Ghost Academy 1: Summer Term, page 8
He was rocked by another burning sensation as the squirming flames worked from the front to the back of Nick’s leg. It squeezed another grunt from him, but the pain was less intense, the flames only grazing his skin.
Panting, Nick looked at his speedometer and saw he was doing seventy-five. Glancing in the rearview, he could see that the shape of the Stalker was gradually fading. A few random commuters drove their vehicles through it unknowingly.
Lotus let out a sound that was between a sigh and a whimper. “Thank you, Nick.” She sniffed. “I—I don’t know what else to say.”
Her voice was soft, but Teza’s addition was clear enough for him to hear. “You’ve got some huevos, cabron.”
He pulled a car length closer to Lotus in the right lane. “Not sure what that means, but I’ll take it as a compliment.” He winced as a throbbing pain covered his entire leg and tightened his grip on the wheel again, willing himself not to think about it. A couple of giggles on the other end of the call helped.
“It’s definitely a compliment coming from her,” Lotus said with another sniff.
With no immediate threats in front or directly behind them, Nick started to wonder if he should seek some medical attention. But he had no idea what he’d tell a medical professional if his skin was burned half as bad as it felt. “Since you were the one who warned me about the pain, I’m guessing you’ve had one of those Stalkers attack you.”
“Yeah, I have. One pawed through my right hand about a month after I became a Medium.”
“What’d you do?”
“Several ice packs, but I still couldn’t make a fist until I visited the Origin Crystal back in Limbo. It’s the only thing that helped with the residual pain.” She put her hand closer to the phone. “The good news is there weren’t any scars.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes. The pain in his leg had receded enough that he could actually focus again. Lotus began to hum an old jingle for a regional fast food chain dotted throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Nick couldn’t fight the smile on his face. Whether it was Lotus’s sneaky way of distracting him from the pain, making a suggestion for food, or a victory for a nameless advertising firm, he didn’t care. He wanted some Taco Time. “Which exit are we taking?”
“Huh?” Lotus stopped humming. “Oh, it’s exit 101.”
“Good. There’s a Taco Time on the east side of the freeway. Are you still as hungry as I am?”
“Yes! How’d you know?”
“‘Good, good, fresh, fresh, Taco Time,’” Nick sang the words Lotus had apparently been unconsciously humming to herself.
Teza joined in the laughter. “I can’t believe you guys like those gringo tacos.”
Chapter 9
There’s No Place Like Haven
Less than twenty minutes later, they arrived at Lotus’s apartment, a shabby, rectangular building of four units across from the freight entrance of an Ace Hardware. She told him to stay in his car and ended their video call. A few minutes later, she emerged with a small can of something in her hand. Even from twenty feet away, he could see that Teza was no longer anchored to the Medium.
Lotus jumped in his car and handed him the can. “It’s burn spray. Should help a little with the pain. At least enough so you can sleep.”
He smiled appreciatively and drove them to Taco Time. The two weary Mediums stood in front of a bemused cashier, ordering enough food to feed a little league team. By the time Nick reached his fourth “and I’ll also have,” the cashier craned her neck around him like she expected to see a bus full of children in the parking lot.
When they eventually received their numerous trays of food, neither Nick nor Lotus spoke between bites of crispy beef burritos, soft-shelled chicken tacos, fried tater tots, and sweet sips of Mr. Pibb. The salty, cheesy, and sweet flavors dancing across Nick’s tongue made it futile to attempt communication.
Both of them were half asleep by the time Nick dropped Lotus off at her apartment.
“Thanks again for helping Teza and I.” Lotus yawned hugely. “Drinks sometime? When we’re not so exhausted?”
“Absolutely.” Nick waited for her to enter the building before pulling away. It wasn’t even 8:30, but he had a feeling the twenty-five minute drive to his house in Silvervale wasn’t going to be easy.
Thankfully, traffic was light, and Nick found himself pulling into his extra-wide driveway in no time. The car’s headlights landed on the mint green garage door of the duplex he’d recently inherited from his grandmother, and Nick breathed a sigh of relief that he couldn’t see any Stalkers around.
After the stubbornly slow, creaky door finally created a large enough gap, Nick pulled his car forward, parked inside of the single-bay garage, and entered the unit on the left.
Nick’s grandparents had purchased and moved into the duplex more than forty years ago. He’d spent so much of his life here that he could navigate the entire building with his eyes closed. Nick took eight labored steps and was through the side entry and halfway into the galley-style kitchen.
Following Lotus’s advice, Nick pulled open the top freezer door on Grandma’s—now his—dated white GE refrigerator. The icebox was next to empty, but Nick did have a couple of cold packs he used after strenuous mountain bike rides. He grabbed two packs and a kitchen towel before walking the next eleven steps to the half-bath on the first floor.
Nick clicked on the light and was greeted by cream-colored walls and a cheap white vanity with an acrylic sink. To round off the budget remodel job from five years earlier, each handle and fixture was silver stainless steel and looked like it had been taken from Nick’s first student apartment.
He pulled down his pants and propped his leg up on the sink. With the immense pain he’d felt, the Stalker’s flames must have cooked a portion of his skin. The cloudy globe-like fixture threw off a muted light, but it was still easy enough to see.
