Hell Fire

crackled into focus. “Hello. I’m here.”

A hard shudder wracked me. This was a child no older than the one I’d seen by the window. Whatever happened to her, it hadn’t been long afterward. She hadn’t escaped or lived to a ripe old age. She wasn’t an angry ghost, or she would have tried to take her wrath out on us, but she didn’t rest in peace, either.

“Who are you?” Shannon asked softly.

“Martha,” came the slow, crackling reply. Her words carried impossible distance, echoes of the grave. “Martha Vernon. It’s dark in here. Have you come to let me out?”

Oh God. Sucking in a sharp breath, I wrapped my arms around my knees. She thought she was still trapped in here. And, well . . . she was.

Shannon looked very pale, arms wrapped around the radio. I could tell she was as chilled as I was, but her answer sounded composed. “We’re going to try. What happened to you, Martha?”

“Same thing that happens to everyone who’s different around here.”

In the stillness, I heard the soft shuffle of someone who wasn’t there. The boards creaked lightly beneath Martha’s invisible weight. As she’d done for countless years, she paced her prison. I thought my heart would explode when the footsteps, accompanied by terrible cold, stopped beside us.

Shannon managed to ask, “What’s that?”

The non sequitur came, low and almost toneless, full of hissing, static snakes. “They found I can call things to me, things that fly, things that crawl. I can fill a tree with butterflies, spell your name in lightning bugs, or send a plague of locusts to their houses, but I cannot get out of here. Won’t you let me out?”

I ached for her. Kilmer wasn’t a good place to be different. That had still been true in my time. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like in hers.

“I’ll try,” Shannon assured the child’s ghost. “But I need to know what happened to you first.”

“Same thing that happened to Holly Jarrett, Timothy Sparks, David Prentice,” Martha sang out. An eerie, tuneless humming poured out of the radio, and it made my head feel strange, almost disconnected from the rest of me. Eventually, the sound evolved back into words again, leaving me numb and frightened. “And more, and more.”

“Tell me what that was,” Shannon begged.

“They fed us to the thing in the woods. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—’ ” the ghost in the machine whispered, “ ‘I took the one’ . . . ‘I took the one’ . . .” Her tinny little voice repeated, a scratched phonograph phantom.

Mr. McGee must’ve been researching the dead children and he’d located Martha Vernon on his radio—not because he was Gifted, but because he was old and near death. He’d said I could understand the whispers, whereas Chance could not because I was soon to die myself . . . and I did.

He’d scrawled down the poem at some point, and Curtis Farrell took it with him. Maybe I didn’t know all the reasons why yet, but I was starting to find connections. Once I had all the pieces, the big picture would take shape.

“That’s the link,” I said aloud. “Remember how you and Mr. McGee found a pattern for the ‘bad things’ that happen every so often on December 21? They targeted families who were different and sacrificed them to the demon. I saw them performing the ritual when I read the wreckage.”

My mother and I had certainly qualified. If anyone knew about Shannon’s gift, it would have qualified her for the purge. I could imagine Sandra Cheney’s chagrin when she realized her family wasn’t perfect enough for her perfect town. Maybe she thought sleeping with August England would change his mind. If she’d only taken a good look in his eyes, she would have seen he had no heart, and hence, no reason to change his mind.

“But why?” Shannon’s question came out anguished.

I shrugged. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Why did they hang so many witches in Salem?”

“ ‘I took the road less traveled by,’ ” Martha announced at length.

The radio crackled and spat. I could sense its vibrations against Shannon’s chest. A cold breeze poured over us, stirring the dust in the attic until it became hard to see.

“She’s getting agitated,” the girl said in a rush. “What should we do?”

Right, I was the mentor here. I didn’t have time to think or ask for a second opinion; Martha was working her way up to a poltergeist tempest. Like most children, she wasn’t long on patience, and the years alone in the attic hadn’t helped.

I decided swiftly. “I’ll pry open the window.”

A child’s strength wouldn’t have been sufficient, not when the nails were new and the boards were at their best. Years of dry rot and rust had weakened the slats over the window, though, so I pulled them off, one by one, not trying to be quiet any longer. I yanked them away, tearing my fingers on the splintering wood, and still didn’t pause until I had the whole thing cleared. Fresh air poured into the attic for the first time in I don’t know how many years, mingling with the spirit storm.

I nodded at Shannon. “Tell her the way is clear.”

Who knew if removing the symbol of her imprisonment would be enough? The girl relayed the message, standing up to thrust an arm through the triangular window. A queer pop emerged from the radio as if something had passed through its ancient speakers, and then wind gusted outward.

Surely we’d set her free. In another moment, we had our answer. Though it was too late in the year for fireflies, they twinkled outside the house, glimmering in sequence to spell out the words, “Thank you.”

Shannon whispered, “Good-bye, butterfly girl.”

The radio went dead silent. In response, Shannon clicked it off. I stretched, arms over my head, just as we started to hear commotion downstairs.

“Where the hell are they?” Jesse asked.

“Hell if I know.” Chance wasn’t a morning person, let alone a middle-of-the-night person. “Did you hear a car pull up?”

“Didn’t hear anything,” he answered. “The Forester and the Mustang are still here. You think someone took them?”

Chance’s voice became panicked. “They wouldn’t have gone out to the woods without us?”

That tore it. If we let them, they’d go running around looking for us, trying to play heroes, and wind up lost. Then we’d have to go save them before the demon scared the piss out of them and they broke their necks falling in the gully like Rob Walker.

“We should nip this in the bud,” I said.

Shannon grinned. “Yeah, they’re about to have twin aneurysms.”

In response, I unhooked the catch and gave the ladder a good kick. It dropped with a thunk; then I waited. Both guys came running, armed with makeshift weapons. Their fear turned in unison to absolute exasperation.

“What are you two doing up there in the middle of the night?” Chance demanded.

Shannon told him pertly, “Exorcising a ghost.”

Excellent. I couldn’t have done better myself.

Jesse thought better of whatever he’d meant to say. “Did it work?”

“Yep.” I knew I sounded smug. “Didn’t you feel all that wind blow through here?”

“Well,” Chance muttered. “Yeah. It woke me up, in fact.”

“But I thought something was wrong and that the windows were open when they shouldn’t be,” Saldana added.

“That’d be a reasonable assumption under any other circumstances . . . ,” I began.

“And with any other combination of people,” Shannon finished.

Lord, I loved this girl. I gave her a quick hug around the shoulders, surprising both of us. Sheepish, I grinned and indicated with a gesture that she should precede me down the stairs. We went into the kitchen and fixed pancakes, even though it was a few hours before dawn. It didn’t look like any of us would get back to sleep anyway.

The guys bitched us out soundly for not waking them, but neither of them had much to say when I asked, “Just what would you two have contributed to the occasion?”

Frankly, Shannon hadn’t even needed me. Unless she wouldn’t have thought to open the window. In that case, I’d been mildly useful.

After conceding the point, Chance made a pot of his deluxe coffee, and I didn’t try to talk Shannon out of