Forever Freaky (2 page)

“I don’t see it.”

“You want to know what really happened to
her?” he asked.

“Can I stop you from telling me?”

He thought about it for a second, and then
said, “Probably not.”

I tossed up my hand, and leaned back in my
chair, like, Okay, let’s hear it.

“There are separate realities,” he started
carefully, as though he didn’t quite know how to explain.

“You mean like being dead and being
alive.”

“Not exactly. I’m talking about physical
realities.”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“These realities are parallel to each other,
and they are separated by—well, I guess you could call it a
membrane.”

“A membrane?”

“It’s easier to think of it that way. You
have taken biology, right?

I rolled my eyes. “I know what a membrane
is.”

“Sometimes, in certain places, at certain
times, this membrane, for some reason, can become thin, so thin
that a solid object can pass through it from one physical reality
to another.”

“How interesting,” I said, thinking Not. Then
I realized, “You mean Mary Jo…?”

“Exactly,” he said.

I thought about that for a minute, and then I
burst out laughing.

“This is not funny,” Jerry said gravely.

But I found the entire thing more hilarious
than horrifying. “You’re telling me that Mary Jo was in the girl’s
room, in one of the stalls, sitting on the can and doing her
business, and she slipped into another reality. And you don’t find
that funny?”

“Not at all.”

“I wonder… when she landed in the other
reality, do you think she peed all over herself?”

He smirked. “Okay, maybe it’s a little funny.
But, on the serious side, you need to do something.”

“What? Tell the cops? I could just see that.
‘Oh, yeah, officer. I know what happened to Mary Jo. She didn’t run
away or anything. She just slipped through a membrane into another
reality.’ Oh, yeah, that would sound great! You know, my main goal
in life is trying not to end up in a straightjacket. I don’t see
the big deal. Tough luck that something weird happened to her, but,
you know, that’s life.”

“She doesn’t know where she is. She’s alone.
She probably scared out of her wits. Don’t you have any compassion
at all?”

“No,” I said. “Why should I?”

He sighed, frustrated.

“Well, it’s more than just Mary Jo,” he
continued. “When she slipped into another reality, something else
slipped into yours. To balance things out. I guess you could call
it a kind of displacement.”

“Something from the other reality.”

“From another reality,” he said, “not
necessarily the reality Mary Jo went to. Some of these realities
are pretty dark. Whatever came through—a spirit, a demon,
whatever—has already disrupted things.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“You remember when you left school yesterday?
There was a bad car accident outside on the street.”

“Yeah, so?”

“It should have never happened,” he said.

I couldn’t help laughing. “Okay, you’re
trying to tell me that because Mary Jo disappeared there was a car
accident? This thing that replaced her is an evil spirit or
something?”

“It doesn’t have to be evil, really. It’s
just something that shouldn’t be here; it’s disrupting the natural
flow of events in this reality. Now there are two people in the
hospital—a seventy-two-year-old woman with a broken hip and her
forty-five-year-old daughter who sustained a serious head injury.
And, I should add,” he said, holding up a finger, “the daughter
would not have been so seriously injured if she had been wearing
her seat belt. That’s why you must always buckle up.”

“Great,” I said. “Just what I always wanted
to hear: a public service announcement from a dead cop.”

“Jules, this thing—whatever it is—needs to go
back where it came from. For that to happen, Mary Jo has to be
brought back here.”

“I understand that,” I said. “The part that
is a little fuzzy is why me?”

“Because you have a gift?” he said.

“A gift? Please, don’t make me vomit. I see
things in my head that would gag a medical examiner. My mother
always calls it a gift, but then she never had it, so what does she
know? I got it from my grandmother, who never thought it was much
of a gift either.”

“I’m just saying: this has all got to be put
right, or else people are going to keep getting hurt. But then
maybe you don’t care about that, either.”

He got up from the table and drifted out of
the room.

I couldn’t believe it. I was getting
guilt-tripped by a ghost. What next?

***************

I had only a half-day of school today, and
yet I barely made it through. My last class, English, I kept
nodding off at my desk.

