The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl)

by Paige McKenzie

  We round another blind corner. We are getting closer to it. I don’t stop to think it might just be letting us get close, leading us somewhere. Suddenly a shabbily dressed man stumbles out of one of the shadows and crashes into Lucio, barely missing me as well. Lucio and the man fall to the ground, and the man groans in pain. I don’t look back because I don’t want the demon to hide in one of the shadows while I’m not looking.

  It takes a sharp left and enters a room off the alley. I slow down and cautiously look inside. The room is covered in pale green tile, and mold is growing in the corners and on the ceiling. An old, dirty fluorescent light hangs from the ceiling, flickering over a few pieces of garbage on the floor.

  We’re not alone. A woman sits in the middle of the room. She looks exhausted and her face has that same blank stare I sometimes saw on Mom’s face when the water demon possessed her.

  I can see the demon clearly now. Its fur seems to be soaking wet, but I don’t think it’s sweat or water because it reeks like it’s been doused in gasoline. It has a short, pointed tail and horns that twist up behind its face, which is more human than goat, although its eyes glow yellow. It takes one look at me and leaps toward the woman.

  She opens her mouth to a disturbingly unnatural size and easily swallows the demon’s head. The rest of its body flails about, forcing itself inside this woman, kicking off the sickly green tile below it. First the front legs and eventually the back legs, so only the tip of the tail is hanging out of her mouth. She turns her focus on me, smiling after she consumes it.

  Lucio bounds into the room. “Where’d it go?!” He pants heavily. All I can do is point at the woman. She stands and walks toward us. I reach for the knife in my back pocket, only it’s not there.

  The woman’s grin grows larger as she approaches us. Maybe this was a trap. We need to run.

  “Run,” I whisper loudly, backing into the alley. I pull Lucio’s arm, and in an instant we’re going as fast as we can. Only we’re not the ones giving chase this time. Much to my surprise, the possessed woman doesn’t follow us for long, though. Instead, she stops and laughs, a high-pitched cackle that echoes through the narrow walls of the town’s back alleys and makes my skin crawl.

  We run through the maze of alleyways at top speed. As we round one of the corners I catch a glimpse of a man lurking in the shadows, wearing a long black coat and black hat, surrounded by darkness.

  It doesn’t take us long to kick-start Clementine awake. We jump on, and Lucio gases it. Soon we’re climbing the hill we descended earlier. I hang onto Lucio as I look back at the town—not so cute and peaceful anymore.

  Things don’t calm down much when we get back to campus. Before Lucio can even bring us to a full stop, Aidan bursts out of a stucco building directly across the courtyard from the mansion. I can tell Lucio’s eager to fill Aidan in on what happened, but Aidan doesn’t want to listen right now. Instead, he scolds Lucio for taking me off campus. I hear phrases like You know it’s not safe and Do I need to remind you what’s at stake? Lucio argues that we stayed on Llevar la Luz land, but my brain tunes out most of it because it’s still stuck on what happened back at the town, on that poor man the demon killed, on the sound of that horrible laugh as we ran away, and on the man in black. Why did he look so familiar? Was that the same man I saw at the airport back in Washington?

  The sound of Lucio’s voice saying my name breaks through the thoughts racing around my brain. “Sunshine, you have to tell him.” I look up and see Aidan and Lucio staring back at me.

  “Is it true?” Aidan asks.

  “Is what true?”

  “You can see spirits, both light and dark?”

  “Yes. It’s true.” I answer, exhausted. I know Aidan wants to hear every detail of what happened tonight.

  “Let’s go inside.” Aidan turns to lead the way into the house. Lucio follows, and I notice something on the ground, not far from where we’re standing. My rusty old knife. It must have fallen out of my pocket when I got on the motorcycle earlier. I quickly bend down and put it back where it belongs, relieved to feel its weight in my pocket again.

  For the next two hours we sit at the kitchen table, and Lucio and I tell Aidan about everything that happened. Aidan takes notes and asks questions, but in typical Aidan fashion, he gives us little in return.

