Reveal
By Brina Courtney
Copyright 2011 Brina Courtney
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Cover art by SMReine, Trevor Scheitrum
Model Allison Braucher
Editor Amber Halsted
For everyone who ever thought they were different.
Cryptids
The human cell is something to be admired. It adapts to survive in the most unusual circumstances. Splicing occurs when you mix animal cells with human cells, which results in what some scientists call a parahuman, a type of cryptid. A cryptid can be described as a paranormal being with some animal-like traits. This is the story of one of those creatures.
Chapter 1
“Shay,” my mom calls to me from downstairs and from her tone, I know I’m late. I take one last look in the curved iron mirror that hangs on my bedroom wall. My jet black hair falls in my eyes as I check my red lipstick that makes my thin lips look full and plump.
“Looks good,” I say aloud, to no one in particular. I pick up my book bag and practically fly down the stairs, grab a bagel from the kitchen and run to the door.
With my hand on the doorknob I realize that my mom is yelling something about coming home right after practice. I turn back to pop my head into the living room to see her sitting in our black armchair reading the Marksville Gazette, our local newspaper. I can smell the coffee she must have in her hand hidden behind the paper.
“No problem.” I say with a quick smile, she lowers to newspaper and smiles back.
“Have a good day, darling.”
I know she’s worried about me. I know that because it’s not normal for an eighteen year old senior to be hanging out in graveyards. And it’s certainly not normal for this same girl to be talking to ghosts. Obviously my mom doesn’t know about the second part, the whole talking to ghosts part, she’d probably have me committed if she knew.
My mom does the single parent thing fairly well and it’s not my business to shake that up. I’m well fed and clothed; I live in a beautiful house close to the lake and I’ve never wanted for much, except a father - which is not something she can order out of one of her fancy catalogs.
God bless her, Mom has tried to date. There was the dentist. He was nice. He had a comb over and lived in a huge house, dentist’s salary and all that. They dated for a while… until he asked Mom to drive him home after dinner one night. Turns out he used his gas machine at his office the day before and got himself a DUI on his way home. Really sweet guy, huh?
And then there was the ex-football player. My brother Chad adored him. Too bad his IQ was in the toilet, along with his career. My mom is a college professor so that really didn’t add up.
Lastly there was the firefighter. He was hot, no pun intended. But when my mom found out he was in a firefighter calendar called Hold the Hose, she stopped taking his calls. I, on the other hand, purchased the calendar immediately. Mr. October is still hiding under my mattress. Yum, yum.
Sometimes I miss my dad and I know my mom does too. Some nights I sit on one of the Adirondack chairs on the wraparound porch with my coffee and look at the stars. She joins me and I know we’re both thinking the same thing, where is he?
My dad disappeared when I was six. Chad was just a toddler at the time so he doesn’t remember anything. To be honest, I don’t remember much either, just my dad not coming home from work one summer night. I remember it was summer because I had been swimming all day, without floaties, and Mom said I could wait up to tell Dad about it. That’s the night I started talking to ghosts and I have ever since.
When my dad didn’t come home and Mom forced me to go to bed, I started wondering out loud as six year olds usually do, where is he, why did he leave? All normal questions a scared daughter would ask when her dad goes missing. Even then I don’t think I ever expected a response.
But a response was what I got and it was a crappy one: “I don’t know,” came a small voice from a dark corner of my bedroom.
I looked up from my tear stained pillow to see a small boy, about my age, staring at me.
“I don’t know,” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
I sat up in bed and let my anger surge through me. “Boys are not allowed girls’ rooms!” I yelled, in the same annoying tone my grandmother used. “Get out!”
“Stop yelling,” he said in a hushed whisper, “your mama will hear you.”
“Well she should. You’re a boy and I don’t know you and you’re in MY ROOM!”
With that, my mom threw open my bedroom door and as the light flooded in, I proceeded to explain my six year old’s tale of the little boy in my room. My mom said I was just having a bad dream and wanted to know if I wanted to sleep with her that night. I told her that was for babies and I was in first grade, so no thank you, I would be fine, again sounding just like Grandmother Rose.
The minute she left, the boy reappeared much closer to my bed this time, and reminded me, “I knew your mama wouldn’t believe you. I told you to be quiet.” All that I could do was look at him and take in his scrawny appearance.
