Texas Gothic

5



the column burned blue as a gas flame, and in the incandescent center was a hazy outline of a man, washed-out and blinding. But cold. Cold as a gravestone iced by a winter moon.

The awful paralysis of nightmare gripped me. I couldn’t move—not to shout, or speak, or run. Maybe I was dreaming. I could half convince myself of it except for the dogs’ breath wreathing their quivering muzzles, and the stinging chill on my bare arms and neck.

New features molded out of shadow—a hint of a nose, a jawline, a mouth. A caricature of a face, gaunt and stripped of definition. Then, movement. A half-formed arm lifted slowly, as if pulling against the weight of death to reach for me, and the shade of a mouth worked in horrific, soundless desperation, like a fish gasping at thin air, as the hollow eyes fixed on my face.

As it stared at me, icy bands tightened around my chest so that all I could take were shallow, insufficient breaths. The edges of my vision sparked a warning as my head seemed to float and spin away from the rest of me. It was a horrible helpless feeling, like passing out in slow motion. My fingers went slack, and the phone tumbled from my grip. If Aunt Hyacinth was still there, I couldn’t hear her over the buzzing in my ears. But even if I could call out to her, how could she help me from China?

The door slammed open, crashing against the wall and rattling the picture frames to the floor. Through the empty doorway, a torrent of wind poured into the room, raging like an invisible animal. It pulled at my hair and flung papers and books from the desk and whipped the drapes like Fourth of July streamers in a sudden summer storm.

Lila jumped up with a woof of recognition. The ropes of ice around my chest thawed, and warm air rushed into my aching lungs—warm and scented with sage and mesquite, dusty denim, and a whiff of violet. The spectral blue light and the shape within it vanished, blown out like a candle in a gale.

The cyclone whisked out the way it had come, slamming the door behind it, an emphatic period on the ghostly tirade. For a long moment, I sat staring numbly into the dark. The awful paralysis had drained away, but shock and bewilderment held me still. Then the rest of the dogs scrambled to their feet, letting loose a cacophony of barking sufficient to …

Well, to raise the dead.

The clamor bounced around my skull, knocking my tumbling thoughts into even more of a mess. Telephone, I remembered first. Aunt Hyacinth.

I searched through the tangle of blankets and twelve dog paws, fumbling the receiver to my ear when I found it. “Aunt Hyacinth? Are you still there?”

Nothing but a dial tone.

The door banged open again, and I gave a shriek that might have, under other circumstances, been overreaction but wasn’t because there’d just been a freaking ghost in my room.

At least one ghost, plus whatever that was that had swept through and driven it away—Uncle Burt?—which had seemed almost benign next to the deathly cold thing at the foot of my bed.

The foot of my bed, ohmigod. My racing brain revved that single thought through my head, pushing out everything else.

“Amy! What’s going on?”

Phin stared at me from the doorway, her pajamas rumpled, her hair sticking out in all directions. The hall light fell across the bed, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror: huddled in the safety of my dogs and blankets, the snarl of my dark red hair stark against the bloodless pallor of my skin, my freckles standing out like raisins in oatmeal. And my eyes—huge and wild and world-tilted-on-its-axis terrified.

No wonder Phin stared like she’d never seen me before. She flipped on the overhead light and goggled at the mess. “Holy moly! This looks like my room. What happened?”

“There was a ghost. Right there!” I pointed. The dogs jumped off the bed and circled the room, whining at the tension.

Phin frowned in confusion. “A ghost? You mean Uncle Burt?”

“Not Uncle Burt,” I said. “I’m not scared of Uncle Burt.” I kicked off the covers and went to the spot where the light and cold had coalesced. But not too close. “It was right there. Like a column of blue-white light, and a figure in the center.”

It seemed like there should be a burn or a mark or something, the way the image was singed into my retinas. When I blinked, I could still see the glow, and I shuddered.

Phin hung back in the doorway, as if she were afraid of contaminating a crime scene. “A ghost shouldn’t have been able to get in here.”

“I know.” I rubbed at the gooseflesh on my arms. My tank top and boxer shorts were meant for sleeping under a hundred and fifty pounds of dog, not for dealing with ghosts.

“But it did.”

“But it shouldn’t have,” she insisted.

“I know!” Though I didn’t really, not until I looked at her—her features set and tense, her skin drawn tight into an anxious mask. She was genuinely shaken, and clinging to what she knew, because throwing that out was too frightening.

I sank onto the antique trunk next to the wall. “Oh.” I forced myself to voice what I thought she was thinking. “For something to get in here, it would have to be stronger than Aunt Hyacinth.”

