As Dead As It Gets

The only way I’d get any information was to go after it myself. I grabbed my car keys and hurried out to my car before I could lose my nerve.

I stopped at the grocery store, bought a small vase of flowers, and drove across town to the Evanses’ house. Someone was home—there were cars in the driveway, so I walked up the front path and rang the doorbell.

Mrs. Evans pulled the door open. She looked at me vacantly for a moment, then blinked in recognition. One of the advantages of having white hair—people tend to remember meeting you. “Alexis?”

I held up the flowers. “Um, I brought you these.”

I’d intended to use the flowers as a reason to go there. What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that they made it seem like I thought Ashleen was dead. But from the way Mrs. Evans stared down at them, I realized my mistake.

“They’re to cheer you up,” I said stupidly, and she reached out and took the vase. She stepped back into the house, probably not intending to invite me in, but I followed her anyway.

We went all the way to the kitchen, where two boys, one older than me, one younger—both of whom looked like Ashleen—were moping at the table. They raised their heads when we came in, then slumped again.

“I wanted you to know how sorry I am,” I said, and Mrs. Evans startled and turned around, not expecting to see me behind her. “I’m sure she’s all right.”

Her eyes widened. “Do you know something? Something you want to tell me?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry. I’m just worried, and I thought coming here might…”

How to jump into the topic of where she might have gone?

Mrs. Evans went hazy again. But one of the boys at the table, the older one, looked at me.

“Did Ashleen like to hike?” I asked. “I’m just thinking if she had, you know, wilderness skills…”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “She didn’t hike. She rode horses. And she had plenty of survivalist experience. She did this ride last summer—one of those ‘live off the land’ things. She was gone for two weeks.” His voice swelled with pride.

“That’s great,” I said. “Where did she ride around here?”

“Mostly the trails over at Wyndham Forest,” the boy said. He leaned forward, his interest waning. “But they’ve searched it already.”

The younger boy looked up at me suddenly, his eyes burning. “Do you know how hard it is to find someone who doesn’t want to be found?”

“Shh,” the older boy said, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “That forest ranger didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Then the younger boy started crying, and the older one glanced up at me.

“Thanks for coming by,” he said. “And thanks for the flowers.”

It’s time for you to go, he didn’t say.

“You’re welcome,” I said, grateful for the opportunity to leave.

* * *

An expedition to a deep dark forest in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly my first choice, but there was no other way to get out the door without concocting an elaborate web of lies for my parents. So I passed the rest of the afternoon thumbing through the book of charms and marking the ones I hoped would be useful. I had a lot of faith in Walter Sawamura, so when the paragraph on the back of the book claimed it would help “send the lingering spirits of the dead onward to a state of permanent transitional resting,” especially since he promised “a minimum of trouble and danger to the executor of the spells,” I believed him. His work had saved a whole town full of women from my sister’s evil doll.

After my parents and sister went to bed, I slipped on a pair of jeans, a hoodie, and my Converse. I took a piece of chalk from the chalkboard that hung over my desk and dropped it into my pocket. Then I grabbed my coat, car keys, and wallet, and slipped silently out the front door.

It was weird. You’d think it would have felt like more of an event—giving up everything I’d spent a month trying to build for myself, jumping back into the fight.

But instead, it felt more like I was starting a really hard project for school—something I didn’t want to do but didn’t have a choice about.

As much as I hated the idea of having anything to do with ghosts, I couldn’t just sit back and let Lydia rampage around Surrey, hurting people. Until I found a way to stop her permanently, I might just have to stop her on a case-by-case basis.

Unless she stopped me first, of course.

As my headlights swept over the empty roads, I thought, So much for normal.

I PULLED DOWN A DIRT ACCESS road and parked on the shoulder. In the highly unlikely event that someone came by, I’d just say I’d been driving home and got lost. That wouldn’t explain why I was wandering around in the forest, but if I combined it with a simpering helpless-teenager face, I was positive it would do the trick.

Logistically speaking, I felt pretty confident about the whole operation. The rain had let up, and the moon was full and round, bathing the night with blue light so bright that even under the canopy of the trees I could see the reddish-brown color of the pine needles on the ground. I had my phone with me, and approximately every fifty feet I checked to make sure the GPS signal worked so I could find my way back to my car. In case that failed, I also marked my trail, putting slashes of chalk on tree trunks to indicate which direction I should go to find the previous tree.

In other words, getting lost in the woods—not an option.

And I wasn’t exactly scared of encountering Lydia—for all the awful things she’d done, she still had yet to really hurt me. I still thought of her as Lydia first, ghost second—more pest than danger. I couldn’t help it, even though I knew it would be smarter to see her as a real threat.

But my faith in the book of charms was nearly absolute. I had it tucked between my two sweatshirts, because just seeing it might even be enough to scare her off. I’d bookmarked “For Temporary Immobilization of Spirits” and “To Send Spirits to a State of Rest,” and I wanted her to stick around long enough for me to read one and dispatch her to the next plane. Lydia in a state of rest—someplace far, far away from me—sounded pretty heavenly, if you’ll excuse the pun.

An hour later, I was freezing through all of my layers and begi

I’d seen one ghost so far—a Native American girl about my age, with a bullet hole in her shoulder and a healthy splotch of blood on her animal-skin cape. She was intent on some kind of hunt, and she didn’t even look up at the flash of the camera.

I kept moving.

The sound of every footstep, no matter how lightly I tried to tread, seemed magnified in the air around me. And the harder I concentrated, the longer I walked, the louder my breathing got. It became a complex little routine—walk, pause, chalk a tree, take picture, look at picture; repeat.

As the minutes continued to tick by, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Luckily, not the terrifying kind of mistake I usually ended up stumbling into—more of a tactical error. Just because this was a place Ashleen knew didn’t mean I’d find her here. And if she wasn’t out here, what good would it do for me to be stomping around in the wilderness in the middle of the night? Like her brother said—they’d searched these woods already.

Two and a half hours in, there was no sign of Ashleen, the white light, or Lydia herself. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was an ice cube on legs, I would have fallen asleep on my feet. A growing sense of futility began to overwhelm me. I gave myself five more pictures before I would call it a night and go home.

The next picture, nothing.