"Hold on!" shouted Emmett over the buzzing and zapping. He extended the tuning fork. A great roar rent the air, a lightning bolt ripped through the bus ceiling, and the tuning fork, Emmett, and Valente were electrified. Luminous clouds of greenish gas swirled through the bus interior, stinking of sulfur, and for one long, eerie moment, both of them flashed transparent, skeletons showing through. Then a sucking sensation pulled at my hair, tugging upward, like a giant vacuum cleaner from above, and everything moved backwards. The lightning receded up through the ceiling. With an ear-splitting crack, it disappeared, leaving only a dark spot that smoked slightly, like a bag of burnt popcorn.
I sat frozen, death-gripping the bus seat. Brandishing his tuning fork, Emmett bowed to Valente. They both seemed no worse for the experience. What on heaven and earth had all that been about? I wondered if the Paranormals had heard any disturbance. Where were they, anyway?
"That's got it! Muchas gracias! You may go," said Emmett. Valente sat there, one huge, toothy smile, but did not move.
"Go! You . . . may . . . go. Now." Emmett gestured for Valente to leave, but Valente only sat and grinned. "Crux it all!" Emmett frowned. He pocketed his spectacles, then plucked the goggles from my face so deftly, I hardly felt it. Into his coat pocket they went. He addressed me and said, "Excuse me, but could you help me out? We're done here, and he usually understands me, but things being what they are now—I'm not getting through. Would you mind telling this fellow what I said?"
I gibbered, tried to find my voice. At last, I said, "You have spiders, bats, and a magical tuning fork that spits lightning, but you can't communicate with him?"
Emmett shook his head, his eyes pleading with me to help him make sense to Valente.
"Sheesh, I don't know," I said. "Do you need Spanish? I could get my friend's phone."
"Ah. The electrical devices. Unfortunately, we—that is, Valente and I and others like us—have a little problem with anything that uses electricity. So, I'm afraid those wonderful apps that you mortals are so fond of down here are out of the question. It's frustrating, I know. We do have our work-arounds, but at the moment, I'm stuck. Could you just—?" Emmett folded his arms and waited, watching me.
I stared back at the ghost boy, holding his tuning fork that still sung with electrical charge—or spectrical charge, or whatever he called it—and then at Valente, happily planted on the bus seat, ignoring Emmett. I held up my hands, spread my fingers, amazed to discover that the charge from my hands was gone, too.
"What was all that? Who are you? I can't even believe this. Valente, vámonos!" I snapped my fingers. Valente vanished without so much as a parting nod.
Emmett's eyebrows went up. "You got through to him! Passed the test with flying colors. Say, it was superb to meet you, whatever your name was."
How had I done that? I held my fingers before my face. I snapped again.
A bat came hurtling through the air with a shriek-like squeak, spun in a circle, and crash-landed on Emmett's chest. It lay flat against his black-and-white tie, then sank and disappeared. His chest had absorbed the bat.
"Wow, Elvira. Relax. I wouldn't leave without you. Take a chill pill," said Emmett.
I lowered my hand. No more snapping.
Emmett bowed his head to me. "As I said, lovely to meet you. Many thanks."
"Wait! Emmett!" I reached out, but my hand passed through his fading form. In a second more, he'd disappeared. I gazed around the now quiet bus and sank down on the bus seat. "There's so much I wanted to ask," I said. I had to get to the Paranormals—should be easy to reach them from this side. But I took a minute to think. I stretched out my hand. No sparking. I wasn't overloaded with blue electricity for once. Much as Oskar predicted, Emmett had somehow relieved me of it. How? If only he'd come back. The image of that disarming smile floated in my mind's eye. It brought a tingle to my stomach that wasn't electrical.
Oh no! I couldn't possibly. Why did I want to see Emmett again so badly? This was ridiculous. I couldn't like a ghost that way. For heaven's sake, Heather. Get a grip!
"Emmett?" I called again, despite myself. "Come back?"
Chapter Twelve
The Other Side
A thin crack of light split the air, illuminating the bus interior. I shaded my eyes. Out of the crack popped Emmett's disembodied head.
