Oddest of All

by Bruce Coville

  “Have you ever seen your mother’s ghost?” asked Chris.

  Dolores shook her head.

  “Then why did you think she was still around?” I asked.

  “The parrot sees her.”

  She looked defensive, as if she was daring me to contradict her.

  “How do you know the bird sees her?” asked Chris.

  Dolores looked down at her hands. “He talks to her. He was her bird, she’d had him from before I was born.” She smiled. “He always used to greet her when she walked into the room. ‘Hello, Sweetie!’ he would say. ‘Hello, Sweetie!’”

  Her smile faded, and she looked down at her hands. “The bird didn’t say a word for six weeks after Mother died. Then one night after I came home from the hospital I was sitting in the living room when he let out an incredible squawk and cried, ‘Hello, Sweetie! Hello, Sweetie!’”

  Dolores’s good eye grew very large as she remembered the night. “‘Mother?’ I called. ‘Mother, are you there?’”

  “I knew she was. But she didn’t answer.”

  Dolores sat back in her chair. “She’s haunted this house ever since. She comes about once a month. I never see her, but the bird always knows when she’s here, always tells her hello, always cries ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ when she leaves, just like he did when she was alive.”

  She closed her eyes. “She must be so angry. I have to tell her how sorry I am. Maybe then her spirit can rest. I go out every year on this night, hoping maybe I will meet her along the road. But I never do.” She paused, then said, “I’m terribly sorry about your car. When I saw it tonight, for a moment I thought . . .”

  She looked away, her shoulders trembling. “It’s almost identical to the car Bud was driving that night. I thought . . . oh, I don’t know what I thought! I was so shocked I must have lost my mind for a moment. After you swerved away from me, I fainted. When I came to, I was horrified. I went to see if you were all right, but you had already left. I’m so sorry.”

  Now this was a situation my father never anticipated when he chose to drive an antique car. I was trying to figure out how he was going to react to Dolores’s story when I heard Chris say softly, “Do you want to try something?”

  Dolores and I both spoke at the same time. “What?”

  Chris looked a little nervous. “Before I tell you, you have to realize there’s a lot about this ghost stuff that Nine and I still don’t understand yet ourselves. It does seem like the more experiences we have, the easier it gets for us to see them. The problem is, we’re not the ones who need to see your mother. You are. But I’m wondering if we go in the living room and sit together, me on one side of you, Nine on the other, and hold hands—well, maybe it would bring you into the link so that you could see her, too.”

  The idea made me a little nervous; we had never actually tried to summon a ghost. And I wasn’t sure what this ghost was going to be like. Just because she had been weeping when we saw her didn’t mean she wasn’t still in a screaming rage about what had happened twenty years ago. What would we do if she showed up angry? It’s not like we had an instruction book with a chapter titled “How to Deal with a Really Furious Ghost.”

  On the other hand, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. If fate had brought us here to help Dolores, this made as much sense as anything.

  Dolores seemed to have pretty much the same reaction. “I’d do anything to see her again,” she whispered.

  “Shall we try it?” asked Chris, looking at me.

  I nodded. Without another word, the three of us stood, and walked into the living room.

  “Jeremiah,” squawked the parrot as we entered the room. “Go to Jeremiah.”

  “That’s the second time tonight he’s said that,” I whispered. “Who’s Jeremiah?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” said Dolores. “I never heard him say it at all until about four months after the accident. It was as if he learned it after Mother’s death—though neither my father nor I taught it to him. For a while, I wondered if it was someone that Mother wanted me to contact. I even looked in her address book. But she didn’t know any Jeremiah.”

  One more bit of weirdness. I was trying to figure out how they all fit together.

  We sat on the couch, Dolores between Chris and me. I was on her left side, the side with the scar.

  “Now what?” asked Dolores.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess you should try to call your mother.”

  Dolores closed her eyes. “Mother,” she whispered. “Mother, can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Maybe Nine and I should try,” said Chris. “Mrs. Smiley, if you can hear us, come back, come—”

  She was interrupted by Commander Cody. “Hello, Sweetie!” he squawked. “Hello, Sweetie!”

  Dolores’s hand flinched in mine.

  For a moment, we saw nothing, and I wondered if the bird was really an indicator that the ghost was around. Then Mrs. Smiley shimmered into view, a still-pretty, middle-aged lady whose face was marked by infinite sorrow.

  Dolores gasped.

  Mrs. Smiley looked at her daughter and shook her head sadly. I felt a surge of relief: At least she wasn’t mad.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  No answer. I wasn’t surprised. In all the times Chris and I have met ghosts, not one of them has ever spoken to us.

  “Mother,” whispered Dolores, “I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”

  I wondered if this would break whatever tie held the ghost, free her to go on to the next world. But Mrs. Smiley didn’t go. Instead, she leaned over to the parrot, as if whispering to him.

  “Jeremiah!” it squawked. “Go to Jeremiah!”

  The ghost looked at us pleadingly, as if begging us to understand.

  That was when I got it. “Was your mother very religious?” I whispered.

  Dolores nodded. “Very. It was something else we fought about.”

  “Don’t move. I’ll be right back!”

