Scarecrow’s Dream (2 page)

Addie jumped out of the rocker with surprising ease, hurried over to the couch, and plopped down beside me. She reached out and then immediately pulled back.

“Yow! Talk about not right. Not right at all. I’d say this clinches it. But if you’re still not convinced…” She grabbed a purse sitting on the table and pulled out a compact, but didn’t open it.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “This night is racing from a bit weird to demonically strange. As in non-reality-loco land.” My voice croaked. “Want to know the truth? I’m scared.”

“Now, now. Don’t let the weirdness get to you. But, let me ask you one more thing. What do you remember before you came into the apartment tonight? Where were you? What were you doing? Specifics, please.”

I tried to concentrate and looked up at the ceiling for some sort of guidance. “I was on the Henry Hudson Bridge and then I was falling into the water. I sort of blacked out. Then I was on the bank of the creek and then I walked over here and managed to get into the building because someone had left it unlocked and I’d lost my keys and half my stuff in the water because my bag was open.”

“Okay. Here’s the biggie. How did you get
out
of the water? Let’s face it. Swimming under the bridge in the cold rain at this time of night is not what I consider the sport of choice for most people.”

“Hold on a second. It’s like…” I couldn’t put into words the sensation but I could hear an odd, whirring, tinny noise then feel myself flying through the air. And every sound and feeling seemed as though it had happened to someone else a long time ago. I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing before the ‘flight.’ Zippo. I explained this to Adelaide, and then I sat straight up.

“Wait. Motorcycle. I’m sure I was riding on one before I went sailing off the bridge. I can still hear the sound of something hitting the tire.”

“How long were you in the water?”

“No idea. I don’t really have a memory of hitting the water. I suppose I woke up once I’d made it to dry land.”

She snapped out the next question before I had a chance to think. “When did this happen? Any idea?”

“Last night.”

“Not what I meant. I’m talking year, here, not day.”

“Year? Year? What kind of crazy question is that? Now! I mean,
this
year. As in 1973.”

“Oh boy.”

“What?”

Addie stayed silent.

“
What
? You’re scaring the fool out of me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not calm either, believe me, although I’ve lived long enough to see a helluva lot of freaky things. I’ve always been very interested in the paranormal and studied up on the subject. I’ve even attended the odd séance in my life.” She chuckled. “And I do mean odd.” She stopped. “Sorry. Not funny. I’ll go on then, shall I?”

“Oh sure, what the hell, why not? I’m dying to find out where this is going.”

“Well, let’s start with the year. Which is 2016 and has been since January. Let’s move to the interesting fact that, whether you want to believe it or not, I can hear but not see you. Which leads to me saying when I came close enough to touch you I got this bizarre sensation. I have no words to describe it. It’s like…electricity humming? It’s very interesting and also very not of this world. Finishing with, and no offense, but, you’re not quite what I’d call—uh—corporeal. I’m so sorry. This is all sounding crazier with every word.”

“Go on.”

“First, do you have a wallet or anything? One with identification?”

“It fell out into the creek along with my keys.”

“Ah.” She added, “Oh well, that’s okay. Forget it. We don’t need it, anyway.” She pushed the compact she’d taken out of her bag in my direction. “Open it.”

I did. “So?”

“Check the mirror.”

I did. And saw nothing.

“What!”

Addie’s tone turned almost mischievous. “I should consult with some of my occult buddies as to the physics of this to be certain but the only explanation for now is…you may not have made it out of the water as fast as you imagined.”

It took me a good two minutes before her comment made sense. Finally I asked, “Are you saying…wait, you’re saying I drowned? You’re telling me I died?”

“Pretty much. It’s forty-three years later than you believe it to be. I
am
your aunt Addie and I’m seventy-six years old. Isn’t it obvious? I’m sipping hot toddies with my niece, Holly Malone—who just happens to be a ghost.”

Chapter Two

“Yo, Holly, you in the living room?”

