Darkness Creeping (7 page)

There was a mighty roar and a shattering of wood and metal. Then something hot and silver passed through me, and in an instant it was gone.

So was my body.

So was the entire second story of our house.

A moment later, the blast of a great explosion shook the air.

When we had first moved to this house, my parents had asked me if I wanted the bedroom upstairs or downstairs. I had chosen upstairs. Big mistake. With the second floor of the house torn away, I could see my parents below in their roofless bedroom, screaming. They weren’t hurt. No, they were terrified—still not knowing what had happened, and not understanding why there was morning sky above them instead of their ceiling fan.

But I knew exactly what had happened. A jumbo jet had taken off half of our house just before slamming into the ground two streets away.

As for my body, well, I’m sure it felt no pain because it was over so quickly. Anyway, I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t there to feel it. Perhaps if it hadn’t happened so quickly, I might have been drawn back into my body to die with it, but that’s not what happened.

Now I’m alive, but with no body to live in.

Perhaps that’s how ghosts are made.

I remember drifting into school the next day, going up to my friends and screaming into their faces that I was still here. But they couldn’t see me or hear me. I also remember hovering among the flowers at my funeral, thinking that being there was the proper and respectable thing to do.

For many weeks after that, I drifted through the rooms of my uncle’s house, where my parents were staying now that our house was destroyed. I stayed there, sitting on the couch and watching TV with them. I sat on an empty chair at the dinner table, day after day, yet they never knew I was there . . . and never would.

Soon my parents’ grief was too much for me to bear. There was nothing I could ever do to comfort them. So I left.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to have lost everything. Losing your house, and your things, and your friends, and your family is all bad enough—but to lose yourself along with it—
that
was beyond imagination. To lose my thick head of hair that I never liked to brush. To lose those fingernails that I still had the urge to bite. To lose the feeling of waking up to the warm sun on your face. To lose the taste of a cold drink, and the feel of a hot shower. To just
be
, with no flesh to contain your mind and soul. It was not a fun way to be.

I drifted to the lonely basement of an old abandoned building, and lay there for weeks, not wanting to go anywhere, not wanting to face a world I could not be part of. I just wanted to stay in that lonely place forever.

Perhaps that’s how buildings become haunted.

It was months before I could bring myself to look upon the light of day again, and when I did, it was like coming out of a cocoon. Once I could accept that my old life was gone, I began to realize that I did have some sort of future, and I was ready to explore it.

I began testing my speed. I was just an invisible weightless spirit of the air, but I could will myself to move very fast. I practiced, building my skill of flight the way I had built my swimming speed in the pool—back in the days when I was flesh and bone. It wasn’t that different, really, except now I didn’t need muscles to make myself move, only thoughts.

Soon I could outrace the fastest birds and fly higher than the highest jets. I could turn on a dime and crash through solid rock as if I were diving through water. These were times I did not miss the heavy weight of my body.

And, wow—were there ever places to explore! I dove through oceans, and actually moved through the belly of a great white shark. I dipped into the mouth of a volcano, racing through its dark stone cap—right into red-hot magma! I plunged deeper still, beyond the earth’s mantle to hit its super-dense core. It wasn’t as easy to move through as water and air, but I did it. I did all these things.

And each time I would slip into one of these great and magical realms, I would play a game with myself.

“I am this mountain,” I would say. Then I would expand myself like a cloud of smoke, until I could feel my whole spirit filling up the entire mountain—from the trees at its base to the snow on its peak.

“I am this ocean,” I would say. Then I would spread across the surface of the water, stretching myself from continent to continent.

“I am this planet,” I would tell myself, stretching out in all directions until I could feel myself hurtling through space, caught in orbit around the sun.

But soon the game lost its joy, for try as I might, I could never stay in the place where I had put myself. I did not want to be a mountain, immense and solitary, moving only when the earth shook. I did not want to be a sea, rolling uneasily toward eternity, a slave of the moon and its tides. I did not want to be the earth, alone and spinning in an impossibly vast universe.

And so I dared to do something I hadn’t found the nerve to do before. I began to move within the minds of human beings.

