Apparition, page 18
His feet touched the concrete slab of the basement floor. Even through his shoes he could feel how cold the floor was – like ice, a glacier that sat below their house and sent waves of chills up and down his spine with every step he took. He half expected to see his own breath plume out of his mouth like it might on a trip into snowy mountains. But no, the air was warm around him. Perspiration prickled his skin. How his feet could feel so cold when the rest of him was on fire he had no idea, but that was what was happening.
Ella was spreading some things around on the floor in the center of the basement. Matthew was about to ask her what she was doing when he caught sight of the dark figure in the corner.
He froze. The shape was barely visible in the dim basement, just a slightly darker patch of shadow in a pool of shadows that seemed to wax and wane in front of him. But it was there. He was sure of it. This was no vision, no waking dream. This was real.
“El,” he whispered. Then, because she didn’t seem to hear him, he said it louder. “El-la.”
“What?” she said sharply, flicking her gaze up to him.
He lifted a hand slowly, pointing at the darkness-on-darkness in the corner.
The figure, the small shape in the black, did the same.
Matthew froze.
“What is it?” said Ella again. Her voice sounded insistent, but he could also hear a strange undercurrent, a foundation of fear that she was trying to hide under tones of irritation. That would have made him feel better about his own fear if it weren’t for the fact that he was staring at something that he felt could signal their doom.
His hand dropped to his side.
The arm of the thing in the corner lowered as well.
“What?” Ella said again, the third time that she had asked him what he wanted. And suddenly Matthew knew. He knew what he was seeing, and his fear melted away instantly beneath the hot flush of embarrassment.
It was a mirror. He could make it out now that his eyes had adjusted to the dungeon-murk of the basement. The glass sat in the corner, framed by a long oval of dark wood, standing on a frame that kept it upright. It was taller than he was, allowing him to see his entire reflection at once.
“Nothing,” he said. He turned away quickly, hoping that by doing so Ella wouldn’t press him about what had just happened. As he turned, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. The image in the mirror – the shadow-him that stood in darkness in a wooden circle – seemed to shimmer. Like the glass had grown darker for a moment, then brightened again. He almost stopped turning away from it, almost looked closer to see if it would do it again. But then he saw what Ella was doing, and all thoughts of the mirror in the corner fled his mind.
“What are you doing?” Matthew asked. His voice squeaked out through a throat that still felt strained and tight, and he wondered for an instant if he was ever going to feel unafraid again.
He doubted it.
Ella was putting down candles, lighting each one as she set it on the floor in a rough formation. The candles flickered and spat as though angry to be in use, their flames growing tall and then shrinking away to pinpricks before lengthening out again. The movement of the candlelight made everything in the sparsely outfitted basement seem to shift slightly, as though everything down here existed in two separate dimensions that almost touched in this strange space between worlds.
In the center of the candles, Ella had put a piece of paper – one of the things she had printed. Matthew moved toward it and saw that it was covered in letters. The upper right corner boasted the word “NO” in large block letters. In the upper left, the word “YES” seemed to dance in the trembling light of the candles. Below the letters Matthew saw the words “Good Bye.”
Matthew’s skin crawled. He knew what the page was. He had heard about these things. Once, before Mom came for Ella, before everything changed, he had gone to a birthday party for a friend named Pete. It was nothing huge, just six little boys and some cake. But it was a slumber party, meaning Matthew’s parents thought he was old enough to spend a night away from home. The night was great, full of rolling around and wrestling and giggling from six boys who had eaten too much sugar before bedding down in the sleeping bags each had brought for the occasion.
Eventually Pete’s daddy came into the dark living room where they were “sleeping.” He had tired eyes, half-hidden behind heavy lids, and he rubbed them non-stop as he lectured them sternly about the difference between having fun and keeping everyone else in the house awake.
Everyone quieted down after that. The giggles became hushed whispers and the whispers turned into a huddle of boys telling scary stories. None of them was remotely scary, of course… until Bobby Butler spoke. His tale was short, only a few sentences. But it had scared Matthew stiff. As the rest of the boys drifted off to sleep, he had lain awake, his eyes glancing at the window from time to time, expecting to see the scarred face that Bobby had spoken of, the demon summoned by a few children who hadn’t known better than to avoid using the Ouija board they found in the trash.
And that’s what was laying on the floor of the basement: a paper version of a Ouija board. A way of talking to spirits; of summoning the dead.
Matthew had to resist shivering; he suspected that if he let his body do that he wouldn’t be able to stop.
“You sure this is a good idea?” he said. His voice sounded even higher, if that were possible. He was surprised that the dark mirror behind him didn’t crack and then shatter into a million pieces under the sharp edge of his voice.
