Afterworlds (22 page)

We came to rest on another dark expanse, just like one we’d left behind.

I looked up into the empty black sky. “How can you even tell where we are?”

“We’re where you wanted to be, Lizzie. If you have a real connection to this place. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged. “We could be anywhere.”

“Right,” I said, wondering if the Chrysler Building might have been the safer choice.

Yamaraj knelt and placed his palm on the ground, and a moment later black oil began to bubble up. It spread quickly, and I skipped back to keep my sneakers out of it.

“What are you
doing
?”

“It’s okay, Lizzie.” He pulled me closer, my feet joining his in the black oil.

“Seriously?” We were already sinking.

“This is how it’s done. You’ll understand better if you keep your eyes open.”

“Um, okay.” I held Yamaraj tighter as we descended, hungry for his body heat, and not minding the feel of lean muscles through his silk shirt. The black oil wasn’t much colder than the river’s current, but shivers still fluttered through me as it climbed my spine.

I managed to keep my eyes open, and as the darkness rose past my vision a new reality fell into place around us—houses and trees and mailboxes, a whole suburban street.

I looked up, half expecting the black water’s surface to be there just above my head. But there was only a starry night sky,
with the same half-moon we’d left behind in San Diego. In front of us was a house just like the one in my mother’s old photograph, except that at some point someone had added a picket fence.

We were in Palo Alto.

I took a breath, and the metallic smell of the flipside filled my lungs.

“This makes no sense.” My voice sounded thin in my ears. “I sank through my bedroom floor to get to the river, and we just went down to get
out
of it too?”

“That’s the afterworld for you. Down always works.”

“Of course.” I realized that I was still clinging to him and let go, stepping back.

Yamaraj was smiling. “The river isn’t as depressing as the rest, is it?”

“No, it’s more like a roller coaster. Except you wear a blindfold, and creepy wet things brush against you.” I turned to the house before us. “But it takes you someplace, at least.”

The little bungalow was older than the other houses on the street, with a wide front porch. The flipside had painted it gray instead of the sky blue in my mother’s photograph, but this was definitely the right place.

Of course, this old house wasn’t really why I’d wanted to come here.

“This is amazing, Yamaraj. But it’s kind of weird, finally seeing this place. Do you mind if we walk around a little first?”

“Of course,” he said, and took my hand again.

It felt bad making him think that this was some big emotional
moment, when really I was playing Nancy Drew. But I swallowed my guilt and led him away, glad to have his hand in mine.

My mother’s old street seemed normal enough, with tidy lawns and mailboxes decorated with seashells, a few palm trees swaying in the moonlight. Not the sort of neighborhood that looked like it was harboring a child killer. Though I guess that was the point of living here, if you happened to be one.

What I was looking for had to be somewhere nearby, though I didn’t really know how to recognize it. Most likely, the bad man had died or moved away in the last thirty-five years, but maybe he’d left some sort of sign here on the flipside.

A small form shot from beneath a car right in front of us, streaking across the road. I jumped back, letting out a shriek.

But it was only a cat, a long and lean tabby that came to a skidding halt on the far sidewalk, staring straight at us. Its eyes glowed unearthly green against the gray background of the flipside.

“What the hell? Is it
looking
at us?”

“Cats see everything,” Yamaraj said. His voice was soft, almost reverent. “Their eyes are in both worlds.”

“Right. Mindy said something about that.” My heart was pounding in my chest, and I realized that the gray world wasn’t fading around me. “That scare didn’t send me back. My grip on the flipside must be getting better.”

Yamaraj shook his head. “You can’t cross back to the real world here, only where you started. The river is carrying only your spirit, not your body.”

“So this is like astral projection?” I pinched the flesh of my own arm, which was goose-pimpled and cold, and felt totally real.

“Only for now,” Yamaraj said. “One day you’ll be able to travel in body as well.”

“So if my body isn’t here, where is it? Back in my bedroom, where my mother’s going to find it and freak out?”

“Don’t worry.” He paused, thoughtful for a moment. “This may sound strange, but it’s in the ground beneath your house. Safe among the stones.”

