The Summoning

"I mean contacting a specific person. Can I do that? Or am I restricted to those I just stumble across?"

He went quiet. When he spoke, his voice was uncharacteristically soft. "If you mean your mom, Chloe —"

"No." The word came sharper than I intended. "I haven't even thought — Well, yes, I've considered it, for someday maybe, of course I'd like to, love to—" I heard myself rambling and took a deep breath. "This is co

"You mean Liz?"

"No. I —I should try to contact her, I guess. J-just to be sure. But that's not it. Forget why I want to know."

He leaned back into the sofa pillows. "If I knew why, I could answer a lot easier."

Maybe, but I wasn't telling him until I had enough facts to confidently lay out my theory.

"If I can contact a specific person, how would I do it?"

"You can, but it's not easy and it's not guaranteed at your age. Like Simon and his spells, you're at the . . . apprenticeship level."

"Where I can do things by accident, like raising the dead."

"Well, no." He absently scratched his arm, the skritch-skritch filling the silence. "From what I heard, raising the dead is the toughest thing to do, and it needs this complicated ritual." He shook his head and stopped scratching. "I must have heard wrong. Like I said, I'm not an expert."

"Back to how, then. How do I call up a specific ghost?"

He slouched, head resting on the sofa back, staring at the ceiling before nodding, as if to himself. "If I remember right, there are two ways. You could use a personal effect."

"Like with a tracking dog."

A small noise that sounded like a laugh. "Yeah, I guess so. Or like one of those psychics you see in movies, always asking for something that belonged to the person."

"And the second way?" I tried not to show how much I wanted this answer, how much I hoped I'd already guessed it.

"You need to be at the grave."

My heart hammered, and it was a moment before I could speak. "At the grave. Presuming that's where the body is buried. It's the body that's important, not the grave site."

He waved off my petty distinction, the old Derek sliding back. "Yeah, the body. The ultimate personal effect."

"Then I think I know what that ghost in the basement wanted."

I explained how the ghost had urged me to "make contact" to "summon them" and "get their story."

"He meant the buried bodies. That's why he wanted me to go into the crawl space. So I could get close enough to the bodies to contact those ghosts."

Derek reached back to scratch between his shoulders. "Why?"

"From what he seemed to say, it's about Lyle House. Something they can tell me."

"But those bodies have been down there way longer than Lyle House has been a group home. And if this ghost knows something, why not just tell you himself?"

"I don't know. He said . . ." I strained to remember. "He seemed to be saying he couldn't make contact with them himself."

"Then how would he know they had anything important to tell you?"

Good questions. This was why I'd gone to Derek. Because he'd challenge my assumptions, show me where the holes were and what I had to learn before jumping to any conclusions.

"I don't know," I said finally. "However they got there, I'm pretty sure they didn't die of natural causes. You're probably right, and it's completely unco

"Hold up."

He lifted a hand, and I braced for more arguments. It was a waste of time. Dangerous, too, after we'd been caught down there earlier. And, don't forget, last time I tried to contact these ghosts, I'd returned them to their corpses. Do that again, and I'd better not call him for reburial duty.

He pushed to his feet. "We should take a flashlight. I'll grab that. You get our shoes."

Thirty-four

I WASN'T SETTING FOOT —bare, stockinged, or shoed—in that crawl space until I'd talked to the first ghost and asked all the questions Derek had raised.

We went down to the laundry room. Derek took up a position at the side, leaning back against the dryer. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, closed my eyes, and focused.

It didn't take long, as if the ghost had been waiting for me. I still couldn't catch more than phrases and glimpses. I told Derek this, then said, "I stopped taking the meds after you gave me that jar. But they must still be in my system."

". . . not medic . . ." the ghost said. ". . . block . . ."

"What's blocked?"

"Spell . . . ghosts . . . blocking . . ."

"A spell to block ghosts?" I guessed.

That got Derek's attention and he shifted forward, arms uncrossing. "Did he say a spell's blocking him? What kind?"

I was about to translate, but the ghost could obviously hear and answered. "Magic . . . ritual . . . important."

"It's important?"

"Not . . . not important," he said emphatically.

I related this to Derek who grumbled about the imperfection of this mode of communication as he furiously scratched his forearm, then said, 'Tell him to say one word at a time. Repeat it until you get it and you say it back. It'll be slow, but at least we won't miss —"

He stopped, his gaze following mine to his forearm. His skin was . . . moving. Rippling.

"What the —?" he began, then growled in frustration and gave his arm a fierce shake. "Muscle spasms. I've been getting them a lot lately."

He peered down at the rippling skin again, made a fist, and pumped his arm, trying to work it out. I was about to suggest he see a doctor, then realized that might not be so easy for someone like Derek. I could see now that it was his muscles, expanding and contracting on their own. A side effect of his condition, I guess, muscles developing in overdrive. Like the rest of him, slamming through puberty.

"Just as long as you don't rip through your clothing and turn green," I said.

"What?" His face scrunched up, then he got it. "The Incredible Hulk. Ha-ha. Incredibly Stupid Movie, more like." His rubbed his forearm. "Ignore me and get back to your ghost."

The ghost had heard Derek's suggestion about taking it one word at a time, and that's what we did. It worked much better, though it felt a bit like charades, him saying a word over and over, and me excitedly repeating it when I finally understood.

I started with questions about the ghost himself, and learned he was a necromancer. He'd been at the hospital when I'd been admitted. Something about stopping ghosts from harassing the mental patients, which I didn't really understand, but it wasn't important.

Ghosts recognize necromancers, so he'd known that's what I was. Realizing that I didn't know what I was, he knew I needed help. But before he could make contact, they moved me. So he'd followed me to Lyle House. Only it was somehow blocked against ghosts. He thought it was a spell, though when Derek challenged that assumption, the ghost admitted that it could be anything from the construction materials to the geographic location. All he knew was that the only places he could make even partial contact with me were the basement and the attic.

As for the bodies in the crawl space, he knew two things. One, they'd been murdered. Two, they were super-naturals. Put those together and he was convinced their stories would be important. He couldn't get them himself because he couldn't contact the dead as easily as he could before he became one of them himself.

"But they were just skeletons and dried up flesh," Derek said. "Like mummies. Whatever happened to them wouldn't have anything to do with us, here, now."