  Eventually, as the two of them discuss the description of the demon I gave them for a fifth time, I begin to fall asleep right there at the table. Aidan finally excuses us so we can get some sleep. But I’m pretty sure that no matter how tired I feel, I won’t be getting much sleep tonight.

  I Find the Protector

  I see him across the crowded coffee shop. I think I would have recognized him even if that woman hadn’t told me what he looked like. He has that same far-off look so many protectors have, as though being out here in the world interacting with people doesn’t come nearly as naturally to him as burying his head in a book.

  There are a stack of open books in front of this boy. As he reads, he fingers a camera on the table with one hand, gripping his coffee mug with the other. He doesn’t take a single sip, as though he’s forgotten why he’s holding it at all. Instead, he puts the cup down and starts making frantic notes, like he’s hoping if he just writes quickly enough, he’ll get to his answer that much sooner.

  Poor boy. Even from here he’s trying to help her. Hoping his research might reveal all the solutions they haven’t yet found. He looks profoundly unhappy. Which should make this a whole lot easier.

  Like most luiseach, I’m aging slowly: no one who saw me would guess my real age. (Which is decades younger than Aidan, in any case.) And I’m short, shorter than the average female, which should work to my advantage.

  Humans never quite stop associating height with age. When elderly people begin shrinking, humans treat them like they’re younger than they are. I can easily pass for a college student, just a few years older than that boy. I had the forethought to dress the part. Rather than my usual vintage clothes, I bought two pairs of jeans, several graphic T-shirts, and a puffy down jacket that makes me look like a marshmallow from nearby chain stores—nothing one-of-a-kind. Now I pull my hair down from its tightly knotted bun, letting my curls fall across my face. I concentrate on softening my expression: unfurrowing my brow, unsquinting my eyes, relaxing my jaw. Like I haven’t a care in the world.

  That woman told me his name.

  Of course, I have to pretend not to know it now.

  Have to pretend I’m sitting down beside him only because there are so few vacant seats in this shop.

  Have to strike up a conversation because I’m new to Ridgemont—just transferred to the university a couple of towns over, and rents were so much cheaper here than close to campus, but it’s hard making friends when you live so far away and you’re majoring in such a specialized subject.

  A subject, I have no doubt, that will grab this boy’s attention.

  It shouldn’t be so easy, but it is. I tuck my hair behind my ears, roll my shoulders into a schoolgirl-ish slouch, and smile slightly as I ask, “Is that a Nikon F5?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My Ghost

  I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I arrived here. Each night I go to bed exhausted from the day’s work, certain that tonight I’ll finally crash into a deep, dreamless sleep. I imagine I won’t wake up until Aidan is banging on the door, insisting it’s time to get started for the day. But that never happens. Not even close.

  The nightmares that started on my first night here haven’t stopped.

  The woman holds my infant form tenderly, humming a sweet sort of nonsense tune. Her grip turns tight; her fingers are like rods of steel digging into my sides, my neck, my legs. I try to scream, but she’s squeezing me so tightly, I can’t even get out a pathetic, baby wail. I’m so small that she can wrap her hands around my entire rib cage. It feels like she’s going to break every bone that protects my heart. It feels like she’s going to keep on squeezing until her fin
gers go right through me.

  I wake up gasping in the darkness. This isn’t the first time my dreams have carried over into my waking life. I spent night after night dreaming of Anna in her wet dress back in Ridgemont.

  But when I dreamed of Anna, I was living in a haunted house. She left her wet little fingerprints all over my stuff; she laughed and played and whispered in my ear.

  I get out of bed and head for the bathroom. I can feel the cool air coming from the crack beneath the nursery door, smell my birth mother’s perfume from the master bedroom down the hall. I close my eyes and picture the forgotten furniture downstairs, covered in sheets and decaying in the humid air.

