by Devon Glenn
“What if you miss him?” Sadie continued. “You’ll be stuck on a ship without him for a whole year.”
“I’ll have a job to do. I’m going to be a medium—a professional medium—for someone other than my mom and dad. But if it gets to be too lonely, I can just pretend to be sick. I’ll even barf for dramatic effect. They won’t want me onboard after that, believe me.”
To her surprise, Sadie seemed to understand. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “You’re right. If you miss Elerick, he can barf on Joan and Burt until he’s the one who’s asked to leave, and he can come join you on your ship. You are a strong, independent woman, and you will own that cruise ship until you are good and ready to come home.” She took Emily’s bag out of her hand. “Let me drive you.”
Emily released the breath she had been holding all afternoon. “Thanks.”
“Won’t you at least bring your phone so we can reach you?” Sadie pleaded.
“I’m not bringing them with me,” she said, lowering her voice.
Unfortunately, they already knew. While Emily and Sadie were hashing out the details of her ill-advised trip, a message from Alex flashed on the monitor of her computer that terrified Emily.
ALEX: Have either of you logged in to Orbies in the last few hours?
“Nope,” Emily said. “I’m done with that place. I’m off to see the real world. You know, Earth. I’ll send the Orbiters a postcard.”
ALEX: There’s now a restricted area on Orbies that I’ve been unable to access. Whoever is using our app has set up a secret forum. Take a look.
Elerick had been right. If an Orbies employee couldn’t log in, they really were in trouble. She didn’t know what the ghosts were talking about in the restricted area, but whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. It was restricted!
Sadie and Emily clicked on the link and stared at the name on the screen: “Spring Migration in Cape May?” Sadie read aloud, shaking her head in disbelief. “Someone hacked into a ghost hunter’s app to open a secret bird-watching app? Is this a joke?”
Emily didn’t have time to wait for Alex to regain control of Orbies. She needed to get to the ferry before it left for Delaware without her.
“I’m migrating whether you like it or not!” she yelled at the screen, where the warning continued to flash: “Access denied.”
“Bon voyage to you, too,” Emily replied. To Sadie she said, “Let’s go.”
Sadie got her keys and walked with Emily to the parking lot of the inn without saying another word. Emily stared out the window while the engine roared to life and a cheerful radio announcer’s voice blasted through the speakers:
“The weather report was brought to you by—”
But the sponsor’s name was lost in a blast of static. “What now?” Emily muttered.
As the digital tuner skimmed through various channels looking for a signal, only two words came through as it passed from one station to the next, but they came in loud and clear: “Kill…you…”
Emily knew this combination of words was too specific to be a coincidence. “Stop the car,” she said to Sadie.
Sadie did as she was told. “Was that an EVP?”
“Definitely,” Emily confirmed. “They can reach me through the radio—I can’t believe I didn’t think of that sooner. I have to find another way out of here that doesn’t involve electricity.”
After unfastening her seat belt and reaching across the center divider to give Sadie one last hug goodbye, Emily got out of the car and went back to the inn to grab a bicycle. She looked up at the sky, which had turned ominously dark. Winter was already starting to melt into spring, which usually meant some showers. Emily paused to consider the effects of a thunderstorm on her departure, and then quickly dismissed the thought—a few sprinkles wouldn’t matter on such a large ship.
Emily tossed her bag into the basket at the front of her bike, drew a large breath, and pedaled toward the ferry station.
“The storm warning is now in effect for all residents of southern New Jersey, where unprecedented levels of storm-surge flooding are expected along the coastal regions.”
Elerick’s stomach knotted. He asked the taxi driver to turn up the radio.
“While hurricanes are unusual this time of year, please be advised that the weather forecast is not a hoax; meteorologists have confirmed that a Category Three hurricane will reach the southern tip of New Jersey beginning at six p.m. this evening. Residents in flood-prone areas should evacuate immediately. We will continue with more details on the storm after the break.” The announcer took a beat. “Today’s weather report was brought to you by the Cape May Fudgery, now offering free samples at the Washington Street Mall.”
Yes, it’s the perfect time for fudge, Elerick thought as he got out his cell phone. He punched in the number for the cruise line’s customer service hotline and waited until the automated voice message confirmed what he already knew: all departures that day would be cancelled. He kept pounding Zero until a frazzled customer service rep begrudgingly picked up the line.
“Hey, sorry, I know the cruise is cancelled,” Elerick blurted, “but could you tell me whether anyone has come to the ship to check in?” He gave the woman Emily’s name and a description. Emily hadn’t been answering her phone.
“I don’t have anyone named Emily listed as a staff member,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think they even hired a psychic for this trip. Are you sure you have the right cruise line?”
Elerick hung up and told the driver to make a U-turn and take him back to the inn. When he reached the front door it was locked, with a Closed sign in the window. He hoped they hadn’t immediately responded to the evacuation warning. Pressing his ear to the door, he could hear Joan and Burt having a heart-to-heart talk on the lobby couches. It wasn’t going well.
