Blur (Blur Trilogy)

by Steven James

  Still, anxiety twisted through his gut as he tried to figure out the best way to bring it up.

  “Hey, listen, Kyle . . .”

  Man, he did not want to do this.

  “Yeah?”

  But he also did want to do it, did want to talk to someone about what’d been happening with him and what might have been causing the hallucinations.

  “What is it?” Kyle had a mouthful of pizza.

  Here goes nothing.

  “I’ve been seeing things.”

  “What do you mean?” Kyle swallowed. “What kinds of things?”

  “Ones that aren’t there.”

  “Bro, that’s usually what people mean when they say they’re seeing things. I’m wondering what kinds of things that aren’t there are you seeing.” He reached for one of the three remaining slices.

  “Ghosts. I’ve been seeing ghosts. Well, one ghost, actually. Emily Jackson’s.”

  Kyle stopped short when he heard the words. He stared at Daniel. “You’ve been seeing Emily Jackson’s ghost?”

  “I’ve seen it twice now. Once at the funeral, the second time at the football game, right before I got sacked. That’s why I didn’t throw the ball, why I hesitated on that play. Either it’s her ghost or . . . I don’t know. I guess I’m hallucinating.”

  There.

  Now.

  It was out in the open. He’d told someone and at last things would change.

  Kyle would either believe him or he wouldn’t believe him, but either way things were going to be different. And at least the secret wouldn’t be trapped inside Daniel any longer. At least there was a possibility that he might get some answers about what was going on.

  His friend didn’t say anything for a long time, just worked his way through the slice of pizza he’d picked up. He looked deep in thought.

  The fact that he didn’t reply made Daniel anxious. “I think she’s trying to tell me something, Kyle.”

  “Emily is dead, Daniel.”

  “I know, but—”

  “There’s no ‘but.’ She’s dead and ghosts don’t exist.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?”

  “No,” Kyle replied. “I don’t. Revenants and eidolons, any of that.”

  “Revenants and eidolons?”

  “Different kinds of ghosts.”

  “What about all the stories you tell when we go camping, on road trips, that sort of thing?”

  “They’re stories—just like you said. Urban legends, campfire tales, that’s it. You know that.”

  “But what about all the things people see, spirits, specters, hauntings? You don’t really think they’re all just figments of their imagination?”

  “Just because people see things doesn’t mean those things exist. Sometimes our eyes play tricks on us.”

  “This is a lot more than my eyes playing tricks on me.”

  Kyle was quiet.

  There really weren’t very many possible explanations for what was happening. Either he was seeing ghosts or he was seeing something that wasn’t there.

  Either seeing the dead, or hallucinating.

  Great options there.

  Normal people don’t have hallucinations. Only people who are losing touch with reality do.

  Only people who are going crazy.

  Kyle covered another slice with crushed red pepper to the point where it looked almost inedible. “So talk me through it. You’re seeing ghosts, and at the game you didn’t pass out because you were hit? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know exactly. All I can say is that I saw her walking toward me on the field.”

  “Emily.”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright.” He took a bite of the red pepper–ified slice. It would have put most people’s mouths on fire. It didn’t seem to faze Kyle. “Lay it out. Details.”

  Daniel talked through the events that had preceded each of the two blackouts.

  He recounted Emily’s words about Trevor and her request for him to find her glasses, then he told Kyle about the necklace and how she’d tugged it through her neck and held it up for him to see.

  He finished by saying, “I don’t think this is going to stop until she gets what she wants.”

  “And what is that? What does she want?”

  “The truth.”

  “The truth about what? Her death? Her drowning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like in that movie The Sixth Sense? When the ghosts kept appearing? That kid who saw dead people?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Daniel wanted so badly to tell him about the broken glasses that he and Stacy had found at the beach, but he knew he couldn’t. “If there’s no such thing as ghosts, you’re telling me I’m having hallucinations? Is that it?”

  “Maybe. Yeah. I don’t know. I’m just saying I don’t think you’re seeing Emily Jackson’s ghost.”

  Daniel remembered his research on hallucinations earlier in the morning. He didn’t really like considering the possibility that he had some type of brain tumor or was beginning to go insane, so he stayed on the topic of ghosts. “She grabbed my arm at the funeral. There was still a mark there the next morning.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “It’s gone. It healed.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not making this up, Kyle.”

  His friend stared for a moment at one of the pictures of Italy hanging on the wall, then looked back at Daniel. “Did I ever tell you the story of the doll in the window?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure if it’s still there, but when we lived in Minnesota, we would drive through Janesville to get to our place. If you took the old Highway 14 through town, as you’re heading west, just as you cross Main Street, there’s this old two-story house on the right-hand side of the road.”

  “What happened?” Daniel anticipated where this was going: “Was someone killed there?”

