I wanted the yoga voice back.
Maybe that pain in my ears at the end of the ritual wasn’t pressure after all. Maybe it was a knife, or a gunshot. Maybe the rushing sound wasn’t me being sucked into the canteen, but my brains leaving my skull out a bullet hole.
My eyes had been adjusting to the darkness; where there was only blackness when I first landed, I could now discern gray and blue. I sat up—feeling less dizzy than I expected—and looked around. It was like one of those charity haunted houses they do at Halloween. A low-budget one. What little light there was was faint and bluish. A heavy mist swirled sluggishly around. When I ran my hand over whatever was under me, it felt like outdoor ground, not a floor. But not grass either. Cracked, baked, hard ground. No wonder it had hurt so much to fall on.
And that was it. That was all I could see, and there were no sounds, no smells. No, not a haunted house, I thought, more like a movie set. It felt like cardboard. I felt like cardboard.
This wasn’t nice enough to be Heaven, but it wasn’t awful enough for Hell (Hell is empty) either. Some sort of limbo or purgatory, then?
Well, I supposed I ought to do something. If I was dead, I needed to get organized, because I had no idea what that entailed. What was expected of me. What to do next.
I stood up, and for a while that was as far as I got. I was kind of hoping somebody—maybe an angel, but I really wanted it to be Nat—would come along to greet me and explain things. Nobody did. And all the waiting did was give my mind a chance to reflect unbidden on what being dead would mean. I imagined Warren’s face when Charlie had to tell him that I was gone forever, and felt a keen, concentrated pain that took my newly regained breath away.
I stood there for what seemed like a long time, thinking about my little boy and crying. But eventually I pulled myself together. I wasn’t sure I was dead, was I? When it came down to it, I didn’t really have the first clue what happened, did I?
I needed to find out, and if answers weren’t going to come for me, I’d best go looking for them. I picked a direction at random and started walking.
I walked through that misty blue nothingness, in air that was neither warm nor cold, until I started feeling a certain terror that this was Hell, after all. Wandering alone in eternal emptiness (empty Hell) suddenly seemed worse than fire and brimstone.
And there were worse things still: how very exposed I was, for example. How wide open this space felt, and yet how short a distance I could see. Anything could be here with me, lurking, watching, waiting.
I fought against that rising dread, but all the while I was straining my ears for (Roderick’s laugh) any sound of approach, peering into the emptiness for (gargoyles) any sign of attack.
I had no sense of time, nothing to mark it by. But at some point things began to change. The ground grew softer by nearly imperceptible degrees, until my feet were sinking into something sticky. Surely that would be mud—the mist was still too thick to see it—but in my freaked-out state I imagined soft, dead flesh. Gradually, the blank sensory canvas began filling in with a smell that supported that image, sweaty and damp and slightly rancid.
Next came sound: a buzzing of insects. The noise rose and fell, sometimes so intense in one ear or the other that I actually tried to swat the bug away. But there was no bug there, at least not that I could see. The constant hum and drone, impossible to escape, shredded what was left of my nerves.
The light brightened to a dull gray, but it didn’t matter because there wasn’t much to see except mist and clouds and empty space between them.
And then I heard the footsteps.
They were soft, plopping into the wet ground, but they were unmistakably there. Sadly, I couldn’t tell which direction they came from, which made the knowledge of them much less useful. I couldn’t run away if I didn’t know which way to run.
I stopped walking and desperately wished I had a corner to back into, something to press my back up against, but there was nothing. I was wide open to attack from any direction.
I listened as whoever it was closed the space between us. And I heard him before I saw him, a deep baritone voice
asking, “Who’s there?”
Which was when it occurred to me that I was the intruder here. Maybe it was like my mom always said about snakes: maybe he was more scared of me than I was of him. But he didn’t sound scared.
A tall figure emerged from the mist, dressed in an old-fashioned, loose-fitting three piece suit and a fedora with a wide ribbon. I wondered whether you still called it a ribbon, even when it was on a man’s accessory? I also wondered whether thinking about ribbons in my current circumstances meant I was now officially hysterical.