“I suppose it’s my fault for raising her in an inn,” Joan lamented. She looked around the room, her gaze resting on the pictures in frames, on the wallpaper, on every chair. “There were too many people, too many strangers, standing in the way of our influence. Emily is completely out of my control.”
“She seems to be doing pretty well for herself,” Burt observed. “She found a job without a college degree and without any help from us.”
“Exactly,” Joan continued. “This is Emily’s time to focus on herself. At least we won’t have to pretend Elerick isn’t sneaking into her room every night through the vents.”
Burt groaned. “That’s a very disturbing image, Joan.”
Elerick didn’t want to pretend he didn’t know she was pretending, either. But at least she and Burt were laughing now.
“But you’re right. She can focus on herself, and so can we. Between the restaurant and the spa, the new inn is doing surprisingly well for this time of year,” Burt said. “I really think that when summer hits, we’ll be able get by without her. Maybe now is the best time for her to go.”
“I know,” Joan admitted. “I just don’t want her to leave me. She’s always been here. Even when she’s channeling spirits, or whatever she calls it, she’s still here with us—and we’re a family.”
“Joan, do you think twenty-one is a good age for Emily to stay home and spend more time with her parents?”
Joan laughed. “Yes!”
“Me too,” Burt said. “But we’re both wrong.”
“All right,” Joan said. “Let’s go tell her she can join the conga line on the lido deck instead of continuing a proud family tradition.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Elerick heard silence for a few moments, and then a scuffle of footsteps as Joan came running back into the room. “Emily’s gone,” she said, her voice unusually shrill. “I found a letter on her nightstand. Listen to this:
“‘This was my decision, not yours. I will call you in forty-eight hours with my cruise itinerary and all the emergency phone numbers. Do
n’t bother with the police—I’m twenty-one years old, and I’m not running away; I’m getting a job. It could be worse. Love, Emily.’”
Emily’s bicycle hit the wet sand with surprising force. She pulled hard, her feet sinking into the ground as she tried to wrestle the wheels free. She realized with a lump in her throat that her cruiser would have to stay put. Above her head, the sky had turned orange, then yellow, and the wind swirled warm and wet around her face.
As the waves lapped dangerously closer to the side of the road, Emily resigned herself to the walk back to the inn. She vowed that if she made it back before the storm hit, she would apologize to her mother.
The wind had collided with the coastline with just enough force to knock a power line across the road in front of Emily’s feet. Bits of wood scattered across the ground and floated off into the waves beyond. As she stepped gingerly around a fallen telephone pole, Emily felt a hand on the small of her back; a sharp voice cut through the wind into her ear.
“Do you want to know what’s out there, Emily?” the voice snarled.
Emily ran forward, turning over her shoulder in terror. A specter had formed where the wires had come loose: a towering figure that darted from one corner of her eye to the next. Edgar had come to face her at last.
“Go to hell!” she shouted.
“Never,” he said with a laugh, the power line crackling behind Emily as he raced by her side. The specter was using the power line as an astral tether to put him and Emily on the same plane.
Behind Emily, the waves swelled and grew dark. She realized with horror that the floating objects she had mistaken for driftwood were moving. One by one, the faces of the dead floated to the surface of the waves, their arms groping for the sand, for the power lines that were spinning wildly from overturned poles.
They clasped one another’s hands and formed a chain, one ghost climbing over the next until they reached Edgar, who threw his free hand into the air. The first ghost to touch his hand grew immediately brighter, and the power surged down the line to every ghost in the chain. Emily felt feverish under the gaze of hollowed eye sockets. They called out to her from their kelp-choked throats as they circled her body.
Emily knew the specters were immaterial—that she could pass through them and continue on her way. But something about the whip of the wind and the electrical current sparking from the live wire left her frozen in her tracks, praying for Edgar to let her pass. He did not.
The tide continued to rise, and now rain poured from the sky, dampening Emily’s clothing and hair where she stood. One wrong move and she would be electrocuted.
“Please,” she whispered to Elerick. “Find me in time.”
Elerick pounded his hand against the front door of the inn, calling the names of its residents one by one until Joan finally appeared at the door, her hair disheveled and her face ghostly pale.
“Where is Emily?” she screeched at him through the lobby window.
“I came to get her,” he said.
“Oh really?” Joan said with a cold laugh. “Where were you earlier this afternoon when my daughter decided to ride her bicycle to the ferry terminal by herself without checking the weather report?”
“Let me in, Joan,” he said. “We need to find her now.”
“You’ve done enough damage,” Joan snapped, and walked away from the door.
“Burt!” he yelled through the window, undeterred. “We need to get Emily!”
Burt bounded down the stairs, his face chalk-white as he opened the door to find Elerick standing on the doorstep, his eyes wild with fright.
“I’m letting him in, Joan,” he said to his wife, “before this gets any worse.”
Elerick shut the door behind them. “Emily never made it to the cruise terminal—I just called the cruise line to check. They didn’t even have Emily’s records. The entire job offer was a scam. We need to go find her now.”
Burt shook his head. “We should stay here and wait in case she comes home or calls. We’ll be safe here—this inn is on higher ground than some of the other buildings in town. It’s survived multiple nor’easters.”
