The Reaping of Norah Bentley (7 page)

Now I was sitting in my room, the lights and T.V. turned off so hopefully my parents would think I was asleep. Dad, I wasn’t really worried about; I couldn’t remember the last time he’d popped his head in my room to tell me goodnight. In fact, I’m not even sure he remembered which room was mine. I’d tried to make a point to Helen, after I finished helping her clean up the mess from dinner, that I had a lot of schoolwork and needed quiet. So far, she’d taken the hint; probably because nothing pleased her like the thought of children slaving away over piles of homework. That’s what normal, well-adjusted children did. And she wouldn’t interrupt that for anything in the world.

The earbuds of my iPod were jammed into my ears, blaring Snow Patrol at a volume she most definitely would have nagged me about. Helen could nag all she wanted to, though—I wasn’t taking them out. Until Eli got here, they were the only defense I had against the noise in my head. I leaned back in my computer chair, spun it around a couple of times and jiggled the loose right arm back and forth for a little while. I needed to replace the screws in that arm. I’d needed to for about three years now.

My laptop was resting on top of my knees, unopened. I’d pulled it out of its case, the word Eli had used earlier bouncing around in my head, demanding to be Googled.
Doppelgänger.
How the hell did you even spell that? I slid the button on my laptop’s lid over and opened it half-way. The screen started to light up, casting an eerie bluish white glow over my room. I closed the lid. Took a deep breath. Opened it again. I wanted to know what Eli hadn’t managed to say, but at the same time I was terrified to fill in the blanks for myself. I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. It claimed it was just a little after six—which couldn’t be right; it had already been dark for hours.

I opened the laptop one last time, telling myself I just needed to check the time, and then I could close it again. But the second I had it open, my finger was moving on its own, shaking along the touchpad. I clicked to open my internet browser and typed “google.com” in the address bar.

“Alright,” I said, my breathing rapidly increasing until it was almost keeping pace with the blinking cursor in the search box. “D-O-P—” I guessed at the rest of the letters and hit enter before I had time to talk myself out of it. Google replied with “Did you mean:
doppelgänger
?” and I hastily clicked the underlined link. About 4,620,000 results. A lot more than I expected—how had I never heard of this word? My palms had started to sweat by this point. I scrolled down the page until I came to a promising link, clicked it, and started to read. About half-way down the page, with its black background and cheesy ghost clipart in the header, I found this passage:

“In the vernacular, the word doppelgänger (a German loanword) refers to a double or look-alike of a person. Doppelgängers are often perceived as an ominous form of bilocation and are usually regarded—at the least— as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, seeing one's own doppelgänger is considered an omen of death.”

“What?” I whispered at the screen. “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

Morbid curiosity got the better of me then, and I copied and pasted those last three words into the search box and hit enter again. Just under 300,000 results this time. I didn’t scroll any, just clicked on the first link I could get the arrow to point to and frantically started to scan the list centered on the page.

They were all there. Black Dogs. Screaming Banshees. Seeing your own double. And at least a dozen more signs of impending doom collected from folklore and legends from all over the world. The last omen on the list, in a comic sans font that didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of its topic: “a clock that stops at the time of death”.

I shut my computer slowly and, after nearly dropping it twice, managed to slide it onto my desk. Then I turned, as if in a trance, to look at the clock again.

Still 6:13.

My trance broke into a sudden, passionate lunge across the room. I dove onto the clock, sending a stack of books and guitar picks and empty coffee cups all sliding off the nightstand and clattering to the floor. I pounded on the buttons across the top of the clock, trying to change the hours, the minutes—but it just kept insisting it was 6:13.

I stared at it, tracing the bright red numbers over and over in my mind. Six. One. Three. Was that even the right time, though? I tried to think back to what little I remembered of that night. I’d left the beach house a little after dinner, and I know the sun had been starting to set. But I think it was before six. Way before six. Maybe. Probably.

“Must be broken…” I whispered to the John Lennon poster on my wall. But Lennon didn’t look any more convinced than I felt. “Stop looking at me like that,” I said, sinking back against my bed. “I’ve had this thing for like ten years now. I’m surprised it’s just now stopped working.”

Without another look at John, I leaned back up and yanked the clock’s cord from the wall. The numbers faded slowly, and I breathed a sigh of relief; I’d half-expected them to keep glaring me down. I pulled the headphones from my ears and held the clock up and shook it, wishing I’d hear something rattling inside, some sort of proof that the stupid thing really
was
just broken.

Silence.

I wrapped the clock in the folds of my worn comforter so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, and then laid back, stiff as a board, staring unblinking at the ceiling. It was several minutes after the initial shock before I realized how everything was still silent, inside my head and out. Without taking my eyes off the ceiling, I groped around until my hand fell on the smooth screen of my iPod. I held down the button until it powered off.

Almost instantly, though, I wanted it back on; wanted to put the ear buds back in and crank the volume back up to full blast. Because even though the screams were gone, I still had my thoughts to contend with, and in the silence they seemed louder than the screams had ever been.

Something hit my window. I blinked, listened closer for a minute, heard nothing. I decided I was imagining it and resumed my blank stare at the ceiling, only to be interrupted again seconds later.

Tik.

I sat up slowly, propped myself up on my palms and turned toward the window.

Tik.

I caught a flash of movement in the glow of moonlight outside my window, something small and dark hitting the pane. I turned away from the window and lowered my numb feet, one by one, into the plush carpet. I stretched each leg, tested my weight on it before I started toward the window. Once there, I suddenly realized why the noise in my head was giving it a rest; it must’ve been nearly eleven ‘o’ clock. Because there stood Eli, a shadowy figure in the silvery light of a half-moon.

