Shadowland

by Meg Cabot

  Andy said, “Hey. Watch it.”

  “Well, jeez, Dad,” Dopey said. “One’s a freakin’ albino and the other’s a fag.”

  This earned him a very hard wallop on the head from his father, who also grounded him for a week. Meaning, I couldn’t help pointing out to Dopey later as we were clearing our plates from the table, that he would be unable to attend Kelly Prescott’s pool party, which, by the way, I—Queen of the Freaks—had gotten him invited to.

  “Too bad, bubby,” I said, giving Dopey a sympathetic pat on the cheek.

  He slapped my hand away. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, at least nobody’ll be callin’ me a fag hag tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said. I reached out and tweaked the cheek I’d just patted. “You’ll never have to worry about people calling you that. They call you much worse things.”

  He hit my hand again, his fury apparently so great, it rendered him temporarily speechless.

  “Promise me you’ll never change,” I begged him. “You’re so adorable just the way you are.”

  Dopey called me a very bad name just as his father entered the kitchen with the remains of the salad.

  Andy grounded him for another week, and then sent him to his room. To show his unhappiness with this turn of events, Dopey put on the Beastie Boys and played them at such high decibels that sleep was impossible for me…at least until Andy came up and took away Dopey’s speakers. Then everything got very quiet, and I was just about to doze off when someone tapped at my door. It was Doc.

  “Um,” he said, glancing nervously past me, into the darkness of my room—the “haunted” room of the house. “Is this a good time to, um, talk about the things I found out? About the house, I mean? And the people who died here?”

  “People? In the plural sense?”

  “Oh, sure,” Doc said. “I was able to find a surprising amount of documentation listing the crimes committed in this house, many of which involved murder of varying degrees. Because it was a boardinghouse, there were any number of transient residents, most of whom were on their way home after striking it rich in the Gold Rush farther upstate. Many of them were killed in their sleep and their gold absconded with, some thought by the owners of the establishment, but most likely it was by other residents—”

  Fearing I was going to hear that Jesse had died this way—and suddenly not at all eager to know anymore what had caused his death, particularly not if he happened to be around to overhear—I said, “Listen, Doc—I mean, Dave. I don’t think I’ve gotten over my jet lag yet, so I’m trying to catch up a little on my sleep just now. Can we talk about this tomorrow at school? Maybe we could have lunch together.”

  Doc’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? You want to have lunch with me?”

  I stared at him. “Well, yeah. Why? Is there some rule high schoolers can’t eat with middle schoolers?”

  “No,” Doc said. “It’s just that…they never do.”

  “Well,” I said. “I will. Okay? You buy the drinks, and I’ll buy dessert.”

  “Great!” Doc said, and went back to his own room looking like I’d just said tomorrow I’d present him with the throne of England.

  I was just on the verge of dozing off again when there was another knock on the door. This time when I opened it, Sleepy was standing there looking more wide awake, for once, than I felt.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re gonna take the car out at night, just put the keys back on the hook, okay?”

  I stared up at him. “I haven’t been taking your car out at night, Slee—I mean, Jake.”

  He said, “Whatever. Just put the keys back where you found ’em. And it wouldn’t hurt if you pitched in for gas now and then.”

  I said slowly, so he would understand, “I haven’t been taking your car out at night, Jake.”

  “What you do on your own time is your business,” Sleepy said. “I mean, I don’t think gangs are cool or anything. But it’s your life. Just put my keys back so I can find ’em.”

  I could see there was no point in arguing this, so I said, “Okay, I will,” and shut the door.

  After that, I got a good few hours of much needed sleep. I didn’t exactly wake up feeling refreshed—I could have slept for maybe another year—but I felt a little better, at least.

  Good enough to go kick some ghost butt, anyway.

  Earlier in the evening, I’d gotten together all the things I was going to need. My backpack was crammed with candles, paintbrushes, a Tupperware container of chicken blood that I’d bought at the butcher counter in the Safeway I made Adam take me to before dropping me off at home, and various other assorted necessary components of a real Brazilian exorcism. I was completely ready to go. All I had to do was throw on my high tops, and I was out of there.

  Except, of course, Jesse had to show up just as I was jumping off the porch roof.

  “Okay,” I said, straightening up, my feet smarting a little in spite of the soft ground I’d landed on. “Let’s get one thing straight right now. You are not going to show up down at the Mission tonight. Got that? You show up down there, and you are going to be very, very sorry.”

  Jesse was leaning against one of the giant pine trees in our yard. Just leaning there, his arms folded across his chest, looking at me as if I were some sort of interesting sideshow attraction or something.

  “I mean it,” I said. “It’s going to be a bad night for ghosts. Real bad. So I wouldn’t show up down there if I were you.”

  Jesse, I noticed, was smiling. There wasn’t as much moon as there’d been the night before, but there was enough so that I could see that the little curl at the corners of his lips was turning skyward, not down.

  “Susannah,” he said. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing.” I marched over to the carport, and yanked out the ten-speed. “I just got some things to settle.”

