Whispers from the Dead (2 page)

I’d even reached out, trying to touch whatever might be there. “Who are you?” I’d whispered into the silence, but no one answered.

I didn’t tell Mom or Dad about the presence. What could I say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous and wouldn’t cause Mom to worry about me? Besides, I began to get used to my invisible shadow. I don’t remember exactly when or why I stopped being afraid, maybe when it occurred to me that this presence was like someone standing protectively by my side, someone who cared about me.

That’s when I made a terrible mistake.

Marcie, Andy, Kent—all of us—were at Marcie’s house one evening, and Kent began telling one of those weird murderer-with-an-iron-claw stories that’s always supposed to have happened to a friend of a friend. Andy topped Kent’s story with a gruesome ghost story, and we were laughing and acting so crazy that I suddenly said, “I’ll tell you something that’s really true! Listen to what’s
been happening to me!” Like a fool, I blurted out the whole story about the spirit who shadowed me.

Nobody laughed. When I finished, their glances slid away. It was easy to see what they were thinking. Sarah’s weird. She’s strange. My face flushed hotly, and I wondered if it was possible to die from embarrassment. Why had I been so stupid as to tell them? To make everything even worse, I felt as though I’d somehow betrayed the invisible spirit.

Marcie finally broke the silence by saying, “Sarah, something’s wrong. It’s creepy. Have you told your parents what you told us?”

“No,” I said. I tried a laugh but couldn’t make it. “And I wish now I hadn’t told you.”

A little frown dipped between Marcie’s eyebrows as she said, “I really think you should tell your parents.”

I did, hoping, I guess, that I’d get reassurance from Mom; but it didn’t happen that way. Mom immediately took me to Dr. Clark, our family doctor, and I had to repeat the story to him.

Dr. Clark was the first person who had listened to me calmly. “There’ve been some studies made about this—what you might call a haunted feeling,” he told us.

“What do you mean?” Mom’s voice was high-pitched, and she gripped the edge of her chair.

“A number of children who’ve been on the brink of death and recovered have claimed they were being followed by an invisible presence. One of them was the author, Edith Wharton.”

I got hung up on the word
children
and complained. “I’m not a child.”

“You’re only sixteen, Sarah, so you’re not an adult,” Dr. Clark answered. “Now stop interrupting so I can tell you the rest. The author of one study believes that some children who have had a near-death experience made contact with another dimension and are reluctant to lose this contact, so they become more sensitive or intuitive to what you might call otherworldly beings.”

Mom gasped. What he said scared me too. “Are you talking ghosts?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I’m just trying to tell you that other people have experienced what you have, that you’re not alone in having these unusual sensations. I thought it might help you to know that.”

It didn’t help. I wanted control over my own mind. I didn’t want to be some kind of weird link between two worlds.
Weird Sarah. Haunted Sarah.
I shivered.

“What do we do about this?” Mom’s voice hit another high note, and she gripped my hand.

Dr. Clark reached over and patted her shoulder. “For one thing, Dorothy, don’t worry,” he said. “These odd experiences that have been bothering Sarah will eventually fade out and disappear as the trauma recedes.”

“As the trauma recedes?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“In your case, probably when you stop reliving your fear of drowning,” he told me.

“I almost drowned. How can I
not
remember that?”

“I didn’t say ‘remember.’ I said, ‘relive.’ ”

“Does Sarah need counseling? Some kind of therapy?” Mom asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dr. Clark said as he smiled at me. “I think she needs to stay busy with her friends. Have fun, go swimming again.”

It was hard to hold back a shudder. Go swimming? Never!

During the weeks that followed, Mom and Dad were strong and steady, as they’d always been, but sometimes a little scared-rabbit look flickered in Mom’s eyes, and I wondered what she thought—
really
thought—about what was going on in my mind.

I wished I knew myself.

Sometimes I’d groan, wondering,
Why did this happen to me? And why had I been dumb enough to talk about it?

