by E. E. Holmes
“Some spirits just don’t know what’s good for them,” she’d said.
And so here we were, preparing for a transatlantic trip with a ghost— and self-appointed stylist—in tow. It was a little more baggage than I’d anticipated, but he made Hannah happy, and so I grudgingly put up with him.
It had been four weeks since the crossing, and though I was still heart-broken about Evan, the time had been fulfilling, too. Hannah and I were getting to know each other, and each day brought us a step closer to the bond that had been denied us for so many years.
We sat up for hours past dark every night, and talked across the narrow gap between my bed and the matching one that had been crammed into our room during the intervening days. We asked endless questions, and the answers only triggered more questions to follow. It would be a long time, I thought, before we felt like we knew enough about what had passed to move forward.
She was shy, but incredibly smart. We both had a love for books, and she had many of the same favorites that I did. She was easy to smile but slow to laugh out loud—the sound of it seemed to startle her. She was exceptionally observant, reading people even more voraciously than she read books. In many ways, it was like the years of torment hadn’t broken her. In other ways, it had.
She struggled with what could only be described as a sort of obsessive compulsive disorder. As ghosts and doctors wreaked havoc over the big things in her life, she fought for control over as many of the little things as possible. She was often unaware that she was doing it, but it seemed to help her keep her grip on things. She wouldn’t talk about the scars on her wrists when I finally mustered up the courage to ask her about them. She would only say, “It made me feel better.”
Hannah opened up little by little each night, like one of those flowers that only bloomed when the sun went down. The only topic that seemed to close those shy petals tightly again, was our mother. It seemed, as yet, a conversation she wasn’t prepared to have. I tried not to push her. There would be time for that.
“Are we all packed up, ladies?” Karen asked. She stood in our doorway looking like a kid on the way to Disney World. Hannah and I both knew why she was so excited. This nerve-wracking new chapter for us was a trip down memory lane for her. She was thrilled to be going back to Fairhaven Hall, even if it was only to get us settled.
“All set,” Hannah confirmed.
“Well, then, let’s get going! Bon Voyage!” she grinned, and grabbed the handle of Hannah’s suitcase.
We made our cumbersome procession down the stairs and out to the car. Noah was there to help as well, still a little shell-shocked from the recent obliteration of his comfortable little world.
You couldn’t blame the poor guy. He came home from work one day to the extraordinary announcement that he had inherited not one orphaned niece, but two, (surprise!) and that both of them, accompanied by his devoted wife, would be disappearing in a matter of days to attend a school halfway around the world. Other than acquiring a permanently dazed look, he was handling it fairly well.
With Noah waving after us, we pulled away from the brownstones and into the heart of the city. We would not be heading straight to the airport yet. Our first stop would be a couple of days at St. Matt’s, where I had a paper to turn in, two exams to take, and a lot of explaining and good-byes to take care of. It wouldn’t be easy, but saying goodbye was apparently going to become a specialty of mine. I’d better start practicing.
As we left the city behind us, Hannah, with that uncanny perceptiveness I was just starting to get used to, seemed to sense my thoughts. She reached over and squeezed my hand. We didn’t look at each other; we didn’t have to. We looked instead at the life, at the world, ahead of us. A world beyond the only one we’d ever known had existed. A new home a world away from where we’d been. We had a lot of exploring to do, but from now on, we would do it together.
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Sample Chapter from
SPIRIT PROPHECY
-BOOK 2 OF THE GATEWAY TRILOGY-
BREATHE IN. BREATHE OUT. BREATHE IN. BREATHE OUT. Now repeat to yourself: We are not going to die. We are not going to die. People did this every day. So what if it seemed to defy all logic and the natural order of where and how human beings were supposed to exist? So what if the only things keeping us dangling thousands of feet above the open ocean were the sketchy and, in my opinion, totally unreliable laws of physics? Do you know what I remembered from physics? Gravity. That inescapable force that would send us plummeting to a watery grave at any moment.
“Barf bag?”
I unclenched my face enough to open one eye. Milo was grinning at me from the aisle seat. “No, thank you.” “Are you sure? It looks like your airplane food may have purchased a round trip ticket.”
I considered hitting him, but that would have required releasing my white-knuckled grip from my armrest. It also would have been completely pointless.
“I’m fine. Besides, if I throw up, I fully intend to aim for you.”
“Empty threats, darling.”
Damn it, he was right. Someone as annoying as Milo had no right to be dead. It seriously depleted my options for revenge, physical violence being my first choice. My twin sister Hannah leaned across me, placing a gentle hand on my arm. “Milo, be nice, please.” “Come on, Hannah, let’s not set him up to fail. Give him an easier one.”
Hannah tried to scowl at me, but smiled instead. “Milo, can’t you find something else to do other than bother Jess? I think I saw a woman up in first class reading the new Vogue.”
“Ooh, Vogue? See you later, sweetness.” Milo winked, and shimmered out of view.
