Audrey Claire - Libby Grace 01 - How to be a Ghost (2 page)

“Liberty,” he said again with such authority in his tone, I stood up and took a few tentative steps toward the door. Not that I felt compelled to go. I was more curious.

When I stood within a foot of the door, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to open it in this ghostly form. Fresh pain and anguish began to rise when Ian spoke. “Tell me to come in,” he said.

I frowned. What did he mean by that? Testing my voice, I responded, “W-What do you mean?”

“Tell me to come in,” he repeated.

At this point I realized I wasn’t so sure I wanted him to see me as a ghost. I wasn’t ready to face the inevitable, so I turned and darted toward the small hall that led to the kitchen. I hid like a child around the bend and peeked out at the entrance. “C-Come in,” I called, and just in case, I needed to be specific, I said, “Come in, Ian.”

To my astonishment, the dead bolt began to turn. I had a chain on the door at Mason’s insistence when he lived there, but I hadn’t engaged it. Still, the chain rattled, and I had the horrible feeling that I was being haunted. Yet, I was the ghost.

The doorknob turned, and the door began to open. Ian stood there with his hand on the knob. For some reason seeing it calmed me down a little, as if the magic of the self-unlocking door had never happened because Ian performed what I couldn’t.

He found me in the dim hallway within seconds and narrowed his eyes. “You disturbed my reading.”

I forgot my intent to hide and came out to face him. “What were you doing reading at this time of night? Besides, I wasn’t screaming that loudly.”

He pinned me with that cold stare he had, a look that could cut others down with a glance. Since I lived so close, I probably saw him more often than others, leaving his house only at night and I assume returning at dawn. I had concluded Ian worked for a company that stayed open overnight. Not in Summit’s Edge, but maybe in the city.

“You were wailing,” he corrected, and his gaze slipped over my form, down to my feet and back up to my face, which was probably flushed. I felt exposed and not because of my lack of physical substance. Ian pointed at me, annoyance in his tone. “Where is your body?”

I opened and closed my mouth a good ten times, scrambling for words. He questioned me as if he came across ghosts every day, and the way he posed the query made it sound like my body was no more than a misplaced sock. No wonder he didn’t socialize much.

I patted my sides, made a show of checking my pockets, and glanced around the floor. “I know I left it here somewhere.”

He didn’t appear amused.

While Ian glared at me, a new thought came to mind. If I had been screaming my head off, why was it only Ian who came to see what was the matter? Now that I considered it, I should have worried I would rouse and frighten Jake. He was a light sleeper. Besides that, I had another neighbor on the left, and houses lined the opposite side of the street, including my best friend Monica Wade’s place.

Wait,
Monica
! Memory returned that I had asked Monica to watch Jake while I ran out, but what had I gone to do? What happened while I was wherever I was?

Ian seemed to sense my confusion. “You used what has been called a ghostly wail,” he explained. I blinked at him, and the furrow between his eyes deepened. “The sound is not a physical one. Humans cannot hear it.”

“Humans?” I repeated, dumbfounded.

“If you continue to make that racket, you will draw more than me to your door,
things
… you do not want visiting.”

I gulped, eyes widening, and then considered how he had said humans couldn’t hear the noise I had made. If he heard it, what did that make him? Something
non
human? No, no, no, this was all too much for me to accept. I decided finding out I was a ghost was enough to deal with. Whatever Ian in his hatred of people decided to believe about himself, well, it could remain in his own mind. I had nothing to do with him or his delusions.

I began at that point to worry about him leaving me alone in this state and blurted out, “I think I’m dead.”

I hoped he would laugh and say that’s ridiculous. Just wake up. But he didn’t. He gave me another grave look and thinned perfectly formed lips. “You are not dead. Not in the usual way. I sense life around you. Also… Death is not here.”

He said it that way, with a capital D. I figured I heard him wrong and let it pass.

