by E. E. Holmes
I decided to wait to tell Tia about the investigation until I had more details. No sense in worrying a compulsive worrier when it may not even happen. When I finally received an email from Pierce at the end of March, explaining that the investigation would be the following week, Tia took it better than I’d expected. She was nervous, of course, but she thought it was a perfect opportunity to find out what we’d both been obsessing over.
Tia was almost as frustrated at our lack of progress on the Hannah-front as I was, and Tia didn’t deal well with frustration. She was of the firm belief that, if you worked hard and persisted through trusted means of research, you could always find what you were looking for. When her tried and true methods failed, she only attacked them harder. Tia didn’t do failure; I think it was a genetic thing.
But I had a renewed sense of hope in the entire situation. There was a plan, and the more I thought about it, the more I let myself hope that it would work. I was going to see Evan again. I just didn’t realize how soon.
§
He was sitting at the foot of my bed. I had the distinct impression that he had been there for quite some time, just waiting for me to wake up. I wasn’t startled, as I had been when I’d awakened to find little Peter Mulligan floating in very nearly the same place. No, something had alerted me gently to this presence before I’d even opened my eyes, and when my gaze fell upon him, it was with clear expectation of seeing him there. He nodded his head to me in greeting.
He looked exactly how I had remembered him, my sketch come to life. I would have thought him alive, except for the fact that I could see him so well in the dark. It wasn’t that he was glowing; he simply seemed to exist on a different plane, a plane whose brightness illuminated him like a spotlight. I imagined a photo of him being taken on a bright sunny day, and then cutting out his form and pasting him onto a photograph taken at night. That’s what it was like.
“Hi, Jess,” he said.
“Hi, Evan.” I sat up in my bed.
We sat in silence for a moment, looking at each other. He looked a little sad.
“Are you really here?” I asked finally.
“Yes.”
“Am I awake?”
“No.”
I digested this information. “So I’m dreaming right now.”
“Yes. But I really am here. This conversation is really happening.”
“Okay.” I’d accepted many more far-fetched things than that.
Another moment of silence.
“I thought you were avoiding me, because of what I said in the alleyway.”
“I was. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be a coward. I didn’t want to deal with the fact that …”
“You’re dead,” I finished for him. I hated saying it out loud, but it had to be easier for me than it was for him.
“Yes,” he answered, as his calm face drooped into melancholy resignation.
“You’re a ghost.”
“Not right now. Right now I’m just my own consciousness, talking to your consciousness. I’m not taking any physical form. You’re just picturing me this way because you know this is what I look like. This is how I exist, most of the time.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“Sometimes I get lonely for people. When you’ve only got your own thoughts for company it can get pretty maddening.”
“I’ll bet.”
“That’s when I become visible. It’s not easy. It took me months to figure out how to do it. I gather enough energy to materialize and that’s when I can talk to people.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me what you were?” I asked, a little desperately. “It would have been so much easier if I’d known what you were. I told people about you, Evan. I’ve been trying to repair the damage for months.”
Evan hung his head. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to cause you trouble, Jess, honestly. It’s hard to explain, but all those times I talked to you, I wasn’t … completely aware of what was happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I’m like that—visible to people—I’m using all my energy to stay in a physical form. I don’t have any capacity left to remember that I’m only pretending to be alive. It’s like I’m concentrating so hard on imitating who I was, I forget what I am.”
“So when you were talking to me, you … forgot you were dead?” I couldn’t imagine being able to forget something like that. Then again, I couldn’t imagine being dead either.
“Yeah, I did. I couldn’t help going to the carnival one last time. I wanted to be a normal student again, hanging out in the gift shop and eating in the dining hall. And that night in the library, I saw your paper there and it—brought me back to that moment in my own life. I couldn’t resist the urge to go back to it, so I did.”
“Because you were lonely?”
“Yeah,” he answered. He leaned forward across the bed, his tone a little frantic. “I’m sorry, Jess. I didn’t mean to confuse you or … scare you. I know I shouldn’t try to relive things like that. But I just know—if I was still alive—that we would be … friends. I could recognize that as soon as I saw you. And I wanted to know what that would feel like. I’m just drawn to you, and I can’t explain why. You draw me in. Don’t be angry with me, okay?”
“I’m not angry, I promise,” I said.
He leaned back again and smiled, relieved.
“How could I be angry, really? That night, at the party ….”
Evan’s face darkened but he said nothing.
“I know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“Well, maybe you didn’t need to hear it, but I needed to say it.”
We were both silent for a moment. Then another one of my myriad questions burst from me. “So, have other people seen you before?”
“Yes,” he admitted sheepishly.
“A lot of people?”
“Maybe about twenty. None of them ever figured out what I was. I’d never talked to anyone before you, though.”
“Why not?” I asked in surprise.
“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t enough … just to watch you.”
I shivered. I thought of all the times I’d seen him, and realized that he must have been near me much more than that. How many times had he been there, watching me like some kind of invisible companion? And yet, I couldn’t help thinking about who I would want to talk to if I were a ghost, and it wasn’t some random person I’d never met in life.
