The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  During lunch, she said Mike was a nicer person than she remembered.

  Deborah knocked on the kitchen door while we were eating brownies. She was thin, like Roger, but her hair was dark. She wore gray slacks and a darker gray jacket, and she carried a big purse. She looked like someone who didn’t know how to relax.

  Mom let her in without asking too many questions and gave her some brownies, but then Mom said to me, “Deborah’s your friend Roger’s sister? How old is Roger?”

  I glanced at Roger. “Twenty-three,” he said, and I repeated it.

  “Jack, where did you meet him?” Dad asked.

  If they only knew how stupid it was to worry about stranger danger now. I heaved a sigh. “I met him yesterday by the Seven-Eleven. He’s been dead since Monday.”

  “Oh, Jack,” Mom said, “not again.”

  I knew she’d say that.

  “If you’re starting up that dead stuff again, I’m leaving,” Mike said, which was different from what he said when we were at summer camp telling ghost stories around a campfire. Maybe it took burnt marshmallows to make it okay.

  Deborah took a notebook and a pen out of her purse. “Can you tell me what kind of memorial service Roger wants?”

  I glanced at Roger. I was getting used to the red stain on his shirt. It almost looked like a flower to me now. “I’d like if she’d get the album out of the cupboard under Mom’s TV,” he said, “and find the pictures of when we were little, before Deb told me she’d never speak to me again. If she could look at those, and maybe light a candle, that would be good.”

  I repeated all that. When I got to the part about her never speaking to him again, she covered her eyes with her hands and asked me to stop. In a little while, she let me finish. Mom and Dad stared at me. Mike stood up, but he didn’t leave.

  “Does he have friends he wants at the service?” Deborah asked.

  “That is so sweet,” Roger said. “There are three people who might care. Can you write down their names and phone numbers for me?”

  I got a pad of paper and a pencil, wrote down what he said, and handed the paper to his sister. “Did you see your mom yet?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “She’s okay?”

  “She’s not okay, but she’s being taken care of,” she said.

  “Could you take me to see her? Roger did this thing where he’s—” I looked at my parents and Mike. I didn’t want to say this in front of them, but I couldn’t think of a way to talk to Deborah alone. “He’s with me. I don’t think he can get there on his own.”

  “Would that be okay, Mrs. Wronski?” Deborah asked.

  “None of this is okay,” said Mom.

  “Do you really believe the fantasies of a child?” Dad said.

  “How did he know my childhood nickname? How does he know—” She stared down at her hands, one of which clutched the piece of paper I had given her. “About our photo album? I do believe.”

  “Jack,” said Dad.

  I stood up, my ghosts at my back, and studied my father. There were so many things I didn’t understand, things I ran into every day. Shades I saw but mostly didn’t hear, shades who didn’t notice me, and now two ghosts who lived with me. Dream monsters who left real-world bruises.

  I didn’t know what had connected me to Roger and Mrs. Jernigan, or whether I’d ever be able to get rid of them. They were closer to me than my parents now. I turned to them. Mrs. Jernigan no longer looked quite so mean, and Roger smiled at me, tired, but maybe happy that his sister was helping him do what he wanted.

  I felt like they cared about me.

  Mom was fed up with my ghosts. Dad thought I was making it all up. Mike, my best friend since kindergarten, kept saying he’d leave.

  “What can I tell you?” I asked my father.

  “You didn’t grow out of this—this—” He waved his hand as though shooing away flies.

  That so didn’t work with ghosts. It just made your hand cold if you brushed it through them.

  “No,” I said. “They’re still around, but I learned not to talk about them. This is different.”

  “You’re not taking my son anywhere without me,” Mom said to Deborah.

  “Fine by me,” said Deborah.

  Mrs. Jernigan got me my third ghost on the way to the nursing home.

  Dad was driving. Mom was in the front passenger seat. Deborah sat next to me in the back seat, and Roger was curled up in the cargo space behind me. Mike had finally gone home, though he didn’t seem to want to by the time he left.

