Spooky Little Girl (31 page)

Jilly raised her glass. “To dear Tulip,” she said.

“To dear Tulip,” the guests repeated.

And then Jilly moved aside, and behind her on a table was a framed picture of Tulip as a puppy, sitting on Lucy’s lap, her long tongue mid-kiss, right at the bottom of Lucy’s lower lip. On a stand was Tulip’s red collar and matching leash, well worn, with her smell still on them. Below that was her water bowl and dish, her favorite ball, and a bag of biscuits, the kind that Jilly remembered Lucy used to buy for her. Jilly had gone to the pet supply store and bought her more, throwing the generic ones away. Tulip had been too good, everyone would agree, for generic biscuits. Marianne was standing at the table looking at Tulip’s things, when she heard someone ask Jilly if she had heard from Lucy recently.

Jilly shook her head and said “No.”

“She’ll be back,” someone else said confidently. “You know Lucy. When you least expect her, she’ll pop up again.”

“Yeah, maybe she’s living on some tropical island with no phone and no stress,” a girl Marianne didn’t recognize said.

“You said she loved Hawaii,” the guy next to her said. “I bet she hopped the next plane back there.”

“Maybe she met some rich and wealthy old count and is sailing
around the world on a yacht,” the man behind him said. “And being attended to by servants.”

“Maybe,” Jilly said with a slight smile.

“Don’t you miss her?” the girl asked.

“Very much,” Jilly said, same smile still intact.

“I loved her laugh,” someone from the back of the group added. “No one had a laugh like Lucy. It was as contagious as the flu.”

“She was hilarious,” a girl with red hair said. “Do you remember that party where she hid—”

“In the bathtub to get away from that guy who had that enormous crush on her and wouldn’t leave her alone?” someone else finished. “She finally fell asleep in there!”

“We didn’t find her till the next morning,” the girl added. “And her back was messed up for weeks!”

“Well,” a guy in a plaid shirt chimed in, “you couldn’t exactly count on Lucy, but you always knew you’d have fun with her. But she’d surprise you. She once loaned me rent money and was late paying her own because of it.”

“She drove me all the way to Tucson when my car broke down and I had to be down there to play a show with my band,” another guy with longish hair said. “But then she hooked up with the guitarist from the band we opened for and went on tour with them for five months!”

“That is classic Lucy,” a girl with a blond ponytail reminded them.

“On our vacation to Hawaii, she wouldn’t let me go to this guy’s room alone,” Marianne added. “And it was a good thing, because I’m pretty sure he was a creep.”

“In the end, she’d come through. Well, sometimes!” The man in the plaid shirt laughed. “But really, Lucy was a great friend.”

“Lucy was. She really was,” Marianne agreed.

“To Lucy!” the guy in the plaid shirt said, and raised his beer.

“To Lucy!” everyone chimed in, and cheered to her.

“See that, Jilly,” someone yelled from the back. “Lucy wouldn’t leave and not come back, not without saying goodbye. She’s probably touring with the Rolling Stones. She’ll be back. You’ll see.”

Jilly nodded, and took a sip of wine. She hoped he was right, but she wasn’t betting on it. She had gotten an email from Alice, who was coming down in a few days and wanted to drop in and say hi. Jilly found it odd, since she really didn’t know Alice that well, but she’d said sure, she’d love to see her, it had been a long time. She’d left it at that. See you in a couple of days, she’d replied.

Everything else, she figured, was better left for then.

Behind Isis, the light—swirling, churning, and powerful—had grown to the size where it was almost blocking the entire front door, and Lucy and Naunie were beginning to feel it. The brightness that emanated from it was nearly blinding. It was not the comforting sort of light that people who have reported near-death experiences claim to have seen, but a blatant, coarse, almost violent light that was paralyzing in its ferocity. The roar of the light filled the house, although it was apparent that only Lucy and Naunie could hear it. It was loud, mechanical, and angry.

Lucy could see that the light was actually more of a tunnel, and the pulling force it possessed was daunting, spiking fear in Lucy, and no doubt in Naunie as well. As they clung to each other and fought the tugging draw of the light, Naunie yelled over the crush of the tunnel’s roar.

“Hang on, Lucy!” she demanded. “Get behind me, but don’t let go!”

“No,” Lucy argued, shaking her head. “We need to stay together! If I’m behind you, you have to fight off more!”