“What about your family?”
He shook his head desolately. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t leave the campus.”
“You mean you’re trapped here?” I had a vision of spectral shackles around his ankles.
“I don’t know how it works, but I can’t see anything outside the gates of the school. It’s like everything goes blurry after that and I don’t know where I am. I’ve tried to go home before, but I can’t find my way. I never get very far.” His voice was shrouded in carelessness. I wasn’t remotely fooled.
“That’s awful, Evan. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It’s probably better. If I saw them, I don’t know if I could stop myself from trying to talk to them. They’re having a tough enough time. I can’t go haunting them everywhere they go. They’ll never get over it.”
I slid slowly across the bed and sat next to him. I wanted to comfort him somehow. “I’m glad you spoke to me, Evan. Really. You’re right, about what you said before.”
“What did I say before?” he asked.
“I think in life we would have … connected.” I reached out tentatively and laid my hand on his. It didn’t feel cold anymore; it didn’t feel like anything. I couldn’t register any sensation at his touch. After all, this was only a dream.
He looked down at my hand in surprise and then raised his eyes to my face. An inexpressibly sorrowful shadow passed over his face
and he closed his eyes for a moment. I started to pull my hand away.
“I’m sorry, Evan. I didn’t mean to upset—”
“—No,” he replied, opening his eyes. His fingers laced through mine and grasped them tightly. The shadow had passed. “Don’t apologize. It’s okay. It’s just hard to think about.”
“What is?”
“What it could have been like. With us. If I were still alive.”
We sat again in silence, both looking down at our interlocked fingers.
“Evan?”
“Hmm?”
“Are there many of you here? Spirits, I mean? I’ve seen a few others, but ….”
His voice was unexpectedly harsh as he responded. “Yeah. Yeah, there are lots of us. It seems to have gotten much more crowded lately.”
“Lately?”
“Ever since you got here.”
“Why? Why is that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you think … do you think you’re only drawn to me for the same reason they are?” I asked. I couldn’t hide the sadness in my voice.
“No,” he said immediately. “It’s not just the pull you have on us. I feel that too, just like they do, but there’s something else. I meant what I said, Jess. We would have connected in life.”
We smiled at each other. I could feel my color rising and changed the subject.
“So, it’s crowded. But it can’t be everyone who’s ever died here. I mean, not everybody becomes a ghost, do they?”
“No. From what they tell me, most people don’t stay behind.”
“Why are you still here?” I didn’t know if it was a rude question to ask, but I wanted to know the answer so badly.
The response burst from him, his tone pleading, “I don’t know! I’m not supposed to be. Somehow I missed the moment I was supposed to—I don’t know what it was! I just remember I could feel a pulling, and part of me wanted to go, but part of me didn’t.” His voice was rising now. He raked a frantic hand through his hair. “Everything was telling me to just let go and follow whatever it was that was taking me away, but that little part of me just kept clinging on, and then, just as I decided I was going to let go … it had passed. I missed it.”
He looked at me with such desperation that I couldn’t help myself. I flung my arms around him. He went stiff with surprise, but then he responded, wrapping his arms around my back, winding one of his shaking hands into my hair. I could almost feel him. Let this be real, please let this be real! It was all I’d wanted from the first time he’d locked me with those eyes. I grasped tighter, willing myself to feel the solidness of his body, the wetness of his tears as they slid from his cheek to my neck. I grabbed his face between my hands and lifted his face so that it was an inch from mine. I could feel my intent cross with burning intensity into his eyes.
“We won’t be able to feel it,” he croaked.
“Yes, we will,” I whispered fiercely.
He crushed his lips to mine. As he kissed me, my heart thumped wildly. My veins seemed to lift beneath my skin, fighting their way toward the surface. My breath was gone and my ears were ringing. The ringing got louder and louder. The sound was drowning me and I couldn’t breathe as I struggled to hold onto him. He was slipping away and the noise was unbearable.
“JESSICA! WAKE UP!”
My eyes flew open and I gasped as my lungs inflated. I actually felt myself land on the bed with a forcible thump. As though I had just resurfaced from deep under water, I gulped the warm air in the room, my lips tingling and cold. The ringing noise continued, deafening me as I fought for breath.
“JESSICA!” Two hands grabbed the front of my sweatshirt and shook me roughly. I focused my eyes in the dark. It was Tia, and she looked positively terrified.
“You were floating!” she yelled over the ringing.
“I … what?” I could barely hear her. I felt feverish. What the hell was that ringing?
“You were floating in the air two feet above your bed, for goodness sake!” she repeated as she hoisted me out of the bed onto shaking legs. I still felt unsteady from lack of breath. “Get your shoes on, we have to go!”
“What? Why? What the hell is that noise?”
“It’s the fire alarm! Someone pulled it, probably some drunk idiot—can you walk?” She was practically holding me up.
