“Dad, I don’t know what to tell Mom about all this,” I said after he released me from a bear hug that had nearly crushed my ribs flat. “She seems fine, but I know that underneath it all, she’s still heartbroken.”
He extended his arms out to their full length, a big beefy paw on each shoulder, so that he could look me up and down and study me a little.
“I know, son. She’s putting on a front to try and keep you from figuring out just how hurt she really is. But you have to trust me when I tell you that now is not the right time to try and break this to her.”
“Couldn’t you, you know, visit her in her dreams and let her know that you’re still around?” I pleaded.
“Danny, I do,” he smiled back at me. “More often than you realize, in fact. We walk arm-in-arm together in the fields and meadows of the Summerland, just like this one.” Dad opened his arms and gestured all around us at the broad expanse of wild green grass that we were standing in. Just the very thought of that brought a tear to my eye. “What you have to understand is, she thinks that those visits are just dreams. When she wakes up in the morning, she feels worse than she did before.”
“Huh? How would a visit from you make her feel worse?” I didn’t understand.
“Because when the sun comes up, she feels as though she has lost me all over again,” he explained.
Lamiyah nodded sadly in agreement. She was standing several respectful paces back from us both, kindly allowing us to have this father-son moment all to ourselves. “You know that it is often this way, when a non-seer receives a visitation from one that has passed across to the other side of the veil.”
She was right; I did know that. Most people woke up after a sleep visitation with tears streaming down their faces, convinced that they had just been in the physical presence of their loved one; but that feeling tended to fade away with the arrival of morning, and by the time the toothpaste cap was back on, they had usually written it off to simply being a really lucid dream.
That’s what Mom must have been doing, every time Dad came to visit. No wonder she was walking around in a daydream half the time.
“I’ll tell her one day,” Dad promised me, trying to cheer me up with a smile. “When the time is right.”
In the end, we decided to leave it at that. I totally trusted him to do the right thing, and if he said that the time wasn’t right yet, then I guessed that the time really wasn’t right yet…but I hoped that time was coming soon.
CHAPTER TWO
Before we knew it, the summer was gone and fall had arrived. Everybody went back to school. Becky and I started spending a little more time together, but neither of us ever brought up the “d’ word…neither of us actually came out and said that we were dating. I don’t know why Becky didn’t say it, but I can tell you my reason for sure: I was scared. Scared that she was going to laugh at me, or reject me; scared that she would say we were just friends, and nothing more. That would mean I was locked into the friend zone for all time, like the bad guys trapped in the Phantom Zone by Superman. Once you were imprisoned there, you could never get out again.
We hung out all the time, at first. Sometimes the three of us — Becky, Brandon, and me — would get in his car and head up Boulder Canyon, always headed for the same place: the Peak to Peak Highway, and Long Brook. It was almost as if we were obsessed with the place, trying to make sense of everything that had happened on that crazy night of darkness and fire. Becky admitted to me in private that she was frightened that her grandmother, Jennifer, might still be earthbound, maybe trapped and haunting the burned-out old ruin. Every time she said it, I pointed out to her that we had seen her stepping inside her very own portal up on that burning rooftop. That seemed to calm her down for a while, but it wasn’t long before the anxiety was back again.
Finally, I told her I’d speak to Lamiyah and ask whether my spirited guide would check up on Jennifer for her.
“Just as you suspected,” Lamiyah told me the next time she came to me in my sleep, “Rebecca’s grandmother did indeed cross over of her own free will. I have spoken with her spirit guide. She is now spending what passes for time in the Summerland in deep spiritual contemplation and learning. Apparently, Jennifer felt a great deal of remorse for what she had done during her time at Long Brook; she must take into account, however, the fact that much of that was done under duress, and that much of it was due to the malign influence of another, one who was steeped in genuine evil.”
She meant von Spiessbach, but didn’t seem to want to say the name.
“What about…him?” I asked hesitantly. Hey, I was curious. So sue me.
Lamiyah paused for a moment before replying, as though searching for the words that would allow her to frame her answer perfectly. “He, also, is a student,” she said at last, her voice carrying an undercurrent that I found just a little bit ominous. “Although I think that he will find his schooling to be significantly more…challenging than Jennifer will.”
A shiver ran through me. I had heard other spirits talk about how it felt to confront their own inner darkness, along with the true horror of some pretty horrific actions such as murder and physical abuse. Maybe Marko von Spiessbach would be redeemed one day, but the chances were that it wasn’t going to be any day soon.
Becky had been moved to tears when I called her the next morning and gave her the good news. “I thought she was suffering,” Becky told me between sobs, “suffering for helping him.”
I hesitated, not really knowing what to say. I’m pretty awkward around girls at the best of times — even around Becky, who doesn’t cross the street to avoid me like most of them seem to do — but I just don’t handle tears very well, no matter who they’re coming from.
“Aren’t you going to say anything, Danny?” she cried after my silence had stretched out for long enough to be called ‘awkward.’