I called out, “Yeah, I’m here. Just check for Boo-Boo whenever you want to find me. She hasn’t left my side except to get water. I swear she really can see and feel me. Then again, maybe it’s just that doggie sixth sense of an abnormal presence.”

“Whichever. We’ll figure out the shapes of things to come for ghosts and dogs as we go. Meantime, I bear gifts. Media Rack over on Sherman had a major sale going.” Addie marched into the living room, then plopped what she called an eco-friendly bag on the coffee table. “Three DVDs for five dollars. Too good a deal to pass up. So you now have about thirty more movies to dive into. I did my best to choose the flicks I thought would help guide you through the culture of the last four decades.” She chuckled. “If one can label
Demolition
Man
or
Jaws
as culture. Not that I care. Sly Stallone and Roy Scheider make up for any lack of brilliant dialogue.”

“I appreciate it. Nothing like catching up on forty years of life in a matter of days. Well, catching up on
other
people’s lives since I don’t have one.”

“Now, now. Quit angsting. We’re working on it and we’re still not sure how you do the things you do when you’re dead, and do you have any idea how stupid everything I just said sounds?” Addie trotted into the kitchen, returning about thirty seconds later juggling a bag of pretzels, a bag of chips, a carton of rocky road ice cream, and two large bottles of diet root beer.

“Speaking of stupid. Or bizarre.”

“What?”

“A ton of high-calorie junk food and a sugar-free soda,” I told her.

“Ah, but as you noted, it’s
diet
soda. Makes up for the junk food.”

“Yeah. Right. You go ahead and convince yourself, Miss Adelaide.”

“I do.”

“I do love you, dearest Auntie. You take rationalization to new heights. And always have, if my memory is right.” That wasn’t saying much, however, given the gaps I had in it.

“Yeah, yeah. Now, move over and take the mutt with you so I can see her and avoid sitting on you,” Addie suggested.

“Will do.” I scooched toward the right side of the couch and tried to give Addie enough room. She seemed to almost instinctually steer clear of touching me most of the time, but if she accidentally got too close I seemed to give off some vibe she claimed intrigued her to no end. I was surprised she wasn’t poking at me all hours of the day and night.

Addie set the food on the table in front of us, and then sank onto the couch next to me. “Talk about bizarre, Holly. You wanna hear the spookiest thing?” She chuckled. “No offense.”

“None taken. Spookiest thing. You were saying?”

“Repeating a thought from the other day but you can pat the dog and she can feel your touch. Which is actually kind of a no-brainer. Puppies are the closest things to innocence ever and I have no problem with them being able to see or exist on more than one plane or dimension. Where was I? Oh yeah. As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, I can hear you, which I’m positive has to do with our genetic makeup. For all we know there are Malone family ESP tendencies that have been dormant for seventy very odd years and only now surfacing. I always said if I lived long enough something totally out there and supernatural would happen.” She mused, “I didn’t imagine it would be my own niece.”

“Right. Thank you so much for labeling me as totally out there. But you went off track as usual. Spookiest thing? What in particular?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was zoning and musing about supernatural characteristics in the Malones. Anyway, you’re capable of picking things up physically, although I still swear you came sauntering through the front door your first night back among the living.”

I started to protest but she interrupted.

“I buy it. I mean, the whole physics of Holly Malone, ghost, not making sense. Even walking through objects doesn’t make me raise an eyebrow, and don’t start with the ‘but, Auntie, darling, I’m sure the door wasn’t locked because if I actually passed through it once I should be able to do it again’ bullshit. I’ll let that one pass. But what’s
really
crazy is you feel cold and heat and you eat and you sleep and do all the normal things that flesh and blood folks do. Can we say illogical squared?”

I grumbled, “Well, since I don’t own a ghost manual for the newly departed and any of their relatives they’re haunting, I have no clue what’s going on. I’ve given up trying to make sense of anything. Hell, I’m happy just to know my name and not spend my days wandering around the park howling like a banshee asking everyone I see to tell me who I am.”