I steadied myself on my own feet and slipped into my sneakers. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
We stumbled down the staircase and out the front door, jostled amidst the crowd of grumbling, sleepy students. The clock tower on Wiltshire Hall read 2:15. We were herded out onto the grass where we waited, shivering, to be let back in. Several guys next to us were shoving each other around and laughing loudly. They smelled like a brewery floor.
Tia was staring at me, still shaken. “What happened?” she murmured in my ear.
I led her away from the crowd to a vacant patch of grass under a massive pine tree. I sank into a sitting position beneath it and she knelt down next to me. I explained about the dream. When I told her about the kiss, she gave a sharp intake of breath, but didn’t interrupt me. I felt a pang of guilt and hoped that Evan wouldn’t mind that I’d told someone. It suddenly felt very private.
“When he kissed you … was that right at the end of the dream?” she asked.
“Yeah, just before I woke up. We were still kissing when …” Realization hit me. “Did you say I was floating?”
“Yes!” Tia hissed. She glanced around to make sure no one could hear her. “The alarm started sounding and I woke up. It scared the life out of me. I looked over and I couldn’t believe you were still asleep. I started shouting your name to wake you, but I couldn’t. You seemed to be talking in your sleep. And then suddenly you just … stopped breathing.”
I gaped at her. I thought back to the breathless drowning feeling I’d experienced.
“Your lips were turning blue and your back was arching right off the bed and then … you just lifted up, blanket and everything. I freaked out, I ran over and grabbed you and shook you. That’s when you woke up.” Tia’s voice broke and shuddered with a barely repressed sob.
“It’s okay, Tia. It’s okay, I’m fine,” I put a comforting arm around her.
“I thought you were dying,” she choked.
I just sat with her, rubbing her back until she calmed down. Sirens were sounding and colored lights flashed carnival bright across the lawn. People were starting to get impatient, jeering at the firefighters and cops for keeping us out of our beds.
“Hey! So who is Hannah?” Tia turned on me, panic obliterated by epiphany.
“What?”
“You were talking to him! You must have asked him who Hannah was! What did he say?”
I felt my heart drop to the vicinity of my knees. I couldn’t believe it. He’d been right there, answering all of my questions and I hadn’t asked him the one thing I’d been dying to know for months. My face flushed in shame and I couldn’t bring myself to meet Tia’s eye.
“I didn’t ask him,” I answered in a small voice.
“You can’t be serious! What do you mean you didn’t ask him?” she demanded.
“Well, I … just didn’t think of it. It all happened so fast, and all of a sudden we were kissing ….”
Tia dropped her head into her hands. Her voice came muffled from between her fingers, like she was talking to a toddler. “Jessica. You haven’t seen him in months. We’ve spent countless hours with virtually nothing to go on but a first name, trying to find out what this ghost could possibly want from you. And you ‘just didn’t think of it’?”
“It was a dream!” my voice grew louder and more defensive, as the weight of my mistake sank in. “I don’t think I had any control over what I was saying or what he was saying. It all just … happened.”
Tia took a deep breath but seemed to accept my explanation. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry I snapped at you. I was just hoping you would have found out more, that’s all. I guess you’ll h
ave another chance soon enough, at the investigation.”
I nodded and we fell into silence. I knew that I had lied to Tia, just a little. It was only a dream; Evan had told me as much. But it wasn’t like a typical dream, where I was just along for the ride, drifting wherever my subconscious wanted to take me. I’d been able to think clearly, to make choices. I had to admit that I’d really blown an important opportunity. I resolved that it wouldn’t happen again. I knew what the first question was that I needed to ask Evan, if I ever got to see him again. My lips still tingled where they had met his. And there was that to discuss too.
As I gazed over the crowd, something drew my eye to our window. Tia’s striped curtain was swaying slightly. Beside it, barely distinguishable at first from the shadows around it, a figure loomed, a solitary hand pressed to the glass.
Evan looked down on me, his face a mask of sorrow. I gazed back until his form melted away again into the darkness.
13
MIXING MEDIUMS
THE NIGHT OF THE PARANORMAL INVESTIGATION had finally arrived. I’d been watching the clock for what I was fairly sure was five or six years as the hour hand crawled toward 10:30 with agonizing sluggishness. Finally I decided to abandon my unread book, and started to get ready.
As soon as I stood up, Tia threw her homework aside. “Jess, are you sure you want to do this?” She was positively dancing with anxiety, her feet flitting about beneath her as though independent of her control.
“No, I wouldn’t say I want to. But I do want some answers, and I don’t see how else we’re going to get them,” I said. But I wasn’t exactly telling the truth. A part of me, the part that wasn’t awash with skepticism or fear, did want to go—to see Evan again, no matter how strange the circumstances.
“At least let me come with you?” Tia asked.
“Ti, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do when I get there. I really don’t know how this works. What I do know is that Pierce takes it very seriously and I don’t think he’d appreciate my friends tagging along. Besides,” I looked up at her as I finished tying my sneaker, “you’d be scared out of your mind.”