Wraith (4 page)

"No." He sprang up and began to pace, his
voice edged with frustration. "No! I’ve never seen anything like that.
There must be something else. Some point. Some
reason
." He stopped
and held my gaze. "I mean… what am I supposed to
do
with
myself?"

He looked so distraught, so helpless. Those blasted
puppy dog eyes of his were killing me. I almost folded back the covers and got
up to move closer to him, but I caught myself in time.

"Listen," I began, an idea forming,
"I’ll admit I haven’t read much about ghosts; in fact, I’ve avoided the
subject, just like I’ve avoided everything to do with the shadows. But I’m
pretty sure I’ve never heard of a ghost with amnesia. Whatever it is you’re supposed
to be doing, surely you have to remember your own life in order to do it. Maybe
that’s where you need to start?"

A smile spread slowly across his face. "See
there," he said more hopefully, plopping back down on the edge of my bed.
"I knew you could help me."

"I haven’t done anything yet," I
protested.

"Oh yes, you have," he insisted, his green
eyes twinkling. He had propped himself up on one muscular arm and was leaning
over my legs at knee level. "I wish I knew how to thank you."

I drew in a ragged breath.

How about you turn real and take me to prom?

"How about leaving me alone now and letting me
sleep?" I said instead. "We can work on your memory tomorrow."

He stood up immediately. "Whatever you say,
Beautiful. Where shall we meet in the morning? I wouldn't want to drop in
uninvited."

"How about breakfast on the deck?" I
responded, pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d just called me. I had no makeup
on, my hair was in a turban, and I was wearing a sack that looked like
something out of a seventh grade slumber party. He was only flattering me
because he wanted something. Duh.

"Can’t wait," he said with a grin. Then,
after a blur of action that made his entire body translucent for the smallest
whiff of a second, he was gone.

"
Kali!
Kali, wake up! Hurry!"

The voice filtered through the haze of my brain like
a fly trying to swim through syrup. That is to say, it didn’t get too far. My
mind was deeply involved in an endless, ho-hum dream in which Kylee, Tara, and
I were driving around Cheyenne in a car with no doors, trying to tell everyone
that the spaghetti supper at the high school had been cancelled. Only no one
was home, because they had already left to go eat the spaghetti, which meant,
clearly, that we were all about to be jailed for stealing their ticket money.
The fact that my brain was reluctant to leave this spellbinding tale, and
resisted, quite strongly, the voice that kept trying to intrude on it, I can
only blame on continued jet lag.

"Kali, please! You have to wake up!"

I knew whose voice it was, but that didn’t help
anything. My brain seemed pretty sure that Zane was part of another dream, so
it was okay, therefore, for me to go on sleeping.

"KALI!" the voice yelled, mere inches from
my ear. "Wake up NOW!"

I lifted my head off the pillow with a start.
"What the—"

The apology came quickly. "I’m sorry, really I
am. I didn’t want to yell, but I can’t shake you!"

I fought to get my eyes focused. I could barely make
out Zane’s uneven silhouette leaning over me in the near total darkness. It was
still night.

"Are you crazy?" I muttered. "Leave
me alone!"

"I can’t!" he said desperately.
"Please, you’ve got to get up and come with me. I can’t do anything to
stop her, but you can! It’s a matter of life and death!"

It was his tone, rather than his words, that at last
began to clear the cobwebs. I lifted my head and propped up on my elbows.
"What—"

"Just follow me," he ordered. "We can
be there in two minutes." He reached out as if to help me up, but his hand
passed through the crook of my arm, causing him to groan aloud with
aggravation. "Come
on!
"

I forced my body up and out of bed, even as my mind
stayed a step behind. I had felt something when his hand passed through me. I
wasn’t sure what… a curious sensation, like the slightest pinging of vibration.
But maybe I was only imagining it. I was almost certainly only imaging that I
was grabbing my jacket off the hook on the back of the door, stumbling through
the dark condo after Zane’s rapidly moving form, and then opening the door to
the deck.

"Wake up, Kali!" he demanded as I stepped
outside. "Are you with me? You have to be alert for this!"