“Nothing creepy about that.”

“The afterworld isn’t comforting, Lizzie.”

“You said that already. But still . . . this is pretty amazing.” I stood and caught my breath, taking in the hilly landscape around us, so different from the flatness of San Diego. “I didn’t even know the address, and we came straight here.”

“Not bad for your first time.”

“Thanks.” Motion flickered at the corner of my eye, and I spun to face it. But it was only the tabby, following us from a distance.

Yamaraj was looking closely at me. “You’re funny, Lizzie. In the airport, you were composed enough to play dead. And just now you were facing down that old man without any help from me. But this neighborhood has you jumping at shadows.”

“I guess so.” I didn’t want to lie to Yamaraj, so I went for vague instead. “Like I said, something happened here when my mom was little.”

“Something bad?”

I nodded. “Bad enough that she never talked about it. She only told me after what happened in Dallas.”

“Nothing bad will happen now,” he said, taking my hand again.

We walked in silence, taking in the moonlit empty streets. It was nice simply being with him, and basking in the fact that I had brought us here with my mystic powers. I didn’t see any sign of the bad man, which was fine with me.

Yamaraj was too polite to ask any more about my mother, but after a while he said, “Every psychopomp has a story like that.”

“Like what?”

“One that’s hard to tell. We all cross over the hard way, the first time.”

“So what’s your story?” I asked softly. “How did you wind up playing dead?”

He shook his head. “There were no wars where I was born, no terrorists. My sister and I come from a small village. A quiet place.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It was beautiful, but to me and my sister it mostly seemed small. When we saw sails on the horizon, we’d rush down to the docks for glimpses from other places. The sailors were like people from another world. They wore cloth dyed in colors we’d never seen before, and used bronze knives that our village coppersmith couldn’t dream of making.”

“Bronze knives were high tech,” I said. “Okay, so this was a while ago.”

He shrugged. “It was, and our village was backward even then, I suppose. When the sailors showed us pressed flowers from other lands, and claimed they were warriors slain in a great fairy war, my sister and I believed them.”

“That’s sweet.”

“They knew other languages too, and my sister would trade
them her prettiest seashells for foreign words. She had a fine collection of curses.”

I felt a smile on my face. “Sounds like my Spanish.”

He smiled back at me, but the expression faded. “It was a good place to grow up. But people didn’t live long back then. My sister died younger than most.”

“Yeah, she only looked about fourteen. Wait, were you . . . ?”

He nodded. “Twins. We still are, even if I’m a little older now.”

“Right. Weird.” Yami was stuck forever at the age she’d died, but her brother wasn’t. “Is that why you stay in the underworld? So you don’t leave her behind?”

“I live there to keep my people from fading away.”

“And she’s one of them. You’re a good brother.”

He didn’t answer, and we walked a little farther. I’d always wondered what it would be like to have a brother or sister, especially a twin. I’d imagined making up our own language, and giving each other secret names.

Of course, I’d had an invisible sister all that time. Mindy had been there every day, watching me grow into an eleven-year-old, then aging past her. A shiver went through me.

“Are you okay?” Yamaraj asked. His eyes glinted brown against the gray world. He and I were still in color, as if we didn’t belong behind this veil of death.

“I’m fine. So when your sister died, is that when you became . . . like us?”

He nodded. “I couldn’t let her go alone.”

“Whoa. So that whole twin-bonding thing is real.”

Yamaraj thought for a moment, then shrugged. “It is for us.”

“How did she die?” I asked, my voice small.

“She was betrayed by an ass.”

“Um, pardon me?”

“A donkey,” he said. “A beast that belonged to my family.”

I was still confused, but my next question froze in my mouth. Past Yamaraj and down the street, the cat lurked in the shadows, green eyes glimmering.

But it wasn’t watching us anymore.

It was staring at another bungalow, even older than the one my mother had grown up in. The house was set back from the road, with gnarled desert trees in the front yard. Around each was a planter box full of stones.

