by R. L. Stine
Claire, I whisper.
Somehow I understand that I can move in a way I never did in life. Like steam I rise up toward the ceiling; beneath me I see blood that seeps from my head into a pool of vivid scarlet. My blood. As easily as one snuffs out a candle, I have ceased to be, and yet I still exist. This new state of being confuses me.
One of my shoes has landed three feet away, and my fingers curl from my palm as though they are petals of a flower. It’s so strange, truly seeing myself from the outside. Not a reflection of my face in a mirror but the whole of who I was. I know this man shot me but I cannot explain why. I close my eyes and try to remember.
Then my memory returns full force, so that I gasp.
One hour before, I’d been sitting at my desk, listening to Mr. Ward as he explained a dragonfly’s prismatic vision while a boy named James yawned sleepily at a desk to my left.
“The dragonfly has amazing sight because as it flies it can scan three hundred and sixty degrees in every direction,” Mr. Ward intoned while drawing a hexagon on the whiteboard with a green marker. “A dragonfly has the best perception of any creature on earth. Their senses are almost magical.”
And then a loud crack of the door followed by shrill screams as my killer burst inside our classroom, his gun held out in front of him, both hands gripping the handle tight.
“Give me two hostages! I want two! Now, now, now!”
In the end the man had chosen me and Claire. Class-mates who could not have been more different—I, who have sparkled all my life, and Claire, quiet, friendless, awkward, strange.
“You with the long blond hair!” he had screamed, pointing directly at me. “And you!” The gun had snapped over to Claire. “I want you both to stand by the window or I’ll start shooting your friends! The rest of you, get out. Move, move, move!”
In death I see the irony of our lives, mine and Claire’s, how they’d become irrevocably intertwined in that one random act. I remember the girls crying, the boys stoic as they shuffle by me in a single file. How Mr. Ward had tried to stay in the room but was forced to leave when my killer shot the window, so that the glass exploded onto the countertop in a galaxy of stars. How Claire and I had clung to each other while outside police car lights flashed and the fire truck wailed. To my shame I remember this, too—wishing that if one of us should have to die, let it be Claire.
How selfish I was in life. How clear is my vision in death.
“Why did you kill her?” Claire chokes out each word.
“I told them. I told them.” He releases her hair and kicks the ribs of my body with the toe of his boot. What is left of me rocks gently on the linoleum. “They’ll believe me now—I killed the pretty one. She’s dead. They’ll hear that.” His breath swirls out of his mouth. I have never seen air before. It’s strange, the way I perceive everything, even thoughts, as if I, too, possess the dragonfly’s prismatic vision. My killer’s name is Drew. Seamed lines fan down to his neck, and there is dirt beneath his fingernails. The soul is twisted and dark as tree roots.
“They only listen to blood!” he shouts. His spittle hits Claire’s skin.
Claire is thinking that she has only moments to live and I know she is right. I am swirling above her, powerless. Claire whispers my name so softly that Drew does not hear. I swoop in close so that my forehead almost touches hers. As easily as reading a book I look inside her and I see an amazing thing: Claire’s soul is shining. It’s filled with some kind of essence, gold and white, bright as the edge of the sun. The girl I had always dismissed amazes me with her light.
With my new sight I follow the threads of her life as they unfurl like ribbons. I follow one and see how she loved James quietly, too shy to speak. There is Claire making dinner in a tiny kitchen, laughing as she drains noodles. I see her looking in a mirror, her mouth pressed into a thin line until she sighs and shakes her head as she walks away. I watch her read a book to a small boy; I see her strain as she cleans garbage from a gutter. There is another strand unwinding. In it I see myself and my friends as we laugh at Claire behind cupped hands. We snicker at her black clothes, her odd hair, whisper at the thickness of her thighs. Claire understood she was an object of our ridicule and yet, amazingly, she grieves that I am gone.
In death I am ashamed.