  When Anna was haunting me, at least it was fun from time to time. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I was terrified and confused and overwhelmed, but I was also playing Monopoly and checkers with a little girl who liked my toys and laughed when she won. There’s nothing fun about this house. It’s so humid that sometimes it looks like the walls are crying.

  I miss Anna. She’s probably moved on by now, right? I know that Victoria’s letter said her spirit still had work left to do on Earth, but it’s been weeks since I destroyed the water demon who killed her. She knows better than anyone the risks of lingering too long.

  Lucio mentioned once that you could seek spirits out if you knew about their lives before they passed away. I know a lot about Anna’s life: I know where she lived and how she died and that her favorite toy was a stuffed owl that matches the one in the nursery across the hall.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed. It takes all my strength to open the window wide with the vines pressing heavily from the other side. The plants crack and rip as the window ascends. I stick my head outside and close my eyes.

  Concentrate. Just like Aidan always tells me to.

  I picture the inside of Victoria’s house, its plush, pastel-colored furniture, a stark contrast to her dark clothes. I picture Anna’s face—not the little girl in the wet dress I saw in my dreams, but the pictures on Victoria’s mantel—the pretty girl with the nearly black eyes that matched her mother’s. If I can pull her near, now that I’m more experienced, will I be able to see her? Will I want to see the Anna who was drowned in her own bathtub? Goosebumps blossom on my arms and legs.

  “Anna!” I say out loud, careful not to shout—Lucio is asleep in his room below. “Anna?” I repeat, a question this time.

  Softly, like it’s coming from miles away, I hear the laugh I know so well.

  Then, as quickly as it came, the sound disappears, like a connection that’s been broken, a call that’s been dropped. I concentrate once more.

  “Please.” I hold my arms out in front of me, like I think if I just reach out far enough, I’ll be able to grab her and pull her close.

  No such luck.

  Then I have an idea.

  I run into the hallway and throw my weight against the nursery door. Just like my first night here, this room is a pleasant few degrees cooler.

  But I’m not here to enjoy the weather. Even in the darkness I find what I’m looking for almost immediately. I grab it, its fur soft and cool under my fingers. I close the door behind me and go back to the window. This time, when I reach my arms out in front of me, I’m holding something Anna will recognize.

  I close my eyes and concentrate, thinking of the sound of her voice saying night night and of her footsteps pattering on the floor above me. I even think about our bathroom on the night the demon arrived. The sound of her voice when she begged for her life.

  I open my eyes and I can see her. She is all I can see—her long, dark hair and her pale skin and her dark eyes. “You’re dry,” I say dumbly. Every time I saw her before—and then it was only in my dreams—her hair was wet, her clothes dripping. Whenever she touched anything in my room, wet fingerprints were left behind. She nods but doesn’t speak, and I understand she’s been dry ever since the water demon was destroyed.

  “Are you ready to move on?” I ask, holding out the stuffed owl that matches hers.

  She shakes her head.

  “Don’t you want to move on, Anna?” I sense her answer immediately. I smile, relieved. Until she adds, But not until the time is right.

  “What does that mean? It’s too risky to stay here.” If anyone knows what’s at stake when a dark spirit manifests, she does. “You have to move on,” I say fiercely. “Please let me help you.” My hands are trembling, so the owl is shaking in my grip. It looks like it’s about to take flight. In a second it does. I mean, it’s floating up away from me.

  “How are you doing that?” I ask. The last time I saw a stuffed owl fly, it was Dr. Hoo in my bedroom, his wings flapping so hard they lifted my hair in the breeze. But that was when the water demon was there too.

  “Please!” I shout at her, not even bothering to try to stay quiet. “Let me—”

  But before I can finish, the owl falls abruptly to the ground. I can see the ground now. I can see everything. Everything except Anna, who’s vanished.

  I run out of the bedroom and down the stairs, opening the heavy front door. The moist night air covers me like a blanket as I go around the side of the house and pick up the owl, one of its wings stained brown with mud where it hit the ground. I hold it up, ready to flex every single muscle in my body, ready to concentrate in order to bring her back, but I can’t concentrate because I just noticed a tiny beam of light coming from the window of one of the stucco buildings across the courtyard.

