Where I End and You Begin (14 page)

I
n the East, ghosts are sometimes very different. Violent deaths, yes, and unfinished business, yes. The unburied dead come back, vengeful and cruel, just like those in the West that were buried at a crossroads or in an unsanctified grave.

But as you go toward the rising of the sun, emotions carry a lot more weight. The strength of emotion unresolved in life can tie a ghost to this world, just as surely as a violent death will. An emotion so uncontrollable that it takes on a life of its own. They haunt the places they died, tied to this world, and everyone who touches them is infected with the disease of their feelings.

Ghosts who mourn. Ghosts who hate. Ghosts who covet, ghosts who desire. Envy, greed, lust, unrequited love. Resentment. Loneliness.

Sometimes it seems that just about any feeling at all could turn you into a ghost.

“I
don’t want to flunk out of college.”

Those are my first words to Daniel as I climb into his car on Saturday afternoon.

He looks at me in surprise. “I didn’t think you did.”

“No,” I say. “I
really
don’t want to leave. I couldn’t live if I had to leave.”

His brow creases as he moves the car into gear. “What do you mean?”

What
do
I mean?
I’ve spent all night wrapped up in fear and dread, the strength of my desire to stay so overwhelming that at times I nearly climbed down out of my bed and grabbed a beer from my underwear drawer. Drinking in bed is never a good sign. But I didn’t. There’s no way I could have shown Daniel my hung over face.

Now I can’t wait to get out of this car and into an old building, somewhere that time has stopped. I need to stop time, and this is the only way I know how to even pretend.

I stare at my hands and try to process all the emotions tumbling over and over inside me. “I just feel like I’ll die if I have to leave. You’re friends with Father O’Reilly. Can’t you put a good word in for me?”

His lips tighten, but not in anger. He just looks troubled. “I’m not sure Father O’Reilly thinks much of my assessments right now,” he says.

I frown, then remember. “Oh, right. The sabbatical.”

He nods.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Aren’t you just taking a little time off? Away from the pressures of seminary or whatever?”

His brow creases as we turn onto the road toward the highway. I have no idea where we’re going, but I don’t care. As long as it’s something, as long as I’m doing
something
other than stewing in fear.

“It’s different when you’re in Seminary,” he says.

“Different how?”

“Different because being a priest is a life-long commitment. If you take a sabbatical when you’re studying eighteenth century Chinese law, no one cares. But if you take a sabbatical when you’re supposed to be called by God...” He trails off and shrugs, but a line of tension remains in his shoulders, and I can see this bothers him more than he is letting on.

Well, it makes sense. “So why are you taking a sabbatical?” I ask. “Is there something wrong?”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out between his teeth. “Yes. No. I don’t know,” he says. “It’s...it’s very personal. Can we not talk about it?”

I don’t want to admit it, but that stings a little. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s fine. Where are we going?”

“Nompton,” he says, clearly relieved at the change in subject. “There’s so much stuff there. I looked it up online, just to see what’s around here.”

I nod. “Yeah, Nompton is Jibril and Alice’s favorite place to go. There’s like ten different places you can explore. The hospital, the school, a couple of old industrial plants, some houses, and there’s this church that’s all boarded up. You can’t go in it, but it’s pretty on the outside. I don’t even think the diner is one anyone’s thought of.”

He nods. “I didn’t see it listed. We’ll have to go back with a camera some time, but right now I want to go visit the old school.”

Oooh,
I think. “That sounds delightfully creepy.”

He smiles. “I don’t think there are any ghosts there.”

“Yeah, but I bet there’s a ton of stuff related to kids. Toys and murals and junk associated with kids is always creepy when it’s covered in dust or whatever.”

“You’re probably right,” he says. “You know more about that than I do.”

I snort. “You think so?”

“My parents were pretty strict with me, too,” he says. “My mom didn’t like ghost stories or Harry Potter or any of that stuff. She never expressly forbid it, but I was such a suck up that I didn’t go against what she wanted.” The tone in his voice is almost bitter and I look at him in surprise.

He stares at the road ahead of us, turning onto the highway, and doesn’t even glance at me.

That’s fine. It gives me a chance to study him.