How can I have been so blind? Nothing on this side matters the way it did when I was alive. Not shoes or the clothes I had so carefully worn. Here there is no status. Love is the only thing that crosses over with the soul, and Claire is filled with it.
“Don’t worry, I’ll let you live,” Drew lies to Claire now. His words are the color of my blood. Panic rises through me and shoots out of my fingers in electric waves. Drew is going to murder Claire and then himself—the pictures flash through his mind. He wants to be remembered forever, a celebrity for eternity. Pages of his manifesto are tucked into the pocket of his jeans.
“No!” I scream. Emotion shoots through me in flames, pulsing through me like a fire to scorch everything inside. My hand hits him, but it passes though him without a mark. I am helpless.
“We’re going to the window, you and me,” Drew tells Claire. “The police heard that gunshot. They’ll want to know which girl is still alive.”
He will kill her at the window so that everyone will be a witness. I can taste Claire’s fear as she struggles, begging for her life. Her words mean nothing to him.
I concentrate with everything I have, pushing against the molecules of air. Outside, lawmen decide to break into the school, but I know they will be too late. The trigger cocks. Claire squeezes her eyes tight because she feels her own death coming. She pictures her parents and thinks of God.
“Now!” I scream to no one, to everyone.
I don’t understand how I do it, but I feel myself compress my spirit into a tiny point and shoot myself into the tip of Drew’s trigger finger. Everything inside me pulses as I inhabit his very cells; I feel his blood surge and the adrenaline storm through his veins, but I am matching his energy. I discover I can move his flesh. With that knowledge I strain with everything inside of me.
“What the . . . ?” he cries as the gun inches away from Claire. Cursing, Drew tries to regain control, but I intensify my focus. His eyes go wide as his hand snaps to his own temple. My energy is like a laser as I turn my soul into fire. A shot splits the air. An instant later Drew falls to the floor close to my own broken body as my spirit breaks free. A blackness pools into the floor with a moan and he is gone, a shadow melting.
It is over. The only sound is Claire’s ragged breathing. “Oh my God!” Claire cries, dropping to her knees. Spattered in Drew’s blood, she leans over to touch my lifeless body, tears streaming down her face. She cries in loud gulps while I rejoice in the fact that she is alive.
“Savannah,” she gasps. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry.”
The space that separates us seems thin as gauze, but she does not sense that I am still here, right next to her. “It’s okay,” I tell her. I stroke her head, my hand brushing the coils of her red hair, but she cannot feel me. The energy I had has dissipated and I am once again without touch. I look into my body’s blank eyes, a deepwater blue. There is so much I should have done when I was alive, when things mattered. But I was given this one bit of grace. Because of me, Claire will go on.
The police are running inside the building, and I know they are just moments away. When I look ahead I see there will be a huge funeral inside the gym for me, with thousands of flowers emanating their oversweet scent. Everyone will weep and secretly wonder if Claire should have been taken instead of me. The thought makes me sad. Because like a dragonfly, I perceive with a panoramic vision that reveals truth. Neither one of us should have been taken in that wasteful act of violence, but it is Claire, not me, who is destined to accomplish amazing things. The girl I ignored will leave her mark on the world in a way I never could. To know this helps me accept my fate. The understanding is bittersweet, a lesson learned too late on earth, and yet I see a new
purpose in my lingering here. From this side I believe the right girl lived.
And I’ll be watching her, every day, until we meet again.
JEEPERS PEEPERS
▼ RYAN BROWN ▼
Darkness had fallen, but the late August air still hung hot and thick over the bayou when Elizabeth Nolan finally reached her destination.
The babysitting job had required her to leave her own neighborhood—where the roads were actually paved!—and drive halfway around the lake after dark.
Seething at the very idea, she almost turned for home right then, but she knew she couldn’t. She needed the money. School started back next week and she had no fall wardrobe to speak of, and a summer spent mostly at the mall or lying by the pool had left her flat broke.
