Texas Gothic Read online

  And that was as far as I got, because Phin’s words had tripped my pay-attention-this-is-trouble switch.

  So this is the perfect opportunity to expand my research on the measurable paraphysical effects of supernatural phenomenon.

  “Hang on,” I said when she paused to take a breath, and I pointed to the contraption on the table. “You mean this is some kind of ghost detector you’re planning to use over on the McCulloch property?”

  “Of course not!” she said in a huff. “It’s a spectral energy visualizer. Weren’t you listening?”

  I placed my hands flat on the slate table, hoping to channel some of that cool into my demeanor. “Listen, Phin. You can’t go around spouting off about supernatural phenomena. I mean, Austin is pretty open-minded, but we’re not in Austin. This is a small town. And you definitely can’t go ghost hunting or energy visualizing or whatever on the McCullochs’ place. We need to keep well clear— What are you doing?”

  She continued to open and close the workroom cabinets and drawers. “I’m trying to find an EMF meter in Aunt Hy’s things. I blew mine out in an experiment for my physics final.”

  “You don’t need an EMF meter. You need to pay attention. This is important.” I followed her around the room, talking to the back of her head. Maybe if I threw enough words at her, some of them would penetrate her skull. “The McCullochs are already peeved at Aunt Hyacinth. If they’re trying to build this bridge, and then this body turns up, and if the ghost talk is making it even harder to get business done, their tolerance for quirky girl ghost detectives is going to be really low right now.”

  “Aha!” Triumphant, she extracted something that looked like a ray gun from one of the drawers.

  “What is that?” I asked in spite of myself.

  “Infrared thermometer, of course. I knew she’d have one. Culinary equipment has made it so much easier to be precise in cooking up spells.” She continued searching. “She’s got to have an EMF meter, too. It’s important to know where the electromagnetic fields are when you’re working.”

  I tried a more logical approach. “The ranch is about a bazillion acres huge. How are you going to know where to look for spectral auras or whatever?”

  She gave me a don’t-be-ridiculous look. “At the shallow grave, of course.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant. Because the only thing worse than trespassing would be trespassing on a crime scene.” I slapped a hand on the cabinet door she was about to open. “Are you listening, Phin?”

  Finally she turned and faced me. “We wouldn’t be trespassing,” she said, as if stating something obvious. “We’ve been invited.”

  “By whom?” The only thing obvious to me was how much we would not be welcome.

  “By Mark.”

  “And who is Mark?”

  “One of the anthropology people. I met him in the hardware store. He’s the one who told me they’d be digging tomorrow, and he invited us to come and see.” She pulled at the cabinet door.

  I leaned against it. “Right. The dig. Tomorrow. Not ghost hunting tonight.”

  “It needs to be dark to image the Kirlian aura!” Pull. “Plus if we go tonight, I can get data before and after excavation.”

  Push. “I’m not going.”

  She stopped and gaped at me like I’d told her I wanted fried kitten for breakfast. “But you have to go! Investigations have to be done in pairs to corroborate subjective experiences.”

  I dropped my hand from the cabinet and drew myself up to my full height, which was respectable but only nose high to my sister, Galadriel. I made the best of it, though. “I have one purpose in this family, and that’s to convince people we’re normal. I haven’t done a bang-up job of it so far today, but I’m not going to make it worse by aiding and abetting your trespassing.”

  “But how else am I going to test my coronal aura visualizer?”

  “Test it on Uncle Burt.”

  Snap. The lights went out and the air conditioner stopped humming. Again.

  “Dammit, Phin!” With the blackout curtains still up, the room was pitch dark.

  “It wasn’t me!” she cried. “You see—Uncle Burt doesn’t want me to test it on him.”

  “We’re in the country. The power goes out all the time, even without your, or Uncle Burt’s, help.” It went out so often that there were flashlights stashed in all the rooms. I stumbled to a drawer by the door and rooted around for one.

  There was the scratch of a match and then a flickering glow as Phin lit one of the many candles around the room. Aunt Hy made those, too, but I rarely lit any, since I didn’t know what was for decoration and what held some arcane purpose.

