by E. E. Holmes
I also suffered through three more fruitless sessions with Dr. Hildebrand, during which he talked a lot and I answered in one-word sentences and threw him filthy glares. Karen drove me back and forth to them in stony, silent solidarity.
I took the train back to St. Matt’s on the fifteenth of January, two days before classes started up and the first day that campus opened for the new semester. Karen seemed upset that I was leaving early, but if she wasn’t going to be honest with me, I could see no reason to stay.
The dorm was quiet when I arrived Saturday morning, but by that night it had repopulated, the gathering snow storm whirling students through the doors on gusts of blustery wind. I knew that Sam would be there early too, since R. A.s had to oversee student arrival, so I swung by to visit him. He had one of the worst sunburns I’d ever seen.
“Nice tan! What beach did you lay on all break?” I asked.
“I wish. My family went skiing. This is windburn,” Sam said. “And it hurts like a bitch, I might add.”
“That sucks. Still, at least you did something interesting, which is more than I can say for my break.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Mind-numbing.”
“Didn’t you even get to…” Sam glanced past me out into the hall and shouted, “Really, O’Reilly? In a paper bag with the name of the liquor store on it?” He jumped up and leaned out the door. “I’m walking down to your room in thirty seconds, and I better find that bag full of junk food or something else that won’t get you put on housing probation!” He turned back to me, incredulous. “Seriously, it’s like they’re getting dumber every year. I should go take care of that.”
I laughed. “No problem. I’ll catch you later.”
Sam stopped me in the doorway. “Hey, when Tia gets back, have her stop by. You know, if she wants to.”
“Sorry, lover boy, she’s not back yet, but I’m sure she’ll come running as soon as she gets here.” I patted his cheek a little harder than necessary.
“You two are so cute. I could just eat you up.”
Sam blushed even redder. “Yeah, yeah, alright,” he grumbled, and took off down the hall after O’Reilly and his poorly disguised contraband.
After unpacking my stuff I headed to the student center, where I found a nice surprise in my campus mailbox. The final paper I’d written for Professor Marshall’s class was tucked into a big manila envelope along with a letter. The paper had earned me an A, I noted with a mixture of relief and pride. The letter was a relief too, containing an apology from Professor Marshall, who had read my email and was very sorry about her “overreaction” to my “honest mistake.” The whole reconciliation was something of a lie, of course, but I felt better anyway. I emailed her when I got back to the room, thanking her for her note and accepting her invitation to have coffee and a chat when classes resumed.
Tia called to let me know that she would not be back until Sunday afternoon. “Mami” couldn’t bear sending her little girl back to that place without ensuring that she had one last day of home-cooked sustenance. Leave it to a mom to mistrust institutional food. Tia actually ate the healthy stuff, for the most part. In fact, with the exception of the occasional bag of Skittles, Tia ate healthier than any normal college kid should.
I fully intended to use my alone time that night to do a last spot of non-assigned reading, but by ten o’clock, I was whacking myself in the face with my book as I dozed off. Rather than risk permanent facial damage, I lay the book aside, clicked off my reading lamp, and drifted to sleep quickly.
I couldn’t be sure what the sound was that woke me, but suddenly I was awake. It hadn’t been another dream, as far as I could remember. I rolled over and looked at my alarm clock, glowing like a neon sign in the darkness. 2:37AM. I heard loud music thumping next door, punctuated by raucous laughter. I briefly considered chucking one of my shoes at the wall, but I thought this may not be an obvious enough hint for them to quiet down, so I rolled over instead and pulled my pillow over my head.
The pillow dulled the sound enough that I should have been able to drift back off but I found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t the music that had wakened me at all. My feet were cold; they were bundled in fuzzy socks and my comforter, but they were as cold as though I’d stuck them out the window into the January air.
And there was another sound, indistinguishable at first from the racket bleeding through my wall. It was a steady dripping sound, as though I had left a faucet only partially shut off in the bathroom. I tried to ignore it, but once my ears had picked up on it, it was all I could hear—like the ticking of a clock in a silent room. I’d just made up my mind to crawl out of my bed and take care of it when I remembered that I didn’t have a bathroom. No bathroom and therefore, no faucet.
My heart was suddenly beating rapidly. Somehow I knew there was something I didn’t want to see on the other side of my pillow. I couldn’t say how I knew it, but I was certain that if I pulled that pillow away, I would not be alone. For a moment I was completely unable to move; my muscles had actually forgotten how to respond to my brain, which was screaming at me to leap out of the bed and out of the room as fast as I possibly could. Instead, I did the one thing I had absolutely no intention of doing; I flung the pillow off my face and looked for the source of the sound.
What I saw was as mystifying as it was horrifying, and it was all I could do to stop from screaming aloud. At the foot of my bed, hovering just above my achingly cold feet, was a figure. In the darkness, I could not immediately make out the details, but my terrified eyes quickly adjusted, each newly visible aspect multiplying my fright. The figure was that of a small boy, no more than seven or eight years old. He was dressed in a pair of jeans, a red jacket, and dirty white sneakers. Unwillingly, my eyes were drawn to his face. Black hair was billowing hypnotically around an eerie, green-tinged complexion. His eyes were so dark they looked almost black, and his expression was mirroring my own terror.
