There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (2 page)

I grabbed hold of Vicki's sleeve to get her to hurry up—it's embarrassing to have the whole bus wait for the kid everybody knows is your sister.

"I didn't do it on purpose," she repeated to Zach.

Zach, holding his homework at arm's length so it wouldn't drip on him, tapped her none too gently on top of the head to show just where he figured she'd been dropped.

She began to howl again, but fortunately she kept on walking.

None of us bothered to answer as Mom's voice followed us outside. "And have any of you brushed your teeth?"

FOR THE NEXT COUPLE
days, I pretty much forgot about Marella. For one thing, she behaved herself the rest of that first day, which was a good thing, since Dad was able to take off enough time from accidentally sabotaging people's phones to drop in for dinner, so there wasn't an extra chair. And apparently she wasn't much for eating, so—after a while and because our table conversation was boring, according to Vicki—she stopped coming at mealtimes.

Still, Vicki seemed to be spending a lot of time in her room, playing quietly, having earnest little conversations with herself. Mom and Dad thought it was cute, Zach asked if there were any other demented people in the family, and I spent more time worrying about the Social Studies Fair than about people who weren't there.

My project was Luxembourg—which just goes to show that our countries were assigned to us, since who
in their right mind would choose Luxembourg? The whole country isn't that much bigger than Rochester. The year before, when we'd done states, I'd gotten Ohio. I'd written a real nice letter to the board of tourism, explaining about the fair and telling them I'd appreciate any flyers or travel brochures or other information they might have. The entire fifth grade wrote these letters to various states, and most of them got all sorts of wonderful stuff in return: postcards, state flags, bumper stickers. Ohio was one of two states that did not respond. Anyway, this year I'd written a letter to Luxembourg. Now, with only the weekend left till the fair, it looked like I was going to be stood up again.

So Friday, after dinner, I bicycled to the library to look up information about Luxembourg, the one country in the world in which nothing interesting has ever happened.

I'd already done the written report—it had been due the Monday before the fair—but I was looking for maps and interesting pictures to trace for my display. Still, all the while I was thinking about how Joe Antonio had constructed a Lego model of the Eiffel Tower, and Andrea Dittman—who was doing Scotland—had this inflatable Loch Ness Monster her dad had brought back from a business trip, and Lenny Stetzel had been telling us for weeks about the delicious Greek baklava his mother was going to bake.

The librarian suggested
National Geographic
and—hooray!—there was an article in the July 1970 issue.
(National Geographic
has been around forever, so it's probably even done a piece on Ohio.)

Luxembourg
is
kind of pretty, but there was no way I could trace those pictures. I started feeding quarters into the photocopier.

The librarian came up behind me. I was sure she was about to tell me I was damaging the binding on the magazine and that I'd have to stop making my little black-and-white, nearly illegible copies, but she said, "Are you aware, young man, that there are several large boxes of
National Geographic
in the used-books room? The magazines are only twenty-five cents each."

For once I was lucky. Somebody must have been cleaning out their attic, because there were these boxes full of magazines—boxes labeled and in chronological order—from 1963 to 1981.

I found the July 1970 issue, paid my quarter, and bicycled home.

Now what? The judges would not be impressed by my report and a single issue of
National Geographic
lying side by side, no matter how old that issue was. I decided it would look like more if I spread it out: cut out the pictures, paste them on something, maybe draw a picture of the Luxembourg flag in the middle (three horizontal stripes: red, white, and blue—real creative), or maybe I could draw a giant map of Luxembourg and put the pictures around the inside of that.

I decided I did not want to use poster board. For one thing, we didn't have any, and if I asked my mother to
buy some now, she'd ask why I'd waited so long to start. For another, I remembered that last year those of us who'd used poster board had spent half the evening picking up our displays every time they tipped over. I needed something more substantial.

After generations of Beatsons living in the same house, our basement is full of just about everything anybody could need. In fact, our basement—come to think of it—is the only part of the house that is the least bit spooky, with its packed-dirt floor and separate little cubbyhole rooms for storage. But Mom has about a dozen braided area rugs all over the laundry and workbench areas, and it's well lighted. I found a section—about three feet by five feet—of wall paneling left over from the latest redoing of the downstairs bathroom. Just what I needed. Properly braced,
that
wouldn't sag under its own weight and fall.

