There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

by Vivian Vande Velde

  I positioned the best illustrations and left space for the flag, then went to fetch a hammer and nails. The nails I found right away. But the only hammer was the rubber mallet for putting hubcaps back on after changing the car's tires.

  "Zach," I called up the basement stairs. "Zach!" I could hear him—talking on the phone; how come he couldn't hear me?

  I trudged upstairs. "Zach, where's the hammer?"

  Zach put his hand over the receiver. "Can't you see I'm on the phone?" he snarled.

  Yeah, and by the way he'd been talking, I could see he was on the phone with a girl.

  "I need the hammer," I said.

  "It's in the basement."

  "No, it's not."

  Zach shrugged, his contribution to scholastic endeavor exhausted, and went back to his phone conversation.

  I returned to the basement and tried pounding a nail with the rubber mallet. I missed, hit the wood, bounced off the wood, and came close to knocking myself out. The next time I aimed more carefully, but even hitting the nail didn't get me anywhere.

  Back upstairs, Zach was off the phone and drinking milk from the carton, which he knows drives Mom crazy. "Have you thought where the hammer could be?" I asked him.

  Apparently he hadn't heard me coming up behind him, and he choked, spitting and dribbling milk all over. "Do you mind?" he sputtered.

  Zach isn't the handy kind around the house, so it really didn't seem likely that he'd used the hammer and could be harassed into remembering where it was.

  So I called Mom at work, which I guess wasn't a good idea. They had to call her to the phone, and when she came on, she said, "What's happened? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," I said. "I'm looking for the hammer."

  There was a long icy silence. "And you thought I might have brought it with me to the restaurant?"

  I squirmed. "I was hoping you might know where it is."

  "In the basement, as far as I know." She got suspicious again. "Ted, is there something wrong at the house?"

  What was she picturing? "No," I assured her. "I just need it for a school project. It's not in the basement. Do you think Dad took it to work?"

  "No, they gave him his own toolbox. Check the basement again."

  "Right." She was just trying to get rid of me. We both knew I wouldn't have called without carefully checking the basement to begin with. "Thanks, anyway."

  "Toodles," she said. "I'll be home in another hour and a half."

  I hung up. All this wonderful enthusiasm for Luxembourg, and no way to use it. I knew if I waited too long, it'd go away. So I figured, Oh, all right. Why not?

  I went upstairs and peeked into Vicki's room—Zach is the only one who closes his door: closes, locks, and barricades—with soiled laundry and week-old lunch bags. "Vicki," I whisper-called into the darkness. "You still awake?"

  "Yes, Teddy," she answered. She's the only person in the world I allow to call me Teddy.

  "You wouldn't happen to know where the hammer is, would you?"

  "I've got it."

  I saw her reach under her pillow and pull it out. I went into the room. "What in the world are you doing with that?" I had thought maybe she'd used it to crack nuts or kill spiders, but under her pillow was weird.

  Weirder yet was that she wouldn't put the hammer into my outstretched hand. "It's protection," she said.

  "Against what?" I sat on the edge of her bed, wondering if she'd heard something scary on the news.

  "Against the bad lady," Vicki said.

  "What bad lady?"

  "The one who comes here at night."

  "Here?" I asked, still trying to relate this to something on the news. "This neighborhood?"

  "This room," Vicki said.

  "Vicki," I told her, laying my hand on hers, "there's no bad lady. How could she get in here? March is too cold out for leaving the windows open—"

  "She comes through the walls," Vicki said.

  "Oh," I said. Then I had a sudden inspiration. "Like Marella?"

  "Marella's afraid of her."

  "What, exactly, does this bad lady do?" I asked.

  Vicki gave me that look reserved for the very bright to give to the very slow. "She comes through the walls," she said.

  Well, yeah, I guess that would have been enough for me, too. She wasn't going to hand over that hammer, I could tell. I tried a different approach. "Have you talked to Mommy or Daddy about this?"

