Page 46 of All Her Ghosts
The timer in my head ticks down, screaming at me to move. I can’t. I stare, transfixed by the device’swrongness, frozen by a deep and rotten kind of fear. I can feel it lying there, pulsing like a broken bone, pained and jarring and out of place. Hungry for more of me.
I want to shatter it. Ineedto shatter it. But I know if I touch it, it will wring me out until there’s nothing left but the husk upstairs.
Swallowing hard, I skirt around it, striding to the computer bay instead. Gripping the smallest screen, still demanding its password, I concentrate on draining rather than unlocking it. Power floods into me but too slowly. I’m running out of time for careful and precise. Climbing over the table, knees searing on its iron surface, I reach a hand between railroad spikes, plunge up to my shoulder in the wall. The familiar power line burns so close, power thrumming up and down the street—
Behind it, the ley line wakes, hot blue in my ghostly eye. Sour blue-raspberry blue. Swollen as a creek with rain, it sleeps closer than it did yesterday, like the storm’s rerouted it. Like it’s reaching for me. Trying to find me.
Seeking me the way my ghosts did.
Fingers outstretched, shoulder burning on railroad ties, I reach back. I don’t know what it wants—don’t know whatIexpect to achieve—but in that moment, I don’t care. A strange instinct washes every thoughtaway, the un-heart in my rib cage poundinghome, home, home. I forget my waiting body. Forget my ghostly shape. All that matters is my glittering fingers in the dirt, the river reaching for me—
In the basement behind me, the computer screens flare bright andpop, circuits smoking. Footsteps pound down the stairs.
Horrified, hard, my mother snarls, “What are you?”
Her voice cuts through my head like a hot knife. I remember myself all at once, skitter back from the wall, from the ley line, and spin to find her looking straight at me.
How is it that only now she sees me?
In the many spinning mirrors dangling from the rafters, I catch sight of my reflection. My un-body carves a frozen mist in the air, winter come early, a human figure sketched in gauze.
“Don’t you know?” I snarl, but this far from my body, my voice doesn’t work. It rips through the air, awful and discordant, like the last bubbles from a drowned man’s throat.
Mom rears backward. Tearing at the wall, she rips out a railroad spike and falls into a fighting stance. She stalks forward, poised for battle like a middle-aged Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and plants herself between me and her morbid bearskin rug of mirrors and wires and wrongness. Protecting her favorite child.
Some last vital thing in my chest cracks. Eyes stinging in my faraway body, I whisper, “How could you not know your own daughter?”
But how can I be surprised? Why would she? She doesn’t believe what she can’t see, what she can’t test and record, instead tallying up my ever-lengthening series of disappointments. To her, I’m a failed experiment in girl-shape. She doesn’t knowme—not the real me—just theversion of me in her head that she keeps measuring my disappointing reality against. So, fine. Let her have the science experiment she likes better. The one that can’t disappoint her with all its messy hopes and dreams and inconvenient emotions.
Flooding back into my body, I stagger down the stairs, hook my numb fingers through the loop of MothmanMotel,Room 13. Shaking violently, fried with energy, the RV keys rattle in my fists, betraying my position with sleigh bell insistence.
No time to cover—no more time to waste—I fumble the front door open.
A thick, pillowy whiteness swallows the sidewalk, thick across the grass. I run into the yard barefoot, muscles tight, braced for cold. Only, it’s not snow—
It’s flowers.
A field of asphodel blinks starry eyes open to the night sky. The trees lean close, thready fingers dark and washed of color. The night bleeds mist, every dewy particle lit with a hidden rainbow, too-saturate in the single thread of moonlight washing over Bas’s shoulders, crouched at the bumper of the RV.
He doesn’t seem surprised to find flowers blooming at his feet. He surges upright, swings his backpack over his shoulders, crosses the distance between us in a single, huge leap.
“Are you all right?” His hands climb my body—forearms, biceps, shoulders—and land cupped around my jaw. “I’ve got you.”
His calluses trace the outline of my lips. My soul settles beneath my skin at his touch, receding from my seams. I stop shaking so hard my teeth rattle and in the mossy silence, I hear thecreakof flowers strainingever higher. The moon burns so brightly, washing us in silver—but somehow, standing there with flowers climbing our knees, I’d swear his eyes were ringed in gold.
“We don’t have time,” I breathe. Regretfully, I peel his hand from my face, press the keys into his palm. “My mom will be here any second.”
Squeezing my hand, Bas nods. He spins around, gets the passenger door, and scrambles over the seat, sliding down behind the wheel. I leap up behind him, slam the door shut and the lock down, for all that little lock’s going to protect us against my vampire-slaying mother when she finally storms outside.
“Do you even have your license yet?” I demand, tossing my carpetbag behind us into the living area.
Bas slots the keys into the ignition on his first try. The engine roars awake. Glancing over, he winks.
“Felonies, remember?” he says and floors it.
My back slams hard into the seat. The RV launches forward, clips a lawn chair out of the way, and barrels into my backyard. Bas smashes over the ornamental grass as I grope for my seat belt, veers around the swing set by the time I catch my breath enough to gasp, “What are you doing!”
My shaking hands won’t work right. I can’t get my damn seat belt slotted, the metal tongue chattering in the slot. Steering with one hand—casually, like a maniac—Bas reaches over and clicks it into place.
