Past Midnight

by Mara Purnhagen

  When Jared was finished speaking, he looked directly at Avery. They were both crying. I could see the tears running down their faces, but they continued to hold hands.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Avery said. “I know that was difficult for you.”

  “I don’t want you to feel guilty. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Avery nodded and looked down but said nothing. Jared leaned in, and I could tell he was squeezing Avery’s hands.

  “I mean it,” he said. “It was not your fault.”

  “If I’d been more careful with Dante, if I’d made sure he didn’t get out of the house that day—”

  “Listen to me. There was nothing you could have done. I was in the car with him, and I couldn’t do anything.”

  Jared choked a little on his last sentence, and I wondered if it was the first time he’d said the truth out loud. Avery looked at him.

  “It was an awful accident. It wasn’t your fault, either. I hope you know that.”

  “I do now.”

  They looked at each other, neither one wanting to let go of the other. My screen flashed a dozen different colors before abruptly turning off by itself.

  “I have no idea what just happened,” I said to Mom as we moved toward a corner, “but I think it’s time for a new camera.”

  Mom smiled. “Maybe it’s just time to look at our data in a new way.”

  “Do you think Adam was actually here?” I asked. I looked over at Avery and Jared, who were talking to each other. “I mean, I didn’t think his energy would stay behind after he died. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was Adam’s energy,” Mom said as she checked the thermal. “I think it was something else entirely.”

  Avery and Jared were still so deep in conversation that they didn’t seem to notice the rest of us.

  Shane came over, shaking his head. “That was messed up. I’m going to be studying the tapes for a month trying to figure this one out.” He walked toward Noah and began taking down the main camera with Trisha.

  “So what was it?” I asked Mom.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said it wasn’t Adam’s energy. So what was it?”

  “I think it was another kind of energy. I think it came from them.” She waved her hand in the direction of Jared and Avery. They were smiling at each other, and I felt a twinge of something. Not jealousy, exactly, but something about the way Jared looked at Avery, something about how intimate it seemed and, well, I knew I wanted that for myself. I wanted someone to gaze at me that way, someone to share a truly incredible moment with. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

  Mom was still talking. “I don’t know what I’d call it, but whatever it was, it was a good thing, don’t you think?”

  I needed a clearer answer, something more definitive than “another kind of energy.” Before I could ask Mom more questions, though, the front door of Giuseppe’s flung open and Dad came marching toward us.

  “We have to go,” he said to me and Mom. He was out of breath and his voice held a frantic edge to it. “Now.”

  “Patrick, what’s going on?”

  “Everything. Time’s up. I’ll explain on the way there.” He looked around at everyone in the room and seemed to be counting them all. “Seven. Okay, that should work,” he muttered.

  Mom placed her hand on Dad’s arm. “Are you okay?”

  He ignored her and addressed everyone. “We need your help, all of you,” he said. “We need you to come with us right now.”

  “Where?” Trisha asked. She was standing so close to Shane that she was almost on top of him.

  “To Charleston. We have to leave right now. I’ll explain on the way there.” He turned to me and Mom again. “We found the Pickenses. All three of them. But there’s no time left. We have to do this tonight.”

  “Tonight? Why?” I had never seen my dad so anxious. He looked at me, and there was something dark in his eyes. Fear, I thought. He’s actually afraid.

  “This is it,” he said as he gathered up some of the gear. “We’re almost out of time.”

  “How do you know?” Mom asked.

  Dad was already carrying equipment toward the front door, but he paused to answer Mom’s question.

  “I know because they told me.”

  twenty

  When ghosts speak, you listen. And if you don’t—well, they find a way to make you listen.

  But they don’t use words.

  I saw for myself what had spooked Dad so badly when we made a quick stop home before heading to Charleston. Mom said she needed her notebook, which contained all the information on how to perform a Circle of Seven ceremony. She also wanted me to wear Annalise’s pink sweater.

  “It worked before,” she explained, “and I want to make sure we do everything we can to facilitate contact.”

  We pulled up to the house while Avery called her mom to tell her she’d be spending the night. Jared called his folks, too, and of course, Noah was already with his mom, who was riding shotgun next to Shane.

  I was right behind Mom when she opened the front door and gasped.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?” I craned my neck to see around her.

  “Stay here, Charlotte. I’ll get what we need.”

  She went in and shut the door behind her, but I opened it a little and peeked inside. The entire downstairs looked as if it had been ransacked. Chairs had been tipped over and papers lay scattered across the foyer. I opened the door wider and took a step inside. Around the corner, jagged pieces of a lamp littered the carpet. The sofa where I’d been sleeping for the past month sat in the center of the room, strangely intact.

  I wanted to check the damage in the living room, hoping that all of our computers had been left untouched by the chaos. As soon as I took a step forward, though, I felt something ram my chest. It was as if someone had shoved me with both hands. I fell backward and bumped my head on the wall.

  Stunned, I looked around. Mom came running down the stairs with her notebook and the sweater. “Charlotte? What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I was pushed,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m fine.”

