Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Zane
Thursday afternoon
Zane’s algebra class was the first place he discovered he talked in his sleep. At least that was what he told his teacher. Moments later, he pointed a finger at a metal filing cabinet and blurted out, “Who’s that?” He stared wide-eyed. “Look. There she goes!”
A golden-haired woman drew a bolt of lightning into her woolen cloak and darted out the classroom, disappearing down the corridor of Math Path, the main hallway for math courses at Anklesteam High School.
“She’s running away,” Zane hollered. “Someone stop ’er.”
Students giggled. Two teens in the back row pulled up the collars of bleached sleeveless jean jackets and whispered, “Hallucinatory Hall Monitor’s at it again.”
Zane never liked that nickname. Was it his fault he could see things that others couldn’t? They were just jealous because the voices talked to him.
Zane stirred from his stupor and leaned back in his chair. Classmates looked at him as if he swiped the teacher’s purse and was drawing on the desk with her lipstick.
It seemed so real. That vision. That woman. Was it another full-color daydream?
Uh, oh. Here she comes.
Zane sank lower in his seat to dodge the teacher’s oncoming verbal artillery. His algebra teacher, Old Lady Camelback, glared at him. She was a lanky, hunchbacked woman who was getting on in years. Sarcastic teens were something she’d rather see on a skewer. She was a woman who loved numbers, loved them to death. Zane had a few fateful wishes of his own for numbers and equations.
“Please, Zane, if you’re done with your staged theatrics, tell us the significance of our current math postulate. From chapter twelve. It’ll be on the final.”
Postulate? How ’bout your posture, you bumpy old duffel bag?
Old Lady Camelback earned her name by posture alone. No one called her that to her face, but was a name that stuck. Like a dark spell. Long silver hair spun into a tall bun with one of those funny-looking chopsticks stabbed through its heart, glimmering in the overhead lights. Her hunched shoulders were almost too painful to watch.
She smoothed out her plaid skirt with the sweep of a wrinkled hand. Gray V-neck sweater fit tight around her frame. Pantyhose and black buckle-strap ankle boots completed her outfit. She flared her nostrils; a miscreant nose hair to curled around it.
Tapping her foot insistently on the floor, Zane watched that shoe in action, refusing to make eye contact because her coffee breath would cloud his vision.
“Well?” she said hoarsely, pursing thin lips.
Zane leaned back to distance himself, just enough to breathe without gagging.
You have no idea what’s keeping me up at night, Camelback. “Like I said, I talk in my sleep. Uh, sorry.” He started to doodle nervously on his paper.
Old Lady Camelback cleared her throat and did her best to stand upright, which looked about as easy as straightening the curves in a roller coaster.
“I hope you all understand how easy you’ve got it,” she professed in a raspy tone. Her eyes drummed across the front row of laptops, a mixed look of distaste and envy filling her frumpy face. She folded her arms across her chest and scanned the class, making sure all eyes were on her. “Slackers bog down the learning process. Goes against my code of conduct. We must keep pace with the curriculum. Sleeping in class results in repercussions. Simple-minded actions deserve simple-minded consequences. And what would that be?”
Silence from the gallery.
“Detention,” Camelback spiked gravely and slid a pencil behind her ear. “I remember teaching before the advent of computers. Yes—a time when the Dewey Decimal system and library card catalogs were the only search engines out there. No such thing as Facebooking or Googling, gaggling, haggling. Such mindless dribble,” she scoffed.
Most students just stared at her as she regurgitated her take on detention. They had heard it all before: “It’s nothing more than a slap in the face, but an effective slap in the face. Students, if you truly call yourself students, should spend more time in the library.”
Zane wondered if this Dewey guy was responsible for inventing the decimal point in mathematics. Never heard of the scoundrel.
Zane did not want another detention.
Too late.
Old Lady Camelback was already filling out a detention slip. Zane gave one of those ‘oh well’ shrugs and let his mind drag him away from school, thinking of that psychic he recently met; some old bald dude that drove a wooden coach led by a two-horse team of black Percherons. Biggest, darkest horses he had ever seen. More on that later.
Summer meant hanging out with friends, swimming in the local lagoon, diving off rocky cliffs and plunging into river-fed tide pools. College was next fall and he hoped for one last summer in the wilderness. He loved the wilderness.
Oh, if he only knew what was in store for him.
Zane rifled his eyes across his open textbook, hoping to appear to be paying attention. Camelback’s eyes were boring a hole into his skull. He peered up through curly bangs falling over his eyes as she scrawled an equation on the board. She underscored it twice.
“This is review,” she reminded class, speaking as if she had something else on her mind. She trolled up the aisle, horseshoed her way around Zane and returned to the digital projector.
Zane sighed; his shoulders stiffened. “I’m so tired,” he whispered, not caring if anyone heard him. Senioritis had set in sometime back in February; June seemed a hundred miles away.
Suddenly, he felt a twittering sensation growing inside him. Sound intensified. Every object, every action, every noise in the classroom was an exact replica of events that had transpired just seconds ago, and it was happening all over again.
Déjà vu.
The way the rain pelted off the window and streaked the glass pane, the underwater sound of the marker clanging in the gutter beneath the whiteboard. This had just happened seconds ago and was happening all over again. Right now.
No one else seemed to notice the amplified sounds in the air. Even the crinkle of someone’s loose-leaf paper magnified, echoing in Zane’s ear. He stared off, fumbling a hand into his backpack and pulled out a pencil before realizing he already had one in his hand.
He then seemed to snap out of it.
This mysterious sensation, whatever it was, had dirtied his mind with sticky images of darkness and the unknown and then, just like that, faded away. Gone.
