The Summoning (15 page)

A deep breath. Then I slipped out of bed and walked to the door.

The hall was empty. I could hear only the
tick-tick-tick
of the grandfather clock downstairs. As I turned, a pale shape flickered near a closed door down the hall. A closet, I’d presumed earlier. What was it with ghosts and closets in this house?

I crept down the hall and eased the door open. Dark stairs led up.

The attic.

Uh-uh, this was as bad as a basement, maybe even worse. I wasn’t following some ghost up there.

Good excuse
.

It’s not an—

You don’t want to talk to them. Not really. You don’t want to know the truth
.

Great. Not only did I have to deal with Derek’s taunts and jibes but now even my inner voice was starting to sound like him.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

I SLID MY HAND ALONG the wall, searching for a light switch, then stopped. Was that a good idea? With my luck, Tori would head to the bathroom, see the attic light on, and investigate … only to find me up there talking to myself.

I left the light off.

One hand on the railing, the other gliding along the opposite wall, I climbed the stairs, ascending into blackness.

My hand slipped off the end of the railing, and I pitched forward. I’d reached the top. A trickle of moonlight came from the tiny attic window, but even after I paused to let my eyes adjust, I could only make out vague shapes.

I walked with my hands out, feeling my way. I smacked into something, and it sent up a cloud of dust. My hands flew over my nose to stifle a sneeze.

“Girl…”

I stiffened. It was the ghost from the basement, the one who kept insisting I open the locked door. I took a deep breath. Whoever he was, he couldn’t hurt me. Even that janitor, as hard as he tried, couldn’t do anything more than scare me.

I had the power here. I was the necromancer.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“…contact … get through…”

“I can’t understand you.”

“…blocked…”

Something was blocking him from making contact? Leftover meds in my system?

“…basement … try…”

“Try that door again? Forget it. No more basements. No more attics. If you want to talk to me, do it on the main level. Got it?”

“…can’t … block…”

“Yes, you’re blocked. I think it’s something I was taking, but it should be better tomorrow. Talk to me in my room. When I’m alone. Okay?”

Silence. I repeated it, but he didn’t answer. I stood there, shivering, for at least five minutes before trying one last time. When he didn’t respond, I turned toward the stairs.

“Chloe?”

I wheeled so fast I knocked into something at knee level, my bare legs scraping against wood, hands hitting the top with a thud, enveloping me in a cloud of dust. I sneezed.

“Bless you.” A giggle. “Do you know why we say that?”

Blood pounded in my ears as I recognized the voice. I could make out Liz, a few feet away, dressed in her Minnie Mouse nightshirt.

“It’s because when we sneeze, our soul flies out our nose and if no one says ‘bless you,’ the devil can snatch it.” Another giggle. “Or so my nana always said. Funny, huh?”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t force words out.

She looked around, nose wrinkling. “Is this the attic? What are we doing up here?”

“I—I—I—I—”

“Take a deep breath. That always helps my brother.” Another look around. “How did we get up here? Oh, right. The séance. We were going to do a séance.”

“Séance?” I hesitated. “Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?” She frowned. “Are you okay, Chloe?”

No, I was pretty sure I wasn’t. “You … never mind. I—I was just talking to a man. Can you see him? Is he here?”

“Um, no. It’s just us.” Her eyes went round. “Are you seeing ghosts?”

“Gh-ghosts?”

“Chloe?”

This voice was sharp and I spun to see Mrs. Talbot feeling her way over to me. I turned back to Liz. No one was there.

“Chloe, what are you doing up here?”

“I—I—I—I thought I heard … a mouse. Or a rat. Something was moving around up here.”

“And you were talking to it?” Tori stepped through the attic doorway.

“N-no, I—I—”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I heard you say
ghost
. And you were definitely talking to someone. It seems you aren’t quite as cured as you said you were.”

***

Mrs. Talbot brought me a sleeping pill and waited while I took it. The whole time, she didn’t say a word to me, but as I heard her feet tapping double time down the stairs, I knew there would be a lot of words for Dr. Gill and Dr. Davidoff.

I’d blown it.

Tears burned my eyes. I swiped them back.

“You really can see ghosts, can’t you?” Rae whispered.

I said nothing.

