Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (3 page)

He nodded, unconcerned; it was old news to him. “My school came here. I fell. My neck, it broke.”

Maybe his clothes came across so 1970s because that was when he died. “Do you think you were pushed? Did someone murder you?”

“What? No. Not possible.” Giovanni seemed utterly sure about this. “Rain was falling. The steps were wet all over. My feet went”—he made a hand motion that resembled the Nike swoosh.

“He says he wasn’t murdered,” I whispered to Cairo, who shrugged. The only other sounds were the increasingly distant patter of the tour guide and the shuffling feet of French tourists walking away. I turned back to Giovanni. “Then why are you still here? I always thought . . . if spirits stuck around on earth, it was because they had some kind of unfinished business here.” But what did I know? It had been only stupid TV shows and horror movies to me until a few hours earlier.

Yet Giovanni nodded. “One thing I never did on earth. One thing I always wanted to do.”

Maybe he needed me to find his mother and tell her he loved her. Maybe I had to search for some long-lost friend. Or get revenge. Was I willing to get revenge for Giovanni for something that happened decades before I’d been born? Carefully, I said, “What’s that?”

Bashfully, Giovanni said, “Never I kiss a beautiful girl. Never any girl, actually.”

For a long moment, I thought I must have gone crazy after all. He couldn’t have said that, could he? “You’ve hung around on earth for thirty years or so because you didn’t want to go to heaven without kissing a girl?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Cairo whispered. I elbowed him sharply in the side; mockery wasn’t going to help us.

Giovanni said, “I want this very badly. Please—maybe you would—maybe? You are most beautiful girl.”

I didn’t especially want my first kiss to be from a dead guy. If this was a sign of how my love life would go from then on, my already low expectations were going to have to drop even lower.

And yet . . . it was such a simple request. He wanted it so badly. He thought I was beautiful. He was so gorgeous; if I hadn’t realized he was dead, I would have kissed him for certain. And Giovanni would always be the first guy who had ever flirted with me.

The tour group had moved significantly ahead of us now, but we could still hear them—still catch up if we had to, without getting lost down here. I told Cairo, “Can you give us a second?”

“For what? So you can kiss him?” To my surprise, Cairo— who’d been so unflappable through all of this—looked disgusted. “You don’t know what that will do. He might, I don’t know . . . suck your soul out.”

“I don’t think it works that way.” How it worked, I wasn’t sure, but I felt convinced that Giovanni wasn’t trying to hurt me. “Remember how you know that Michael’s always interested in Audrey’s feet? That’s how I know Giovanni isn’t trying to hurt me.”

Cairo considered this. “You can read his mind?”

Giovanni said, “Tell him I will not hurt your soul.”

“It’s not mind reading. It’s just . . . if he were lying, I’d know. I feel sure of that.” And I did.

The French-speaking guide had taken our group almost out of earshot. With a sigh, Cairo said, “Okay, I’m going ahead. Catch up when you can. And if anything weird happens . . . scream even louder than you did last time.”

“All right.” We tangled pinky fingers for just a moment, a quick sign of solidarity we hadn’t shared since we were eight years old. Then Cairo walked off without a backward look. I knew it was his way of saying he trusted my judgment. The question was, did I trust my own?

I turned back to Giovanni, who still stood there, hopeful and sweet. He was so beautiful—big, dark eyes, long eyelashes, dimpled chin—that only one question came to mind: “How is it that you never kissed a girl?”

It turned out to be possible to blush after death. Giovanni flushed so that the catacomb around us seemed to turn a soft shade of pink. “Did not always look like this.”

“What do you mean?” I shouldered my cloth bag and tried to stay focused. I hadn’t brought my shawl this time, and I shivered slightly in the underground chill. “Did you . . . change or something? After you died?”

“After death, we look like we are meant to look. Not always in life.”

I began to understand. This wish of his wasn’t only about kissing a girl; this was about making up for the life he lost—not after he died, but before. “Show me.”

Giovanni didn’t want to, I could tell, but he obeyed. His beautiful face seemed to melt, the skin along the left side of his jaw crinkling and turning a vivid, meaty red. A burn scar, I realized. Giovanni’s fall on the catacomb steps wasn’t the first terrible accident he’d been in.

It wasn’t so horrible, really—just a line along one side of his face—but I could imagine what most girls would’ve said about it. What Audrey would have said. If Giovanni had lived to be a little older, he might have met a girl mature enough to look past his scar and see the gentle, beautiful guy beneath. But he didn’t make it.

