A Guide to the Other Side

by Robert Imfeld

  “That’s what you think,” she said ominously.

  I ignored her comment and marched on, somehow getting through the day and looking forward to band practice. I thought about skipping it, but since I’d missed Thursday, I felt like I had to go.

  I’d started playing the tuba on a whim a few years ago. I had tried out for soccer because I liked how much I got to run, but I quit during my first game. There were far too many ghosts on the field, and I could barely tell who was a player and who was dead. Twenty minutes in I stomped off the field and told my parents I couldn’t play anymore.

  Playing the tuba, on the other hand, has become my saving grace. Whereas running around in soccer allowed my mind to be too receptive to all the spirits around me, playing the tuba forces me to concentrate on the music. The sound helps block out all the chatter. After a few minutes of staring at sheet music, I almost transform into someone who can’t talk to dead people. I’d never admit this to Kristina, but it’s nice to feel truly alone, even if it’s only for a little bit.

  Four years later, and I’m still playing the tuba. I’ve learned to play the guitar and the piano, too, but I prefer the tuba. There’s something about wrapping that instrument around my body and blasting music out of it that makes me feel like I’m in my own little world with no one to bother me.

  The band instructor, Mr. Gilbert, was a short man with long, curly red hair. He wore a tie every single day, and today it was decked out in little Snoopy drawings.

  “Looking good, Mr. G.,” I said as I limped into the giant room. There were a bunch of skylights that lined the ceiling, casting a dull, wintry light over the room, and flimsy blue soundproofing material covered every wall.

  “Glad to see you’re feeling better, Baylor,” he said, “though that limp doesn’t look too great.”

  “Took a nasty spill on Halloween,” I said. “Collecting free candy is hard work.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Children,” he said, shaking his head and smiling.

  I got my tuba from the instrument closet and said hey to Aiden before taking my place in the semicircle of chairs. He’d given me the surprisingly full bag of Halloween candy at lunch.

  “I had to hide it from my mom in my dirty-clothes hamper,” he’d said. “You know how she gets.” I’d searched for some Twix while trying not to think about my candy languishing next to Aiden’s filthy underwear for two days.

  As he unpacked another pepperoni-and-mustard sandwich, he’d asked, “So where’d you disappear to, anyway? Why’d you drop all your candy?”

  I’d sort of frowned at him and said, “Believe me, Aiden, you do not want to know.” He’d widened his eyes and didn’t ask anything else about it.

  Today we were prepping for the parade that would take place downtown on Main Street the weekend before Thanksgiving. We’d be near the end of the parade, and Mr. G. felt confident that tackling a Christmas medley would set the mood for the holiday season.

  “A classic medley!” he said. “Something we’ve never done before but that’s been done to death by everyone else in America.”

  “Then why are we doing it, if it’s been done before?” asked one of the saxophonists.

  “Because we live in Keene, New Hampshire,” he said slowly. “Our town loves anything festive.”

  It was true. Our town was infamous for its huge pumpkin festival, trying to break a Guinness world record for the most jack-o’-lanterns lit at once, and at Christmastime the downtown square transformed into a majestic, brightly lit wonderland.

  Mr. G. passed out the sheet music and asked us to play through everything once so he could gauge what needed the most work. We started with a rough rendition of “Jingle Bells,” followed by “The Little Drummer Boy,” and finally finished with an interesting mash-up of “Silent Night” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

  We sounded so bad I wasn’t sure what Mr. G. would think needed the most fine-tuning, and he looked just as perplexed. He’d winced with every wrong note and disharmonious chord, which meant his flowing hair had whipped around nearly nonstop for ten minutes.

  He decided to start with the mash-up: If it wasn’t going to work, he wanted to know fairly early so that we could practice something entirely different.

  After running through it four times, I started to get a little bored. Considering “Silent Night” was a peaceful, almost relaxing song, the tuba didn’t have much of a place. I began to sing the lyrics in my head, closing my eyes and letting the positive energy of the Christmas music overcome me. Christmas was the one time of year when I never had any trouble with ghosts.

  Silent night! Holy night!

  All is calm, all is bright

  Round yon Virgin Mother and Child.

  Holy Infant, so tender and mild,

  Sleep in heavenly peace,

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  When we had to stop and do it a fifth time, I sighed and looked at Aiden, who was visibly sweating. He was in the opposite situation from me: The flute was prominently featured.

  By now even I could tell the mash-up wasn’t going to work. How on earth would Mariah Carey lyrics fit in there?

  “One, two, three . . . ,” Mr. G. called out, and I reclined back, closed my eyes, and began to recite the lyrics in my head once more.

  Silent night! Holy night!

  All is calm . . .

  The music stopped all at once. I opened my eyes to see what had happened, but I was alone in the room.

  Except I wasn’t alone—he was there.

  The Sheet Man was standing in the middle of the semicircle, staring at me. He hadn’t brought his cronies this time. It was just him and me, and by this point I’d had enough.

  “What do you want?” I said, standing up with my tuba. “Say something or stop bothering me.”