  “Maybe it’s the McCullochs’ ghost,” said Phin, the dancing flame casting eerie shadows on her face, the stone walls and black drapes turning the cozy room into something from a macabre fairy tale.

  “That’s not funny.” And then, because I wasn’t sure she was joking, I asked, “A ghost couldn’t get through the security system, right?”

  “Of course not,” Phin assured me. “Aunt Hyacinth knows what she’s doing. Plus twenty-five years of positive energy use here has strengthened it until the spectral equivalent of an F-five tornado couldn’t get through.”

  While I was picturing that with some dismay—did that mean there was a spectral equivalent to a house-leveling tornado?—something cold and clammy pressed against the back of my leg. I jumped with a startled squeal. In the dim light, Sadie’s eyes shone back reproachfully, while the other dogs pressed close to me for comfort.

  “For crying out loud.” Spurred back to sense, I found two flashlights and gave one to Phin. “I’m going out to the fuse box. Keep the dogs inside so they don’t give me another heart attack.”

  “Here,” said Phin, running to her equipment and returning with the headlamp she’d worn earlier. “So you can keep both hands free.”

  I took it, even though I knew I would feel too ridiculous to put it on. “Thanks.”

  I went out through the mudroom, relieved to see that it wasn’t as dark outside as it seemed in the house. The sun had set behind the big granite bluff to the southwest, casting everything into an eerie twilight of silvery blue and indigo shadows. Sunset had also brought a breeze to blow away some of the heat of the day, and dark shapes rode the currents overhead.

  Bats. I shivered. They lived in the limestone caves that riddled the hills, and dusk brought them out to hunt bugs. I was generally pro-bat, except when I was trekking through the dark trying not to think about the inevitably dire fate of every horror movie character stupid enough to go into the dark with a flashlight and check the fuses.

  The breaker box was outside the physical and metaphysical barrier of the board fence. A ridiculous arrangement. I slipped out of the gate, feeling the change like a pop in my ears, a tingle of warning. Maybe because I was still thinking of dead bodies. Aunt Hyacinth’s protections around the house would stop a spirit. They wouldn’t do anything against an axe murderer except make him queasy, which didn’t seem like it would be much of a deterrent. I mean, a strong stomach probably came with the job.

  The thought made me hurry as I tried to outrace my nerves. Unease had knotted tight under my ribs when Phin had mentioned F5 arcane tornados, and it hadn’t loosened.

  Phin’s talk of ghosts shouldn’t have bothered me so much. I’d grown up around Uncle Burt, and my cousin Daisy had been dealing with the dead as long as any of us could remember. But tonight I could not push away images of cold, silty water and slimy rocks, and thin, pale hands reaching—

  The breeze lifted my damp hair and carried the rosemary scent of the shampoo, clearing my thoughts and bringing memory into sharp focus. I knew exactly what had my stomach in knots, why carefully latched mental doors were rattling their hinges. It was partly the argument with Ben McCulloch, but mostly Phin bringing up La Llorona.

  The weeping woman. Another spook, another river. A camping trip to Goliad, a flashlight, two preteens with a really bad idea. Phin was twel
ve and I was eleven and we had snuck out of our rented travel trailer and gone looking for the veiled woman who, legend said, wept by the river for her drowned babies. The stories of her luring living children to their deaths didn’t frighten us enough to make us waste the opportunity to investigate. Jeez, we were stupid.

  I remembered nightmare snatches. The shadowed veil, the ashen skin of her clawed hands. Water closing over my head. But I didn’t remember exactly what had happened at the river, or how Phin and I had gotten away.

  I recalled vividly what happened after, though. Dad had flipped his lid when he found his wet, bedraggled daughters after a frantic midnight search. He’d driven home growling things like “your crazy mother” and “encouraging this BS.” And scarier things like “court” and “judge” and “custody.” Much scarier to me than La Llorona.