And that’s not to mention the good ol’ take-some-initiative /show-some-responsibility speech her parents had been giving her.
Resigned, she turned off the ignition. Her ears buzzed with the screech of the crickets and cicadas in the surrounding woods. She opened the driver’s door and heard water trickling in the distance. And to her horror, from somewhere much closer by, she heard the wet, throaty croak of a frog.
Great, she thought. Frogs. How fan-freaking-tastic!
Steeling herself, she stepped out of the car.
The house was a single-story shack, tucked under sprawling live-oak limbs that wept streams of moss onto its corrugated tin roof. Funny thing about those moss-strewn trees, she thought. Lining the manicured fairways at the country club near her house, they offered a certain majestic beauty. But out here they had a much more depressing effect, adding to the ghostly gloom of the place.
The house was as square as a cracker box, and sat at a tilt on crumbling cinder blocks. It had a screened front door, beyond which a dull light glowed, but Elizabeth couldn’t make out anything except yellowing walls inside.
A female figure appeared behind the screen.
“You’re late.”
Elizabeth stepped onto an elevated porch riddled with rusted tools and bald tires. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
The woman didn’t open the door, but remained a faceless silhouette behind the screen. “You near enough made me late. I can’t afford to get m’self fired, you know. Not in my situation.” Despite the hostile tone, her words came out slow and cool, almost in a whisper.
Elizabeth swallowed hard. “Again, I apologize. It’s sort of a long way out here. And I got a little lost past the fork, where the road veers off into the . . . um . . .”
“Swamp.”
“Pardon?”
“Call it what it is. City folk’ll call it the bah-yoo, but I say call it what it is.”
“Well . . . anyway, I got here as quickly as I could. It was a last-minute call, so I had to rearrange my schedule and everyth—”
“I had no choice ’bout that. I’s desperate. No one else would come.”
Elizabeth didn’t even want to think about the meaning of the last comment. “Well, I’m glad I could help out,” she said, trying to lighten the exchange. She reached into her purse. “I’ve got a list of references here if you’d like to see them.”
“Would have done. But I don’t read too good and I hadn’t the time anyhow. You been sittin’ kids long?”
“Since eighth grade. And I used to babysit my cousins sometimes before that.”
Elizabeth sensed the woman sizing her up from head to toe, studying her.
“Well,” she sighed. “I got no choice. You’re here and I gotta be off.”
“So where’s, uh, Webster?”
“Wilbur.”
“Right. Sorry. Wilbur.”
“He’s gone to bed already. Maybe he won’t need no tendin’ to at all.”
“That’s fine. I’m sure I can keep myself busy with—”
“Then again, there’s times when my Wilbur needs a little . . .” The woman’s words drifted off. She drew a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “Well, sometimes he needs a little . . . extra care. I hope you can see to that.”
Her tone had grown eerily sober.
Elizabeth waited a few beats for further explanation that never came. “You mean bad dreams?” she said. “Well . . . sure. I think I can handle that. Is there a number where I can reach you? I could call if I thought there was any reason for concern.”
“Ain’t no phone here.”
“But, when we spoke—”
“I called you from the bait shop up yonder. Mr. Simmons there done me a favor, found your ad on that computer a’ his and gave me your number. I’s desperate, you see.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, it doesn’t matter. I brought my cell phone.” She dug the phone out of her purse and turned it on. Her stomach sank when the screen came up. “Oh . . . um, unfortunately, I don’t seem to be getting a signal.”
“You know, I would stay and tend to him m’self if I could,” the woman said. “It breaks my heart to hafta leave my boy like this. You believe that, don’t you?”
There was a tinge of sadness in her voice now.
Elizabeth stared into the faceless shadow. “Well, yeah. I’m sure if you could—”
“God Almighty, how I hate to leave him. Especially . . . especially in his condition.”
The implication made Elizabeth uneasy, but the woman continued before she could ask the nature of the boy’s “condition.”
