The Ancestors

by Brandon Massey

  “Neema, quit playing,” he said, poking at her bedcovers to make sure she hadn’t disguised her bulk somehow. The bed was empty.

  Davie picked up Raggedy Ann—who truly was raggedy, since she’d belonged to their Aunt Evie when she was a little girl, special-made by a black dollmaker—and even looked under Neema’s pillow, for no particular reason. “I mean it. Dang, you’re such a baby.”

  Steely, eerie silence.

  But I heard her. It was Neema. She was saying “And this one and this one . . .”

  Just in case some law of physics or the space-time continuum had been violated, Davie checked the bathroom across the hall, too. And his own room. No Neema. There was always the front of the house, but how could she have gotten past him? No way.

  You were standing right here in front of her door. YOU HEARD HER VOICE.

  For the first time, Davie realized that the tears he thought he’d fought off right before he heard the ghost dog hadn’t been banished very far. They were still there, just beneath his eyeballs, waiting for the slightest reason to peek out. Neema being gone made him want to cry.

  How could he tell Dad?

  “Please, Neema?” he said to her empty room, his voice small.

  That did it—his appeal to her charity. Conceding his helplessness.

  The closet rustled, and the lid to the clothes hamper opened, revealing Neema’s round face inside. She grinned. “I tricked you! I kept the clothes on top.”

  Davie was so relieved to see her that he couldn’t get as mad as he wanted to be. “Good one. Seriously,” he said, and helped her climb out. “I’ll get you back, though.”

  “Not-uh.”

  “You wish, freak-girl.”

  Just like that, life was normal again. Now there would be no exhaustive explanations (“See, this ghost dog was here, and I think he dragged Neema into another realm . . .”), no looks of disappointment, and then concern, and then yawning horror.

  Reality check.

  Yeah, the divorce would be bad. But not as bad as losing Neema.

  In daylight, armed with his new glass-half-full outlook, Davie couldn’t believe his luck: A ghost encounter his very first night! This house was like a river brimming with catfish. If he hadn’t chickened out, he might have followed that dog to God-knew-what ghost rally, chock full of chances to capture the manifestation on video and audio for YouTube.

  In daylight, Davie chastised himself for his loss of faith in the power of communication. If he could say, “I don’t want to hurt you” to a human ghost, then “Good boy, good boy” should do for a dog. He’d let himself fall prey to species bigotry, and he’d lain there like a lump while his chance at ghost-hunting stardom had trotted down the hall.

  He’d need to man up by nightfall. He was so determined that he walked to the Handi Mart at the corner and paid way too much for a bag of dog biscuits, just to be on the safe side.

  “Yes, I’m sure it was a dog,” he told Neema in his room while he made his preparations, when she demanded the full story of why he had dog biscuits alongside his ghost-hunting supplies out on his bed.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I saw some kids bury a dog yesterday. Right outside the back fence.”

  He hoped he hadn’t blown Neema’s mind badly enough to give her nightmares.

  “Cool!” she said. “I wanna see the dog too!”

  “Shhhhhh,” he shushed her. That was the main problem with Neema: She couldn’t keep quiet. With Neema tagging along, living room recon was a nightmare. She could wake up an entire house without trying. Between that and her inability to sit still longer than five minutes, Neema was pretty much useless. Stealth and patience were the only two qualities that mattered in ghost-tracking. So far, at least, his baby sister had neither.

  But if she was going to get trained, he had to train her now.

  Imani said she heard the ghosts the first year she came to the Graceville house in summer, but not after she was thirteen. She said it was as if the channel had changed, or she’d unplugged somehow. Grandma and Grandpa said they never noticed noises either except for occasional creaking, just like Mom and Dad. Maybe only kids could really hear the ghosts.

  This might be his last chance. After this summer, Neema would be on her own.

  “You have to take a nap so you won’t be tired tonight, ’cuz we’re gonna be up late,” he said. “If I hear any whining—and I mean any whining about anything—I’m gonna go back to bed and do it alone some night when you’re sleeping.”

  “No you won’t. I’ll stay awake every night too.”

  “I mean it, Neema. Either it’s my rules or you don’t play.”

