The Boy from Tomorrow
Camille DeAngelis
Amberjack Publishing
New York | Idaho
Amberjack Publishing
1472 E. Iron Eagle Drive
Eagle, Idaho 83616
http://amberjackpublishing.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Camille DeAngelis
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: DeAngelis, Camille, author.
Title: The boy from tomorrow / by Camille DeAngelis.
Description: New York, NY; Eagle, ID: Amberjack Publishing, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-944995-61-4 (Hardcover) | 978-1-944995-62-1 (ebook) | LCCN 2017954150
Summary: Josie and Alec communicate via spirit board, realize they are living in the same house a century apart, and develop a life-changing friendship.
Subjects: LCSH Psychics--Juvenile fiction. | Spiritualism--Juvenile fiction. | Friendship--Juvenile fiction. | Ghosts--Juvenile fiction. | Child abuse--Juvenile fiction. | Family--Juvenile fiction. | Ghost stories. | BISAC JUVENILE FICTION / Ghost Stories | JUVENILE FICTION / General
Classification: LCC PZ7.D351 Bo 2018 | DDC [Fic]--dc23
Cover Design & Illustrations: Agnieszka Grochalska
For Elliot & Kate,
who said,
Think of all the people we’ll love
who haven’t been born yet.
Josie Asks the Oracle
1.
A companion is not always the same as a friend. Josie’s sister was her closest—indeed, her only—companion, but a little sister is too young to understand certain things, like the concept of privacy, for instance, or the crucial role of books in the development of a person’s intelligence. Josie’s tutor understood such things, as well she should, but then, her tutor was nearly a decade older—a grown woman, if a bit of a goose at times.
No, Josie Clifford required a friend: someone her own age, who knew what it was to be lonely, who would not call her morbid when she confided that she sometimes awoke cold and trembling in the middle of the night, convinced that she would not live to her sixteenth birthday. That was something you could never, ever tell your little sister.
On one such night, when sleep had abandoned her, Josie lit a candle and tiptoed down the stairs to her mother’s reading room. There were books in the reading room, but her mother seldom took any out of the glass-fronted cabinet. A very different sort of “reading” happened here most weekday afternoons, when Mrs. Clifford convinced strangers she could speak to the dead.
There were curious things inside the cabinet and along the side table, mostly gifts from Mr. Berringsley, who was her mother’s best client. There was a talking board with angels painted at the corners, a crystal ball that grew tinglingly warm when you touched it, and a contraption through which—were you brave enough to fix the earpiece to your ear—you could hear the voices of your ancestors telling you where you ought to travel and whom you ought to marry in order to fulfill your destiny. Josie didn’t truly believe it was possible to speak with your ancestors, or angels, or people who died in tragic accidents, and yet she always found herself sneaking back into this dark and eerie room as if she did.
Her favorite of Mr. Berringsley’s gifts was a brass sculpture, perhaps ten inches tall, in the shape of a woman in a flowing cape. The hooded figure had downcast eyes and hands outstretched above a glass panel, which displayed the mechanism that stacked and shuffled a set of cards. (The real oracles of ancient Greece did not need fortune cards, her tutor Emily had pointed out, but Mr. Berringsley’s sphere was finance, not history.) When you pressed the button at the base, the device chose a fortune for you. Josie had longed to press that button when Mr. Berringsley first presented the gift a month ago, but she had known better than to ask her mother if she might. Mother always, always said no—but Mother was not here now.
“I wish for a true friend,” Josie whispered. How ridiculous that her heart should race as she laid her finger on the button! There was no magic here, after all.
The mechanism whirred to life, and the two stacks of cards wove in and out before one fortune slid forward. Josie held her candle to the glass.
You shall be united with the object of your desire.
Part of her—the foolish part—was delighted. It was easy to believe in false prophets. She must ask a second question to test it.
“Does my mother love me?” Josie said, and pressed the button again. This time the card read:
It is not meant to be.
Josie saw then that she had placed herself in a distressing predicament: whether or not the oracle machine proved true, happiness would only ever be allotted to her in half measure. She did not dare ask again.
H-E-L-L-O S-P-I-R-I-T
2.
It was almost as if the new house—an old house—had a personality of its own; it was calm and quiet and generous, happily divulging its secrets one at a time so long as Alec asked nicely. The real estate agent told them that someone famous, an actress maybe, had built the place a hundred years ago. People had been happy here, lived interesting lives in these rooms, and now it was their turn.
Alec was born in the city, but after one perfect week in the Adirondacks when he was five, he’d wanted very badly to wake up to birdsong and the soft sound of the wind in the trees, not just on vacation, but every morning. The clamor of the city made him anxious, and while his mother understood this, it had taken several years of conversations about moving before it actually happened.
And then, after all that, his father did not move with them. The house at 444 Sparrow Street was much too big for a family of two, though neither Alec nor his mother would ever admit it. The divorce was painful enough.
