“Well, I guess I forgot. Why do you need me home?”
“I want to talk to you,” my mother said, her voice backed by a strange, low buzzing.
“Um, okay. Aren’t we talking now?” The buzzing was getting louder. I pulled the phone away from my face and looked at it. The battery was almost completely dead. I was losing the connection. “Mom, my phone’s about to die,” I said, but my mother was talking over me.
“This is not something to discuss over the phone. It’s important.” My mother’s lectures were always important. To my mother. I glanced at Emma, rolling my eyes, but Emma wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at my backpack.
“Do you hear that?” she asked, leaning forward and looking down into it.
“Oh, shit!” I said. The buzzing wasn’t coming from my phone. It was coming from the blades.
“What did you just say?” my mother demanded.
“Shoot, I said ‘shoot’” I lied.
Emma was staring wide-eyed at the blades, now buzzing like a hornet’s nest. “What is that?” she asked, looking up at me.
I shook my head, leaned over, tried to zip up the backpack with one hand, and dropped my phone.
“Just a sec—my mom—the phone,” I said, picking the phone back up only to find it had hung up.
The blades buzzed, vibrating against my legs through the leather bag.
Emma reached into my pack, grabbed the top of the baggie, and tried to pull it out. It resisted, the zipper of the pack not quite open enough, and then it came away with a tearing sound, razor blades cascading into the depths of my backpack in an avalanche of sharp metallic whispers.
“Sorry,” Emma said, the shredded, plastic baggy hanging limply in her hand.
My phone rang again.
“Mom, I dropped my phone,” I answered, having to talk loudly over the noise the blades were still making. “And it’s almost dead. Can’t we talk tomorrow?”
“I have clients tomorrow,” she said, her voice clipped and cold. “I expect to see you home in half an hour or there will be consequences.”
“But that’s not fair. I—”
The phone gave a little chirp, flashed a low battery message, and shut itself off.
I looked over at Emma.
“What are those things in your bag?” she demanded, shaking the torn baggy at me. “And why are they making that noise?”
“They’re razor blades,” I said.
“Razor blades?” I could see the wheels spinning behind her eyes, making connections, jumping to conclusions.
“They’re not mine,” I said. “I think my hand pulled them out of Passion. And I have no idea why they’re making that noise.”
5
THE DARK MAN
“Em, I’m sorry, I really have to go.” I was standing under the glow of the Campbells’ front porch light. I’d told Emma what I could—a very condensed version of what had happened with my hand and Passion and Marcus and the blades. Of course, she had a lot of questions. Questions I didn’t have time or answers for. In the end, she’d offered to keep the blades hidden at her house until we could figure out what to do with them. But as much as they scared me, the thought of leaving them with Emma scared me even more. I didn’t know what they were, or why I had them, but I knew I couldn’t just dump them in my best friend’s lap. And while we talked, they’d grown quiet in the bottom of my pack as if they were listening, as if they were aware and didn’t want to be given away.
“You will call me,” Emma said, “First thing tomorrow we’ll get together and figure this out. Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?”
“Nah. Then you’d just have to walk back by yourself. And my mom is going to be pissed when I get there.”
“Okay,” she said. “But be careful, and don’t do anything stupid.” She hugged me and I hugged her back, still careful to keep my ghost hand far away from her.
I stepped off the porch and walked down the Campbells’ front walk, looking back at Emma twice and waving.
As I rounded the first corner, the street lights of Greenfield were just flickering on. The wind was whipping up swirls of fallen leaves on the grey, shadowed sidewalks. I loved fall, especially at night. The sharp, crisp tingle in the air made me feel better, somehow hopeful, despite the nightmarish events of the day.
I set off down Vine Street. My house was on the other side of town from Emma’s, but in Greenfield that was only a fifteen minute walk. The dark wasn’t an issue. I’d been walking between my house and Emma’s since third grade, day and night.
At the end of Vine, I turned onto Locust Street. At the end of Locust, I veered off the obvious street-course home and headed up Sunset Hill Drive toward the cemetery, the huge oaks that lined it burying me in their darker-than-night shadows. I often cut through the cemetery during the day when the gates were left open for visitors. They were usually locked at dusk, but it was worth a try.