  "I told Zach. I asked if I could sleep in his room so the bad lady couldn't find me, and he told me I had to sleep here but I could use the hammer to protect myself."

  Good old Zach.

  "Well, could you loan me the hammer for five m—"

  "Tomorrow," Vicki said. "During the day."

  "Right," I said. There was no use arguing, I could tell. "Well, good night, Vicki." I felt sorry that she was so obviously worried, so I added, "And remember: Mommy and Daddy and I—and even Zach—we'd never let anything hurt you."

  Vicki snorted as she replaced the hammer under her pillow. Even at five years old she knew enough to recognize that as the empty promise it was.

  CHAPTER 4

  Would All the Dead People Please Leave the Room?

  I WAS HAVING a bad dream.

  You know how in dreams you can know things that there's no way of knowing? I knew I was in Luxembourg. (See what being too conscientious about homework can lead to?) I was in an abandoned castle. The rooms were empty and huge: seven or eight times taller than me, with acres of polished-stone floor to cross before coming to a pair of golden doors opened to reveal an identical room beyond, leading to another pair of golden doors opening into another room ... on and on as far as the eye could see. There was something I needed to get—I didn't know what, but I was desperate for it—and I walked faster and faster, searching frantically, my footsteps echoing hollowly. I knew—the way you know in dreams—that it was no use calling out: My voice wouldn't work.

  And I also knew, though the castle didn't look particularly scary, that something bad was about to happen.

  I mean, Something Really Bad.

  But then I found what I was looking for. It was a hammer, lying on the floor in the middle of a room just like all the other rooms. I thought now that I'd found it, I'd wake up. But I picked it up and nothing happened, so I turned to retrace my steps.

  Except that the rooms looked different, coming from this direction. They were still huge, but instead of being empty, they were full of once-rich-but-now-moldy couches and chairs. And lounging on the furniture, in equally once-rich-but-now-moldy clothes, were decaying corpses.

  Well, I said to my dream self, who needs this? There must be a back door.

  I turned back to keep on going past where I had picked up the hammer, but now I saw that there were no more rooms beyond this one. No windows, either, now that I thought about it. I had to go out the way I had come in.

  The rooms I had to pass through stretched in a straight line before me, each room smaller and smaller, visible through the open doorways. Far off I could see a hint of green grass and blue sky—the safety of outside. I held the hammer close to my chest and started walking. The corpses stayed where they were. This wasn't so bad, after all.

  Except that when I passed through the first doorway, the huge golden doors slammed shut behind me, cutting off any possible retreat.

  So I started running, just in case the other doors started closing, and that got the attention of the corpses in the second room. They jumped up, all bony and disgusting, some of them leaving behind clumps of loose hair and tattered finery on the furniture. They started to close in on me, their movements stiff and jerky—like badly controlled marionettes—but fast.

  Zach says that if you die in a dream, it's such a shock to your system that you actually will die. I've always thought that was pretty dumb, and I'd always meant to look it up somewhere but had never gotten around to it. At this point it suddenly didn't seem so dumb anymore.

  I burst through the second set of door
s, and they slammed shut behind me.

  The corpses in that room got to their feet.

  Room after room, I fled. My heart felt as though it would burst, but in each room the corpses were a little bit faster. I could smell them—like the rotten seaweed that sometimes accumulates on Lake Ontario—and I could feel their bony fingers snatching at my clothes, each time a little bit more solid as they came closer and closer.

  And then suddenly I was in the next to the last room. I could see outside clearly. Luxembourg's one mountain range, the Ardennes, towered in the distance, dwarfing the telephone pole practically on the castle's doorstep. My father was on the telephone pole, reading the repair manual, not even aware of my danger.

  I tried to cry out, but still my voice wouldn't work. Just as I reached the second-to-the-last doorway, the fastest of the corpses got a solid grip on the collar of my shirt. I felt my shirt bunching up against my throat. Behind me, I could hear the corpse's bones rattling as it tugged, then I heard my shirt ripping. I half fell forward as a sizable chunk of shirt gave way. The corpse must have fallen backward. The doors slammed shut between us, and there weren't even any corpses in this last, smallest, room—just a tiny entryway, about the size of an elevator. But I staggered, still off balance from the tug that last corpse had given.