He sank his chin onto his sleepy arm. Why was it so easy to drift off at school? Yet late at night, at home, under a bright-eyed starry sky, he seemed to be jacked-up on some new bio-fueled save-the-earth blend of honey, electricity, and corn on the cob. Revved up and ready to go.
At the moment he didn’t care about saving Mother Earth. He closed his eyes. Nap time…
An obnoxious, yet familiar buzzing sound woke him: the school bell. He sat bolt upright and sent a calculator spinning off his desk and across the tile floor, an imprint of his beaded amber bracelet tattooed to his forehead. Two girls dressed in tight torn denim jeans—as if they were attacked by a dragon on the way to school—staggered past him, careful to step over his fallen calculator. No one thought to pick it up.
Zane sat on a blue-stitched afghan at the foot of his bed, unearthed his Algebra book, and smoothed out his wrinkled note sheet. Oddly, his book felt warm, as if baked in an oven. He ran his fingers along the spine. It hummed under the pads of his fingertips. He smiled, enjoying this sensation. That was until he heard a voice call out to him. He looked up. No one else was in his room. Then, from inside his closet, the voice said, “Got your witch on?”
Zane shuddered and squinted at his closet, narrowing his vision to focus on the closet door. Was his brother hiding inside, playing a joke on him? Or maybe his laptop was logged onto a website playing a looped pop-up ad. His eyes spotted his laptop sitting quietly on his cluttered desk, buried beneath a stack of graphic novels.
The voice spoke again. “I said…got your witch on?”
The voice was scratchy. Ancient. Definitely sounded like an old man. Zane cringed, thinking back to the whispering voices he often heard in the middle of the night. He listened intently.
Please tell me this is my imagination.
Box springs under his mattress creaked nervously as he stood up, tiptoed to the closet and slid the wood-paneled door open. He sucked in a breath of air and froze.
An old man was standing there. Glowing. Silvery-blue. Zane stumbled backwards and fell onto his bed.
This closet intruder folded his arms across his chest and stepped into a square of sunlight that bled right through him as he glanced out the window. The stranger did not cast a shadow.
He spoke in a calm tone, “Lad. I’ll ask you one more time. Got your witch on?”
Zane’s heart raced; he fumbled with his thoughts. Uncertain what to do. “My witch? What—who are you? What’re you talking about?” Zane stifled a frown and gazed into this man’s dark eyes. “How’d you get in here?”
“The front door,” he said in a lifeless tone. He spun on his heels with the blur of a tiny tornado, turning his back to Zane. Remarkable maneuver for someone so old. He splayed out his fingers and inspected his fingernails. “Don’t be frightened. I’ve been watching you.”
Gee— that made Zane feel so much better. Was this guy a stalker? Zane placed a hand over his mouth.
A staring contest ensued.
He had been hoping for a normal day. Nothing normal about this. He began spitting tiny half-moon fingernail bits onto the carpet. Was he about to be the victim of a mugging?
“Allow me to introduce myself. Name’s Stanley.” He strode across the bedroom, pausing to dust the stiff shoulder pads of his brown tweed blazer. “Hope I didn’t spook you…boo.” He smiled, revealing partially yellowed teeth.
A warm buzz cycled through the room, and Zane, for a moment, was able to swallow and breathe again.
Stanley had snow-white hair. Thick and wavy. Pencil-thin peppered mustache. He moved across the shag rug with purpose. Seemed to hover inches above the carpet. He was all aglow—literally. He smoothed out a few wrinkles in the sleeve of his finely stitched tweed blazer. “You heard me. Got your witch on?”
Zane said nothing.
The man called Stanley chuckled. “Witches are watching you. Pay attention. It may be a real life saver for you…one day soon.”
“Witches?” Zane didn’t believe in that sort of hooey, nor did he have a violent streak in him but now wouldn’t be such a bad time to have a double-barreled shotgun stowed under the bed.
A silvery-blue sepia tint outlined Stanley’s head and hands. Navy-green slacks and a pair of thick-soled Doc Martins complemented his outfit. For a second Stanley looked transparent. Zane could see right through him. But then he’d solidify. Always glowing.
Stanley claimed, “I’m a ghost. Can’t you tell?” He spun on one heel and wiggled his hips. Looked at his reflection in the bedroom window, adjusted his yellow bow tie, and patted his chin with the backside of his hand, as if ironing out flabby flesh that hung there.
The front door of the house clicked open and closed. A couple of minutes later his brother, Marcus, strolled down the hall, passing his room. Zane’s eyes rifled from Stanley to the hallway and back to Stanley. He remained seated on the edge of his bed, and called out, “Hey Marcus…what’s up?”
“Uh….a few clouds. A Blue bird,” Marcus said from down the hall, lacking any semblance of enthusiasm.
“Come in ’ere a minute, will ya?”
“Why? I’m busy,” Marcus grumbled. The sound of a backpack thumped onto the floor.
Zane could hear his brother’s TV monitor click on and the sounds of one of his video games, Grandstand Thief Fifteen, cueing up.
“Marcus? Please…it’s an emergency,” he begged.
Marcus muttered something incomprehensible and poked his head into Zane’s room. “What?” he said flatly.
Zane darted his eyes in the direction of Stanley and then he pointed with his chin at the ghost.
Marcus stared at his brother. “What? What is it?” he said, sounding thoroughly bothered.
“Don’t you see ’im?”
Marcus looked around. “See who?”
Stanley shrugged, placed hands on hips. “You didn’t let me finish. No one else can see or hear me…at least not here. Consider yourself lucky.”
“Can’t—don’t you hear that?” Zane pleaded to his brother all the while thinking: how does this old man know my name? What the frick?
“Don’t hear a thing. Having a coronary about finals, are you?” Marcus waved a hand at him and rolled his eyes. “When the next emergency happens,” he stared at his brother, “text me.”