Tanya’s right. Hell, I know she’s right. Daniel is really hot, but to me it’s sort of overshadowed by his personality, which is... almost odd, because if there’s anything Daniel seems like, it’s gentle. He’s gentle in spirit. He’s not hard like me, not full of nails and bile. He’s just sweet, and kind, and a good person. People like that, usually they are retiring. Their sweet natures don’t come out, and you think of them in terms of their looks, but Daniel’s sweet nature almost drowns out the fact that he is, in fact, really hot.

I’m attracted to him, no question, but I’m glad I’m not supposed to be, and he’s not supposed to be attracted to me. It makes it so much easier to not leap on it like a lifeline, as though attraction signified anything other than lust. Here is a man I don’t have to sleep with. Here is a man who won’t sleep with me. We are
friends.

It’s a refreshing sort of relationship.

I look back at the road. “I was interested in ghosts since I was an itty bitty kid,” I say. “I’ve always been fascinated by ghost stories, so I had a lot of that stuff under my belt before my mom went a little crazy with the religion.”

“How’d you get interested in that?” he asks me.

I frown. “I don’t know. I don’t remember at all. All I can really remember is that by the time I was in second grade I was reading ghost books like they were candy, and that was all I wanted to read, like, ever. Anything creepy, I loved it. I know all sorts of things about ghosts and werewolves and vampires and stuff.”

He smiles at that. “What do you know about vampires?”

“Everything.”

“Tell me something interesting about vampires.”

I think about this. “Every culture in the world has a vampire figure in it,” I say. “They don’t always drink blood, but they definitely rise from the dead and prey on the living.”

“And werewolves?”

“Did you know you can become a werewolf by drinking water from a wolf’s footprint?”

“I did not know that.”

“Well,” I say. “Now you do. So be careful when you’re drinking water from canine footprints and make sure it’s a dog.”

He laughs at that. “I’ll be sure to remember.”

“What about you?” I say. “What are you into? Other than God.”

He purses his lips. “Art,” he says. “I really did study photography in undergrad, but I went into seminary after I graduated.”

“Why? Because there are no jobs for photography majors?”

He looks vaguely pained. “I know you’re joking, but yeah, that was part of it. The tipping point. It had always been an option for me, you know? In the back of my mind. And when I realized that there was no reason for me to try to pursue photography other than personal pleasure, that ministry would be more fulfilling and more meaningful, I decided to become a priest.”

“What, you have nothing better to do so you wanted to give up sex and love and all that?” I stare at him.

He gives me an irritated glare. “There are different kinds of love,” he tells me.

“I know that.”

“So I wouldn’t be giving up love.”

I shake my head. “I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that,” I say. Giving up sex? I just can’t even imagine that. “Do you have to give up masturbating, too?” I ask him.

His cheeks color again and I try to stifle my smile. Teasing him is fun. “Are you always so crude?” he asks me.

“Usually cruder,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’m not sharing that with you.”

“Because you secretly do masturbate and you aren’t supposed to, or because you don’t and just talking about it makes you happy in your pants?”

“Bianca!”

I laugh and hold up my hands. “Okay, okay. I’m just teasing you. You’re fun to tease. I tease because I care.”

“Hmph,” he says, and then we’ve reached the outskirts of Nompton.

Daniel parks the car in our usual spot. I get out of the car and feel the bite of winter in the air. The weather is getting colder, and the last time I saw the sun was on Tuesday. I have a scarf with me this time, and I wrap it around my neck while Daniel pops the trunk. I wonder if he’s made any more of those delicious kolaches and wander over, curious, but instead he pulls out a large dark bag.

He sees me raise my eyebrows and grins at me.

“Equipment,” he says. “Need some light for this one. There’s a lot of interior rooms and it’s bigger than the hospital.”

I nod. “Anything I can carry?”

“No, don’t worry about it. I have it. One of us has to have free hands.”

“I have a flashlight,” I say.

“You won’t need it.”

Now I’m
really
curious, but I say nothing as we wander down the street, trying to look unobtrusive and totally innocent.

The school is actually in the older part of town, a place I haven’t been before. The town sort of expanded in the direction of the highway when it was built, but the town didn’t actually grow in population, so many of the buildings at the outskirts were abandoned.

“I read this place was closed in the early eighties,” Daniel says as we approach a large, hulking building. “It was used for K through twelve, so there should be some really interesting stuff in it.”