I had awful sleeping habits. I’d had insomnia
forever. Sometimes, I thought I was born with insomnia. I’d lie in
bed at night and stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom. Everything
was dark and quiet and peaceful, but still I couldn’t fall asleep.
It was always as though something was there, at the periphery of my
senses. I was just aware of it enough for it to keep me awake,
waiting to see something freaky. But usually nothing happened. I
waited and waited, until finally I was so exhausted I drifted away.
It wasn’t so much falling asleep as it was sliding into
unconsciousness. Other nights, the freak show began almost as soon
as I turned off the lights. I’d look at the ceiling, and suddenly
some strange face was staring down at me. Sometimes there were a
lot of faces. Sometimes there were just sets of staring eyes. I had
to pull the covers over my head to hide from them. When I did that,
there were still times when I could see eyes looking at me from the
underside of my blanket. I had no idea who they belonged to or what
they wanted, but at times they were impossible to escape.

So, no, I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I always
looked pale and had tiny pouches under my eyes. This, too, was in
my school file: always appears tired, along with, often distracted,
anti-social attitude, emotionally detached, possibly anorexic. All
of it was true, too, except for the anorexic part. Actually I ate
like a horse most of the time, but still I remained on the thin
side, as though my metabolism was all jacked up.

After my last class, I left the building. It
was a sunny early-spring day. I walked round to the student parking
lot, passed the two squad cars that were still parked near the
front, and worked my way back to me car, which was an ancient Chevy
Nova that still ran great. I climbed in behind the wheel, put on my
seat belt (so Jerry wouldn’t haunt me any more than he already
had), but didn’t turn on the engine. I was just so wiped out. The
ride home wasn’t far, but still I didn’t want to chance falling
asleep at the wheel. I was debating taking a little catnap, when my
body decided for me and I drifted away.

I woke up with the side of my face pressed
against the door window. I had a nasty crick in my neck, but
otherwise I felt a lot better. I looked around to see that the
parking lot was almost completely empty. Even the two squad cars
were gone.

Since I felt better, I decided to check out
an occult bookstore. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of involving
myself in the whole Mary Jo thing. But, I had started thinking, if
Jerry was right that this other entity might cause problems around
the school and around people connected to the school, maybe I ought
to see what I could do. After all, I attended the school, and my
father was a fireman, whose job could be pretty dangerous; if he
ended up falling through the roof of a burning building, I’d always
wonder if that were something that I could have prevented.

So I headed for the bookstore. It was located
in one of those congested north-side neighbors in which you had to
fight tooth and nail to find a parking space. I passed the store
about ten times, driving around in circles, until I finally found
an open space about three blocks away.

I could have checked the school library, but
that would have been taking a chance; I knew for a fact that the
librarians reported if a student inquired about books on something
weird. Librarians are notorious snitches—don’t let anybody convince
you otherwise. It would have gone straight back to my counselor,
who would have jotted new notes in my file. Searching for unusual
literature—the occult, demonology, or a possible interest in
devil-worship?

I couldn’t go to the public library, either.
Public libraries, like hospitals and churches and, strangely,
bowling alleys, attracted large numbers of earthbound spirits. I
avoided any place that might be filled with ghosts. In my most
horrifying dreams, I am in a place that is crowded with spirits,
and then, suddenly, all at once, they realize I can see and hear
them. I am stampeded and end up drowning in a small lake of
ectoplasm.

I stopped in front of the occult bookstore
and peered through the window. I was always a little paranoid about
places I’d never gone to before. I couldn’t see much; the lighting
inside seemed dim. I took a chance and pushed open the front door.
Chimes tinkled overhead as I walked inside. It seemed like a cozy
little shop, with rows of bookshelves on one side and a line of
glass counters on the other. I wasn’t assailed by a hoard of
spirits. The place seemed deserted of people, both the living and
the dead. Then some guy wandered out from behind one of the rows of
shelves. He had spiked hair, white make-up on his face, and was
carrying a small silver tray on which burned a cone of incense. He
wore a long black robe. He strolled past me, as though I wasn’t
even there, turned round at the front of the store and then started
toward the back, leaving in his wake a strong smell of jasmine. I
figured the guy must work here, but I couldn’t figure what his job
might be—maybe he was in charge of ambiance or something.