  Jesse strolled over toward me as I was strapping on the bike helmet. “With Heather?” he asked lightly.

  “Right. With Heather. I know things got out of hand last time, but this time, things are going to be different.”

  “How, precisely?”

  I swung a leg over that stupid bar they put on boys’ bikes, and stood at the top of the driveway, my fingers curled around the handlebars. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll level with you. I’m going to perform an exorcism.”

  His right hand shot out. It gripped the bar between my fingers. “A what?” he said in a voice completely devoid of the good humor that had been in it before.

  I swallowed. Okay, I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as I was acting. In fact, I was practically quaking in my Converse All Stars. But what else could I do? I had to stop Heather before she hurt anybody else. And it would have been really helpful if everybody could have just supported me in my efforts.

  “You can’t help me,” I said woodenly. “You can’t go down there tonight, Jesse, or you might get exorcized, too.”

  “You,” Jesse said, speaking as tonelessly as I was, “are insane.”

  “Probably,” I said miserably.

  “She’ll kill you,” Jesse said. “Don’t you understand? That’s what she wants.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “She doesn’t want to kill me. She wants to kill everybody I care about first. Then she wants to kill me.” I sniffled. For some reason, my nose was running. Probably because it was so cold out. I don’t see how those palm trees could stay alive. It was like forty degrees or something, outside.

  “But I’m not going to let her, see?” I continued. “I’m going to stop her. Now let go of my bike.”

  Jesse shook his head. “No. No. Even you wouldn’t do something so stupid.”

  “Even me?” I was hurt, in spite of myself. “Thanks.”

  He ignored me. “Does the priest know about this, Susannah? Did you tell the priest?”

  “Um, sure. He knows. He’s, uh, meeting me there.”

  “The priest is meeting you there?”

  “Yeah, uh-huh.” I
gave a shaky laugh. “You don’t think I’d try something like this on my own, do you? I mean, jeez, I’m not that stupid, no matter what you might think.”

  His grip on the bike relaxed a little. “Well, if the priest will be there…”

  “Sure. Sure he will.”

  The grip tightened again. Jesse’s other hand came around, and a long finger wagged in my face as he said, “You’re lying, aren’t you? The priest isn’t going to be there at all. She hurt him, didn’t she? This morning? I thought so. Did she kill him?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t feel so much like talking all of a sudden. It felt like there was something in my throat. Something that hurt.

  “That’s why you’re so angry,” Jesse said wonderingly. “I should have known. You’re going down there to get even with her for what she did to the priest.”

  “So what if I am?” I exploded. “She deserves it!”

  He put his finger down, gripping the handlebars of my bike with both hands. And let me tell you, he was pretty strong for a dead guy. I couldn’t budge the stupid thing with him hanging on to it like that.

  “Susannah,” he said. “This isn’t the way. This wasn’t why you were given this extraordinary gift, not so you could do things like—”

  “Gift!” I nearly burst out laughing. I had to grit my teeth to keep from doing so. “Yeah, that’s right, Jesse. I’ve been given a precious gift. Well, you know what? I’m sick of it. I really am. I thought coming out here, I’d be able to make a new start. I thought things might be different. And you know what? They are. They’re worse.”

  “Susannah—”

  “What am I supposed to do, Jesse? Love Heather for what she did? Embrace her wounded spirit? I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. Maybe Father Dom could do it, but not me, and he’s out of commission, so we’re going to do things my way. I’m going to get rid of her, and if you know what’s good for you, Jesse, you’ll stay away!”

  I gave my kickstand a vicious kick, and at the same time, yanked on the handlebars. The move surprised Jesse so much, he let go of the bike involuntarily. A second later, I was off, spraying gravel out from beneath my back wheel, leaving Jesse in my dust. I heard him say a bunch of stuff in Spanish as I sped down the driveway. I think it was probably swear words. The word querida was definitely not mentioned.

  I didn’t see much of my trip down into the valley. The wind was so cold that tears streamed in a pretty constant flow down my cheeks and back into my hair. There wasn’t much traffic out, thank God, so when I flew through the intersection, it didn’t really matter that I couldn’t see. The cars stopped for me, anyway.

  I knew it was going to be trickier to break into the school this time. They’d have beefed up the security in response to what had happened the night before. Beefed up the security? All they had to do was actually get some.

  And they had. A police cruiser sat in the parking lot, its lights off. Just sitting there, the moonlight reflecting off the closed windows. The driver—doubtlessly some luckless rookie to have pulled so boring an assignment—was probably listening to music, though I couldn’t hear any from where I stood just outside the gate to the parking lot.

  So I was going to have to find another way to get in. No biggie. I stashed the bike in some bushes, then took a leisurely stroll around the perimeter of the school.

  There aren’t many buildings you can keep a fairly slender sixteen-year-old girl out of. I mean, we’re pretty flexible. I happen to be double-jointed in a lot of places, too. I won’t tell you how I managed to break in, since I don’t want the school authorities figuring it out—you never know, I might have to do it again someday—but let’s just say if you’re going to make a gate, make sure it reaches all the way to the ground. That gap between the cement and where the gate starts is exactly all the room a girl like me needs to wriggle through.

