Aftersight (37 page)

It startled me for only a second, then I felt the crystal whoosh of excitement tingle up my being like the release of adrenaline. I'd made it! I did it! I was free!

A picture of Nicole reached up through my awareness. Nicole. I had to get to Nicole. I willed myself to the floor and descended gently, slowly — maddeningly slowly. Nicole was in danger. I felt this in every particle of my being. The same sense of danger that I'd felt the last twenty-four hours, magnified now in my pure spirit state.

Unwilling to risk instantly transporting to Nicole's location, as Robert and Arika would have insisted I could have done, I willed myself toward the stairs. The momentum of my flight carried me farther than I'd planned. I bound past them and would have careened into and through the wall, if I hadn't calmly willed my spirit body to a stop and reversed toward the attic door.

I felt more in control as I passed through the opening and into the second story hallway. The corridor should have been dark, but everything was bathed in a creamy white light, like multidirectional moonshine. I sensed a disturbance in Emily's room but immediately shut it out. My entire focus had to be on Nicole or I'd get distracted and never make it.

I coasted down the stairs to the main floor and kept going, careening through the foyer toward the front door. Regaining my balance, I continued to make my way clumsily toward the basement, certain now that my astral presence was the only thing that could save my friend.

Tyson

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:27 a.m.

In a panic, I pointed the flashlight in Nicole's face, then angled it back down. "Who's out there?" I demanded, making no effort to keep quiet now. "Come out and show yourself, you little coward. You don't scare us."

As if in answer, a piece of debris boomeranged out of the darkness, striking Nicole in the temple and toppling her to the floor. I ducked, dropping to my knees, crouching over her protectively lest something else come shooting out of the shadows.

"Nicole, are you okay? Nicole?"

"Tyson? Tyson? What happened?"

I directed the flashlight to her forehead. A troubling amount of blood raced from a cut near her eyebrow, into her left eye and down her cheek. The bright red fluid mirrored her bright red hair. I'd seen head wounds before, knew how badly they bled. They usually looked a lot worse than they was, but it didn't make looking at it any easier.

I searched the ground around us until I found what hit her. It looked like the wooden armrest off a wrecked chair. I held it up. "This smacked into you."

She squinted at it blankly. Shook her head.

"Never mind. We need to get out of here. Are you dizzy? Do you think you can walk?"

I was still helping her to her feet when something crashed on the far side of the basement. I angled the flashlight in the direction of the disturbance in time to see the second stack of books knock into the third, and the third knock into a fourth, starting a chain reaction of falling boxes, furniture, and debris that reached into the little nook where me and Nicole was sheltered, cutting off our path out through the main aisle.

Several large boxes knocked into a nearby desk where an old wooden spinning wheel perched. The rickety antique hit my shoulders with the weight of one of the boxes behind it, taking my feet out from under me and sending my flashlight spinning into the fallen debris. It hadn't even come to a stop before more boxes keeled over, burying it — our last remaining light source — completely.

Becky

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:29 a.m.

I heard ghostly footfalls all around me. It was like all the boys that had been haunting the house had gathered in a mob to rush me, sensing me as a threat to their hold on the physical world. At the same time, Emily woke with a startled cry. She sat up and went slamming back down to the mattress, as if something had whacked her hard across the face. At the foot of the bed, Sara stirred.

"Sara, get up!" I shouted. "Emily's being attacked."

Sara opened her eyes, suddenly awake. She and I moved in to surround Emily, hugging her on either side protectively as all around us toys, books, and stuffed animals went flying back and forth through the shadows, bouncing off the walls, occasionally glancing off us as they passed.

Several times I was slapped across the side of the head or pinched or scratched. From the sound of Sara's cries, the same was happening to her. As I watched, a nasty cut appeared just under Sara's right eye and started to bleed.

Cali

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:30 a.m.

I moved down the darkened basement steps, lit now by the directionless white moonlight beaming from my own ghostly being and reflecting from everything around me. There was a kind of hazy but noticeable liquid resistance preventing me from reaching the bottom of the basement steps. I had to push through it the way someone might push their way through neck-deep water. Something about it made me feel less ghostly, more
real
.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw a figure standing with his back to me, gazing into the ruin of fallen boxes and smashed debris in the unfinished part of the basement. He was relatively short — my height — and had long, wiry white hair growing out from under his black-capped head. He was dressed completely in black and, though solid-looking, was absolutely colorless, bled of pigment by the darkness and the translucent astral light.

"Gotfrid!"
I knew his name, though it had never been consciously spoken to me.

The old man didn't turn so much as rematerialize facing me. He still had long, bared teeth; stubbly white whiskers covering pale, sagging flesh; and wide eyes,
crazy
eyes. But, as substantial as he was, he was only a man now, no longer a ghostly being to frighten with shock and surprise.

"Anderlyn!"
the old man called out to me.
"So you've come to me. But for help or hindrance?"

I looked behind me, thinking maybe he was talking to someone standing there. When I turned around, I caught a glimpse of my own astral form: the black robe that reached down to my knees, the black hose and pointy, black shoes, the white hair that framed my field of vision. There was only an instant of bewilderment, a passing thought that somehow I'd taken on the old man's appearance, mirroring his form. But then I knew. Then I
remembered
.

"You think you can just join these witches with impunity?"
Gotfrid barked.
"You think you can just dance into their midst and they'll accept you as one of them? You were just as complicit in their retribution as I. It was cosmic justice and now you are as cursed as they!"

Tyson and Nicole emerged from a seam in the boxes, having felt their way out through a narrow side channel. Like Gotfrid, they lacked definition or color. Ty looked moonlit and handsome, but Nicole... Nicole was radiant! She possessed beauty far outshining even the sculpted features she possessed in life.