There’s not even a fence surrounding the school, so we can walk right up to it. The front door is, of course, locked, but Daniel leads me around to the back where an old playground sits. The equipment is faded, and the blacktop behind the school has cracked and heaved and grown through with choking weeds. It was painted once, but between the sun and the overgrowth the paint is almost invisible now. At the end of the blacktop is a hole in the ground, probably from a basketball hoop or something similar.

One window is broken out completely and the wood boarding it up is loose. We scramble through it into the old gymnasium.

The moment we step inside, it’s different from the other places we’ve been to. The room is huge, like a cathedral, and the windows running around the top of the walls, letting in the gray light, illuminate the space softly, muting its faded colors until it seems that we have stepped back into a world painted only in monochrome.

Ropes still dangle from the rafters. I always hated ropes in gym class. I could never get up them, and I’m not about to try now. I still wander over and touch one.

Small strands of hemp come away in my hand at the barest caress. The illusion of solidity, like a world built only of dust. I grasp it more firmly and give it a shake. Hemp rains down around me, and I’m certain if I tried to climb up I’d be eating the wood-laid floor before I even put my full weight on it.

Behind me, the floorboards creak as Daniel moves across them, and I steal a glance at him. His sandy hair is dark in the dim light, and his camera is in his hands as he wanders, his brown eyes searching for just the right angle.

I’ve known photography and art students. Not many, since our paths don’t cross often, but they’re all sharp-eyed, intense. Daniel’s soft, absorbing gaze is almost out of place as he serenely surveys the fall of light streaming in through the windows. Even in the grayness the light is almost solid with flying dust motes.

I watch him move, casual and unhurried. His footsteps are muffled against the wood floor, but the emptiness of the enormous room takes the soft sounds of his footfalls and throws them up against the walls where they ricochet back and forth.

Then he glances at me and smiles. I smile back, but it seems forced on my face and I turn away, studying the old gym. All the scents of a gym—sweat and farts and all that disgusting stuff—has faded with time. I always hated gym in high school. I hated the stink of it.

A sound pulls my attention and I turn to see Daniel in the middle of the dusty floor pulling equipment out of his bag. The first thing I see is an electric fluorescent torch, the bulb caged in steel bars, hooked up to a portable battery. He sets them on the floor, then pulls out a plastic package.

I cross the floor as I watch him open it, and I’m surprised to see that he’s brought along a small package of dust masks. He smiles at me as I approach.

“Got kind of paranoid when you said we were probably breathing in lead paint and asbestos,” he says. “Here.”

I reach out and take the mask from him. Our fingers brush together for a brief moment, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with the need to be touched.

Not fucked. Not kissed. Not titillated. Just... held, perhaps. Embraced. Enfolded.

I pull away quickly and turn my attention to the little mask in my hand before slipping it over my head and bending the metal piece around the bridge of my nose. Immediately my mouth and lips begin to heat up. “If I’d known I was going to be wearing this I would have left my scarf at home,” I say.

He’s putting his on as well, and I see him smile beneath it. Then his breath, slipping upwards, fogs his glasses and he heaves a sigh, pushing them to the top of his head.

I point to them. “Don’t you need those to see?”

“Not really,” he says. “The prescription is pretty weak, but I wear them to drive.” He swings the black bag over his body and hoists the light in his hand. “Ready?”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to hold that?”

“I’m sure,” he says. “It’s fine. I read online that we should have a stick, though, to test stuff like floors and move things out of the way that we might not want to touch with our hands. Think you can find something like that?”

I purse my lips and look around. “Let me peek in the office,” I say. “Maybe there’s some leftover sports equipment.” Along one wall are the old offices and two restroom doors.

He follows me as I trail over to the office. Inside there is a large metal cabinet, the kind that might hold some sort of supplies. Slipping inside I try the handle and it swings open.

The saddest collection of balls—soccer and basketball both—outside of Marchand House sit there, mostly collapsed but still clinging to air pumped into them decades ago, before I was born, before Daniel was probably born. They’re useless, but at the bottom of the cabinet is an old aluminum bat. I pick it up.

“Ready,” I say.

We push through the doors of the gym and into the school proper.

Shadows dance and dart as we move through the windowless halls. We pass rows and rows of lockers, some closed, some gaping open. The lights and ceiling above us are water stained and brown, and paper and old insulation lines the floor.