Hereafter (14 page)

I smiled slightly and turned to Joshua. I flicked my head back to the hallway, indicating that it was time to leave the room. He picked up on my cue and turned around quickly—ready, I think, to be away from these images.
I know the feeling,
I thought as I moved to follow him.

Before I left the room, though, I peeked back over my shoulder. Just to memorize the tiny space one last time.

That’s when I noticed the thick layer of dust over everything. A transparent brown film covered the gold stars, the dresser, the books. I paused, frowning at the dust.

Though my parents hadn’t changed a thing in this room, they certainly hadn’t entered it in a long time, either.

For some reason that saddened me even more. Not because my mother didn’t trudge each day into some room-sized shrine to me, dust rag in hand. But because my parents had kept the room this way
and
sealed it up, as though it were some tomb, filled with things too painful to come near.

Which it likely was.

I shook my head, stepping out of the room and into the hallway without another backward glance.

“Close it, please,” I asked Joshua, my voice hoarse. He did so without a word, pulling the door shut behind me and sealing the tomb once again. I shuddered at the sound.

Joshua came and stood beside me. I looked up at him grimly, too spent to even attempt a smile.

“Was that hard?” he asked.

I just nodded.

“If it makes you feel any better, I think you have almost as many books as I do.”

“Had,” I said. “I
had
almost as many books as you do.”

He frowned. “Amelia, you can have all my books.”

“Which would be awesome, if I could ever turn the pages.”

Joshua ducked his head, and I felt instantly ashamed of myself.

I ducked down too, met his eyes, and gave him a slight smile. “But you know, Joshua, no matter how I feel right now, that’s still very good to know.”

“Hope so,” he said with a timid, answering smile.

I took a huge breath, drawing my shoulders up and then letting them fall back into place. I felt raw, and oddly bruised. Yet there were still more things I wanted to see.

“Mind if we check out the living room real quick? I think . . . my mom used to keep a bunch of pictures in there.”

“Not at all.” Joshua swept his arm toward the living room, so I crossed in front of him and into the room. I scanned the walls until I found it: the little shelf my mother had nailed to the far wall in place of a mantel.

Joshua and I wove our way through a maze of chairs and ottomans until we stood directly in front of the shelf. It was still cluttered with the same pictures, each framed in cheap plastic or wood. A few new items also decorated this area, most noticeably the two large photos now hanging above the shelf.

I recognized the photo on the left immediately. It was my senior picture, the very one Joshua and I had found in the yearbook this afternoon. My living face stared out at us, surrounded by an expensive-looking wooden frame. To my horror, someone had draped wide black ribbons around the perimeter of the frame. The ribbon on the left side had been printed with my name in silver, metallic ink; the ribbon on the right proclaimed the dates of my birth and death. The otherwise pretty picture was thus transformed into the kind of macabre memento you might leave on someone’s grave.

The embarrassing display, however, wasn’t the thing that horrified me most. Instead, it was the other picture hanging over the shelf, the one directly to the right of mine.

The photo itself didn’t scare me. Under any other circumstances, it would have made me smile. The photo was of my father, taken around the time he and my mother had married. Back then my father still had a thick mop of hair. His tan skin was less lined than I remembered, but his green eyes still creased at the corners as a result of his huge grin.

Yet, despite the happy tone of my father’s photo, I began to shiver uncontrollably.

Because, like my senior portrait beside it, my father’s photo was draped in black ribbons.

The ribbon to the left of my father’s picture bore the name Todd Allen Ashley. It glinted out at me in the same embossed silver that surrounded my own portrait. I couldn’t quite read the ribbon on the right, nor did I want to. No matter what the dates printed on the ribbon read, I knew what they symbolized: a birth date . . . and a death date.

At first the individual pieces of what I saw didn’t make sense. But the longer I stared at the photo, the more the details came into horrifying clarity. The moment they all clicked into place, the bottom dropped out from my world.