As he raised a tiny, pale hand out towards me, I noticed for the first time that there was a faint glow surrounding the boy. It didn’t seem as if the light was emanating from him, but I could see no other source. The light was unsteady somehow, wavering across the fearful little face so that it rippled in and out of focus. The quality of the light was familiar, but it wasn’t until the boy’s mouth opened and emitted a stream of bubbles that I realized why. The boy was standing at the foot of my bed and yet he was very clearly submerged in water.
Before I could control it, a scream ripped from my throat, followed by another, and then another. I couldn’t stop, even as the ghostly form before me shook his head in protest. I screamed and screamed until I heard commotion in the hallway and a pounding on my door. Finally the door flew open and my room was flooded with light.
“Jess! What the hell? Are you okay?” I recognized Sam’s lithe form tearing across the room toward me, but I still couldn’t silence my own voice. My eyes remained trained on the spot where, moments before, the drowning boy had reached out to me and where now there was nothing but empty space.
“Jess! JESSICA!” Sam was by my side then, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me harshly. He grasped my face and wrenched my head around until I was forced to look at him. The sight of his living, familiar features turned my screams immediately to sobs. I buried my face in his neck and his arms closed around my heaving shoulders.
“It’s fine, everything’s fine,” Sam called to the small crowd of students crammed into my doorway. “She had a nightmare or something; go back to your rooms.”
From the reactions it was clear that this was a rather anticlimactic conclusion to the uproar I had caused.
“A nightmare? Are you kidding me?”
“Did you hear her?”
“The whole campus heard her!”
“I thought we were going to find a serial killer in here.”
“Hey! Did you hear me? Clear out and shut up, before I write you all up for the party you’re throwing in there!” Sam shouted.
“It’s okay, Jess. Take a deep breath now, and try to calm down.” Sam said as I struggled to master myself. “Where’s Tia?”
“N-not back y-yet,” I managed to stammer.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
I picked my head up from his saturated t-shirt. His eyes were burning with concern.
“I … I think I had a nightmare,” I gasped.
“You think you had a nightmare? You’re not sure?”
“I … well, it m-must have been, I guess. But it just seemed s-so real.” The vision of the boy danced in negative before my eyes and I fought to dislodge it.
“What was it about? Do you want to tell me?”
I was too rattled to think up anything but the truth, so I told Sam exactly what I’d seen, making a mental note to draw it all out later when my hands stopped shaking. In an effort to salvage a scrap of my dignity, I made it sound as though I hadn’t known that I was wide awake.
Sam let out a low whistle when I’d finished. “Well, damn, I would have freaked too. What, did you watch another horror movie last night or something?”
“No.”
“Well, good. I was afraid you were going soft on me.”
I laughed weakly. “Sorry if I scared the crap out of you.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, I think I was about as scared as you were for a minute there. But I’m glad you’re okay. And you definitely subdued that party next door. I was going to have to bust them up soon, and I really wasn’t looking forward to that. So thanks!”
“Um, you’re welcome?”
Sam waited for me to stop crying, and after about the fiftieth time I told him he could go, he went. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and instead turned all the lights and the TV on, made myself a mug of tea and some ramen noodles in the microwave, and then sat down with my sketchbook. I had no desire to relive the visitation that had just awoken me, but I had to be sure to record what I had seen before time distorted it. I knew that this was another ghost, as Evan had been, though who he was or why he had visited me I had no idea. Was he a ghost who was always on the campus? Had he died on the property as Evan had? And, most crucially of all, why, why on earth were ghosts seeking me out? Were ghosts going to start appearing to me everywhere, scaring the living daylights out of me or following me around like lost puppy dogs? Was this boy really only the second I’d seen, or had there been others, that I hadn’t even recognized as ghosts? I had no idea if I would ever be able to find out who the boy was. I had no information to go on other than what I’d seen.
Sighing, I tucked the sketch away and tried to distract myself with a stream of syndicated 90’s sitcoms. My parapsychology class with David Pierce would begin in less than forty-eight hours. Now if only I could keep myself awake until then.
11
ENERGY
THE MYSTERY OF THE BOY AT THE END OF MY BED pretty much solved itself. No super sleuth mission required, as with the Evan situation. The next morning in the dining hall during my break I snagged a newspaper to scan while I ate my cereal. What I saw on the bottom of the first page demolished what little appetite I had. The boy from the previous night grinned up at me from what looked like a posed portrait taken for school. Beside the photo ran the following article:
CAR RUNS OFF QUANNAPOWITT RIVER BRIDGE, LOCAL BOY KILLED
Local police were called to the Quannapowitt River Bridge yesterday afternoon in response to a 911 call that a car had gone into the river. Officers responding to the scene spotted a red 2007 Toyota Corolla submerged beneath the surface, as well as a man clinging to one of the steel bridge supports. Emergency responders were able to lower an officer to the man to rescue him. The driver, Robert Mulligan, 42, of Worcester, revealed that his son was still trapped inside the car. All efforts were made by local rescue teams, but the boy, seven-year-old Peter Mulligan did not survive. The car, with the boy inside it, was removed from the water several hours later by use of a crane. Mulligan is being held in police custody under suspicion of drunk driving, an offence for which he has been arrested twice before, his license having been suspended in 2003 for a similar…
I couldn’t read anymore. Further words were obscured by the thought of poor little Peter Mulligan, deep in the Quannapowitt River and reaching out, for some reason, to me. I stared blankly into my cereal bowl, helpless. What in the world was I supposed to do? He’d looked so scared, and all I could do was scream at him, just as terrified.