Emma thought the cemetery was creepy, but it was one of my favorite places. Before my dad had died, we’d spent a lot of time there together. He’d liked to take etchings of the tombstones, or sketch stone angels, or tell me bizarre stories of death and woe to match the names and dates on the tombstones. Once, we’d even had a picnic on the top of an old sarcophagus and watched the sunset. And now that my dad was in the cemetery, how could I be afraid of it? Dead people weren’t scary. They were just people; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and husbands. People someone loved and missed. Emma didn’t get that. She’d never lost anyone she loved.
Halfway up Sunset Hill, a car approached, bathing me in the beam of its headlights. I waved as it went by, and the driver waved back. Everyone in Greenfield waved.
At the top of the hill I came to the gates of the Sunset Cemetery, huge, wrought-iron and locked up tight with a chain and hefty padlock. I gripped the bars and rattled them a little. My dad would have known what to do about my hand.
The blades started buzzing again, vibrating against my back. Why were they doing that? It was so random. I slipped off my backpack, set it on the ground, and reached for the zipper with my ghost hand.
Pain shot up my arm into my elbow and I yanked it back. What the—? It had felt like a jolt of electricity. I glanced up and down the street, an instinct born purely of embarrassment. Did anyone see that?
And that’s when I saw him.
At the bottom of the hill, a dark figure was coming up the sidewalk. His head was bent, looking at something in his hand—a phone or an iPod maybe—so I couldn’t see his face. But I knew the moment I saw him that I didn’t know him. He wasn’t just a tall man in dark clothing taking a brisk stroll through a quiet rural town at night. He was a strange man.
That in itself wasn’t so alarming. Out-of-towners did occasionally show up in Greenfield. Relatives. Tourists. People just passing through. This man didn’t look particularly threatening. He wasn’t even looking my way. But with every step he took, the buzzing of the blades grew sharper and louder and more insistent, as if they were trying to warn me of something.
The Dark Man lifted his head, his face cast in shadows by the overhanging trees, but I felt the moment he noticed me. I felt myself become seen.
He quickened his pace.
And I knew he was coming for me.
I threw my backpack over my shoulder. Thankfully, it didn’t zap me again. The blades wouldn’t shut up though, rattling at my back. I turned to the cemetery gates and pushed my ghost hand through the satin glove, straight into the rusty old padlock. It was a trick I’d used before to help kids open their lockers. My PSS pulsed against the metal workings inside the lock until it clicked and released.
I fumbled to pull the lock off the chain, at the same time looking over my shoulder.
He was halfway up the hill.
The lock came loose in my hand, and I tugged at the hard loops of the chain, hoping for enough slack to make a gap in the gates I could fit through. One more tug and I slammed my shoulder against the right gate, turning
my body sideways and jamming my knee against the left gate, widening the gap. I pressed myself between them, ducking my head under the chain, but I only made it halfway. I’d forgotten to factor in the backpack. It was stuck. I was stuck.
I pushed, metal digging into me, not caring if the backpack tore or the blades spilled out. He was coming. I could hear him, the thud of his footfalls contending with the wild thumping of my heart. I pushed again, straps biting into my shoulders, and then the backpack gave way, slipping through the bars, and I was on the other side. Instinct screamed at me to run, but I didn’t. I forced myself to reach between the gates, slip the lock back on the chain, and snap it closed with a satisfying click. He wasn’t going to make it through that gap; he was way bigger than I was.
If I took off down the narrow, paved road of the cemetery, I’d be out in the open. Instead, I scurried to the side where the gates were hinged into an old stone wall and ducked down, crouching behind a bush. The wall was massive, with tall shrubs and hedges growing so close to it that it was green and frilly with moss. But the cemetery caretaker, Mr. Jackson, worked very hard to make sure nothing grew directly against the wall to dig roots into old mortar and pull away stone. Because of this, there was a thin, dark gap, almost like a deer trail, running along the entire inside perimeter of the wall. I knew I could follow it all the way to the south gate because I’d done it just for fun when I was ten.
