Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7
It started as a rapping at my window at almost ten o’clock. I was in bed, half-asleep already. At first I fought against the clumps of dirt bombarding the glass, thought that maybe he would just go away. I was so tired, after all. I had spent the day with my family, traversing the countryside on one of our weekend outings. The dirt kept coming, though.
I finally climbed out of bed and opened the window. “Richie, you’re coming over tomorrow morning to wash my window. I had to do it the last three times, cause Mom keeps asking how they get so dirty.”
“Sure, just com’on! We don’t have much time.”
“Much time?”
“Com’on!”
“I’m tired. I just want some sleep. Maybe tomorrow — ”
But Richie wouldn’t be left alone. He balled up his fists and pounded them once against his dungarees. “Com’on!”
And I went. I threw on the clothes I had been wearing that day and tiptoed out of my room. Mom and Dad were already asleep, and I could thank the heavens for Dad’s loud, horse-like snoring. It had buried the sounds of my departure on so many nights.
The two of us stole into the night like… well, like kids stealing into the night. I tried to fish what was going on out of him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said, “You’ll see, but I can’t tell you. They’ll tell you.”
“They who?”
“You’ll see, but I can’t tell you,” he said again.
And we ran. We covered the distance between our houses in about five minutes, and then he took me upstairs to his room. That’s where we usually went on our nighttime journeys. Normally we played games. Sometimes we brought the radio up to his room and listened really quietly. And three weeks earlier we had shared our first kiss.
His dad had died in the war, about three months earlier. Since then, we didn’t see as much of each other, because he said he wanted some time alone. I could understand that, so I let him be.
His mom was already asleep when we got to his house. She tucked herself in most nights with a couple swills of bourbon.
Richie had about fifteen model airplanes hanging from his ceiling. He usually rambled on and on about what types they were and what guns they carried. I paid attention, but all that information ran off me like water off a duck, or a loon maybe. And though we didn’t talk about planes that night, they still loomed in the air above us, stuck in an airspace that was impenetrable to them. The best those airplanes could do was cast tenebrous, misshapen shadows of themselves onto the walls, shadows that slowly patrolled those walls as the moon made its way across the night sky.
He had a platoon of little soldiers all lined up on his desk. A whole artillery of books on every subject imaginable flowed off his bookshelves like a frozen waterfall. And the smell of soiled, summer socks wafted from Richie’s laundry bin.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Here. Sit here.” And he cleared a little spot on the floor for me. Only a young boy, I think, would have an interested lady sit on his floor. “Remember last summer? Remember those two kids who drowned?”
“Of course I remember, Richie. My mom near throws a fit every time I go swimming without her because of it.”
“Right,” Richie said. “Right. Well, let me show you something. You have to promise, though. You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“Geez, get to it. You dragged me all the way from my house.”
Richie didn’t even attempt a response. He just cleared a spot on the floor next to me, sat down, and waited.
“Fine, yes. I promise. Never do I tell a lie, this secret shall within me die. There.”
Richie didn’t hesitate now. He smiled a smile he must have been practicing for months. He stood up, took a sheet of paper from inside his desk, and put it on the bed. When he looked at me again, that smile had run off into the night. “Don’t look at the bed,” he whispered. “Don’t look at the bed and just stare at a spot on the floor.”
“Richie, you — ”
“Quiet. Just do it.”
And I did as he asked. I would have done anything for him, I think; by that time, my crush on Richie was in full bloom. I turned my head away from the bed and stared down at a little stained spot on the rug. And from behind me — from behind us — came a faint, scratching sound. If there had been an actual ghost worm like I had told him, this would have been exactly what it would have sounded like. I’m sure of it.
Suddenly I found myself clutching that rug, my fingers digging into it the way Richie’s had dug into the sand a year earlier. It isn’t Richie — I had to keep proving that to myself. The problem was, it was too easy to prove, because I could see him from the corner of my eye.
And then it stopped. Just silence and the patrolling shadow planes.
“What was that?” I started. “What are you trying to do? What — ”
“Take a look. Look at the paper.”
I got to my feet slowly, and I don’t remember breathing at all while moving to the bed. The paper sat just on top of the bed sheet, the only distinctly white thing up there. Just the same as when he had put it there. Just the same rectangular bit of paper, only now there were words on it.
My fingers trembled as I picked it up.
“Hello, Jane Sallersby,” it read, in long, cursive lettering. “It is good to finally meet you.”
I threw the paper to the ground and turned on Richie. “Don’t toy with my mind, Richie. You are going to scare me. And I hate being scared. I hate it more than anything else. Tell me that you wrote this. Tell me that you wrote it and tell me now!”
