There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (3 page)

And in the instant it cost me to regain my balance, the front door slammed shut in my face.

In the total darkness, I pounded on the door to get my father's attention. But, though behind me I could hear the corpses scratching at the wood and calling out to me, my own fists made no sound. I couldn't make out the corpses' words; still, I figured that was probably all for the best. Somewhere nearby, a bell was ringing, some sort of alarm that kept clanging on and on and on.

At least there're no corpses in here,
I thought.

And then I felt something touch my face.

Cobwebs,
I thought, and brushed them away.

But then they came back, more solid, more insistent.

I could feel a whimper building in my throat.
If I could only scream,
I thought,
I would wake up.

At which point, the room began to fill with water.

Over my toes, up my legs, up my torso.

I tried to build the whimper up louder than the scratching or the calling or the bell, to a sound loud enough to wake me.

The water was almost to my chin, past my chin, over my head. But still the cobwebby fingers brushed my face, and still the bell clanged. Despite the water, I opened my mouth for one final attempt at sound.

A scream jerked me awake.

I sat up, my heart pounding. For a second, I thought the scream had been mine, but then there was another one. My eyes focused on Vicki standing in the doorway of my room.

I glanced behind me to make sure that she wasn't screaming because something was about to leap out at me. Reassured, I scrambled out of bed. What if she was sleepwalking? Everybody knows you aren't supposed to wake up sleepwalkers. But Vicki had never sleepwalked before, and it was more likely that she was hurt or frightened. "Vicki," I said—
frightened,
I decided as she threw her arms around me and began to sob—"what's the matter?"

The hall light came on, and Dad called, "What's going on?" I could hear him coming down the hall without waiting for an answer, Mom right behind. From Zach's room next to mine, I heard a thud and an angry mumble: Zach tripping over something on his way to the door.

From Vicki I was getting no sense at all. She had her
face pressed into my stomach and only kept repeating, "The bad lady, the bad lady." She was still saying it when the rest of the family caught up.

"What bad lady?" Dad said, crouching down beside us. "Are you hurt? Ted, what happened?" He wedged his hand between my stomach and her forehead, feeling for a fever.

"She was going to hurt Teddy," Vicki said.

Mom gave me one of those so-you're-behind-all-this looks.

I shook my head to indicate my innocence and ignorance.

"Did you wake us all up for a bad dream?" Zach demanded.

Vicki shook her head. "It wasn't a dream. The bad lady was in my room, and I threw the hammer at her, just like you said, Zach."

Mom turned her look onto Zach, who smiled guiltily, then hunched in his shoulders and tried to look small and innocent.

"And it made her go away," Vicki continued, "but then she floated across the hall to Teddy's room."

Dad said, "If Zach's the one who gave you the hammer, she should have gone after him.
I'll
go after him if that hammer put a dent in the wall."

"This is not funny," Mom told him. "I don't know what kind of stories you two have been telling Vicki—"

"I haven't," Zach protested, at the same time I said, "Not me."

Dad finally pulled Vicki away from me. He gave her a tight hug before picking her up. "I know it seemed real, honey," he said. "But it
was
just a dream."

"It wasn't," Vicki insisted. "I saw her in Teddy's room. She was touching his face."

Zach reeled back in horror, clutching at his heart. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "That
was
dangerous! Good thing you stopped her in time."

"Go to bed," Mom ordered Zach. Then, "Sometimes," she told Vicki, following as Dad began to carry Vicki down the hall back to her room, "when we wake up from an especially real-seeming dream, it takes us a few seconds to stop being confused."

"It wasn't a dream," Vicki said again, as the three of them disappeared into her room.

"We'll leave the hall light on," I heard Dad assure her. "Night-lights keep away both bad dreams and bad ladies."

Zach yawned loudly, scratched his rear end loudly, and returned to his room.

Which left me alone in the hall, wondering why Vicki would dream about the bad lady touching my face at the exact moment I was dreaming about cobwebby fingers touching my face.

On the other hand, I thought with a shudder, maybe I didn't want to work that one out after all....

