Texas Gothic

4



phin bounded into the workroom, a forty-four-ounce soft drink in one hand and a reusable shopping bag in the other. She started talking without any greeting, which was normal, but her words tumbled over each other in excitement, which made me very nervous.

“Hey, Amy! Guess what.”

With most people, “Guess what” was a rhetorical opening statement, but Phin clearly expected me to take a stab at clairvoyance. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and sighed loudly. “You’re late and you don’t bother to answer your cell phone.”

She waved off my tacit rebuke. “That’s not a guess, that’s self-evident.”

Subtlety really was wasted on her. I eyed the Route 44 in her hand and the straw clamped in her teeth. “It is also evident you have forgotten my cherry limeade.”

“Oh.” Guilt flashed on her face. “Sorry.” She held out the cup. “Vanilla Coke? There’s still a lot left.”

“No thanks.” I’d written the drink off as a loss an hour ago. “So what kept you? Extraterrestrials landing at the supermarket?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She plunked her shopping bag beside the rest of her mess and announced, “There’s a ghost on the neighbors’ ranch.”

I sat up so fast the dogs jerked out of their snooze.

“What?”

“They have a ghost on their prop-er-ty.” The last word was broken like she was spelling it out for a moron.

I ignored that—it was my fault for not saying what I meant, which was, Really? Ben McCulloch wasn’t just making up things to be mad about?—and concentrated on the part that had my heart tap-dancing against my ribs. “You didn’t go over there, did you?”

“Where?” Phin asked. “ ‘Over there’ is a relative adverb phrase, Amy, and not much use without—”

“Onto the McCulloch prop-er-ty,” I interrupted. Jeez Louise, sometimes I was sure she could only be that obtuse on purpose.

“Why would I go there?” she asked.

“To look for the ghost.”

“Without any equipment?” Her tone implied that I’d suggested she go snow skiing in a bikini. “Of course not. Besides, it’s still daylight.”

At just past midsummer, dusk lasted until almost nine o’clock, which let me breathe again. I still had time to make sure Phin didn’t do anything stupid. “How did you find out about this ghost?”

“In town.” She stabbed the straw into the ice at the bottom of her cup. “Everyone is talking about it.”

That was what Ben McCulloch had said. Everyone was talking about the ghost, and it was making his life difficult. My brain spun, trying to fit this information into a very fragmented picture. “Then why didn’t we hear about it before this? And why didn’t Aunt Hyacinth say anything?”

“We haven’t been off the farm in days.” Phin dismissed the question with a shrug. “And Aunt Hy had a lot on her mind before she left.”

The memory of my aunt on the porch, Mom waiting in the van, rushed back again. I guess there had been something she forgot to tell me. As for not going into town, that was true, too. And even if I’d watched the local news—which wasn’t local at all, but out of Austin—that wasn’t the type of thing most channels would carry except at Halloween.

“Do you think it’s an actual ghost,” I asked, “or just a legend?”

“It could be either,” said Phin. “Or both—a minor paranormal event that gossip has blown up into a full-fledged haunting.” She shook the ice in her drink and went on conversationally, “There is a sad lack of firsthand accounts. Mostly hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Nothing even to say what kind of apparition, if it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, or a woman in white, or what. Since it’s by the river, it could even be a variation of La Llorona.”

The name yanked tight the coiled knot in my gut, making it suddenly hard to breathe. I tried to keep my reaction from showing, and the old emotions pushed into the corner where they belonged. “La Llorona is south of here, on a completely different river. On the San Antonio River, at Goliad.”

Phin shook her head, mouth full of soda, and swallowed before she answered. “La Llorona—the weeping woman—is just a type of apparition. They fall into categories. Don’t you remember any of this stuff? You read every book on the subject when we were kids.”

“I’ve had other things to think about lately.” Things like being devoted to reality. “Spectral taxonomy isn’t something they cover on college entrance exams.”

Her snort said that she found this a serious lack on the part of admissions boards everywhere. I was contractually obligated to love Phin, but she was idiosyncratic, to say the least, and sometimes outright infuriating. Other times, in spite of everything, she made me laugh.

Which I almost did—until she said, “In any case, I’m keeping an open mind that there’s an actual haunting of some sort. After all, it could have to do with the body by the river.”

“The what?” This was not a rhetorical question. I mean, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to come out of my sister’s mouth, but the ultracasual way she’d said it made me doubt my own ears. “As in dead body?”

“Of course dead body.” She raised her brows. “If it were a live body, I would have said ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or ‘person.’ Semantics are important.”

I ignored that. “By our river?”

She nodded and sipped her soda. “A mile or two upstream, judging by where I saw the sheriff’s cruiser when I drove by.”

