Paranormal After Dark

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Cress!” He spun around and scooped me up in a giant bear hug. ”Can you believe this place? I mean, turns out I was wrong about the Free Masons, but whatever. I mean, can you believe it?”

  “They told you everything too?” I asked when he finally put me down.

  “Yeah. I mean, Jackson did. Technically they’re not supposed to, ‘cause I’m not some evolved Breaker person or whatever. But Jackson said if they didn’t want me to know, they’d just mind wipe me later. Which doesn’t sound like something I should want to happen to me, but I kinda do anyway.”

  He started bouncing the pin pong ball up and down against his racket, like one of those balls connected to a paddle with string.

  “Oh! This is Jackson.” He pointed to the young boy beside him.

  Jackson was all of four feet tall. He had dark skin, close cropped hair, and a smile that said that not only did he understand Casper’s specific brand of oddball, but that he enjoyed it.

  “Sup Cresta? Sorry about your mom. Sup? Casper just taught me that. Sup?”

  “Turns out they don’t get out much,” Casper explained.

  “Later he’s going to teach me about something called extreme couponing,” Jackson said, and they both smiled.

  Great. Now there are two of them.

  The day inched by. Every once in a while, someone would approach me, introduce themselves, and asked me questions I either couldn’t or didn’t want to answer.

  “I don’t understand how you couldn’t have known. How didn’t you know?”

  “Do you hate your mother? I think I would hate my mother if I were you?”

  “Was it weird being normal?”

  My story, it seemed, was out, and it was safe to say that it was the talk of Weathersby.

  “Don’t be mad at them. They’re just curious. All of our new people are old. We all grew up with each other in the Hourglass. You’re the first new new person we’ve ever seen.” Jackson told me over lunch, a feast of roasted chicken smothered in mushrooms, roast beef in gravy, mashed potatoes, crisp green beans cooked with ham, baked apples with cinnamon, and at least three different kinds of bread.

  “No worries. I get it,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I did. “What’s the Hourglass?”

  “Wow,” he said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “You really are a greenie, aren’t you? The Hourglass is our home. It’s where we all come from.”

  “All the Breakers?” Casper asked, his mouth similarly full of potatoes.

  “Right,” Jackson stabbed at a piece of chicken, careful to miss the mushrooms, and drug it through his mashed potatoes before shoveling it into his mouth. “We don’t leave for training until ten. Before that, we get to live with our families and friends in this huge hidden community called the Hourglass.”

  “So you just got here?” I asked. Still full from breakfast, I barely picked at my food.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Plus, most of my friends won’t go to training until next year, which is why I’m not, you know, super popular around here. I hope at least a few of them get assigned to Weathersby. That would be…trippin’?”

  He looked to Casper for confirmation. Casper shook his head. “Not the right word dude. Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  I looked around. There were cliques here too. I could see it from the way the tables filled out; pretty, vapid looking girls at one table; a quiet group with their heads buried in respective books; large muscular guys laughing way too loudly. It seemed even the world’s most evolved couldn’t escape the stigma of jock, geek, and everything in between.

  The lights flickered overhead and, as quickly as they stopped, everyone got up from the table as one.

  “Sorry, gotta get to class,” Jackson, pushed his plate to the center of our table. “I’ll see you later guys, okay? Good to meet you Cresta,” he said and, for the first time since I got here, I actually believed somebody was happy I came.

  As soon as the students were gone, a cleaning crew filtered into the cafeteria, headed by the lady from this morning with the breakfast tray and the ‘simply divine’ OJ. Casper and I went back into the common area, afraid we’d be asked to help or something. He suggested that we explore the rest of Weathersby, calling it ‘definitely the most awesome of awesome places’, but that idea was short lived. No sooner had we walked past the archery range and toward the general couches; completely empty seeing as how everybody was in class, we were approached by Echo and Dahlia.

