The Haunted (15 page)

“How did you get so smart, Aunt Marjorie?”

She laughed. “I can’t tell you all of my secrets. Where’s the fun in that?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll bow to your wisdom and hope to learn your methods one day.”

“That’s what I’m talking ’bout,” she said.

I laughed so hard at that, I had to hold the phone away from my mouth for a second. “Where did you hear
that?
”

“From a movie.”

Of course.

“Hey… Aunt Marjorie… what was it like for you?” I asked. “Um… falling in love?”

She took my sudden change of topic in stride. “It was exhilarating. And terrifying. The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I didn’t know how I could I be so sure.”

“What if you’ve never had a boyfriend before?” I rushed out. “How can you know then?”

“Ahh,” Aunt Marjorie said. “Your
friend
, hmm?”

“I guess I’m just confused about a lot of stuff right now.”
Like how I can be in love with someone who’s dead.

“I’ve always thought that maybe it’s different for everyone,” she said. “But for me, I had to trust my gut. One instant I was seeing your Uncle Gerald as just this good-looking fella, and then
bam
! It was almost like everything around me slowed down. And I knew.”

I knew
exactly
what she was describing. I felt that same stopping of time around Caspian, too.

“If you had the chance to spend one more hour with Uncle Gerald, knowing that the pain of losing him would happen all over again, would you do it?”

“Without a doubt,” she said. “I’d give anything to have one
more minute with him. I’d take him by the hand, look him in the eye, and tell him that I love him.” Her voice broke on the last word, and I felt the ache of tears gathering. Blinking rapidly, I tried not to let them fall.

“Thanks, Aunt Marjorie.” I cleared my throat. “You’re the best great-aunt I’ve ever had.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Anytime you need me, you call. And you’re the best great-niece I’ve ever had too.”

She said her good-byes, and I hung up the phone. I had a full mind and heavy heart.

I bided my time the next day, willing two thirty to come faster. For some odd reason I’d decided that two thirty was the perfect time to head to the cemetery, and I was counting down the seconds.

Finally, at two p.m., I changed into a red-and-white checkered sundress and spent an inordinate amount of time on my hair. It was precisely 2:32 when I left the house, and I told myself to try to walk at a normal pace.

But when those cemetery gates came into view, my heart flip-flopped inside my chest, and I quickened my speed. My feet flew as I followed the path, and I found myself standing in front of Caspian’s mausoleum.

Tugging nervously at my dress, I moved to the door and opened it. Then I realized what I’d forgotten to do, and stopped to glance behind me. No one was in sight, so I slipped inside.

I noticed right away that he’d lit more candles. The room was now clearly illuminated. Caspian was bent over one of his makeshift tables, with a candle resting on the box before him. He held up a finger to motion for me to wait.

“I didn’t know when you’d get here. I’m almost done.” His hands were shaping something. Flashes of silver caught the light, and I noticed a peculiar scent in the air. Like a wire burning.

“What’s that smell?”

“It’s my soldering iron. I was using it earlier.” He held whatever it was he’d been working on up to the light and inspected it. A moment later he nodded and then turned to me.

I suddenly grew shy. “Hi.…”

“Hi.” He palmed the item and walked over. “I thought you might change your mind. Why’d you come back, Abbey?”

How do I answer
that? “Curiosity,” I blurted out. “I have lots of questions.”

“Oh. Right.” His face fell, and he turned away. I took a step forward and put a hand out to touch him, then let it fall to my side.

“What do you want to know?” He shoved the item he’d been holding into his back pocket.

“Tell me what that first day was like. The car crash. And after. What do you remember? How did you get here?”
Are you buried here?
was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back.

Caspian glanced up and then ran his fingers through his hair. “You don’t start with the easy ones, do you? What’s my favorite color, when’s my birthday…”

“Oh, I want to know those things too, but later.”

He closed his eyes. “It was the day after Halloween. I remember that.… My dad wanted me to get a part for him at a junkyard. I went to go pick it up, but I got the wrong one. When I got home, Dad yelled that I’d never learn, never get a real job, if I didn’t start paying attention. I shot back some smart-ass comment about how I didn’t want to be a grease-monkey like him. Didn’t want dirty fingernails and split knuckles for the rest of my life. Then I took off.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing me.

“I was going to go back and get the right part. I don’t know if he ever knew that. I never told him.…” Sadness was all over his face, and I ached to put my arms around him.

But I couldn’t.

“The next thing I remember… I was sitting on the side of the road. Just sitting there. It was dark, and when I tried to figure out where I was, I had this big, gaping hole in my memory. It was like the hangover from hell without the nausea.”

Since my alcohol experience was limited to occasional sips of wine at special dinners and weddings, I didn’t know what the hangover from hell felt like. But I
did
know about that gaping black hole. I’d experienced the same thing when Kristen died.

“Was there anyone around? Cops, firemen, random people?”

Caspian shook his head. “No. I was alone, and my car was gone. Now that I think about it, there wasn’t even any glass or anything on the road. I don’t know how much time had passed. I just ended up walking back to the house. Dad was asleep when I got there, so I went to bed too. Figured I’d get my car back in the morning.”

He hesitated, then started pacing back and forth. “I must have slept… or something… for a while, because I think it was a couple of days later when I woke up. I’m not sure why, but time passes differently for me now. Faster.” He glanced over at one of the boxes, and I followed his gaze to the alarm clock sitting in there.

“That’s why I have
that
,” he said, pointing to it. “I had to set it to go off every time I was supposed to be meeting you.”

“Time moves
faster
? How?”

“I can’t explain it. But when I close my eyes, I kind of fall into this void. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s my body going to an astral plane, or heaven… or wherever it is I’m supposed to be.”