Jeremy was also six years old then, the same age he was when he died over seventy years ago. Jeremy had been left in Marksville, Virginia when his parents couldn’t afford to keep him. The Great Depression had been hard on the family and when they decided to move out West to be part of the Work Project Administration, they knew Jeremy wouldn’t survive the trip. They would be walking and riding the railroad most of the way to the job site and it was not a place for a three year old boy. So Jeremy had been dropped off at the local Marksville Home for Children, one of the largest orphanages in rural eastern Virginia. That same orphanage burned down only three years after Jeremy had been sent there to live. Nobody really knows the origin of the fire or much about what happened that night, only that no one survived. Thirteen children and their caregiver perished that summer night in 1942.
Jeremy and I were thick as thieves. He was the only one that understood my gift, my talent, my curse, my… whatever it is. We spent every day together playing and laughing. Mostly, though, Jeremy scared other ghosts away.
It wasn’t that these other ghosts didn’t try to visit me and a couple times even make contact, but whenever Jeremy was around, they seemed to keep their distance. When the ghosts did visit it was never for long and they never asked me for anything. They would ask questions: What year was it? Who was I? Why could I see them?
It was the same story each time one approached me. I got used to it.
The only ones I couldn’t deal with were the children. They just make me feel so sad. Jeremy said children stayed ghosts because they had jobs to do here on earth. He wouldn’t tell me what those jobs were and it always worried me. Was someone looking out for them, keeping them safe and away from the evils of our world?
The children never approached me. Sometimes they’d smile from afar and then beckon Jeremy over to chat with him, always out of earshot. I sometimes think children are the smartest ghosts.
Throughout the years Jeremy grew up with me. Ghosts can change their appearances, so as I turned seven and then eight, so did Jeremy. At thirteen, when I got pimples, his face remained beautifully smooth but aged nonetheless.
It was when I was fifteen that Jeremy stopped visiting me. And it was because I’d pushed him too far.
It was a
bitterly cold winter day. I was sitting on my bright purple bedspread. Jeremy was standing, watching TV in the front of my bedroom. We had since gotten past the “No Boys Allowed” rule. Since Jeremy’s life began and ended before television had arrived to change the world, he was fascinated by it. Jeremy always had me turn the TV on for him; he really liked The History Channel. It was important to him to know what was going on in the world and what had transpired since his demise years earlier.
Jeremy had been traveling before he met me. He never told me why or what he had done, just that he had “tasks.” Nor did he ever tell me who had assigned him his chores.
I would often lie in bed at night wondering what his tasks might be. He would occasionally leave me for weeks at a time to go on these trips and when he abruptly returned, he would pick up with our friendship just where we had left off. He had just returned from one of his excursions (missing my winter formal and my perfect sparkly blue dress) on that wintry day.
It was the first time I had seen him in about two weeks. He was wearing trendy clothes for our time, jeans with a striped button up shirt.
The argument started the way it always did, “Jeremy, can you do something for me?”
“No.”
“Oh come on, just this once?”
I had pleaded with Jeremy at least once a month since I was about thirteen to look for my father, but he wouldn’t even consider it. I got the same answer each time, a simple no. He couldn’t. But I knew the real answer -- he wouldn’t.
Jeremy was scared. He had told me this, but this was all he had told me. Maybe he was scared of what he would find. Maybe of what he wouldn’t.
I pleaded with him. “If my father is dead I think I have the right to know.”
Another simple answer from Jeremy. “Then you would.”
I started to get annoyed. I was already mad he missed my formal and now this. I didn’t want to argue anymore. I just wanted him to say yes.
“Don’t you ever go looking for your parents?” I asked, knowing I might be digging a hole that I couldn’t get out of and really didn’t want to, but I continued. “They’ve got to be dead by now. Don’t you ever go searching for them, or are you just mad they left you here?”
I knew the sore spot I’d created was now getting bigger – time to shut up, Shay. Shut up.
He still didn’t react, which downright pissed me off. I shouted at the top of my lungs, “At least my father wanted me!”
I knew this was the final blow. I shouldn’t have said it then and even today it hurts me to think about it. He looked at me, wounded, and for the first time in years I had known him, I saw in his eyes the scared little six year old boy from my bedroom corner who told me not to tell my mama about him.
“They did love me and they did want me. That’s why they left me! You forget I’ve had more than seventy years to think about this. You don’t know what it was like back then. No food, no shelter. You live in this huge house with everything you could ask for, so you can’t know what I went through. I don’t go looking for them because there’s nothing to find. They had no unfinished business here on earth. They went where they were supposed to go and it’s not my job to find them or anyone else!”
He stood, fuming, breathing in and out the heavy air of anger, and staring me down. The six year old gone and a much older anger inhabiting his eyes.
Instead of backing off, as I should have, I let my emotions get the best of me. ”Well then, you go. You obviously have more important things to do then to sit around here listening to me moan about my missing dad.”