Ella lit the last candle. She produced a glass and turned it upside down on the makeshift Ouija board. “You want to know if the house is haunted?” she asked.
“I know it is,” Matthew responded without thinking. But as soon as he said the words, he knew they were true. He thought of the gleaming yellow eyes he had seen in the darkness outside their house, the dreams he had been having, the overwhelming sense of not-rightness that had pushed its way into almost everything that was happening. It had to be a haunted house, that was the only way to explain it.
“Well, fine,” Ella said. “But you want to know if it’s haunted with something bad?”
Matthew shook his head. He already knew that, too.
Or did he? As bad as things felt, there was also an occasional hint of something else, something that had no part of the evil that was plaguing them here. So was the house all bad? Were the ghosts here nothing but rotten, worse than a trip to the dentist and a dinner of nothing but asparagus and broccoli all rolled into one?
Could there be something else?
Ella mistook his silence for fear. “Don’t be such a wuss.”
“Daddy says not to use that word,” he said automatically, then almost clamped his hand over his mouth. What a terrible, stupid, kiddie thing to say.
Ella’s expression clearly showed she was thinking along the same lines. “Fine,” she sighed. “Don’t be such a wimp.”
Ella sat down on crossed legs between several of the candles. They flickered as she did so, and the dim basement grew somehow dimmer.
“Turn out the light,” she said.
Matthew shook his head. There was another light switch at the bottom of the stairs, only a few steps away, but the idea of voluntarily making it even darker down here struck him as a very bad one. Bad things happened more often in the dark, everyone knew that.
“Come on,” insisted Ella. Matthew relented and moved across the floor, toward the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t just the fact that she would hound him relentlessly about being a wimp (or a wuss). That wasn’t enough to push him to the light switch, and it certainly wasn’t enough to convince him to turn off the light.
No, it was the fact that he needed to know. He didn’t want to know, but he was old enough to understand that wanting and needing were two different things. So while he had no desire to understand what was going on around them, something deep inside him was whispering that if he didn’t find out, his ignorance might lead to people getting hurt.
Or worse.
Snick.
Darkness dropped around him when he flicked the light switch, falling as quietly as snow. Now the only illumination in the basement was the flickering candles on the floor. He looked up the stairs, saw the bright rectangle of the open door to the kitchen, but somehow none of the light made it down the steps. As though even the summer sun was afraid to make its presence known down here.
The prickling sensation that had been surging non-stop up and down his body started moving faster. It didn’t feel like ants were crawling up and down his spine; they were jogging and then running, a million tiny footsteps that made him want to run away screaming.
He didn’t run, though. Not only because he had to know what was happening, but because to run away would be to leave Ella behind. And that was one thing he could never do. Even though she was older, he was her brother and he knew that meant he was always supposed to be there for her, was always supposed to protect her.
So he turned back to her and walked slowly toward the rough circle of candles in the center of the basement.
“Sit down across from me,” she said.
Matthew did. He glanced at the corner where he had seen the mirror, expecting to see his reflection mimicking his actions. But the corner was dark, a deep pool of black that permitted nothing to escape, not even a reflection. In fact, the darkness there seemed even thicker than the rest of the basement. It moved slightly in the flickering candlelight, like a dark pit containing thousands of black vipers that crawled and writhed over and around each other as they sought blindly for food.
Ella reached out and put a single finger on the upside-down glass that sat on the paper Ouija board. She looked at Matthew and he knew she was waiting for him to follow suit. Again he almost got up and left. Again he quelled the urge. He wouldn’t leave Ella alone.
His finger went out and he touched the bottom of the glass. His entire arm grew rigid and tight, like he expected to be bitten or burnt at any moment.
Nothing happened. The candles flickered, shifting the shadows minutely around them, but no other motion caught his eye. He remained alert, but could not help but wonder if this was all just a big joke that Ella was playing on him.
“What’s this supposed to do?” he asked, as much to break the silence as anything else.
“We ask questions, and if there’s a ghost, it answers us by making the glass move over letters to spell something out.”
Matthew nodded, but at the same time he said, “Can’t we do this upstairs?”
Ella shook her head impatiently. “All the websites say it works better in the dark.” She took a deep breath and her eyelids dropped. “Close your eyes,” she said.
Matthew did not want to do that. Bad enough they were summoning ghosts or demons or whatever. Worse that they were doing it in a dark and thoroughly creepy basement. Adding closed eyes that would just allow any nearby monsters to get to them that much easier seemed like the dictionary definition of “bad idea.”