I sat, huddled in the dark, the backpack still buzzing angrily between my shoulder blades. Would he be able to hear that from outside the gate? It wasn’t that loud. More like a sensation even, than a sound. It just felt loud to me because it was right against my back. Maybe he wasn’t even following me. Why would he? Why would anyone? When he’d looked up at me, I’d been so sure. But suddenly, it seemed ridiculous.
If he walked past the gate, if he kept going, I’d know. Just a strange man out for an evening stroll. No reason to get freaked and go tearing through the cemetery. From where I was I couldn’t see much outside the gate, but I’d know if he tried to open it.
I waited, the evening breeze brushing my face, the quick intake of my own breath punctuating the night.
Suddenly two pale hands slipped through the gate, gripping it and rattling it exactly the way I had. He rattled it again, harder. He might still give up. Just because he wanted in the cemetery didn’t mean he was after me. Maybe he’d come to visit a dead relative. At night. In the dark.
The hands stayed and were joined by a triangular wedge of black jutting between the bars near the ground. It was the toe of his shoe wedged against the bottom bar of the gate. He was going to climb over. Shit! I hadn’t thought of that. Time to get moving.
I got up as quietly as I could and took off along the dark little trail that skirted the wall. He wouldn’t guess I’d come this way, unless he was some kind of professional tracker. Or he could see in the dark. Or the blades really were calling to him. Any of those and I was screwed. I thought about ditching the blades, but now that they were loose inside my backpack, that would mean tossing the whole thing. There was stuff in there I needed, like my phone and my homework, not to mention that I’d bought the backpack myself, searching long and hard for it on the internet. Besides, how could the blades have anything to do with the guy chasing me if they’d come from inside Passion?
I ran a little further, then stopped and listened. No footfalls behind me. No sound of someone pursuing me through the brush. A feeling of elation came over me. I’d done it. I’d lost him. Let dark creepy stalker-man wander around in the cemetery all night, he wasn’t getting what he wanted. Whatever that was.
Following the hidden trail along the wall was not as easy as it had been when I was ten. First, I had been much shorter then. Second, I hadn’t remembered it being so snarly and bumpy and annoying. Already I had almost been brained by low-hanging branches twice, not to mention there was a small rock in my boot, digging painfully into my foot. I had no idea how long it had been since I’d left Emma’s, but I probably wasn’t going to make my mother’s deadline unless I broke out into the clear.
The blades had quieted to a bare tremble. I wasn’t even sure I was still hearing them. Maybe it was just the memory of hearing them, an echo in my imagination.
I came around a bend in the path and tripped on a root, flailing forward. I grabbed for the wall with my left hand, skin scraping against stone, and managed to keep myself from falling flat on my face.
“This is stupid,” I hissed when I’d regained my balance. My hand was stinging like crazy, and I could see just enough to know it was oozing blood. “That’s it,” I pushed my way between two bushes and walked out into the dappled moonlight of the open cemetery.
Dark, stumpy silhouettes of tombstone, like sleeping dwarves, rose from the ground all around me. Down the hill toward the cemetery road, several large stone crosses jutted above the rest like King and Queen. Up the hill to my left was the boxy slab of an aboveground sarcophagus, the same one my dad and I had picnicked on. I knew exactly where I was. It was an older part of the cemetery, but just down the hill and across the road was the section where my dad was buried. I could cross that way toward the south gate and home.
I stood, listening. I could see most of the cemetery, and I didn’t see any sign of the Dark Man. No moving shadows. No sound but the sigh of the wind and the rustling of the leaves. Even the blades were silent. Still, it would pay to keep out of sight as much as I could.
I made my way down the hill, ducking from shadow to shadow, weaving between gravestones. I crossed the road under the dark canopy of an overhanging elm. Again, I waited and watched. Then I crossed into the grass and limped the few paces to my father’s grave so I could remove the rock from my boot. The only thing to sit on, other than wet grass, was Melva Price’s headstone, 1938-1999, Beloved Mother and Wife, now in God’s hands. I sat on it. I always sat on Melva; she didn’t mind.
