Texas Gothic Read online

  It seemed like there should be a burn or a mark or something, the way the image was singed into my retinas. When I blinked, I could still see the glow, and I shuddered.

  Phin hung back in the doorway, as if she were afraid of contaminating a crime scene. “A ghost shouldn’t have been able to get in here.”

  “I know.” I rubbed at the gooseflesh on my arms. My tank top and boxer shorts were meant for sleeping under a hundred and fifty pounds of dog, not for dealing with ghosts.

  “But it did.”

  “But it shouldn’t have,” she insisted.

  “I know!” Though I didn’t really, not until I looked at her—her features set and tense, her skin drawn tight into an anxious mask. She was genuinely shaken, and clinging to what she knew, because throwing that out was too frightening.

  I sank onto the antique trunk next to the wall. “Oh.” I forced myself to voice what I thought she was thinking. “For something to get in here, it would have to be stronger than Aunt Hyacinth.”

  She nodded, dispelling the hope I’d been wrong. “Aunt Hy and all the aunts who help renew the spells every year.”

  I felt sick. That was a lot of Goodnights, all combined. Thanksgiving filled the farmhouse to bursting. Hot queasiness warred with the chill of fear on my skin, and I shivered, wrapping my arms tight around myself. “Do you see my jacket?”

  Phin took the inane question in stride, scanning the room, where my belongings had been flung to kingdom come by the supernatural tornado. “Did the ghost do all this?”

  “No.” I shook my head and ordered my thoughts. “That is, not the first one. First was the figure I told you about—”

  “An actual apparition?” she asked. “Not just an orb or a column?”

  “Yes.” This inquisition was more like normal, unconquerable Phin, and it shored up my nerves, made me think I might be normal, unconquerable Amy again soon. “Sort of light and shadow, but definitely a human shape.”

  “Full body or torso?”

  “Full body. Or, at least, I think so. The footboard was in the way, so I really didn’t see.” I shivered again, the phantom of memory prickling my skin and tightening my chest. “It was so cold. I couldn’t breathe.”

  Phin walked to the end of the bed and extended a hand as if testing a breeze. “There’s not much of a chill left.”

  “The wind blew it away.” Watching her pace like Sherlock Holmes in mismatched pajamas had a perversely settling effect on me, too, and I considered the differences between the two events—the specter and the gale. “That’s why I think there were two ghosts. The second was invisible, just this force that slammed open the door and drove back the horrible cold.”

  And there was Lila, who had barked as if she recognized something in it. Or someone. “I think that might have been Uncle Burt,” I said. “Or maybe a combination of the protection magic plus him. I don’t know.”

  I spotted my jacket hanging from a light fixture and stood to get it, relieved my knees held me up. Then, unable to look at the mess anymore, I reached to straighten a potted plant that had toppled, its soil spilled out onto the floor. “I should probably try to call Aunt Hyacinth—”

  “Don’t touch that!”

  The piano wire of my nerves sent me nearly to the ceiling. I snatched back my hand and whirled toward Phin, but she’d already dashed from the room. Two of the dogs went with her.

  Should I follow? Was something going to blow up? The dogs seemed calm. That should have been a good sign, but alone again in the room, I felt my dread come crawling back up from the place where I’d pushed it.

  The problem was, in all my acquaintance with Uncle Burt, I’d only seen him nudge things, turn lights on and off, and rock in his favorite chair. The scale of destruction in my room forced me to wonder, if it had been him, what awful thing had motivated such violence.

  I took the Goodnight oddities—herbs, crystals, potions, ghosts, even Phin’s paranormal chemistry set—for granted. Magical hair products and Uncle Burt hanging around his beloved wife, those were familiar and natural in a way even I could sense. This cold, desperate thing was an unknown, and when it reached for me, what I felt—the terrifying, visceral pull that robbed my breath and my body heat—was … unnatural. It was out of joint, distorting the order of both worlds, normal and paranormal.