But this new-old house would comfort them, even as his mother arranged for the necessary repairs and renovations. Mrs. Frost was starting a new job soon at the elementary school, and Alec would be able to walk to the middle school. Surely there were two or three friends to be made in this leafy-green neighborhood.
In the meantime, he had the whole house to explore. There were cupboards, each peculiar in its own way: a huge curio cabinet in the dining room, a storage nook on the landing midway up the front stairs, and a small one, the size of a medicine cabinet, built into the wall of the spare room adjoining his new bedroom. It had an old-fashioned keyhole but no key, and Alec’s mother was too busy talking to the contractor about the new back porch to pay much notice to this little mystery.
“Don’t you want to know what’s inside?” Alec asked.
“Probably nothing,” Mrs. Frost replied.
“Then why would it be locked?”
She smiled as if she were happy again. “There is such a thing as too much imagination, you know.”
Alec ran his fingers over the woodwork. The cupboard had been painted over a half-dozen times, and sloppily too, so that the shape of the keyhole was no longer crisp. Maybe the key was lost somewhere in the house.
The contractor gave him a battered wooden crate full of things the workmen had found behi
nd the walls and under the floorboards: a fistful of rusty jacks, crumbling wads of newspaper, broken bits of fancy china, a book so moldy he couldn’t make out the title. Alec rummaged eagerly, but the only key in the box was a boring modern one. The house was holding onto this secret for the time being.
But it offered him another one: a talking board. Alec found it in the massive curio cabinet in the dining room, in a drawer that stuck so badly most people would have given up tugging on it.
The board was laid out in black and gold on a wooden tray about eighteen inches square. There was an angel in each corner carrying a banner: HELLO in the top left, GOODBYE on the right, and on the bottom, YES and NO. The alphabet was arranged in a pair of concentric circles at the center of the board, A through M on the outside and N through Z on the inside, with a question mark at the center. The numbers appeared in a row along the bottom edge, with TODAY and TOMORROW on either side. Carefully, Alec lifted the board out of the drawer and found a glass pointer in a niche lined with green felt.
It was the coolest thing he’d ever seen, no contest. Alec wanted to call out to his mother, but something made him pause. He might be the only living person who knew about this, and it would be fun to keep it that way for a day or two.
He Googled “spooky board with letters” and found that people used them to try to communicate with the dead. You’d put your fingers on the glass pointer—the planchette—and ask a question, and the ghost would supposedly push the pointer from letter to letter to answer you. He wondered how often the board had been used by its original owner, and he shivered at the next thought that came to him: you could ask.
* * *
Their new neighbors stopped by with welcome gifts, things like pineapples and homemade mulberry jam. Two of the women had sons in Alec’s grade, and this was how he came to host a sleepover before school had even started.
Alec was nervous, but Danny put him at ease. The boy came barreling through the front door, laughing and joking, as if he were already planning to spend a great deal of time here in the years to come. He told Alec’s mom her homemade pizza was “an edible masterpiece,” and Alec watched another of those rare-these-days smiles light up her face.
Danny’s friend Harold was quiet in comparison. After dinner he passed a few minutes browsing Alec’s bookshelves, saying eventually, “You sure like Terry Pratchett.”
“Discworld is the best,” Danny put in, and Harold arched a brow.
“The best?”
“Who’s your favorite writer?” Alec asked.
Harold shrugged. “Hemingway, maybe. Or Vonnegut.”
Danny laughed and turned to Alec. “He just picks authors who sound the most impressive.”
Watching a movie seemed like a safer bet than talking about books, so Alec suggested they go downstairs again, and they settled on The Incredibles.
Once Mrs. Frost had gone up to bed, Alec led his new friends to the dining room and opened the drawer. Danny ran his finger along the board’s golden outlines while Harold hefted the planchette in his palm.
“Handpainted,” Danny said admiringly. “Definitely one of a kind.”
Danny’s father owned the antiques store on Main Street, and over pizza he’d talked about the weird old stuff his dad had found in dead people’s houses.
“Have you ever used one?” Alec asked as they sat down at the dining table.
“First time for everything,” Danny replied. “But I know how. I saw it on TV once. So who are we trying to talk to?”
“What about Einstein? Or Houdini? No, I’ve got it,” Harold laughed, “Attila the Hun!”
“If we actually talked to Attila the Hun, you wouldn’t understand a word he said,” Danny pointed out. He drew a pad and pencil out of his backpack. “Here, you guys put your fingers on it, and I’ll write down the letters.”
Harold laid the pointer on the board and pushed it with his index finger. It looked like a plain old paperweight. The glass was slightly concave, magnifying each letter it rested on, the edge rimmed in green felt to protect the wooden surface.
“If it even works,” Harold said. “Which it won’t.”
Danny turned to a fresh page and waited.
