Black Wave

by Devon Glenn

  Elerick: Hey, can you keep a secret?

  silversiren: Of course not!

  Elerick: Good. I need help finding Emily, and somebody has to spread the word to the other ghosts.

  The EVP recorder buzzed with the sound of Lorelei’s laughter. The private dialogue box disappeared, and Lorelei looked straight into the camera. “You can’t help yourself by hurting others,” she said via video to all the Orbiters in her network. “Emily is a person, not a power source. Holding on to her will only hold you down. Reach out to her, and you’ll find the lifeline you need.”

  Joan’s eyes filled with tears. The sentiment bar shifted from red to green as more people chimed in.

  grandmeow: Emily helped me talk to my granddaughter. She was very upset, but Emily calmed her down. I hope she’s OK.

  Elerick cleared his throat. “We don’t have much time left. Can any of you help me find her before the storm hits?”

  Katherine26: I’ll start running now. I won’t stop until we find her!

  Elerick swallowed a hard lump. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Joan sank into her chair and smiled while the messages continued to pour in with promises of support. Elerick paced the floor, fists balled in determination.

  But the ghosts weren’t done with them yet.

  EDGAR: If you can’t see us, how do you know about EDGAR?

  Elerick thought for a moment. “How do you know I can’t see you?”

  EDGAR: I waved. You didn’t wave back.

  “Well, the camera would have caught it if that were true,” Elerick said, clenching his jaw.

  EDGAR: You forgot to turn on the ghost filter.

  Slowly, tentatively, Elerick pushed the button. He didn’t recognize the face in front of him, but Joan did. She screamed, holding her hand in front of her mouth. “Alex!”

  At that moment, the facial recognition feature kicked in, tagging the ghost’s face not with one name but three—EDGAR, Alex, and a name that Elerick recognized from Emily’s computer. “Wheels?” Elerick asked in disbelief.

  “Yeah. I used the ghost filter and the EVP recorder to get a job at Orbies. I was the one who made the Alex the Orb video. Can you believe no one ever called me in for an in-person interview or even contacted my references? They do everything online. Idiots.”

  “But you’re dead,” Joan whispered.

  “Hey, Elerick, can you turn the screen closer to Joan?”

  Elerick moved the screen so the ghost and Joan were face-to-face.

  “It’s not your fault,” Wheels said to her. “I want you to know that.”

  “Of course I know that,” she scoffed. “I was driving the speed limit. You were nowhere near the bike lane, and there were Four Lokos cans all over the asphalt. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you throw your life away? And why would you drag me down with you? You think I want to see your bloody face in my nightmares for the rest of my life? I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m sorry, Joan. I’ll make it up to you.”

  “How, Alex? How are you going to do that?”

  “I know where Emily is.”

  Emily felt panic rise in her chest with every raindrop that fell on the highway. The menacing figure in front of her was growing brighter by the second.

  “Horace Burns,” the Gray Man explained, holding out his hand and waiting for Emily to extend hers. When she didn’t, he continued. “I’m the current chairman of EDGAR: The Eternal Death Ghost Alliance Revival, or as our newer members like to call it, the Eternal Death Ghost Alliance Reboot. We are the Gray Man—or rather, the Gray men and women—whom you seem to be so frightened of.”

  “Eternal death?” Emily repeated.

  “That’s right,” Horace continued. “When I died unexpectedly in Cape May, I saw that there were many others, like me, who hadn’t moved on yet. My mother did her best to persuade me to join her on the Other Side, saying that the energy here would not be enough to sustain me in my present form, that I would need to move on. She was wrong.”

  Emily heard a shuffling through the crowd as Finn, red-faced and furious, pushed his way through to where Emily and the Gray Man stood. “Forgive me, Emily. I’m Horace’s great uncle, and a charter member of the club,” he said. “I was wandering the shore after I died, thinking about where to sail to next, when I found that this peninsula, Cape May, drew in energy from all sides. I wanted to live without having to start over again. One day, a mate of mine told me about a medium, Darthilda Crossing, who channeled spirits so well that she could make a ghost stronger than he was on his own. We all took turns haunting the inn to pirate her energy, so to speak. After one séance with her, I could open windows by myself.