“I heard what happened. You aren’t even going to admit it to me now, are you?”

“I want to get out of here.”

“News flash. We
all
do.” An edge crept into her voice. “It’s fine to lie to
them
. But I thought you were seeing ghosts even before you did. Who gave you the idea of looking up that guy you saw at your school? You looked him up, didn’t you? You just didn’t bother to tell me.”

“That’s not—”

She rolled over, her back to me. I knew I should say something, but I wasn’t sure what.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Liz again and my stomach clenched.

Had I really seen her? Talked to her? I struggled for some other explanation. She couldn’t be a ghost because I’d seen and heard her clearly—not like the ghost who’d called me up there. And she couldn’t be dead. The nurses had promised we could talk to her.

When
could we talk to her?

I struggled to get up, suddenly needing to know now. But I was so tired that I couldn’t think straight and hovered there, propped up on my elbows, as the sleeping pill kicked in.

Something about Liz. I wanted to check…

My head fell back to the pillow.

THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I was called into a meeting with the doctors, I did my best damage control. I claimed I really had gotten past the I-see-dead-people stage and accepted my condition, but had woken up hearing a voice in the night, calling me to the attic. I’d been confused, sleep drunk,
dreaming
of seeing ghosts, not really seeing them.

Dr. Gill and Dr. Davidoff didn’t fully appreciate the distinction.

Then Aunt Lauren arrived. It was like when I’d been eleven, caught peeking at test scores, egged on by the new classmates I’d been eager to impress. Being hauled to the principal’s office had been bad enough. But the disappointment on Aunt Lauren’s face had hurt worse than any punishment.

That day, I saw the same disappointment, and it didn’t hurt any less.

In the end, I managed to persuade them all that I’d had a minor setback, but it was like the little boy crying wolf. The next time I said I was improving, they’d be a lot slower to believe me. No quick track to release now.

“We’re going to need you to provide urine samples for the next week,” Dr. Gill said.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Aunt Lauren said. “How do we know she wasn’t sleepwalking and dreaming? She can’t control her dreams.”

“Dreams are the windows to the soul,” Dr. Gill said.

“That’s the eyes,” my aunt snapped.

“Anyone versed in psychiatry will tell you it’s the same for dreams.” Dr. Gill’s voice was level, but her look said she was sick of parents and guardians questioning her diagnoses and defending their children. “Even if Chloe is only dreaming she sees ghosts, it suggests that, subconsciously, she hasn’t accepted her condition. We need to monitor her with urine tests.”

“I—I don’t understand,” I said. “Why do I need urine tests?”

“To ensure you’re receiving the proper dosage for your size, activity level, food intake, and other factors. It’s a delicate balance.”

“You don’t believe—” Aunt Lauren began.

Dr. Davidoff cleared his throat. Aunt Lauren pressed her lips into a thin line and started picking lint from her wool skirt. She rarely backed down from an argument, but these doctors held the key to my future.

I already knew what she’d been going to say. The urine tests weren’t to check my dosage. They were to make sure I was taking my pills.

***

Since I’d missed morning classes, I was assigned lunch duty. I was setting the table, lost in my thoughts, when a voice said, “I’m behind you.”

I spun to see Derek.

“I can’t win,” he said. “You’re as skittish as a kitten.”

“So if you sneak up and announce yourself, that’s going to startle me less than if you tap me on the shoulder?”

“I didn’t sneak—”

He shook his head, grabbed two rolls from the bread basket, then rearranged the others to hide the theft. “I just wanted to say that if you and Simon want to talk, you don’t need to do it behind my back. Unless you want to.”

“We were just—”

“I know what you were doing. Simon already told me. You want answers. I’ve been trying to give them to you all along. You just have to ask.”

“But you said—”

“Tonight. Eight. Our room. Tell Mrs. Talbot you’ll be with me for math tutoring.”

“Your side is off-limits. Is she going to let me go up there, alone, with a boy?”

“Just tell her it’s for math. She won’t question it.”

Because he had problems with math, I supposed.

“Will that be … okay? You and I aren’t supposed to—”

“Tell her Simon will be there. And talk to Talbot, not Van Dop.”

