Past Midnight. Mara Purnhagen

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СКАЧАТЬ only strong or intense emotions lingered, which was why places where a death had occurred seemed haunted. But then Mom discovered something that changed his mind.

      Mom met Edith, a woman who lived down the street. Edith claimed that an evil spirit was trying to force her out of her home. “It grabs my feet at night,” she said. “It tries to pull me out of my bed.”

      Edith was nearly hysterical. She’d been living in the house for only a few months and she didn’t want to move, but the paranormal activity occurred every week, and she couldn’t take much more. My parents investigated and noticed some strange readings in the master bedroom. While Dad spent a week at the house, Mom contacted the former owners, who had lived there for over thirty years before retiring to Florida. They’d never had a problem with anything strange, they said. Their daughter, now in her forties, still lived in town, and Mom invited her to the house one day.

      “I loved this place,” the woman said. “My family was so happy here.”

      Mom didn’t tell the woman what had been happening, only that she was researching the history of the house. When they walked into the master bedroom, the woman told Mom how she used to wake up her parents every Sunday morning by running into their room.

      “I’d grab their feet,” she said. “I’d try to pull them out of bed so they’d get up and make me pancakes.”

      The revelation changed the way my parents looked at their research. They’d been working under the assumption that only people who died left behind energy, usually after a single powerful event. Now they realized that perhaps simple repetition could also leave an imprint. It explained doors opening, or the sound of footsteps. Their new goal was to determine what triggered such energy. Why didn’t Edith feel the pull at her feet every single night or only on Sundays? They never figured it out completely, but they did introduce Edith to the woman and explained the story and their theory. The solution was actually easy: Edith moved her bed, and the tugging stopped. My parents reasoned that the trigger was the position of the bed because Edith had placed it in exactly the same spot as the previous owners.

      “The truth is that the paranormal is normal. It’s just a normal we don’t understand yet,” Dad liked to say.

      I thought about Edith’s story as my parents continued to investigate Charleston. They would spend a week at a place, filming in both the daytime and at night to get the best possible results. They tried to coax Annalise into returning to the Courtyard Café, but she refused. Mom and Dad backed off, but I knew they were just waiting, hoping that she would change her mind before the end of the summer.

      Annalise and I spent the next few weeks of our vacation going to the beach or taking walking tours of the historic downtown. She didn’t talk about what had happened and I didn’t ask. I hated to see her so quiet, though. She wasn’t simply my sister—she was my friend. We’d spent our lives moving from place to place and, besides my parents and Shane, Annalise was the only truly constant person in my life. Despite the fact that I sometimes felt overshadowed by her beauty and the attention she received, I was closer to her than anyone. I had missed her terribly when she left for school, and I knew I would miss her even more after the summer ended and we moved to our next destination while she began her junior year of college.

      “Where are you guys going after this?” she asked me one afternoon. We’d stopped at a little park to enjoy a picnic lunch. I was sitting against the trunk of a huge tree, eating pasta salad out of a paper bowl. Annalise was sitting cross-legged in the grass and poking at a Cobb salad with her plastic fork.

      “No idea. They’d better figure it out soon, though. I need to register for school.”

      “You’ll be a senior,” Annalise said softly. “Wow. That’s kind of hard to imagine.” She fastened a foil lid on her bowl and set it inside the beach bag we’d brought. “How many high schools have you been to?”

      I did a quick calculation. “Five? No—six. I guess Florida doesn’t really count, though, because I was only there for a few weeks.”

      Annalise shook her head. “You know, it’s not fair. To you, I mean. You should be able to stay in one place for more than a single semester.”

      I sighed. “That would be nice.”

      I had learned how to leave a place behind without leaving a piece of myself along with it, but more important, I had taught myself how to be detached. I never joined teams or clubs, and I doubted my picture appeared in a single yearbook. I was, in a way, a ghost: no one could prove I had ever existed once I physically left a location.

      “You should say something,” Annalise said. “I mean, aren’t you tired of Mom and Dad dictating your life?”

      “Why didn’t you ever say something? You’ve been to more schools than I have.”

      “Honestly? It never even occurred to me that I had a choice.”

      “But you think I do?” I wasn’t sure what my sister thought I could accomplish. Did she want me to pick a fight with our parents? Did she want all of us to move permanently to Charleston?

      “I think that if we approached them together, we could change things.”

      “Change what things?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to join Annalise’s revolution. Things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. I could live with that.

      “It’s time we had a voice,” Annalise said. “Whatever Mom and Dad want, they get. If they want to move across the country, they do. If they want you to stand in the middle of a room and allow negative energy to hurt you…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

      “What really happened?” I finally asked. She was plucking grass from the ground.

      “I don’t know, Charlotte. I really don’t. But I don’t want to feel that way ever again.”

      “What way?”

      “I just felt this sadness. This terrible, awful sadness, and it seemed to come from inside me and fill me up until I could hardly breathe.”

      I watched my sister for a while. She was staring at the grass, slowly running her fingers over it. I wanted to help her get over the experience, and there was only one way I knew how to do that.

      “You have to go back,” I said.

      “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

      “If you don’t face it—whatever it is—it’ll bother you. And you can’t escape it, exactly, because you live here now. What if your friends decide to go to the Courtyard Café for lunch one day? You can’t avoid this. Not forever.”

      “I know,” Annalise said softly.

      “We can go in the daytime, with the entire crew and everything, so you won’t be alone.”

      “That didn’t help me before.”

      “I’ll be with you, too. I’ll stand right next to you and I won’t leave no matter what.”

      “I know you won’t, Charlotte. But you didn’t feel what I did. You’re not afraid because you don’t think anything’s really going to happen.”

      She had me there. Annalise was the sensitive one in the family, a sponge soaking up other people’s emotions. СКАЧАТЬ