  And in the instant it cost me to regain my balance, the front door slammed shut in my face.

  In the total darkness, I pounded on the door to get my father's attention. But, though behind me I could hear the corpses scratching at the wood and calling out to me, my own fists made no sound. I couldn't make out the corpses' words; still, I figured that was probably all for the best. Somewhere nearby, a bell was ringing, some sort of alarm that kept clanging on and on and on.

  At least there're no corpses in here, I thought.

  And then I felt something touch my face.

  Cobwebs, I thought, and brushed them away.

  But then they came back, more solid, more insistent.

  I could feel a whimper building in my throat. If I could only scream, I thought, I would wake up.

  At which point, the room began to fill with water.

  Over my toes, up my legs, up my torso.

  I tried to build the whimper up louder than the scratching or the calling or the bell, to a sound loud enough to wake me.

  The water was almost to my chin, past my chin, over my head. But still the cobwebby fingers brushed my face, and still the bell clanged. Despite the water, I opened my mouth for one final attempt at sound.

  A scream jerked me awake.

  I sat up, my heart pounding. For a second, I thought the scream had been mine, but then there was another one. My eyes focused on Vicki standing in the doorway of my room.

  I glanced behind me to make sure that she wasn't screaming because something was about to leap out at me. Reassured, I scrambled out of bed. What if she was sleepwalking? Everybody knows you aren't supposed to wake up sleepwalkers. But Vicki had never sleepwalked before, and it was more likely that she was hurt or frightened. "Vicki," I said—frightened, I decided as she threw her arms around me and began to sob—"what's the matter?"

  The hall light came on, and Dad called, "What's going on?" I could hear him coming down the hall without waiting for an answer, Mom right behind. From Zach's room next to mine, I heard a thud and an angry mumble: Zach tripping over something on his way to the door.

  From Vicki I was getting no sense at all. She had her face pressed into my stomach and only kept repeating, "The bad lady, the bad lady." She was still saying it when the rest of the family caught up.

  "What bad lady?" Dad said, crouching down beside us. "Are you hurt? Ted, what happened?" He wedged his hand between my stomach and her forehead, feeling for a fever.

  "She was going to hurt Teddy," Vicki said.

  Mom gave me one of those so-you're-behind-all-this looks.

  I shook my head to indicate my innocence and ignorance.

  "Did you wake us all up for a bad dream?" Zach demanded.

  Vicki shook her head. "It wasn't a dream. The bad lady was in my room, and I threw the hammer at her, just like you said, Zach."

  Mom turned her look onto Zach, who smiled guiltily, then hunched in his shoulders and tried to look small and innocent.

  "And it made her go away," Vicki continued, "but then she floated across the hall to Teddy's room."

  Dad said, "If Zach's the one who gave you the hammer, she should have gone after him. I'll go after him if that hammer put a dent in the wall."

  "This is not funny," Mom told him. "I don't know what kind of stories you two have been telling Vicki—"

  "I haven't," Zach protested, at the same time I said, "Not me."

  Dad finally pulled Vicki away from me. He gave her a tight hug before picking her up. "I know it seemed real, honey," he said. "But it was just a dream."

  "It wasn't," Vicki insisted. "I saw her in Teddy's room. She was touching his face."

  Zach reeled back in horror, clutching at his heart. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "That was dangerous! Good thing you stopped her in time."

  "Go to bed," Mom ordered Zach. Then, "Sometimes," she told Vicki, following as Dad began to carry Vicki down the hall back to her room, "when we wake up from an especially real-seeming dream, it takes us a few seconds to stop being confused."

  "It wasn't a dream," Vicki said again, as the three of them disappeared into her room.

  "We'll leave the hall light on," I heard Dad assure her. "Night-lights keep away both bad dreams and bad ladies."

