Sydney Mackenzie Knocks 'Em Dead

by Cindy Callaghan

  4. FILE THE STACK OF PAPERS JOYCE LEFT IN THE OFFICE ACCORDING TO HER INSTRUCTIONS.

  5. SWEEP THE WORKROOM.

  “That doesn’t look so bad,” Nick said.

  I gave him a look that said, Maybe for someone who does chores.

  “Come on, Mac.” He called me Mac! “It’s really not that bad.”

  Nick clearly didn’t understand me. I had never had chores before.

  “Look: Scoop ashes out of the fireplace,” he said. “That’s easy.”

  Maybe he thought it was easy, but I had no idea where to start.

  “I’ll show you how. But you’re doing it yourself.”

  I asked, “Don’t you have to get back to work?” Not because I didn’t want to hang out with him, but because I didn’t want him to get into trouble because of me.

  “This delivery was all my uncle had for me today.” He looked at the list. “You’ll need a bucket, a broom and a shovel, a rag, and maybe a vacuum cleaner.”

  I led him to the workroom. “Voila. Work stuff.”

  He crossed his arms as if to say, These aren’t my chores.

  I picked up the bucket, shovel, and broom. I couldn’t hold anything else, so he got a rag and followed me.

  I stared at the fireplace.

  He said, “You need to open the doors.”

  I did. He talked me through the cleaning, which resulted in both of us being lightly coated in ash. . . . Okay, so maybe Nick wasn’t lightly coated. He took the sleeve of his flannel shirt and wiped the ash off his eyes.

  “Now I know what chicken feels like when it’s Shake ’n Baked,” he said, and laughed.

  I laughed too, even though I’d never had Shake ’n Bake. But I’d heard of it.

  When we were done, Nick suggested, “Maybe you should just leave the bucket of ashes in the workroom and ask your dad, errr . . . Jim, where he wants you to dump ’em.”

  “All right.” I took out the list. “Flowers.”

  “Cool, the graveyard. You’re gonna need a trash bag for the dead flowers.” Nick pulled one out of a box in the workroom and darted out back. I was glad he was helping me.

  Nick ran around looking at headstones and telling me about them. I tried hard not to be creeped out that he was walking on dead people.

  We were mostly done with my list of chores when we heard Jim calling from the roof.

  “What’s up?” I yelled outside to him.

  “Ummm,” he says. “I have a little problem.”

  “Want me to get Roz or Cork?”

  “Nah, don’t do that,” he called back down.

  I looked at Nick, confused.

  “I’ll check it out.” He started up the ladder. “Maybe I can help him.” Once he made it to the top, I heard him and Jim talk in muffled voices.

  “What is it?” I called up.

  Nick gave me the one minute finger and disappeared onto the roof. I climbed up the ladder to see what was going on. Nick had fetched a hammer and was prying a nail out of the roof that had gone through Jim’s coat before going through the shingle. Jim had nailed himself to the roof. I held back a laugh. Nick pushed hard on the handle of the hammer, and slowly the nail eased out.

  Jim said, “Thanks, you’re a good kid.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  I backed down the ladder and Nick followed, but before his head dropped below the roofline I heard Jim say, “Um, you don’t have to tell anyone about this.”

  “No, sir,” Nick said.

  When he reached the bottom, the two of us covered our mouths and laughed.

  Then Nick hopped on to Goog and asked, “So, do you think this place is really haunted?”

  “I guess we’ll find out Friday.”

  He zippered his coat. “I thought maybe, you know—”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you were making it up.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To have friends. Like with the credit card in California.”

  I choked back a growing tear and watched Nick ride down the snowy hill.

  This place had better be haunted.

  * chapter eighteen *

  GIRL POW

  THE THUDS DIDN’T HAPPEN THE next two nights. Maybe I had made it up.

  I was dressed in what I thought was a good séance outfit: black sweater, black scarf, and black jeans. I laid out chips and candy. Joyce had heated up a pot of her famous hot cocoa. At ten after eight no one had arrived.

  I paced in the foyer of the Victorian.