“Sheriff’s cruiser?” I echoed. Again.

Phin’s brows knit in concern. “Have you had some sort of sudden-onset hearing loss?” She bent to speak rather loudly a few inches from my face. “Are you having any dizziness? Ringing in your ears?”

I brushed her off and pushed out of my chair. “Of course not. I mean, why the sheriff?”

“To keep people away, of course. Until the forensic team gets in there and decides if it’s a crime scene or not.” She waved away such trivial concerns as homicide. “But that’s really not important.”

My mouth worked up and down, a soundless guppy face of … There were no words for my emotion. Finally I managed, “Not important? You didn’t think you should lead with the fact that someone has been killed mere miles from where we’re staying?”

“Well, not recently,” she said, as if I were the one incapable of conducting a linear conversation. “That’s why they had to wait on the physical anthropology team to come from the university.”

I thought after “dead body” I could be excused for being a little slow to catch up. “Physical anthropology” meant that what they’d found were mostly bones. But it was summer in Texas. Hot, but dry. How long would it take for a body to become a skeleton?

“When did this happen?” I asked, trailing her as she went to her laptop.

“No one knows yet.” Phin ducked under the table to mess with some wires running down to the outlet in the floor. “They just started investigating today.”

I addressed her rear end. “No, I mean, when was the body, skeleton, whatever, discovered?”

“A few days ago.” She emerged, straightened, and pushed a few wisps of hair out of her face. “Somebody’s building a bridge, and they’d barely begun when the crew uncovered a skull and some bones, and tomorrow the UT physical anthropology department will excavate the rest. Which is why the sheriff’s cruiser is extremely irritating, because this would be the perfect chance to test my coronal aura visual media transfer device.… ”

She started talking gadgets and I stopped listening. I was trying to sort through what Ben McCulloch had said in his litany of Goodnight offenses. Something about a bridge, one that they were building because Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t let them cross the river on her land. Which didn’t sound like her, but I put that part aside. Maybe she’d explain if she emailed me back—

And that was as far as I got, because Phin’s words had tripped my pay-attention-this-is-trouble switch.

So this is the perfect opportunity to expand my research on the measurable paraphysical effects of supernatural phenomenon.

“Hang on,” I said when she paused to take a breath, and I pointed to the contraption on the table. “You mean this is some kind of ghost detector you’re planning to use over on the McCulloch property?”

“Of course not!” she said in a huff. “It’s a spectral energy visualizer. Weren’t you listening?”

I placed my hands flat on the slate table, hoping to channel some of that cool into my demeanor. “Listen, Phin. You can’t go around spouting off about supernatural phenomena. I mean, Austin is pretty open-minded, but we’re not in Austin. This is a small town. And you definitely can’t go ghost hunting or energy visualizing or whatever on the McCullochs’ place. We need to keep well clear— What are you doing?”

She continued to open and close the workroom cabinets and drawers. “I’m trying to find an EMF meter in Aunt Hy’s things. I blew mine out in an experiment for my physics final.”

“You don’t need an EMF meter. You need to pay attention. This is important.” I followed her around the room, talking to the back of her head. Maybe if I threw enough words at her, some of them would penetrate her skull. “The McCullochs are already peeved at Aunt Hyacinth. If they’re trying to build this bridge, and then this body turns up, and if the ghost talk is making it even harder to get business done, their tolerance for quirky girl ghost detectives is going to be really low right now.”

“Aha!” Triumphant, she extracted something that looked like a ray gun from one of the drawers.

“What is that?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Infrared thermometer, of course. I knew she’d have one. Culinary equipment has made it so much easier to be precise in cooking up spells.” She continued searching. “She’s got to have an EMF meter, too. It’s important to know where the electromagnetic fields are when you’re working.”

I tried a more logical approach. “The ranch is about a bazillion acres huge. How are you going to know where to look for spectral auras or whatever?”

She gave me a don’t-be-ridiculous look. “At the shallow grave, of course.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant. Because the only thing worse than trespassing would be trespassing on a crime scene.” I slapped a hand on the cabinet door she was about to open. “Are you listening, Phin?”

Finally she turned and faced me. “We wouldn’t be trespassing,” she said, as if stating something obvious. “We’ve been invited.”

“By whom?” The only thing obvious to me was how much we would not be welcome.

“By Mark.”

“And who is Mark?”

“One of the anthropology people. I met him in the hardware store. He’s the one who told me they’d be digging tomorrow, and he invited us to come and see.” She pulled at the cabinet door.

I leaned against it. “Right. The dig. Tomorrow. Not ghost hunting tonight.”

“It needs to be dark to image the Kirlian aura!” Pull. “Plus if we go tonight, I can get data before and after excavation.”

Push. “I’m not going.”