But I wasn’t scared. I wanted it. I wanted darkness, nothingness. I wanted a nightmare right now. I wanted to let the river suck me down, to make me drown or trap me in Eli’s horrible netherworld.

I wanted anything but this.

No matter what I wanted, I didn’t fall into darkness. I stood motionless in the cramped living room in which my mother probably sat alone, night after night. No daughter to fight with, no husband to talk to.

Because I was dead.

And my father was dead.

I placed my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. Joshua reached for me, but I pulled away and shook my head.

As if he had just read my thoughts, Joshua whispered, “It’s not your fault, Amelia.”

“It is. I know it is.”

“How?” he urged.

“Look at this place!” I gestured around me, to the ramshackle contents of the room and the entombed bedroom just outside of it. “It all fell apart when I died. It’s all fallen apart.”

“I know, and it’s horrible.” Joshua’s voice was softer, but still insistent. “Terrible. And I’m sorry, Amelia. But—sometimes it happens. And the important part
is, you didn’t make it happen.”

It didn’t seem to matter what Joshua said—I couldn’t stop shaking. “I wasn’t there, Joshua. I wasn’t there when . . . when . . .”

I choked on the thought. Joshua rushed over, reaching out for me; but I forced the words out of my mouth before he could touch me. In fact, I nearly spat the words at the floor.

“I wasn’t there when my dad died. Now my mom’s all alone, and my dad could be
anywhere
. He could be lost, like I was. Or he could be . . . someplace worse.” I shuddered, thinking about Eli’s dark world and the poor, trapped souls there. “And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

My eyes prickled. I wasn’t surprised when one tear managed to course its way down my cheek. But I was stunned when an entire flood of tears followed.

I looked up at Joshua, my mouth open, my face probably the picture of miserable shock. I wiped furiously at my cheeks and stared down at my hands, which were quickly becoming soaked.

“I . . . I’ve never cried,” I stuttered, staring back up at him. “Not like this.”

He grabbed my arms and practically yanked me to him.

“Whatever you do, Amelia, it’s all right with me.” His voice was rough, deepened by emotion.

I was shocked yet again by what the sound of his voice did to my body, no matter how desolate my mind might be. Suddenly, my arms were wrapped fiercely around Joshua’s neck. Just as fiercely, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him faster than I could pull myself. Now there was no space between us. We were curved against each other; and when he shifted closer, I thought I might actually stop breathing.

I could feel it all: the pressure of his arms around me, the grip of his fingers at my waist, the warmth of his breath on my skin. Everything I knew about myself and my relationship to the living world told me this was impossible. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that I felt alive. I felt
everything
.

Joshua stared down at me, and I could feel the heat of his midnight blue eyes on every inch of my body. When I curled my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, he moaned. Once the sound escaped his lips, we didn’t even give it a second thought. We leaned into each other and pressed our lips together.

The kiss crashed over me, wave upon wave of fire. The ache exploded across my chest like an atom bomb, incinerating everything in its path. I let it burn me; I let it consume me.

As Joshua parted his lips and moved them against mine, I felt his lips—felt the soft, warm skin of them.

At that moment I
was
the atom bomb. I was the orange, brightly glowing ball of fire. The exact spot where a lit match touches a pool of kerosene.

Then I was cold. Terribly cold.

I opened my eyes and gasped. I began choking and clutching around me, futilely trying to find something to anchor me. Something to help me claw my way out of here.

Because I was suddenly in the black water of the river. And I was drowning again.

Chapter
Sixteen

W
hen the oppressive black water finally vanished, I woke up, coughing and sputtering
in the morning sunlight. I found myself on my knees, leaning over on all fours and clutching the earth as if it were a life preserver. Which, in essence, it was.

For the longest time I stayed in that position, bent over and staring at the ground. My hair hung in thick curtains on either side of my face, blocking my view of everything but the dry grass and patches of red dirt beneath me.