  What if they were the ones who had been faking, and they really didn’t think the cemetery was cool?

  Headlights came up the hill into the driveway.

  Phew.

  Mel and Johanna hopped out of a truck and waved to the driver, who went back down the hill. I opened the front door. “Hi, guys,” I said.

  “What’s with you?” Mel asked me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Johanna said, “No way! Was the spirit already here? Where was it? Inside or outside? Did we miss it? That’s great—my idiot brother, Alan, couldn’t find his keys, and now we missed the ghost. Didn’t we?”

  “No. Johanna, you didn’t miss any ghosts. I was just thinking that maybe you guys had changed your minds about the séance, that’s all.”

  “Are you KIDDING?” she yelled. “I’ve been working on this for two days, lots of research and practicing. I chanted all night.”

  Mel said, “This is the most exciting thing going on around here in a long time.”

  “Yeah,” Johanna said. “Even more exciting than the time Nick’s uncle’s horse broke through the ice. Remember that, Mel?”

  “Uh-huh. That was exciting.”

  To me Johanna said, “They saved the horse, but it took hours.”

  I said, “Speaking of Nick, where is he?”

  Mel said, “I saw him after seventh period. Travis’s dad got them tickets to NASCAR, and there was no way they were going to miss it.”

  “Oh.” I was surprised Nick hadn’t found me at school to tell me.

  “You look bummed,” Johanna said. “Wait. Press the pause button on the séance. Mac, do you like Nick Wesley?”

  “No. Oh, no. It’s no big deal,” I said. “It will be a girls’ night.”

  Johanna made a fist and held it up over her head and exclaimed, “Girl Pow!”

  “Girl Pow?” I asked.

  “Like ‘Girls Rule,’ ” she said. Then she made the fist again and held it over her head.

  Mel put a fist over her head in a mocking way. “What’s this about?”

  “I made it up. Just now. Cool, huh? We can do that to each other like a sign. Just for girls.”

  I said, “Sounds good to me.” I put a fist over my head. “Girl Pow.”

  We looked at Mel to see her do it too, but she didn’t. She just rolled her eyes and said, “Oookaay.”

  “I guess it’s stupid.” The smile faded from Johanna’s face, and she started talking about the boys as if Mel pooping on her idea didn’t bother her. “Seriously,” she said, “we’ll be better off without them. They don’t believe I can do this, and I don’t need anyone’s negative energy hanging around. We need only positive spiritual energy and pure intentions to call the spirits.” Johanna sounded like she was reading or quoting from a book. “We don’t want any disruptions when I contact the other side.”

  “Huh?” Mel smooshed Johanna’s face in between her hands. “Who are you and what have you done with our JoJo?”

  “Stop that.” Johanna pushed her hands down. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about communication with spirits. Not just books, I went on the Internet, too. Plus, I talked to my aunt Pam. She thinks she’s clairvoyant. She gave me tips. I can totally do this. For real. The boys wouldn’t take this seriously, and that would ruin it. I can just imagine connecting with a spirit only for Travis to rip a fart.”

  Mel and I laughed because Johanna was so right.

  “Come on. Let’s go out
back,” Johanna said.

  “You know, it’s really cold out tonight. I’ve got some good snacks. Maybe we could just do it right here, in the kitchen . . . ,” I suggested. With the lights on.

  “Inside?” Johanna asked like that was a crazy idea. “Have you looked out back? That’s a graveyard! That’s the perfect place for a séance. You can’t ask for better conditions than that. You must love living here.”

  Mel said, “Wait, are you scared?”

  “No. I’m totally used to this.” If I were Pinocchio, my nose would’ve reached the Hollywood sign. “And I do love living here.”

  Mel looked like she wanted to say Yeah, right.

  I said, “Here’s the thing: I didn’t want to scare you, but I’ve seen a lot of movies, and usually a town gets taken over by zombies after a séance. So, there’s that.”

  “And we all know that everything you see in the movies is real,” Mel said sarcastically. “Jo, we better be careful of zombies.”

  “Yup. Sure, things can go wrong. I read about it. But that’s where you’re lucky.”

