DoubleDown V (25 page)

“What?”

“Being dead.”

Bobby blanched.

“Come on,” Karen said, “now that the cat’s out of the bag, we may as well talk about it.”

She sensed resistance from Bobby, but in the end he relented. “Well, it’s weird, but like anything else, I guess you get used to it. I mean, I know I’m not alive, but I still feel like
me
, you know? I mean, all the thoughts and feelings that make me Bobby Jersey are still here, even though physically I don’t exist. I know none of
this
is real.” Here he paused and held out his arms. “I don’t have a body anymore; this is just a manifestation with no real substance. In fact, I can only see myself when I’m being seen by someone else, like you or my mother. Otherwise, I’m basically just consciousness floating around.”

“Can you go anywhere you want? Like think about Paris, and you’re there?”

A smile broke across Bobby’s face. “Afraid not. I seem to be linked to my mother. Must be a familial thing, a blood bond or something. I can’t be too far away from her.”

“Have you tried?”

“Oh yes, believe me I’ve tried. But if I go too far, it’s like I get pulled back, as if I’m on a tether or something.”

“Do you ever get the sense...I mean, is there anything in your experience to indicate there’s something more than this, something beyond this reality?”

“You mean like a tunnel and a bright light?”

“Guess that sounds silly,” she said with a laugh.

“No, and believe me, I’ve looked for that tunnel, that light. Especially in the first few years. Being disconnected this way, here but not here, it gets exhausting.”

Silence slipped back into the room, hung out with them for a few more minutes, then made another quick departure.

“Do you remember anything from the coma?” Karen asked.

Bobby frowned. “What do you mean? I told you, I died instantly when the car hit me.”

“Not according to one of the articles I found online.”

“What article?”

Karen turned to the laptop and pulled up the page from her browsing history. Bobby stood behind her and read over her shoulder. The article seemed to disturb him.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you this,” she said, closing her laptop.

“No, it’s just...I mean, I always assumed.... So, the other side of the room looks pretty bare.”

She followed Bobby’s gaze to what had been Brittany’s side of the room. It was indeed quite bare; even the bed had been stripped.

“Brittany’s still in the hospital. She’s lucky, all things considered. A broken arm, a few cracked ribs, a concussion, but it could have been much worse. But she’s not coming back to the room. She had her friend Summer come and gather her stuff. I guess they’ll be rooming for the rest of the semester.”

“She’s not saying you did it, is she?”

“No, she told the police that when the shelves collapsed, she’d been looking right at me and I wasn’t touching the crank.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, but...I get the feeling she suspects
something
. Enough that she doesn’t want to be in the same room with me anymore.”

“Don’t beat yourself too much. I mean, I know you and you’re not a bad person. I know you would never intentionally hurt anyone. You just need to learn how to control your power.”

“I agree. So I guess we should go see your mother.”

*  *  *

They sat in the circle behind the house, Karen and Penelope facing one another over the altar. Bobby stood outside the circle, as if afraid to enter. Or perhaps he couldn’t. Karen didn’t exactly know the rules. But she was here to learn.

Penelope offered a slight smile. “Welcome back to the circle, Still Waters.”

“So what, are we a coven now? Can you call it a coven if there are only two people?”

“How about we just call ourselves friends?”

Karen pondered this one for a moment before saying, “I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten how you lied to me, and I can’t even say I’ve fully forgiven you for it. But...the truth is, I do understand
why
you did it. Wanting your son back, wanting to give him another shot at life...I can’t see it as the horrible thing the coven makes it out to be. You wanted me to get to know Bobby and care about him, and you succeeded in that. I want to help him; I want to help you both.”

“Karen, this is a good thing, sincerely.”

“I want to make it very clear, though, that whatever trust I had in you has been eroded, and you’re going to have to work to rebuild that. I don’t want any more lies or I’ll walk away. I mean it.”

Penelope nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

“I guess you know I talked with the coven.”

“I figured you would.”

“I had to be sure that what you’re planning to do—what
we’re
planning to do—wasn’t going to harm anyone. They said that if it was someone who had recently died, you could install Bobby’s soul in that body.”

“That’s correct. It sounds simple, but it requires so much power.”

“And you think I have enough?”

“With some to spare.”

“But...the thing is, the coven said the body would have to be very fresh, fresh enough that the brain would not have suffered much deterioration.”

Penelope nodded with a knowing smile. “Are you asking if I’m planning to kill someone to get the body?”

Karen opened her mouth to refute the claim but closed it again. “I am just trying to figure out how you could find a body that fresh. Are you just going to hang out in the ER waiting room and hope someone drops dead right next to you?”

“I am still trying to work all that out, but the truth is we have time. It’s not like we can do the spell tomorrow. It takes preparation and must be performed on the Spring Equinox. That gives us the time we’ll need to explore your power, to develop it, so that we’ll both be ready.”

Karen sat in silence for a moment then took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m in. But this is a
quid pro quo
. You have to teach me not only to develop my power but how to control it. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

“Deal.”

Standing, Karen awkwardly held out her hand, and the librarian shook it. “I need to get back to campus. If I don’t start seriously focusing on my schoolwork, I’m going to get kicked out.”

As Karen walked out of the circle, she paused by Bobby, said good-bye to him, then disappeared around the corner of the house.

Penelope and Bobby stood quietly until they heard her car pull off down the street. Then Bobby said, “We shouldn’t lie to her anymore.”

“It wasn’t a lie so much as an omission. I’ll tell her when I think she’s ready to hear it.”