THE NEXT DAY WAS
Saturday. With the telephone strike, Dad had to work both days of the weekend; for the time being, the only day he had off was Thursday. Mom at least had Saturdays off.

Saturdays Vicki and I go to the Rochester Museum and Science Center for fun-type classes. Zach used to come, too, but now he likes to say he's too smart not to recognize school, however it's disguised. I figure he just doesn't like to get up before noon for fear he'll see his shadow and have to crawl back into his hole for six more weeks. I don't think of it as school. In the past I've taken things like snowshoeing, pottery, "Dinosaur Madness," and "Clownology." At the moment, I was two weeks into a four-week session on magic. Vicki was taking something called "Chipmunks and Squirrels," a nature course that involved, as far as I could see, running around the museum's grounds terrorizing small animals, making leaf rubbings, and stuffing down as many animal crackers as possible.

At breakfast Mom didn't say anything about the night before—as though she was hoping that Vicki and I would each assume it had all been a dream. So everything was the same as usual when she dropped us off in front of the building where they have the classes. I took Vicki to her room (the small kids' rooms are clustered together on the second floor, where their noise won't drive the older kids or the office workers crazy), then I went down to the basement for my class.

On this particular day, we learned a couple rope tricks, a mysteriously-disappearing-then-miraculously-reappearing-coin trick, and how to pull foam-rubber rabbits out of the ears of members of our audience.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I trudged up the eighty or ninety stairs between the basement and the second floor. Everybody else was heading down, of course, to the parking lot and their waiting parents.

By the time I got to the second floor, Vicki was the only one left in the classroom. She was wearing a construction-paper headband decorated with a bird beak and was snarfing down the last crumbs from a box of animal crackers. Her lips were bright grape-Kool-Aid purple.

"Come on," I called to her.

"Wait a minute," Vicki said, tipping the box upside down over her mouth. "There's still some in here."

"Take it with you," I told her. "Mom'll be mad
if she has to park the car and come in looking for us."

Vicki walked down the hall, inhaling into the animal cracker box as though she hadn't eaten in a week.

"Let's take the elevator," I said.

The elevator's so slow, you can run from the second floor all the way down to the basement and back faster than the elevator can make it to the first floor, but Vicki was walking so slow and leaving such a trail of cookie crumbs, I thought it'd be faster.

The only people still in the second-floor hallway were some presenters from "Visiting Old Rochester." "Visiting Old Rochester" is one of those one-day courses that your parents make you take. It's like a local-history career day, going from the Indians to George Eastman founding Kodak, with the teachers dressed in appropriate costumes and telling all about "themselves." Still hanging around were a French fur trapper, a nineteenth-century suffragette, a pioneer child, and Abraham Lincoln, talking together. Not that I have any idea what Abraham Lincoln ever had to do with Rochester, New York.

The elevator finally came and we got in, and I began punching the
CLOSE DOOR
button simply for something to do, because nothing can speed up that elevator.

But just as the doors slowly began to close, someone called, "Wait up, please," and I stuck my foot out between the doors.

"Thanks." It was the teacher dressed as the suffragette. She set her sign—
RIGHTS FOR WOMEN
—on the
floor and leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator to start.

Behind me I heard Vicki drop her animal crackers box on the floor.
What a slob,
I thought. I turned to yell at her before the teacher did, and found her pressed up against the back wall, her face white around the Kool-Aid purple of her lips. "It's her," she whispered. She dropped to a crouch, covering her head for protection. I didn't need to ask who "her" was. But how
could
it be her?

The teacher stared at Vicki. "Are you all right, sweetie?" She was young, like most of the teachers at the museum seem to be—probably too young to have kids of her own. Vicki had her face buried in her knees, and she started making a little whimpering sound. The teacher looked at the floor indicator—it still read "2," and it was hard to tell if we were moving yet—then she looked at me. Her expression said, "This little kid isn't going to have some sort of strange fit in here, is she?"