Then I turned my head only a fraction of an inch to the right. Through my hair I could just make out my surroundings.

The field. The trees. The headstones.

I sat back on my bare heels and wrapped my arms around my chest. Only after providing myself that feeble protection did I shake my hair back so I could see the scene more fully.

I’d had another nightmare, one far worse than any of the others.

It began normally enough: the flailing, the coughing, the general sense of desperation. Soon, though, after I’d quieted from the initial shock of the water, I could hear the strange voices again, the raucous ones that reminded me so much of Eli’s netherworld. But this time, in addition to the voices, I heard laughter. Angry, violent laughter, coming from what sounded like a party.

When I looked up to find its source, I saw them: a crowd of figures, standing high above me on High Bridge. Watching me struggle. Before I could make out their faces, I plunged once and finally under the water. Only then did I wake in this graveyard.

Who were the people on the bridge? And why were they watching me with such obvious joy?

These were questions I really couldn’t answer. And, of course, they brought up even more questions concerning
why
I could see them in the first place. Maybe I heard and saw them because I’d become more aware lately? Or perhaps it was like Joshua said: I’d repressed most of my memories about my death and now they were returning in vague but painful detail.

Thanks, nightmares,
I thought wryly,
for being so consistently fun.

This consistency, of course, led to another thought. A pattern seemed to have emerged in my nightmares, particularly with the way they began. Something to do with my emotional state maybe. After all, the last one began when Eli upset me the night he told me I had no choice but to join him in the darkness. Then this nightmare started with the touch of Joshua’s lips.

No,
I thought with a shake of my head. Not at the moment he first kissed me. But instead, at the moment I’d thought I might explode—from misery at the loss of my father and my mother’s forced isolation; from desire, sparked by the feel of Joshua’s lips against mine.

At the thought of Joshua’s lips, I pushed against the grass and jumped up. I could think about the nightmares later; right now I had more important problems to solve. Such as the fact that a day had passed since our kiss, probably leaving Joshua with more than a few questions about my whereabouts. Without another glance at this terrible place, I broke into a sprint.

Possibly a half hour later—I wasn’t sure—I skidded to a stop in the Wilburton High School parking lot. I panted, not from the effort of the run, but from fear that I’d arrived too late to find him.

Luckily, one glance at the back lawn of the school let me know I wasn’t too late. All across the lawn, students gathered in little clusters over their lunches, laughing and basking in the sun. I hurried past them, studying each of their faces as I walked.

Not seeing the one face I wanted, I had no choice but to wait outside the cafeteria door, tapping my foot and fidgeting until someone finally pushed the door open. I took one cursory glance at the students coming out of it and, dismissing them, circled around to squeeze inside before the door slammed shut. Once inside the cafeteria, I scanned the room impatiently and then began to walk forward.

I was searching the tables so intently, I didn’t see him until I’d almost smacked right into his chest. We both skidded to a stop before impact, less than an inch from each other.

A brief wave of real scent—sweet, musky, warm—washed over me and then disappeared. I raised my head, ever so slowly, until I met his gaze.

I’d found Joshua.

I felt a swell of joy. Joshua, however, appeared as though he didn’t share my feelings. In fact, he looked down at me with no expression at all, his dark eyes unreadable.

“Joshua—,” I began, but another voice interrupted mine.

“Mayhew, dude, what’s the holdup?”

“Nothing,” Joshua shot back without looking at O’Reilly.

“You’re blocking the door, handsome,” a girl—Kaylen, I think—called from the crowd behind Joshua.

But Joshua still didn’t move. He stared down at me in that frozen, immobile way. Eventually he stirred, keeping his gaze locked onto mine but turning slightly backward.

“Just remembered,” he told his friends, “I forgot something in my car.”

“Then could you, like, go get it?” Jillian whined. “Because ‘Joshua Mayhew’ isn’t a tardy excuse for the rest of us.”