"Did you say something?" asked the head.
I made a noise like "urgh" and then I said, "I don't know. Maybe."
The light crack widened, and the rest of Emmett stepped out. His arms grasped his floating head and pulled it to rejoin his body. "I could have sworn I heard you say something. It sounded like—"
"Like what?" I squinted at him.
"Like 'take me with you, Emmett! I want to see the other side!'" He regarded me from the corner of his eye. "Was that it?"
"Oh!" I had not said that. "No."
"Oh." Emmett's face fell. "So, you don't want to visit the other side?"
"Well . . . " I hadn't said I didn't want to visit it either. Maybe I had thought I wanted to visit. Maybe I had only wished, and somehow, he heard it. Could a ghost hear a wish?
Cross over.
The tingling was back, in my fingers and toes, running up and down my spine. Yes. I wanted to. More than anything I'd ever wanted before. The other side—the place Dad came back from—surely the place Sam waited in the City of the Dead. I struggled to catch my breath.
"Yes!" I burst out at last.
"Oh," said Emmett, still flat and disappointed. "You don't want to."
"No, no. I mean yes! I do! I do want to! Please?" I clutched my hands over my heart to convince him of how much I really did. Then I remembered the Paranormals. Trenton, Oskar, Lily. I hated to leave them—but what if this was my only chance to find Sam?
"Oh, you do want to? Then I shall escort you," said Emmett. He flashed his huge grin. "I would have offered anyway, except I haven't really picked up the place, but if you don't mind a slight amount of ectoplasmic residue—I apologize in advance, though, for any spiders. They don't really bother me, so I leave them where I find them." He paced away from me, talking on and on. I cleared my throat.
"Oh! Off I go then. Perhaps we shall meet again. Whatever your name was." He swerved around and glided back, almost colliding with me in his haste to shake my hand.
"Heather. Aren't you forgetting something?" I said.
"Probably. Happens all the time, now that I'm past my second millennium. I haven't forgotten my name's not Heather, though." Emmett giggled. I stared at him because—well, I had never heard a ghost giggle.
"What?" I said. "Oh, never mind. Emmett, you said you'd escort me to the other side."
"Oh, right!" A sunshine smile lit up his face, and my stomach fluttered. That smile!
"I forgot, but you needn't worry. The agreements of the dead follow them. You might say it's the one thing we take with us. If I agreed, it shall be done—even if I don't remember doing it." He speared the air with his tuning fork, then tucked it under his arm. "Coming?" Emmett held out his hand. This time, no spider dangled from it.
I took his cool hand. I met his gaze. "Can my friends come with us?"
He shook his head, smile growing wider and wider. "Just you."
"Wait. I know where I've seen you before," I said.
Emmett's smile hardened into a grim line. "Hold on," he said.
He drew me forward, and for an instant, it glimmering in the space next to us—the dark whirl, the spinning cyclone of stories and visions, churning up through the bus ceiling. Emmett reached out, and it reacted, whipping toward us as if magnetized. It hit us with a rush of air.
My body shifted fast sideways, the interior of the bus whizzing past and away, like I had stepped out of time and space for a quick cup of coffee and would be right back. Then my body slid one way and my head the other, or was it my feet? My feet seemed to touch my head as I rolled like a wheel through a bumpy meadow, a flatter and flatter meadow that squeezed until it held only the essence of me. Th
e essence of something that was not me squeezed out of the wheel through another sideways passage, and too late, I remembered Sybil.
We crashed through, into a real, three-dimensional meadow, surrounded by gray, dead grass and ringed by woods. Emmett stood over me, gripping his tuning fork, almost dashing compared to me. I writhed on the ground, clutching at the grass. I felt like a bus wrecked with a train in the middle of a tornado. Shaken up, dizzy, cramping with nausea—and there, a few feet away, lay Sybil's inert body. I stretched out my hands toward her. Some sort of filmy black material clung to them. I clawed it away and dragged myself over to Sybil. Hugging her to my chest, my head spinning, I lost it completely. I leaned forward and threw up.
"Good All! You know, that happened to the last person I brought up here, too?" It was Emmett again, helpfully standing over me and doing nothing.