"It's all right, Vicki," I said. "This isn't her. This is just one of the museum teachers. Look at her."
Look at her and reassure me
was what I meant, but Vicki stayed where she was, in her defensive crouch.

The light over the door finally shifted to "I."

I took a firm hold of Vicki's jacket at the shoulder, standing between her and the teacher. Just in case. Not that I'd do much good defending Vicki from a woman who could go through walls and invade dreams.

Vicki continued to whimper.

The teacher continued to look—I thought—like she was praying no emergency would occur that she'd have to cope with.

When the doors finally opened, I hauled Vicki to her feet. I was ready to push her past the teacher, but the teacher was out of there even faster. Maybe she thought Vicki was going to throw up on her. She didn't even say anything about the dropped box of cookies. She practically ran into the school office.

I hustled Vicki outdoors.

Mom beeped her horn and we scrambled into the backseat of the car.

"You two look like you've seen a ghost," Mom said as she pulled away from the curb.

I could see into the building, and there was no sign of the teacher lurking there watching us.

Vicki started to cry.

Mom slammed on the brakes and turned around. "Ted, what did you do?"

My fault again. "Vicki thinks she saw the same woman she was dreaming about," I explained.

Mom looked from me to Vicki to me. Finally she said, "Working at the museum?"

I nodded.

Mom bit her lip, considering. "What does she look like?"

"Dark," Vicki said. "Dark, like Marella—but mean."

I nodded. "Dark eyes. Dark hair."

"Dark skin," Vicki added. "Like Bill Cosby, except that he's nice."

That was wrong. "Maybe Italian or Hispanic," I corrected. "Not African American."

"Like Bill Cosby," Vicki insisted.

I shook my head for Mom to see.

"And she was old," Vicki continued, "like Aunt Rose."

Mom said, "Rose would be delighted to hear that." She looked at me.

"About Ms. DiBella's age." Ms. DiBella is my teacher, fresh out of college last year.

"Were you two looking at the same person?" Mom asked.

I remembered how Vicki had been cowering in the corner, not even looking at the woman. "How was she dressed?" I asked Vicki.

"Long black dress." Vicki rubbed her hands over her arms, indicating full-length sleeves. "A black bonnet that tied under her chin."

"It was the costume that was the same," I explained to Mom. "There was a woman on the elevator done up like Susan B. Anthony. But it wasn't the same woman as your ghost, Vicki."

"There is no ghost," Mom said, annoyed with me even though Vicki calmed down instantly.

The car behind us honked.

Mom started driving again. "I'm glad you realize that the museum woman isn't anybody to be afraid of,"
she said to Vicki. "But there is no such thing as a ghost. And it's very bad of Ted to tell you there is."

"Me?" I said. "How come I always get the blame?"

"I don't want to hear any more about it," Mom said.

But when we got home, she wouldn't let Vicki play outside by herself, and that night she and Dad let Vicki sleep in their room.

EVER SINCE OUR PARENTS
started working such long hours, the only time we can all make it to church together "as a family"—"as a family" is one of my father's favorite phrases—is the Saturday evening mass. Sunday mornings, Dad is gone before the rest of us are up, then Mom's got to go to the coffee shop to serve the Sunday brunch crowd. Zach—favorite child that he is—gets to stay home, alone, or he can visit with his friends, so long as he lets Mom know where he is. Vicki and I, of course, are too young to be left on our own, so we get dropped off at the crack of dawn on the doorstep of my aunt and uncle. And then, lucky Vicki and me, we get to go to mass all over again with Uncle Bob and Aunt Rose and Cousin Jackie.

Excuse me; she would prefer
Jaclyn.

It used to be Jackie, but apparently thirteen-year-olds are too sophisticated for nicknames. Now she insists
on Jaclyn. Which is why—whenever her parents aren't there—I try to remember to call her Jac.

Jackie and I used to get along fairly well, although—since she's two years older—she's always had a tendency to boss me around. But now that she's reached the ripe old age of teenagehood, she doesn't want anything to do with me. And she's no more pleased about being stuck with my company on Sundays than I am about being stuck with hers.