  “I think it’s time we had a conversation,” he said. His voice was calmer, more formal than before. Dahlia, for her part, stood silently, glaring at us. “To my office, shall we?”

  Echo’s office was the same as I remembered from last night, minus the then present archers. But Casper reacted as though he was seeing it for the first time, which I suppose, he was.

  “This is unbelievable! It’s like an ancient Mayan cave or something, except with ‘W’s everywhere,” he said wide eyed.

  “It’s good to see that your new mental cues are working. We can’t have you bumping into the furniture again,” Echo cracked a small smile.

  “This room is preserved from Weathersby’s original iteration. It’s over two hundred years old. The rest of the facility has, of course, been updated. But, as the heart of the place, it’s customary that head Breaker’s office remain untouched,” Dahlia said, though she didn’t look at either of us.

  “Take a seat,” Echo said. Sitting behind his desk, his fingers immediately went to drumming. Dahlia stood behind him, her arms crossed over her chest like a shield.

  “It’s time you tell us exactly what brought you here,” Echo said when we were seated.

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to relive it, not so soon anyway. But now was the time, with the details so fresh in my memory. Besides, if I was going to be in this; put my trust in Morgan Montgomery as was my mom’s wish, I might as well go in all the way.

  I told him everything; about Owen, Mrs. Goolsby, the empty house, the black Sedan, all of it. When I was done, Echo handed me a tissue. I took it, not realizing that I had been crying.

  “She’s telling the truth. It’s all true,” Echo looked back to Dahlia.

  “What are you, like a human lie detector?” Casper shuffled in his seat.

  “I’m known as a Reader.” Echo’s fingers drummed along. “When people lie there are things that instinctively happen, mostly within the left side of the brain. As a reader, my mind is attuned to picking up that activity. In some cases, I can shut down the activity, making it physically impossible for someone to lie to me.”

  “That’s scary,” Casper gulped.

  “Only if you’re planning on being dishonest with us,” Dahlia circled the desk, her hand tracing a large steel sword that hung on the wall.

  “I rarely do it,” Echo answered. “It’s not something I enjoy.”

  “That’s enough,” I said louder than I intended. “I was honest with you. Now it’s your turn to be honest with me.”

  I saw Dahlia’s brows arch, but I continued anyway. “I wanna know about my mom, why she lied to me for so long, and what you plan on doing with me now.”

  “Yeah,” Casper grinned nervously. “Me too. Not to be an ingrate, but I can’t help but notice that I’m the only, you know, normal person here. No offense.”

  “We exist as part of the United States government, though we don’t necessarily answer to them. Our laws and traditions are older than your country,” Dahlia said. “We are run by a tribunal of elected Breaker elders known as the Council of Masons. Your situation has been relayed to them, and we’ve been given leave to house you until more information is available. Both of you.” She looked from me to Casper.

  “”The consensus is that, with the identities of your attackers still unknown, sending Casper back home presently might put him in danger, especially considering the whitewashing that’s been done.”

  “Whitewashing?” I sat up in my seat.

  Echo’s hands stopped dr
umming long enough to press a button on the inside of the desk. The room went dark and, just when I thought classes were about to change again, the visage of a woman appeared. She was see-through, like a ghost. Except she wasn’t a ghost, she was a reporter.

  Sandra Adams was Crestview’s most popular (and only) on the street reporter. She’d always go around town for Channel 6 to talk about the major news topics of the day; most notably the time Mae Warner tried (and failed) to bake the world’s largest chocolate chip cookie, or when the senior citizens on the Greenview Hills Rest Home took to the streets to protest the home’s move to glass coffee tables in the television room (How would they see them?).

  Today through, streaming live from my street into the cloaked office of a Breaker somewhere in Florida, she had a darker story to tell.

  “Here, at the crime site, people are livid.” Her back was straight, her face bright. It was obvious that she enjoyed actually having something to talk about.

  Mr. Colburn appeared on the screen, scratching his bald head. “I just can’t believe somebody would do something like this. Drugs, I tell ya. It was drugs. Theys always makin’ good people do bad things.”