RAE AND I DIDN’T SPEAK much all day. She wasn’t nasty; Rae wasn’t like that. She sat beside me in class and asked questions, but there was no chatter, no giggling or goofing off. Today we were classmates, not friends.

Before dinner, when we’d normally hang out or do homework together, she took her books, retreated to the dining room, and closed the door.

After dinner, I followed her into the kitchen with my dirty plates.

“It’s my turn to do laundry,” I said. “Would you have a minute to show me how to use the machine?” I lowered my voice. “And I’d like to talk to you.”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

***

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said as she demonstrated the dials on the washer. “I’m … I’m having a hard time with it.”

“Why? You can talk to the dead. How cool is that?”

It wasn’t cool at all—it was terrifying. But I didn’t want to sound like I was whining. Or maybe I just didn’t want to sound like a wimp.

I dumped in the first load and added soap.

“Whoa, whoa! You’ll give this place a bubble carpet.” She took the soap box from me and scooped some of the detergent back out of the machine. “If you can prove you’re seeing ghosts, why not just tell them?”

A perfectly logical question, but at the thought, some deep-rooted instinct screamed
Don’t tell
!
Never tell
!

“I—I don’t want to tell anyone the truth. Not yet. Not here.”

She nodded and set the box aside. “Gill is a pencil pusher with all the imagination of a thumbtack. She’d keep you locked up in here until you stopped this ‘ghost nonsense.’ Better to save the spooky stuff for when you get out.”

We sorted a basket of laundry in silence, then I said, “The reason I asked to talk to you down here is, well, there’s a ghost.”

She took a slow look around, wrapping a T-shirt around her hand like a boxer taping up for a fight.

“Not right now. I mean, there
was
a ghost in here. The same one I heard upstairs last night.” Before Liz showed up. All day I’d been struggling not to think of Liz. If I was seeing her, didn’t that mean …

Why hadn’t I asked Mrs. Talbot when I could talk to Liz? Was I afraid of the answer?

“—he say?”

I shook it off and turned to Rae. “Hmm?”

“What did the ghost say?”

“It’s hard to tell. He keeps cutting out. I think it’s the meds. But he said he wanted me to open that door.”

I pointed. Her head whipped around so fast she winced and rubbed her neck.

“That door?” Her eyes glittered. “The
locked
basement door?”

“Yes, cliché, I know. Whoooo, don’t go into the locked room, little girl.”

Rae was already striding to the door.

I said, “I thought maybe, we could, you know, check it out. Like open it.”

“Duh,
of course
. I’d have done that days ago.” She jiggled the handle. “How can you live with the suspense?”

“For starters, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in there.”

“Then why’s it locked?”

“Because it’s for storing stuff they don’t want us messing with. Lawn furniture. Winter bedding. Christmas decorations.”

“The bodies of Lyle House kids who never went home…”

She grinned, but I froze, thinking of Liz.

“Geez, I’m
kidding
. You are such a girl.”

“No, I’ve just seen too many movies.”

“That, too.” She walked back to the laundry shelves and rooted through a box. “Another crappy lock, so easy a six-year-old with a credit card can pick it.”

“Not many six-year-olds have credit cards.”

“I bet Tori did. That’s who this house is made for.” She lifted a sponge, shook her head, and dropped it back into the box. “Rich kids whose only use for a credit card is buying a new pair of Timbs. They stick cheap locks on the doors, knowing you guys will turn the handle and say ‘huh, locked’ and walk away.”

“That’s—”

She stopped me with a look. “Unfair? Uh, that’s exactly what you did, girl.” She brandished a stiff piece of cardboard, a tag ripped off a new shirt.

“It’s not perfect,” she murmured as she slid it between the door and the frame. “But it’ll—” She jiggled the cardboard and swore. “Or maybe it—” she swiped it down sharply, a ripping sound as it tore in half “—won’t.”

More curses, some of them quite creative.

“There’s a piece caught … Here, let me.”

I grabbed the edge between my fingernails, which would have been much easier if I had any. When I’d woken in the hospital, my nails had been filed to the pink, like they’d been worried I’d commit suicide by scratching. I managed to get hold of the cardboard, pulled … and ripped out another chunk, leaving the rest wedged in where no nails, however long, could reach it.