It was obvious that what I had told them made my friends uncomfortable. Marcie was the only one who stood by me; but sometimes, when we were alone together, watching TV or walking to the mall, even she’d get jumpy. “Is everything okay?” she’d ask, and I’d wonder if she was afraid of the spirit or of me.

The passage of time helped the memories to fade, and even though sometimes at night the water closed over my head and I awoke from my nightmare struggling for air, the dreams came less and less frequently.

I tried to convince myself that everything soon would be as it once was. I wouldn’t let myself think beyond that point. And I was surprised when one day it dawned on me that my secret wraith had slipped away. I was even more surprised when I discovered that it was more like a loss than a victory.
I had to get rid of you
, I
thought.
I had to stay in control.
But it wasn’t there to hear me.

“Everything will be back to normal now,” I convinced myself, but I was wrong.

Dad got the promotion he’d been hoping for, which meant he’d make a couple of moves, the first one to his company’s Houston office. He brought home a bottle of champagne, and his face shone as he told us his news.

I wanted to cry, to scream, “We can’t leave Springdale! This is our home!” But everything had changed, and it wouldn’t be our home any longer.

Dad said to Mom, “I’ll have to report to the new office by next week. If you can take care of winding up the details here, I’ll do the house-hunting for us in Houston.”

For just an instant Mom had looked wistfully at her collection of potted plants in the sunny bay window. “Make it a beautiful house,” she said.

“I promise,” he answered.

It wasn’t until later, after I’d rushed to Marcie’s house to tell her we’d be leaving, that I gave in to my tears. Marcie cried, too, but at the same time her eyes held a look of almost giddy relief—the same kind of look someone gets when she’s called on to solve a tough problem in geometry and makes it.

“Maybe I can come back next summer for a visit,” I told her, “and in the meantime we can write lots of letters.”

“Sure,” Marcie agreed, “but you know me. I’m not much of a letter writer.”

My silent shadow had vanished, but so had my
friends. I wanted to blame the shadow, but I couldn’t. I knew that the pain from the loneliness that smothered me was my own fault for telling. Was I totally free of any link to another world? I couldn’t be sure. But no matter what happened to me in the future, I’d keep it to myself, even keep it from Mom and Dad. I’d never be humiliated like that again.

A
s we stood outside the empty, contemporary-style house that was to be our Houston home, Mom said, “Frankly, I can’t believe it. This neighborhood, this house—how can we afford it?”

Dad grinned. “Trust me,” he said. He pulled the house key from his pocket and told us, “The electricity’s on, so the air-conditioning should have cooled the house. Just give me a few minutes to open drapes and let in the sunlight before you come inside. I want you to see the house at its best.” He sprinted off, disappearing through the large front door.

Mom glanced to each side at the large houses on the street, then back to our house. “I really didn’t expect anything like this,” she said. She clasped my hand, the way she would when I was very young and we’d cross the street, but I could tell that this time she was the one
needing help. “It’s not much like our house in Springdale,” she added.

“It’s a lot bigger,” I said, not knowing how to reassure her.

“Sarah,” Mom said, “I know it’s hard to move away from friends, from the home you’re used to. It’s—”

I interrupted brusquely. “It’s okay, Mom. We don’t have to talk about it.”

But she finished the sentence she’d begun. “It’s hard for me too,” she murmured. Mom gave my hand a little squeeze and raised her voice as though determined to be cheerful. “Your father’s had enough time to get things ready. Let’s see what our house looks like on the inside.”

She threw open the door and stepped into the entry hall, and I followed. “Oh!” Mom said, staring up at the high ceiling. “This is beautiful!” But I couldn’t move. I felt as though I’d been sucked into a cold, smothering mist that surged forward, its thudding heartbeat racing, pounding against my forehead like hammer blows. The echo of a scream beat against my mind, and I gasped in panic.