“I’m stronger than you are!” she reminded her granddaughter. “I think I have a plan!”

“What is it?” Lucy yelled back. “You’re going to have to tell me or I’m not moving!”

“Isis didn’t open that light. It was Andrea!” Naunie replied, looking Lucy dead in the eye. “She’s the only one with the power to do it. Trust me.”

Lucy knew she was right; their only other option was to cling to each other until they could no longer fight the suction of the light. And, by the looks of it, with the light growing in size and showing no signs of breaking, that wouldn’t take very much longer.

In careful, tiny steps, keeping her grasp on Naunie firmly in place, Lucy worked her way behind her grandmother and held on tight.

“Lucy, I need you to focus,” Naunie yelled over the light’s incessant whirling roar. “And I need you to move forward with me.”

“No!” Lucy screamed. “Don’t go toward the light! It will pull you in!”

“Keep pulling back on me,” Naunie screamed. “You need to keep the resistance going!”

Naunie took a step forward, and Lucy followed, trying to keep them steady and pull back at the same time. The more they moved forward, the more pressure they felt, the more powerful the suction of the light became. By Naunie’s careful third step, Lucy began to understand where they were going.

“ANDREA!” Naunie yelled when they got close enough to the protégée that the sound of the light, which was deafening on the spectral plane but not audible to Andrea on hers, would not drown her out.

“ANDREA!” Naunie called again, and this time, the girl’s eyes flew open and she looked in Naunie’s direction.

While Lucy didn’t think that Andrea could actually see them, she could certainly sense them, and she knew they were there.

“Stop the light, Andrea! It’s not what you think it is. You have to stop it or we will be lost in limbo circling Saturn forever!”

Lucy watched Andrea, and was waiting for her to say something, when instead, she faintly heard

Don’t you miss her?

Lucy looked at the faces in Isis’s circle of light. No one was speaking but Isis, who was chanting the same thing over and over again, “Spirits, join us in the circle of light. Cross over, children. Go into the light. There is peace and serenity in the light ….”

Oh, good God
, Lucy thought.
Really? That movie is practically looped on at least three basic cable channels
.

No one had a laugh like …

Lucy looked around again, trying to place the voice, but there was no one she could attribute it to.

… you always knew you’d have fun with her…
.

“ANDREA,” Naunie called again. “You have to stop the light. Only you have control over it! Focus your mind and stop it. There is no peace in the light. It’s a vacuum that will throw us out into eternal limbo. You must help us! It’s going to destroy us!”

Lucy felt the pull of the light weakening; the snarl of the light was lessening, and the brightness was not as blinding as it had been before, even if only by a slight amount.

“It’s working, Naunie!” Lucy shouted. “She’s listening to you!”

Lucy kept her grip tight on Naunie for what seemed like a very long time. She could tell that the old woman was getting weaker, too.

… all the way to Tucson when my car broke down …

“Keep turning it off, Andrea,” Naunie kept yelling. “Block the light from your mind. Push it away!”

“They’re gone!” Andrea cried, releasing the hands of the people on either side of her and breaking the circle. “They’re gone! They’ve gone into the light. The light is gone.”

“Are you sure?” Nola barked. “Are you sure it’s over?”

… was a great friend …

Andrea nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes. I’m sure they’re crossed over now. It’s over.”

Except it wasn’t. Although the power of the light had lessened, Lucy and Naunie still fought determinedly to keep out of its grasp. Lucy clung to her grandmother, and pulled back as hard as she could, but she was struggling. She didn’t think she was strong enough to pull them both back despite the weakened light. She wasn’t sure how long she could hang on, because if Andrea couldn’t close the light she had opened, this tug of war could only end up one way: with Naunie and Lucy sucked into the middle of it and spit out on the other side, shriveled, compressed, and circling a gas giant until the end of time.

“I won’t let go,” Lucy told Naunie.

“Why are you looking over there, then?” Nola demanded of Andrea, who was still tuned in and could hear all of what Naunie and Lucy were saying. “I think you’re lying. Isis, I think your worker is lying to me. I don’t think Marcus Welby is gone at all. In fact, I think he is right there!”

Nola grabbed the thermal scanner off of the coffee table, where Spliff had put it after he’d replaced the dead batteries with the extra set. She marched full force right at Lucy and Naunie. She charged at them, swinging the scanner and pressing every button, as if she was trying to Taser them like a cop at a peace rally.