“Do you feel a connection with your body?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by a connection. In fact, I didn’t
feel
anything. Not the floor beneath my feet, not the evening air, nothing. I let out a whimper at this but stopped myself just in case I lapsed into the wail. Even if Ian was crazy, I didn’t want to take chances.

“I don’t know.” Desperate to distract myself from my situation and to keep him with me until inspiration struck on how to fix it, I said, “Tell me how you performed the trick.”

“What trick?” The man continued to speak in a superior tone as if he tolerated me. I bristled at the insult but was still determined that he was my only lifeline, if one could call it that.

“You unlocked my door. I saw the lock turn, and there was no key when the door opened.” I squinted at him. “
Did
you use a key?”

He watched me in silence. I had the feeling he debated telling me the truth.

“You need to get your body back. Having you out of it is an inconvenience to me.”

At that point, I was ready to toss him out on the street and go it alone. “Inconvenience? What is that supposed to mean?”

He made no move to speak and stood so still he might have been a statue. I folded my arms under my chest and decided to wait him out then gave a silent
whoop
of triumph when he spoke first.

“Where were you when you lost it?”

Was I really having this conversation? “I’m not sure.”

“Think about it, Liberty.”

I bristled. “No one calls me Liberty. I’m Libby.”

He made no indication that he would comply with the request.

Pacing, I thought over the day before. I had worked at the school as usual, and when Jake and I left there, he had begged for ice cream as dessert. Since he had shown me an A on his last math test, I figured ice cream was a great reward. We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to pick up Cookie Dough flavor for Jake and Black Cherry for me. Then what happened? I wracked my brain, worried that maybe I’d had a stroke or something that shorted out my memory just before I died. Not that I had any idea if what happened to a person physically affected their soul after death. This was all new to me.

Death
. Just thinking the word set my teeth on edge and gave me an urge to sink into the floor in despair. Then I remembered Jake. The sooner I figured this mess out, the better for him.

“I came home and…” I chewed my lower lip, struggling to recall, and then it hit me. “The leak! I had a leak in the bathroom beneath the sink.”

Ian nodded. “So you called a plumber? Did you check in the bathroom?”

I raced toward the bathroom with visions of finding my body there unconscious after a phantom plumber clunked me over the head for some reason. Mustard-colored shaggy carpet in front of the sink matched a cover for the back of the toilet and tank, which offset the cream paper on the walls and gay trimming toward the ceiling. I rethought the entire yellow theme outside my body. Décor aside, my body was not there, but the drip was, plopping steadily into the small rectangle tub beneath the sink.

My heart sank, but Ian prompted me to search the rest of the house. He followed, moving behind me without sound. Jake in his bedroom and Monica stretched across my bed asleep, what little else there was to explore, we covered in a few minutes. Hope sprung to life once we entered the front hall again.

“What was I thinking? I can’t afford a plumber.”

Ian’s expression said I couldn’t afford
not
to hire one.

I raised my chin. “I have watched plenty of home improvement shows on TV. I know with a few tools and maybe a book on how to fix a leak, I could get it done in a jiffy.”

“If that was your logic,” he said, and I knew he was being generous using the word logic, “then you would have gone to buy the tools and book.”

“Yes!” I almost clapped my hands. “George’s Hardware. Of course. George has tools and books, and just about every other thing you might need in that store. I remember now. I asked Monica to watch Jake while I ran over to George’s. He stays open a little later than most.”

“Good.” Ian turned to go.

“Wait.” I reached for his arm and then remembered just before I made impact that I couldn’t hold onto anything at the present time. Passing through Ian’s arm, though, turned out not to be the issue I faced with the man. Ian seemed to repel me with a force that sent me stumbling backward. An icy chill raced over my being down to the core. I might not feel anything normal like the carpet or the air, but I most certainly felt Ian, and not in a good way. “W-What was that?”

He hesitated and then said simply, “You cannot touch me in that state. Not presently.”

“I know, but why didn’t I pass through you like everything else? Is it because you’re a person and not an inanimate object?” I was treating him like an authority on the subject, but he did seem to know a lot. He had registered no real surprise when he saw me, or fear for that matter, and it made me more than curious about him.