  That shut her up quick. He didn’t often have leverage over Neema, but he had big-time leverage now. She’d been begging him to let her track with him since she was three. Her face was longer every year, more like Mom’s, and the thin cornrows Mom had slaved over for hours before she left still looked fresh and flawless on Neema’s scalp, the ends anchored by a swarm of white barrettes shaped like tiny butterflies. She looked like a princess too.

  “Why’s Daddy sad?” Neema said. Changing the subject was her specialty.

  He decided on the nothing’s-wrong-here approach. “He’s sad?”

  She nodded, certain. “Yeah.”

  “I guess he misses Mommy.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Neema said. Dad’s sadness was contagious.

  “We’ll see her soon.”

  “Not-uh,” she said. “A month’s not soon. A month is a long time.”

  Neema often sounded certain of herself, but never more than now. She understood there was significance to it. She knew that Mom’s time away meant something.

  It might be harder to keep the secret than he’d thought.

  At six o’clock, just when Davie thought he would lose his mind waiting for the sun to go down, Grandma excused herself from the Game of Life board game they were playing. She had a meeting, she said. The community was trying to stop another construction project. The “community” was busy.

  “Why don’t you want more houses, Grandma?” Neema said.

  Davie wanted to kick her under the dining table. Now they were in for a whole tutorial on infrastructure and sewer lines. But instead, Grandma sighed and glanced at Dad, who shrugged. Dad barely listened to any of them; his conversations were in his head.

  Grandma fixed her hair net, looking into an egg-shaped mirror on the wall. “I wasn’t gonna say anything to you kids—but there’s bodies buried over on that land across the street, out beyond Tobacco Road. McCormack’s land. They found an old burial site, the bones of people who lived ’round here a hundred years ago. And not a cemetery neither—this has been McCormack land for generations. But the university folks say they were black. Nobody knows how many bones there are, or how far they’re spread out . . . so if they keep building up these houses, we’ll never learn the full story about who they were, or how many people died.”

  It was the coolest thing Grandma had ever said. Davie was captivated.

  Grandpa Walter spoke up, half-limping from the kitchen. His joints hurt worse at night. “If it was Indians, see, there’s special laws about that. It’s a burial ground, so it’s sacred. But not for us. Nothing that’s got to do with us is sacred.”

  “Our family?” Neema asked. She hadn’t figured out yet that whenever Dad and Grandpa said “us,” they meant “black people.”

  “Everybody wants it buried,” Grandma went on. “So I’m going to a meeting to try to stop the people from building more houses on top of the bones. In case there are more.”

  Neema looked at Davie with wide, gleeful eyes. Even Neema knew that the fresh unearthing of bones meant heightened ghost activity. What luck!

  “How many skeletons did they find?” Davie said.

  “Twelve,” Grandma said.

  “So far,” Grandpa added. “Could’ve been a slaughter, like Rosewood. Hundreds of people hunted down like animals, a whole town.”

 
; Dad looked up at his parents, as if he’d just noticed the turn of conversation. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot. This is a great goddamn topic for my eight-year-old.” He nearly roared Neema’s age, and Neema jumped as if he was yelling at her. It was the maddest Davie had ever heard his father. Cussing at his parents! And blasphemy too, which Grandma couldn’t stand.

  Davie thought better of his next question, which was going to be: Were there any dogs?

  Instead, they all stopped talking about the bodies. Grandma went to her meeting, and Grandpa kept coaxing Neema to spin the wheel and help him read the cards while Davie and his father only pretended to play the board game. (More like a bored game, Davie told himself.) He and Dad were both happy to miss their turns if they were forgotten. The Game of Life was not the product as advertised.

  Bedtime was a relief beyond words.

  Thanks to a consistent campaign at every birthday and holiday, Davie had decent ghost-hunting gear. No EMF or motion detectors yet—but he had a lantern-style flashlight, an old 8mm video camera with Night Vision (a hand-me-down from Dad), a mini-cassette recorder he wore around his neck, and the digital camera his mother had given him for Kwanzaa. He kept it all inside his old army-green knapsack, alongside the extras: protein bars, water bottle (Mountain Dew would spray him, alas), a small notebook. And now, dog biscuits.