She stopped and gaped at me like I’d told her I wanted fried kitten for breakfast. “But you have to go! Investigations have to be done in pairs to corroborate subjective experiences.”

I dropped my hand from the cabinet and drew myself up to my full height, which was respectable but only nose high to my sister, Galadriel. I made the best of it, though. “I have one purpose in this family, and that’s to convince people we’re normal. I haven’t done a bang-up job of it so far today, but I’m not going to make it worse by aiding and abetting your trespassing.”

“But how else am I going to test my coronal aura visualizer?”

“Test it on Uncle Burt.”

Snap. The lights went out and the air conditioner stopped humming. Again.

“Dammit, Phin!” With the blackout curtains still up, the room was pitch dark.

“It wasn’t me!” she cried. “You see—Uncle Burt doesn’t want me to test it on him.”

“We’re in the country. The power goes out all the time, even without your, or Uncle Burt’s, help.” It went out so often that there were flashlights stashed in all the rooms. I stumbled to a drawer by the door and rooted around for one.

There was the scratch of a match and then a flickering glow as Phin lit one of the many candles around the room. Aunt Hy made those, too, but I rarely lit any, since I didn’t know what was for decoration and what held some arcane purpose.

“Maybe it’s the McCullochs’ ghost,” said Phin, the dancing flame casting eerie shadows on her face, the stone walls and black drapes turning the cozy room into something from a macabre fairy tale.

“That’s not funny.” And then, because I wasn’t sure she was joking, I asked, “A ghost couldn’t get through the security system, right?”

“Of course not,” Phin assured me. “Aunt Hyacinth knows what she’s doing. Plus twenty-five years of positive energy use here has strengthened it until the spectral equivalent of an F-five tornado couldn’t get through.”

While I was picturing that with some dismay—did that mean there was a spectral equivalent to a house-leveling tornado?—something cold and clammy pressed against the back of my leg. I jumped with a startled squeal. In the dim light, Sadie’s eyes shone back reproachfully, while the other dogs pressed close to me for comfort.

“For crying out loud.” Spurred back to sense, I found two flashlights and gave one to Phin. “I’m going out to the fuse box. Keep the dogs inside so they don’t give me another heart attack.”

“Here,” said Phin, running to her equipment and returning with the headlamp she’d worn earlier. “So you can keep both hands free.”

I took it, even though I knew I would feel too ridiculous to put it on. “Thanks.”

I went out through the mudroom, relieved to see that it wasn’t as dark outside as it seemed in the house. The sun had set behind the big granite bluff to the southwest, casting everything into an eerie twilight of silvery blue and indigo shadows. Sunset had also brought a breeze to blow away some of the heat of the day, and dark shapes rode the currents overhead.

Bats. I shivered. They lived in the limestone caves that riddled the hills, and dusk brought them out to hunt bugs. I was generally pro-bat, except when I was trekking through the dark trying not to think about the inevitably dire fate of every horror movie character stupid enough to go into the dark with a flashlight and check the fuses.

The breaker box was outside the physical and metaphysical barrier of the board fence. A ridiculous arrangement. I slipped out of the gate, feeling the change like a pop in my ears, a tingle of warning. Maybe because I was still thinking of dead bodies. Aunt Hyacinth’s protections around the house would stop a spirit. They wouldn’t do anything against an axe murderer except make him queasy, which didn’t seem like it would be much of a deterrent. I mean, a strong stomach probably came with the job.

The thought made me hurry as I tried to outrace my nerves. Unease had knotted tight under my ribs when Phin had mentioned F5 arcane tornados, and it hadn’t loosened.

Phin’s talk of ghosts shouldn’t have bothered me so much. I’d grown up around Uncle Burt, and my cousin Daisy had been dealing with the dead as long as any of us could remember. But tonight I could not push away images of cold, silty water and slimy rocks, and thin, pale hands reaching—

The breeze lifted my damp hair and carried the rosemary scent of the shampoo, clearing my thoughts and bringing memory into sharp focus. I knew exactly what had my stomach in knots, why carefully latched mental doors were rattling their hinges. It was partly the argument with Ben McCulloch, but mostly Phin bringing up La Llorona.

The weeping woman. Another spook, another river. A camping trip to Goliad, a flashlight, two preteens with a really bad idea. Phin was twelve and I was eleven and we had snuck out of our rented travel trailer and gone looking for the veiled woman who, legend said, wept by the river for her drowned babies. The stories of her luring living children to their deaths didn’t frighten us enough to make us waste the opportunity to investigate. Jeez, we were stupid.

I remembered nightmare snatches. The shadowed veil, the ashen skin of her clawed hands. Water closing over my head. But I didn’t remember exactly what had happened at the river, or how Phin and I had gotten away.