“It isn’t an excuse for me, either. Just ask Ms. Wolters.” He turned fully to the crowd behind him and gave them his normal, broad grin. But when he turned back to me, the grin faded and his eyes finally flashed with real emotion. He shrugged and pushed past me, exiting the cafeteria.

I felt cold all over. Colder, even, than when the chilly air in the netherworld cut me to the bone. I easily recognized the emotion that had flashed in Joshua’s eyes, although I’d never seen it there before.

It was fury. Joshua was furious.

Trembling, I found an empty space between some of the students who were filing through the door and followed them. Once outside, my head swiveled around to find Joshua. I spotted him, already several paces away from his friends and striding quickly toward the school parking lot.

Finally, I was able to break through the crowd, and I hurried to catch up with Joshua. One look at the rigid muscles in his neck, however, made me hesitate. I stalled several feet behind him, with one foot on the curb and the other wavering just above the asphalt.

Joshua reached his car, opened the passenger side door, and made a show of digging around on the floorboard for his imaginary forgotten item. Standing upright, he gave me a sidelong glance and jerked his head toward the open door. Both gestures gave off a decidedly angry air.

As my foot dropped to the asphalt, I gulped. I trudged past him and then crawled into the car. Joshua slammed my door shut and, once he was in the car, jerked his own door shut as well. I winced at the sound.

Joshua didn’t look at me. He just sat there, hands gripped to the steering wheel and eyes glued to the dashboard. A thick silence fell over us. It seemed to squeeze out all the air in the car and, in the process, smother me. I would have preferred any amount of door slamming to this.

“I had a nightmare—,” I began lamely.

“Is that why you disappeared into thin air?” He spat out the interruption without taking his eyes off the dashboard.

“I did what?” I asked.

“You disappeared. Right after I kissed you. Or you kissed me. Whatever. We were kissing, but when I opened my eyes, you were gone.”

“Joshua, I—I had no idea it happened like that,” I sputtered. “That I just disappeared. All I know is that I was kissing you and then I had a nightmare. I woke up less than an hour ago, and I ran straight here.”

He finally turned toward me, scowling. “What do mean, ‘nightmare’? You had a bad dream or something?”

“Not exactly.” I held his gaze while I explained. “Every time I have a nightmare, I don’t really sleep. I just go unconscious and—apparently—disappear from wherever I am before the nightmare starts. It’s like I black out, and then suddenly I’m drowning again. I call them nightmares because eventually I wake up.”

Joshua remained silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his words still rang with disbelief. But I heard another chord in his voice, too—that of hurt.

“But you just woke up an
hour
ago?” he asked. “It’s been almost a full day since you disappeared. How is that even possible?”

I struggled to breathe normally. Calmly. “Like I said, sometimes I just go unconscious. After that I wake up somewhere else, and apparently some
time
else.”

“So . . . you really didn’t just run away from me?”

Now the wounded tone in his voice was perfectly clear. I realized then that all his anger probably hid a simple truth: my sudden disappearance had hurt him. A lot.

Still, I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation at his stubborn refusal to believe me. “Why would I want to run away from you, Joshua?”

“Because I kissed you.”

“I kissed you back,” I pointed out, and then added, “and I
wanted
to.”

Joshua frowned, but when he spoke, his voice was significantly softer. “Are you sure, Amelia?”

I nodded vigorously. “Yes! Yes, to a million degrees! It’s just . . . well, I got really upset about my parents, and I guess I sort of lost it. After all, I’m a
ghost
. You know that.”

“Actually,” he started hesitantly, “I kind of thought that had something to do with it. Like you were afraid I was going to exorcise you.”

I blinked. “W-what? Were you thinking of doing that?”

“No!” He shook his head, looking surprised. “No way. I just thought maybe you’d be worried about it.”

“Well,
now
I am,” I gasped.

“Don’t be,” he said, suddenly intent. “I wouldn’t do that, no matter what. No one could make me.”

