Echo City

by Layla Lawlor

  I was worrying anyway.

  "You're staring at me," Drew said.

  "Just wondering if you felt normal. Normal for you, I mean."

  "Oh, you want to know what I'm feeling, do you? Let's see, I guess you could say there's a certain amount of ennui, perhaps a dash of schadenfreude, a smidge of fernweh and a hint of duende, and oh by the way, I'm still dead."

  "A smidge of who and what?"

  "Fernweh," Drew said. "It means the feeling of being homesick for a place you've never been to."

  "And duende is?"

  "Something to do with art, I dunno."

  "What have you been doing, reading the dictionary?"

  "Wikipedia, when anyone leaves a laptop open so I can scroll. The point is," Drew said, "I don't know why you're wasting time getting bent out of shape about whatever you think might have happened to me tonight when the worst thing that can happen to me has already happened, namely I'm dead, instead of worrying about the person who's still alive and might actually be in danger, which is to say, my sister."

  "I can do both at once. Look, tonight your sister and her friends tried to summon something above your grave. And it worked. Excuse me if I'm concerned there might be side effects. Are you sure you didn't feel anything at all while Grandma and I were out? Especially around midnight?"

  "No," Drew said. "I spent the evening, well, most of the evening watching TV over Fresca's shoulder on her laptop. I wish you'd educate her tastes a bit or at least, I dunno, stick some Lynch or Kubrick in her Netflix queue. I tried to let her know I'd appreciate something other than another episode of freaking Fushigi Yuugi by jumping up and down on the spacebar, and it did actually work a few times, but I think she just thought the playback was stuttering."

  I realized I'd risen half out of my chair. "Drew, for fuck's sake, stop messing with Fresca. She can't see you and she has enough problems as it is. Like your death." I still had nightmares about Drew sprawled on the ground in a dark spray of his own blood, and I had the advantage of being able to talk to him, whole and alive, or at least alive-looking, every single night when the sun went down. Fresca knew about the ghost, but she couldn't see the ghost. "Where is she now, anyway?"

  "Out," Drew said, sulking a bit. "On a date."

  I sat back down hard. "Right. Okay. With, uh, what's her face."

  "Zeena." Drew studied me with a less guarded and more thoughtful expression. "You're really gone for her, aren't you?" he said quietly.

  I glared at him. "Fresca and I are friends."

  "And she's dating someone else."

  "Oh, shut up."

  "Yeah, you're not bent out of shape about that at all."

  "When did we start talking about me? Can we go back to talking about you? And Gail and her creepy new friends and whatever they were doing with your grave." Hitting below the belt, but at least I knew steering the conversation back around to his sister would distract him enough to get him off the topic of my love life, for now.

  I'd been conducting ghost-by-proxy wellness checks on Gail for a couple of months now. Drew, who couldn't leave the house for the same metaphysical ghost reasons that made him unable to manifest during daylight hours, had started pestering me this past summer about keeping an eye on his little sister. For the most part, this took the form of me driving by her house or school occasionally and then reporting back to Drew. I tried not to do it often enough to be noticed. I'm a tall black chick in a mostly white town, so I kinda stand out, and I did not want to have that particular conversation with the cops.

  I still couldn't quite figure out how doing an occasional drive-by to make sure Drew's sister was dealing okay with her bereavement had somehow escalated into sneaking into graveyards at night to rescue her from a cult. I could trace every single step that had led to me doing this and I still couldn't figure out how it had somehow turned into my business. First it was reporting back on her to Drew every couple of weeks or so, then it was realizing that her new friends were bad news, then the next thing you know there are graveyards and summoning rituals and evil black spots in the air.

  This stupid town.

  It was just ... I felt bad for her. I'd talked to Gail Hollis only once, when she and her mother came to collect Drew's things from the house after his death this spring, but I remembered all too clearly how Drew's sullenness and mulish stubbornness and tendency to pick fights had suddenly snapped into focus after I'd met his overbearing, awful mother. I understood about controlling mothers; there was a reason I'd gone halfway around the country to get away from mine. And mine was a walk in the park compared to Drew and Gail's.

  I didn't have brothers and sisters. I didn't understand brothers and sisters. I knew that I'd never quite be able to relate to whatever it was that drove Drew when it came to Gail. But I could relate to her and feel for her as a human being.

  And I really didn't like the fact that she'd managed to get involved with a group of people who knew how to do summoning rituals that actually worked. It was bad enough when I thought they were just dumbass kids dabbling in the supernatural. But if they were doing real magic, they probably weren't going to stop at one botched ghost-summoning.

  Not to mention my pressing worry about what else they'd already done.

  I had to hope it was a fluke. I knew from firsthand experience that it was possible to do a summoning ritual by accident, because that was how Drew had died in the first place. Maybe they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  "Do you think she's trying to bring me back?" Drew asked, with a subtext of Do you think it might work?

  "Well, it obviously has to do with you in some way or they wouldn't have picked your grave. She might be trying to give herself closure, maybe? I mean, if I had a dead relative that I really missed, I can imagine getting suckered in by someone who promised me I could say goodbye to them." Lily-Bell, I thought with an inward flinch that still hadn't faded even though technically she'd died a long time before I was born. Thanks to timey-wimey shenanigans that I was still trying not to think too hard about, it was just last summer for me.

  "Do you think it's possible to—"

  "Drew," I said, "if there's one thing I've learned about magic and the supernatural by now, it's that if someone does find a way of bringing you back, it's really, really not going to go well for you. Or for them. If it was possible to bring back the dead, don't you think people would do it all the time?"

  "Okay, point, but can you please talk to her? Like directly, face to face. Tell her everything you just told me? Warn her how dangerous it is?"