  We were passing a big stone church with a square tower. It looked like a castle, kind of a mean one. I noticed a man and a girl on the front stairs, but I didn’t see what they were doing.

  Mrs. Jernigan, who was sitting halfway out the door next to me, stretched away from me, flying like a witch, except she had no broom. She grabbed the girl from the man. The man howled and grew three times his size and came screaming after Mrs. Jernigan, but she tripled in size, too, and smote him. I mean, her arm turned into a giant wooden-looking club, and she whacked him up the side of the head. He roared in pain and flew away like a popped balloon, deflating as he went.

  “Whoa,” said Roger, “how’d she do that?”

  She snapped back to me like she was attached by a bungee cord, the girl still in her embrace. A new spot above my right shoulder blade froze. There was that smack-suck feeling, and I knew someone else was part of me.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  “Stop what?” asked Deborah.

  “I was talking to someone else,” I said. “Stop putting more people on me.”

  “You didn’t see what he was doing to her,” Mrs. Jernigan said. “With us, these things can go on forever. She might never get away.”

  I knew the feeling.

  The girl was behind me, in the cargo space of the station wagon with Roger, I guessed. I didn’t know how much space ghosts actually needed. Mrs. Jernigan was half in and half out of the car again, her face on my side of the window, at least, which made it easier for me to hear her. So she didn’t need to take up much room, but she seemed attached to the shape she wore, except when she changed into a monster, or got bigger, or both.

  “Forever,” I said.

  “You give us the chance to change,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  Mom turned around in the front seat and stared at me. “Is this how you’re going to be now, Jack? Talking to yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Jernigan said, “Let’s see how it goes with Roger’s mother.”

  “Did Roger tell you who killed him?” Deborah asked.

  “No,” I said. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the shooting, really, except what he told me to say on the phone.

  “Ask him if he’d know the shooter if he saw them again. Someone should pay,” said Deborah.

  “It was an accident,” Roger said, and I repeated it.

  “It’s never an accident when someone brings a loaded gun somewhere,” said Dad. “I didn’t get the whole story. Did this happen during a robbery?”

  Roger and I said yes.

  “Don’t you want justice?” asked Deborah. “Don’t you want to make sure the killer doesn’t kill anyone else?”

  “I have no focus there,” Roger said.

  I didn’t understand that. I glanced back at him with my eyebrows up, and he said, “I just don’t care about that.”

  I repeated it.

  “Turn here.” Deborah pointed, and Dad turned between tall green hedges into a driveway that crossed lawn and went between trees. It took us to a big pale green building that looked kind of like a school, with a big front entrance covered by a porch roof with white columns, but all the windows had grilles over them. A small sign said GREEN HAVEN REST HOME by the steps leading up to the front door. We parked in a slot marked VISITOR and got out of the car.

  Deborah led us into the building.

  I hadn’t even gotten a good look at
my new ghost. She hadn’t made a sound yet. Roger and Mrs. Jernigan walked beside me. The new passenger followed.

  An older woman with big puffy hair an unlikely color of reddish brown sat behind a desk that faced a small waiting room full of overstuffed furniture, dusty plants, and paintings of little kids in long-ago clothes. The air smelled like air freshener, one of those ones that pretends to be a forest but smells more like chemicals. “May I help you?” asked the woman, and then, “Oh, it’s you again, Deborah. Did you want to see your mother again?”

  “Yes, please. Is she allowed this many visitors?”

  “Of course,” said the woman. She stood. She was wearing a green-and-brown striped business suit. “Hello. I’m Jackie. There’s the door into the home.” It was in an alcove. She pointed to a sign on the wall with numbers on it, near a touchpad with buttons. “If you could memorize the door code, it will let you out from the other side as well, or if you forget, ask one of the attendants. Just don’t tell the residents, all right?”