  The building Aidan angrily emerged from as Lucio and I returned from the fishing village. That must be the building where he does all his work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Dark Discovery

  Before heading upstairs to bed tonight, I managed to pull Lucio aside and ask him the question I hadn’t had the chance to ask before: “What did you mean, Aidan thinks we’re going extinct?”

  “Well, not you and me personally. But the species. Which I guess is sort of you and me personally, if you’re the last luiseach to be born, right? He thinks that’s your destiny—you’re the last luiseach.”

  I wrinkle my nose. The Last Luiseach sounds like the name of a movie, and not one I want to have a starring role in. What will happen to humanity if luiseach go extinct? I remember what the water demon almost did to my mother. What it succeeded in doing to Anna and her father when there wasn’t a luiseach to save them.

  Will the rest of humanity suffer the same fate? With no one around to exorcise them, will the entire world be blanketed in dark spirits? I close my eyes and imagine such a world: humans running away, as though it’s possible to hide from a demon. People dying, their spirits trapped here on Earth. Will this be the result of the growing darkness Lucio was telling me about?

  “But why does he think we’re going extinct?” I asked. If I really am the last luiseach, then someday I’ll be here on Earth all alone after the rest of the luiseach are gone. A single person trying to do the work that a whole species used to manage together. “He wouldn’t just let the planet descend into chaos. That must be what he’s working on in his lab at all hours.”

  “You should ask him yourself,” Lucio said.

  No time like the present, right? In my bare feet and pajamas—worn-out sweatpants and an old T-shirt—I make my way across the courtyard.

  I stop and carefully lie the stuffed owl down on the house’s front porch. I won’t give up until I get Anna to agree to move on.

  Even at this hour the air is thick with humidity, as warm as a touch on my skin. The building where Aidan does his work is in surprisingly good shape. In the moonlight I can see that there’s no dust on the floor, which is covered with enormous, cream-colored tiles. I hear footsteps clicking above me, and I head toward the stairs on the far right, even though there are no windows along the staircase so after the first few steps it turns pitch black. I cross my fingers and hope there aren’t any missing steps that need to be hopped over.

  I nearly fall flat on my face when I get to the top of the stairs an
d bite my lip to keep from crying out. I hear noises coming from down the hall. Blindly I head in the direction of the sound, but soon my steps become heavy, labored. The air feels thick, like walking through quicksand. I can barely put one foot in front of the other.

  And the temperature is plummeting.

  I manage to make it to the open doorway all the way down the hall. There’s a circle of light coming from inside, where Aidan has a flashlight perched on a cold-looking metal table, the sort of surface you’d expect to see in a doctor’s office or a morgue. Nothing else in this room looks like I expected; it doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to my high school’s chem lab. Just shelves with books, hundreds of newspaper clippings tacked to the wall, and a large map of the world with four spots circled in red and what looks like dates next to them. There aren’t any beakers of fluid bubbling up in the corner, no microscope so Aidan can study specimens through its lens.

  But there are specimens in there.

  The room is filled with spirits, but I can’t see them like I usually can. They’re worked into such a frenzy, so upset for some reason that they swirl the room in a blur. I think there might be dozens of them. Hundreds of them? I remember the chill I felt when I first arrived here, the presence of spirits so close and yet unable to touch me. Now, from the doorway, I can hear their voices drifting in and out of my head.

  I sink to the floor. I’ve never heard such agony. They’re begging for my help, begging to be set free. Pleading with me to help them move on, beseeching Aidan to stop what he’s doing to them. Flashes of their lives and deaths spring up behind my eyes, as vivid as images on a movie screen: a man throwing a ball for his beloved dog, a woman rocking her baby to sleep, a toddler taking his first, uncertain steps. Then, a hospital heart monitor flatlining, a car skidding across the meridian, a pair of eyelids dropping heavily and permanently shut.