Standing on the lawn were five little girls, all Mindy’s age, dressed in outfits that all looked out of date—plaid jumpers, shirts tucked into jeans, short dresses. They were all staring at the house.

“He’s still here,” I murmured.

Yamaraj turned to follow my gaze. “Who is, Lizzie?”

“The bad man. The man who killed Mindy.”

He took my arm. “
This
is why you wanted to come here?”

“She needs to know.”

“Be careful,” Yamaraj whispered. “There are some ghosts you can’t save.”

“I don’t want to save them, I just want to help Mindy. She’s afraid all the time, even after all these years.” I couldn’t take my eyes from the
collection
of little girls. They just stood there staring at the house, silent and fidgeting, as if waiting for a performance to start.
“She needs to know if the man who killed her is still alive. Or if he’s wandering the flipside, looking for her.”

“Come away from here, Lizzie.” Yamaraj pulled at my arm, but I shook him off.

“I have to make sure he’s still alive.”

“You don’t want to go any closer to that house,” he said.

As I opened my mouth to ask why, one of the little girls moved. Her head turned slowly, the rest of her body utterly still, until her gray eyes rested on us. She was a little younger than Mindy, wearing overalls and sneakers. Her gaze lingered, her expression blank except for the barest hint of puzzlement.

Yamaraj turned to face me. “Don’t look at them.”

“But they’re just . . .” My words faded as the other girls, all in one motion, turned their heads to stare at us. Their five little gray faces regarded me with growing interest. “Okay, maybe this is kind of weird.”

Yamaraj was already kneeling, his palm on the asphalt. He stood up as the bubbling oil began to expand beneath our feet, and put his arms around me, his muscles tense and hard.

“You don’t want them in your memories,” he whispered as we began to sink into the street. “Just think of home.”

*  *  *

Our second journey in the river seemed faster, as trips home often do. It was easy to hold an image of my own house in my mind, because I wanted to be there so badly. But it was harder this time to ignore the wet, shivery things that brushed against us. Some part of me had realized what they were—loose memories, fragments of ghosts who had faded away.

I kept my eyes shut the whole way, head pressed against Yamaraj’s chest, his warmth and solidity protection against the blank stares of the gray-faced little girls.

We came to a halt on another windy expanse under a blank sky, but somehow I could feel home just overhead. Or maybe it was beneath us—the afterworld had confused me on the concepts of up and down.

But before I returned to my bedroom, Yamaraj took me by the shoulders.

“You give this up, Lizzie. Don’t go there again.”

“I have to help Mindy. It’s what I would do for a living person.”

“But those ghosts are in your head now.”

“That’s for sure.” I shuddered, seeing their gray faces. “But why is that such a bad thing, besides the potential for nightmares?”

“Ghosts go where they can for nourishment. Think about it. Mindy died in that house, didn’t she? Hundreds of miles from here, but she lives with you now.”

“Right. Because my mother remembers her.”

“More than anyone else in the world. More than her own parents.”

“That’s kind of sad. And weird.”

He shook his head. “It’s not as strange as you’d think. Sometimes when children go missing, their parents can only stand to hold on to their memories for so long. When they let go, those children fade, unless someone else keeps them in mind.”

My mouth was dry. “But that means those little girls are there . . . because the bad man remembers them better than anyone else?”

“Their last days, perfectly. But what if they had
you
to nourish them instead?”

I imagined the five little girls on my front lawn, waiting and wanting, and a shudder went through me. I could still see the face of the first one who’d turned to look at me—her worn overalls and the half-dozen sparkly barrettes in her short hair.

“How am I supposed to forget what I just saw?”

“You can’t, Lizzie.” His hands fell from my shoulders, and he sighed. “It was only a glance, not enough to bring them here.”

“So you’re just trying to scare me?”

“You
should
be scared.” He was angry now, his brown eyes locked on mine. “Promise me you’ll never go near that house again.”

I turned away. I’d had enough of being afraid, and Mindy had been trapped with her fear for decades. I couldn’t just leave her in limbo, now that I knew where the bad man lived.