Beyond (15 page)

“Your house, Leo?”

N

I go back to the sketch, drawn cartoon-simple, and start inking it in. Turning the house black. I add something on the top, scrawling curved lines sticking up from opposite sides of the roof, each ending in a point, making what looks like horns.

A house with horns.

“Whose house?” Lexi presses. “Did something bad happen there?”

Y

My strokes are getting more agitated with her
questions, tearing through the page. She lifts my hand again and turns to a fresh one.

“What happened? What bad thing?”

My fist is shaking, the knuckles gone white.

“Is that … where you died?”

I carve three long slashes across the page. Then I go over them, making them deeper. Deeper.

Y

Y

Y

Ripping and shredding through. A wild swipe sends the notebook flying off the desk. “Okay, enough! Stop it!”

But I can’t. I keep going, scraping into the desktop.

Y

Y

Y

“Jane, wake up now. Wake! Up!” I feel Lexi shaking my shoulder. “Snap out of it!”

Lexi makes a grab for the pen. But I’m too quick. I watch my fist pull away from her, rising up high and then plunging down. Stabbing the pen into my right wrist.

I feel only a faint sting through my numb haze. When my hand pulls up again, blood spills out of the hole I’ve made on the inside of my wrist. I try another stab, but Lexi catches me. We struggle, and our skulls crack together. I lose my grip on the pen.

And it’s like the lights come back on inside my head, burning off the fog. The pain hits me then.

Blood runs down my palm, dripping off my fingers. Deep red.

“Jane? You there?” Lexi stares at me like I’m a stranger.

“Yeah,” I gasp through my teeth. “I’m here.”

My blood spatters the notebook lying on the floor, staining the pages.

Painting that black house red.

Down in the basement, I’m doing laundry. Just trying to keep busy and act normal, as if nothing’s wrong, like that will make it true. But it does calm me a little, this everyday stuff.

Our basement is a jungle of old junk. Boxes stacked high and forgotten. The ground-level window above lets in a gray wash of light from the stormy day.

I’m tossing the load in the dryer. I try to do it one-handed, with my right wrist still stinging from where I stabbed myself.

Lexi freaked at all the blood and wanted to get me to the emergency room. But the wound wasn’t that deep. And I’m so sick of hospitals. Besides, that would mean too many questions. How was I going to explain it? So we got me cleaned up, carefully, and Nurse Lexi bandaged my wrist. I just have to stick to long sleeves for a while and hide it from my parents. They can’t help me with what’s happening anyway. Can’t protect me.

I remember taking Dad’s self-defense course for women over at the community center. It was a police outreach
kind of thing, where he showed us all the moves—kicks, punches, eye gouges, scratches, how to stab with a nail file and claw with your keys. I know how to fight back, but I can’t hit something that isn’t even there.

Lexi’s feeling so guilty, like it was her fault because she tried interrogating my ghost, making him mad. She’s texting me every ten minutes, checking to make sure I’m okay. And we’ve been trying to figure out what it all means. Piecing together my vision of the bald man and the crow with my drawings of the bird and the black house with horns.

I slam the dryer shut and set it for a half hour. As it starts up, the lights dim. We get a lot of brownouts during windstorms.

I can hear it gusting outside now. Looking up at the small window, I feel a draft brush past me with a hushed sound.

I turn to go.

Someone’s sitting on the stairs.

It’s him! The hood of his sweatshirt is pulled up, shadowing his face, so all I see are his eyes, shining amber.

I back up into some boxes and grab for whatever I can use as a weapon. I find a golf club and hold it out in front of me.

“Get away from me!”

He doesn’t move. Just watches. He looks so real and solid sitting there.

“What? What do you want?”

He stares into me, those eyes burning bright.

You
.

I recoil at the voice in my head. He’s ten feet from me, but it’s like his lips are pressed to my ear.

“Why? Why me? What did I do?”

There’s a long silence, with nothing but the rumble of the dryer and the drum of my heartbeat.

It was always you
.

“Leave me alone. Go! Away!”

He just sits there blocking my escape.

My sweaty palms are slick on the handle of the club. I’m so scared, and so sick of being scared. I have to try something.

“I know who you are. Leo Gage.”

Those eyes flare with yellow fire.

“I know something bad happened to you.”

He steps down the stairs to the basement floor.

“M-maybe if you tell me, I can help.”

No!

What am I doing? I don’t want to make this thing angry. I know what it’s capable of. But what else can I do?

“Just try. P-please. Tell me … tell me about the bald man with the bird.”

SHUT UP!

His voice is deafening inside my skull. I try to back away, but I’m cornered against the boxes.

His eyes blaze so bright it hurts to look at them.

Come with me. I’ll make it quick. Then we can stay together
.

I’m shaking so badly I can’t even speak.

