The Ghost in Love (20 page)

“You think?” The boy sprang from the ceiling. Twisting gracefully in the air like an expert gymnast, he landed in a coiled crouch near Danielle. The move was unexpected. The verz was taken completely off guard. It was unable to stop little Ben when he sprang again, this time for Danielle's throat.

Instinctively throwing up her arms, she crossed them in an X in
front of her face. That quick gesture blocked the boy for precious seconds. And in those seconds, the being masquerading as young Ben Gould transformed back into what it really was.

Death is what humans fear most, although everyone has a different idea of what it'll look like when it comes for him or her. But Danielle Voyles had already seen her death once. Seeing it now for the second time only made her angry.

“Oh, no you don't.” She threw the radio at the thing with all of her might and hit it in the face. Then she sprang five feet straight up in the air and landed on top of the refrigerator. None of it was thought out: her body screamed
Jump!
and she did. Crouching on the refrigerator, she tensed to jump again if the beast came after her.

But the verz was faster. Charging forward, it sank its teeth into what moments before had been the little boy. But by then the “boy” had metamorphosed into something unrecognizable.

Fearsome jaws clamped tight around it, the verz stepped slowly backward while dragging the squirming being along with it. The verz wanted to get the thing out of the kitchen because it did not want the others to see what it was going to do next.

Not that they
wanted
to see. Pilot didn't move. German Landis stepped back fast to avoid touching either creature when the verz passed her.

Danielle stayed perched up on the refrigerator and watched the action down below. From that safe-for-now vantage point, she wondered, How'd I do that? How did I jump so high? Her mind was split between watching with awe as the verz dragged the whatever-it-was out of the room and puzzling over how she had leapt to her present location. What she didn't realize yet was that she had only copied the boy. She had done exactly as he had to escape.

While crossing the floor, the verz suddenly slid on something
slippery and lost its balance. For an instant it opened its mouth in surprise and the thing wrenched itself loose. Darting across the room, it went straight for Danielle again. She saw it coming, leapt off the refrigerator, and skittered high up on the wall, just as the boy-monster had done minutes before. Up there on the kitchen wall, she glared at her new enemy a few feet away on top of the refrigerator.

Down below, the verz sprang for the monster. The monster sprang for Danielle. Like a fly, Danielle waited till the last second and then easily jumped from the wall and across the kitchen, landing near German Landis, who stared at her in wonder.

The monster followed but this time it was cut off in mid-flight by the verz, which caught it by the throat and pulled it brutally to the floor. Together they landed on top of the dog. Pilot was not quick enough to scramble out of their way.

Frightened, desperate, pinned down, and unable to move, Pilot instinctively bit whatever was nearest, and that happened to be the verz. The white animal had one job to do: protect Danielle Voyles. Nothing else mattered and nothing else could interfere with that task. Without hesitation it raked its claws down the dog's side, drawing blood.

Pilot howled and thrashed around, almost freeing himself in the process. The verz saw this and moved slightly to allow the wounded dog to escape. Held tightly between the verz's teeth, the red thing was losing energy now. The verz could feel the slackening through the muscles of its jaw, but it would not let go until it was sure the thing was dead.

“Stop!” Danielle shouted.

None of them really registered the command, because so much was happening at once. The world around them was havoc.

“
Stop!
Don't kill it.”

They heard this time and turned to Danielle.

“Don't kill it. Let it go. You have to let it go.”

The verz immediately opened its mouth and let the beast drop to the floor.

It was red now, russet, almost brown. The red was not blood, though, but the true color of its skin. Mortally wounded, it had no energy to move. Its neck was broken. The little oxygen it could draw in did no good.

Showing no fear or hesitation this time, Danielle walked over and squatted down close by. Even as it lay dying, the thing's drooping eyes followed the woman. Extending both hands, Danielle grabbed hold of its body and dug her fingers deep into its skin.