"Really. I'm surprised you remember," I said. I wiped my mouth.
"No, you got me. I don't remember. I just made that up to be polite." A tight and tiny smile this time.
I laid Sybil out in my lap and stroked her head. She didn't move. I couldn't see her breathing!
"Emmett, my dog's hurt! I forgot she was curled up in my pocket. What should I do?" I said.
"Hurt? She's more likely dead," he said in a blasé voice. My eyes blurred with tears, but through them, I saw his expression change to concern. He stuck the tuning fork into the ground and reached for Sybil. He tapped her ears and tail with his forefinger.
"Interesting," he said, and reaching inside his coat pocket, he pulled out another black Chihuahua, identical to Sybil. "Even more interesting." He set the two Chihuahuas together.
I sucked in a breath as Sybil raised her head and came nose to nose with the other Chihuahua. Two black Chihuahuas blinked their eyes and shook their ears. Two black Chihuahuas opened their mouths to bark and produced squeaky bat screeches instead. Two black Chihuahuas backed up in surprise, and stretched out their tiny, bat-like—wings?
I had to squeak to get the words out, my voice shook so. "What are those?"
"It appears Sybil and Elvira have procreated, as it were," said Emmett. He nodded all around at the field, the sky, the surrounding trees. He looked downright proud.
"They've what? You mean they've had babies? But how?" The small dogs rose into the air and swarmed around us, flapping wings and wagging tails. I jumped to my feet. "Those aren't babies! What the heck are these things?"
"Something new," said Emmett, his face soft with wonder. "These are our children."
He floated up, hovering a foot above the ground, and with waving hands and pointing fingers, he began to lecture.
"You see, all that spectricity I was transporting might have caused some, ah, unexpected procreation. We in this place do not have babies such as you would know. Anything born anew in Dead Town is a part of something that already was. This is a little different than what you are used to. You, in the mortal world, give birth to new beings made by two other beings. We, in Dead Town, create new beings from halves of two other beings. One half of one, and one half of the other—that is the usual way it is done. The originals are altered. We don't increase our population. But something new is created anyway."
I might have found all this more fascinating if I hadn't been fretting about Sybil turning crazy flips in the air over my head. However, Sybil—whichever one was Sybil—appeared completely happy.
"Which one is my dog? How can I take her home like this?" I demanded.
Emmett glided over to the tuning fork and seized it. "One moment," he said. He hefted the tuning fork high in the air. It roiled with spectricity, then rose and rose, like a balloon lost at the fair, until it faded from sight in the gray indistinct sky. "There. That's done," he said.
I watched, craning my neck to see it go. When I lowered my gaze, his black eyes met mine.
"It was you I saw in the junkyard, wasn't it?" I said.
Emmett tore his gaze from mine, staring up into the sky as if the tuning fork might be due to come crashing down any second. "I have no idea what you mean. Why would I hang around a grungy old junkyard if I didn't have to?" he said.
"And you wrote to me, too," I ventured. I caught the quick side glance he sneaked at me.
"I may have," he said in a tiny voice.
"Are you going to tell me why?" I said.
He was studying his floating toes, fingers laced behind his back. "Because . . . I don't know. Why do you write? Why does anybody? To make contact, I suppose." He stared up at the pale-lit sky, avoiding my gaze. "Anyway, I told you that there was too much spectricity. I went to the junkyard to take care of it, and that is all. I do maintenance all the time. I'm like . . . a technician for spectricity." He gestured widely toward the murky sky as if it held the answers.
"So where did you send this spectricity?" I asked.
He faced me, staring wide-eyed. "Up!" he said.
Stifling a laugh at his sincerity, I said, "No, I mean, why've you sent it up?"
"It dissipates up there. It sometimes builds up too much on the lower levels, so I send it up," he said.
"What is it, exactly?" I asked.
"It's spectricity! Didn't you see it, buzzing all over the place?" He flapped his hands, like that made it obvious.
"I saw it. That doesn't mean I know what it is." Actually, I had more than seen it. I had been experiencing it throughout my entire body.