  I slipped my hand out of hers, half afraid the ghost would vanish once I did. But she stood in place, a look of desperate hope on her face. I tiptoed up the stairs and into the room Mr. Smiley had assigned to Chris and me.

  The family Bible that lay on the dresser was covered with dust. I blew it off, then started to flip through the pages. It took me a moment to find the book of Jeremiah, but when I did, I struck pay dirt. Pressed between the pages were two thin sheets of paper, almost like the stuff you use for airmail. They were so thin you would never have known there was anything in the book if you weren’t looking for it.

  Glancing at the pages where the letter had been waiting, I saw that two phrases had been underlined in the text. The first was in chapter 31, verse 22: “How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter?”

  Yow, I thought. That sure puts a finger on what Mrs. Smiley was all wound up about.

  But the second phrase, which was part of verse 34, gave me hope. It said, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

  I glanced at the letter. The handwriting was wobbly, as if the person who wrote it had been very weak, and it looked unfinished. But I knew Dolores had to see it.

  I slipped back down the stairs. When the ghost saw me, saw what I was holding, she burst into tears.

  I thrust the letter into Dolores’s hand. “Here,” I said. “Read this.”

  She glanced at it. Then, with a quavering voice, she spoke aloud the words her mother had written nearly twenty years earlier—the undelivered letter her spirit had stayed to make sure her daughter finally read.

  My Darling Dolores,

  As I write these words, we both lie in hospital beds, with little hope that either of us will ever leave them. If the Lord must take one of us, I pray it will be me. You have a whole life ahead of you. I already have too much behind me.

  I will have one great sorrow in dying, dear one, which is that I will not be here to see you grow to womanhood.
I have, too, one great fear—not of death, for I trust the Lord. My fear is of dying before we can make peace between us.

  Oh, my sweet baby girl, how can I say what is in my heart? How can I say how much I love you? You will not know until you are a mother yourself. I would do anything, give anything, to protect you from the sorrow and pain that have come to you. I am so sorry, my beloved. More than sorry.

  There is one thing you must know if I should die before you wake. I forgive you. For whatever part you feel you played in this tragedy, I forgive you. For whatever you fear I am angry about, I forgive you. For whatever sorrow you think you have caused me, I forgive you. For whatever wrong you believe you have done me, I forgive you—as I hope that God and you will forgive me.

  Terrible things happen between mothers and daughters, my dear one, but there is a ferocious love that binds us. With all the love I have, I release you from guilt.

  Do you remember when you were little and we used to read The Hunting of the Snark? The Bellman said, “What I tell you three times is true.” You used to repeat that whenever you wanted to convince me of something. Now I am telling you three times: I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you

  That was as far as Mrs. Smiley had written. She must have tucked the letter into the Bible, then died before she could finish it. As her daughter read it aloud now, Mrs. Smiley’s ghost drifted toward us. Kneeling before her daughter, she gazed at her with the most radiant look of love I have ever seen.

  Something twisted inside me as I wondered where my own mother had gone.

  After a moment Mrs. Smiley reached her hand toward Dolores’s face. She couldn’t touch her, of course. That’s the thing with ghosts—their forms are less than mist, and no matter how they try, they just can’t touch you. So Dolores didn’t realize her mother was there until I whispered, “Dolores, look up.”

  She raised her head and gasped. Tears streaming down her cheeks, flowing through the valleys of her scars, she whispered, “Oh Mother, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.”

  Mrs. Smiley nodded in understanding. Yet she seemed sad as well. She looked up, and I saw an expression of great longing on her pale, glowing face.

  “You have to let go of her, Dolores,” I whispered. “She didn’t stay all these years because she was angry. She stayed because you needed to know she loved you, needed to know she forgave you. She stayed because you hadn’t let go of her.”

  “Nine’s right,” said Chris. “You have to let her move on now.”

  I could see Dolores swallow. “I love you, Mother,” she whispered. “I miss you. And . . . I release you.”

  She said it three times.

  I thought it was over. But from the darkness, from a place beyond understanding, another visitor arrived.

  It was a young man, pale and transparent, yet quite handsome.

  “Bud!” whispered Dolores.

  The new ghost smiled at Dolores sadly. Then he floated toward us, bent, and pressed his lips against her scarred cheek. He could not really touch it, of course. But Dolores knew what he was telling her. Raising her trembling fingers to her face, she watched as Bud took Mrs. Smiley’s hand and began to lead her away from us—out of this world with its sorrows and rages and tragedies, on to a place of perfect forgiveness.

  Suddenly Mrs. Smiley stopped. Turning back to us, she blew her daughter one last kiss. Then she smiled again, turned, and vanished slowly into the darkness.

  In the Frog King’s Court

  DENNIS JUGGARUM was squatting at the edge of Bingdorf’s Swamp the first time he spotted the five-legged frog. The sight made him recoil in fear and disgust. Even so, he decided to catch the thing—partly because he was fascinated by it, and partly because he wanted to show it to his biology teacher, Mr. Crick. They had discussed mutations in class just a week or two earlier; maybe he could get extra credit for bringing this one in. Given his grades on the last two tests, that would be a good thing!