I blew out one frustrated puff of air. “Well, we’ve certainly got our problems, haven’t we?”

Joshua gave a bitter little laugh. “Yeah, the list isn’t a short one.”

“The nightmares are on there,” I pointed out. “So is the fact that you’re technically supposed to exorcise me.”

And let’s not forget about Eli
, I added in my head.
Or my inability to help my mother and save my father from darkness. Or how about what happens when you age and I don’t, or when your grandmother finally decides enough is enough as far as I’m concerned . . . ?

For now I kept those thoughts strictly internal. Aloud, I simply added, “I wish I could come back to life and make this easier on us. I really do.”

Joshua seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He frowned heavily and then dragged his hand through his hair toward the back of his neck.

“This is going to be complicated, isn’t it?” he asked.

I nodded. “Seems like it, yeah. You know, I have no idea how this works. The nightmares, the whole ‘you and me, Seer and ghost’ thing. I just don’t know any of the . . . rules. . . .”

The last word trailed out of my mouth, falling like a feather from my lips. It drifted away under the weight of something greater, something that had just occurred to me.

Two people—well, one person and one spirit—knew the rules and could help me. Could help
us
.

As I formed my plan, my eyes became transfixed on an invisible point outside the car. I started to speak in a businesslike clip to distract myself from the dark turn our conversation had taken.

“Here’s the deal, Joshua: I think I know someone who might explain what’s happening. Someone who could actually help us understand how I . . .
work
, I guess. But I’ve got to go somewhere this afternoon to see if my idea is even possible. So can you meet me there after school? And can you trust me to be there?”

“I think I can.”

“Good,” I repeated. I bit my bottom lip and nodded emphatically. “Now, could you tell me where your grandmother is right now?”

It didn’t take long to walk to the largest church in town, nor did it take long for someone to push open one of the doors and unknowingly let me inside. As Joshua had said, the church swarmed with people preparing for tonight’s midweek service.

Finding Ruth within the church also proved easy enough: she was the one at the front of the chapel commanding a small troop of women in an imperious tone. Each time she shook her head—probably to reject some lower-ranking person’s suggestion—she reminded me of Jillian, and I had to stifle a smile.

Any hint of the smile disappeared the moment Ruth turned around and caught sight of me. Upon meeting my gaze, she froze in mid order and let out a strangled noise of protest. Then, without breaking our eye contact or finishing her sentence, Ruth pushed past her minions and marched down the center aisle of the church.

She only released me from her icy glare when she stormed past and hissed, “Outside. Now.”

I followed Ruth outside the double doors of the chapel to the bottom of the church steps, where she waited with her back to me.

“Ruth . . . I mean, Ms. Mayhew,” I started, keeping my voice steady. Self-assured. “I know you don’t want to talk to me, but—”

“You shouldn’t be near such a sacred place,” Ruth interrupted, spinning around to face me. She didn’t meet my eyes but instead glared up at the church as if it, and not some teenage ghost, had addressed her. “You aren’t worthy to be here, much less to exist.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t cowed, or even respectful. I was angry. So angry, in fact, I forgot what I’d undoubtedly been taught about respecting my elders.

“Well, it’s not like I turned into a pillar of salt when I walked through the doors,” I snapped. “So obviously,
someone
divine is okay with my existence.”

Ruth shook her head stubbornly. “If you’re dead and still walking this earth, you’re an abomination.”

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to shout. “Abomination? How dare you! You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know enough,” she said. “I know if you’re still wandering around, chances are good you came from that bridge.”

She had me there. I could only sputter, “Yeah . . . but . . .”

“But nothing. Even if you
aren’t
evil at this point, you’re—at best—an empty vessel that evil will eventually fill, and use. You’re unclaimed, but you won’t be for long. I’m sure
he
wants you . . . the boy who haunts that place. The one we’ve been hunting for years. So now that you’re here too, our work just got more complicated.”