“Yeah, go haunt someone else for a while,” I mumbled, fighting a wave of nausea.
“Just take some deep breaths, Jess. We’ll be there soon, don’t worry,” Hannah soothed.
Her words did little to ease my tension. What I was heading towards was just as stressful as how I was getting there. I felt like someone had hijacked my life.
I was supposed to be a regular college student, testing my maturity level with some hard-earned freedom and spending school vacations with my loving, if somewhat disastrous, mother. Instead, my mother was dead, and I was flying across the ocean with a twin sister I never knew I had, to develop a newly discovered talent for seeing ghosts everywhere I went. I knew the first year of college was supposed to be full of change and new experiences, but come on, how much change could one person take?
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself somewhere, anywhere, else. My thoughts wandered back to my goodbyes at St. Matt’s the day before.
§
Pierce’s office door was open, revealing the familiar jumbled disaster of papers, ashtrays, and used coffee mugs. He was encased in an enormous pair of headphones and crouched over a legal pad, writing feverishly. His face was a masterclass in concentration. If this hadn’t been my only chance to say goodbye, I wouldn’t have disturbed him. But it was now or never, so I knocked on the door frame.
He looked up, startled, and his face broke into a grin. He yanked off his headphones. “You’re alive!”
“No thanks to you.”
“Hey, don’t look at me. Crazy shit like that didn’t happen on my investigations until you showed up.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, I had to uphold my reputation as ‘ghost girl.’”
Pierce’s smile shriveled a bit. He gestured to his leather chair. “So, you really are okay?”
I sat. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
Pierce looked me in the eyes, as though searching for a hint of the otherness he’d seen there the night he found me in the bathroom. Then he sighed and flopped back in his chair. “I�
�m so sorry, Ballard. I had no idea anything like that was going to go down. I never would have suggested it if I thought—”
I held up a hand to silence him. “Don’t. Please don’t blame yourself. No one could have predicted what happened in there. I don’t even think the ghost knew what was happening. I’m okay now, really.”
Pierce still looked slightly miserable. I tried to distract him.
“What are you listening to?”
“Your parapsychology homework,” he said, plucking a little silver voice recorder off of his desk. I recognized it at once as the one he’d given me to record EVPs while I slept. I’d forgotten all about it.
“So, did it catch anything spooky?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light.
“Spooky, Ballard, is the freaking understatement of the century,” Pierce said. He pressed the “play” button.
At first I heard nothing but the innocent noises of sleep; a little tossing and turning, a bit of deep breathing. Then, a whispering began, soft enough that it could have been dismissed as the breeze or the rustling of a sheet. But then a second whispering joined in, and then a third, and the vague swishing began to resolve itself into sounds and words.
“Take her! What are you waiting for?”
“Something’s wrong.”
“I can feel it, she’s the one.”
More voices split and echoed from the first.
“She pulls me. She draws me.”
“She is incomplete. There is no light here.”
“Wake her! Enter her! We must get through.”
Pierce stopped the tape. Our eyes met across his desk. “That goes on for about six hours,” he said.
It took me a few moments to make sure I could suppress the tremors in my voice.
“Right. So, as far as homework goes…”
“I’d say you passed.” He looked down at the recorder like it was his first-born child and then slid it across the desk to me. “Here.”
“I don’t want it!” I cried, then collected myself. “I mean, I’m not going to listen to any more of that, so you can just keep it.”
“No, actually, I don’t think I can,” Pierce said grimly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, someone has made it abundantly clear that I’m not supposed to keep any evidence related to you.” He waved a hand toward a large box perched on the radiator. It was full of cassette tapes, CDs, video tapes, and memory cards. “That’s every piece of video and audio captured from our investigation. And every single one of them is blank.”
“Blank?”
“Wiped clean. Someone broke into my office while we were at the hospital. The only reason they missed this recorder is because I still had it in my pocket. They did a very neat job of it, too. Dan’s spent hours trying to retrieve the files, but it’s no use. Iggy’s in a state of depression, and I think Oscar may never recover.” The corner of his mouth twitched into a sad little smile. He looked like he was the one who might not recover.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Karen had told me the Durupinen had been protecting their secrets for centuries, that they had complex systems and methods for doing so. If we’d been willing to wait, Finvarra could have arranged Hannah’s release from New Beginnings using her own mysterious connections. Pierce’s video and audio evidence of my abilities was exactly the kind of thing they would go out of their way to destroy. I imagined Lucida scaling the side of Wiltshire Hall and slipping into Pierce’s office, like some kind of Bond girl super-spy. I almost laughed until I realized how plausible that scenario actually was.
I took the voice recorder from Pierce’s desk. I’d have to choose my words carefully to protect him. “I’m really sorry that I can’t tell you what’s going on. If anyone deserves to know the truth, it’s you. You believed me when almost no one else did. You did so much to help me, and I’ll never, ever forget that.”