  Phin returned, heralded by the slap of her bare feet on the pine floor. She was breathing hard, like she’d run to the workroom and back. My sister was no athlete. The only things that ran a mile a minute were her brain and occasionally her mouth.

  She’d gone to get one of her gadgets—a camera with some kind of complex arrangement of wires and extra lenses on the front. Before I could decide if it was a Steampunk thing or an alien-invasion thing, she flipped off the light and started snapping pictures.

  At least, that was what it looked like she was doing.

  “Did you rig up some kind of night vision?” I asked, just to make conversation and avoid dwelling on how the moonlight-filled curtains echoed the glow of the apparition.

  “No.” Click. “This is the coronal aura visualizer.”

  She had a tone, one that I interpreted to mean You wouldn’t understand. Irritation chased away the lingering chill of unease. “I’m not an idiot, Phin. I’m capable of grasping the principle, at least.”

  In the dark I heard her sigh. Loudly. “I told you the principle downstairs.”

  Awkward pause and … Click.

  “Well,” I said finally, reluctantly admitting I hadn’t been listening. “I now have a pressing reason to pay attention.”

  Click and sigh. “It takes an image of the aura discharged by living objects which have been subjected to metaphysical or psychic energy.” She gave a very detailed lecture as she worked, but I gathered the basics: Whatever a spirit had touched lit up with a sort of invisible halo that showed in the images she took through her camera gadget. The touch of a person might show a slight glow, but supernatural events or psychic episodes would get a brighter corona, as Phin called it.

  Since I couldn’t see what she was photographing, I wasn’t expecting much as I peered over her shoulder at the camera’s viewscreen. But the image made me inhale sharply. “Oh my gosh, Phin! That’s so cool.”

  Against a dark background, the leaves of the plants that had been knocked over by the ghostly gale were lit around the edges, like a harsh halo of washed-out neon—blues and pinks blending to purple, cut through with angry spikes of yellow.

  She shrugged off the compliment, but there was a hint of pride warming her voice. “It would be more functional if it worked in daylight. I haven’t figured out why it only works in the dark. Since it’s not a visual energy, ambient light shouldn’t make a difference.”

  I studied the images as she thumbed through them on the screen. They changed shape and brightness, but they were all in the same color scheme. One of our cousins saw auras around people, and the halos looked like what she described. “Would two separate ghosts show up differently?”

  “That is a good question. You mean the apparition and the unseen force that you say chased it away?”

  “Yes.” I decided not to remark on her unflattering surprise at my inquiry.

  Phin thought about it. “In my experiments, different moods affected the corona’s spectrum, so possibly different spirit entities would change the colors as well. Did the apparition move or touch anything in the room?”

  I shook my head. “No. It was very … contained.” If anything, the figure had pulled energy toward it. Eleven-year-old Amy—the one who went foolishly running after specters by the river after dark—knew that the theory behind cold spots at hauntings was that a ghost needed energy to manifest, and heat was a type of energy, so—

  Eleven-year-old Amy needed to shut up. I was not getting sucked in. I’d made my decision to live as ghost- and magic-free as possible. Even if “as possible” was sometimes “not at all.”

  And yet I still found myself asking the very question that I knew
would lead to trouble. “Do you think the apparition was the McCulloch ghost? The one people are talking about?”

  Phin considered it but sounded doubtful. “I don’t know. Most ghosts are closely tied to a location, and they take territory pretty seriously.”

  I knew what she meant. You wouldn’t think barbed wire would slow down something without a body, but fences that merely marked a border for a human could be literal boundaries for a spirit. Like Aunt Hyacinth’s security system was supposed to be.

  Phin voiced the conclusion before I could. “If it is the ghost from the neighbor’s place, it wouldn’t just wander over here.”

  Not without a reason. That was what she was getting at, the possibility I didn’t want to face. Not without a fight.

  “Maybe the McCulloch ghost is just a local legend,” I said. “You told me the reports were mostly secondhand. Maybe that ghost story is based on one already on the Goodnight side of the fence.”

  “The geography still doesn’t hold up.” Phin might have been rattled earlier, but she sounded calm and logical now. “And even if that’s true, it still means that the ghost came through all the wards around Aunt Hyacinth’s house.”