  He didn’t say a word, but the sheet, which had remained so still before, began to whip violently, like a tornado had just entered the room. It raised higher a bit, and for the first time I caught a good glimpse of his shoes: some kind of brown leather with an odd, shiny buckle on top.

  I couldn’t see them for more than a second or two, though, because once that nonexistent wind started blowing, I began to feel light-headed. So light-headed that I began to question how I was still standing, how I had gotten to this room, how I was still alive even.

  It felt like he was sucking all the energy out of me.

  “Stop,” I said, clasping my tuba for support, forgetting I was the one supporting it in the first place. “Stop!”

  It did stop, and I found myself swaying back in the middle of the band room full of my friends, all of whom had stopped playing and were turned my way, their mouths agape in horror. But it was too late. It felt like all the blood had left my body, and before I could do anything else, I went crashing to the floor.

  TIP

  7

  Ghosts, just like living people, can be quite rude.

  DURING THOSE FIRST CONFUSED SECONDS after I came to, I had no idea where I was, what the time was, why there was a huge crowd of people around me, and why my head hurt so much.

  “Finally, he’s up,” said a squat woman to my left. She had brown hair that was twisted into a bun on her head, and she looked at me like she was scolding a naughty child. “We’ve been waiting for hours.”

  “What took so long?” said a gruff bald man in a black biker vest, tattoos covering his bare arms. “It was just a tuba.”

  “Move over!” a familiar voice said. “Get out of the way!”

  Kristina emerged from behind a large, frowning woman who was wearing a muumuu.

  “Baylor!” she said. “How’s your head?”

  “Not good,” I said, trying to lift my arm from the stiff hospital bed but getting caught in a jungle of wires.

  “Your head is covered with electrodes,” she said. “Monitoring for a concussion.”

  “Great,” I moaned. “Where are Mom and Dad?”

  “Outside talking to the doctor.”


  “Never mind your parents, they’re fine,” said the first woman. “I need you to tell my daughter that her husband is a scumbag. She’s right down the hall.”

  “Enough with this demon dung!” Kristina said, enraged. She turned and pointed her finger at the woman.

  “Oh no,” the woman said as a blue wave of light surrounded her body before she vanished.

  “Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Neither did we,” said the bald biker guy, taking a step back.

  “I’ve been developing some new tricks with my spirit guides the last few days,” Kristina said, flexing her fingers. “That felt weird.”

  “How so?” I asked. It was funny to hear Kristina describe things because she couldn’t actually touch anything in the physical world and had no true reference.

  “It felt hot, like whenever you get into the car in the summer and all you do is shift around and complain about how it takes forever to cool down.”

  “I don’t do that!”

  “My goal is to find this Sheet Man who keeps making an appearance and zap him into the next universe,” she said, ignoring my denial.

  “Did you just zap that woman into some weird universe?” I asked.

  “No, I just made her go away,” she said, shrugging. “She was being rude.”

  “Does this mean he’s not going to deliver messages right now?” asked the woman in the muumuu.

  “Obviously,” Kristina snapped. “How could he? He’s confined to his bed.”

  “He could call a nurse and have her deliver the messages room to room.”

  The crowd chimed in with their approval.

  “That works!”

  “He’s not doing anything else!”

  “My son needs to know he’s dating a thief!”

  “No!” Kristina said firmly. “The only reason he can see you right now is because he can’t focus enough to tune you out. Just because he’s in the hospital doesn’t mean he’s your slave.”

  “It would be a nice thing, helping us,” said the tattooed man.

  “You know what would be really nice?” Kristina said, her voice seeped with venom. “It would be so nice if all of you would leave the room and come back at a more appropriate time. Our parents are coming back in a few seconds anyway.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “Our families need to hear these things. That’s what he’s here for.”

  “He’s seriously dating a thief! She steals raw meats from the grocery store! Who does that?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t help you,” I said as they all backed out of the room in one smooth motion, like a vacuum was sucking them out. I wasn’t sure if that was part of Kristina’s new powers or if it was of their own accord. “I’m just not going to right now.”

  As the last spirits groaned their way out of the room, I noticed a doctor standing near the door, my parents next to him. He was probably in his late thirties, and he didn’t look happy at all.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said, turning to my parents. “I’m supposed to listen to him talk to an empty room for minutes on end and accept that nothing is wrong with his brain? You are both out of your minds.”

  “He does this all the time,” my dad said in the same light, singsong voice he used with Ella. “It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Talks to ghosts,” the doctor mumbled, writing something on my chart. “Outrageous. The kid is hallucinating.”

  I shot a look at Kristina, and a moment later two old women were standing next to her.

  “Thank you for letting us back in,” the first one said. She was tall and had that long silver hair only a few old ladies can really pull off, though I wasn’t so sure she was one of them.

  “Dean’s going through a hard time right now,” the second one said. Her hair was the correct length, and she had a huge, gleaming smile that would have made me smile if the nerves in my face hadn’t been screaming in agony right then. “His brother, Dillon, has a rare form of lung cancer. He only started smoking after he saw Dean do it when they were younger, but Dillon could never kick the habit after Dean did.”