  “As soon as the others found out she wanted to leave Cape May, they used their boosted energy to create a storm, led her straight into it, and killed her,” Finn said. “And took many other innocent people—Virginia, Lottie, and even Horace before he went to the dark side—along with her. And when Dar stayed behind to wait for Rahul to join her in the afterlife, Edgar hid in the shadows, where they conspired to keep the two of them apart. I left the group as soon as I heard she was dead.”

  “I refused to join,” another voice spoke up. Emily smiled with relief when she saw it was Beth. “My late mother told me, through Dar, to run away from my father. If I had listened to her, I would have been gone long before the storm hit, and I would have lived. So when I found out that they had killed her because she wanted to leave the town, I wanted no part of it. I was on my way to the lighthouse to join my mother on the Other Side when some EDGAR members captured me and refused to let me pass. I thought I was being punished.”

  “Dar let us hide in her foyer closet while she kept doing her séances upstairs,” Finn continued. “It was a long time before Rahul was able to get through to her, but we helped him any way we could. He sent messages to her through flowers.”

  Now Emily understood the scene she and Elerick had walked in on. Dar and Rahul had been reunited in the ghost plane after a long separation, and they were planning their escape.

  “But they didn’t get very far, did they?” Horace laughed. “Dar and Rahul are now Elerick and Emily: another silly pair of lovebirds who can’t stop migrating to Cape May. And the new ghosts I met through your electric typewriter helped me organize a new chapter of EDGAR to make sure you never fly away.”

  This was news to Emily. All this time, she had thought that Dar was haunting the inn. She thought about every encounter she had ever had with the dead medium: Dar had never spoken to Emily directly, except on the day that Emily spoke to Dar’s reflection at the cocktail hour. Emily wasn’t talking to a ghost; she was reliving a memory. More specifically, she was remembering a conversation she’d had in a past life.

  “EDGAR has a system,” Finn explained to Emily. “They send one ghost in to make the connection—I did it, and so did Wheels—and the rest of the ghosts come in to feed off the energy. They hide their faces so you don’t know that you’re being used.”

  Horace looked at Finn with a dark expression. “We gave her everything she asked of us in terms of guidance from the spirit world—access to dead loved ones, amusing historical anecdotes—whatever it took to keep the tourists of Cape May happy. But it wasn’t good enough for her. She was ready to leave us behind without even a second thought about what that might do the ghosts of Cape May.”

  The ghosts nodded fervently at Horace’s ridiculous assertion that their well-being depended on some poor medium being tethered to one spot for the rest of her life. The dead are all around us, though we don’t always see them, Emily thought, remembering what Rahul had told Dar in the ocean more than a hundred years ago.

  Evil was an active volcano that threw sparks, spilled over, subsided, and lay dormant for a time, but it never really went away. She was not only stuck living at home during her college years; she and Elerick had been stuck he
re for more than a century. Their freedom, then and now, had been an illusion. And if she tried to leave with him, EDGAR would kill her. The cycle would never end. “Where is Elerick?” she asked Finn, desperate to hear that he hadn’t tried to follow her to the boat with a storm approaching.

  “He’s covered in feathers!” a voice interrupted. A small woman with a black veil and a black wool coat bustled through the crowd, crossing herself and raising her hands.

  Emily’s heart fluttered with hope. If Elerick was still alive, there was a chance that she could get back to her body and find him in time. She could feel a weak electrical pulse transmitting signals between her body and her soul through her astral cord as if she were a pair of tin cans connected by a string. Physical Emily had fallen to the ground, and astral Emily was struck by the terrible thought that it was possible to die in only two inches of water. If only she could roll on her side like Elerick had taught her, all of this might go away—at least long enough for her to stand up and walk home. She looked at Elva. “Will you help me?”