There was nothing there.
His first instinct was to lean closer. Nick knew the lighting was poor, but there had to be something he wasn’t seeing. The burning had dulled, but it was still there. On top of that, the soreness was amping up. It felt like someone had taken a bat to his thigh. Still, there was nothing there. No blisters, swelling, or even redness.
Nick gave up on his pointless investigation, wrapped the cold packs around his leg with the towel, and slowly took the twenty-six steps to his bedroom on the second floor in his boxers.
The white door shook as Nick pushed it against the doorstop in his room. The same uninspiring cream-colored walls greeted him when he clicked on the ceiling fan light fixture. He’d removed his grandmother’s things and stored them in the empty unit next door, but even without her heavy antique furniture covered in little glass figurines, the rooms were still dated.
For the hundredth time since he moved in, Nick took a mental note.
Once I settle in, I need to paint the walls, and I should probably do something about these cheap doors.
As he was running through the additions to his home improvement checklist, Nick had to chuckle at himself. He knew computers, and he was comfortable with the components under the hood of his car, but fixing things around the house was a completely different animal.
I wonder if Grandpa felt the same way when they first bought this place?
Nick’s grandparents had occasionally brought up their motivation for buying the duplex. His grandfather had been an auto mechanic by trade, and he’d made decent money working for a busy shop in town. However, when the global debt crisis in the early ‘80s hit, his grandmother had lost her payroll accountant job at the lumber mill.
His grandfather had wanted to make a bit of extra money to ensure his wife could stay home and raise their two daughters instead of scouring for a low-paying job with the rest of the unemployed folks. So they’d found this house in Silvervale, and his grandfather had figured renting out the right side was the perfect opportunity to make up their income shortfall.
It had failed miserably.
After their tenth round of bad tenants in less than fifteen years, Nick’s grandfather had ranted and raved about renters not respecting the work he’d put into maintaining the other half of the house for the last time, and gave up on trying to fill the space. Coincidentally, Nick was born around the time his grandfather came to this conclusion. It just so happened that his parents, both barely out of college, needed a place to stay.
Within a year, Nick’s parents found decent jobs and bought their own house only seven miles away. His grandfather had reasoned the now-empty second unit should be utilized by family and friends who were visiting or needed a temporary place to stay.
Two years had passed with a growing baby, Nick spending much of his time with his grandmother while his parents worked. They only had one car to save money, so both of his parents would pick him up from his grandparents’ house. He had no memory of the event, since he’d only been three at the time and was probably more concerned with building and knocking over towers of Duplos. One day, his parents didn’t pick him up after they finished work. After that, he’d stayed with Grandma and Grandpa all of the time.
Many years later, his grandma showed him the newspaper article: “Five Die on I-5 as Semi Tire Blowout Causes Pileup.”
The Summerlands were a fairly small bunch—especially after Nick’s parents died—and his grandfather had been adamant that they get together as often as possible. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. All smashed together at the old oak table loaded with food and crowded with various types of chairs so everyone had at least an elbow on the table.
“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything,” his grandfather would announce in his gruff voice from the head of the table before every holiday meal. He would briefly glance at the ceiling, and Nick knew he was thinking of his daughter and son-in-law that should have been at the table with the rest of them.
Nick turned off the light and climbed into his queen-sized bed. Even though he was exhausted, Nick couldn’t keep from thinking about his Aunt Matilda—the reason his grandfather stopped going into the right unit of the duplex.
He remembered what it was like to be six and seeing a nekros on someone he loved.
Death had still been a vague subject at that age, but he’d already made a connection between seeing the nekros and people eventually going away. But seeing one over Aunt Matilda’s head sparked something. It was like a switch flipped, and Nick became inconsolable at the thought of not seeing his favorite aunt again—his closest connection to the mother he had no memories of.
Every time she came to visit Nick tried to tell Aunt Matilda, but she attributed Nick’s frantic exclamations that she was sick, or that something was going to happen to her, as a combination of an overactive imagination and seeing a horror movie one of his cousins shouldn’t have shown him. She waved off each of Nick’s comments, and he watched in terror as his aunt’s clock deteriorated.
When she eventually became sick enough to visit her physician, the diagnosis was stage four pancreatic cancer. Aunt Matilda died less than three months later in the duplex unit on the right side of the building. Her husband had left when her condition worsened, and Nick’s grandparents refused to send her to hospice. So Nick watched his aunt die little by little, day by futile day.
During her funeral service visitation, Nick had asked his grandparents why Aunt Matilda didn’t listen to him. He’d tried to warn her about the clock, but she ignored him. Maybe she’d be alive if she just would have listened to him about the clock.
His grandfather had sucked in a sharp inhale and shook with anger. He’d stormed out of the viewing and proceeded to get drunk with a few of his old coworkers from the garage.
Nick’s grandmother had pulled him aside. She bent down to look Nick in the eyes and asked, “Do you know why your grandfather’s so mad right now, Nicky?”
“No,” Nick sobbed.
“He’s mad because he just lost someone he loved very much, and you told him a fib.”