“She’s not stupid, Mother. I mean, you’ve been trying to find someone to help you with this spell for years, but you haven’t figured out how you’re going to get a body? She’s going to realize that doesn’t make sense and start asking more questions. If she finds out we’re still keeping things from her—”

Penelope turned on Bobby with blazing eyes, instantly silencing him. “Just calm down. I will tell her...eventually. When the time is right, I’ll take her to meet Pete.”

Karen walked along the breezeway that ran the length of the John E. Furman building. The brisk January wind blew leaves along the path in front of her, and she pulled her coat tighter, her backpack hanging heavily on her shoulder. The sky was a solid blanket of gray. They were calling for sleet later in the evening, but so far there was nothing but this frigid wind.

The sound of footsteps made her glance up. When she saw who was approaching from the other direction, she almost thought about stepping out of the breezeway and crossing the quad. But she’d already made eye contact so she continued, plastered a smile on her face, and said, “Hi, Brittany.”

Brittany looked like she was considering bolting herself, but she fabricated an equally unconvincing smile. “Hey, there. Long time, no see. Sorry we didn’t get to hang over Christmas break.”

Karen and Brittany had traveled to West Virginia separately and had not spoken nor seen one another during the holiday. But they hadn’t spoken or seen one another much at all since Brittany had gotten out of the hospital and moved in with Summer.

“Oh, and happy belated birthday. I meant to get you a card last week, but the beginning of the semester is so hectic, you know.”

“Sure,” Karen said. “So how’ve you been?”

Instinctively, Brittany held her left arm, the one that had been broken in the accident, against her chest. “I’m okay. Been Skyping with Derek a lot. I hope to go see him over Spring break.”

Derek was currently in a rehabilitation facility in his home state of Pennsylvania, learning to adjust to life as a paraplegic. As far as Karen knew, he was still claiming amnesia regarding the night his spine had been broken in the cemetery. Karen wasn’t sure if he was pretending or if he honestly didn’t remember. Either way, she was glad she didn’t have to see him.

“Well, I should get back to my room,” Karen said. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do, and I don’t want to get behind like I did last semester.”

Brittany looked relieved that the conversation was ending. “Good seeing you.”

With another exchange of tight smiles, the girls went their separate ways. As Karen approached the end of the building, she saw Bobby standing just beyond the breezeway. She did not pause or look directly at him, but he fell in step beside her as she passed.

“That must have been rough, running into Brittany like that,” he said. “I know you still feel guilty over what happened, but remember, you weren’t in control then. You’re doing much better now.”

Karen tiltled her head and reached up to rub her neck, momentarily making eye contact with Bobby and giving a minute nod. Over the past several months, she’d become quite adept at communicating with him in public without drawing unwanted attention and making everyone around her suspect she was schizophrenic.

“I know you have a lot of schoolwork to do, and I hate to bother you, but my mother sent me. She said she needs to talk to you.”

 Karen sighed, pointedly shifting the backpack and raising her eyebrows, conveying the message,
Can it wait?

“All I know is that it has something to do with the coven. She says it’s urgent.”

The coven. Karen hadn’t heard anything from them since she’d left the studio apartment last semester, but she guessed it was unlikely that they would just give up. Especially now that the equinox was approaching.

Karen headed toward student parking.

*   *   *

Bobby sat in the passenger’s seat on the ride over. Of course, Karen mused, he wasn’t really sitting at all. He had no body, no form—the physical presence she saw was a mental construct. But still he was there, in whatever form, and she found his presence comforting. Truth was, he had become her best friend. And the truth beyond that, which she didn’t even want to admit to herself most of the time, was that she was in love with him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Bobby looked at her and nodded.

“Do you see other ghosts? I mean, is there like a whole community of the undead that the living are unaware of?”

Bobby laughed. “Community of the undead? That’s a good one. But the answer is no, I’ve never seen a ghost in all the years since...well, since I’ve been in this condition.”

“Hmm, but there must be other ghosts out there. Stands to reason.”

“I’d imagine so, but apparently we are not able to see each other. Like I said, typically I can’t even see myself.”

“Must be lonely,” Karen said with a commiserating smile.

“It can be. I keep thinking there must be something beyond this.”

“You mean like heaven?”

“Maybe not angels on clouds and streets of gold, but some other plane of existence, another dimension. Or even oblivion, for that matter. There have definitely been times when I felt that would be preferable to this in-between state.”

“Well, in only a few short months, you won’t be stuck in-between anymore.”

“You sound pretty confident.”

“I’ve really learned a lot from Penelope these past few months, and I feel my power growing every day. There’s still the problem of finding an appropriate body, but this is going to work. I just know it.”

Bobby nodded but said nothing, turning his eyes back out the windshield. They continued the rest of the way in silence.

*   *   *

They had hot herbal tea in the messy living room. Penelope usually preferred to talk out back, in the circle, but the sleet had started just before Karen had pulled up in front of the house. Karen was eager to get this over with and get back to campus. The weather reports weren’t calling for much accumulation, but she wasn’t comfortable driving on ice.

“So what are our wacky pals in the coven up to now?”

“They’ve apparently done a binding spell,” Penelope said, her expression pinched.

Karen paused with the mug halfway to her lips, then set it on the coffee table. “What? Can they do that?”

“A binding spell can’t completely strip someone of his or her powers, but it can limit powers. And my powers are definitely diminished, have been for the past day and a half, and I know the coven is behind this. I suspect they have attempted to bind yours as well.”