  “Exactly!” I’d thought I wanted unflappable Phin back, but I didn’t. I wanted someone as freaked out as I was, so she would know that I didn’t want logic right now. I wanted reassurance. “It came in the house.”

  “I realize that’s a little unnerving—” she said.

  “Unnerving?” I swept an angry arm at the carnage around us. “Look at my room, Phin! There was a supernatural event in my bedroom. A spectral apparition nearly froze me to death, and a ghostly wind touched all my stuff.”

  She lifted her brows in disapproval, whether at my tone or my priorities. “I don’t see how arguing over whether it crossed one fence or two is going to help. Something came into Goodnight Farm, past our wards, and the only way we’re going to figure this out is by applying reason and logic, not taking refuge in denial.”

  “Phin, the only thing more unnerving than realizing there’s something that can get past Aunt Hyacinth’s defenses is wondering why it would.”

  “Why do ghosts haunt at all?” she said. “Because they want something.”

  The words hung in the air like an unfinished musical chord. There was the question I didn’t want to ask: What did it want?

  A knock downstairs shattered the moment. Someone was at the front door.

  The dogs exploded into barking and took off in a thunder of paws and scrabble of claws, sounding like a pack of hellhounds on the stairs.

  “Oh my God,” I blurted, grabbing onto Phin as we faced the open bedroom door. “It’s the axe murderer.”

  “I doubt he would knock,” she said, but she was whispering, too, and didn’t move away from me.

  Another rap, imperative and authoritative enough to be heard over the dogs. That didn’t seem like a nefarious thing.

  “Maybe we should look out the window,” Phin suggested.

  Feeling stupid that she’d thought of it first, I hurried across the hall to Aunt Hyacinth’s room. Even through the sheer curtains, I could see the front of the house and yard were lit like a shopping mall parking lot on the twenty-third of December. A normal person would have assumed the floodlights were motion activated, but Aunt Hy hadn’t bothered with sensors when she had Uncle Burt to turn on the lights.

  Which made it easy to see the police car parked next to Stella and Aunt Hyacinth’s Trooper. The shield on the door said “Sheriff,” and every instinct inside me screamed “Trouble.”

  6

  there was never a good reason for the police to be at the door at one in the morning. My imagination was supplying all sorts of horrible scenarios, making me wonder if something had happened to Mom. But surely one of the aunts would have called if that were the case. So it had to be some other sort of bad, and there was no lack of possibilities there, either.

  “Maybe it’s another body,” said Phin as we hurried downstairs to the accompaniment of the dogs’ continued barking.

  I knew she was not as macabre as her enthusiasm would imply. I was sure she meant “another long-dead skull for the anthropologists to dig up” and not “somebody’s husband or kid.”

  What I couldn’t explain was why the memory of the two dead bats weighted my feet as I quieted the dogs and answered the front door.

  The officer on the porch reminded me of a wolverine. Not as in X-Men, but as in Animal Planet—very compact, kind of squat and solid, with a mean look about the face.

  I opened the door a crack, with Phin right behind me, and he held out his badge just long enough for me to see that his last name was Kelly, which matched the name tag on his khaki shirt. “Miss Goodnight?”

  His tone told me two things: no one in my family had died, and he meant to be intimidating.

  “Yes, Deputy?” I said, in my politest voice. He narrowed his gaze, as if wondering if I was being a smart-ass.

  I wasn’t. When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird. Unfortunately, it’s hard to sound naturally polite when someone’s tone sets your back up. So maybe I was being a little bit of a smart-ass.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, more genuinely. Behind me, I heard Uncle Burt’s rocking chair creak, as if he were getting up to join Phin and me. I shivered slightly, because it was eerie, but eerily reassuring, even after the night’s adventures. “Is everything okay?”

  Deputy Kelly didn’t answer but peered over my shoulder and said, “Is that your sister in there with you?”

  “Yes.” I opened the door a smidge, obliging his implied request to see her, as if checking our alibis.