  Be Prepared, the Boy Scouts said.

  Waiting for Grandma and Grandpa to go to bed was always a breeze—they were down by nine-thirty, tops. Dad was the problem, usually. Dad liked to stay up late on his computer or watching TV, but on this trip Dad was sleeping late and going to bed early, with naps in between. His laptop hadn’t come out of its case once. “Are you sick, Daddy?” Neema had asked him after dinner. Dad hadn’t even heard her.

  Waiting for quiet was the hardest part. No TVs, no bathroom breaks, no refrigerator raids. Pure, uninterrupted quiet. Davie called it the Golden Hour, and it came at a different time every night. That night, the Golden Hour was ten-thirty. Quiet.

  Davie leaped out of bed, unplugged his video camera (a dead video camera battery would be the difference between fame and obscurity), and strapped his ghost kit across his shoulder. Then he crossed the hall to Neema’s room.

  Neema’s Raggedy Ann doll was propped up against Neema’s closed door. The doll didn’t look like it had been lain there gently, as Grandma would; Raggedy Ann looked thrown against the door, head lolling, legs akimbo. Her black-thread hair was wild, pulled out of its ponytails, or braids, or whatever she used to have. For the first time, Davie noticed the doll’s faded red gingham dress, a relic. The doll looked a hundred years old, not just from the ’70s.

  What did girls see in dolls? After scooping up the doll, Davie opened Neema’s door.

  Neema was sitting at the foot of her bed, waiting for him. Still as a doll herself.

  “What are you doing to her?” She said it as if Raggedy Ann was real.

  He chuckled. “I’m not doing anything to your dumb doll.” To put the doll in its place, he tossed Raggedy Ann to Neema, who caught the doll midair and clicked her teeth, irritated.

  “Stop! Then why’d you take it?” Neema said.

  “I have more important things to think about. It was outside the door, Brainiac.”

  “Liar.”

  “Whatever. Let’s go.”

  Neema didn’t get up. Instead, she hugged the Raggedy Ann to her chest, gazing across the room at the doll shelf. “I don’t like all the dolls in here. It’s like they’re looking at me.”

  Davie glanced at the dolls’ unblinking rows of eyes, and they gave him the creeps, too. But this wasn’t the time to worry about a bunch of old dolls.

  “If you’re a scaredy-cat, stay in here,” Davie said. “Ghosts aren’t for scaredy-cats.”

  “I’m not a scaredy-cat.”

  “Then come on. And no noise.”

  Davie had recorded ghost activity all over his grandparents’ house: A salt shaker that fell down on the kitchen table by itself, a faucet dripping backward in the bathroom (hard to prove, but he had seen it), and the egg-shaped mirror skewed slightly to one side in the foyer. (Grandpa, seeing Davie’s footage, had just said, “So the mirror’s crooked—so what?”)

  But the living room was Davie’s favorite place to camp. The living room was his grandparents’ museum, the place for their old black-and-white photographs, old books, old paintings on the wall, old everything. Even the furniture had been in Grandma’s family forever, shaky antique legs and upholstery that smelled like a dark closet. Ghosts liked the old and familiar. The living room was definitely the first place he would go.

  “What now?” Neema whispered. She couldn’t keep quiet to save her life.

  “Shhhh. We camp out and we wait.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  Davie closed his eyes and counted to five. Dad’s trick to keep from getting too mad.

  “Davie? I’m thirsty.”

  He reached inside his ghost kit and pulled out the water bottle. “Don’t spill it on the wood, or Grandma’ll freak out. Now just sit and be still. They won’t come unless it’s quiet.”

  Bringing Neema was a mistake, he decided. Fine: They’d camp out in the living room for an hour, she’d mess it up with her complaining and whining, and he’d go to bed. Tomorrow, he’d wait until she was sleep for sure. Tomorrow, he’d wait until midnight if he had to.

  But Neema surprised Davie. After he chose their ideal camping spot behind Grandpa’s recliner, right near the bookshelf full of musty-smelling books, Neema sat as still as a doll herself. Sometimes she hummed a little, but she caught herself and covered her mouth. Like him, she just stared into the darkness and cupped her ear to listen. Davie couldn’t believe how much older Neema seemed since last summer, or even Christmas.