I feel him reaching out to me. Into me. And—

A squealing sound cuts through the air. The basement
door opens above on its creaky hinges and a stream of light spills down the stairs.

“Jane?” Mom calls. “You down there?”

I gasp like I’m waking up, sucking in a deep breath.

Spinning around, I scan the basement. Nothing. I’m alone.

“Jane?”

It takes me a second to get my voice back. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Phone for you. It’s Lexi.”

My rubbery legs barely hold me up.

“You coming?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t forget we have a doctor’s appointment later.” Mom walks away, and I want to yell, Wait for me!

I move while she’s still within earshot. Quick! Before he comes back.

Stumbling up the stairs, I trip, but don’t fall. I slam the door shut behind me, leaning against the wall and stare at the doorknob as if it’s going to start turning any second.

When it doesn’t, I go down the hall and pick up the phone with trembling hands.

“Lexi?”

“Hey, Jane, I found it!”

So good to hear her voice right now. Something to hold on to. I take a steadying breath.

“Found what?”

“A house with horns.”

The nail has to come out.

Dr. Simon, my neurologist, just broke the news. Me, Mom and Dad sit facing him in his office.

“The risk factors of not extracting it are too great,” he says, showing us why on his computer. “The main concern is blood flow. The nail is lodged here in the cerebrum, right next to the medial occipital artery and a number of smaller blood vessels. While it hasn’t shifted, the surrounding scar tissue continues to build up, putting pressure on these vessels. Even a minor blockage could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?” Mom asks.

“It could possibly cause a stroke, or brain-cell atrophy if the area is starved for blood. And because this region is part of the visual cortex, her sight could be affected.”

The image on the screen is from my latest scan. It shows my brain colored in bright blues and greens, with a small area of orange. The nail itself is black and has these dark streaks radiating out from it, as if it’s shining with some black light.

“Why does the nail look like that?” I ask. “What’s with those lines sticking out of it?”

“Metallic objects can cause a distortion in the imaging. This is called an aliasing effect. It’s what gives the nail that glow. The darker blue around it is the scar tissue, which has grown incrementally with each new scan we take.”

“And this orange patch here.” I lean over to point it out. “Does that mean anything?”

“That just indicates a spike in brain activity during the scan, in your visual cortex. Could be caused by a bright light.”

No, it wasn’t a light. That’s what my brain looks like when I’m seeing
him
. When I had my freakout in the scanner.

“How soon can we get this done, then?” Dad asks.

“I’ve already consulted with a neurosurgeon. He’s available later this week, and the operation can be performed right here at Mercy.”

Dr. Simon runs through the operation with us. Real horror-movie stuff. Sawing off a portion of my skull to dig the nail out, cleaning away the scar tissue. The whole procedure takes about eight hours.

Mom’s taking notes. She and Dad grill the doc. I’m not really listening to all the details. Don’t tell me how, just do it! I’m ready.

I know, my haunting started way before I got nailed. So I’m not fooling myself that this surgery is going to cure me of my ghost.

But I’m hoping it might put Leo back to sleep. He left
me alone for years between the train and the nail gun. He let me live.

But with the nail in me he seems stronger somehow. I can see him, hear him. It’s almost like that sliver of metal is keeping the gate between this world and the great beyond open.

So cut it out. And slam that gate shut. Send him back to hiding in my shadow and buy me some time to figure out how to get rid of him permanently.

There must be a way. Now that I know who he really is—or was. If I can find out what happened to him, maybe I’ve got a chance. We’re getting closer, me and Lexi. She found a house with horns.

Not a house, really. Lexi says it’s what they used to call a
trappers’ hut
. From early in the last century, when the Raincoast was just wilderness. The first settlers were animal trappers and fur traders who built these huts out in the woods. The horns are actually chimneys made from cans and tin drums welded together, with smaller cans on top. In the historical photo she dug up, they do kind of look like horns, thinning almost to points at the top.

So now we’re trying to find out if any still exist. There must be one. That’s where Leo died.

“Jane?”

I snap back to see Dr. Simon staring at me.

“What?”

“Do you have any questions?” he asks.

I look over at my brain on the screen, the nail shining darkly.

“No. Let’s just do it.”

“Are you afraid?” my psychiatrist asks.

I stare back at Dr. Iris.

“Afraid of what?”

My life has turned into a multiple choice of horrors. Pick one.

“You’re going in for major surgery,” she says.

“Well, yeah, that’s scary stuff. But I kind of want to get it over with. Can’t keep walking around like a ticking time bomb. Then I think, what if something goes wrong and when I wake up—
if
I wake up—I’m not me anymore?”

“There’s always some risk involved, but these operations are very precise. Neurosurgeons take every precaution. You’ll be in good hands.”