He nodded. “I had a feeling we’d be having a conversation rather like this. Are you leaving?”
“Yeah, for a while. ‘Study abroad program,’” I said with air quotes.
“Do you know how long?”
“Two years. Karen promised I could come back and finish my senior year here at St. Matt’s.”
“And I’m guessing that joining in on ghost hunts will not be on your list of approved activities when you get back?”
I shook my head sadly.
“Well, I would have kicked myself if I didn’t at least ask.” Pierce stood up and shuffled through the mess to his ancient coffee maker. “Want a hit?”
“You know me. Can’t resist caffeine,” I smiled.
Pierce turned his back on me to doctor up my coffee, but kept talking. “I guess I’ve always been a bit of a glutton for punishment. Stubborn as hell, y’know? Whenever someone told me I couldn’t do something, I’d turn right around and do it, just as a ‘fuck you.’ That attitude followed me right into academia. The world said parapsychology wasn’t legitimate science, so of course, I studied it. But it wasn’t just that. I really believed in it. That’s why I knew I had to help you; I recognized another kid scared shitless by stuff she couldn’t explain.”
I took the chipped mug from him and cradled it in my hands. “So, you had your own experience when you were younger?”
“Sure did. When I was just a kid, my older brother Teddy came home from Vietnam the night of my eighth birthday. He woke me up just after midnight to wish me a happy birthday, still in his uniform. I was so happy to see him I didn’t even stop to wonder why he still had his helmet on and an M16 assault rifle slung across him. We talked for hours, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, and fell asleep. When I got up in the morning, I ran downstairs to have breakfast with him, and my mother told me I must have been dreaming; he hadn’t come home. I didn’t believe her; I searched the whole house, wouldn’t let it go for days. Then about a week later, the uniformed officer showed up and destroyed my mother with three sharp knocks on our battered screen door.”
I was speechless. I’d felt like I knew Pierce pretty well, but for all I’d confided in him, I knew almost nothing about his personal life. Finally I choked out, “I’m so sorry.”
Pierce drained his own mug. “No one was going to tell me ghosts weren’t real after that. But naturally, being me, I made it my mission to study the most mysterious, most elusive subject in all of ghostlore: the Durupinen.” He winked at me and grinned. “You realize that sharing a cup of coffee with you is like going for a swim with the Loch Ness monster.”
I snorted. “You sure know how to flatter a girl.”
“Well, there’s something I’ve heard exactly three times in my life, and only two of them were sarcastic,” he replied.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“If I could tell you everything, I would,” I said.
“Can you at least tell me if you’ll be okay now? What happened to you in the library, that’s not going to happen to you anymore, is it?” There was a fatherly concern etched into his face.
“No, I’ll be okay now. They’ll help me.”
“Good. That’s good.”
We chatted a bit longer while I sipped my coffee. Pierce showed me the syllabus he was working on for the fall semester. Due to the popularity of the parapsychology course, the college had added another level. Pierce lit up like a campfire as he described the course content. His arms flailed wildly as he gesticulated, knocking files to the floor in coffee-ringed avalanches. As I watched him, some terrible knot inside me loosened; Pierce was going to be just fine, too.
Half an hour later, I stood to leave.
“You sure you can’t initiate me and tell me all your mystical secrets?” Pierce asked. “I promise I won’t tell anyone except the entire scientific community, and maybe a few geeks who read academic publications.”
I just smiled. “I’ll see you, Pierce.”
“Don’t be a stranger, eh? Keep in touch.”
“You got it. I’ll send you lots of letters with
blacked out names and details,” I said. I couldn’t find anywhere to put my mug down that looked safe, so I handed it to him instead. “Say thank you to the guys for me, okay? And Annabelle, too.”
“Are you going somewhere, Jessica?”
I spun to see Neil Caddigan hovering in the doorway. As was his general style, I had neither seen nor heard him approach, and therefore jumped in surprise at the sight of him.
“Neil, hey. Sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”
“It is I who ought to apologize. Am I intruding? I can come back, David. I just wanted a quick word,” Neil said with a polite little bow. His gaze never left my face; I’d never seen eyes so blanched of color.
“No, I was just leaving,” I said, suddenly glad he’d appeared to shape this odd moment of goodbye for us. “Goodbye, Pierce. Thanks for everything.”
“See you around, Ballard. Take care of yourself.”
He thrust out a hand and I shook it. Then I turned and brushed past Neil. I could feel his eyes burrowing into me all the way down the hallway. For one strange moment I wanted to turn around and run back to Pierce’s office. There was something incredibly important I hadn’t said to him. But since I couldn’t put into words what that something was, I just kept walking.
About the Author
E.E. Holmes is a writer, teacher, and actor living near Boston, MA with her husband, two children, and a small, but surprisingly loud dog. When not writing, she enjoys performing, watching unhealthy amounts of British television, and reading with her daughter. She has written several one-act plays, but Spirit Legacy is her first novel.
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