“You see me now,” he said, ashamed.

“I see you now.” I stepped closer to Giovanni and put one hand to his face. I couldn’t actually touch him—or so it seemed to me—but when my fingers appeared to brush his face, his lips parted slightly as though he could feel it. “I see all of you.”

I lifted my face to his and closed my eyes. I felt his kiss not as a touch, but as a glow—warmth spreading through me, making me aware of my blood and my pulse, of everything that separated the living and the dead. For one moment, I knew more than ever before what it meant to be alive.

The kiss’s end was like the snuffing of a candle—a little less light and heat in the world.

When I opened my eyes, Giovanni was beaming at me, his face whole and perfect once more, and slightly transparent now. “Thank you,” he said.

“Is that enough?” I still couldn’t believe that he wanted nothing more than one kiss.

Giovanni shook his head as he faded even further. “Nothing is enough. Nothing makes up for it. But . . . is something. Something beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” I said, and he must have known that I meant it, because the last of him I could see was his smile.

I caught up to the French tour group, and Cairo and I managed to get a taxi to the hotel more than an hour before the others were due back from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. We ordered a couple of coffees from the café downstairs and drank them in his hotel room, which had a view of the street below—crowded with little cars and motor scooters, both more tourists and just Roman people trying to get on with their day.

“We have to tell Mom and Dad about this, don’t we?” I said.

Cairo sipped his cappuccino. “I think they already know.”

“How could they know?”

“Ever since this started happening to me—I know we tried to hide it from Mom and Dad, but I always suspected they knew. Almost like they were waiting to see what would happen, you know? To see what I’d make of it.”

“How would they guess you were hearing people’s thoughts?”

He gave me a look. “They got married three weeks after they met, Ravenna. I always wondered about that, and now I believe we see the reason. You don’t think they recognized something special in each other? Something unique? Just consider it. Everything they’ve discovered—stuff they found where nobody else even knew to look—and the way Dad’s books all seem to be written like he was really there?”

Cairo was making some wild leaps—but I wasn’t sure he was wrong about our parents. If they possessed these powers, did that mean Cairo and I had inherited them?

My mind was full of so many things, too many for me to discuss them with my brother before our friends returned and we were once again surrounded by other voices, other thoughts. So I said the most important thing first: “I shouldn’t have turned on you like that last night, Cairo. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks for saying that. But I mean it, Ravenna. I get why you didn’t believe me. Why you were angry. You thought I was leaving you, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“No such luck.” My brother grinned at me over the rim of his paper coffee cup. “No matter how weird it gets from now on . . . we’re in it together.”

Scenic Route
by Carrie Ryan

here should we go next?” Margie sets the large atlas on the table, smoothing her hand over the worn cover. Her younger sister, Sally, shifts to her knees on the bench to get a better view.

“Mississippi?” Sally asks, tucking dirty-blond hair behind her ears.

Margie shrugs and fiddles with pages, swollen after getting wet in the rain. “Too hot right now. Besides, we’ll be coming from the west here, under Canada. That’s where we left off planning yesterday.”

“Page fifty-seven, then,” Sally says, leaning her elbows on the table.

Margie rolls her eyes as she flips through, letting the atlas open almost on its own volition. “You know, I really don’t get your fascination with West Virginia.”

“It looks pretty,” Sally says, tracing her small fingers around the counties.

Neither girl has been there. Neither knows anything about it other than the contours on the map and the teaser entries from the guidebooks stacked along the front wall under the window.

Margie pulls the light closer and checks over her shoulder outside. It’s full dusk, the summer days stretching late and dying slow. Greasy smoke chokes up from the lantern—almost all their oil is dirty, and dark patches stain the ceiling over the kitchen table from their evenings cramped over the atlas.

“So maybe we come in on the interstate here,” Sally says, “but I think it would be more fun if we did the smaller roads after that. More scenic and probably less crowded.”

Margie pushes a notebook across the table, sifting through the pages until she finds where they’d left off the night before. “You start writing it all down, Sal. I’m just going to check outside real quick.”

Sally looks up at her sister then. It’s almost silent in the cabin, just the sputter of the flame and the two girls breathing. “Why?”

“One last sweep before bed.” Margie tries to keep her voice from fluttering.