  To his surprise, the frog’s lopsided condition did nothing to slow it down. Extra leg flapping uselessly at its side, the creature easily leaped away before he could lay hands on it.

  “Drat!” muttered Dennis. He cursed mostly out of habit, since he was actually relieved not to touch the thing. Part of him—not his brain, but something deep in his gut—feared that whatever caused the weird mutation might be contagious.

  That fear didn’t stop Dennis from returning to the swamp the next afternoon. But then, he had done that nearly every day for the last six years. For some reason he felt at home there—certainly more at home than he ever did in school, where some oaf was always ready to tease him about his looks, or, more specifically, about his bulging eyes.

  He had long ago given up complaining to his mother about the teasing. “Oh, Dennis, what nonsense!” she would scoff. “You’re a very handsome boy.” Which, oddly enough, he knew to be almost true. All he needed to be as handsome as a prince was eyeball-reduction surgery.

  In the swamp he could forget about his looks, about school, about teasing, about everything that bugged him in his daily life. The only thing he couldn’t ignore was the smokestacks of the Bingdorf chemical factory on the far side of the swamp—the only blot on an otherwise beautifully untamed view. Even though everyone in town was sure the plant was dumping its toxic wastes here, no one had been able to prove it. According to his mother, most people didn’t want it proved, preferring jobs to clean water. And since old man Bingdorf owned not only the factory but also the swamp, he was able to get away with it.

  Dennis forced his eyes away from the distant silhouette of the hated factory. Today he had come to the swamp for a more specific purpose than simply losing himself in the buzz and pulse of life that surrounded him whenever he was here. Having bombed his third bio test in a row, he was determined to catch the mutant frog. The need for extra credit had grown to emergency proportions!

  Squatting a few feet from the murky water, holding himself motionless, Dennis cast his glance in all directions. He gasped. Barely an arm’s length to his right squatted the five-legged frog—and next to it a frog with eyes on its shoulders! The eyes blinked, causing Dennis to cry out and stumble backward. At the sound of his voice the frogs leaped away, disappearing with a plunk under a mat of algae.

  Dennis wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed—or relieved.

  When he told his mother about the mutated frogs that night she frowned and said, “I’ve been reading about that problem in other places, Den. They’re pretty sure it’s caused by chemical pollution. Around here, that would mean the Bingdorf factory, of course. Not that old man Bingdorf would care. He’d sell his own children if he thought he could get a decent price for the chemicals they were made of. But you’d better stay out of the swamp, Dennis. I don’t want three-legged grandchildren!”

  Though Dennis rarely rebelled against a parental order, he couldn’t resist the weirdness of what he had seen—or the chance for that extra credit in bio. So the next afternoon found him back in the swamp, frog hunting again. At least, that was the reason he gave himself. The truth was, he would have gone even without the lure of the mutants. The swamp was just too important to his peace of mind for him to abandon it so easily.

  His defiance of his mother’s orders paid off when he spotted the five-legged frog again. This time it was sitting alone. Gathering his courage, Dennis crept forward, hands cupped and ready. But just as he was about to lunge for it, the frog leaped away.

  Dennis splashed into the swamp after it.

  Aside from the fact that it would make his mother angry, going into the water didn’t seem dangerous. He had waded into the swamp plenty of times before and knew it was less than two feet deep here.

  At least, it had never been more than two feet deep in the past. To his shock, Dennis now found himself up to his thighs in water.

  Even worse, his feet were stuck in the muddy bottom.

  No, worse than stuck. He was sinking!

  Quicksand! was his first, terrified thought. I’ve stumb
led into quicksand!

  Then something else happened, something so appallingly weird that it drove the thought of quicksand from his mind. He saw a virtual army of deformed frogs swimming toward him, some with missing legs, others with five, six, or even seven legs; some were absurdly small, others horrifyingly large; some had split faces or extra eyes, or were weirdly colored. Dennis cried out in horror as the little monstrosities clambered onto his shoulders, then his head. The clammy flesh of their bellies pressing against the skin of his face drove him mad with fear. They seemed to be weighing him down, pushing him into the soft, sucking bottom of the swamp.

  Dennis’s screams were cut off as his head went under the surface. The muck—well past his thighs now, nearly to his waist—was holding him, clutching him. Wild with terror, he flailed his arms, churning the water like a propeller.

  It did no good.

  He opened his eyes. Through the dimly lit water, green and murky, he saw that the swarm of frogs was growing thicker, more dense. Hundreds—no, thousands—of frogs were swimming closer, pushing him deeper into the swamp.

  Choking on his fear, Dennis continued his descent into the muddy bottom. The ooze, more frightening than mere water, crept up his neck. When he felt it on his chin he opened his mouth to scream again. A tiny frog slipped inside. Revolted, he spit it out and clamped his lips shut.

  The muck crept past his mouth, beyond his nose.

  Finally it closed above his head.

  When Dennis woke he was lying facedown on a patch of damp grass. Insects buzzed around him. Under their music he heard the song of frogs—the trill of spring peepers, the tenor tones of the small frogs he used to catch in the swamp, the deep baritone of the great bulls. He rolled over, then yelped in fear.