Beyond The Grave. Mara Purnhagen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ didn’t know. He had bought a new car the following week, a little black hybrid.

      “He needs time,” I said quietly. “We all do.”

      “I know.” Annalise put the silverware away. When she turned back around, her eyes were filled with tears. “I worry about you. Both of you.”

      I gave my sister a hug. “Well, I worry about you.”

      She sniffed and pulled away. “I’ll manage. I have school and my friends and Mills.”

      “And I have school and my friends and Noah,” I reminded her.

      “But you also have—” she looked around the room “—this. You’re stuck here, where she was hurt. I can remove myself from it. You can’t.”

      What I couldn’t make Annalise understand was that I did not want to remove myself from it. Yes, the house held horrible memories, but also good ones, and I couldn’t separate the two. My life was formed by both, and I wasn’t willing to let any of it go.

      “I’m going to call you every day,” I told Annalise. “And you’d better answer the phone.”

      She hugged me again. “I promise.”

      Later, after I was sure that Dad was asleep in his room and Annalise was asleep in hers, I pulled out the box I kept under my bed. Hidden beneath a bunch of wrinkled T-shirts were a few pieces of equipment my parents had used in their paranormal investigations. I turned on the EMF reader first and set it on my nightstand. Then I checked the battery on the digital recorder. Finally, I brought out my thermal imaging camera and turned it on.

      “Is anyone here?” I whispered. In my parents’ show, they always called out in a loud, clear voice, but that was to ensure the sound quality of the program. For my purposes, I only needed to be loud enough for the sensitive recorder to pick up my voice. “Can you hear me?”

      I waited, as I had nearly every night for weeks. Only one light shone on the EMF reader, the one signaling that it was on.

      “I need to know if someone’s here.”

      I had been doing this for so long it felt like a sacred ritual. After I could no longer bear the daily visits to Mom’s bedside, I decided that I could do something else to help her, something more powerful than my somber hand-holding. And even though nothing had happened yet, I still believed that I was helping her. I held on to the possibility that the answers I needed could be discovered if only I tried hard enough. Mom had suffered serious injury because of a paranormal entity. With her doctors at a loss for how to help her, I had to find a way they wouldn’t dream of. If the cause of her suffering was paranormal, couldn’t the cure be paranormal, as well?

      My work was done in secret and in the dark. Not even Noah knew about it. After what had happened, it would freak everyone out. It freaked me out, at first. What if I contacted the Watcher or something like it? I wasn’t even sure that the thing that had attacked my family was gone. Not even Beth, who knew more about the paranormal than anyone I’d ever met, could tell me that I was safe. She could only say that for now the Watcher was subdued, which made me think of it as being held back, but still struggling to escape.

      Something had been after me and I’d stopped it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t find a way back. It was my worst fear, and a solid reason to stay away from trying to make contact with the paranormal, but my fear was eclipsed by a powerful need to help Mom.

      I waited, watching the lights on the meter and wanting so much for all of them to light up, but they didn’t, and I felt defeated because I knew I was just a desperate girl whispering in the dark and asking for something I might never get. But there was still a voice inside me, quiet and insistent, telling me to try one more time. I clutched the EMF reader more tightly in my hand. “Please.”

      And something happened. Two things, right at the same time. Three lights on the meter lit up just as my cell phone buzzed on the nightstand. I ignored the phone and stared at the meter, willing it to light up again. Then I heard the tinkle of chimes from my phone alerting me to the fact that someone had left a message.

      I stood up and, still holding the EMF reader, grabbed my phone, never once taking my eyes off the lights. I flipped open the phone and listened to Noah’s voice.

      “Hey. I thought you might still be up. Call me if you are, okay?”

      Four lights flickered this time, and I took out the digital recorder and began speaking. “Is anyone here with me?”

      It was how we always began an EVP session. The goal was to ask simple questions, wait for a few silent seconds, and then play back the recording to determine if it had captured an electronic voice phenomenon.

      “Can you help me?” The EMF reader was showing only two lights now. I asked a few more questions, and by the time I was done, all signs of activity had vanished. Still, I was happy that after months of trying, it appeared that I had finally reached something.

      After attaching headphones to the recorder, I sat back down on the floor and listened to what I had captured.

      My first few questions seemed to go unanswered. The highly sensitive device picked up the sound of my own breathing, but not much else. I had been expecting more, even if it was an undecipherable voice, but on the tape I was already asking my final question.

      “Can you help me?”

      And then, after a few seconds, a high-pitched whisper responded.

       I am trying.

       three

      Annalise returned to Charleston the next morning. She engulfed me in a firm hug and blinked back tears, then turned away before I could see her cry. I watched her car pull away, waving until it turned the corner and disappeared, and then walked down the hill to Avery’s house. I pulled out my key, unlocked the front door and stepped inside. A low whimper greeted me from the top of the stairs.

      “It’s just me, Dante,” I called. When Avery’s little dog didn’t appear right away, I sighed and trudged upstairs to find him. He always hid in the same place: underneath Avery’s empty bed.

      It had taken only moments for the airy pink room I had spent so much time in to transform into something completely different. Gone were the delicate silver picture frames that used to dot Avery’s dresser. The closet held several dangling hangers and a single formal dress from Homecoming. Even the bookshelf had been stripped of all but a few titles. It wasn’t her room anymore, I thought. It was the space that used to be her room.

      I had helped her pack the week before, pulling clothes out of her dresser and stacking books she thought she’d need.

      “This should be enough, right?” Avery had surveyed the half-dozen plastic storage bins that sat on her bedroom floor. They’d reminded me of oversize building blocks. “I mean, I’ll be back over Labor Day weekend if I need anything.”

      “I don’t know,” I’d said. “I don’t think they have stores in Ohio. You might be in trouble with only—” I pried open the lid closest to me “—twenty pairs of shoes? Wow.”

      “I need those.” Avery swatted at my hand. “Besides, it took a lot of work to get them all into one bin, so don’t mess anything СКАЧАТЬ