  Zach yawned loudly, scratched his rear end loudly, and returned to his room.

  Which left me alone in the hall, wondering why Vicki would dream about the bad lady touching my face at the exact moment I was dreaming about cobwebby fingers touching my face.

  On the other hand, I thought with a shudder, maybe I didn't want to work that one out after all....

  CHAPTER 5

  My Sister Develops an Unreasoning Fear of Susan B. Anthony

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday. With the telephone strike, Dad had to work both days of the weekend; for the time being, the only day he had off was Thursday. Mom at least had Saturdays off.

  Saturdays Vicki and I go to the Rochester Museum and Science Center for fun-type classes. Zach used to come, too, but now he likes to say he's too smart not to recognize school, however it's disguised. I figure he just doesn't like to get up before noon for fear he'll see his shadow and have to crawl back into his hole for six more weeks. I don't think of it as school. In the past I've taken things like snowshoeing, pottery, "Dinosaur Madness," and "Clownology." At the moment, I was two weeks into a four-week session on magic. Vicki was taking something called "Chipmunks and Squirrels," a nature course that involved, as far as I could see, running around the museum's grounds terrorizing small animals, making leaf rubbings, and stuffing down as many animal crackers as possible.

  At breakfast Mom didn't say anything about the night before—as though she was hoping that Vicki and I would each assume it had all been a dream. So everything was the same as usual when she dropped us off in front of the building where they have the classes. I took Vicki to her room (the small kids' rooms are clustered together on the second floor, where their noise won't drive the older kids or the office workers crazy), then I went down to the basement for my class.

  On this particular day, we learned a couple rope tricks, a mysteriously-disappearing-then-miraculously-reappearing-coin trick, and how to pull foam-rubber rabbits out of the ears of members of our audience.

  I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I trudged up the eighty or ninety stairs between the basement and the second floor. Everybody else was heading down, of course, to the parking lot and their waiting parents.

  By the time I got to the second floor, Vicki was the only one left in the classroom. She was wearing a construction-paper headband decorated with a bird beak and was snarfing down the last crumbs from a box of animal crackers. Her lips were bright grape-Kool-Aid purple.


  "Come on," I called to her.

  "Wait a minute," Vicki said, tipping the box upside down over her mouth. "There's still some in here."

  "Take it with you," I told her. "Mom'll be mad if she has to park the car and come in looking for us."

  Vicki walked down the hall, inhaling into the animal cracker box as though she hadn't eaten in a week.

  "Let's take the elevator," I said.

  The elevator's so slow, you can run from the second floor all the way down to the basement and back faster than the elevator can make it to the first floor, but Vicki was walking so slow and leaving such a trail of cookie crumbs, I thought it'd be faster.

  The only people still in the second-floor hallway were some presenters from "Visiting Old Rochester." "Visiting Old Rochester" is one of those one-day courses that your parents make you take. It's like a local-history career day, going from the Indians to George Eastman founding Kodak, with the teachers dressed in appropriate costumes and telling all about "themselves." Still hanging around were a French fur trapper, a nineteenth-century suffragette, a pioneer child, and Abraham Lincoln, talking together. Not that I have any idea what Abraham Lincoln ever had to do with Rochester, New York.

  The elevator finally came and we got in, and I began punching the CLOSE DOOR button simply for something to do, because nothing can speed up that elevator.

  But just as the doors slowly began to close, someone called, "Wait up, please," and I stuck my foot out between the doors.

  "Thanks." It was the teacher dressed as the suffragette. She set her sign—RIGHTS FOR WOMEN—on the floor and leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator to start.

  Behind me I heard Vicki drop her animal crackers box on the floor. What a slob, I thought. I turned to yell at her before the teacher did, and found her pressed up against the back wall, her face white around the Kool-Aid purple of her lips. "It's her," she whispered. She dropped to a crouch, covering her head for protection. I didn't need to ask who "her" was. But how could it be her?