  The scene changed again. This time Sandra stood in front of a smoldering pile. It didn’t take a second glance for me to know what it was. The black wreckage behind her was what was left of my house.

  “Police say the arson happened sometime last night and was, as Mr. Colburn surmised, likely a drug related accident. The culprit, Casper Rhodes, is a known drug addict and is currently on the run,”

  A picture of Casper replaced Sandra. It was from the photo booth session he and I took last year at the corn carnival, except I was missing from the shot.

  “What?!” Casper shot up. “I’m not a drug addict. I sooo couldn’t afford drugs!”

  “Crestview residents describe Casper as a loner, saying he had no friends and was always by himself,” Sandra continued.

  “That’s not true!” Casper answered.

  “Casper’s father, Carlton Rhodes, had this to add.”

  Casper’s dad popped on the screen, in his usual trucker’s hat and lip full of Skoal. “That boy was always no good. I never liked him.”

  “That part’s true,” Casper said.

  “Luckily,” Sandra appeared before us again, speaking to her town wide audience of dozens. “The house in question was abandoned, so no one was hurt in the incident. If anyone has information that may lead to the arrest of Casper Rhodes, the police ask that you contact them at-“

  Sandra disappeared as the lights came back.

  “I’m a junkie criminal,” Casper turned to me wide eyed. “A loser junkie criminal with no friends who burned your house down. It’s like every bad thing my dad ever said about me is true.”

  I stood up and hugged him. “Your dad’s an idiot. This is about me. They did that to get rid of me, right?” I turned to Echo.

  “You and your mother,” Echo confirmed. “We’ve spent the morning digitally combing through town records. There’s no sign of a Cresta or Julie Karr ever living in town. What’s more, there’s no trace of your mother ever working at St. Vincent’s.”

  “They’ve cleaned the planet of you, and they used your friend here as the scapegoat to cover their tracks,” Dahlia added, examining a mace that hung from the wall.

  “Sorry Cass, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen to you,” I said, looking down.

  “Hey, cars drive on roads, right?” He took my hand.

  “Right,” I said, squeezing it.

  “The problem is, we have no idea who’s behind this. I’m sending Dahlia to Crestview with a team to try and uncover answers,” Echo picked up a pen and started marking a sheet of paper.

  “I’m confused,” I said, twisting a strand of hair around my fingers for lack of my necklace and my steering wheel. “If they erased me from town, what good will that do?”

  “They erased you from people’s minds, from their public records,” Dahlia answered. Her voice betrayed annoyance. Her arms crossed herself again. “But the walls themselves are a different story.” She smirked. It was cold and bitter, but it was a smirk nonetheless.

  “She’s a Surveyor,” Echo said. “She picks up on the mental fragments that reside in areas. Cars, houses, even streets and fields; they all have mental signatures. And she can read them”

  “It’s like digging for fossils,” she added. “You break the surface, and you’d be surprised what you find. Two hours in that lovely town of yours and all your secrets will be mine.”

  “How comforting,” I said.

  “In the meantime, there’s something we need to discuss,” Echo said, and his fingers started running across the desk again.

  I’m really starting to hate that.

  “We have something of a situation,” he added. “You didn’t come alone.”

  “I know. I brought him,” I pointed to Casper.

  “You remember me; the crack head firebug,” Casper waved mockingly.

  “No, I mean the two of you didn’t come alone. You were followed.”

  My hand tightened in Casper’s. The blood in my veins went cold like ice, thinking of one of those freakish nightmares in front of me again.

  “What? Where-“

  “Calm down,” Echo stood, holding his hands out in front of him. “He was caught trying to sneak passed our security systems last night and has been apprehended. It’s under control.”

  I relaxed some, but just a little. Apprehended meant he was still here, in the building. If it was Jiqui or Ezra, or God forbid one of those meatheads that probably beat my mother until she couldn’t-

  Ugh! I can’t think about this.

