The Summoning (16 page)

“Get the feeling someone doesn’t want us going in there?” Rae said.

I tried to laugh, but ever since she’d mentioned “bodies,” there’d been a sour taste in my mouth.

“We’re going to need the key,” she pronounced, straightening. “It might be on the ring with the one for the shed in the kitchen.”

“I’ll get it.”

***

When I slipped into the kitchen, Derek was pawing through the fruit basket. The door hadn’t made any noise opening and he had his back to me. The perfect chance for payback. I took three slow, silent steps toward him, barely daring to breathe—

“The key you want isn’t on that ring,” he said, not looking my way.

I froze. He dug out an apple, took a bite, then walked to the fridge, reached behind it, and pulled off a magnetized set of keys.

“Try these.” He dropped them in my hand and walked past me to the kitchen door. “I have no idea what you guys are doing down there, but next time you want to secretly open a locked door, don’t whale on it hard enough to bring down the house.”

***

When I brought the keys downstairs, I didn’t tell Rae that Derek knew what we were up to. She might have decided to abort the plan. Anyway tattling wasn’t Derek’s style. Or so I hoped.

As Rae tried the keys, I rubbed the back of my neck, grimacing against the dull throb of a threatening headache. Was I really that anxious about what lay behind the door? I rolled my shoulders, trying to shake it off.

“Found it,” she whispered.

She swung open the door to reveal …

An empty closet. Rae stepped inside. I followed. We were in a space so small we could both barely fit.

“Okay,” Rae said. “This is weird. Who builds a closet, doesn’t put anything in it, then locks it? There’s gotta be a catch.” She rapped on the wall. “Yow! It’s concrete. Painted concrete. Scraped my knuckles good.” She touched the adjoining walls. “I don’t get it. Where’s the rest of the basement?”

I rubbed my temple, now throbbing. “It’s a half basement. My aunt lived in an old Victorian place before she got sick of the renovations and moved into a condo. She said when her house was built, it didn’t have a basement at all, just a crawl space under the house. Then someone dug out a room for the laundry. She used to have real bad problems with flooding and stuff. Maybe that’s why this is empty and locked. So no one uses it.”

“Okay, so what does your spook want you to see? Overlooked storage space?”

“I told you it was probably nothing.”

The words came out more sharply than I intended. I rolled my shoulders and rubbed my neck again.

“What’s wrong?” Rae laid her hand on my arm. “God, girl, you’re covered in goose bumps.”

“Just a chill.”

“Maybe it’s a cold spot.”

I nodded, but I didn’t feel cold. Just … anxious. Like a cat sensing a threat, its fur rising.

“There’s a ghost here, isn’t there?” she said, looking around. “Try contacting it.”

“How?”

She shot me a look. “Start with ‘hello.’ ”

I did.

“More,” Rae said. “Keep talking.”

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

She rolled her eyes. I ignored her. I felt foolish enough without having my dialogue critiqued.

“If someone’s here, I’d like to talk to you.”

“Close your eyes,” Rae said. “Focus.”

Something told me it had to be a lot more complicated than “close your eyes, focus, and talk to them.” But I didn’t have a better idea. So I gave it a shot.

“Nothing,” I said after a moment.

When I opened my eyes, a figure flashed past so fast it was only a blur. I wheeled, trying to follow, but it was gone.

“What?” Rae said. “What’d you see?”

I closed my eyes and struggled to pull a replay tape from memory. After a moment, it came. I saw a man dressed in a gray suit, clean shaven, wearing a fedora and horn-rimmed glasses, like someone out of the fifties.

I told her what I’d seen. “But it was just a flash. It’s the meds. I had to take them today and they seem to … block transmission. I only get flashes.”

I turned slowly, eyes narrowing as I concentrated as hard as I could, looking for even the faintest shimmer. As I circled, my elbow hit the door, knocking it against the wall with an oddly metallic clank.

Motioning Rae aside, I pulled the door forward to peek behind it. She squeezed in to take a look.

“Seems we missed something, huh?” she said, grinning.