Jeremy moved forward to apologize but I turned away, yet another stupid move on my part. “I don’t want you here anymore, so LEAVE!”
With that, he’d gone. He just vanished into thin air. I stood there thinking how I wanted him to come back, but it was too late, he was gone.
For months I didn’t even say his name, too angry that he left, too ashamed that I’d turned him away, too hurt to admit to myself that he was my best friend and I missed him.
If I had only known then, what I know now, I never would have let him go.
Chapter 2
I arrive to school just in time, slamming the door on my red Honda Civic as I race to calculus. My boot heels making a clicking noise that echoes off the white walls as I run to class. I slide into my cold hard seat just as the bell rings.
We don’t have homeroom at Marksville High. Our first class is our homeroom, part of that teaching bell to bell thing I’ve heard about on the news.
I only take four classes now, so I don’t really mind not having the social time. Besides, I only have a few friends here, mainly my best friend Olivia McEwyen.
Liv is one of those pretty girls who don’t know they’re pretty. She has the most beautiful green eyes and curly red hair. Her dad is Irish so that’s where she gets her looks. Her parents own a cute little antique shop in town. It’s where I spend most of my time, partly because of Olivia, partly because I work there.
As I sit in calculus I think about some of the neatest things I’ve found in that shop and things that have happened to me there. Once somebody brought in a coffin to sell, which was surrounded by countless ghosts. I convinced the McEwyens not to buy it, gave them some crap about bad mojo, but the truth was that all the ghost talk surrounding it was giving me a headache. Can’t say I wasn’t happy to see that thing go back into the truck it came out of and drive away with all of its previous owners.
However, other things in the shop are breathtaking and beautiful. The locket I wear daily was a Christmas gift from my employers. I’d been eyeing it for weeks and they knew on the money I made there that I couldn’t afford it. Besides, I was saving up for new running sneakers for track. So on Christmas Eve, when I closed the store, they had left the locket in with my paycheck and said it was a “Christmas Bonus.”
I was so glad to get it I didn’t even argue. Usually I wouldn’t take such a lavish gift, but this was special. Ever since Jeremy left I wanted something to remember him by and this locket was found in the old burned down orphanage. I felt like I finally had a piece of him.
A group of arson specialists had done research in the orphanage studying how the fire had been started. They wanted to use the place for a museum and the people of Marksville wanted to know if it would ever be a safe structure to use. They were the ones who found it. I’m surprised they found anything -- vandals and other idiots would have picked over anything even slightly valuable years ago. Somehow they had missed the locket, this beautifully delicate silver locket with two angel wings engraved into it. The locket that was twisting between my fingers as Mrs. Snickle called on me.
“Shay, do you know the answer to number three? Shay?”
“Ummm… yeah it’s, hold on I have it here… somewhere.” I rifle through my papers at lightning speed but that isn’t enough for Mrs. Snickle. Not today, at least.
“Miss Tafford I hate to remind you that being prepared for class, or not, is considered in your grade. Please consider yourself warned.”
She turned back to the board and began writing the answer to number three in her favorite shade of whiteboard marker, purple.
Bitch, I thought. I’m always prepared for class, usually giving most of the answers. I’m allowed to have an off day now and again. To be honest since I found out I’d be going to James Madison in the fall, I’ve had more off days than on. But I’m a senior, I take all honors classes, and it is spring. What do you want me to do? Senioritis had kicked in the second I got that acceptance letter. Snickle should be glad I even show up and with my homework, thank you very much.
When the bell rings I grab my things and pull out my phone. I have to conceal it from Snickle, she likes to take phones and keep them in her desk. Sometimes you can even hear them ringing.
There’s a message from Olivia -crash campus after fourth? I quickly type back- def.
My mom teaches at the local college. So Liv and I make her workplace our regular stop after school, before
we go to track practice. We make a run to the coffee shop and either sit there or if it’s nice enough we claim a bench near our favorite tree in the Quad.
Mostly we pretend to be students and scope out boys because, let’s be honest, they’re way hotter than high school guys. A lot of the guys we see are reading or listening to music or trying to look mature and studious.
Over the past few weeks every time we’ve gone to the coffee shop there’s a boy I’ve been watching. He’s tall and tan, really dark especially for this time of year. He has black hair like mine, but short and messy, whereas mine is stick straight and hangs long. He has beautiful brown eyes, though I swear the last time I saw him they were green, but since it was from a distance, I could have been wrong. I’m sure it was just my eyes playing tricks on me; I mean staring at him for any length of time will do something to your head. He’s got this rugged look about him, but in a subtly beautiful way.
Reveal (Cryptid Tales) Page 1
