Things had changed so much.
As she plowed home in the driving rain, her pride played tag-you're-it with her guilt. Neither won. The road was slick but her Volvo held the surface well, and they made good time - until they approached the city bridge. Traffic there was at a standstill both ways.
The old overpass was one lane either way, built for horses and buggies, like most of the city. An accident could tie up traffic for hours.
A few yards ahead, on the bridge itself, a car had jumped the sidewalk, smashing into the railing. Ambulances had squeezed between the lanes and flanked the accident scene, their red lights flooding the street.
Lynn tried to make out what was happening, but the rain would flood her windshield the instant the wipers swooshed past. "I hope nobody got hurt."
Cole didn't answer. He was sitting in the passenger seat, staring rigidly ahead.
"You're very quiet," Lynn said.
No reply.
He was upset. She knew it. She knew she should have insisted more with Mr. Rattigan. Darren's mom was at the show, Tommy's mom and Bobby's mom. If she'd pushed a little harder, called a few more of the other workers maybe...
"You're mad I missed the play, aren't you?" she asked.
Cole shook his head.
"I have two jobs today - you know how important they are for us. I'd give anything to have been there."
Cole turned to face her directly. He had that odd intense look in his eye. That I-want-to-say-something look. The look that promised so much yet always ended up with a "Pass the Pop-Tarts" or "Can I sleep in your room?"
But this time Cole said something different. "I'm ready to communicate with you now."
"Communicate?"
"To tell you my secrets."
Lynn felt a sudden chill. She'd been waiting for this moment, but it scared her. Would she finally learn about the bruises and cuts? The violent writings and curses? The stolen figures from the church?
In a way, she'd hoped things would just work themselves out the way they had been doing over the last few weeks, without any dwelling in the past. Without explanation. "What is it?" she asked cautiously.
"You know that accident up there?"
"Yeah..."
"Someone got hurt."
"They did?"
"A lady. She died."
"Oh my God." Lynn wiped the inside of the windshield with her sleeve and tried to look up ahead. "You can see her?"
"Yes."
"Where is she?"
"Standing next to my window."
Lynn's heart thumped. She spun around toward Cole's window but saw nothing. "Cole .. . you're scaring me."
"They scare me, too, sometimes," Cole said.
"They?"
"Dead people."
"Dead people?"
"Ghosts."
No. This was not happening. She was not having this conversation with her son. But she couldn't not have it, either.
"You see ghosts, Cole?"
"They want me to do things for them."
"They.. . talk to you?"
Cole nodded.
"They tell you to do things?"
Cole nodded again.
Lynn tried to compose herself but she felt as if she were flying off in all directions. He believes he sees ghosts. And he hides in a tent and has horrible murderous thoughts. What now? What? Things weren't going to magically work out, after all. She'd been stupid to think they would. He'd need more help. But how could she possibly help him when she'd exhausted everything - when the loving home didn't work, and the school drama club didn't work, and the church and the psychologists and the parties and -
"What are you thinking, Mama?"
- And he was her son, the sweetest boy in the world, and she would die for him, die for him if she had to, if it meant she could deliver him to happiness from his dark fantasies. "I don't know..."
"You think I'm a freak?"
Lynn's eyes shot toward his. About this, she had no confusion. "Look at my face," she said levelly. "I would never think that about you - ever. Got it?"
"Got it," Cole replied.
"Just... let me think for a second."
Okay. All this stuff was real to him. "Which meant - what? Deny it and upset him? Give in and risk that he'd never grow out of it?
"Grandma says hi."
Lynn's thoughts screeched to a halt.
"She says she's sorry for taking the bumble bee pendant," Cole continued. "She just likes it a lot."
Keep it together, Lynn commanded herself. Above all, there is a reality. A real reality. "Cole, that is very wrong. Grandma's gone. You know that," she said sternly.
"I know. She wanted me to tell you -"
"Cole, please stop!" This was crazy stuff. Cole was not crazy. Her son was not crazy!
"She wanted me to tell you, she saw you dance. She said when you were little, you and her had a fight, right before your dance recital. You thought she didn't come to see you dance. She did."
Lynn felt her hand rise to her mouth. How could he know that? She had no control now. She felt disengaged, floating, half-conscious.
The glare. The glare in the photos. He was different, wasn't he? He wasn't like other kids.
Cole's eyes were all she saw now. They were her mother's eyes, soft and sensitive but also stubborn, so stubborn....
"She hid in the back, so you wouldn't see," Cole said. "She said you were like an angel. She said you came to her where they buried her. You asked her a question. She said the answer is, 'Every day.'"
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God.
"What did you ask her?" Cole whispered.
He knew. He knew things he couldn't have known. Things Lynn had kept only to herself.
She slowly took her hand from her face and told Cole the question she had never repeated to a soul. "Do I make her proud?"
The words released a decade of tears, the accumulated misunderstandings and unspoken sorrows of the two deepest relationships of her life.
Cole began to cry, too. Lynn opened her arms and he fell into them, crying and laughing and clinging to her as if to life itself.