“Uh…” was the best I could come up with.
In a fit of sobbing, she hung up.
Looking back, I think that’s when we first started drifting apart.
Not only that, but over the course of the next few months, Brandon started to drift away from us. It’s not as if we had a falling-out or anything like that; he just told me one day that he was “through with all of that weird crap” and was going to focus on the more important things in his life.
“Like what?” I asked him skeptically.
“Like…sports, for starters. The Broncos. The Nuggets. The Avalanche. Then there’s girls. You know,” he finished airily, “the important shit.”
The important shit. Right.
I sighed inwardly. Brandon must be the only human being ever to walk the face of the Earth who, when confronted with definitive proof of life after death and a universe that was suddenly so much bigger and stranger than he could ever possibly have imagined, decided to put it all out of his mind in favor of the Denver Broncos and the Colorado Avalanche. First I shook my head in disbelief. Then I shook his hand. We parted ways amicably, each of us going off to do our own thing. Each of us, I suspect, secretly feeling sorry for the other.
That was last month, and though we’re still friends on Facebook, I haven’t heard a word from him since.
A rhythmic clackety-clack sound brought me back to the here and now. It was my teeth chattering in the cold night air.
Becky had brought a little something along with her for Jake; nothing special, just a cheap bouquet of flowers. The first thing she did when we arrived was to lay them gently on the spot where he had died, or at least as close to it as we could figure, when taking the massive devastation of the building into account. I could have sworn that there was a tear in her eye as she knelt and laid the bouquet gently in the middle of the floor, carefully clearing away a few small chunks of fallen masonry and rubble first to make a clear spot.
I glanced over toward them. The flowers were still laying there, with a little ambient light glinting from the protective polythene wrapper around the stems.
Bored now, I was
asking myself for close to the hundredth time just why I was freezing my butt off out here in the middle of nowhere, when I could just as easily have been curled up at home watching a few episodes of The Clone Wars…but the truth is that I already knew the answer to that question.
It was to please Becky.
She was obviously still fascinated with this place…I mean, it seemed like she dragged me up here every single chance she could. Knowing that her grandmother wasn’t haunting the burned-out shell of the old sanatorium had been a huge relief, but it hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm for visiting the place one little bit.
“I just feel…I don’t know, drawn here,” she had told me awkwardly after our last visit. It had only been a week ago. “It’s as if there are answers that I’m somehow supposed to find somewhere around here.”
So here we were again. Something else that hadn’t put her off was the total absence of ghosts. Long Brook had been packed full of them when we arrived for our first adventure here, but I hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of an earthbound soul — not even a good old classic residual apparition, non-intelligent and dumb as a box of rocks — on any of our visits since. There was only the ruin, the wind, and now the bone-chilling cold.
“The taxi will be back pretty soon,” I hinted, gesturing towards the shadowy tree-lined driveway, “and we’re really starting to lose the light.”
“There’s no need to rush, Danny. He’ll wait.”
“I just don’t see why we’re poking around in the middle of what’s basically a burned-out barbecue pit,” I countered irritably. I knew the second the words came out of my mouth that I’d said the wrong thing.
“Danny…people died here. A lot of people died here. Good people. At least one of whom I really care about.”
Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can see just how easy it would have been to do the right thing. All I’d have had to do was admit that what I’d just said was in really poor taste, and follow it up by admitting that I was cold, tired, miserable, and perhaps even a tad creeped out. In other words, an apology. I was starting to get to know Becky fairly well as a person; she’d respect the honesty and integrity that it would have shown for me to make a difficult admission like that.
Instead, I doubled down. Because I’m a moron.
“Yeah, but those people are long gone,” I pointed out doggedly. Stupid stupid stupid, a voice in the back of my mind was hissing before the words even left my mouth. There’s no way that this is going to end well if you keep on pushing her buttons like that. “Even the ghosts are gone. It’s all just ash now. We’re stupid for even being up here.”
Becky shot me a look that wouldn’t have been out of place on Medusa. It’s a miracle that I wasn’t turned to stone right then and there.
“Stupid,” was all she said, echoing me softly.
I had nothing to say to that. That inner voice was screaming at me now, raging at me like Kirk raged at Khan, telling me to take back what I’d just said while there was still time to make it good, or at least salvage something from what was quickly becoming a train wreck.
Stubbornly, my mouth stayed silent. That’s what happens when you let your ego into the driver’s seat, kids. Learn from my mistake.
The taxi ride back to Nederland, and then the bus journey back into Boulder both seemed to take an eternity, mainly because they took place in absolute silence.
Things only got worse from there.
CHAPTER THREE
We sat on separate seats on the bus heading home. The central aisle felt like a massive invisible barrier that was keeping us apart, like The Wall from Game of Thrones. Well, the air around Becky was frosty enough that it really did feel as though winter was coming. She was angry at me, royally pissed, and deep down I really couldn’t blame her. I knew that I’d acted pretty badly up there, when all she had wanted to do was poke around a little, satisfy her curiosity, and maybe even spend a little quiet time with me…and what had I done? Said something epically crass, and then shown about as much patience as a baby with a poopy diaper.