My father’s grave was just a grassy mound without a marker, and I tried to quell the surge of anger I always felt when I saw it. My mother had refused to buy a tombstone. She hadn’t asked my opinion. She’d informed me, “We don’t need anything to mark his grave. That’s not him.” So, all there was to indicate Stephen Black’s place of rest, to declare his time and existence on this earth, was a small stone provided by the cemetery that said G42. G for the cemetery section. 42 for the number of the plot. Just a letter and a number so they wouldn’t dig him up by accident, or bury someone on top of him. My dad was nothing but a bingo call.
But not for much longer. I’d been saving for two years. Not for a fancy headstone—those ran in the thousands of dollars and dad wouldn’t have wanted anything like that anyway. But I had picked out a simple, etched granite headstone for only fifteen hundred dollars, and I was almost there. My mother thought I was saving for a car.
“Hey dad,” I said softly, bending over to unbuckle and loosen my boot. I tried to do it quickly, but they weren’t exactly designed for easy removal. “Today pretty much sucked,” I told him, still glancing around nervously. “My hand went all weird, reached into Passion Wainwright, and pulled something out.” I yanked my boot off, tipped it upside down, and shook out the rock. “And I think someone was following me, so I have to get moving.” I said, pulling my boot back on.
In my backpack, the blades began to tremble. Leaves crunched behind me, and suddenly a hand was on my face, slapped across my mouth, smashing my lips into my teeth. Two muscled arms closed around me, and someone pressed against my back, grinding my pack into my shoulder blades. A warm huff of a voice in my ear said, “I won’t hurt y—” and before I could even struggle, I was yanked backwards off Melva Price’s headstone.
When I hit the ground, it wasn’t ground. Something writhed under me. Not something. Someone. The Dark Man had found me and was gripping me so tightly I could barely breathe, and yet he seemed to be the one convulsing and choking, and gasping for air. I tried to roll away, to kick him, to extract myself from his clutches. Instead, we rolled down the slo
pe of Section G, his body smashing mine into the earth numerous times before our momentum was halted by an abrupt crash into something hard and prickly.
The world was dark and spinning. I couldn’t breathe. All the air had been pounded from my lungs. I opened my mouth, gulping like a fish. When I opened my eyes I thought for a moment that a tree had somehow fallen and landed on top of me. But it wasn’t a tree; it was one of the huge hedges that divided the various sections of the cemetery. And it hadn’t fallen on me. I had rolled right under its carefully manicured edge and been stopped by its thick trunk, which was now digging into my side. I was facing the dark, upper interior of the hedge, a lower branch poking my left cheek, grinding into my teeth and gums. I tried to push it away, but I couldn’t lift my hand.
My captor’s grip had gone slack, the two of us so tightly wedged under the bush I could barely move. It wasn’t lumpy ground beneath me. It was him. Pinned under me. But he wasn’t moving. He was still, very still, though I could feel the rise and fall of his chest, even with my backpack wedged between us. Maybe he’d been knocked out during our downhill tumble. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Now was my chance to get away from him.
I pulled my face back from the branch and turned my head. I could see a small strip of cemetery from under the hedge. There was my dad’s grave and the bottom portion of Melva’s headstone. Beyond that was home, safety, normalcy.
I tensed my muscles and tried to squirm out from under the bush, but I couldn’t find any leverage. Maybe I could position my arms and hands against the trunk and push myself out. I squirmed a little more, trying to clear obstacles from around my hands and arm. A branch snapped, but not a branch I’d been pushing on. The noise had come from out in the cemetery.
I froze as a pair of dark feet and legs appeared in my small strip of vision.
Whoever was out there crouched at the side of my dad’s grave, inspecting the ground.
I still couldn’t see his face, but I could see enough. There was no doubt in my mind. The Dark Man was out there. The man I’d been running from was still after me.
Ghost Hand Page 3