“Do you find yourself visiting yourself in the past or future?” I joked. “Are you wearing chains? Or do you hang out in the attic of old houses?”

He looked at me blankly.

“You know. Ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Future? Haven’t you ever seen that Bill Murray movie
Scrooged
? And the chains and the attic are from haunted houses. Technically, you
are
a ghost.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” Caspian said.

Open mouth, insert foot.

“But no, no chains or haunted houses. Just calendar pages flipping faster and faster. What’s a day for you can be a week for me. Or a month. Whenever I said I’d meet you at a specific time, I’d have to set the alarm to make sure I didn’t miss it.”

“Why close your eyes and go into this black void thingy at all then? Why not just stay awake the entire time? Do you
need
to sleep?”

He looked me directly in the eye. “It’s not like when I was alive. I don’t
need sleep. Sometimes, this weariness comes over me…” He paused, then said, “Have you ever felt time crawling? Have you ever been so desperate to make the hours disappear that you’ll do anything? Do you know what that feels like?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “When Kristen died. After her funeral. After I met you… I couldn’t sleep. My dreams were awful, so I forced myself to stay awake. It got so bad that I started to think that Kristen was there with me. That she’d… come back.”

His eyes were understanding. “Sometimes I’d go weeks at a time and not wake up.”

“What changed?” I held my breath waiting for his answer.

“You,”
he said. “I saw you and Kristen here, and around you I could see
color
. I knew that meant you were different.”

I cracked a smile. “What did you see—my aura?”

“No. I saw your beauty.”

My heart lurched and started beating triple time. It was thumping so hard that I put one hand to my chest, afraid it would break right through.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Do you need to sit down?”

His concern for me was adorable. “I’m fine. I don’t need to sit down. You just need to give a girl some warning when you’re going to say something like that. It sends my heart into quivers.”

Caspian suddenly looked all bashful and shy. I liked that almost as much as I liked him being worried about me. But I took pity on the poor boy. “Tell me what happened with your dad. When you finally woke up.”

“I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer. I thought maybe he was just pissed about the car thing, so I went outside to give him some space. Saw some people on the sidewalk and said something to them. They ignored me too.”

He paced over to the bench and sat down. He looked sad. I moved toward the bench too and sat next to him.

“For days… or weeks… I don’t really know which, I walked the streets. Screaming at the top of my lungs. Trying to stop every person I came across. Searching for someone to tell me what was going on. I even went to the police station. Threw myself in one of their chairs and waited all day. Nothing changed.”

I shook my head, horrified at what he was saying. “Did you… did things…
people
… pass through you?”

Caspian didn’t answer. Just looked at me. I wanted to touch him so badly that I locked my fingers together so I didn’t forget again and reach out. “You must have felt like you were going crazy,” I whispered. “Like everyone around you was a part of something connected, but you had broken loose.”

“That’s exactly what it felt like.”

“How did you get here? To the cemetery?” I asked him. “Are you… ?”

“I’m not buried here. And for a while I just stayed in my old room. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t get hungry or thirsty, so I never needed food. I tried not to move anything in case my dad noticed, but he wouldn’t come into my room, so eventually I just stopped caring. That worked until—” He broke off.

“Until?” I prodded.

He got a funny look on his face, somewhere between horror and frustration. “Have you ever watched all of your stuff being hauled away? Seen your parents put the contents of your life into garbage bags and set them outside at the curb? Like yesterday’s trash? He put a tarp over the bags… ,” he said slowly.

I forgot then, or remembered, but I just didn’t care. I grabbed for his hand.

And hit solid bench as it went right through.

He looked down, startled.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just… Oh God, Caspian. That’s awful. And terrible. No parent should ever do that.”

Caspian shook his head. “I don’t blame my dad. He waited long enough. It was time to move on with his life.”

He traced the ornate scrollwork on the arm of the bench
before speaking again. “I followed the trucks that took my stuff. I thought they were going to the dump, but they went to Goodwill. So I waited until it got dark and jimmied the lock on the store. Filled one of the bags with my art stuff, some clothes, and a couple of books.”

“I went to the high school and stayed there for a while. Sometimes I’d wander the halls when the bell rang, just to feel like I was a part of something again. I thought that if I tried hard enough, brushed shoulders with them long enough, that someone would know. Someone
had
to see me or feel me.”

A mischievous look spread across his face, and I was struck again by his gorgeousness. My heart was rapidly melting at the sight of him.

“I have to admit though, it wasn’t
that
bad there. Perhaps you’ve heard of the urban legend about my school?”

I cocked my head to one side. “Enlighten me.”

“The legend says that the White Plains High School boys’ bathroom is haunted. Oddly enough, strange things only happen when the jocks are beating up on the freshmen.”

“I take it that was you?”

“Maybe. Nothing makes a football player scream faster than the words ‘You are going to end up with bad hair plugs and tiny balls by the time you’re thirty’ suddenly appearing on the mirror.”

“Steroids?”

He flashed a smile. “Exactly. That’s why the biggest ones always screamed the loudest. The plumbing is awful too. Sinks randomly turning on, toilets that won’t flush at the most
inopportune
times.”

“Why didn’t you stay there? Practicing random acts of… non–toilet flushing?”

“Summer came. School let out. Everything was stale and tired. Then eventually I started growing more and more used to the quiet. The dust. I knew that when school let back in, I wouldn’t want to be around all those people anymore. This place came to mind, and I figured it would be perfect. It took me three days of searching to find a mausoleum that was open.”

“So then… you just keep your stuff here and in your spare time hang out with the crazy girl who can see you?”

“Crazy beautiful,” he said with a half smile. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

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