  “The situation is a bit complicated though. It’s- Well, why don’t you see for yourself. Follow me.”

  He walked toward the door. I didn’t follow. Neither did Casper. He must have been out of his mind, thinking I’d want to look in the face of someone who helped kill my mom.

  “Cresta,” he held out his hand. “It’ll be okay. Trust me.”

  So I did.

  We walked out of his office and through a long hall. Students were all around us, sorted in groups dependent on age and activity. Soon, I realized that these were classes. To our right, I saw a gaggle of girls pulling at dumbbells and lifting more weight than I’d have thought possible. Jackson shot us a smile as we passed him, working his way through a class Echo called ‘An Exploration of Dead Languages’.

  Sounds useful.

  There were no walls or doors, leaving only empty space to stop the classes from bleeding into each other. Still, none of the students seemed to be distracted by anything going on around them. In fact, I had never seen people so focused, at least not in a classroom. There wasn’t one person, not one, who looked less than completely engrossed.

  “Breakers have to be well rounded,” Echo answered a question I hadn’t asked. “We train them physically as well as mentally, so that by the time they’re ready to go out into the field, they’re able to deal with whatever comes.”

  “You make it sound dangerous.” I felt like he expected me to say something.

  “It can be,” he answered. We pushed out of the facility and into the outdoors. It was cold today, and I shivered as the icy breeze hit me. “As Breakers, we’re often called to a series of widely varied vocations during our careers. The future is fickle and can twist in a thousand different directions. We have to be prepared for all of them.”

  “You, like, kill people?” Casper asked. He was shivering too. With his arms crossed, he rubbed along his biceps, trying to keep warm. Echo, though, seemed unaffected by the cold.

  Still, he winced when Casper asked his question. “That’s not really something we like to talk about, son. I’ve been a Breaker for almost twenty years now. I’ve ate with kings and fought with killers. I’ve helped people find the greatness inside of them and I’ve beat back mudslides. Now, I teach the next generation. And yes, I’ve done things that I wish could have been av
oided, but that’s rarely the way of it. We fight for the future, and do what we have to in order to preserve it.”

  In front of us, crops popped up in rows as far as the eye could see. Every fifty feet or so, large planks jutted from the ground; like the sort you’d expect to see a scarecrow hanging from. Only, instead of a straw-filled man, these planks held large wooden ‘W’s painted red. People; Breakers, I was sure, shucked corn, bailed hay, and hauled water off in the distance.

  “This wasn’t here yesterday,” I muttered, my teeth chattering.

  “It was, you just couldn’t see it,” Echo answered.

  “Is that what the ‘W’s are for, to make people see what you want ‘em to?” Casper asked.

  “You’re shrewd for a baseline, aren’t you?” Echo smiled. “Illusions as big and sustained as what we use here, or what I assume was used on you in Crestview, require anchors; something to trick the human mind into ignoring what’s in front of it. Without the stipends we put in place last night, the sight of any ‘W’ on this property would send a message to your brain telling you to see something other than what’s actually there. We have over two hundred acres of farmland here. We also raise cattle and chickens, but anyone passing by would just see a barren field within the walls of a juvenile delinquent center, and beyond that, a wildlife preserve.”

  “You farm?” I asked. It hardly seemed like the exciting life of a band of suave superspies.

  “Where do you think the food we eat comes from?” He smiled. “Besides, this sort of work teaches the children about responsibility. It teaches them to work for what they have and that, even with abilities as powerful as the ones they possess, they’re like everybody else. They have to earn their way.”

  I was right. They were Breakers. They were students. Apparently, when the kids here weren’t doing three hundred pound bench presses or learning how to say ‘Thank you very much’ in Klingon, they’re made to grow their own food.

  This place sounds like a winner.

  “You’re thinking it sounds like a lot of work,” Echo looked at me. It’s like he was reading my mind. Wait? Was he reading my mind?