“Hurry to the store,” he said in answer.

I straightened, annoyed but swallowed the emotion as I wanted to keep his assistance. “Will you go with me?”

Ian glanced over his shoulder toward the window above the door. I had loved that spot from the first time I stepped into my home because it let in such a strong concentration of sunlight. When Mason and I were still together, I dreamed of changing the front door to the kind with a window to let in more light and having someone cut in a picturesque window for the kitchen. That never happened, and my budget didn’t allow for it now.

“No, I will not.”

“Ian, you’ve been very helpful so far, and it would mean a lot if you would go along. If nothing else, at least you’re alive.
Please
.”

He gave an odd quirk of his lips at my little speech but kept to his decision not to go. “It is late. I doubt you can make yourself invisible to humans, so go quickly. The town rises early, does it not?”

A fissure of panic rose in my belly. He was right. Half the population of Summit’s Edge rose at the latest five a.m. I headed toward the door and stopped, unsettled because I couldn’t open the door. I would need to pass through it, which I wasn’t used to. I had visions of banging into the panels and falling on my rump in front of Ian.

He moved past me and laid a hand on the doorknob. I almost sighed in relief, but he paused, pinning that intimidating gaze on my face. “Listen closely.”

I nodded.

“It is crucial that you do not let anyone see you.”

“Because they’ll be scared out of their mind. Of course.”

“More than that.”

“Like?”

“Banishment.”

My eyebrows rose. “Banishment?”

“If you are seen by the wrong person, you could be banished.” He appeared to consider a different way to explain. “Do you know the term exorcist?”

I felt sick. “Yes.”

“Similar to that.”

“But an exorcism is just casting a spirit out of a body, right? I mean, technically, I’m not in a body, so…” I gave a short, shaky laugh, but I saw no humor in the subject.

“It is where the spirit goes afterward that is important.”

“I could be sent to a specific place?”

“Somewhere you do not wish to go, nor can you return from.”

All of a sudden, I was terrified of leaving the house. Ian opened the door, and I just stood there, staring out into the darkness. I imagined I could feel the evil ready to engulf me and sweep me away to this prison for spirits he had mentioned.

“Liberty.”

I opened my mouth to correct him on my name but decided it made no difference. I had to do it. He refused to give me any more help, and I needed to get back into my body. How could I hide from humans? Then a calm came over me. There were no exorcists as he called them in Summit’s Edge. We had two ministers of two different denominations, and they vied for members all the time. I doubted either man could be stirred from their schemes to perform an exorcism on little old me.

Afraid but determined, I set out into the night and rushed on foot the ten or so blocks to George’s Hardware store. With any luck, I would be back in my body by sunup.

Chapter Two

When I reached the road outside my house, I ran and didn’t stop. I crossed to the opposite side of the street and passed Monica’s house. Monica had a green thumb unlike yours truly, so she had placed two huge terra-cotta planters on either side of her front door with colorful flora growing beautifully in them. The red flowers bloomed each spring and complemented my friend’s bright red shutters. I joked that her shutters could be seen from space, but Monica always said that’s just the way she liked it.

Ian’s warnings played through my mind as I ran, and as I peered into the shadows, beneath cars, behind trees, everywhere since our little residential road held so few lights, I imagined the darkness reached out to me just waiting to swallow me whole. Fear crawled up my back, making me more vulnerable than I had ever been in my life. A few turns onto new roads led me down Memorial, the street where our pesky newspaper reporter Luis Riley lived. I had never had reason to be featured in the local paper, and I did not relish the idea of my debut tonight.

I suppose I could have just run in a straight line through the walls of the houses between me and the hardware store, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I settled for cutting across lawns and phasing through fences. Could I describe what I did with that term?
Phasing
?

At last, I reached Main Street and paused. I thought to pant to catch my breath then realized I was not winded. However, I was tired, but this feeling—a sense of being drained—puzzled me.