She nodded, dispelling the hope I’d been wrong. “Aunt Hy and all the aunts who help renew the spells every year.”

I felt sick. That was a lot of Goodnights, all combined. Thanksgiving filled the farmhouse to bursting. Hot queasiness warred with the chill of fear on my skin, and I shivered, wrapping my arms tight around myself. “Do you see my jacket?”

Phin took the inane question in stride, scanning the room, where my belongings had been flung to kingdom come by the supernatural tornado. “Did the ghost do all this?”

“No.” I shook my head and ordered my thoughts. “That is, not the first one. First was the figure I told you about—”

“An actual apparition?” she asked. “Not just an orb or a column?”

“Yes.” This inquisition was more like normal, unconquerable Phin, and it shored up my nerves, made me think I might be normal, unconquerable Amy again soon. “Sort of light and shadow, but definitely a human shape.”

“Full body or torso?”

“Full body. Or, at least, I think so. The footboard was in the way, so I really didn’t see.” I shivered again, the phantom of memory prickling my skin and tightening my chest. “It was so cold. I couldn’t breathe.”

Phin walked to the end of the bed and extended a hand as if testing a breeze. “There’s not much of a chill left.”

“The wind blew it away.” Watching her pace like Sherlock Holmes in mismatched pajamas had a perversely settling effect on me, too, and I considered the differences between the two events—the specter and the gale. “That’s why I think there were two ghosts. The second was invisible, just this force that slammed open the door and drove back the horrible cold.”

And there was Lila, who had barked as if she recognized something in it. Or someone. “I think that might have been Uncle Burt,” I said. “Or maybe a combination of the protection magic plus him. I don’t know.”

I spotted my jacket hanging from a light fixture and stood to get it, relieved my knees held me up. Then, unable to look at the mess anymore, I reached to straighten a potted plant that had toppled, its soil spilled out onto the floor. “I should probably try to call Aunt Hyacinth—”

“Don’t touch that!”

The piano wire of my nerves sent me nearly to the ceiling. I snatched back my hand and whirled toward Phin, but she’d already dashed from the room. Two of the dogs went with her.

Should I follow? Was something going to blow up? The dogs seemed calm. That should have been a good sign, but alone again in the room, I felt my dread come crawling back up from the place where I’d pushed it.

The problem was, in all my acquaintance with Uncle Burt, I’d only seen him nudge things, turn lights on and off, and rock in his favorite chair. The scale of destruction in my room forced me to wonder, if it had been him, what awful thing had motivated such violence.

I took the Goodnight oddities—herbs, crystals, potions, ghosts, even Phin’s paranormal chemistry set—for granted. Magical hair products and Uncle Burt hanging around his beloved wife, those were familiar and natural in a way even I could sense. This cold, desperate thing was an unknown, and when it reached for me, what I felt—the terrifying, visceral pull that robbed my breath and my body heat—was … unnatural. It was out of joint, distorting the order of both worlds, normal and paranormal.

Phin returned, heralded by the slap of her bare feet on the pine floor. She was breathing hard, like she’d run to the workroom and back. My sister was no athlete. The only things that ran a mile a minute were her brain and occasionally her mouth.

She’d gone to get one of her gadgets—a camera with some kind of complex arrangement of wires and extra lenses on the front. Before I could decide if it was a Steampunk thing or an alien-invasion thing, she flipped off the light and started snapping pictures.

At least, that was what it looked like she was doing.

“Did you rig up some kind of night vision?” I asked, just to make conversation and avoid dwelling on how the moonlight-filled curtains echoed the glow of the apparition.

“No.” Click. “This is the coronal aura visualizer.”

She had a tone, one that I interpreted to mean You wouldn’t understand. Irritation chased away the lingering chill of unease. “I’m not an idiot, Phin. I’m capable of grasping the principle, at least.”

In the dark I heard her sigh. Loudly. “I told you the principle downstairs.”

Awkward pause and … Click.

“Well,” I said finally, reluctantly admitting I hadn’t been listening. “I now have a pressing reason to pay attention.”

Click and sigh. “It takes an image of the aura discharged by living objects which have been subjected to metaphysical or psychic energy.” She gave a very detailed lecture as she worked, but I gathered the basics: Whatever a spirit had touched lit up with a sort of invisible halo that showed in the images she took through her camera gadget. The touch of a person might show a slight glow, but supernatural events or psychic episodes would get a brighter corona, as Phin called it.

Since I couldn’t see what she was photographing, I wasn’t expecting much as I peered over her shoulder at the camera’s viewscreen. But the image made me inhale sharply. “Oh my gosh, Phin! That’s so cool.”