The eyes rolled up into its head. It made a sound that could have been a sigh or a gasp. Squeezing and squeezing and squeezing, Danielle began kneading its skin like bread dough. After some moments the red body sagged visibly in her hands. It was dead by then but that didn't matter, because moments before it expired, Danielle had found what she was searching for inside it and brought that back into her own body. It was alive inside of her now. It was the reason she had told the verz not to kill the beast. She needed to take this thing from it while it was still alive.

Standing, she could feel that new element moving inside her while it searched for its proper place: the place of its origin. Not a pleasant feeling for Danielle. It felt like an icy wire sliding down the inside of her chest. Perhaps it wanted to escape. Perhaps these things cannot return to us once they have left our bodies—once we have
allowed
them to leave. Despite that, Danielle waited, and in due course it did stop moving. She touched the small of her back and said, “It's here. It stopped here.” The others did not know what she was talking about.

On the floor the dead thing began to fade. Within seconds it had disappeared. Both hands still on her back, Danielle looked at German Landis and pointed with her foot to the place on the floor where it had lain. “What I took out of it was once part of me. I lost it when I was little. No—
I gave it away
when I was little. I did it; it was my choice.

“That's what all people do when we're frightened: we give away parts of ourselves. We do it on purpose. No one steals them or forces us. We give away our best parts: the ones that make us whole and right. Piece by piece we give them up until finally . . .” Danielle stopped and put one hand to her forehead. “I have to sit down.” She crossed the room and sat again at the kitchen table.

Danielle put a hand flat against her chest. “We're born with everything in here—everything we need to be happy and complete. But as soon as life starts frightening us, we give away pieces of ourselves to make the danger go away. It's a trade: you want life to stop scaring you, so you give it a part of yourself. You give away your pride, your dignity, or your courage . . .

“When all you feel is fear, you don't
need
dignity. So you don't mind giving that away—at the moment. But you regret it later, because you'll need all those pieces. By then they're gone, though; you can't use them to help.

“Do you have a piece of bread? I'll show you how it works.”

German took a dinner roll out of the wooden bread box on the counter and handed it over. Danielle placed it on the table. “This is how we look when we're born: complete and whole, every single person.” She began pinching small pieces off the roll. In seconds it was pitted all over and looked like birds had been pecking it. Dropping the pieces on the floor, she covered them with her foot and pressed down. When she lifted her shoe again, the squashed bread
bits had turned into dirty shapeless blobs. Some were stuck to her sole.

Peeling one off, Danielle made to fit it back into the roll. When that didn't work, she held out the dirty bit to German and said, “Imagine this is a part of myself I gave up once when I was frightened. They took it, changed it, and sent it back looking like that.” She pointed with her chin toward where the dead creature had lain. “When that thing began to die, I suddenly saw through its body to the heart. I recognized it had once been part of me. I gave away that part. They changed it into the heart of a monster and then sent it back to get me.”

Exasperated, German shook her head. “How do you know this? How can you
know
these things?”

Danielle's face was clear and serene. In time she said, “I saw through the skin to its heart. It was beating slower and slower. As soon as I saw it, I knew that heart was once part of me. So I reached in and took it.” She touched the area on her lower back where it was now. “You can always take back the lost parts of yourself if you can find and recognize them.”

Benjamin Gould awoke
breathing through fur. After opening his eyes, several seconds passed before his brain grasped that he was sort of breathing, sort of suffocating. However, it wasn't a frightening feeling; it was more uncomfortable than anything else.

The first thing he saw was a large white something directly in front of him—not a few feet away but inches. And heavy. Whatever it was lay across the lower half of his face so that it covered much of his mouth and nose. The more awake he became, the more smothered he felt. Plus, the thing covering his face and chest was
heavy
. Ben shoved it off and tried to sit up—unsuccessfully, because when
he put his arms down to brace himself on the ground, both hands sank into warm fur on either side of his body.