Like anything else, it took practice.

When I first slipped inside a human being, all I could see was the blood pumping through thousands of veins and arteries. All I could hear was the thump of a heartbeat. But soon I would settle within someone and begin to pick out a thought or two. And soon after that, I could hear all of that person’s thoughts. Then I began to feel things the way that person felt them, and see the world through that person’s eyes—without ever letting on that I was there.

It was almost like being human, and this hint of being human again drove me on with a determination I’d never felt before.

After many weeks of secretly dipping into people’s minds, I discovered I could not only hear the thoughts of these people but change those thoughts. I could make them turn left instead of right. I could make them have a sudden craving for an ice-cream sundae. Have you ever had a thought that seemed to come flying out of nowhere?

Perhaps someone was passing through you.

I moved daily from person to person, taking bits of knowledge with me as I went, taking memories of lives I’d never lived. I got to dive off cliffs in Mexico, experience the excitement and terror of being born, and I even blasted into space in a rocket, hiding deep within the mind of an astronaut.

This was a game I could have enjoyed forever . . . if I hadn’t gotten so good at it. You see, I came way too close to the minds on which I hitchhiked.

“Who are you?”

The voice came as a complete surprise to me. I didn’t know what to do.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And why are you in my head?”

I was in the mind of a baseball player. I’d been there for a few weeks, and this was the first time he’d spoken to me.

He was a rookie named Sam “Slam” McKellen—I’m sure you’ve heard of him. They called him Slam because of the way he blasted balls right out of the stadium at least once a game. I know because I swung the bat with him.

“You’d better answer me,” his thoughts demanded.

McKellen was the first one to know I was there. I was thrilled

. . . but also terrified.

“My name is Peter,” I said, and then I told him about the plane crash. I explained how I had lost my body, and how I had survived for more than a year on my own. I must have gone on babbling for hours—it was the first time I had someone to talk to.

McKellen listened to all I had to tell him, sitting quietly in a chair. Then, when I was done, he did something amazing. He asked me to stay.

“We have batboys in the dugout to help us out,” he told me. “Who says I can’t have a batboy on the
inside
as well? Heck, I’m important enough.” He began to smile. “Sure,” he said, “someone to pick up my stray thoughts that happen to wander off. Someone to remind me when I’m late, or when I forget something important. Sure, stay, kid,” he said. “Stay as long as you want.”

I don’t need to tell you how it changed my death. It’s not everyone who gets to live inside a major-league baseball player. I mean, I was with Slam every time he swung that bat, every time he raced around those bases, every time he slid into home. And when he came up to accept his MVP trophy that year—it was
our
hands that held it in the air.

When we went out to eat, sometimes he would let me take over, giving me total control of his body. That way I could be the one feeding us that hot-fudge sundae—and tasting every last bit of it.

At night we would have long conversations about baseball and the nature of the universe—a silent exchange of thoughts from his mind to mine. In fact, we did this so often our thoughts were beginning to get shuffled, and I didn’t know which were his thoughts and which were mine. Pretty soon I figured our two sets of thoughts and memories would blend together forever, like two colors of paint. As far as I was concerned, that would be just fine.

But then he offered to do something for me that I never had the nerve to ask him to do, and it changed everything.

“I’m gonna write your parents a letter,” he announced. “I’m gonna tell them that you’re alive and well and living inside my head.”

I should have realized how that letter would have sounded, but I was too thrilled by the offer to think about what might happen. So we wrote the letter together and mailed it. Then, three days later, the world came collapsing down around us like a dam in a flood.

You see, my parents were never much for believing anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. When they got the letter, they called the police. The police called the newspapers, and suddenly the season’s star MVP was a nutcase who heard voices.

Sam “Slam” McKellen became the overnight laughingstock of the American League. It’s funny how that happens sometimes . . . but it wasn’t funny to us.

I tried to get him to shut up, but he insisted on telling it like it is, getting up in front of the microphones and explaining to the world how a kid was renting space in his brain. We even went to see my parents, and although I kept feeding him facts about my past that only I could know, my parents were still convinced McKellen was a madman.