The front door slammed shut behind me. “Sarah,” Mom said, “what is it? You’re trembling.”

Mom’s words echoed loudly in the empty hallway, shattering the mist, and it retreated. Hovering, waiting, its dark shreds silently clung to the walls.

I didn’t stop to think. “It’s this house,” I whispered. “Can’t you feel it?”

Mom’s eyes widened in fear, and she struggled to keep her voice steady. “There’s nothing wrong with this
house,” she said. “Whatever you think you may feel, well … it’s—”

With a shudder I finished her sentence. “I know, Mom. You’re trying to figure out the tactful way to say that you think the problem is me. I’m sorry I said anything. I shouldn’t have.”

She put an arm around me and gave me a comforting, strengthening hug; but I heard tension bite through her words. “Sweetheart, if you felt something frightening … well, couldn’t it be just a trick of your imagination?”

This was not like the other time. There was something horrible here in this house, and it had reached out and touched me. I wanted to scream, “Don’t do this to me! I don’t want to be a link to some other world! Leave me alone!”

But I tried to stay calm, nodded agreement, and said, “You’re right. It was just my imagination.”

Mom stroked my hair back from my face with her free hand. “Oh, Sarah, I thought those feelings you had were over.”

“They are,” I insisted, hating myself for being different, for being strange.

I heard Dad enter the house through the back door and cross the kitchen. “Dorothy!” he called.

“Don’t tell Dad what I said, please,” I whispered to Mom. “I’d rather just forget what happened.”

“If you’re sure,” she said, and I could tell that she’d like to forget it too.

“I’m sure.”

Dad strode through the dining room to join us in the
front entry hall. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he was tall and broad-shouldered, and at that moment he looked so pleased with himself, he couldn’t keep from grinning. His attention was focused completely upon the house, and he gently ran a finger up the smooth wood molding around the tall window at the left side of the front door, examining it carefully.

“How do you like the place?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he added proudly, “I did all right with my house-hunting. You’ll have to admit it.”

“It’s a beautiful house, Ron,” Mom answered. “I can’t believe you picked it up for such a low price.” She smiled up at him with such admiration that his grin grew wider.

Mom—with her shaggy salt-and-pepper hair and her figure, which was too flat on top and a little too wide at the bottom—never would have won a beauty contest, but Dad often looked at her as though he knew she was the most marvelous person who’d ever entered his life.

He pretended to preen a bit. “That’s one more point to my credit. Evelyn Pritchard, the real-estate agent I told you about, the one who helped me house-hunt, lives right next door. She said that it was very important to her to have good neighbors, so she was tickled pink when I made an offer on the house.”

Mom giggled. “Your agent took a lot on trust,” she said. “What if you’d had a mean wife and horrible children who zoomed around the neighborhood at midnight on dirt bikes and threw rocks at cats?”

Dad laughed. “I told Evelyn all about you and Sarah, and she’s eager to meet you.” Impatiently he added,
“You haven’t set foot out of the entry hall. Wait until you see the rest of the house.”

Mom took my hand and we followed Dad. As we walked through the rooms our voices echoed, bouncing off the high ceilings and the bare walls. But there were other voices. The house seemed filled with whispers, and twice I turned, almost expecting to see someone behind me.

Mom and Dad didn’t seem to hear them. They chattered on about where to put the freezer and if the microwave should go here or there as though there were just the three of us present.

Get out of here!
In my mind I shouted at the whisperer,
This is our house now, and you don’t belong here! Go away! Leave me alone!

The sudden silence startled me. The spirits had listened to me. I’d won. I gave a long, grateful sigh of relief.

I caught up to Mom and Dad, trying hard to concentrate on what Dad was showing us. He had kept his promise to Mom to find her a beautiful house. The front and backyards of this house were shaded with pines and dotted with late summer flowers. The ceilings were high, and there was lots of glass, so that the rooms were bright with dappled sunlight.