Sometimes I really, really can’t stand myself.
“Maybe there are still spirits there,” she said after a while. The bus had just reached the outskirts of Boulder, passing the library and heading downtown.
“Huh?” I grunted, taken a little by surprise. I hadn’t expected her to start speaking to me again.
“You’ve said it yourself, Danny: you’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of them these days.”
That was true. I had been seeing them less. It was something else that had been on my mind lately. Were my abilities starting to fade as I got older? I wondered if maybe it was because I was starting to go through a growth spurt, and the hormones were messing with my Seer abilities.
“Maybe. Or maybe there just aren’t any. Maybe the place isn’t haunted at all any more. Which do you think is the more reasonable answer?”
I was being difficult just for the sake of being difficult — I knew that. You see, there was something really, really wrong with me, and it had nothing to do with being able to see the dead: it was something far, far worse than that.
Slowly but surely, one day at a time, I could feel myself turning into a complete tool…and worst of all, I didn’t know why.
This is how a friendship dies. One petty cut at a time.
Flash back a few months to a time before all of this began, before we had ever gone up to Long Brook for the very first time. I’d had a massive crush on Becky, even back then. Yes, it’s a cliche, but I really had worshiped her from afar, daydreamed about her in the daytime, and even had a few real dreams about her at night — and no, I’m not going to talk about those ones, before you even ask.
Until that day on the sidewalk when I was confronted by Brandon and his gang of bullies, when the spirit of his dead grandmother had gotten in his face and slapped him when Becky just happened to be watching, the object of my affection had never so much as looked at me twice. Then, when she finally gotten proof of my Seer abilities, she had latched onto me and flirted just enough to wrap me right around her little finger and do what she wanted.
All of us have a place, deep down inside of us, somewhere below the hundreds and thousands of tiny little lies that we tell ourselves each and every day just so we can get through this miserable physical life, where we keep the pure, absolute truth. Whoever said “the truth shall set you free” was full of it, so far as I’m concerned. Because I know my truth, and knowing it doesn’t free me at all, not one little bit…and knowing that truth makes me sick to my stomach.
Becky was too darn good for me, and there was no way in hell she was ever going to stick around for the long haul.
And that cold, hard truth terrified me. It was like an icy knife in my belly, an eel slithering around in my guts and making my stomach churn out of pure fear.
Just looking at her took my breath away. She was tall and slender, with green eyes that you just wanted to fall into forever, and straight red hair that fell down past her shoulders, which was usually gathered up into a ponytail.
A beautiful, no, gorgeous girl like Becky was never going to end up with a gangly hundred-pound nerd like me. Not in a million years.
Sooner or later she was going to dump me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
So what did I do about it?
I got snarky. I became an even bigger A-hole than usual, in some stupid, moronic, passive-aggressive way that makes me blush now to even tell you about. A shrink would probably have said that I was subconsciously sabotaging my own happiness, setting up my own self-fulfilling prophecy that was meant to push Becky away from me and thereby bringing about the one thing I feared above all others.
Maybe they’d be right. Push her into breaking up with me sooner rather than later.
“You’re acting like such a jerk, Danny.” She said it so softly, and I’m pretty sure that none of the other passengers on the bus heard it over the noise of the engine…but those seven wor
ds couldn’t have cut me any deeper if she had screamed them at the top of her lungs.
I opened my mouth to answer her, without having even the slightest idea of what words were going to come out of it…so, pretty much business as usual for me. Becky didn’t give either of us the chance to find out, though. Shouldering her backpack, she got up and walked to the front of the bus. The glow of the streetlights and storefronts streaking past outside the steamed-up windows told me that we were almost at her stop. My mind raced, running through all the things I ought to be doing: dash to the front of the bus and hug her, say that I was sorry, let her know that yes, I was being a jerk, but it was only because I was afraid, absolutely terrified, of losing her, and it was driving me halfway out of my mind. Then she’d hug me back. Maybe there’d be tears and maybe there wouldn’t, but all would be forgiven. We’d laugh and maybe even hold hands for a while, and Becky would tell me to stop being silly…perhaps even tell me that she wanted to be more than just my friend.
I just sat there. Silently. Not moving.
With a hiss of brakes, the bus came to a stop. The driver opened the doors, and just like that she was gone. Out into the night.
From where I had been sitting on the left side of the bus, I couldn’t see much of anything over on the right side. Quickly, I butt-bounced once, twice, and then scooched across the aisle and dropped into the seat that she’d just been sitting in. It was still warm. Trying not to be too obvious about it, I wiped a small spiral clear of the fogged-up glass, the condensation caused by the driver and the eight of us remaining passengers breathing.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 2