“Hello?” Alec said, starting when the lamp in the corner flickered. Harold laughed.
“Look!” Danny said. “It’s moving!”
The glass piece made a whispering sound as it glided across the board. Unseen hands directed the pointer to HELLO in the upper left corner, then moved back to the circles of letters:
s-p-i-r-i-t
They glanced at one another with raised eyebrows.
“Who are you?” Alec asked, and the glass piece took off again:
w-e a-r-e y-o-u-n-g l-a-d-i-e-s
The boys spoke over each other as they sounded out the words. Danny scribbled it down, and when he was done, Alec asked, “How many of you are there?”
The pointer dipped to the number three.
and how many of you?
“There are three of us, too.” Alec’s hands were shaking, and he hoped the others wouldn’t notice. Harold couldn’t be pushing the glass—if he were, the pointer would already be spelling out “your mom” jokes.
“When did you die?” Danny asked. “Were you murdered?”
certainly not—a pause—we are very much alive—
Harold laughed again. “That’s what they all say.”
the planchette spins—what does this signify?
The marker had only moved to point to each letter in turn. “What do you mean?” Alec asked. “It’s not spinning.”
it has stopped now—do you mean to say you see the board—do you see us, spirit?
“Not gonna lie, you guys,” Danny whispered. “I am getting a little freaked.”
Fear surged through Alec’s fingertips, yet he felt himself carried along by it. How could they stop now? “We can’t see you. Can you see us?”
we cannot—but you say you see our board?
“We see our board.”
your board?
Then the pointer began to whirl in a circle, and the boys jumped back from the table. Harold muttered a curse, and Alec’s heart hammered in his chest. Now the glass piece moved between the letters even though no one was touching it, and Danny scrambled for his pencil.
silly stubborn spirits—
“We’re not the spirits!” Alec cried. “You are!”
Then the planchette made a quick series of sidesteps in the bottom right corner:
NO NO NO. you are quite mistaken—goodnight spirit—
Alec looked at the other boys in turn, not knowing what to say. Even Harold, who seemed quick to laugh at anything he didn’t understand, sat back from the table, folded his arms, and stared at the board.
“All right,” Danny said finally. “Which of you was pushing it?”
Josie’s Wish is Granted
3.
Josie leaned back from the table, her pulse pounding in her ears. Cassie gazed at her with saucer eyes, more frightened than her sister had ever seen her. Emily rose and whisked the talking board back into the drawer. She paced the carpet a few times, chuckled nervously, and proffered her hands so the girls could see how she trembled.
“Would you look at me! I could never do what your mother does for a living.”
“Mother doesn’t really talk to spirits.” This was the first time Josie had ever said so aloud, and the declaration settled her nerves.
“What do you call this, then?”
Josie bit her lip. It was impossible that Cassie could have manipulated the planchette, for it had formed words her sister didn’t know how to spell. When the pointer strung together “when did you die,” a horrible thrill had coursed all through her.
Emily shook her head. “Until tonight I’d have said you two were capable of any mischief—but not this, c
ertainly not this.”
“I can’t explain it,” Josie said.
“Perhaps your mother could, were any of us foolish enough to tell her.” Now Emily was scurrying around the reading room tidying up the cushions to make it appear as if no one had been there. “Now, then, up to bed. They’ll be home soon.”
As she hung her dress in the wardrobe, Josie heard Mr. Berringsley’s motorcar draw up to the curb. Cass ran to the window seat and looked out.
“He’s coming inside,” she announced in a stage whisper as three figures—Berringsley, Lavinia Clifford, and Merritt, her manservant—came up the walk. Berringsley spoke, and they heard their mother laugh.
It was Berringsley who’d commissioned the talking board from an artisan in New Orleans. He was a nice man, always well-intentioned, but his enthusiasm gave rise to an awkwardness that only he could not perceive. When he wished to converse with Josie, he drew too near, and his breath made her think of a sealed-off room.
The front door opened and shut, the voices and footsteps moving into the reading room directly beneath the nursery. The murmur of their conversation drifted upward as Emily seated herself at the foot of Cassie’s bed, listening with head bowed as the girls said their prayers.
“We pray for those we have loved and see no more,” Josie began.
Cassie bent over her tightly clasped hands, eyes screwed tight. When you are six years old, religious devotion and the melodramatic appearance of it are one and the same. “For Grandmother and Grandfather, for Daddy and Mr. Malcolm,” she said.
Every night it gave Josie a prickly feeling along the back of her neck to hear her little sister mention their fathers by name. David Malcolm had been Josie’s father, but she could not remember him. She’d passed his portrait in the hall every day for years before she even realized who he was.
Mr. Clifford had been kind to Josie—he’d even adopted her—but when he’d come home from a business trip to Panama with some horrible wasting illness, they’d hidden him away, and neither of the girls had been permitted to say goodbye. Not that Cassie would have understood; she wasn’t even two.
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