“You already did the last sweep,” Sally points out. A sliver of hair hangs limp and heavy across the side of her face, throwing her eyes into shadow.

Margie doesn’t want to tell her that something outside keeps making her look up. It’s the feeling on the back of her neck, like the tension before a thunderstorm—that quality of light spreading a sense of dread somewhere in your body left over from before humanity knew such things as language and science.

“Here.” Margie squats by the small stack of books against the wall and flips through for the right one. “You figure out where you want to stop for dinner and if there’s any sightseeing you want to do. Plan it all out, and I’ll be right back.” Margie sets the
Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia
on the table and picks up the shotgun before stepping outside.

When she looks back, her little sister still kneels on the bench by the table. Her finger’s stuck on that map, pointing at something too far away, which probably doesn’t exist anymore anyway.

Margie never mentions to Sally that sometimes she just has to get away from the tightness of it all. In the beginning, just after the change time, she’d hated the outside, hated to leave the comfort of four walls and a roof, but now it makes her feel trapped. She’s always judging the escape routes, figuring distance and the time it would take to cover it.

Their newest cabin sits on top of a mountain that’s steep enough to keep the monsters away. There’s a deep well, a gun cabinet stashed with crates of ammunition, a cistern of fuel oil, and a pantry brimming with canned food—enough to make Margie think that perhaps they have a shot at surviving all of this so long as it’s just the two of them. They’ve lived here for most of the summer, so that now the fear’s just a low humming noise in the background, like the sound of bees around a blackberry patch.

The first thing she did after Sally and she moved in, other than tossing the bodies over the cliff, was cut down all the rhododendron and laurel. She piled it in a circle partway down the mountain and in the gaps she strung old cans and bottles on twine to rattle if anyone—living or dead—came near.

That’s why it doesn’t make sense that something could be moving around outside. That’s why she’s jittery and pre-lightning-strike aware. If someone’s on their mountain, it’s not one of the monsters, and too often it’s the living that end up being worse than the dead. She’s seen it before when the bandits have come claiming supplies and people and shelter as their own. There’s not enough safety in this new world, and too many people are willing to take what little they can find at any cost.

“I know you’re out there,” she calls, her fingers curled around the gun, holding it tight to her shoulder. She’s lying—she doesn’t know that anyone’s really out there at all. She figures that if it’s somehow a monster, he’s already smelled her, so shouting won’t give her away, and if it isn’t a monster then she may as well have been shouting at the stars.

No one answers, which doesn’t surprise her.

“I’ve got the place trapped,” she calls out again. “You try coming inside and you might as well go blow your own head off.”

Another lie—but nothing whoever or whatever is out there needs to know.

“Find anything?” Sally asks when Margie gets back inside.

“Skunk,” Margie mutters. “Don’t go out there stumbling around until I find him,” Margie warns. “We don’t need to smell things up again.”

Sally crinkles her nose. Dirt mingles indistinguishably with freckles along the bridge. She yawns, long and loud.

“Bedtime,” Margie says, pushing Sally toward the rope ladder up to the loft.

Once they’re both curled up on the wide bed with just a sheet pulled over them, Margie says, “Tell me about this trip we’re taking through West Virginia.”

“There’s this place there called the Paw Paw Tunnel—it took them more than a decade to dig,” Sally starts to tell her. “First we’ll have to stop by the town and eat at this place on a hill called Panorama at the Peak. It’ll be a long walk from there to the tunnel, but the travel book says it’s a must if you’re visiting the area.”

Margie closes her eyes. Her little sister smells like sweat and unwashed hair, but it’s a sweet smell, familiar and steadying. Margie tries to sleep—she wants to sleep—but instead she just counts heartbeats. Outside it begins to rain, thunder tripping through the valleys around them. Sally’s breathing falls into a steady rhythm, and in between lightning strikes all Margie can think about is someone being outside. Right now. Watching their little cabin.

She sneaks back down the ladder and crouches by the window, looking out at the clearing surrounding the house. Rain courses from the sky—a curtain of water blocking the outside world.

The storm rolls closer, lightning and thunder wrapping around each other and pummeling the mountain. In the bare seconds of light, Margie scours the clearing around the cabin, terrified of seeing something out there that doesn’t belong.

Eventually, when her legs fall numb, she moves to the table, where the flashes of lightning illuminate the atlas and tattered notebook. The change time came when Sally was in third grade and Margie in tenth. Her sister’s handwriting is stiff and careful, the letters showing the unsteadiness of her little hand as if she’s still stuck in the before time that happened years ago.