  “He needs to let go of his guilt!” the one with long hair said. “Dillon is a grown man and made his choices. Dean didn’t force a cigarette into his brother’s mouth the first time he tried it, and he didn’t force-feed every single one to him for twenty years, either.”

  I nodded to each of them and said, “Thank you,” which made the doctor scoff and throw up his hands.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “Uh, Dean? Can I call you Dean?” I asked, not leaving him any time to answer. “It’s what your grandmas called you.”

  His eyes widened. “My grandmas?”

  “They know you’re in a bad place because of Dillon’s cancer, but they want you to let go of the guilt associated with it.”

  He dropped the chart. “Who did you hear talking about this? Was it Marta? I’m going to have her fired. I knew I couldn’t trust her.”

  “No! Don’t fire Marta, I don’t even know who that is,” I said. “Your grandmas are standing right there.” I pointed to the space to my left, next to a silver cart. He looked over, but of course he saw nothing.

  “He was always so stubborn,” the short-haired grandma said, laughing.

  “I’ll keep trying,” I said under my breath. “Dean, Dillon may have lung cancer, but you didn’t give it to him. You’re not responsible for it.”

  “Why are you playing this trick on me?” the doctor said. I’m sure his aura was bloodred with fury. “This is a very personal subject.”

  “I’m not tricking you at all. One of your grandmas has long hair and talks with a very proper accent, almost like she’s British, but I know she’s not. The other one has short hair and doesn’t stop smiling. She’s also way shorter than the other one.”

  Dean’s hands started shaking as he searched the empty space where they stood beaming at him.

  “Mention the little Easter chick he got as a child that lasted maybe five minutes before the dog got it,” the long-haired grandma said. “That should do the trick.”

  Once I repeated that back to Dean, he left the room, still looking incredibly annoyed, and said he would return in a few minutes. The grandmas followed him out.

  “Well, that was awkward,” my mom said, plopping into the armchair next to my bed. “We mentioned to him that you might do that, just so he wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with you if you started, you know, communicating with . . . them.”

  My dad wasn’t looking at me because he was wiping away tears from his eyes. Ever since his father crossed over, he became emotional whenever he witnessed me delivering a message of any kind.

  “What happened, Baylor?” my mom said, massaging my right hand. “You’ve never passed out like that before. Were you feeling sick?” She spoke in a cheerful voice that was so obviously fake I couldn’t let her continue for a second longer.

  “It was the Sheet Man,” I said. “He made an appearance during band practice, and this time I stood up to him. Except that after I stood up, I lost all my energy and the tuba fell on me. I knew I should have taken up the flute.”

  I grimaced at the memory.

  “Oh my God,” she said, her smile melting, the cheerful tone eliminated. “I knew it.”

  “The candles didn’t work?” Dad asked.

  “I guess not,” I said. “Kristina is even learning some new powers, and with all that, he still got through to me.”

  “Isn’t there a ghost police or something that can help you?” Mom’s voice was raised, exasperated. “This guy needs to leave you alone! Oh God, I don’t ever want to die, it’s just chaos over there, Baylor.”

  “Calm down,” I said. “If he wanted to hurt me, he would have already.”

  “Baylor, do you not see where you are right now?” she asked, her voice going up to an unsustainable octave. “You’re lying in a hospital bed with your head all wrapped up!”

&n
bsp; “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of words,” I said, “but I sort of caused this on my own.”

  “It’s working,” she said, panicked, turning to my dad. “That thing, it’s working its evil powers on him already. He’s getting Stockholm syndrome, but for ghosts! Stocksoul syndrome!” She turned back to me, her eyes moving like crazy over my face. “Snap out of it, Baylor!” She snapped both of her hands in my face. “That thing is dangerous! It wants to hurt you.”

  Kristina started laughing hysterically, and even I had to focus really hard to keep my mouth from twitching.

  “Mom, you’re overreacting,” I said. “I promise you, I don’t have Stocksoul syndrome. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  The concern remained in her eyes.

  “I’ll be watching you like a hawk, Baylor Bosco,” she said. “Any sign of any of the sheet craziness, and I’m getting the holy water out.”

  TIP

  8

  Not all healing messages are created equal.

  DOCTOR DEAN EVENTUALLY RECOVERED AND came back into the room. He made no mention of my messages, but he didn’t keep calling me crazy, either, so I guessed he believed me. He told me I had to stay overnight for observation, but that I was most likely fine. I just got my “bell rung” really good, as he said, causing my father to interject with, “More like he got his tuba blown.” No one laughed.

  I managed to persuade my mom not to spend the night. At first she flat-out refused to listen to me, saying the evil spirits were making me say that and it was all the more reason for her to stay, but I managed to turn that thinking around on her, saying that the hospital was filled with spirits that would play tricks on her, keep her up all night, and make her think she was going insane.

  I knew I’d hit the nail on the head when I said the word “insane,” because her eyes got really wide and it was clear she was starting to feel that way. She’d been pacing around the room nonstop and blurting out nonsensical things about sheets, and I made a pact with myself not to mention the Sheet Man to her anymore. The fewer details, the better.

  It took a while, but she finally agreed to leave with my dad, which was exactly what I wanted, because Kristina and I needed time to talk.