  "Drew—"

  "Come on, Kay. Please. I'd do it myself except ..." He pointedly stuck his arm into the wall up to his elbow.

  "How am I supposed to get her to talk to me? I'm a total stranger. What should I do, just walk up and be like, oh hey, I'm your dead brother's roommate and he wants me to talk to you about how demon summoning is wrong and bad?"

  "Dude!" Drew exclaimed, gesturing widely. "You're a ... a professional demon hunting person. Tell her you caught her at the graveyard and you know what she's up to, and give her a scared-straight lecture about all the horrible horrors that you, personally, have stabbed with your magic sword."

  "She's a kid," I said. "That'll just make her want to do it more. I mean, what would you have done at her age if some adults started lecturing you about staying out of graveyards and knocking off the nighttime chanting?"

  Drew looked horrified. "We're not adults."

  "Uh, I hate to break it to you, but we actually kind of are. At least as far as a fourteen-year-old is concerned."

  "Shit." He dangled his legs off the countertop and kicked his feet, making them swing in and out of the cabinet doors. It was very distracting.

  "How do you sit on top of things, anyway?" I asked him. "How do you even stay on the floor?"

  "How should I know? I'm not an expert in ghost physics." He pointed at the cup of cold coffee by my hand. "Want a warm-up?"

  "Yes, I—no, fuck y
ou, Drew, you can't even pick it up."

  Drew grinned. I had never seen him grin like that while he was alive; like so many things about him, it was something I was getting newly used to now that he was dead. He had dimples. "I know I can't, but watch what I can do now."

  He slid off the counter to the floor—still maintaining the illusion that his body had weight and mass; his duster even moved around him—and placed a ghostly hand over my coffee cup.

  "Have you figured out how to do something gross to it? If you're getting ectoplasm in my coffee, Drew—"

  "Shhh. I'm concentrating." He lifted his hand away. "Touch it."

  "I've heard that before. From boys in grade school trying to make me touch frogs—"

  "Kay, c'mon, do it."

  "—or my glue-covered locker door." But I did it anyway, and then hissed and jerked my fingers back in shock. The cup was ice cold. There was even frost forming around the edges.

  Drew waved his hand through it. "Okay, that's not how that was supposed to work."

  I tried to get my breathing back to normal. Man, I was on edge tonight. "Who needs air conditioning when you have a poltergeist. How long have you been able to do that?"

  "Not very long." He passed his hand through the cup again, looking disappointed. He was half-sitting on, or rather in, the edge of the table. "I've been working on it for a while, the same way I've been working on learning move things. In six months I've leveled up to being able to push keyboard keys if I jump on them really hard."

  I touched the cup again. The frost was beginning to melt. "This is new, though. How much does it take out of you to do that?" I tried to think back to half-remembered physics classes. Not my area of expertise, but changing the energy states of matter had to be hard. Of course, it probably made a difference that magic was involved. For all I knew, maybe making things cold was the easiest magic spell in existence. Nobody tell Frigidaire.

  "I don't think I could do it to a whole room, but I'm not too wiped out."

  "Energy's what you're made of, right? I don't think you should use too much of it."

  Drew shrugged. "The worst already happened, Kay. The worst that could possibly happen now is I burn myself out here and go on wherever people go when they die properly. I can feel it sometimes, you know."

  "Feel what? The afterlife?"

  He gave me a serious nod. "I guess so. Feels like a sort of tugging. Like, if I wanted to, I could just let go and ... float away."

  "Drew, I think that's the most depressing thing you've ever said to me, and that's saying something."

  The somber mood vanished and he grinned, although there was still a dark edge underneath. "I'm not going to. Not anytime soon. I have a house to haunt, ex-roommates to spy on ..."

  "You better not be spying on us. I'll exorcise you."

  "Promises, promises."

  "Oh, that reminds me." I retrieved a notebook from my pocket, flipped it open, and scribbled a quick note with the pen we kept handy for updating the running shopping list on the fridge.

  Drew moved around to read over my shoulder. "10-26, Inlet Valley Cemetery, teen cult summoning, type unknown. Banished with sword."

  "Manners," I said, flipping the notebook shut.

  "What is all this, anyway?"

  "Muirin wanted me to keep track. She says there's more ghost activity than normal for this time of year."

  "So it's a ghost list? Did you put me in there?"

  I flipped the notebook open again, and mimed writing. "Annoyed by roommate's ghost at kitchen table—No, you dink. I'm only writing down the ones I've hunted."

  "That's still a lot," Drew said, and I couldn't argue with him, glancing back up the list of ghost sightings and/or banishings. One tonight, two last night, one the night before ... no wonder I was so tired.

  "It ought to slack off after Halloween. At least Muirin says so."

  "Oh, her," Drew said. He'd developed a deep antipathy for my mentor. Probably the fact that she kept telling me I needed to get him exorcised before he faded away to a vengeful amnesiac vestige of himself had something to do with it.

  "She's the closest thing to an expert we've got." I glanced at the microwave clock and yawned. Maybe I was sleepy after all. "I guess I'll drive down to Binghamton in the morning and show her the brazier from the cemetery. If she's going to make me keep racking up miles on my car, I gotta get a better car."

  "Text her a picture."

  "I did. She never checks her damn phone. I've got—let's see—philosophy in the a.m., which I can skip because I'm pulling an A. Just gotta get back for my afternoon art class."

  "And talk to Gail?" Drew asked hopefully.

  "Yes, fine, I'll talk to Gail. I'll go by her house after she gets off school. Good?"

  "Good," Drew said, and he flashed me another of those surprisingly charming grins.

  Hollow Souls

  Sept. 29, 2020

  Preorder now!