Margie flips through the book: page after page of adventures and plans. Details of a path across the entire continent, as far as their maps can take them. It’s to be the grandest road trip ever, according to Sally.

Margie wonders when Sally will figure it all out. Figure out the truth of their life.

Because it’s the end of summer, another big thunderstorm rolls into the valley the next afternoon. The sky glows a sickening green, and nothing feels right to Margie. Heat settles thick and humid, the wind holding its breath before the storm pushes in hard. Sally seems oblivious, sorting through the guidebooks, flipping through the pages with an almost manic intensity.

“Whatcha looking for?” Margie asks. She crouches next to her sister but keeps glancing out the window. The air’s so saturated it’s hard to see much farther than the porch.

“West Virginia.” Her voice comes out almost breathless, that kind of sound you get on the edge of panic. “I can’t find West Virginia. We haven’t finished the route through, and I need to find someplace where we can stay the second night or we’ll be trapped outside.”

She looks up at her older sister with eyes wide and wet. “We can’t be outside, Margie,” she whispers harshly. “We have to be inside where it’s safe, and I can’t find the book of inns and hotels.”

“It’s okay.” Margie lays a hand on her sister’s shoulder, but she shrugs it away. “We had it last night. It’s here.”

“It’s not here!” Sally cries, shaking her head. “It’s not here,” she says again.

“We’ll keep looking,” Margie reassures her. Beyond the window the storm finally hits, wind hissing and rain bending trees to the ground.

Margie convinces Sally to skip West Virginia for now and figure out where they should stop in Maryland. “I’ve always heard they have great crab cakes there,” Margie says. She finds the Maryland guidebook and sets it on the table.

The picture on the cover shows a faded blue bay and white sails, with a red crab bursting from the text. It makes Margie ache for something she’s tried to give up. It makes her feel lonely in a way she hasn’t before—an intense desire to share something as simple as a chair by the water with someone who understands.

Sally keeps her head bowed low over the map, stringy tips of her hair brushing the crinkled pages. “After that we’ll go to Maine. It’ll be safer up north in the winter,” she says without looking up. “They don’t move as much in the cold.”

Margie presses her lips together tight. She remembers planning vacations that didn’t revolve around monsters. When snow meant sledding and snowmobiles and fun. The aching part inside her wells deep, spreading fast and hard through her—pounding in her blood.

“Right,” she finally says. “That’s right.”

She leaves Sally sitting at the table and steps out onto the porch, where the rain beats against the ground as if to punish it. In two steps Margie’s deluged, letting the heavy drops sting her skin and mix with her tears. She feels helpless under this weight of water. The world’s too big for her to survive in, much less for her to keep another being safe.

She knows a day will come when it’s too much. When she’ll trip up and miss a sign or signal, and that will be the end of that. She feels like a windup clock—and now she’s winding down and doesn’t know what to do next, how to twist herself back up again to keep on going.

The storm shifts and the wind howls like the dead. They’re out there, she knows, climbing the mountain, pushing at the circle of laurel, tripping over strings of tins cans that beat and rattle in the storm.

Eventually this tiny fortress will no longer keep them safe. She’ll have to tell Sally to plan the next trip, and they’ll move on, and the clock will keep ticking until the gears wind down to nothing.

Margie climbs back onto the porch, every bit of her body soaked and cold with rain. Just as she reaches for the door, the glint of light off water makes her pause.

There’s a puddle at the end of the porch with two ovals of mud dissolving in the middle, the edges blurring and washing away. A strip of damp leads up the wall, as if someone in dirty shoes recently stood there, leaning against the cabin.

Margie’s throat closes. Her body jerks rigid. Behind her the storm menaces—howling and beating and breaking. It’s as if the entire world’s turning inside out, the cacophony of the mountain splitting apart.

She turns around. The sky’s dark, everything that color of deep dusk, when shapes bleed into each other and your eyes play tricks. Movement hums around her but always out of sight. Her teeth chatter as she forces air into her lungs, willing everything to just shut up a moment so she can figure out what’s going on.

She waits for someone to burst out of the rain. To throw her against the wall and attack her in the way of men or monsters or both. A thin thread of light from inside cuts across the porch, dissolving into the storm. Through it she watches individual drops of rain plummet and splatter, running together over and around the cabin.