  “We have to get out of here.” Mom ushered me out of the house and onto the front porch. “We can’t come back until this is done.”

  “What if something goes wrong? What if we can’t perform the ceremony right?”

  We reached the van and Mom pulled open the sliding door. “We’ll deal with that when and if we need to,” she said. “Shane, stay close to us. We’ll be making one stop along the way.”

  We had decided to take two vehicles. Mom and Dad would drive their car and lead the way, while the rest of us would cram into the van so I could explain what was happening.

  I squeezed into the seat next to Noah as Mom slammed the door shut. The very back of the van held our equipment, leaving room enough for only one row of seats. It was made to fit three people, so Jared, Avery, Noah and I were struggling to get comfortable as Shane drove behind my parents. I was practically sitting in Noah’s lap while Jared and Avery sat next to each other. I wanted to ask them about what had happened at the restaurant, but it wasn’t the time.

  “I think there’s a seat belt lodged in my back,” Noah muttered, and we all laughed a little, relieved at the break in tension.

  It was dark outside. I glanced at the dashboard clock, surprised that it was already after eight. The drive to Charleston would take two hours. It was going to be a late night.

  “Um, Charlotte?” Shane was looking at me through his rearview mirror. “I think everyone’s ready to find out what’s going on.”

  “Oh, right.” Everyone was quiet, waiting for me to reveal the reason why we were speeding down a highway at night. “I don’t know where to begin,” I said, almost to myself.

  “Start at the beginning, kid. Start with the Courtyard Café.”

  So that’s how I began my story, with Annalise and me walking into the Courtyard Café for
the first time and all the things that happened afterward. I included descriptions of my dreams and tried to explain what we’d learned about the Pickenses, and ended with being shoved inside the house. No one said anything until I had finished.

  “So these ghosts follow you around?” Avery asked. “I mean, do you think they’re here with us right now, in this van?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I admitted. We all looked around slowly, as if we might see two pale spirits crouched behind the seat.

  “So, what do you guys think?” Shane asked. “You going to help us?”

  “We haven’t given them much of a choice,” I muttered.

  “I’m in!” Trisha exclaimed. “This has been, by far, the most exciting day of my life!”

  I turned to the others, my hair brushing against Noah’s cheek as I did so. “I know I’m asking a lot. I’m asking you to believe in something that’s, well, unbelievable. But I need your help.”

  Jared spoke first. “Charlotte, you were the only person who would listen to me when I needed to talk. If you need help, I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “Of course I’ll help,” Avery said. “I don’t know what happened at Giuseppe’s, but I feel different. A good different. And it’s because of you. So yeah, I’ve got your back.”

  “Me, too,” Noah said. “Just tell me what to do.”

  I was a little overwhelmed at the thought that I was surrounded by people willing to walk into the unknown with me. It was as though I was leading them into a battle that I wasn’t sure we could win. Now that the Pickenses had shown they could manifest strongly enough to cause physical damage, I was truly scared. If we failed, would they stalk me forever, throwing things around and pushing me to the ground? Or worse, would they physically harm the people around me?

  A little later, Shane pulled over at a gas station and Mom walked over to the van.

  “Okay. Charlotte, you’re going to ride the rest of the way with your dad so he can explain what we’ve found. I’ll ride with you guys and fill you in. I want to go over the ceremony with all of you, too.”

  She looked at our tight seating arrangement and frowned. Noah got up with me. “I’ll just sit on the floor, Mrs. Silver,” he offered.

  “Thanks, hon.” She gave me a quick hug. “Everything will be fine, Charlotte. This is almost over.”

  I jogged over to my parents’ car and slid into the passenger seat. Dad was pulling away before I even had a chance to fasten my seat belt.

  “Your mom says you were hurt,” he said as he pulled onto the highway. His voice was hard.

  “I was shoved. It wasn’t bad,” I said. “I think they were trying to tell me to get out of the house, you know? To return to Charleston.”

  Dad didn’t reply. He was focused on the road, but his jaw was clenched and I knew he was angry. I stared out at the dark road stretched in front of us. There wasn’t much traffic, and I found myself checking the side mirror every so often to make sure the van was still behind us. It was. I wondered what Mom was telling the others, what new information had created such urgency in my dad. He was usually so calm and scientific. Had he been attacked by the Pickenses, too?

  After a few minutes, the silence became uncomfortable, so I decided to speak up. “What happened tonight?”

  Dad shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  He said that he had been working at the computer when Annalise called with new information. She and Mills had finally found the Pickenses’ graves.

  “There was a mistake with their grave markers,” Dad explained. “From what the records show, the Pickenses died in Wisconsin while looking for their daughter. Their bodies were shipped back to Charleston, but someone along the way misspelled their names.”

  “But they’re definitely in Charleston? What about Charlotte Pickens?”

  “That’s where it gets weird.”