But Nicole was not the girl I'd met in Sacramento. Though I could not
see
color, I could perceive it still, the wavy blond hair, blue eyes, creamy complexion flushed with health. How I —
Anderlyn? —
loved her! Not as Cali but as...

"You didn't remember, did you?"
Gotfrid observed. His smile showed missing teeth.
"The betrayal of your wife for the whore?"
He motioned in Nicole's direction and suddenly I understood everything. My uncanny attraction to Nicole from the beginning, the out-of-body projection where I saw myself as a black-clad man making love to the young girl, loving her completely.

The past life. I was the priest's brother! I was the magistrate who sacrificed the girls to save my own skin. And lost the only love I'd ever had!

"It's too late for them,
Anderlyn,"
Gotfrid went on,
"but not for you."

Becky

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:32 a.m.

The attacks on Sara, Emily, and I grew more intense.
So much fear in here,
I thought.
They're drawing power from it. From us.

Emily was whimpering, trembling. I could feel the fear like something oily leaking from her. There was actually a sound to it, like random tones washed in ugly dissonance; a symphonic orchestra scratching out notes at random, discordant counter-melodies and overlapping tempos.

Curiously calm and steady, I reached my head down to Emily's ear. "It's okay, sweetheart. They're just boys making noise. Don't be afraid. That's how boys get girls' attention sometimes when they're really desperate. They make noise."

Something slapped the back of my neck. Something else pinched my butt. I heard catcalls and bellows. I ignored them.

"Love is the answer,"
I thought.
"People forget that love needn't be an abstract concept. It is an energy. It is a frequency. We can hone in and tune to it like a radio receiving broadcasts."
I smiled.

"Just think of how scared they are, how truly frightened they are, all on their own with no one to take care of them, no one to love them, no one to show them the way home. Remember their stories? Feel sorry for them, sweetheart, like you did before. Send them love. Send them light. Send them home."

Tyson

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:33 a.m.

I squinted into the perfect darkness, caught a glimpse of smoky movement, motion like white shadows. I recognized Cali first.
Her
face was the brightest: black hair, creamy skin, deep brown eyes that shone in the peculiar starlight like diamonds. I perceived her old-man-Anderlyn traits, too; they was a wispy phosphorescence enveloping her like a wavering mist. The old man was a shadow of Cali,
but he was not rea
l
ly her
.

"We have to go," Nicole said beside me.

I ignored her. "Are you seein' this?"

"Seein' what?"

I glimpsed Gotfrid next. He appeared suddenly, as if he'd slipped through a gash in the gloom. I could feel his hate, hear it like birds screeching in a storm. The fear in the old man was an acid texture that I could have reached out and touched.

"What is it?" Nicole hollered. "What do you see?"

The glowing form of Cali turned to me. My eyes met hers, and the words she spoke in my mind could have been put there one by one.

"Get her away,"
Cali said.
"Get her out. Save her."

Cali

Lord Humphreys' Residence

1:34 a.m.

I watched Tyson claw his way to the cellar's unlocked side door, push it open, and carry Nicole out into the rain. I knew without knowing how that they would reach his car, that he would find an emergency room, that Nicole would be all right. And I remembered now where I'd seen him before. The cowboy in my out-of-body experiences.
T
y
son! The cowboy!

I thought back to my premonition earlier, that something terrible would happen to Nicole. Now I understood why. Nicole had
died
, along with Nicole's three girlfriends, in a lifetime in Germany still imprinted on my unconscious. Had I sensed a true danger to Nicole's life or was I still mourning the girl that, as a German magistrate, I lost when a witch hunt I never meant to start got terribly out of hand?

"You were always jealous of my love for her,"
I screamed at Gotfrid and now I noticed the strange masculine tenor to my own voice.
"It was something you could never have, so you veiled yourself in your piety and self-righteous dogma. You could always find your fears and prejudices justified in your holy books, bending the Word to suit your own purpose.

"But not anymore. You are long dead and buried. You no longer have power in the phy
s
ical world. You are a shell of what you once were and as long as you carry your hate with you, you will always be in your own private nightmare."

Gotfrid fell on me before I could catch him moving forward. Perhaps I'd spoken too soon. The cold, clammy hands that gripped my neck felt real enough. The smell of Gotfrid's breath in my face stank as if all his insides were rotten and hollowed out with decay. The loathing that hemorrhaged from his being was a putrid, greasy discharge.

I grasped the cloth near Gotfrid's chest and lifted. He had mass, bulk, but I lifted him as if he weighed a tenth of his looks. I brought him up over my head and tossed him behind me, discarding him into the shadowy recesses of the old part of the basement.

I felt him falling, receding, growing smaller. As he slipped away, the cellar's heavy energy, the resistance I'd pressed against while moving down the basement steps, scattered like a rapidly fading fog. And as the last bit of the dark entity passed into shadow, the basement lights blinked twice and turned back on.

Becky

Sir Alexander Bray's London Residence

May 9

I sat in the wine-colored leather wingback chair of Sir Alex's Persian-rug-and-bookcase-lined study. The warmth from the nearby fireplace touched my legs as outside the rain continued, occasionally splattering the wood-gridded window panes.

I took a deep breath, very conscious of the shallowness of my breathing and the perspiration coating my palms. I had been meditating for a half-hour, but it didn't do much to take away the flutters in my stomach. A faint scent of cedar tinged the air.

"Jenny, are you there?"

"I'm here."

I opened my eyes, half-expecting to see her standing there. Her voice was always so clear, I think I was waiting for the day when she would walk out from behind a chair and reveal herself at last.