  Phin waved. The deputy eyed her purple cow pj bottoms and yellow spaceship pj top dubiously, and I doubt he missed the corona camera still in one hand. “It took you a while to get to the door,” he said, with an undertone of accusation.

  “We were asleep,” I answered, preferring not to explain about the ghost. And we had been asleep before the apparition invasion.

  He made a deliberate show of looking at all the lights on outside. “All your lights are on.”

  “Motion sensors,” I lied, before Phin could say anything about Uncle Burt turning them on. I knew that his refusing to say what was going on was a power play, but I was out of patience. “What’s this about, sir?”

  Despite the “sir,” the question came out more sharply than I intended, because my insides were twisting into an anxious knot. The night was too full of omens.

  “There was an accident out on the McCulloch place,” Deputy Kelly said bluntly, as if watching for our reaction.

  I heard Phin’s quick inhale of concern, and my hand clenched on the doorframe as in my mind’s eye I saw the two bats hitting the ground.

  “Was anyone injured?” I asked. Ben? His family? Even if they were feuding with Aunt Hyacinth, I didn’t want anyone hurt.

  “Ranch hand was working late to clear the cattle out of the pasture ’fore those university folks start digging, and he fell down a ravine.” The deputy hooked his thumbs on his belt, broadening his already antagonistic stance. “When I went to the hospital to interview him for the incident report, well, he was saying some mighty odd things.”

  “Like what?” Phin asked. She’d been content to let me do the talking until now. I had a sinking feeling I knew what the deputy would say. I think Phin did, too, but just wanted to hear how the ghost had manifested itself, according to the ranch hand.

  “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” said Deputy Aw-Shucks, laying the good-ol’-boy country cop thing on a little too thick. “I was just stopping by, though, to make sure you two kids were okay, especially as you’re house-sitting for your aunt and all. I promised her I’d keep an eye out for you.”

  He was checking up on us, all right. Checking to see that Phin and I, kooky nieces of kooky ol’ Ms. Goodnight, had been home all night, and not out hunting for ghosts or pr
etending to be one.

  Did he think I was an idiot? Yes, he obviously did. His feelings about Phin and me, because we were city girls, or just girls, or just Goodnight girls, were written all over him. Maybe he’d switched tactics to put us off guard, but the hard edge of suspicion was still there.

  “We’re fine,” I said, swallowing my anger. Anger at the condescending deputy, and because I suspected someone had told him we needed checking up on. “We’ve been here all night.”

  Deputy Kelly could have felt the car hoods and made sure the engines were cold, I guess. Or maybe he thought he’d be able to tell if we were lying, with his super-cop skills.

  “All night?” he challenged, glancing from me to Phin, whose bed head was impressive, but nothing compared to mine. I looked like I’d been in a wind tunnel, and I could feel the sting of a furious flush in my cheeks. I was sure that didn’t look guilty at all.

  “Since Phin got back from the store.” I forced myself to relax before my anger and my nerves got me in trouble for something I hadn’t even done. “I was reading and she was working on her independent study for school.”

  “Which is?” the deputy asked, still with his thumbs in his gun belt.

  Phin pointed at the thing in her hands and said, “Coronal aura visual medium transfer device,” and then stopped, thank God.

  The deputy, after a blank look, pretended he was smart enough to know what that was. “I see.” Then he turned to me, since I was obviously the spokesperson. “Well, you know, there’s some pretty wild stories going around these days, thanks to what they found out by the river. I just wanted to make sure you girls were tucked in tight over here.”

  My heart hammered, because he was so patronizing and so threatening at the same time. We’d done nothing wrong—yet—but all I could think of was the park ranger in Goliad standing witness to Dad as he ranted about our crazy mother letting us believe in ghosts.

  Phin saved me in the most unlikely way. She cocked her head, as if studying some strange species of wildlife, and said, “Waking someone up to see if they’re asleep is counterintuitive. You wanted to see if we were home. We clearly are. If you want us to be tucked up tight, you’ll have to leave.”