  “Fine,” said Deborah. She pressed buttons on the keypad. A buzzer sounded and she pulled the door open. We followed her through and she closed it behind her. I looked back. The door had a ledge on it, covered with fake plants. The ledge ran along the wall on both sides of the door so it almost looked like the door wasn’t there, except there was another keypad on this side.

  Mom and Dad and I followed Deborah down a green carpeted hall to the right. There were a few scattered armchairs along the right wall with old people sitting in them, and doors opening off the hall with nameplates on them. Some of the doors were half-open. I saw hospital beds and houseplants, framed photographs, a few frail, white-haired people in bed watching little TVs. The smell was Lysol and pee.

  There were shades everywhere.

  Some of them were in bed with the living people. Some sat in chairs, half in and half out of the old men and ladies. Some drifted up the hall ahead of us or passed through us going the other way. They barely raised a chill in me, and most of them were pretty faded.

  Deborah stopped at a door that had a handwritten sign taped to it: HESTER McFARLANE. She knocked and walked in. We followed.

  “Mom?” Roger said, rushing to the bed.

  That was when things got really weird.

  The woman in the bed was holding some paper napkins. She had torn them in half, and in half again. She stacked the ragged-edged pieces on top of each other, scattered them, and stacked them. She stared at the pieces in her lap.

  “Mom,” said Deborah. The woman didn’t look up.

  The shade sitting beside her did, though. A colored shade who looked a lot like the live woman. She smiled. She didn’t look as old as her living twin, and her smile was really nice. “Debbie? Roger!” she cried.

  “Mom?” said Roger.

  “Oh, Roger,” she said. “What happened to you?” She stared at the stain on his chest.

  “Mom? What happened to you?” Roger asked.

  The shade stood up. She gazed down at the woman playing with little squares of paper and smiled, patted the woman’s curly white hair. “I got old, sweetie.” She glanced at him. A tear ran down her cheek. “I guess that’s not going to happen to you. I’m so sorry, Roger.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He put his hand on her cheek, and she leaned into it and gave him a sideways smile.

  “One way and another,” she said.

  Deborah walked right through both of them and gently stroked the older woman’s shoulder. “Mom?” she said.

  The living woman peered up and smiled. Her eyes looked fuzzy and out of focus. “Is it wisteria?” she asked. “They keep putting the limo in a brown package. I don’t like that.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Deborah gripped her shoulder and started to cry. Her shoulders shook, but she didn’t make much noise.

  “There’s not a lot of me left in there,” said the shadow mother. “Things are unraveling.” She kissed Roger on the cheek. “Thank you for taking such good care of me. I’ll be all right. You go on ahead, now, sweetie. I’ll catch up.”

  Roger hugged her and looked back at me. “Thanks, Jack.” He twisted and spun from a person-looking ghost into streaks of woven light, and then he vanished.

  Warmth stroked up my spine.

  “Did something—I almost felt—What happened, Jack?” Deborah asked.

  I swallowed. My throat felt thick. “Roger left.”

  “Tell Pidge I can stay here,” said the shadow mother. “The nurses are nice.”

  I opened and closed my hands, clenched them into fists so tight it hurt.

  Mom put her hand on my shoulder. “Jack, are you all right?” she asked.

  I swallowed again, and said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Tell the girl, Jack,” said Mrs. Jernigan. She patted my other shoulder.

  I opened my hands and stared down at them. I had little fingernail crescent marks in my palms, but they faded fast. My stomach was churning. I was thinking: Mrs. Jernigan was right. Things could change.

  If I told Deborah what her mom said—

  Hell. I was already a freak.

  I stared at the carpet. It was pondwater green, with a few splotchy stains here and there. “Your mom says she can stay here. The nurses are nice,” I muttered.

  “But Jack,” said Mom. “How could you know—She’s not—“

  Deborah slowly lowered herself to sit on the bed next to her mom. She took her mom’s hand, scattering the torn pieces of napkin. Her mom moaned, slipped her hand out of Deborah’s, and gathered up the napkin scraps.