Against a dark background, the leaves of the plants that had been knocked over by the ghostly gale were lit around the edges, like a harsh halo of washed-out neon—blues and pinks blending to purple, cut through with angry spikes of yellow.

She shrugged off the compliment, but there was a hint of pride warming her voice. “It would be more functional if it worked in daylight. I haven’t figured out why it only works in the dark. Since it’s not a visual energy, ambient light shouldn’t make a difference.”

I studied the images as she thumbed through them on the screen. They changed shape and brightness, but they were all in the same color scheme. One of our cousins saw auras around people, and the halos looked like what she described. “Would two separate ghosts show up differently?”

“That is a good question. You mean the apparition and the unseen force that you say chased it away?”

“Yes.” I decided not to remark on her unflattering surprise at my inquiry.

Phin thought about it. “In my experiments, different moods affected the corona’s spectrum, so possibly different spirit entities would change the colors as well. Did the apparition move or touch anything in the room?”

I shook my head. “No. It was very … contained.” If anything, the figure had pulled energy toward it. Eleven-year-old Amy—the one who went foolishly running after specters by the river after dark—knew that the theory behind cold spots at hauntings was that a ghost needed energy to manifest, and heat was a type of energy, so—

Eleven-year-old Amy needed to shut up. I was not getting sucked in. I’d made my decision to live as ghost- and magic-free as possible. Even if “as possible” was sometimes “not at all.”

And yet I still found myself asking the very question that I knew would lead to trouble. “Do you think the apparition was the McCulloch ghost? The one people are talking about?”

Phin considered it but sounded doubtful. “I don’t know. Most ghosts are closely tied to a location, and they take territory pretty seriously.”

I knew what she meant. You wouldn’t think barbed wire would slow down something without a body, but fences that merely marked a border for a human could be literal boundaries for a spirit. Like Aunt Hyacinth’s security system was supposed to be.

Phin voiced the conclusion before I could. “If it is the ghost from the neighbor’s place, it wouldn’t just wander over here.”

Not without a reason. That was what she was getting at, the possibility I didn’t want to face. Not without a fight.

“Maybe the McCulloch ghost is just a local legend,” I said. “You told me the reports were mostly secondhand. Maybe that ghost story is based on one already on the Goodnight side of the fence.”

“The geography still doesn’t hold up.” Phin might have been rattled earlier, but she sounded calm and logical now. “And even if that’s true, it still means that the ghost came through all the wards around Aunt Hyacinth’s house.”

“Exactly!” I’d thought I wanted unflappable Phin back, but I didn’t. I wanted someone as freaked out as I was, so she would know that I didn’t want logic right now. I wanted reassurance. “It came in the house.”

“I realize that’s a little unnerving—” she said.

“Unnerving?” I swept an angry arm at the carnage around us. “Look at my room, Phin! There was a supernatural event in my bedroom. A spectral apparition nearly froze me to death, and a ghostly wind touched all my stuff.”

She lifted her brows in disapproval, whether at my tone or my priorities. “I don’t see how arguing over whether it crossed one fence or two is going to help. Something came into Goodnight Farm, past our wards, and the only way we’re going to figure this out is by applying reason and logic, not taking refuge in denial.”

“Phin, the only thing more unnerving than realizing there’s something that can get past Aunt Hyacinth’s defenses is wondering why it would.”

“Why do ghosts haunt at all?” she said. “Because they want something.”

The words hung in the air like an unfinished musical chord. There was the question I didn’t want to ask: What did it want?

A knock downstairs shattered the moment. Someone was at the front door.

The dogs exploded into barking and took off in a thunder of paws and scrabble of claws, sounding like a pack of hellhounds on the stairs.

“Oh my God,” I blurted, grabbing onto Phin as we faced the open bedroom door. “It’s the axe murderer.”

“I doubt he would knock,” she said, but she was whispering, too, and didn’t move away from me.

Another rap, imperative and authoritative enough to be heard over the dogs. That didn’t seem like a nefarious thing.

“Maybe we should look out the window,” Phin suggested.

Feeling stupid that she’d thought of it first, I hurried across the hall to Aunt Hyacinth’s room. Even through the sheer curtains, I could see the front of the house and yard were lit like a shopping mall parking lot on the twenty-third of December. A normal person would have assumed the floodlights were motion activated, but Aunt Hy hadn’t bothered with sensors when she had Uncle Burt to turn on the lights.

Which made it easy to see the police car parked next to Stella and Aunt Hyacinth’s Trooper. The shield on the door said “Sheriff,” and every instinct inside me screamed “Trouble.”