The man looked solid, like a live person. I put my hands up in front of me, palms out and ready to defend myself if need be, as he came close enough for me to take in the hard lines of his face, the rogue lock of dark hair that had escaped his hat to fall over his forehead.
And that was as far as I got before his eyes widened in recognition, and he took the last three steps between us in a rush. It seemed my defensive stance was wildly ineffective, because I mostly just stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, while he grabbed me by the shoulders. I pushed at his chest, but he only gripped me harder. The next step was to knee him in the balls, which was what I was about to do when I saw the look in his eyes. It was plenty hostile, but above that there was a desperation that gave me pause. He was scared, after all, although not of me.
“Is Maisie still alive?”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. For a second I couldn’t place the name, so I hesitated while he stared down at me, nostrils flaring. Then it clicked into place. It was those nostrils that did it. They got me focused on his unusually long nose. “You mean Grandma Maisie,” I said. “You’re Thomas Dodd.”
“Answer me!”
“Did you... you know that’s not why they put the house up for sale, right? She didn’t die. They just moved her to assisted living is all. It’s a really nice place, I was there once to visit my friend Stephanie’s father. There’s a gigantic garden and they have this van they use to take them on trips and I think they even do karaoke sometimes.”
Yeah, you don’t have to tell me how stupid that sounds. But I babble when I’m nervous, and I was nervous as all get-out. Thomas Dodd, whose Newfie had attacked me, whose gargoyle (or someone’s gargoyle, in his house) had fallen on me. Who had disappeared through the canteen on a wave of Roderick Turner’s laughter. I should have kneed him in the balls when I had the chance.
But he was already dropping his hands and stepping back out of knee range. Trying to get himself under control, by the looks of it. A vein was throbbing in his neck as he said, “I know where they took her. What I’m asking is, is she still there, or is it too late?”
I considered this. I’d just seen Katie a few days ago at the school. We’d chatted for a minute or two, and what had she said? The usual, everything’s fine, Grandma Maisie’s house hasn’t sold yet and Branson has a really bad cold, or maybe it’s allergies, but Clark got a promotion. Not a word about Grandma Maisie herself, and surely Katie would have mentioned it if she died?
“She’s fine,” I said. “As far as I know, she’s doing fine.”
Tom looked away. “Fine for now,” he muttered. “Okay. That’s good though. And you must know the way out.” His eyes flicked back over to me during that last part, making it clear that I was the you, but it didn’t sound like a question. He seemed to be talking this over mostly with himself.
Everything in my head tangled together into one dazed, overwhelmed, somewhat random mess: I don’t know what’s going to happen to me; I’m scared; Tom Dodd sure turned out to be hot; did he do that with the gargoyle on purpose; will Charlie still take Warren trick-or-treating if I never come home, because he’s so excited about that costume; why is Tom so worried about his niece; why am I calling him Tom like we’re buddies; if I’m dead why does my head hurt so bad; I don’t know what to do right now. What actually came out of my mouth was, “The way out of where?”
His confusion drained a little of the hostility from his face. “This blasted canteen, obviously.”
I blinked at him. “Out of the... we’re in the canteen?”
“Of course. But you must know where you are if you recognized me.”
“In the canteen. Is what you’re saying.” That couldn’t be right. In and out were not the prepositions that went with the canteen. It was supposed to be through. “What, like we got shrunk really tiny or something?”
Tom’s voice was deeper than ever as he boomed, “How can you be asking me that?”
I flinched. I didn’t like him shouting in this place. I had the idea of it rousing something that was better left asleep.
He stabbed a finger toward me. “I should be the one demanding answers from you! How can you not know? Why would you be using that thing if you didn’t know what it did?”
“But I did know!” I said. “We were told it was a portal. To the afterlife. We thought—”
“You thought,” Tom interrupted. His face was getting very red. “You didn’t think it might be a good idea to make sure, before you decided you had the right to ship us off here?”
“How was I supposed to make sure?” I asked. “It’s not like I could go thr—” I stopped, but he knew what I’d been about to say. He raised an eyebrow and nodded at me, presenting the obvious evidence that I could, indeed, come through myself. I could only shrug.