  Inside the courtyard, things looked a lot different than they had the night before—and a whole lot creepier. All the floodlights were turned off—this didn’t seem like a very good safety precaution to me, but it was possible, of course, that Heather had blown all the bulbs—so the courtyard was dark and eerily shadowed. The fountain was turned off. I couldn’t hear anything this time except for crickets. Just crickets chirping in the hibiscus. Nothing wrong with crickets. Crickets are our friends.

  There was no sign of Heather. There was no sign of anybody. This was good.

  I crept as quietly as I could—which was pretty quietly in my sneakers—to the locker Heather and I shared. Then I knelt down on the cold flag-stones and opened my backpack.

  I lit the candles first. I needed their light to see by. Holding my lighter—okay, it wasn’t really my lighter, it was the long-handled lighter from the barbecue—to the candle’s bottom, I dripped some wax onto the ground, then shoved the candle’s base into the gooey drippings to keep it in place. I did this to each candle until I’d formed a ring of them in front of me. Then I peeled back the lid of the container holding the chicken blood.

  I’m not going to write down the shape that I was required to paint in the center of the ring of candles in order for the exorcism to work. Exorcisms aren’t things people should try at home, I don’t care how badly you might be haunted. And they should only be performed by a professional like myself. You wouldn’t, after all, want to hurt any innocent ghosts who happen to be hanging around. I mean, exorcizing Grandma—that won’t make you too unpopular, or anything.

  And Mecumba—Brazilian voodoo—isn’t something people should mess with, either, so I won’t write down the incantation I had to say. It was all in Portuguese, anyway. But let’s just say that I dipped my brush into the chicken blood and made the appropriate shapes, uttering the appropriate words as I did so. It wasn’t until I reached into the backpack and pulled out Heather’s photograph that I noticed the crickets had stopped chirping.

  “What,” she said in an irritated voice from just behind my right shoulder, “in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I didn’t answer her. I put the photo in the center of the shape I had painted. The light from the candles illuminated it fairly well.

  Heather came closer. “Hey,” she said. “That’s a picture of me. Where’d you get it?”

  I didn’t say anything except the Portuguese words I was supposed to say. This seemed to upset Heather.

  Well, let’s face it. Everything seemed to upset Heather.

  “What are you doing?” Heather demanded again. “What’s that language you’re talking in? And what’s that red paint for?” When I didn’t answer her, Heather became—as seemed to be her nature—abusive. “Hey, bitch,” she said, laying a hand upon my shoulder and pulling on it, not very gently. “Are you listening to me?”

  I broke off the incantation. “Could you do me a favor, Heather,” I said, “and stand right there next to your picture?”

  Heather shook her head. Her long blonde hair shimmered in the candlelight. “What are you?” she demanded rudely. “High or something? I’m not standing anywhere. Is that…is that blood?”

  I shrugged. Her hand was still on my shoulder. “Yes,” I said. “Don’t worry, though. It’s just chicken blood.”

  “Chicken blood?” Heather made a face. “Gross. Are you kidding me? What’s it for?”

  “To help you,” I said. “To help you go back.”

  Heather’s jaw tightened. The doors to the lockers in front of me began to rattle. Not a lot. Just enough to let me know Heather was unhappy. “I thought,” she said, “that I made it pretty clear to you last night that I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You said you wanted to go back.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. The dials on the combination locks began to spin noisily. “To my old life.”

  “Well,” I said. “I found a way you can do it.”

  The doors began to hum, they were shaking so hard.

  “No way,” Heather said.

  “Way. All you have to do is stand right here, between those candles, next to your pi
cture.”

  Heather needed no further urging. In a second, she was exactly where I wanted her.

  “Are you sure this will work?” Heather asked excitedly.

  “It better,” I said. “Otherwise, I’ve blown my allowance on candles and chicken blood for nothing.”

  “And things will be just like they were? Before I died, I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said. Should I have felt guilty for lying to her? I didn’t. Feel guilty, I mean. All I felt was relieved. It had all been too easy. “Now shut up a minute while I say the words.”

  She was only too eager to oblige. I said the words.

  And said the words.

  And said the words.

  I was just starting to be worried nothing was going to happen when the candle flames flickered. And it wasn’t because there was any wind.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Heather complained, but I shushed her.

  The candle flames flickered again. And then, above Heather’s head, where the roof of the breezeway should have been, appeared a hole filled with red, swirling gases. I stared at the hole.

  “Uh, Heather,” I said. “You might want to close your eyes.”

  She did so happily enough. “Why? Is it working?”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s working, all right.”

  Heather said something that might have been “goodie,” but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t hear her too well since the swirling red gas—it was more like smoke really—had started spiraling down from the hole, making a low sort of thundering noise as it did so. Soon long tendrils of the stuff were wrapping around Heather, lightly as fog. Only she didn’t know it since her eyes were closed.

  “I hear something,” she said. “Is this it?”