  It had shaken even Mom. Since they had never married, I wasn’t sure what his chances would be of getting custody. But even at eleven years old, I didn’t need psychic powers to see the way things would go if Phin started telling a judge about magic and spells in the Goodnight household. Not after La Llorona had almost made us victims of our own idiocy.

  I didn’t ever want to see that look of fear and loss on Mom’s face again. Trying to get anyone else to change was pointless, especially Phin. I could only change myself. So that night in Goliad was the last time I’d ever spoken of ghosts or magic to anyone outside the family. Until today.

  I didn’t know what that meant, except that La Llorona was, in a weird sort of way, on my mind even before Phin brought her up. I had broken my rule when I’d talked ghosts with Ben McCulloch, right when I most needed to put up a good front.

  A sound dropped me back into the present. I froze, one hand on the breaker box, and listened intently to the cricket-filled night. Had it come from the McCulloch place? The noise was otherworldly, the pitch so low I’d almost felt it rather than heard it. It was a visceral sort of whump, like the subwoofer on a stereo, overscored by a high, thin thread—

  No, that was the bats. The dark shapes that had been swooping in a bug-hunting ballet now wheeled in unnatural and panicked chaos, as if someone had put a magnet on their internal compass. As I watched, two of them collided and plummeted to the ground. They hit with muted thumps and the leathery flop of wings, and then silence.

  My throat clenched around my held breath. Just feet from me, their small black bodies lay unmoving in the circle of my flashlight. Had they knocked themselves out?

  I edged closer, and when neither moved, I touched one with the toe of my boot.

  Not stunned. Dead.

  The practical part of me said I would need to get a shovel and bury them deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig them up. Or maybe I needed to call Animal Control so they could be tested for rabies. Wasn’t erratic behavior a sign of that?

  The other side, the Goodnight side, knew that rabies didn’t make two bats’ radar go so haywire they’d collide hard enough to kill each other. But what would?

  Leave it alone, Amy.

  As omens went, it was pretty clear. Curiosity and ghosts didn’t mix. I knew that, even if the memories were slippery as river silt and cold bony hands.

  The ringing of the phone worked its way into my dream and became a burglar alarm, which was enough to scare me awake, given that my dreams—once I’d finally managed to drift off—involved skeletons riding goats chasing me in my underwear as Ben McCulloch and his horse herded me away from the safety of the house, all while Phin sat on the porch drinking a Vanilla Coke.

  Well, it scared me half awake, anyway. I was so clumsy with sleep that I answered my cell phone, my iPod, and my paperback book before I finally found the house phone. Three large dogs sacked out on my bed didn’t help. They made maneuvering difficult even when I was completely conscious.

  “Unff,” I said, brilliantly.

  “Amaryllis, darling,” said someone who sounded very like my aunt Hyacinth. “I have to tell you something.”

  “But you’re in China.” Maybe that was why she sounded like she was speaking through a cave. The phone was carrying her voice through the center of the earth.

  “Yes, I am. But your email reminded me.”

  Oh yeah. My note threatening to chop down the goats’ tree and her neighbor’s son. I didn’t expect to hear back from her for days. I certainly didn’t expect a Jules Verne phone call.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I need for you to take care of the goats.”

  “What?” I struggled up to a thinner layer of sleep. “I am taking care of them. Phin got plants, I got animals.”

  “Dear, that doesn’t make sense. Just promise me you’ll take care of it.”

  “I will, Aunt Hyacinth. I can’t believe you called just because of that.”

  “It’s very important to me. I’m sorry to put the responsibility on you, but I know you’re the one to handle this.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, wondering if, just possibly, my aunt’s eccentricities extended to a completely non-magical area. “I’ve got it covered.”

  “You promise?”

  “I do, no problem.” Jeez, how many times was she going to ask me?

  “I have to be sure, or I’ll worry about it for the rest of my trip.”

  “I promise, Aunt Hyac—”

  Just as I finished the third assurance, there was a pop in my ears and a strong tug in my belly, as if a knot had been yanked tight. It pulled me out of the fog of interrupted sleep and jerked me upright in the bed with a force that left me gasping.