Panicking, he gasped, “Get off! Get
off
me!” and pushed and squirmed and got up off the ground. The four verzes that had been sleeping on and around him didn't like being disturbed but remained silent. They weren't supposed to say anything because their job was to protect this man at all costs. If he told them to move, they moved.

“You were sleeping on my face!” he said muzzily while wiping his hand back and forth across his mouth. Shivering, Ben rubbed both cold arms and stared at the small tent nearby where the children and Mr. Kyte were sleeping. It looked a lot more appealing than it had a few hours ago when he'd gone to sleep curled up beside the camp-fire. In his mind now Ben saw himself lying in that tent, cozying up inside a thick goose-down sleeping bag. Green. It would be a forest-green goose-down sleeping bag that covered him right up to his toasty-warm neck. He imagined himself inside that sleeping bag without large numbers of earless fat white animals lying on top of him as if he were a rug.

He was hungry and cold and did not know what to do. By the look of things, it was the middle of the night. Not even Ling was around to talk over the situation.

Because he was out there alone amid darkness, bewilderment, and muddle, Ben said in a soft voice, “I want to go home right now. I just want to go home. That's all.”

A heartbeat later he was standing in front of the brightly lit bathroom mirror in his apartment, looking at the reflection of his face. Ben touched the mirror above the sink to assure himself that it was real and not an illusion. He pulled his hand back and touched his face. He opened the door of the medicine cabinet. The bottles inside were familiar products that he remembered buying. He closed the
cabinet and picked up the damp bar of soap on the sink. He smelled it: bitter almonds. That was right too. For his birthday German had given him an expensive box of milled almond soap. What had just happened? How had he managed to return home in an instant from the forest in Crane's View? What had he done to make that happen? He looked again in the mirror.

The door behind him opened. German Landis stood framed in the doorway wearing one of his sweatshirts and underpants. She was so tall that the shirt came to just below her belly button. She had on women's white cotton boxer shorts, her favorite kind of underpants and the ones that always twisted Ben's guts whenever he saw her in them. Her face was flushed and puffy with sleep. He only wanted to kiss her. That's all he thought then: Just let me kiss her and feel that smooth skin again. I don't care about anything else. One kiss. Let me kiss her and smell her hair. Let me do that and I'll be okay again.

“Hello there,” he said gently.

She said nothing and did not react, only stared at him. What was she doing in his apartment? As had happened the first time, Ling again materialized, standing on top of the lowered toilet seat in Ben's bathroom. But now German witnessed it. She saw a small, nondescript woman emerge out of nowhere, standing on top of the toilet with arms crossed over her narrow chest like a genie in a Sinbad movie.

Ling recognized immediately that German Landis could see her. She only wished she'd known earlier that it was going to happen so she could have put on some makeup.

Very coolly German stated, “There's a woman standing on the toilet seat.”

Ben looked and nodded.

Ling stepped down and walked over to German with her right
hand extended to shake. The moment she had dreamed of for so long had arrived. She was about to meet the woman she loved. “How do you do? My name is Ling.”

German Landis looked at the ghost the way you never want to be looked at by the object of your affection. German looked at Ling as if she were a postage stamp, a bottle of ketchup, or an out-of-date movie schedule. Her eyes said nothing, they only took in data. “Who are you?”

For the first time since materializing, Ling looked at Ben to see how he wanted her to answer this question.

“Tell her.”

The ghost started to speak but Ben put up a hand to stop her.

“Wait a minute.”

The two women, both impatient, looked at him.

“Something's wrong.”

“Gee, Ben, no kidding.”

He shook his head. “That's not what I mean.” He stared straight ahead, as if seeing something important in the space directly in front of him. His eyes flicked over to German. “She's in trouble. Danielle Voyles is in trouble.” He hurried out of the bathroom. What else could the women do but follow?

“Pilot?” he called down the hall. “Pilot, where are you?”

The dog lay in his bed fully awake, dreading what he knew would be coming at any moment.