I recalled vividly what happened after, though. Dad had flipped his lid when he found his wet, bedraggled daughters after a frantic midnight search. He’d driven home growling things like “your crazy mother” and “encouraging this BS.” And scarier things like “court” and “judge” and “custody.” Much scarier to me than La Llorona.

It had shaken even Mom. Since they had never married, I wasn’t sure what his chances would be of getting custody. But even at eleven years old, I didn’t need psychic powers to see the way things would go if Phin started telling a judge about magic and spells in the Goodnight household. Not after La Llorona had almost made us victims of our own idiocy.

I didn’t ever want to see that look of fear and loss on Mom’s face again. Trying to get anyone else to change was pointless, especially Phin. I could only change myself. So that night in Goliad was the last time I’d ever spoken of ghosts or magic to anyone outside the family. Until today.

I didn’t know what that meant, except that La Llorona was, in a weird sort of way, on my mind even before Phin brought her up. I had broken my rule when I’d talked ghosts with Ben McCulloch, right when I most needed to put up a good front.

A sound dropped me back into the present. I froze, one hand on the breaker box, and listened intently to the cricket-filled night. Had it come from the McCulloch place? The noise was otherworldly, the pitch so low I’d almost felt it rather than heard it. It was a visceral sort of whump, like the subwoofer on a stereo, overscored by a high, thin thread—

No, that was the bats. The dark shapes that had been swooping in a bug-hunting ballet now wheeled in unnatural and panicked chaos, as if someone had put a magnet on their internal compass. As I watched, two of them collided and plummeted to the ground. They hit with muted thumps and the leathery flop of wings, and then silence.

My throat clenched around my held breath. Just feet from me, their small black bodies lay unmoving in the circle of my flashlight. Had they knocked themselves out?

I edged closer, and when neither moved, I touched one with the toe of my boot.

Not stunned. Dead.

The practical part of me said I would need to get a shovel and bury them deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig them up. Or maybe I needed to call Animal Control so they could be tested for rabies. Wasn’t erratic behavior a sign of that?

The other side, the Goodnight side, knew that rabies didn’t make two bats’ radar go so haywire they’d collide hard enough to kill each other. But what would?

Leave it alone, Amy.

As omens went, it was pretty clear. Curiosity and ghosts didn’t mix. I knew that, even if the memories were slippery as river silt and cold bony hands.


The ringing of the phone worked its way into my dream and became a burglar alarm, which was enough to scare me awake, given that my dreams—once I’d finally managed to drift off—involved skeletons riding goats chasing me in my underwear as Ben McCulloch and his horse herded me away from the safety of the house, all while Phin sat on the porch drinking a Vanilla Coke.

Well, it scared me half awake, anyway. I was so clumsy with sleep that I answered my cell phone, my iPod, and my paperback book before I finally found the house phone. Three large dogs sacked out on my bed didn’t help. They made maneuvering difficult even when I was completely conscious.

“Unff,” I said, brilliantly.

“Amaryllis, darling,” said someone who sounded very like my aunt Hyacinth. “I have to tell you something.”

“But you’re in China.” Maybe that was why she sounded like she was speaking through a cave. The phone was carrying her voice through the center of the earth.

“Yes, I am. But your email reminded me.”

Oh yeah. My note threatening to chop down the goats’ tree and her neighbor’s son. I didn’t expect to hear back from her for days. I certainly didn’t expect a Jules Verne phone call.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I need for you to take care of the goats.”

“What?” I struggled up to a thinner layer of sleep. “I am taking care of them. Phin got plants, I got animals.”

“Dear, that doesn’t make sense. Just promise me you’ll take care of it.”

“I will, Aunt Hyacinth. I can’t believe you called just because of that.”

“It’s very important to me. I’m sorry to put the responsibility on you, but I know you’re the one to handle this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, wondering if, just possibly, my aunt’s eccentricities extended to a completely non-magical area. “I’ve got it covered.”

“You promise?”

“I do, no problem.” Jeez, how many times was she going to ask me?

“I have to be sure, or I’ll worry about it for the rest of my trip.”

“I promise, Aunt Hyac—”

Just as I finished the third assurance, there was a pop in my ears and a strong tug in my belly, as if a knot had been yanked tight. It pulled me out of the fog of interrupted sleep and jerked me upright in the bed with a force that left me gasping.

The dogs didn’t bark. They’d gone stiff, their heavy bodies pressed against my legs, trembling, their barrel chests heaving with fearful pants.

Bear gave a soft, terrified whine. I might have made a similar sound as I stared at the growing column of light at the foot of my bed. I was trapped by the weight of the dogs on the blanket, and by my own dread, as the glow began to take human shape.