Tom took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, then without warning grabbed me by the elbow and started walking. “This is no place for a discussion, we need to get you out of the open. If I sensed you, the others will too. And I can’t vouch for your safety if they find you.”
“What do you mean you sensed me?”
“I knew there was a live person nearby.”
“I’m alive?” I couldn’t help my smile breaking through, even though I figured it was rude to celebrate it so baldly in front of a dead guy. “How can you be sure?”
Tom shrugged. “I can feel it. Live people can feel the presence of ghosts, right?”
“A lot of them can, yes.”
“Well, I guess the reverse also holds true.”
I stopped short, my arm jerking painfully in his grip. “Well thanks for letting me know I’m not dead. Really. But I’m not going anywhere with you.” He scowled. I almost laughed. “What, that surprises you?”
“Did you not hear me say you aren’t safe? We need to get you out of the swamp.”
“Well I’m sure as hell not safe with you! Last time I saw you, you attacked me. With a Newfie.” I was definitely not at my most rational, but for some reason that seemed like the greatest insult of all, that he would attack me with a dog like Little John, who I had loved so much. Who Kevin and I both loved so much. When L.J. died, there was pretty much no reason to stay married anymore.
“Yes,” said Tom, “and last time I saw you, you trapped me in a goddamn canteen. So I’d say I’ve got the greater cause for complaint.”
“Fine,” I said. “I get it, you’re pissed at me. Which is a good reason not to trust you, wouldn’t you say?”
He looked down his long nose at me. His eyes were the color of thunderheads, which coordinated quite nicely with his expression just then. “It would be contrary to my self-interest to hurt you.”
“Why?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
In the space before he answered, I thought of what Jacob Marley said, when Scrooge asked him the same question: Much. I suppressed a shiver.
“Well, I assumed you understood how everything worked,” he said. “With you being the one working it and all. But now I guess I don’t know whether you can help me at all.” He sighed and jammed his hat back on his head. “You’re not that smart, are you?”
“I am so,” I said, before I could stop myself. Great. What would be next, I know you are, but what am I?
But Tom gave no indication of hearing me. He was looking down, one hand on the back of his neck. I would come to learn that this was his thinking pose. “Still, I guess you know more abo
ut this than anyone else. More than me, anyway.”
“Is there a point we’re coming to here, or...?”
He looked back at me and said in the tone of somebody stating the obvious, “Yes. I expect you to make amends for trapping me here by getting me out. Now let’s go.” He turned and started walking again, without waiting to see if I would follow.
I almost didn’t. But his words were clanging around in my head: I can’t vouch for your safety if they find you. One thing was for sure: if I was really inside the canteen, there were definitely a lot of nasty dead people here with grudges against me.
It was certainly possible that Tom was trying to lead me to (Roderick) a trap. But that begged the question of why; if he wanted to hurt me in some way, I saw no reason to go through the trouble of taking me to someone or someplace else to do it. Lord knew I felt vulnerable enough right where I was.
I fell into step beside him, but it wasn’t easy to stay there. His legs were long and he was stalking off like he had an appointment.
“Look, I don’t think I can give you what you want,” I said. “As you so cleverly spotted, I was wrong about how all this works. I have no idea how to help you get to the afterlife from here.”
Tom laughed without much humor. “No, I’m sure you don’t.” He said it with such certainty that I had to resist the temptation to defend my intelligence again. “But I have no intention of moving on. I have to go back.”
“But I can’t take you back!”
“Of course you can,” Tom said. “You want to go home, don’t you?”
“Well, I haven’t found much here to recommend it.” I waved my hand, once again batting at a phantom fly. But the ground was starting to rise a little, so that much was good. Whatever else happened, I hoped I could at least look forward to dry feet.
“There you are then. You know how to get people in.” I flinched as his arm darted sideways, but he only clapped me on the shoulder, like a coach, his hand unexpectedly warm. “I have full confidence that you can figure out how to reverse that process.”
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 5