Lucy’s reflexes, still very present, made her automatically duck and try to avoid Nola’s swinging bearlike paw and raise her hand to shield herself from the blow. Nola’s arm came swinging down, slicing through Lucy and continuing to swing, as if Nola was batting at flies.

All Lucy heard was the scream as Naunie shot away from her and toward the light, despite the fact that it was still decreasing in size. It still had enough pull to yank a startled, weightless ghost and drag her across the floor to its open, gaping glow.

“Naunie!” Lucy screamed, as Naunie managed to grab on to Isis’s leg, stopping the light from devouring her as she held on for dear death.

“Hang on!” Lucy called to her as she tried to regain her own balance. “I’m coming!”

“Don’t, Lucy, don’t!” Naunie replied. “It’s too dangerous!”

Lucy frantically looked around for something to grab on to as she made her way toward the front door, where Naunie was a foot from getting sucked away into the monstrous hole. All Lucy could do was watch as her grandmother’s grip loosened finger by finger, and she got closer and closer to the light.

… Lucy …

… To Lu …

… To …

… cy …

… To Lu …

… Lucy …

… cy…

To Lucy!

Lucy watched as the light dimmed, more, more, more, and pulled away, getting smaller, retracting, smaller, farther away, smaller, until in a moment, it was gone.

The pull was gone. Lucy had felt the pull slipping away as the light had melted into nothing and left her wobbly. Naunie was still clinging to Isis’s leg, covered by layers of fiesta-colored gauze.

“This is ridiculous,” Naunie said, trying to hunt her way out from under Isis’s skirt. With one reach, well-placed or an ill-timed
mistake, Naunie grabbed the skirt and yanked it down, maybe in an attempt to pull herself up. Instead, the elastic waistband skirt from the clearance rack at JCPenney came shooting down, revealing that a bra was not the only undergarment Isis felt she didn’t require.

Lucy grabbed Naunie, yelled “RUN!” and scrambled out of the room as Andrea blocked the path for Solstice after he yanked the thermal scanner out of Nola’s hand and, panicking, began to try to get a reading on the only true paranormal activity he and most of the people in the room had ever seen.

Lucy and Naunie punched through the back wall, just as Lucy had through the double doors at her funeral, and collapsed on the grass in the backyard, relieved and still more than a little unsettled, trying to process and figure out what had just happened.

“I was so scared,” Lucy admitted. “I really thought I had lost you.”

“Lucy, you stopped it. How did you stop it?” Naunie asked.

“I didn’t,” she replied. “I didn’t do anything. It just started shrinking, and then it vanished.”

“I don’t understand,” Naunie said, still very startled. “If Andrea didn’t close it off, what did?”

Lucy shrugged. “I did hear some voices,” she mentioned. “It sounded like chatter at a party. Did you hear that?”

Naunie shook her head. “I couldn’t hear anything over that racket. I was really scared, Lucy.”

“Me, too,” her granddaughter agreed.

“Excuse me,” a voice whispered, coming from the shadows on the side of the house. “I don’t mean to bother you, but … It’s Andrea.”

The girl crept forward and stepped into the light from the house.

“If I just helped two mean ghosts escape, I’m going to be mad,” she said.

“We’re not mean,” Naunie replied. “We’re just misunderstood.”

Lucy burst out laughing. “We’re not mean, or misunderstood,
we’re just on assignment,” she said. “Thank you for helping us in there. We both know you didn’t have to.”

“Explain to me what you mean about the light,” Andrea probed. “It doesn’t help people cross over? Then, what is it?”

“It’s a psychic vacuum cleaner, sort of,” Naunie tried to explain.

“But whatever it sucks out—bad energy, bad intent, bad spirits—gets compressed and is forever in limbo,” Lucy finished.

Andrea quickly covered her mouth. “I always assumed they were screams of joy!” she gasped.

“Good ghosts shouldn’t get sucked up like bad pennies,” Lucy said plainly. “It’s a terrible fate.”

“ANDREA! ANDREA!” they heard Isis yell. “We’re about to start the smudging! Quickly!”

“I have to go,” the girl said quickly. “Even though I can’t see you, it was nice to meet you. And you might want to steer clear of the house for about a half hour. Smudging stinks. And I don’t think it works.”