She held him there, oblivious to traffic, feeling his little heart beat as relief washed over him like rain, holding tight to the son she would never doubt again, letting him know by her embrace that she had always been, and always would be, the mother he needed.
Malcolm entered his house without a sound.
He had left Cole with a mission. Now he had his own.
The silence had to stop, the anger and secrecy. If it wasn't too late.
As Malcolm crept through the front hall, the harsh blue-white light of the television set emanated from the living room.
He paused in the doorway. Anna was asleep, curled up in a blanket on the sofa. Her skin was soft and translucent, her expression serene. Whatever she was dreaming had released her from the weight of sadness. When Malcolm was younger, he would watch her sleeping face for hours sometimes. He wanted the opportunity again.
The wedding video was running. On the screen, Malcolm and Anna cut their wedding cake, lifted two slices, and entwined their arms. As their guests roared approval, they fed each other and then kissed. Her expression that day was much like it was now. She was dreaming then, too. They both were.
Even after that day, they had not stopped dreaming. And they had not stopped feeding each other. Those had been the two cornerstones of their marriage.
Surely they still had some of the dream left. Malcolm wanted so to wake her, to watch the video together, to talk - but he didn't dare. She needed rest.
You can talk to her while she's sleeping, Cole had said. She won't know you're saying it, but she'll hear you.
Malcolm knelt next to the sofa, gazing selfconsciously at the floor.
The truth. Only the truth.
"Anna," he whispered, "I've been so lost. I need my best friend."
"I miss you," Anna said.
Malcolm looked up in surprise.
Anna's eyes were still closed. She was speaking in her sleep, as if to someone in her dreams.
He hoped it was him.
"I miss you," he said.
She shifted slightly and spoke again in a voice thick and soft and very sad. "Why, Malcolm?"
"What, Anna? What did I do? What's made you so sad?"
"Why did you leave me?"
"I didn't leave you!"
Anna stopped moving, settling into, a deep sleep again. Her arm slid out from under her head, her fingers draping themselves over the side of the sofa.
Something fell from her hand, making a sharp clatter on the floor.
It was a ring, now rolling in a slow circle, reflecting the lamplight.
As it came to rest on the parquet floor, Malcolm recognized it. Her wedding ring. He looked to her ring finger.
The ring was still there.
Malcolm was confused. If it wasn't hers, it had to be ...
His wedding ring.
He held up his left hand. The ring was gone.
But he hadn't taken it off- or had he? Had he even looked in the last few days? Had Anna taken it, maybe - pulled it off while he was sleeping, some message that the marriage was over? That wasn't like her. And even if she had, even if her anger had made her act out of character, why would she still be wearing her own ring!
Nothing made sense. It scared him.
Something was dreadfully wrong.
He felt odd, weightless, out of place. He stood up and took a few steps back, glancing around the room. Everything looked the same but felt somehow different, as if the world had suddenly begun rotating the opposite direction.
Things he hadn't noticed suddenly jumped out at him. He saw the mail spilled on the front desk, unopened for what looked like weeks. Most were bills. The words past due had been stamped angrily on one. last chance to renew on another, is this good-bye? on a third.
To the right, an old table had been jammed up against the basement door. Had it been there before?
The dining room table was set for only one place. But it was always set for two throughout the day. Always had been. No matter what had happened between them, he still had to eat. He still lived here.
Didn't he?
Malcolm felt as if a caul were being lifted from his face. The video ran on and on, Malcolm raising a glass, Malcolm toasting his wife - Malcolm but not Malcolm, an image of the past, of a young man who no longer existed.
A ghost.
Why was Anna watching? Why did a person fix on the past? To connect. To visit something lost, something left undone. That's what Anna was after.
That was also why Cole's ghosts visited him.
Shaking, Malcolm looked at his wife again. Her breaths formed little white puffs.
"No.. ."
Falling.
He was falling.
In his mind, he wasn't in the living room anymore. He was in the past, a year in the past, and he was falling, falling hard on his bed with a bullet in his side, and it was as if he were there again, seeing so clearly what he had since forgotten. There was another shot, in the bathroom, and Vincent was dead, that poor sensitive child had killed himself and it was Malcolm's fault, Malcolm's fault, and what was he going to tell Vincent's mother and -
Anna was screaming. She leaned over Malcolm now, pulling up his shirt
The bullet had made only a small entrance wound. "It's okay."
He turned onto his side and felt the blood coursing onto the bed behind him. He felt Anna's hands pressing against the exit wound, trying to stop the flow. "Malcolm!" she cried out.
"It doesn't even hurt anymore," Malcolm replied, groggily.
And it didn't. Because he was leaving already, separating, seeing it all at once, the bedroom, the shattered frame of the boy in the bathroom, and his wife clutching the body of her husband whose life's last pulse had just sunk thickly into the mattress -
"ANNA!"
His own cry shocked him out of the dream, and he was back in the living room and he knew now that it was all different.
They only see what they want to see.
Malcolm twisted himself to the left and pulled the back of his shirt forward. It was ripped open and covered with blood.
Where his lower back had once been was an ugly hole.
But he felt no physical pain. Only grief. For the life he had clung to that night and lost. For his wife.