  “No. But if you looked up at the attic window you’d see a doll hanging there. It was one of those old-fashioned dolls made of wood and it was hanging from a rafter with a noose around its neck.”

  “Okay, that’s disturbing.”

  “No kidding. Well, there are all these stories about the doll and why it’s there. Some people say it moves; others say someone died in the house and the place is haunted. The way I heard it, there was a girl who lived there and the other kids made fun of her because she was the sort of kid that adults call ‘special,’ and kids call all kinds of other things. You know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” Daniel said quietly.

  “Anyway, the other kids in the town were relentless, making fun of her, calling her names, all that. The story goes that even when she was a teenager she carried that doll with her everywhere—which only made them make fun of her more. One day her mom was looking for her and couldn’t find her anywhere.”

  He paused, as if to accentuate how long the girl’s mom searched. “Eventually she went outside to look for her and when she turned around toward the house, she saw her daughter hanging in the attic window where she’d killed herself—hung herself off one of the rafters. And they say that after the funeral, her parents took the same rope that their daughter had used and they hung that doll up there in the window as a constant reminder to the townspeople of what they’d driven their daughter to do.”

  Daniel was silent.

  “So, last month I was doing this contemporary-issues assignment and I thought I’d try to find out what really happened. I came across this newspaper article from 1975 that said that one time, years ago, the guy who lived in the house was looking through a National Geographic magazine and saw a picture of a house in Pennsylvani
a that had a doll hanging in the window and he basically said, ‘Huh. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a doll hanging in our window too?’ So he hung it up there.”

  Daniel waited. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No suicide? No girl getting made fun of? Nothing like that?”

  “Nope. Just a guy paging through a magazine.”

  He evaluated that. “I don’t think I get it. What’s the point?”

  “Before my dad died he told me there’s this saying in Africa: ‘Something happens and then a story comes along and finds it.’ That’s what happened out there in Janesville. Some guy hung the doll in the window and then a bunch of stories came along and found it.”

  “And that’s what you’re saying is going on here?”

  “This girl died. Emily did. Okay. It’s terrible. Stories are going to come along to try to explain it. It’s normal, you know? Just like how people at school are saying something up there at Windy Point might have pulled her off the edge—a ghost, I’m not sure; I don’t know what all that’s about. Sometimes there’s no way to make sense of something. There’s just the plain old everyday facts and that’s all.”

  “So you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe what you’re telling me—that you saw what you say you saw, that you heard it, but . . .”

  “But you think it’s all in my head. So what about the wound on my arm, the one in the shape of her hand, the one that felt like it’d been burned onto my skin—that was all in my head as well?”

  “You say it healed?”

  “Yeah, the next day. Before football practice.”

  “A mark that looks like it was branded onto your arm—a mark the size of a hand—heals in just over twenty-four hours?”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  Kyle was silent. “Let’s get out of here. I gotta think about this.”

  He rose and, without another word, grabbed the last slice of pizza, then went to pay Rizzo, who was tossing an extra-large circle of dough into the air.

  Kyle held up a twenty.

  “Punch the button and grab your change,” Rizzo called to them in his robust Italian—but now Daniel noticed, also slightly North Dakotan—accent.

  “Keep it, man.”

  “Grazie.”

  When they got outside Daniel said, “That was a nice tip.”

  “That was my mom’s money.”

  “Ah.”

  They headed toward their cars.

  “Listen,” Kyle said, “when the mind believes something it affects your body. People get sick and get healed by their thoughts—placebos, you know. Using ’em, soldiers on the battlefield can make it so people don’t even feel amputations. And then there’s that weird thing about phantom pain, where a person who’s lost a limb can still feel it hurt. I’ve heard they can even feel the limb that isn’t there bump against stuff. It’s wild.”

  “So the mark on my arm just appeared because I believed Emily grabbed me?”

  “I don’t know. I guess, yeah—that or I’m totally wrong about all this and ghosts are real and this one is gonna haunt you until it gets what it wants—whatever that is.”

  “Sometimes you’re a little too honest.”

  Daniel’s phone vibrated.

  “Sometimes the truth is all we have.”

  Daniel checked the screen and found a text from Ronnie Jackson: “Can u come ovr to my house @4? need to talk to u.”

  “What’s up?” Kyle asked.

  “It’s Ronnie, Emily’s brother. He wants to meet up this afternoon at four. You should come too.”

  “Ronnie texted you?”

  “I asked him to. I wanted to talk to him about Emily.”

  “Because you think she was murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “My mom’s showing a house today. I have to watch Michele.”

  Kyle’s four-year-old sister had been a surprise baby to everyone in his family. Ever since his dad died in a car accident two years ago, Kyle, his mom, and Michele had been on their own.

  A lot of times his mom had to work on weekends, and Kyle helped watch Michele whenever he needed to. Though he sometimes complained about it, Daniel knew he really didn’t mind, that he fiercely loved his little sister and would do anything for her.