The closet was so small that when the door opened, it had blocked the left wall. Now, looking behind it, I saw there was a metal ladder fastened to that wall. It led up a few steps to a small wooden door halfway up the wall, the gray paint blending with the concrete. I stepped onto the ladder. The door was secured only with a latch. One hard push and it swung open into darkness.

A musty stink billowed out.

The smell of the moldering dead
.

Right. Like I knew what the dead smelled like. The only body I’d ever seen had been my mother’s. She hadn’t smelled dead. She’d smelled like Mom. I shook the memory off.

“I think it’s a crawl space,” I said. “Like at my aunt’s old place. Let me take a look.”

“Hey.” She plucked at the back of my shirt. “Not so fast, It looks awfully dark in there … too dark for someone who sleeps with the blinds open.”

I ran my hand over the floor. Damp, packed dirt. I fell along the wall.

“A dirt crawl space,” I said. “With no light switch, We’re going to need a flashlight. I saw one—”

“I know. My turn to get it.”

WHEN RAE GOT BACK, she spread her empty hands wide and said, “Okay, guess where I hid it.”

She even turned around for me, but I could ‘see no bulge big enough to hide a flashlight. With a grin, she reached down the front of her shirt into the middle of her bra, and pulled out a flashlight with flourish.

I laughed.

“Cleavage is great,” she said. “Like an extra pocket.”

She smacked the flashlight into my hand. I shone it into the crawl space. The dirt floor extended through the darkness as far as the beam pierced. I waved the flashlight. The beam bounced off something to my left. A metal box.

“There’s a box,” I said. “But I can’t reach it from here.”

I climbed the remaining two steps and crawled in. The space stunk of dirt and stale air, as if no one had been there in years.

The ceiling was really low, so I had to waddle hunched over. I maneuvered to the box. It was dull gray metal with the kind of lid that lifted off, like a gift box.

“Is it locked?” Rae whispered. She had climbed the ladder and was peering in.

I passed the light around the perimeter of the lid. No sign of a lock.

“Well, open it,” she said.

Kneeling, I gripped the flashlight between my knees. My fingertips slid under the lid’s rim.

“Come on, come on,” Rae said.

I ignored her. This room was what the ghost had wanted me to see. I was sure of it. And this box was the only thing I could see in this barren, dark space.

I’d seen boxes like this in movies, and what lay inside was never good. Body parts were usually involved.

But I had to know. The lid started coming off, then stopped. I jiggled it. One side came up, but the other caught. I slid my fingertips around the edge, trying to find what it was catching on. It was a piece of paper.

I tugged, and the paper ripped, leaving me with a corner. There was handwriting on it, but only fragments of words. I found the part of the paper still stuck in the box and pulled, prying the lid with my other hand. One sharp tug, and the paper came free … and so did the lid, flying off and landing in my lap. Before I could think about! whether I wanted to look, I
was
looking, staring straight down into the box.

“Papers?” Rae said.

“It looks like … files.”

I reached into a folder marked
2002
and pulled out a sheaf of papers. I read the first.

“Property taxes.” I flipped through the other pages. “It’s just records of stuff they needed to keep. They put them into a fireproof box and stored it here. The door’s probably only locked so we don’t snoop.”

“Or this isn’t what the ghost was telling you about. That means there must be something else down here.”

We spent ten minutes crawling around, and finding nothing more than a dead mole that stunk so bad I nearly puked.

“Let’s go,” I said, crouched on my heels with my arms crossed. “There’s nothing here, and it’s freezing.”

Rae shone the flashlight in my face. I swatted it out of the way.

“No need to get snippy,” Rae said. “I was just going to say it’s not cold.”

I took her hand and wrapped it around my arm. “I’m
cold
. Those are goose bumps, all right? Feel them?”

“I didn’t say you weren’t—”

“I’m going. Stay if you want.”

I started crawling away. When Rae grabbed my foot, I yanked hard, almost toppling her over.

“What’s with you?” she said.

I rubbed my arms. Tension strummed my nerves. My jaw ached, and I realized I was clenching my teeth.

“I just—I was okay before but now … I just want to get out.”