“But I got no choice, do I? I got to work to keep him fed and tended to, look after his needs and such. It’s just me and him, you see?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes. I think I understand. So is there anything . . . special I need to know?”
“Anything you need to know, you’ll find out, I s’pose.”
It wasn’t the answer Elizabeth had hoped for. She slapped a mosquito feasting on the back of her neck. The swarming insects were the only thing making her eager to get inside. “I think I can take it from here. You shouldn’t be late for work.”
“No. I surely shouldn’t.”
The woman shifted her weight, bringing her face into the glow of the lightbulb dangling from a cord in the room behind her.
Her beauty took Elizabeth aback.
She was younger than Elizabeth had expected given the maturity of her voice, probably mid-twenties. Her skin was flawless and smooth. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun, stabbed through with a pencil pocked with teeth marks. Her honey-brown eyes looked weary from too much work and too little sleep, and yet, whether she wanted them to or not, the eyes betrayed a palpable kindness. Elizabeth found it strangely disarming and couldn’t help but smile.
“What is it?” the woman asked, noticeably defensive.
“Nothing. I just . . .” She didn’t know how to answer. Her eyes fell to the charm at the woman’s neck—a tarnished W hanging from a thin silver chain. “That’s pretty,” she said, indicating the necklace. “W for Wilbur, I’m guessing. Right? He must be very special to you.”
The woman seemed flustered by the flattery. “Yes,” she said. “He is a very special child.” The door creaked open and a hand extended across the threshold. “What do they call you again?”
“Elizabeth.”
“My name’s Grace.” They shook. The woman’s skin was coarse, but her grip was delicate, feminine. “God bless you for lookin’ after my boy.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Take good care of him, won’t you? He’s all I got. I’ll be back at dawn.”
She moved past Elizabeth and stepped off the porch, trailing a scent of cheap perfume. Turning back, she brought her eyes up slowly. “You seem like a nice girl. I’d have liked to get to know you.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Well, who knows? Perhaps you will.”
“No.” The woman shook her head and her smile faded. “You won’t be back. None of them ever come back a second time.”
She turned and started off on foot into the darkness.
The scream came three hours later.
Elizabeth’s resting eyes popped open. She shot upright from the tattered sofa and stood quickly.
Too quickly—she became dizzy. The room was like an oven, stifling and airless. Sweat stung her eyes, forcing them shut again and leaving her completely disoriented.
She felt something brush against the back of her head and spun around in fright, swatting at the air.
Glass shattered.
Broken shards rained down on her.
She opened her eyes again to find herself in total darkness.
It was then that she realized she had just swatted the dangling bulb, sending the house’s only light source crashing into the ceiling.
Panic gripped her as another scream rang out of the boy’s room, louder than the first.
She ran blindly across the living room and continued past the kitchenette to the closed door at the end of the narrow hall. She fumbled for the knob, then flung open the door.
“Mama!”
Elizabeth rubbed the wall in search of a light switch. “No, Wilbur, it’s not your—”
“Help me, Mama! The creepers are comi—”
“Calm down, Wilbur, it was just a bad dream . . .”
“Come, Mama! Please!”
“I’m not your mother, Wilbur!” she called into the darkness. “I’m your babysitter. Everything’s okay, now.”
“Come! Please!”
Giving up on the search for a light switch, she made a move toward the frightened voice, but tripped on something that sent her tumbling to the floor.
“What happened?” the boy cried.
“It’s okay! I just tripped, that’s all. Are you all right?”
“I’m s-scared!” he stammered. “I wanna see you! Please, let me touch you!”
She heard his arms slapping the bed.
“I’m coming. Don’t be scared.” She managed to get to her knees. “Can you reach a lamp, Wilbur, or tell me where one is? I can’t see a thing.”
“Ain’t none.”
“You don’t have a light in your room?” she exclaimed.
“No, ma’am. No light.”
“Well, do you know where your mother keeps the spare bulbs? I seem to have broken the one in the living room.”