  He’d tried ghost-tracking at Christmastime, but nothing happened, of course. Ghosts only came in summer.

  It was amazing how much noise even a quiet house could produce. When he was younger, Davie used to think he heard ghosts in every creak of the ceiling, every whir of the central air-conditioning, and every cyclic hum from the refrigerator. He used to jump when the automatic sprinklers went on outside and sprayed the windows with water.

  Now, of course, Davie was an expert listener. And since he’d already heard a ghost the night before, he knew what he was listening for: click-click-click. The dog’s paws. He kept a dog biscuit in his hand, a ready peace offering. The sweat on his palm was making it gummy.

  They sat and listened for a solid hour. No clicking.

  Beside him, Neema was nodding to sleep with her head against the recliner. Just as well, Davie thought. With Neema asleep, he could wait another hour, no problem. After that, he’d take her back to bed.

  Davie felt a cramp from sitting in the same position with his hip bone against the hard floor, so he shifted until he was sitting Indian-style. When he did, he felt something wet seep into the seat of his pajama pants. Wet and cold.

  He touched his pajama pants, and they were soaked. His hand splashed into a shallow puddle of cold liquid. “Hey,” he said, nudging Neema. “You spilled your water.”

  Neema blinked her eyes open, alert, and held up her half-empty water bottle, tightly capped. The light through the window allowed him to see her in the moonlight. “Not-uh,” she said. “The top’s on.”

  But before Neema had said a word, Davie realized the water couldn’t have come from Neema’s water bottle. No way had Neema’s water been this cold. And there was too much. Water was all around them.

  “Crap-o-la,” Davie whispered, and rushed to take off his pajama top. He started wiping the floor as fast as he could, because Grandma would have a serious meltdown if her floor got spotted with water. Who else would she blame but him?

  Davie’s pajama top soaked through as soon as it touched the floor. Davie suddenly saw a shimmering sheen of water across the entire living room, from the foyer all the way to the kitchen, all the way toward the back hall. The floor was completely covered
in water!

  A scent had been faint at first, but now he realized it filled up the entire room. The living room smelled like the water in the fish-tank where his third-grade teacher, Miss Richmond, kept the class’s frogs and turtles. Sour. Like old, rotting plants and leaves.

  Neema was sleepy, but she was getting the picture too. “My clothes are wet—” she said, raising her voice, but Davie clamped her mouth quiet.

  “Shhhhh,” he said. His heart was a jackhammer in his chest. “Ghosts, Neema. Ghosts.”

  “In the water?”

  “Yes,” Davie said, because he didn’t have time to explain. The ghost was the water—that was why it was so cold. The water was real, but it wasn’t. He hoped not, anyway, because it was getting deeper. Maybe an inch deep already.

  Davie pulled Neema to her feet, and he stood at a crouch, pulling his ghost kit higher so it wouldn’t get wet. The dog biscuit fell out of his hand, forgotten, as he flipped his tape recorder to ON and opened the video camera’s eye. He switched on Night Vision.

  Through the viewfinder, the room was almost too bright. The moonlight exaggerated the gleam in the mirror on the wall and the screen on the TV, washing them in whiteness. His hand slightly unsteady, Davie lowered the camera toward the floor. Toward the water.

  SPLASH

  He saw bands of ripples, as if he’d tossed a handful of pebbles into the water.

  Neema made a whimpering sound, clinging to Davie’s hand. Without moving the camera, he turned his head to look at her, and Neema’s wide, delighted eyes met his.

  Did You Hear That? Neema mouthed.

  Davie nodded, grinning. Neema grinned back.

  If Neema had been scared, or crying, he would have whisked her back into her room and locked the door. But Neema wasn’t a scaredy-cat, just like she said. Good girl! Neema was a ghost-hunter after all. Starting this young, she might be one of the best.

  SPLASH SPLASH

  Davie saw the water ripple again, synchronized with the sound. The sound was retreating. Someone—or some thing, like a dog—was walking toward the kitchen.