Still, the alternative to certain death at the fangs of slobbering hordes of demons would be for Ella to call him a wimp again. He closed his eyes.
He waited.
Nothing happened.
He peeked a bit. Not enough to warrant a “wuss” label, but enough to see that Ella was still sitting quietly, one finger on the glass that still sat – unmoving – on the Ouija page. Nothing else.
He closed his eye again.
Nothing continued to happen.
After what felt like a full year of waiting, he said, “Are you going to talk, or am I supposed to?”
“Shut up,” Ella barked. But he guessed she was getting bored, too, because only a second later she said, “Are there any spirits in the room?”
Matthew expected the air to get heavy, like it was going to rain in the basement. But everything stayed the same as it was. The cold concrete floor bit through the thin cloth of his shorts and he could feel his butt falling asleep. He was still touching the glass on the Ouija board, but he didn’t feel it so much as tremble.
All in all, it was pretty anticlimactic.
He waited another year or two, then opened one eye again. He looked at the glass they were both touching. Candlelight flickered off the glass, throwing tiny shards of yellow light on the paper below it. The letters on the printed page seemed to dance a bit, but other than that there was no movement, no hint of anything at all.
“When’s something supposed to happen?” he asked.
Ella cracked an eye open. He wondered how they both looked, sitting here on the floor in a circle of candles and staring at each other through a single open eye each. The image almost made him giggle, but a sound cut off the impulse. It was a low thrumming, like a bumble bee caught in a padded box. Ella let out a little scream, and that made Matthew scream, which made Ella scream louder.
She glared at him and reached into her pocket, pulling out her cell phone. Matthew sighed. “Geez,” he said. “How many times a day do you need to text Jamie?”
Ella turned up her nose like she had just found out she was next in line to be High Queen of Snotville. “She’s my best friend. And you’re just jealous ‘cause Dad said you’re too young for a cell phone.”
She looked at the phone. Matthew was sitting close enough to see the word “Jamie” on the screen. No surprise. What was a surprise was that there was no accompanying text. He was pretty sure Jamie suffered from some weird kind of text-diarrhea, so to see her name without a text message attached was beyond weird.
Matthew looked away then as something caught his eye. He shifted to look straight at it. For a moment he thought he was going crazy as a tiny fragment of shadow pulled away from the rest of the darkness. It skittered across the floor like water dancing on a hot pan, and as it did Matthew realized what it was and relaxed. The shadows weren’t moving.
It was just a roach.
That was gross, because he didn’t like the idea of living in a roach-infested house. Then again, it allowed for some interesting possibilities – like catching one or two and putting them in Ella’s shoes.
He looked back at her and saw her looking down at the phone screen, her fingers moving. The electronic glare of the phone lit her face weirdly, casting long shadows across her cheekbones, boring dark pits where her eyes should have been.
And the glass moved under his finger.
He stared at it in shock. He hadn’t done it, hadn’t moved his finger at all, he was sure.
But the glass had shifted. Not far, not to anything in particular. Just a quick lurch, maybe a quarter-inch.
“Um, El,” he said.
“Hold on,” she muttered. She stared at her phone, clearly waiting for a return message.
The glass trembled under his finger again. This time he pulled away, yanking his finger back and then looking at the tip as though he expected to find it burnt to a cinder. The flesh was smooth and unbroken.
Matthew looked back at the glass. It moved again. There could be no mistaking it: it pushed slowly across the paper on the concrete basement floor.
Matthew shifted to sit closer to his sister. “Ella,” he said again. His voice came out small and frightened, a trembling animal in a world that was far too big for it.
“Hold on,” she repeated. Her phone buzzed. He could see the exchange on the screen from where he was sitting.
Jamie:
Ella: What’s up?
Jamie: Nothing. Why did U call me?
Ella: I didn’t.
The phone buzzed again.
Jamie: U DID call me.
Matthew wanted to speak, to grab Ella by the shoulders and shake her until she listened, until she looked at the glass that was still moving ever-so-slowly across the paper. But instead he watched the text interchange, as though watching something so normal and mundane might cast out the unreality of what was happening right in front of him, might banish it to whatever strange dimension it had come from.
Ella entered another line.
Ella: when did I call u?
The phone was silent for a moment. Silent but Ella didn’t look up; didn’t see the glass crawling along in front of her. The phone vibrated again.
Jamie: Just now.
Before Ella could punch in her reply, the candle flames leapt sideways as one, and then went out. The only light in the basement was suddenly the blue-white screen of Ella’s cell phone. Matthew’s skin felt like it turned inside out, and the small hairs on the back of his neck stood stiffly at attention.
There was no breeze. No way that the candles could have blown out.