I paused a moment and blinked. The fleece jacket I
had thrown on covered me little better than my sleep shirt, and the two
together did nothing to ward off the chill of the brisk ocean wind that
suddenly buffeted me from every side. When a burst of sand, spray, and grit
pelted me full in the face, I at last jolted completely awake. 

"What are we doing out here?" I yelled
angrily.

"Good," he said with a nod. "You
are
awake. Now follow me!"

He began to move toward the beach, but I kept my
feet planted. What could he possibly want from me? I was crazy to have followed
him this far.

He turned around and was back at my side in an
instant. "Kali, please! Trust me. I don’t have time to explain. She could
die. Just run after me and you’ll understand soon enough!"

I don’t know why I followed him. All I know is that
it was close enough to dawn that a few scudding clouds had begun to glow white
against the otherwise inky sky, and that there was just enough light on his
face—at that angle and that moment—to convince me that the terror in his voice
was real.

The pathway from our deck to the actual beach was
rough. The condo was jammed into a large cluster of houses at an odd angle,
making us "oceanfront" by only the broadest of real estate
definitions. After navigating the wooden steps off the deck, we had to cross
multiple scrubby yards, gravel walks, and asphalt driveways before my tender
feet (still months away from barefoot weather in Wyoming) at last sunk into the
relative luxury of the coarse, shell-laden island sand. 

Zane kept running.

"It’s not much farther," he encouraged,
alternating between leading me forward and jogging at my side like an athletic
trainer. "You’re doing great."

His voice was measured, but the tenseness was still
there. I picked up my pace, trying to ignore both the biting coldness that
gnawed at my bare legs and the ominous closeness of the ocean itself—which
seemed, in the eerie glow of near dawn, to be composed more of shining,
frothing, whitecaps than dark and rolling waves. This was only a guess on my
part, though, as the only way I could force myself to keep going was to avoid
looking directly at the water.

We ran along the shore for a couple hundred yards,
the slowness of my progress seeming to drive Zane to a near frenzy. Once or
twice he disappeared, again with the same odd blur that dissolved his form to
nothingness in an instant. But each time he reappeared within seconds, seeming
even more agitated, making me think he was checking on the mysterious
her
that
lay ahead of us.

The sand on the dry part of the beach was deep, and
with every step it grabbed my feet up to the ankles and sucked me downward,
providing a perfect imitation of the supernatural, lead-footed feeling I'd
suffered so often in nightmares. Zane tried repeatedly to lead me onto the more
densely packed wet sand, but his efforts were in vain. Try as I might, I could
not block out the near deafening sound and pulsing vibrations of the sea. I
didn’t need to look to know that the waves were more numerous, higher, and more
violent than any I had yet seen. The air was thick with their salty spray, and
my skin was blanketed with moisture even as the wind whipped my minimal
clothing around me.

It was the anxiety in Zane’s voice that drew me on.
I had no idea what he could be afraid of. I only knew that in his case, it
wasn't the ocean.

"There! Right there!" he said finally,
pointing down the beach ahead of us. "Do you see her?"

I took a breath. Then, for the first time, I looked
fully out toward the roiling water.

I could see her. The "she" of Zane’s
concern was just a toddler. Eighteen months old maybe—no more than two. The
child was running, carelessly and fearlessly, right along the water line of the
menacing ocean, flirting with its fickle waves. It was a game many children
played, chasing the receding wave toward the ocean, then racing back to land
ahead of it, squealing with delight should the leading edge of foam catch their
ankles. In gentle surf, on a clear day, and with competent adult supervision,
it was a timeless, harmless enough amusement.

But in the predawn darkness, for a toddler alone on
the North Shore of Oahu, the game was deadly. Here on this island, I knew, the
ocean contained a raw power rivaling any on the planet. In high surf,
constantly shifting sands on the beaches gouged precipitous drop-offs and
exposed sharp coral, while just a few feet beyond, the giant swells of water
spurred unpredictable rip currents and fatally fierce undertows. It was
difficult, even for an adult, to judge how near to shore the next wave would
break and how far out was too far out for safety.