  “How am I lucky?” I asked.

  “You have me.” Johanna touched her chest. “I’m like a professional. If it looks like the spirit is getting angry at the house or that one of the twins could become possessed, I’ll just pull the plug.”

  “Our very own zombie whisperer,” Mel said. “Then we’re all set. Grab the candy, and let’s go out back.”

  This was really happening. We’d know soon enough if I’d be the haunted Gigi of Buttermilk River Cove or the outcast who made it up and now has lunch with the booger-eater table.

  * chapter nineteen *

  SÉANCE

  ONE STEP INTO THE DARK cemetery and I was instantly chilled through to my bones. Mel took the food bowls so I could slide on gloves and a hat. She bent her neck down, reached her mouth into the bowl, and ate a chip. I took Johanna’s bag while she put on her hat. It was heavy. “Holy Magoo, what have you got in here?”

  Mel stopped walking. “Holy Magoo? What the heck kind of dork-infested language is that?”

  I explained where Magoo came from.

  “It’s kind of a dumb word,” I said.

  Mel didn’t disagree, but Johanna said, “I like Magoo. It’s very gooey Magooey.”

  The way she used the word wasn’t right, but I was glad she liked it. I asked her again, “What’s in this bag? Rocks?”

  “Supplies,” she said. “Everything we need for a successful séance. I had to go to two stores, my attic, the school lab, and Mel’s shed to gather all this Magoo. I was thinking I could Magoo a séance kit and sell it on eBay. It would save Magoos a lot of time.”

  She was Magooing it all wrong. “That’s a neat idea,” I said.

  “You were in my shed?” Mel asked.

  “Just for a piece of flat wood. You’ve got a huge pile of it. I’ll Magoo it back when we’re done.”

  “Okay!” Mel said. “Let’s drop the Magoo—whatcha say?”

  I agreed with Mel, but the way she said it wasn’t nice to the whole concept of Magoo.

  “Sure,” Johanna said, like Mel had just taken away her last chicken spread.

  I took a flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on. Our feet crunched on the hard, frozen ground. I led us around the back of the Dolan mausoleum where Johanna laid the piece of wood she’d taken from Mel’s shed. The board had writing on it.

  “You were going to give it back after you wrote on it?” Mel asked.

  Johanna said, “It’s still wood. It can be burned.”

  I asked, “What are those letters?”

  “That’s the alphabet. This is called a weegee board. It’s spelled o-u-i-j-a.” She pointed to the alphabet on the top of the board. “This is how the spirits will communicate with us. We’ll ask them a question, and they’ll answer with letters.”

  “Why did you make it? Don’t they sell them?” I asked.

  “In Buttermilk River Cove? They don’t sell much around here besides hardware, pizza (ninth slice free), army stuff, and gasoline.”

  “And,” I added, “burial plots (tenth burial free).”

  They giggled.

  Mel asked, “How will the spirits tell us what letter?”

  Johanna reached into her Mary Poppins bag again and took out a tinfoil triangle on top of three Q-tips that were broken in half. She set the triangle on the board, cotton balls down, like a little table. I noticed she had cut a circle out of the middle of the tinfoil triangle. She put the triangle on the letter J so that we could see it through the circle. “Like this. See?”

  “That little Q-tip table is going to slide across the board and land on letters and spell words?” I didn’t believe it.

  “Yup. We’re each going to put our fingers on one side of the triangle, and the spirit will guide it to a letter through our body’s energy. But you have to promise not to push it. The letters have to be from the spirits,” she said. “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  She held up my hand, folded my pinkie and thumb together across my palm, and straightened up my three middle fingers. “Say, ‘I swear not to move the little Q-tip table.’ ”

  “I swear not to move the little Q-tip table,” I repeated.

  “And if I do, I’ll kiss Mrs. Murphy’s cow on the mouth.”

  “Gross. No way. I’m not saying that. I’m not kissing any cow.”

  “If you don’t push the table, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Johanna said.

  Mel added, “Just swear. I’ve seen her like this before. She’s a stubborn Magoo.”

  Maybe Mel didn’t think it was dumb after all.