  Elva touched Emily’s hand, and Emily was immediately taken back to the séance held at Darthilda’s home more than a hundred years ago. Rahul saw Dar expose Horace’s fraud. He then saw Horace hunched over the Ouija board, asking questions about the afterlife.

  Emily thought about the newspaper clipping that she had found in the book from Sadie’s attic: it contained a scathing exposé about a politician who had been dodging his taxes. He must have died moments before the story broke.

  “Your heart was in the right place, Horace,” Elva told him. “I know you were thinking of my health when you hid your money. But it’s not too late to make amends to the people who were hurt by it. All you have to do is to ask for forgiveness.”

  Horace turned to Emily. Stiffly, he reached out his hand to shake hers. He even smiled for effect, but it was not lost on Emily that he didn’t make eye contact. “I’m sorry for helping Angus run you out of business, Rahul,” he said. “I didn’t fully understand where my money was going.”

  That much was true. He hadn’t cared about Rahul, nor did he care about Emily—he had done what he needed to do to have the lifestyle he wanted. It was too late for forgiveness. But if Horace was on the road to hell, as his mother had suggested, it had been paved with Rahul’s good intentions as much as Horace’s. The Burns family’s insidious attack on the Kajarias actually hadn’t stopped them from expanding their business, while Rahul’s heroic effort to rescue Darthilda had ultimately led to her death. Intentions were like paper airplanes tossed in a room, taken by the breeze, and sent gliding over the earth without a runway to land on.

  “I don’t want your apology,” Emily said, and Horace dropped his hand immediately. He was an expert at pandering when he needed to, and she knew it. But no one could talk her out of the rest of her life, especially not this buffoon with the handlebar mustache. Horace’s mother could lead him to salvation, but she couldn’t make him drink. To save herself, Emily would have to look past the false humility and see the real person inside. Taking the advice Darthilda had given Rahul more than a hundred years ago, she concentrated on a symbol—a material object—that he could relate to.

  “You didn’t kill Darthilda or me—just the people we used to be. You might think that Senator Horace Burns is your identity, but you won’t know who you really are until you let him go. It’s the experiences that knock you down, that rip you up, that wash you away and force you to begin anew that show you who you are. The Other Side is not a place; it’s the part of you that you’ve been resisting—the part of you that’s divine,” she said. “If you want to make it up to me, then go walk the plank.”

  Horace’s feigned contrition broke into a sincere smile, and he let out a hearty belly laugh. “I suppose that would be a fitting end for an old pirate like me.”

  “The EDGAR on the Ouija board that night was just trying to scare you into joining the crew when he started talking about hell,” Finn agreed. “You can’t trust a ghost or a human to tell you about the Other Side, but you can trust me. Come on, let’s walk the plank together.”

  Horace looked at Finn’s leg, which was no longer made of wood, and nodded. He put his right hand on Finn’s shoulder and took Elva’s arm with his left. The Cape May lighthouse was shining in the distance.

  Emily held her breath to see if the other ghosts would follow his lead and let her soul pass. Jogging toward them was Katherine, with a plastic rain poncho covering her tracksuit. Lorelei floated above the crowd, letting the wind carry her by her parasol to where the others stood.

  One by one, more friendly ghosts appeared, forming a chain on either side of Emily. She didn’t recognize them all, but they remembered her. Mrs. Crowe arrived, scooping Victoria in her arms and handing her to her parents, who had been waiting for her on the Other Side. Beth’s mother, Maud, joined hands with her daughter. Surrounded by her friends as well as Dar’s and Rahul’s friends from Cape May, Emily followed Elva and Horace to the street where her body, thankfully, was still above water.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell EDGAR that they have the internet on cruise ships now?” Emily asked the group, exasperated. “It’s not like my leaving would have shut them down completely.”