Minutes later I was stepping outside, shutting the back porch door painstakingly slowly in an attempt to be quiet. I sprinted with a light step around the side of the house where I found Eli waiting, crouched beside one of Helen’s azalea bushes, a pile of smooth white garden stones gathered by his feet.

“Rocks on my window?” I said.

He shrugged, and stood to face me. “Call me old-fashioned,” he said. If circumstances had been different, the whole scene might have been unbearably romantic. But at the moment, I couldn’t eye the rocks with anything but raised eyebrows.

“You know, you could have just walked in the front door and right up to my room,” I said dryly. “It’s not like anybody would have seen you.”

He bent down and started to pick up the rocks, tossed them one by one back over into the garden.

“I guess we need to talk about that, don’t we?” he said, flinging the last of the rocks. It hit the skinny trunk of a recently planted dogwood with a
thunk
that sounded a lot louder in the still night air than it probably was.

“Did you think I was going to forget about it?”

“No. No, I guess you wouldn’t.”

“Or the stuff you started to say in Miss Brandes’ office? I didn’t forget about that, either.” He was watching me thoughtfully, leaning one shoulder against the weathered brick siding. I dropped my gaze to the grass, counted the few blades of brilliant green mingled with the mostly dry brown ones, and in a quieter voice I said, “And I already looked some stuff up.”

“…You looked some stuff up?”

I nodded. “The information age,” I said. “Google is a wonderful, terrible thing.”

He was quiet for a minute, then: “What did you look up, exactly?” His voice was barely a whisper; his eyes stared through me as he spoke.

“That word you used,” I said. “Doppelgänger.”

Saying the word out loud brought everything back at once, left me feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach. The stage, the office, the way Eli’s face had gone so pale, so fast. And then alone, in my room, the glow of the words on the screen…

“And other things too, from there,” I continued in a rush, “I was curious, with everything that’s been happening, and I just…” My voice was shaking. Heck, my whole body was shaking. I wrapped my arms around myself and hugged, closed my eyes and rocked, trying to soothe myself to the point of coherent speech.

“Those things can’t hurt you,” Eli said suddenly. He’d moved closer; my eyes were still shut but I could feel his nearness, and then his touch. The tips of his fingers rested feather-light on my arm for a few seconds, and when I didn’t resist he pulled me closer, laid my head against his chest.

“They’re real,” he said. “But they can’t touch you, can’t hurt you.”

“They can still scare the shit out of me, though,” I muttered into the crease of his jacket.

“…I know.”

I opened my eyes and took a half-step back. Eli’s hands slid from their comforting place on my back, to my arms, which he gripped in a gentle restraint that stopped me from putting any more space between us. Not that I really wanted to, anyway. I couldn’t explain why. It was weird— for me, at least— to even be standing this close to anybody. Much less to this guy I barely knew. Maybe I was just so desperate for some sort of solace right then that anybody’s arms around me would have been preferable to being alone. It made sense.

But I knew that wasn’t exactly true. I didn’t want just anybody’s.

A light came on in the window next door, and Eli’s grip dropped from my arms and down to my hands. He took a step back, and without thinking I gripped his hands more tightly in mine, tried to stop him from moving any farther away. He looked away from the window and down at the tangle of our intertwined fingers, and in an almost-shy voice he said,

“Maybe we should go for a walk?”

And I nodded with only the slightest hesitation.

#

The streets of downtown Sutton were well-lit, dozens of streetlamps abuzz with their pale fluorescent light. It was late, but we still passed the occasional person taking their dog out one last time before bed, and a handful of joggers and bikers who kept such late hours in a vain attempt to beat the humidity that being less than an hour from the beach brought with it. The passing people meant Eli and I couldn’t talk, meant I had to let go of his hand as we strolled down the cracked flagstone sidewalks. I still kept close, so close that we kept bumping elbows, and that when I tripped over the rough patches of sidewalk—which was fairly often in my half-dazed, half-asleep state— Eli was always right there to keep me from tumbling over the curb and into the street. It must have looked funny to anyone who might have been watching, I thought, to see me being caught by thin air.

The longer we walked, the more everything started to look the same, to blur with the same speed as my thoughts. We passed Luke’s house, the vibrant yellow Victorian on the corner of Fifth and Main where he lived with his grandparents, and I didn’t even realize it until we’d walked almost another entire block. As I looked back at it, at the silhouette of turrets and the living room’s bay window in the lamplight, my hand automatically went to my pocket to retrieve my phone. I glanced at the screen. Pointless. No new messages. This felt like the longest we’d ever gone without talking.

A brisk, cool wind carried the faint scent of the Atlantic Ocean salt with it as it rustled the mostly bare tree limbs above us. The moon shone brightly through the bare limbs, illuminating the weather-worn sign of our destination long before we reached it: Lakewood Memorial Park.

It wasn’t much of a park, really; just a green space in the center of all the shops and old houses that populated downtown. But it was filled with tall, century old pine trees draped with Spanish moss that provided the curtain of privacy we needed, and plenty of benches to sit on. I collapsed against one of those wooden benches, next to a fountain sputtering water halfheartedly up in its center. Eli stood beside the bench for a second, his hand resting on the corner of the splintering wood. Then he sat down beside me, clasped his hands together and leaned forward onto his knees and said,

“So you looked some things up?” It was more of a statement than a question, and not exactly an encouragement to elaborate.

“Yeah.”

He hesitated. “So what else do you want to know?” he asked the sky.

The moonlight played across his face, throwing shadows over the bottom half but illuminating his eyes in iridescent white. His brows were knitted together, and he was frowning; when he caught my gaze, though, his eyes widened and then softened, and his lips melted back into that easy—if not entirely convincing— smile.