  “Fine.” I rolled my eyes and repeated the pledge. Then I looked at Mel, who was checking out the Ouija board. “Don’t you have to swear?” I asked her.

  Johanna said, “It wouldn’t do any good. If she wanted to move it, she’d do it anyway. I’ve seen her kiss a cow; she doesn’t care.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “It wasn’t pretty,” Johanna said.

  “Then make her swear something else. Something grosser, if there is such a thing.”

  “Enough about kissing cows.” Mel tossed a fistful of Sour Patch Kids into her mouth. “Let’s get this séance started. What do we do, JoJo?”

  “Okay, first we take this sea salt.” She pulled a shaker out of the sack. “And make a white circle around us by sprinkling it on the ground.”

  Mel took the salt. I guided her in a circle with a flashlight. “What’s that for?” I asked.

  Johanna took a note card out of the back pocket of her jeans and read it. “It protects us if we release a wicked soul or something, I guess.”

  “You guess?” I didn’t like the sound of that. “Great,” I said. “Good to have a circle of salt if we’re attacked by the wicked or something.”

  “I don’t think it’ll happen, but I don’t want to take a chance.” She was serious, while I had been sarcastic.

  “Done,” Mel said.

  Johanna put the salt away and took out a tall white pillar candle and matches. “Light this and set it on the north side of us.”

  “Which way is that?” I asked.

  She produced a compass. Seriously, she had a compass. She wasn’t kidding about being like a professional. But being like a professional wasn’t the same as being a professional—someone with séance experience, like an old lady who’s been talking to the dead for fifty years. That’s the kind of person we needed. Johanna looked at the compass. “That side is north.”

  “And what’s the candle for?” Mel asked.

  “I think it’s so that the spirits can see us.” She shoved the index card back in her pocket. “I guess being dead and all, sometimes they can’t see real clearly. That makes sense when you think about it. They don’t have glasses or eye doctors on the other side.”

  “Yup,” I said. It actually did kind of make sense. But I didn’t like that we were guessing about things. Mel and I dug a little h
ole for the candle and lit it. It flickered in the cold night air, but it didn’t go out.

  Next, Johanna pulled out a jug of water. She took the cap off and took a big swig. She handed it to Mel, who took a drink and handed it to me. “Purification,” she said without us asking. “And hydration.”

  I didn’t ask for any details since she seemed pretty sure about this one.

  “Okay. We have to hold hands.”

  Johanna closed her eyes and breathed in really deeply and dramatically. She was totally serious about this.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I did what she said. “You got this from a book?” I asked.

  “Books, plural,” Johanna said. “Now, shhh.”

  Oh, well, I guess that makes you like a professional.

  * chapter twenty *

  CALLING THE SPIRIT

  WE WERE ALL REALLY QUIET for a few seconds.

  “Clear. Your. Miiiiind,” Johanna said in a low, quiet, and drawn-out voice that reminded me of I vaaant to suuuck your blooood. A chill went up my back. “We are calling to the spirit that has been haunting Lay to Rest Cemetery.”

  There was no response.

  “We come in peace,” Johanna said in her séance voice.

  Mel asked, “Isn’t that what the Pilgrims said to the Indians?”

  “Shh,” Johanna said. “Be serious or no one is going to answer us.”

  A little louder she called out, “We would like to talk to the spirit who has been haunting Lay to Rest Cemetery. Please come to us tonight.” Then in her regular voice she softly said to us, “Okay, open your eyes. Put your fingers on the triangle, but rest them very, very lightly so that it can move under us. You can’t push it, and you can’t put the weight of your fingers on it.”

  We put the tips of our gloved fingers on the foil.

  “Now I’m going to ask questions.” I could see her breath coming out in puffs in the cold. She changed her voice again. “Spirit of the cemetery, are you with ussss? If you are among us, make yourself known.”

  The wind blew in the trees. Johanna waited, then chanted. “Was that yooouuu, spirit, or just the wind blowing when I asked you that question?”

  No answer. “Spirit, if you are among us, show us a sign.” The wind blew harder, blowing out the candle.