“Burt’s right. I’ll call the Coast Guard,” Joan said. “Burt, can you tell housekeeping to bring emergency flashlights to the guests? I don’t think the power is going to last much longer.”
Elerick darted up the stairs, where worried tourists lined the hallways, away from the windows, as the wind raged outside.
He took his secret entrance into Emily’s room, where he sank into the velvet armchair. He felt heavy and far away, falling silent as the rhythm of his own breathing pulled his attention inward.
The next thing he knew, he was in Joan and Burt’s room, where Joan was sitting cross-legged on a chaise longue and, to Elerick’s horror, picking at a scab on her leg.
“Damn it,” Joan said, but her lips didn’t move. He could hear her thoughts. Elerick stood there, awkwardly, as Joan’s tears came out in jags.
“Um…Joan?” When no response came, Elerick realized in a panic that he had left his body and was now in Joan and Burt’s bedroom on the astral plane, watching yet another private moment unfolding. He had to get out of there.
Floating higher in the room, Elerick closed his eyes and touched the ceiling, feeling nothing but air. When he opened his eyes again, Elerick was on the roof, watching the wind shaking the trees as the storm ripped through Cape May.
Across the road he could see the water oozing toward Ocean Avenue. “Emily,” he said to the horizon. “Emily, if you can hear me: come home.”
Emily was still in the middle of the highway, surrounded by rows of translucent figures.
In the distance, she could see the Ferris wheel from the Wildwood boardwalk spinning on its own in the wind. The ghosts inside were shrieking and waving their arms in the air, and their tattered clothing billowed around them.
Emily thought she could see one blurred face turn her way, lifting his hand over his head to wave. His voice echoed inside her head: “You’re far from home.”
There was something very wrong with this picture, Emily realized. Looking at her feet, she could see that she had projected, leaving her physical body to fend for itself in the storm and putting her spirit on the same plane as a mob of energy-sucking ghosts: hundreds of ghosts who were strong enough to feel the wind in their hair and their feet rising from the ground as the Ferris wheel spun its course several miles away from where she stood.
Focusing a few feet in front of her, Emily made her way toward Edgar. As she drew nearer, his features came into focus. An amorphous body gave way to a pair of broad shoulders enshrouded in a black cloak. Edgar conjured a hat from thin air and placed it on his head, his face growing brighter and more detailed as she drew nearer.
She saw the elegantly dingy suit, the handlebar mustache, and the dark eyes beneath a pair of thick eyebrows. The Gray Man, no longer Gray, sneered at her.
“Who are you?” Emily asked. On the ground her body felt heavy as she opened her mouth to try and speak. She felt like she was underwater.
“You wouldn’t remember me,” he said. “I’ve lured you here as the others who came before me lured you here in your previous form years ago.”
“Lured me here? Why?”
“You’re a remarkable conduit,” Edgar told her. “When you are in Cape May, it’s as if there are no boundaries between your world and mine. I can move about freely. So you must understand why I can’t let you leave.”
Emily looked around at the legions of Cape May ghosts that had come to watch her die in the rain. Their faces, once indistinct and blurred in her peripheral vision now flickered into full view. They surrounded her so completely that she felt like she was stuck on the parkway during rush hour.
She couldn’t breathe.
Once again, Emily asked, “Who are you?”
“It’s not who am I,” he
corrected her, “but rather, who are we?”
Back at the Black Wave, Elerick paced the roof. He felt the inexplicable urge to go down the chimney, like Santa Claus, back into the house. Emily would be more likely to look for him inside than on the roof, he reasoned.
Holding his breath as if the soot could get in his astral lungs, Elerick climbed into the chimney and shot to the ground floor, tumbling into the living room and blinking into the dark. “This is too much,” he said. “I don’t think I can do this by myself.”
That moment, a light appeared under the closet door. Gingerly, Elerick made his way across the room, willing the door to swing open on its own. When it did, he pushed aside the coats and umbrellas and stared.
“Hello, there,” said Beth.
“Who’s there?” Elerick barked. The girl, haggard and thin, held up a bottle and a spoon.
Finn waved a candlestick in Elerick’s direction. “Stop that bellowing, or I’ll blow this candle out and get you,” he deadpanned.
Elerick flinched, bracing himself for a fight.
“It’s me, Beth,” Beth explained. “And you remember Finn.”
“Oh. Hi, Finn,” Elerick said as a wave of recognition washed over him.
Beth nodded quickly. “Yes, it’s us. But you must be quiet. We are not alone.”
Elerick lowered himself to the floor, joining the two anachronistic figures using the foyer closet for a coffin-cum-opium-den.
Finn looked apologetic. “We need to tell you about Edgar,” he said, “the Gray Man? We thought Edgar would save us from roaming the afterlife alone, but there was more to it than that.”
Beth’s face twisted painfully as she looked into Elerick’s eyes to explain. “Our loved ones had died and moved on,” she said. “We didn’t know we could still hurt anyone else.”
“So you know where Edgar is? Can you take me to my girlfriend?” And the word girlfriend felt right the moment he said it.