  “Jack,” Deborah whispered.

  The shadow mother knelt beside Deborah. “Tell her she doesn’t have to hold on to the beads now that the string has broken,” she said. “Nobody could keep track of them all.”

  I cleared my throat and said that, and Deborah burst into noisy sobs and ran out of the room.

  There was a kind of crushing in my chest. I had trouble getting breath.

  “Jack, what the hell are you talking about?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know,” I wheezed.

  “Straighten up, Jack.” Mrs. Jernigan whacked me on the back.

  I stumbled, stared over my shoulder at her. How had she done that?

  “Shoulders back, chest out. Think calming thoughts.” Her brown dress and sweater and shoes looked yellower, and her hair was loose again, swirling around her head. “Upsy daisy.” She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up straight, and darned if I didn’t start breathing easier, even though her fingers were freezing. “You did a fine job.”

  “But—” I pointed toward the door where Deborah had disappeared.

  “She’ll be all right,” said Deborah’s shadow mom. The live mom was crooning and playing with the paper scraps again. The shadow mom sat beside her, smiling.

  I looked up at my mom. “Can we go home now?”

  “You’re ready for that?” Mom asked.

  I nodded. She hugged me tight, and I let her. It felt good.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. McFarlane,” Mom said. The live woman on the bed didn’t respond. The shadow woman smiled and waved.

  Dad put his arm around Mom, Mom put her arm around me, and we all left.

  Deborah was sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside. She followed us to the car and climbed into the back seat next to me without saying anything. Mrs. Jernigan sat in the cargo space and spoke softly to my third ghost, whom I still hadn’t seen. I leaned back and fell asleep.

  Amy was home from the movies when we pulled into the driveway. She ran outside to meet us, waving Mom’s note as we climbed out of the car. “What were you doing at a nursing home?” She quieted when she noticed Deborah. “Sorry. Didn’t know we had company.”

  Deborah ignored her. “It was when I was a little kid,” she said to me. “Mom had this long necklace of beautiful green beads. Sometimes she let me wear it. One day the string broke because I pulled too hard, and the beads fell all over the floor, and I couldn’t catch them. They bounced and rolled. I couldn’
t—I couldn’t fix it. She said it was okay.” She fiddled with a zipper on her purse, and said, “I’ll call you and let you know about Roger’s memorial service, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She kissed me on the ear, ran to her car, and drove away.

  “What a day,” said Dad.

  “What happened? What happened? What happened?” Amy yelled, dancing around us.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.” I did an end run around my sister and rushed upstairs. I didn’t want to be around when Amy found out I was talking to ghosts again. She was still bigger than me and packed quite a punch.

  And anyway, I had to find out what my new ghost looked like.

  “This is Christie,” Mrs. Jernigan told me. I stared in the mirror at the pale girl behind me. She was wearing a light blue dress and blue shoes that looked like ballet slippers. She had large dark eyes, long, wavy brown hair, and shadowy finger marks around her neck. She tilted her head and smiled at me.

  I swallowed. I was never going to drink anything again. How could I pee with Christie around?

  “We had time to talk while you slept in the car,” Mrs. Jernigan said. “She needs a different kind of help, the kind you can only give in dreams.”

  I fingered the bruises on my upper arms and shivered.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come with you,” said Mrs. Jernigan. “There are things I can teach you.”

  “Like where to find a battle-ax?”

  “Lesson one,” she said.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Art copyright (C) 2011 by Goni Montes

  Novels

  A Red Heart of Memories:

  A Red Heart of Memories (1999)

  Past the Size of Dreaming (2001)

  A Stir of Bones (2003)

  Magic Next Door:

  Thresholds (2010)

  Meeting (2011)

  Fear Street:

  Body Switchers from Outer Space (1996, with R. L. Stine)

  Why I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts (1997, with R. L. Stine)