I positioned the best illustrations and left space for the flag, then went to fetch a hammer and nails. The nails I found right away. But the only hammer was the rubber mallet for putting hubcaps back on after changing the car's tires.

"Zach," I called up the basement stairs. "Zach!" I could hear him—talking on the phone; how come he couldn't hear me?

I trudged upstairs. "Zach, where's the hammer?"

Zach put his hand over the receiver. "Can't you see I'm on the phone?" he snarled.

Yeah, and by the way he'd been talking, I could see he was on the phone with a girl.

"I need the hammer," I said.

"It's in the basement."

"No, it's not."

Zach shrugged, his contribution to scholastic endeavor exhausted, and went back to his phone conversation.

I returned to the basement and tried pounding a nail with the rubber mallet. I missed, hit the wood, bounced off the wood, and came close to knocking myself out. The next time I aimed more carefully, but even hitting the nail didn't get me anywhere.

Back upstairs, Zach was off the phone and drinking milk from the carton, which he knows drives Mom crazy. "Have you thought where the hammer could be?" I asked him.

Apparently he hadn't heard me coming up behind him, and he choked, spitting and dribbling milk all over. "Do you mind?" he sputtered.

Zach isn't the handy kind around the house, so it really didn't seem likely that he'd used the hammer and could be harassed into remembering where it was.

So I called Mom at work, which I guess wasn't a good idea. They had to call her to the phone, and when she came on, she said, "What's happened? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said. "I'm looking for the hammer."

There was a long icy silence. "And you thought I might have brought it with me to the restaurant?"

I squirmed. "I was hoping you might know where it is."

"In the basement, as far as I know." She got suspicious again. "Ted, is there something wrong at the house?"

What was she picturing? "No," I assured her. "I just need it for a school project. It's not in the basement. Do you think Dad took it to work?"

"No, they gave him his own toolbox. Check the basement again."

"Right." She was just trying to get rid of me. We both knew I wouldn't have called without carefully checking the basement to begin with. "Thanks, anyway."

"Toodles," she said. "I'll be home in another hour and a half."

I hung up. All this wonderful enthusiasm for Luxembourg, and no way to use it. I knew if I waited too long, it'd go away. So I figured,
Oh, all right. Why not?

I went upstairs and peeked into Vicki's room—Zach is the only one who closes his door: closes, locks, and barricades—with soiled laundry and week-old lunch bags. "Vicki," I whisper-called into the darkness. "You still awake?"

"Yes, Teddy," she answered. She's the only person in the world I allow to call me Teddy.

"You wouldn't happen to know where the hammer is, would you?"

"I've got it."

I saw her reach under her pillow and pull it out. I went into the room. "What in the world are you doing with that?" I had thought maybe she'd used it to crack nuts or kill spiders, but under her pillow was weird.

Weirder yet was that she wouldn't put the hammer into my outstretched hand. "It's protection," she said.

"Against what?" I sat on the edge of her bed, wondering if she'd heard something scary on the news.

"Against the bad lady," Vicki said.

"What bad lady?"

"The one who comes here at night."

"Here?" I asked, still trying to relate this to something on the news. "This neighborhood?"

"This room," Vicki said.

"Vicki," I told her, laying my hand on hers, "there's no bad lady. How could she get in here? March is too cold out for leaving the windows open—"

"She comes through the walls," Vicki said.

"Oh," I said. Then I had a sudden inspiration. "Like Marella?"

"Marella's afraid of her."

"What, exactly, does this bad lady do?" I asked.

Vicki gave me that look reserved for the very bright to give to the very slow. "She comes through the walls," she said.

Well, yeah, I guess that would have been enough for me, too. She wasn't going to hand over that hammer, I could tell. I tried a different approach. "Have you talked to Mommy or Daddy about this?"