Addie winked at me—or, more accurately, at the dog since she assumed I’d be close by—and began speaking in a heavy Irish brogue. “’Tis a very pretty name too, Holly Malone. Christmassy, like a painted ornament on a berry tree, young lass.”

She switched back to her normal voice. “You are aware I’m the one who chose it? Had to fight Paul. He wanted Jordan. Nice name—which is why we used it as your middle. But Holly was so you. I knew you’d look like my grandmother and your great-granny and I was right. Forgive me for the metaphors but I hear your name and I envision a painting set in County Kilkarney. Red hair and green eyes and too damned stinkin’ tall and ethereal. I had those first two until half the hair went white but never the last. It’s hard to be ethereal when you’re five-foot-one on a good day and have a tendency to overeat.”

I snorted. “Well, you’d have to use ethereal anyway. How else would you describe a ghost?” I shivered hearing the word even though we’d both settled on dead and back as the best explanation for what had happened two days ago.

I glanced at the DVDs scattered on the coffee table.
Jesus Christ Superstar
. I’d loved the music and the Broadway show I’d seen last year, which in this strange new reality had actually been more than forty years ago.
Beetlejuice
.
Saturday Night Fever
.
Star Wars.
Romancing the Stone
.
Good Morning, Vietnam
. A trinity of
Back to the Future
films.
The American President
.
The Birdcage
. A bunch of movies with
Die Hard
in the title. A trio of
Terminator
flicks.
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Four
Indiana Jones
movies. All three
Lord of the Rings
and
The
Hobbit
sequels or prequels or whatever Adelaide had called them.
Hairspray
.
August Rush
.
Step Up
and
Step Up Revolution
. Eight
Harry Potter
movies.
Dark Shadows
, the movie, not the soap opera I’d rushed home from school to watch when I was in high school.
Ghost
, which I’d watched twice last night in an effort to figure out how Patrick Swayze’s character had coped.

“You know what I don’t understand? Patrick could move through solid objects but had difficulty picking things up. I’m the opposite. And then there’s
Curtain Call
.”

Addie interrupted. “I loved that one! James Spader, Maggie Smith, and Michael Caine. Awesome. All three. And Buck Henry the few times he had a scene. Sorry. Go on.”

“Okay. Maggie and Michael could eat and drink. Like me. But they could also pop out of visible and not visible with what appeared to be very little effort. Why can’t I?”

“I have no answers. I’m not sure it really matters as far as whole mysterious ways to haunt go.”

“You’re useless but I love you anyway. Oh! I also watched three episodes of the TV show
Ghost Whisperer
. Do you suppose she makes house calls?”

Addie wisely ignored that inane question.

“It’s going to take me another forty years to watch all these,” I proclaimed. “Thank heaven I can recall most of my childhood memories up through high school and some of college. But as for the few months, well, actually a year or two before the great dive into the river? Nothing. Zippo. Well, except for events and I’m not quite up to date on most of those either. I mean, I vaguely remember Nixon getting reelected and a scandal brewing about the burglary at the Watergate Hotel, although not sure how much is memory and how much was watching
All the President’s Men
this morning. It was in the batch of DVDs you left for me. Another cool movie, by the way.”

“Well, catching up on good flicks is better than sitting around here moping.”

“Believe me, I’d rather be doing something else. I’d hop on out and take Boo-Boo for a walk except people would see she’s alone with a leash floating in the air and want to call animal control. I’m serious about the ghost manual, though. There needs to be a kick-ass book with rules for spirits and the people around them. ‘A Guide for the Undead and How to Navigating Amongst the Living’. Shit. I’m a writer. You’re a writer. You and I could co-author it and do the new self-publishing thing and become superstars.”

Addie waved her hand in the air, dismissing the comment. “You’ve just nailed why I bought
Beetlejuice
. I doubt it’ll be helpful, but the ghosts in the movie do get some kind of guidebook, so there’s an off chance you’ll find something you can use. Holly, you have to make your own rules. You were a rebel in your day, although you were always quiet about it, so why should things be different because your existence is not quite—oh—coalescing with the rest of the world?”