  Kyle hit the unlock for his car. “Let me know what Ronnie says, and if you see anything else, you know, any eidolons.”

  “Eidolons. Right. Hey, last night you texted me that you had something we needed to talk about. That was the whole reason we met for lunch. What’s up?”

  “It can wait.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Tell me, Kyle.”

  “I’m saying—”

  “Kyle. Go on. What is it?”

  “Yeah. Okay, you’re right. You should probably know.” But he didn’t continue.

  “Know what?”

  “Well, I heard people are putting stuff on Emily’s grave. If you really think she was murdered, maybe the killer returned there, you know, like they do on TV shows when they go to the funeral of the victim or the cemetery—leave stuff at the grave, take souvenirs, that sort of thing. I was wondering if you wanted to go out there, have a look around, see if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”

  “You mean anything that might tell us who the killer is.”

  “What could it hurt, just taking a look around?”

  Probably nothing, except Daniel had told his dad he was going to stop poking around, looking into this.

  Oh, and is that why you’re going to go over to talk to Emily’s brother?

  The graveyard.

  Yeah.

  If there was ever a place to see a ghost, it was out there.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen”—Kyle swung his door open—“call me and tell me how it goes with Ronnie. We can talk about the cemetery thing later.”

  They said good-bye and Kyle took off.

  Daniel had a couple hours before he needed to leave for the Jacksons’ house, so he went home to read up on killers. It didn’t take long to find out that often, they really did return to the scene of the crime, as well as attend the funerals and visit the graves of their victims, just like Kyle had suggested they did.

  He looked into hallucinations again for a little while, especially tactile ones, to try to figure out how that burn mark had actually appeared on his arm, and how it had healed so fast. However, even after an hour, he didn’t dig up anything helpful or encouraging.

  Basically, if you start seeing things that aren’t there, or hearing or even feeling things that aren’t there, there’s almost always something seriously wrong with you.

  Maybe his mom and dad were right. Maybe he did need to see a doctor—a shrink maybe—to figure out what was really going on.

  He texted Ronnie to get his address and found that he lived near Lake Algonquin, probably in the same neighborhood Stacy was from.

  Daniel left home deep in thought about their suspicions that Emily was murdered, and the possibility that a killer might have visited her grave and dropped something off there or taken a memento with him when he left.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  Daniel arrived at Ronnie Jackson’s house a few minutes before four. For some reason he was nervous. Even though he didn’t want to be rude, he realized he needed to swing by the bathroom as soon as he got inside.

  After parking at the curb and walking up the driveway, he knocked on the door.

  A dog was barking inside the house.

  Trevor.

  A few seconds later he heard someone’s footsteps.

  It took a moment for whoever was there to unlock the door, but finally it swung open and a man appeared.

  Danie
l recognized him as the person who, at the funeral, had told him he was thankful that he’d come, that it meant a lot to him. From Daniel’s online research into Emily’s life, he knew this was her dad.

  “Yes?” Mr. Jackson didn’t seem to recognize Daniel from seeing him at the funeral, but Daniel suspected he might not remember very much at all about that day. Emily’s shaggy, shedding golden retriever, Trevor, stood by his side, staring at Daniel, panting, his tail wagging.

  Daniel introduced himself, then said, “I’m here to see Ronnie. I know him from school.” He added, “He asked me to come over.”

  “Well, Ronnie’s with his mother right now running errands.” Mr. Jackson hesitated, as if he were trying to figure out what to say next. “They’ll be home in just a few minutes. Please. Come in.”

  A piano sat at one end of the living room. Surprisingly, there was no TV, just a brown-striped couch, two recliners, a couple of floor lamps, and a coffee table with four magazines arranged neatly on its glass top.

  The couch and chairs were covered with dog hair. It must have been quite a chore to keep them clean with Trevor around. An open doorway at the other end of the room led past the dining room to the kitchen.

  Alright, here came the embarrassing part. “Um, may I use your bathroom?”

  “Sure. We’re remodeling the one down here; just go upstairs, second door on your right.”

  “Thank you.”

  When Daniel reached the top of the stairs and saw the stickers on the first door to the right, his heart seemed to come to a stop. A sheet of paper was taped to the door. Written in a girl’s flowery handwriting were two words: “Emily’s Room.”

  Daniel stood there staring at the door. A flurry of images and questions swarmed through him. The funeral, the football game, Ty’s cryptic comments, the horrifying dream last night.

  And then, as if out of nowhere, he heard a voice inside his head: Go in. Look around.

  No, there was no way he was going to do that.

  But the voice persisted: Just take a look, that’s all.

  He heard Mr. Jackson putting dishes away in the kitchen, which was out of sight of the stairway. From there, he wouldn’t be able to see Daniel enter the room.