But he hadn’t written it. I could tell that from the penmanship. Richie couldn’t have written that elegantly had his life depended on it.
“Get another piece of paper,” Richie whispered. “Make sure that it doesn’t have anything written on it. See for yourself.”
After a bit of thought, I went to the desk, pulled out a fresh sheet, checked it over, and put it on the bed. I plopped down next to him again, praying that this time nothing would happen. Praying that it was just Richie’s idea of a joke. Praying that in just a few moments I would be yelling at him for scaring the hell out of me.
The scratching, untuned radio sound came again. And I recognized it as someone writing this time. But who? Who?
I spun around on the floor and stared into the darkness that swirled above the bed.
Nothing.
Nobody.
But the sound persisted.
“Stop it,” I whispered. “Richie, please stop it!”
“It’s not me,” he said. “But they don’t want to hurt us. They are looking for friends.”
I felt my stomach turn into a pit of shrewd and lashing fire. The heat of my raw fear beat at the inside of me, adrenaline pumping river-like through my vessels. I was going to cry. And then I didn’t, because the sky decided to do that for me.
A sudden burst of chortling thunder, and then the tamping rain on the window.
Richie jumped up and got the paper. He brought it to me and smiled, apologetically. “I should have warned you.”
This time the handwriting was different, as if not just one entity, but two had been borne of the air in Richie’s room: “Never do you tell a lie, this secret shall within you die. We like that. We want to play. Do you?” This scrawl was hasty and crude, more like Richie’s.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s them, Janie. It’s Elizabeth and John.”
“I’m going home. I don’t think that I should be here.”
A crackle of thunder from outside again, as if in response.
And Richie went to the window. “We should all go swimming. They can do some neat stuff, and they want to show us something at the beach.” He slid the window up and put his hand out. The sound of the storm — with no glass to shield its fury from my ears — was deafening. For a second I thought he was trying to get lightning to strike him.
I stood there and lost all track of my mind. Something wasn’t right. Something very fundamental wasn’t right at all.
Richie brought his hand back inside. “See?” he said. “My hand isn’t wet. There’s no storm. It’s just them. They’re making it for us.”
I walked tentatively over and slowly put my hand outside. I expected to feel wind and water. I felt neither, just the warm night. What I heard, though — what I heard were the sounds of a sky that seemed to be tearing itself apart. There was another loud belch of thunder, and then it all died away. The phantom storm disappeared.
I brought my hand back inside, half expecting to see just the skeletal remains, half expecting there to be nothing left at all. But my hand was just fine.
And then the model planes above us began to fly. They broke free of their stagnation and flew as far as their tethering strings would allow. They buzzed around above us in tight little circles, their shadows now fluttering over the walls like maniac butterflies.
The planes were my snapping point. I took three huge steps and was out of Richie’s room. I was halfway down the stairs before he appeared in the hallway.
“Where are you going?” he whispered. “You’re not going home, are you?”
“Where else would I be going?”
He started after me, and I made my way outside.
The night was perfectly calm. The moon sat above us, bright and cheery, not a cloud to speak of. The ground was perfectly dry. The air was perfectly warm. But that didn’t matter, I guess — kids can get themselves into trouble with or without a sudden-onset storm, after all. And I kept right on walking.
“Wait, Janie. Please, wait.”
“I’m not waiting for anything,” I said. I fought hard, so hard, against the tears that seemed to be pounding behind my eyes. And I beat them. “You can take your ghost friends to the beach and tell ghost stories around a fire if you want. But I’m not going near any beach, or any ghost.”
“Fireworks. You know, like the kind they had in New York City last month. They are going to put on a big fireworks show above the ocean for us. But the only way they’ll do it is if you come along.”
“What?”
“I’ve been talking to them for months. They aren’t bad. Just because you’re dead, doesn’t mean that you’re bad.” Richie wasn’t doing so well in his fight against tears. His thoughts had turned to his father. I could see it in his eyes. “A fireworks show, Janie. Please, come and celebrate with me.”
I’ve already said that I would have done anything for him — anything just short of dying — and as it turned out, he was putting me to the test.
I tried to smile for him, really, I did. I’m not sure how well I managed, but he perked up a bit.
“Yes!” he screamed. And off he went, running towards a lick of beach I hadn’t visited in an entire year. I had a little more fighting to do with my enraged emotions, but I subdued them. And then I followed him. I followed him into a night that just a few minutes earlier had been shamming near-hurricane force winds and torrential rain.
About Tony Dvorak