She grabbed a giant pretzel and one of her diet sodas, then munched and slurped for a few minutes while she checked her email, a skill she promised to teach me later this week.

I watched my aunt for another minute before bringing up the two things driving me the most nuts. “Addie, I have to find out why I’m here and who I am. Wait. Not a good way of putting it. I’m very confused about what’s real, what I actually lived through, and what you’ve told me happened to me in the past. As I told you, I have memories of Paul Malone as my dad and your brother, especially from my childhood. I know he was the super here and we moved to this apartment when I was a toddler. I don’t have any memories of my mother, which makes sense since you’ve told me she died when I was only a year old. But there are still so many things of which I have zero knowledge.”

“What about your friends? Or the classes you were taking at NYU?”

“Yes and no. I remember going to demonstrations and I remember working on papers for some creative writing class. Maybe scriptwriting? Not vital, I suppose, but it’d be nice if some solid memory flashes from the last couple of years would, uh, flash and make me feel more grounded, if that makes sense. And you weren’t here the year I…died…so I need to find out what led up to me sailing off the bridge. Do you suppose this computer thingy could have any information? I mean, if I’m remembering the sound of what I’m starting to believe was a bullet, well doesn’t it appear I was shot? Which means…”

“Say it. Quit dancing around with ‘ifs’, ‘need tos’, and ‘kind ofs’. Doesn’t do any damned good to keep it buried.”

“Fine,” I snarled. “The operative word is
murdered
. So will the big silver monitor with the keyboard tell me why? It gives my birth date, along with Dad’s but not a lot more. My throat closed as I whispered, “it gives his death date.”

I stopped. “My God. This is awful. My dad only lived fifteen more years after I died. What kind of life did he have? We adored each other. That I do remember. Even when we were arguing about his only child being Ms. Protest of the seventies there was an element of pride in my activities. Although, I seem to recall embarrassing the hell out of him more than once during my years at NYU. I’m positive I ended up in jail. I have this odd semi-claustrophobic sense of being in a large room behind bars alongside a mess of unwashed bodies. Anyway, when I got picked on at school Dad was right there for me.”

Addie sat up straight. “Picked on at school? Anything specific?”

“More of a wisp flying by. I can see myself in a school uniform and two blonde bimbo types giving me grief for being an Irish super’s daughter.”

“Interesting. I’m assuming high school, because if this had happened in elementary I’d’ve been there to defend you and raise holy hell at your school.”

“Yep. High school. Not that it matters. I’m in—fine—if I’m right, I
was
in grad school so the memory is at least from four years ago.” I shrugged. “Make that forty years. Crap. This whole ‘I’ve been dead for forty-three years’ thing makes me crazy. Anyway, I’m damned curious as to who sent me over a bridge to land in icy waters in April and I’d lay bets it wasn’t some snotty prom queen from my senior class. You ready to hear what truly ticks me off? I’m guessing my body was never found. Creepy. Perhaps after I drowned I went floating down the Hudson toward West Point and out onto the Atlantic?”

“I believe you mean
up
the Hudson. Those cute little cadets are north.”

“I’m a ghost. I’m not supposed to worry about geography, apart from why I’m not hanging out in front of the Pearly Gates with St. Pete.”

“Yeah, right, fine. But, Holly, and while I realize this sounds tacky, we still need to figure out who…killed you and why. That’s got to be why you’re back among the living, don’t you agree? Justice. Revenge. Or to prevent a further tragedy, although if disaster happened it would have happened years ago, and I’m confusing myself. Back to my point, justice and revenge are both classic reasons for haunting. But one would imagine the ghost doing the haunting would be haunting the person involved in the ghost’s demise as opposed to irritating a beloved aunt. And not to be repetitive but I will—why now? Why not the day or hour after you went into the drink?”

I groaned. “I’m getting a headache, which should be impossible since I shouldn’t be able to feel my head. But assuming you’re right about me needing to haunt the person responsible, how am I going to figure out who did it and what happened since the powers in the universe who brought me back didn’t see fit to include my full memory?”