Emmett frowned. "Well . . . most of us don't know what spectricity is. Exactly. We do know it builds up from time to time, and then it's got to be removed."
"With a giant tuning fork!?" I said.
"With a . . . certainly! A giant tuning fork is the best, if you can get it. What's wrong with that?" he asked, his eyes even wider.
I shook my head at him, not buying the innocent act. All that writing he did took effort. He had more in mind than to "make contact," that I was sure of. "You don't strike me as much of a technician." I gave him my best squinty look, and he shriveled under it. "And what am I supposed to do about my dog?" I gestured upward.
Emmett shrugged, watching the bat-dogs chase each other through the air in crazy circles. "They seem happy enough—better adapted to the spirit world, too. It's you I'm a little concerned about." He lowered to the ground, linked arms with me, and, whistling to the Chihuahuas, led me toward the tree line. The tiny flying dogs spun dizzily after us. We strolled through the meadow at a swift pace. Emmett tugged to guide me around a smooth-edged hole in the ground. "Spirit portal. Look out. Fall down that one, and you could be reborn as someone's child in your realm."
I twisted to see this curiosity, and almost slipped down another large hole with smooth edges.
"Eww, that's a nasty one. Leads to the Underwood. You really don't want to fall down there. I should keep a better eye on you," said Emmett. He rested his hand on my shoulder. I glimpsed a round, white shape and turned—was that an eyeball sitting on my shoulder?
"Made you look!" said Emmett, giggling. He popped his eyeball back into the socket before I could react, then flashed that disarming smile. I shook my head, suppressing a smile of my own.
"You know, you're kind of silly for a . . . what are you, a ghost?" I said.
Emmett puffed up a bit, and he began to rise, as if floating on the current of words that now escaped his mouth. "Technically, I'm a spirit. Ghosts are haunters like Valente, tied to the mortal realm. I'm not nailed down—I can go wherever I want. Yes, but sadly, my sense of humor has probably gone out of style. They tend to do that. Go out of style faster than fashions. One day you're putting on your spats, and you realize your jokes are no longer funny. People are hissing at you, and you don't know if it's the threads or the jokes."
I'd released his arm, for he'd levitated up nearly two feet as he lectured. His words spent, he whistled to the Chihuahuas, glided down, and caught my hand in his. He hummed a little tune as we strolled through the weird, hole-filled meadow, flying dogs buzzing overhead, for all the world carefree and satisfied. Perhaps this is what
gravestones meant when they said, "Rest in peace."
"How old are you? You look my age," I said. We dodged another portal hole.
"I was your age—fifteen—the last time it happened. But I'm ages older than that. I'm what people in the mortal world call an 'old soul' except rather than wise, age has made me addled, I think." He half-smiled, his black eyes twinkling.
"Really, Emmett. How old?"
"Somewhere around two thousand, I think. I know I'm over a thousand. Not that I can remember much—but I do have a record of it," he said.
"Two thousand? Years?" I stopped short, imagining the things he must have seen. Yet he didn't remember?
"I know what you're going to say. What use is it being so old if I don't remember anything? And the answer is, I don't know. I do recall some of my most recent life, which ended in 1900. Emmett Fitzhugh, 1885 to 1900." He eyed me, gauging my reaction, then whispered, "Of course, most beings are older than they appear." He waited, his black eyes squinting until they glittered.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. You are aware at least of spirit names?" he said.
I shook my head no.
"No?! Oh, my All! You need to know that! Listen, spirits have one name in the spirit world, and can take on many others in the mortal world when they are reborn. But we must keep our spirit names hidden from the Turned Against. They can use our names to control or destroy us." He waited, staring at me intensely. "Your own spirit name, for example."
"I don't know it," I said in a tiny voice. "But wait—is that spirit name thing the reason your name is so long?" I said.
"That is exactly why my name is so long," said Emmett.
I squeezed my eyes shut, reaching out to sense the form of his name. Emmett, Emmett, Emmett—like his hair or his eyes, it was part of him. The long tail of his other names trailed after the first, surrounding it in a turbulent haze of words, letters, identities.
Mortals: Heather Despair Book One Page 10
