“Keep going for another mile,” Paige says.
I think about Paige’s search. I know the impasse is causing more pain than she cares to admit, so I can’t stop thinking about how to help her. The wheels in my mind keep turning. “You know the weird thing about all your documents?”
“What?”
“Everything such a secret. Not just your information but even the judge’s information.”
Paige considers this. “‘Judges’, like, multiple judges? Or ‘judge’s,’ like one judge?”
I shoot her a smile. “Good question. Seems strange, though, that they keep omitting that name, don’t you think? I wonder if it’s the same judge on all those forms.” My stomach gurgles.
Paige turns to me. “That was loud. Did you eat something you shouldn’t have?”
I didn’t eat anything unusual, but I’m feeling suddenly ill. I’m queasy, and I can feel myself warming up more than usual.
“You don’t look so good,” she says.
We’re too close to turn back now. “I’m fine,” I lie. Deep down inside, I hope someone at this rave had the presence of mind to order portable toilets.
“Okay,” she says, not sounding convinced. “Make the next left.”
I’m feeling more nauseous the farther we drive, so I accelerate to get there faster. I make the left turn. Then I slam on the brakes. My tires screech as they skid across the road.
Paige lurches forward, her phone flying out of her hands and her hair shrouding her face. “What the hell?” she cries, wiping the hair from her face.
“Do you see that?” I yell.
She looks through the windshield. “What?”
Just as I feared. I whip the Mini into reverse and peel out backward. My rear tires run off the road and rise up an embankment. The car stops, and a cloud of dust rises around us.
“What are you doing?” Paige says.
“Cemetery.”
“Oh.”
Once the dust settles, I get a better look at what lies before us. Three figures stand in the road, staring at our car. One is an older woman, probably in her sixties, dressed in a floral print dress, her brunette hair puffed up in a bouffant.
Beside her are two children, a boy and a girl. They are roughly the same age, nine or ten. The girl is wearing a gingham dress, and the boy is dressed in a blazer and shorts, with an old schoolboy cap.
“What do you see?” Paige asks. She can’t see them. The reason she can’t see them is because they’re ghosts.
It suddenly becomes clear why I’ve been feeling so uneasy. We’ve been driving alongside a cemetery. The moment I turned and saw those three figures, I knew what they were. They’re not transparent like the ghosts from stories or reality shows about ghost hunters. They appear as tangible as any other person—at least to me. To Paige and most everyone else, they are invisible.
The ability to see the undead roaming the earth is one of those perks of being possessed by a demon. The first time it happened, it scared the bejesus out of me. After I was shunned in Malbrook, I got a room in an old hotel in Philadelphia. The first night there, I was trying to get some sleep when I discovered that the sliding glass door to the balcony was open. I got up to close the door and noticed movement outside. I slowly stepped out, and on the adjacent balcony, I saw a woman trying to push her child over the railing three floors up.
I screamed. The woman and her child froze and whipped their faces in my direction. Then she pushed the child over. I quickly looked to see what would happen to the body, but it disappeared in midair, and the woman was gone. Or so I thought. When I turned around, she was on my balcony, right in front of me.
Then she tried to push me off the balcony. I thought I felt her cold spirit hands press through me. What I actually felt was her energy, though. It wasn’t tactile. There was no physical impact, just the sensation of a frigid wind passing through me.
After that, I ran down to the lobby and learned that years earlier, a woman had killed her three children by pushing them off the balcony. One of her kids even went willingly. Then the woman killed herself.
That was my first ghost. Now I see them often enough that it unnerves me—like when I find a spider in the bathroom—but doesn’t send me running in a panic… like when I find a spider in the bathroom.
Over the years, I’ve discovered there are two kinds of hauntings. The first is a residual haunting. These ghosts are less like spirits and more like the energy of victims playing like a looping video. A ghost will appear and disappear, replaying moments from its former life. Residual hauntings usually occur in a place where a traumatic event, like a death or horrible accident, occurred. Other hauntings of this nature can occur in places of some spiritual significance, such as the location of a secret.
The other kind of haunting—the kind I’m looking at right now—is an intelligent haunting. The spirit knows that it is dead, and it’s on a mission. Some spirits are trying to right a wrong. Others are trying to reach out to someone they love. A few have unfinished business. There are many reasons why someone’s soul might not move on to the next plane.
The three ghosts stare at me, walking from side to side but never toward me. Their feet meet the boundary of the cemetery grounds but never cross it. They can’t. Their mouths move in an attempt to speak, but ghosts make no sound. I’m sure they’re asking for help, but I can’t go near them. Cemeteries are hallowed grounds. There is nothing I can do for them tonight.
“Do I want to know what you’re looking at?” Paige asks.
She doesn’t, because—unfortunately for Paige—I need her to go through there.
“It’s nothing,” I lie.
A pair of headlights approaches from the