Rae crawled up beside me. “You’re sweating, too. Sweat and goose bumps. And your eyes are all glittery, like you have a fever.”

“Maybe I do. Can we just—?”

“There’s something here, isn’t there?”

“No, I—” I stopped and looked around. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just—I need to go.”

“Okay.” She handed me the flashlight. “Lead the way.”

The moment my fingers closed around the flashlight, the light started to dim. Within seconds, it was giving off only a faint yellowish glow.

“Tell me that’s the batteries going,” Rae whispered.

I quickly handed it back to her. The light surged, but only for a second. Then it went out, plunging us into darkness. Rae let out an oath. A swish. Light flared. Rae’s face glowed behind the match flame.

“Knew these things would come in handy someday,” she said. “Now…”

She stopped, her gaze going to the flame. She stared at it like a child mesmerized by a campfire.

“Rae!” I said.

“Oh, uh, sorry.” A sharp shake of her head. We were almost at the door when I heard the distant sound of the basement door opening.

“The match!” I whispered.

“Right.”

She extinguished it. Not by waving it or blowing it, but by cupping the flame in her hand. Then she tossed the dead match and the matchbook over her shoulder.

“Girls?” Mrs. Talbot called from the top of the stairs. “Is your homework done?”

Homework. Simon and Derek. I checked my watch. 7:58.

I scrambled out of the crawl space.

I KNEW RAE WAS DISAPPOINTED by what we’d found—or hadn’t. I felt a weird kind of guilt, like a performer who failed to entertain. But she never doubted I’d seen a ghost or that he’d told me to open that door, and I was grateful for that.

I returned the key, washed, then found Mrs. Talbot and told her I was going upstairs for math tutoring with Derek and that Simon would be there. She hesitated but only for a moment, then sent me off.

I retrieved my newly arrived math text from my room and went around to the boys’ side. The door was open. Simon sprawled on the bed, reading a comic. Derek was hunched over the too-small desk, doing homework.

The room was a reverse image of ours, set at the back of the house instead of the front. Simon’s walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color, everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn’t quite manga, wasn’t quite comic book. More than once Simon had gotten in trouble for doodling in class. Now I could see what he’d been working on.

Derek’s walls were bare. Books were stacked on his dresser and magazines lay open on the bed. Shoved to the back corner of his desk was some kind of contraption full of wires and pulleys. A school project, I supposed, but if I had to build anything that complicated next year, I was doomed.

I rapped on the doorframe.

“Hey.” Simon slapped down the comic as he sat up. “I was just going to tell Derek we should go downstairs, make sure the nurses weren’t giving you a hassle. They didn’t, did they?”

I shook my head.

Derek set his math text on the bedside table, as a prop, then put his binder over it. “I’ll be in the shower. Start without me.”

“Won’t the nurses hear the water running?”

He shrugged, and shoved back his hair, lank and stringy now, the dull sheen of oil glistening under the lights. “Tell them I was already in there. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

He headed for the door, circling as wide around me as he could manage, which made me wonder how badly he
needed
that shower. I wasn’t about to sniff and find out.

If he was showering at night, that might be part of his problem. Kari said she always used to have a bath in the evening, but she’d had to switch to morning showers or her hair would be gross by dinner. I wouldn’t dare suggest this to Derek, but as he passed, I couldn’t resist an innocent, “Why don’t you just shower in the morning?”

“I do,” he muttered as he left.

Simon put away his comic. “Come on in. I don’t bite.”

He lay back in the middle of his bed, springs squeaking, then patted a spot at the edge.

“I’d say this is the first time I’ve had a girl in my bed … if I didn’t mind sounding like a total loser.”

I reached over to put my books on the beside table, hiding my blush. As I opened my text, to look like we were working on it, I knocked the binder off Derek’s. I glimpsed the cover and did a double take.

College Algebra with Trigonometry
.

I flipped through the pages.

“If you can understand any of that, you’re way ahead of me,” Simon said.

“I thought Derek was in tenth grade.”

“Yeah, but not in algebra. Or geometry. Or chemistry, physics, or biology, though he’s only in twelfth grade in the sciences.”