I was staring at Peter’s picture so intently that I didn’t see Tia until I walked right into her.
“Tia! What are you doing back already? I thought your mom was keeping you until tonight?”
“I escaped early,” Tia said, dropping her matched luggage to hug me. “I wanted to make sure I had everything organized for classes tomorrow. I didn’t want to be rushing around with ….” She paused, eyed me critically. “You look awful! What happened?”
I glanced pointedly at several students walking past us into Donnelly. “Nothing happened. Come on, I’ll help you carry your stuff upstairs.”
I knew Tia wouldn’t drop it, but at least she got the hint and changed the subject. We lugged her suitcases down the hall and into our room, but had barely sat down when Gabby sidled in and shut the door behind her.
“Sorry, girls. I need to hide out for a bit.”
“Uh, hi, Gabby. How was your break?” Tia asked, never too flustered to be polite.
Politeness be damned, that was my motto, at least when it came to Gabby. “Why can’t you hide in your own room?” I asked.
“Because the person I’m hiding from is still in my room,” she explained. She pressed her eye to our peephole and groaned. “Ugh, he was not up to my usual standards.”
“I didn’t realize you had usual standards,” I mumbled. I tossed my newspaper on my desk, picked up my Introduction to Poetry anthology and tried to ignore her. She went on as though I hadn’t spoken.
“Scott O’Reilly threw this killer party last night, Tia,” Gabby said. She abandoned her post at the door and sat on Tia’s desk chair instead. “I wish you could have been there. It was an absolute blast, and he has some of the most delicious friends on the basketball team.”
“Oh, that’s … good,” Tia replied. She looked like a deer caught in headlights, poor thing.
“I thought I’d picked a winner. I mean, he was total eye-candy, but one drink too many, and what a disappointment. Let me tell you, he had the equipment, but he did not know how to use it,” Gabby sighed, pulling her suggestively tousled hair into a messy bun on top of her head.
Tia had lost the ability to form words. I watched her in amusement for a moment or two before I leapt in to rescue her.
“Yes, well, as interested as we are in this random guy’s equipment, could you spare us the details, please?”
Gabby glared at me. “Okay fine, Jess, why don’t you tell us about your night instead? It was pretty exciting, after all, with you waking up half the dorm with your hysterical screaming.”
Well, shit. So much for breaking the news to Tia gently. I could have picked Gabby up by the straps of her push-up bra and hurled her into the hallway.
Tia rounded on me. “Hysterical screaming? Why? What happened?”
Gabby answered for me. “Oh, it was very exciting, Tia. She had a bad dream, poor little thing.”
Tia’s look was far too knowing. I smiled grimly.
“Yup, just a bad dream. You know me and those pesky dreams.”
Tia stood up and marched resolutely to the door. She put her eye to the peephole.
“Oh, look at that, Gabby, your overnight guest just left. Looks like you’ve got your room back.”
“Oh, good,” Gabby said as she stood to leave. “Well, I’ll see you ladies later. Try not to scare us all to death again tonight, Jess.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Tia closed the door. “Okay. Talk
to me. What’s happened now?”
I left out nothing, and even tossed her the morning paper, which I’d saved as a sort of morbid grand finale to my unwanted new talent.
Tia, who had been completely silent through my entire explanation, just stared down at the paper, her head shaking very slowly.
“So, it’s not only Evan then.”
“No, I guess not.”
“I wondered why he would be appearing to you, since you didn’t know him or anything. But now it’s not just him anymore.”
“No.”
When she raised her eyes and spoke, her voice was nearly a whisper.
“Thank goodness you start that class tomorrow, Jess.”
I thought about the number of ghosts that could conceivably find their way to me and felt suddenly nauseous. “My thoughts exactly.”
§
I trudged through the newly fallen snow to Pierce’s class with a kind of fierce satisfaction. I felt proactive, something I hadn’t felt since my first day in the library researching Evan. I’d stayed up half the night reading my textbook. It read like most science textbooks: clinical and full of unemotional jargon that felt like it had very little to with the very emotional experiences I’d been having. Still, I was confident that Pierce would be able to explain it all, and somehow I’d start to find the answers I needed.
“Jess! Hey!”
I looked up to see Sam trotting toward me.
“Hey, yourself,” I answered, stopping so that he could catch up with me.
“Where are you off to?” he asked.
“Um, I’ve got class in Harrison.”