The child didn't have a chance.

Even as I stood rooted to the spot—for one endless
moment struck numb with horror—I could distinctly see the silhouettes of a set
of higher, even more powerful waves gathering steam on the horizon behind her. 

"Run, Kali!" Zane ordered. "There
isn’t much time!"

My feet began to move. The wet sand was indeed
easier to walk on, and after a few faltering paces, I was running full tilt. I
came within range just as she had chased a receding wave all the way to its
source. The child watched with amusement as the last of the waterborne sand
sped around her ankles and returned to the sea; she was less amused when the
next wave crashed into a white froth within feet of her. She attempted, with an
admirable burst of speed, to run up the beach out of its way; but natural
apprehension at last got the best of her, and with a plaintive wail she lost
her balance and fell, face down, into the rising water.

I was there, close enough to grab her, before the
body of the wave struck. It was not a large wave, barely up to my knees, but it
would have been big enough to cover her prone form. The child screamed and
struggled as I held her—both out of fear and, perhaps, the indignity of having
her fine game interrupted by the rudeness of a stranger. I lifted a foot to
make my way back out of the water, barely noticing, above both the child’s screams
and the roar of the ocean behind, that Zane was again yelling at me.

He was telling me to look behind us, saying
something about the next one. But he didn’t have to. I knew without looking
that a larger—no, a much,
much
larger wave was gathering behind me. I
could feel it in the force of the back current that was sucking the remnants of
the last wave around my legs. I could hear it in the hellish silence that hung
in the air where the crash of another, smaller, wave should already be
heard—but was not.

Zane was right beside me, still shouting. I couldn’t
hear him; I couldn’t even look at him, much less at what lay behind us. I did
the only thing I could do. I held on tight to the little girl, fixed my eyes on
the beach, and ran as far as I could run before it caught me.

I did not get far. I felt a splash of hideous cold
on my back, and within an instant my legs were covered to the thigh. I
continued slogging forward, holding the child high, as the water continued
rising to my waist.

No higher
, I prayed silently,
no higher
.

The water stopped rising. But I also stopped moving.
Going forward was no longer an option. The direction of the water had reversed;
the wave was rolling out. And it really, really, wanted both the child and me
to go back with it.

Zane was at my shoulder, shouting into my ear.
Something about swimming parallel to something, not fighting it. But he didn’t
understand.

By pure instinct I made the choice to stop where I
was. I anchored my feet in the sand, digging in my toes. I braced my legs,
forward and back, as best as I could. I kept my eyes closed and my mind
focused. All I had to do was stay on my feet.

The pressure against me was enormous. My foothold
was iffy. The child continued to struggle, flailing like a wild thing. But I
hadn’t taken eleven years of dance for nothing. I might be tall and skinny, but
my legs were strong, my back was strong, and like any ballerina who danced
en
pointe
, I had learned to balance in precarious positions. In the endless
seconds that followed I came close to losing it more times than I could count.
But I was determined. I was not going backward, I was not floating up, and I
was
not
letting go of that baby.

Even if the little demon did take a plug out of my
shoulder with her teeth.

The water level dropped. Thigh high. Knee high. I
waited no more. I lifted my feet and sprinted up the beach and onto the dry
sand.

My feet sank down to the ankles again, and my legs
began to wobble, but I kept moving steadily away from the drone of the ocean
until the painful crunch of scrubby grass and sticks underfoot told me I was
well away from the water’s reach. I paused only long enough to catch my breath,
still holding the crying child in a death grip.

"Where did she come from?" A thin, squeaky
voice said. I think it was mine.

Zane hadn’t stirred from my side. He pointed towards
a beach house directly in front of me. Six wooden steps led from a stone patio
up to a large deck; one of a set of French doors leading into the house hung
ominously open, swinging in the wind. I shifted the child’s weight to my
opposite hip. Her waterlogged diaper weighed half again as much as she did, and
with every wriggle she made, another stream of water trickled unpleasantly down
my already drenched leg. I renewed my grip on the child and began a slow trudge
up the steps. Her cries had reduced to whimpers, but she was still struggling
mightily to be put down.