  The dogs didn’t bark. They’d gone stiff, their heavy bodies pressed against my legs, trembling, their barrel chests heaving with fearful pants.

  Bear gave a soft, terrified whine. I might have made a similar sound as I stared at the growing column of light at the foot of my bed. I was trapped by the weight of the dogs on the blanket, and by my own dread, as the glow began to take human shape.

  5

  the column burned blue as a gas flame, and in the incandescent center was a hazy outline of a man, washed-out and blinding. But cold. Cold as a gravestone iced by a winter moon.

  The awful paralysis of nightmare gripped me. I couldn’t move—not to shout, or speak, or run. Maybe I was dreaming. I could half convince myself of it except for the dogs’ breath wreathing their quivering muzzles, and the stinging chill on my bare arms and neck.

  New features molded out of shadow—a hint of a nose, a jawline, a mouth. A caricature of a face, gaunt and stripped of definition. Then, movement. A half-formed arm lifted slowly, as if pulling against the weight of death to reach for me, and the shade of a mouth worked in horrific, soundless desperation, like a fish gasping at thin air, as the hollow eyes fixed on my face.

  As it stared at me, icy bands tightened around my chest so that all I could take were shallow, insufficient breaths. The edges of my vision sparked a warning as my head seemed to float and spin away from the rest of me. It was a horrible helpless feeling, like passing out in slow motion. My fingers went slack, and the phone tumbled from my grip. If Aunt Hyacinth was still there, I couldn’t hear her over the buzzing in my ears. But even if I could call out to her, how could she help me from China?

  The door slammed open, crashing against the wall and rattling the picture frames to the floor. Through the empty doorway, a torrent of wind poured into the room, raging like an invisible animal. It pulled at my hair and flung papers and books from the desk and whipped the drapes like Fourth of July streamers in a sudden summer storm.

  Lila jumped up with a woof of recognition. The ropes of ice around my chest thawed, and warm air rushed into my aching lungs—warm and scented with sage and mesquite, dusty denim, and a whiff of violet. The spectral blue light and the shape within it vanished, blown out like a candle in a gale.

  The cyclone whisked out the way it had come, slamming the door behind it, an emphatic period on the ghostly tirade. For a long moment, I sat staring numbly into the dark. The awful paralysis had drained aw
ay, but shock and bewilderment held me still. Then the rest of the dogs scrambled to their feet, letting loose a cacophony of barking sufficient to …

  Well, to raise the dead.

  The clamor bounced around my skull, knocking my tumbling thoughts into even more of a mess. Telephone, I remembered first. Aunt Hyacinth.

  I searched through the tangle of blankets and twelve dog paws, fumbling the receiver to my ear when I found it. “Aunt Hyacinth? Are you still there?”

  Nothing but a dial tone.

  The door banged open again, and I gave a shriek that might have, under other circumstances, been overreaction but wasn’t because there’d just been a freaking ghost in my room.

  At least one ghost, plus whatever that was that had swept through and driven it away—Uncle Burt?—which had seemed almost benign next to the deathly cold thing at the foot of my bed.

  The foot of my bed, ohmigod. My racing brain revved that single thought through my head, pushing out everything else.

  “Amy! What’s going on?”

  Phin stared at me from the doorway, her pajamas rumpled, her hair sticking out in all directions. The hall light fell across the bed, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror: huddled in the safety of my dogs and blankets, the snarl of my dark red hair stark against the bloodless pallor of my skin, my freckles standing out like raisins in oatmeal. And my eyes—huge and wild and world-tilted-on-its-axis terrified.

  No wonder Phin stared like she’d never seen me before. She flipped on the overhead light and goggled at the mess. “Holy moly! This looks like my room. What happened?”

  “There was a ghost. Right there!” I pointed. The dogs jumped off the bed and circled the room, whining at the tension.

  Phin frowned in confusion. “A ghost? You mean Uncle Burt?”

  “Not Uncle Burt,” I said. “I’m not scared of Uncle Burt.” I kicked off the covers and went to the spot where the light and cold had coalesced. But not too close. “It was right there. Like a column of blue-white light, and a figure in the center.”