“Grandma, I didn’t—”
“Nicky, you did. You fibbed, and you know it.” She’d stood up, her normally smiling mouth now pressed into a firm line. “Now, no more of this clock nonsense. If you say another word about it, you’re liable to get a whooping.”
And he didn’t say another word about the floating clocks, or the rushing wind, or the freezing sensation he sometimes felt. No one would listen anyway.
A couple of weeks after the funeral, Nick started first grade and sat next to the only transplant kid in the class. He was from California, and his parents had moved their family to Silvervale to “Get away from all the crazies.”
The new kid’s name was Ben Whitlock. He was a little bit bigger than Nick, but he’d seemed friendly. He asked Nick if he could borrow his blue crayon, and that formed the first building block in their friendship.
Most of the other kids knew each other from kindergarten, but Nick hadn’t gone to kindergarten. His grandparents had worried that, since he was still telling fibs about hearing strange noises and seeing floating clocks, he wasn’t mature enough.
Ben talked to Nick like they’d known each other for years, chattering profusely about anything that popped into his head. By the time lunch had rolled around, the two new friends were discussing their favorite characters from the Transformers cartoon as they walked into the cafeteria.
Nick was having so much fun talking to a boy his own age that he almost forgot he didn’t bring a sack lunch with him that day. When there was a lull in the conversation, and Ben pulled out his own lunch, Nick was at a bit of a loss and felt embarrassed.
Just as he was thinking of an explanation to tell his new friend, Nick heard his grandfather’s voice calling from the far side of the cafeteria.
“Hey, Nicky, over here.” The old mechanic was holding up a brown paper bag.
He was saved! Nick ran over to his grandfather.
As he was taking hold of the lunch, Nick’s grandfather ruffled his hair and grumbled, “You’ve got to pay more attention in the morning.”
“I did pay attention. My lunch wasn’t in the fridge.”
His grandfather rested his hands on his hips. “I don’t have time for your fibs. Just be happy I was able to drop this off while I was making a run for work.”
“I’m not fibbing.”
The old man waved him off and turned to leave. “You keep this fibbing up and more whoopings are in your future, mister.”
Nick tried not to look too dejected when he joined Ben at the lunch table, but his new friend had seemed to sense there was a problem.
“What’s wrong, Nicky? Did you get a gross sandwich in your lunch? I hate when my mom does that.”
Nick pulled out the bologna and cheese on white bread, his favorite, and knew he wasn’t a good enough liar to tell his friend that his problem wasn’t sandwich-related. “I’m just sad that my grandparents don't believe me when I tell them things.” He took an extra big bite out of his sandwich.
Ben crunched into a cheesy Dorito. “What did you tell him?”
“It’s dumb.”
“You can tell me. We’re friends, right?”
Nick explained the silly situation of the missing lunch, and Ben immediately took his side.
“You believe me?”
“Sure, adults forget things all the time. Besides, we’re friends, and friends don’t lie to each other.”
Nearly twenty years later, as Nick drifted off to sleep, he found himself wondering if Ben remembered their first day of school with the same clarity as he did. Nick would eventually make more friends, but none of them were ever as close to him as Ben.
When Nick’s alarm went off at 6:00 A.M., he was momentarily confused. He didn’t start work until eight, so the early wake-up seemed cruel. As he shifted in bed to turn off the annoying device, pain shot through his leg, and Nick remembered he had intentionally given himself a buffer in case he wasn’t mobile.
He did a bit of groaning as he got out of bed, but he was able to walk and get ready without too many complications. As he was grabbing his daily carry items from his dresser, Nick began thinking about what he was going to do with his extra time.
The thought of going in early had just crossed Nick’s mind when he noticed the two pieces of paper and the shard of crystal he’d received in Limbo.
“Right, the ritual thing,” Nick said to the empty house. He stuffed the bizarre class schedule into his pocket and opened the sheet of paper that accompanied the crystal. The shard, only about the size of his thumbnail, pulsed with a barely perceptible orange light.
Nick read over the instructions and scoffed. “That’s it?” He looked down at the paper again and added, “Alright.” Since he still had more than an hour before he needed to leave, Nick decided to complete the haven ritual.
He walked the shard of crystal around every corner of his half of the duplex. Whenever he entered a new room or hallway, Nick would repeat, “As an activated Medium, I, Nicholas Devin Summerland, claim this location as my haven and seek the protection of the Origin provided by the Celestial Beings.”
Nick felt ridiculous the first four times he did this, but then he remembered the desperation on Lotus’s face the previous night. She’d wanted to keep Teza safe, and she’d said her haven was the best way to accomplish that.
If Nick needed to help ghosts in order to save Ben, establishing a place for them to be safe was part of the deal.
“This isn’t stupid. It’s the first step in saving Ben,” he said aloud and repeated the chant inside of the upstairs bathroom.
Chapter 10
Human Energy
The ritual and subsequent placement of the crystal shard inside of his living room light fixture only took an additional ten minutes of Nick’s time. When he was done, his leg was one big, dull throb of pain. He took a quick ice break, applied some burn spray, and dressed for work in a light blue shirt, black slacks, and black leather sneakers.