  “I did,” Wheels explained. “Once I found out the real reason they had sent me to the Black Wave, I tried to talk them into letting you go. But this place is special, and they wanted to keep you here.” He shifted uncomfortably. “And when I discovered that I could draw enough energy from you to type on a keyboard by myself, it was really tempting to let them do it,” he admitted. “I wanted to feel human again.”

  “I know the feeling,” Emily said. The longer she stayed outside her body, the less connected she felt to her present self. Images from her past life as Rahul appeared before her on the same streets he and Dar had walked more than a hundred years ago. The buildings hadn’t changed much—nor had the vortex of energy-sucking ghosts—but it all looked different through the filter of love.

  Emily was tethered not to the ghosts of Cape May but to Elerick. Rahul had promised to hold Dar’s place there while she traveled the world because he knew that love, like the earth, was round—it would return to him eventually. And Emily still believed that it would. If she could only open her eyes.

  She looked at her pale, rain-soaked face lying in the street. Concentrating, she plunged back inside and rolled herself over.

  When she awoke, Elerick was looking down at her, holding her hand and kissing her on the forehead.

  “I found you!” he exclaimed.

  “I found myself,” Emily said. “And then you found me.”

  “Consider your college experience complete.”

  Emily tried to smile, but tears sprang to her eyes instead, along with the fresh pain of waking up in the hospital. “Are we dead?”

  “No,” he assured her. “I heard the storm warning on the radio and tried to call you. They had to cancel the cruise. You’re in the hospital now.”

  “I should be on that cruise ship right now. Why couldn’t it just happen?” The realization of her defeat was, for the moment, overwhelming the fact that she had just won a second chance at life.

  “It’s more complicated than that, Emily,” Elerick said. “That cruise director never contacted you with a job offer. Someone from Orbies did it under a fake name. EDGAR was just trying to lure you outside so they could kill you with the storm and keep your ghost here, just like they did to Darthilda. Finn and Beth helped me find you, and they told me everything.”

  “Did they tell you how to get me out of here?” Emily asked.

  He didn’t have time to answer. Joan appeared in the hospital room, her arms full of sheets and blankets. “You’ve been shivering for the past hour,” Joan said. “We thought you could use some more bedding—something not quite so threadbare. It’s a good thing your parents own a boutique hotel. I’ll be back with some pillows.” />
  Elerick’s eyes lit up. “That reminds me,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rolled-up pair of socks—soft, cashmere socks in a delicate shade of seafoam green. “I brought these for you. So your feet won’t get cold.”

  He looked so earnest as he put them on her feet that she felt warm all over. “I’ll never take them off,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck.

  From the corner of the room, Joan coughed, and Emily and Elerick looked up to find that Joan and Burt had returned in time to catch the tail end of their conversation. Elerick gave her a quick kiss and walked away from the bed.

  “Hannah left you a note at the front desk,” Joan said. She pulled an envelope from her purse and handed it to him.

  “I’ll be in the waiting room,” Elerick said as he slipped out the door.

  Still glowing from his conversation with Emily, Elerick returned to the bowels of the hospital, where antibacterial cleaning products barely masked the ripe musk of blood, farts, and unwashed bodies and mouths. Hospital smell was easily his least favorite scent. He wished he’d brought Emily some essential oils to go with her socks.

  Inside the envelope Joan had given him was another, smaller envelope, this one with his aunt’s name written on the front. He tore it open anyway, figuring he had a few minutes to kill before he could go back in to see Emily. The note made his heart swell.

  With time to spare, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed his aunt’s number. She answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, El! How’s Emily? Is she awake yet?”

  “Yeah,” he said, pulling the phone away from his ear. His aunt’s voice was loud like his mom’s. “The tree branch that hit her left a bump on her head, but otherwise, she’s doing great. She’ll probably be released later tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”