While I stared after the guy, a woman
appeared behind the glass counters. She was middle-aged, and wore a
lot of wooden beads around her neck and a long colorful dress. Huge
gaudy hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes. She looked at me
placidly but said nothing. During the silence I allowed myself to
read her, which involved releasing that thing inside me that I
fought so hard to control. Two or three seconds of freaky insight
told me that the woman owned the store, that she was a total fake
that didn’t believe in any of the books or other items she sold,
that she thought people were stupid for spending so much money on
such utter garbage, that she had a pet boxer named Howard and a
urinary tract infection for which she had a doctor’s appointment
tomorrow… . I blinked my eyes, and reeled in the freak senses; they
always seemed to enter the realms of TMI (too much info), like did
I really need to know about her urinary tract?

“Can I help you find anything?” she asked,
pleasantly enough but she harbored nothing but disgust at the sight
of me. Young punk. Street trash. Baggy clothes. Probably a
shop-lifter… She would be of absolutely no help to me.

“No…no,” I muttered, looking around, scanning
the inside of store. I spotted a guy that was rearranging the books
near the back of the store. He was tall and slim, and had a weird
pale purplish light around him that I recognized. “No, thanks, but
he can,” I said, pointing at the guy.

The woman looked stunned, as though I’d just
insulted her.

I turned away from her and headed toward the
back of the store. I came up behind the guy who was straightening
the books on the shelves against the rear wall.

“Hey, I need some help,” I said, stepping up
behind him.

He turned around. His face was thin but not
unpleasant. His light brown hair was messy but in a good way. He
gave me a look, a look that asked, What now?

“Just ask Helen at the desk,” he droned,
looking back at the books he was shifting around. “She knows
everything about everything in the store.”

“No, I think I need to ask you,” I said.

He looked back at me. Maybe he saw me for the
first time. Interest registered in his pale blue eyes.

“Hey, you go to Adler, don’t you?” he asked,
finally giving me more attention than the books.

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t recognize him, which
didn’t surprise me; I spent most of my time at school trying to
ignore just about everybody.

“I thought I knew you,” he said. “What are
you looking for?”

“I need a book on some weird stuff,” I
said.

He looked at the books that lined the shelves
around us. “You think you can be a tad more specific?”

“I need something on reality.”

“I’ll save you some money. Reality sucks,” he
said, and seemed pleased with the joke.

“I mean parallel realities.”

He sighed. “I see,” he said. “Follow me.”

He led me down one of the rows of shelves,
and stopped at a section.

“You might want to check in through here,” he
said, pointing to a certain shelf.

Before I could examine any of the books, I
caught a drift from him: he totally thought I was just another
crackpot customer. I found that deeply offensive. I was, after all,
the real deal, not just some wannabe. This ought to be one of the
few places on earth where being me was a good thing.

“I am so not,” I said.

“So not what?” he asked, staring at me,
uneasy.

“I’ve never been in a place like this.”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind,” I said. I turned my
attention to the books. “So which one is the best.”

He gave me a strange look, but said, “Well,
honestly, they’re all pretty much crap.” He reached up and pulled
down a thick leather-bound volume and handed it to me. “This is the
only one that’s pretty much real, and that depends on what you
believe is real.”

I looked the book, which had no title. Then I
glanced at him. He seemed absorbed in my interest. I could still
see that pale purple glow around him; I’d seen that unusual shade
of aura in people who were open, who were at least a little like
me. I figured he had seen a few things, spiritual flashes or
whatever, which he didn’t quite understand. He knew that there is
more going on in the world than everybody thinks, but he didn’t
know exactly what. He was curious about freaky things. This was why
he had taken a job here, rather than at a local Kmart. He believed
this place would satisfy his curiosity, but he was wrong. His name
was Jack Kilgore….Actually, I was catching a good vibe from him. It
was unusual; most of the impressions I got from people, especially
guys, convinced me that you couldn’t trust anybody—ever—with
anything.