For what had to happen next.
Anna was crying in her sleep now, and Malcolm knelt next to her. "Don't cry," he said.
She only cried harder, as if she'd heard him.
But Malcolm knew why he was here now, and what he had to say.
Cole's ghosts had appeared to him because they'd wanted something. Malcolm had taught the boy to give it to them. When they had it, they always went away.
Cole couldn't give Malcolm what he wanted. Instead, he'd done something better. He'd taught Malcolm how to get it.
What he wanted was simple. It was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do.
"I think I have to go," he whispered to Anna. "I just needed to do a couple of things. I needed
to help someone. I think I did that_____ And I
needed to tell you something."
Anna shifted in her sleep. "Tell me," she murmured.
Say it, Malcolm told himself.
Just say it.
"You were never second," he said with all the conviction in his soul. "Ever."
Anna's falling tears were caught in the crease of a sad smile.
Malcolm was crying, too. "You sleep now, Anna," he said softly. "Everything will be different in the morning."
"Good night, Malcolm," Anna said.
"Good night, sweetheart."
As Malcolm leaned back, closing his eyes, Anna's breaths made slow, wispy clouds.
On the TV screen, the wedding reception was at its raucous peak. Malcolm was in the midst of his toast. Anna was behind the camera, keeping his face in full closeup.
"I just have to say," he announced to the guests, "this day today has been one very special day. I wish we could all stay and play."
The crowd laughed and Anna passed a joking comment that made the young groom blush.
"Anna," said Malcolm's image into the camera lens, "I never thought I'd feel the things I'm feeling. I never thought I'd be able to stand up in front of my friends and family and tell them what's inside me. Today I can ..."
The tape was silent for a moment. Even the shaky, grainy image couldn't hide the young groom's tears. "Anna Crowe," he said with tenderness, "I am in love. In love I am."
The screen dissolved into static.
The room fell silent.
Anna Crowe slept soundly, her breaths invisible in the warm indoor air.
Peter Lerangis is the author of Watchers, a popular, award-winning series of supernatural mystery-adventures for preteens. His new two-volume adventure, Antarctica, will be published by Scholastic in the fall of 2000. The Yearbook and Driver's Dead, his best-selling teen thru. have been translated into many languages, and his books for younger readers include Spring Fever, It Came From the Cafeteria, and Attack of the Killer Potatoes. Recent movie novelizations include Sleepy Hollow and El Dorado: the City of Gold. He lives in New York City with his wife. Tina deVaron, and their two sons.
M. Night Shyamatan [pronounced SHA-mah-lahn] began making films at the age of ten in his hometown of Philadelphia. At sixteen, he had completed this 45th short film. At age seventeen, he stood before his parents, both doctors, surrounded by pictures of the other twelve doctors in the family, and informed them that although he graduated cum laude and received academic scholarships to several prestigious medical programs, he had instead decided to attend the New York University Tisch School of the Arts to study filmmaking.
One evening, during his final year at NYU, Night sat down and began writing an emotional screenplay, entitled Praying With Anger. It was the very personal story of an exchange student from the U.
S. who goes back to India and finds himself a stranger in his own homeland: In 1992, that became his first low-budget feature film. In July 1993, it was named Debut Film of the Year by the American Film Institute of Los Angeles.
In June 1995, he was asked to write the fantasy screen adaptation of Stuart Little, based on E.B. White's beloved children's classic.
In 1998, his second feature film, Wide Awake, was released. It starred Rosie O'Donnell. That film was shot entirely in and around the Philadelphia area and tells the story of the close relationship between a boy in Catholic school and his grandfather.
Next up is a new movie for Disney entitled Unbreakable.
M. Night Shyamalan conceived of, wrote, and directed The Sixth Sense. To borrow a line from his movie, he's "ready to communicate with you" now and share his perspective on the movie, as well as unravel elements that continue to mystify.
Sometimes, you just get a picture in your head, and you get this feeling, "Wow, that would make a great story."
That's how The Sixth Sense began.
The concept for the movie came to me very early on. It was just this picture in my head of a child at a wake, after a funeral, sitting on the stairs of this house, and talking to someone who wasn't there. And I was thinking, How can I make a movie about this little child who sees the person who has passed on? For a long time, I didn't know quite how to do it, what the storyline was going to be. And then, I came up with the idea of a father-son relationship, which became, of course, the Cole-Malcolm story.
The picture in my head was one of the reasons I used a child, Cole, as the channel, the heart of The Sixth Sense. But it wasn't the only reason. Most of the movies I make have a child at the center, because they represent my point of view more accurately. Children have a sense of wonder and innocence, and a lack of cynicism, and most of all, the ability to believe. And so, in thinking about a story about ghosts, it seemed natural to place a child there.
Do you know why you're scared when you're alone?
There are aspects of Cole's character that are resonant of my own childhood. I was a very timid kid, very scared of being alone - almost phobic of being alone. My parents always had to arrange for someone to be with me. I hated being alone in a room. Of course, I outgrew that fear in my teenage years, but it was really salient and that is the feeling evoked in The Sixth Sense.
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