"I told Zach. I asked if I could sleep in his room so the bad lady couldn't find me, and he told me I had to sleep here but I could use the hammer to protect myself."

Good old Zach.

"Well, could you loan me the hammer for five m—"

"Tomorrow," Vicki said. "During the day."

"Right," I said. There was no use arguing, I could tell. "Well, good night, Vicki." I felt sorry that she was so obviously worried, so I added, "And remember: Mommy and Daddy and I—and even Zach—we'd never let anything hurt you."

Vicki snorted as she replaced the hammer under her pillow. Even at five years old she knew enough to recognize that as the empty promise it was.

I WAS HAVING
a bad dream.

You know how in dreams you can know things that there's no way of knowing? I knew I was in Luxembourg. (See what being too conscientious about homework can lead to?) I was in an abandoned castle. The rooms were empty and huge: seven or eight times taller than me, with acres of polished-stone floor to cross before coming to a pair of golden doors opened to reveal an identical room beyond, leading to another pair of golden doors opening into another room ... on and on as far as the eye could see. There was something I needed to get—I didn't know what, but I was desperate for it—and I walked faster and faster, searching frantically, my footsteps echoing hollowly. I knew—the way you know in dreams—that it was no use calling out: My voice wouldn't work.

And I also knew, though the castle didn't look particularly scary, that something bad was about to happen.

I mean, Something Really Bad.

But then I found what I was looking for. It was a hammer, lying on the floor in the middle of a room just like all the other rooms. I thought now that I'd found it, I'd wake up. But I picked it up and nothing happened, so I turned to retrace my steps.

Except that the rooms looked different, coming from this direction. They were still huge, but instead of being empty, they were full of once-rich-but-now-moldy couches and chairs. And lounging on the furniture, in equally once-rich-but-now-moldy clothes, were decaying corpses.

Well,
I said to my dream self,
who needs this? There must be a back door.

I turned back to keep on going past where I had picked up the hammer, but now I saw that there were no more rooms beyond this one. No windows, either, now that I thought about it. I had to go out the way I had come in.

The rooms I had to pass through stretched in a straight line before me, each room smaller and smaller, visible through the open doorways. Far off I could see a hint of green grass and blue sky—the safety of outside. I held the hammer close to my chest and started walking. The corpses stayed where they were. This wasn't so bad, after all.

Except that when I passed through the first doorway,
the huge golden doors slammed shut behind me, cutting off any possible retreat.

So I started running, just in case the other doors started closing, and that got the attention of the corpses in the second room. They jumped up, all bony and disgusting, some of them leaving behind clumps of loose hair and tattered finery on the furniture. They started to close in on me, their movements stiff and jerky—like badly controlled marionettes—but fast.

Zach says that if you die in a dream, it's such a shock to your system that you actually will die. I've always thought that was pretty dumb, and I'd always meant to look it up somewhere but had never gotten around to it. At this point it suddenly didn't seem so dumb anymore.

I burst through the second set of doors, and they slammed shut behind me.

The corpses in that room got to their feet.

Room after room, I fled. My heart felt as though it would burst, but in each room the corpses were a little bit faster. I could smell them—like the rotten seaweed that sometimes accumulates on Lake Ontario—and I could feel their bony fingers snatching at my clothes, each time a little bit more solid as they came closer and closer.

And then suddenly I was in the next to the last room. I could see outside clearly. Luxembourg's one mountain range, the Ardennes, towered in the distance, dwarfing the telephone pole practically on the castle's doorstep. My father was on the telephone pole, reading the repair manual, not even aware of my danger.

I tried to cry out, but still my voice wouldn't work. Just as I reached the second-to-the-last doorway, the fastest of the corpses got a solid grip on the collar of my shirt. I felt my shirt bunching up against my throat. Behind me, I could hear the corpse's bones rattling as it tugged, then I heard my shirt ripping. I half fell forward as a sizable chunk of shirt gave way. The corpse must have fallen backward. The doors slammed shut between us, and there weren't even any corpses in this last, smallest, room—just a tiny entryway, about the size of an elevator. But I staggered, still off balance from the tug that last corpse had given.