  Dad had put Annalise on the speakerphone. As she talked about the trail of paperwork they followed to find Charlotte Pickens, things started happening in the house. A lamp switched off, but Dad assumed that the bulb had simply burned out. Then Annalise said they believed Charlotte had traveled to Sicily after her husband died from pneumonia in Ohio. Dad heard the back door open and shut, and he thought that one of us had returned from the restaurant. When Annalise said that Charlotte had died in Sicily, leaving her daughter to be raised by her husband’s family, everything erupted.

  “It was like a tornado formed inside the house,” Dad said. “The furniture moved, papers flew in the air and there was a constant pounding, as if someone was stomping their feet—but on the walls. I’ve never seen energy manifest itself like that.”

  “Do you really think this is just your typical energy?” I asked. “After everything that’s happened, don’t you think this is more advanced, more human than anything else you’ve studied? These are ghosts, Dad. Real ghosts.”

  “Honey, the definition of ‘ghost’ is so subjective…”

  “Not to me. These were real people once, and they’re more than residual energy now. We’re dealing with intelligent beings here.”

  “You sound like your mother.” I could tell by the way Dad said it that he didn’t mean that as a good thing, but I was too angry to argue. How could he be so stubborn? Furniture flew at his head and he was acting as though it was just another scientific anomaly, something he could study later and pinpoint the cause.

  “You told me once that something happened to you that you couldn’t explain,” I said. “Remember? The figure that passed in front of you and said, ‘excuse me’?”

  “Pardon me.”

  “What?”

  Dad’s voice was softer. “It said, ‘Pardon me.’”

  “Did you ever figure out what that was?”

  “No. I’ve tried, though. I’ve been back to that place a dozen times.”

  “You also used to say that sometimes things are simply a normal we don’t yet understand. So maybe we need to use a kind of approach we don’t yet understand, like this Circle of Seven ceremony.”

  Dad seemed to mull this over for the rest of the ride. Soon, we were approaching the long bridge that would lead us straight into downtown Charleston—and toward whatever it was that waited for us there.

  twenty-one

  It wasn’t working. We were on our third try, holding hands as Mom recited the words to the Circle of Seven ceremony, but nothing was happening. The equipment barely blinked and the room temperature in the Courtyard Café remained steady on the thermal camera. Mom flipped through her notebook, scanning for something she may have missed.

  “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I’m following the steps correctly.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “Time to go to plan B, then?”

  Mom glared at him. “No, Patrick, it is not time to go to plan B.”

  Plan B, as Dad had briefly explained when we got to Charleston, was to set up every piece of equipment we owned and antagonize the energy. Sometimes, hurling insults triggered fast results. Not good results, though, and after feeling the force of what the Pickenses were now capable of, I didn’t want to make them any madder than they already were.

  At the moment, though, we were relying mainly on Mom’s words, my voice and a few basic devices to detect fluxes of energy as we stood in the main dining area of the café. The Circle of Seven had been holding hands tightly for the past hour, and I could tell by their wearied looks that they were beginning to lose focus—as well as hope that we were going to achieve anything.

  “How about a brief break?” Annalise asked. “Some of us have to use the bathroom.”

  Annalise and Mills had met us at the Courtyard Café, where they had arranged for us to occupy the place for the evening. We weren’t planning on being there all night, but nothing seemed to be happening.

  Everyone left the room for a break except for Mom and me.

  “Maybe we’ve already run out of time,” I said miserably as I plopped down on a chair. “Maybe the Pic
kenses were too weak to follow us here or something.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mom. “I think if we’d missed our window, we’d be dealing with some very angry energy right now.”

  I put my head down on one of the round tables. I was tired and worried and just wanted everything to be over with. I closed my eyes and let myself feel the cool white tablecloth against my cheek. “Help us,” I whispered.

  At that moment, I saw something clearly in my mind. It was a single, fleeting image that flashed before me in less than a second, but once I saw it, I understood the problem.

  I sat up. “It’s not the ceremony!” I yelled. “It’s the place!”

  Mom gave me a strange look and Dad came running in from the other room. I was already making my way to the door.

  “We’re in the wrong place,” I told him. “Grab your stuff and let’s go.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are we going?”

  The others had gathered in the front room and were looking at me as if I was crazy.

  “But this is where the Pickenses lived,” Mom reminded me. “This is where it all began.”

  “Not exactly.” A grandfather clock near the front door rang eleven times. I waited until the loud chimes stopped before speaking again. “Look, I need you to trust me. We’re close, I promise. Just follow me.”

  I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. I walked briskly and with a sense of purpose, and the others followed, talking among themselves. Outside, the streets were fairly empty and I breathed in the scent of the air, tinged with tired jasmine. It took a few minutes to reach our destination, but when we finally arrived, I knew it was the right place.

  The image that had flashed before me moments earlier was that of a huge old tree. It was in the same park where the Pickenses had camped after the earthquake. It was the same place I had seen in my dreams. And, most important, it was the same tree where Charlotte Pickens’s only child had returned to fulfill her mother’s last request.

  “The park? Are you sure?” Mom asked.

  “Not the park. It’s the tree.” I explained what I’d seen and how it connected to everything else, but Dad wasn’t so sure.