I still hadn’t told Mindy about him, though. No point in scaring her off.
“Sorry,” I said as we climbed the stairs. “I’m just nervous. Never been in a ghost building before.”
“But you’re a pomp! Ghosts should be afraid of you.”
I smiled down at her and stood straighter, trying to conjure up some psychopompish bluster.
The front doors of the school were already open, as if welcoming us in. Locker-lined hallways stretched out, empty and dark, and a hand-painted sign pointed the way to the main office. There were no posters on the walls, no loose papers on the floor, not even dust in the air, as if the transient details had been worn away by time. But the murmur of children’s voices lingered at the edge of my awareness.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered.
Mindy nodded, closing her eyes. “Those aren’t ghosts. Not of people, anyway.”
“Of what then?”
“Of this place. Of its sounds.”
I looked at her, suddenly doubting whether “ghosts” was the right word for all this. “Memories. These are memories, aren’t they?”
“That’s what I keep saying! As long as people remember something, it never completely disappears.”
I reached out to the nearest locker and ran a finger across the air vent. The tick-tick-tick of my fingernail against metal sounded real.
“So we’re standing in memories?”
“I guess so,” Mindy said.
“Maybe this isn’t about ghosts at all. What if us pomps are, like, mind readers? We see other people’s memories as if they were places and things and . . .”
Mindy was glaring at me. “And people? You think I’m just a figment of your mom’s imagination?”
“I don’t know.” As the words came out, I could hear how unkind they sounded. Mindy wasn’t a memory—she was a person whose existence depended on being remembered. There was a difference, maybe. “I was just thinking out loud. I don’t understand any of this, really.”
As we stood there in unhappy silence, a sound drifted down the hallway, a child’s voice singing . . .
“Come down, come down, whoever you are.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “Is that, like, the ghost of a song?”
“No.” Mindy reached up and took my hand, squeezing hard. “There’s someone down there, Lizzie.”
“Okay . . .” The song repeated, distant and forlorn, and sparks of fear kindled in my veins. “Are they going to come up?”
“I hope not,” Mindy said.
We stood there, frozen for a moment, me trying to slow my breathing. The last time I’d panicked on the flipside, I’d popped back into the normal world right in front of Special Agent Elian Reyes. That wasn’t something I wanted to repeat in the middle of a vacant lot surrounded by razor wire, especially with a creepy ghost-song leaking out of the ground.
The singing cut off. Mindy and I stared at each other in the awful silence.
“Okay,” I said, taking a step backward. “Let’s just try to—”
“Look,” Mindy whispered, her eyes on the floor.
A darkness was spreading down the hallway, like spilled ink rolling toward us. It blotted out the tiles of the floor, pure black against the soft grays of the flipside. Like the rivers of oil I’d glimpsed in the desert, it moved with intent, a living thing, and it carried the same thick and sugary scent.
The singsong voice called out again.
“I can heeeear you up there. Why don’t you come down and play?”
“Maybe we should just get out of here,” I whispered.
“Yep.” Mindy turned and ran.
“Wait for me!” I shouted, setting off after her, out the school door and down the stairs. As I ran across the playground, my heart galloped, pushing warmth outward into my arms and legs.
Life was surging through me, and the world began to shift. The playground faded, and stars shone through gaps in the flat gray sky, as if a vast fabric were tearing overhead. I wondered whether to stop and regather my grasp on the flipside, or try and run to the fence in time.
“Please don’t go!” the voice sang from behind, which pretty much made the choice for me.
I ran harder, catching up with Mindy and passing her, my feet pounding the asphalt as hard as they could.
The fence in my path was looking more solid every second. School buses loomed around me now, and I swerved to thread my way between two of them, not wanting to solidify inside a mass of metal and rubber.
The fence was right in front of me, and I launched myself at it, covering my face with both arms. The chicken wire pulled and sucked as I went through, like a thick spiderweb, sticky and reluctant to let me pass. But the tension broke with a snap, and suddenly I was on the other side, stumbling into the living world . . . and the street.
Headlights flashed as I skidded to a halt, the shriek of a swerving car screaming in my ears. I fell and dropped into a fetal position as the machine whooshed by, so close that I felt engine heat in the wind of its passage. But the scream of tires turned into the fading blare of a car horn, and the car flashed past and kept moving.
I uncurled myself and sat up, looking both ways down the street—no cars in sight except for the red taillights, accelerating now. I guess the driver hadn’t been too keen on investigating black-clad figures popping out of thin air.
“Whoa.” Mindy jogged up beside me. “That was close.”
I stood up gingerly, swallowing when I saw skid marks curving around me. My right knee was throbbing and the heels of both hands were raw. The pain felt sharp and real after the gray flatness of the flipside. My scraped palms pulsed with my heartbeat, but it was wonderful, being back in the real world.
I limped as we crossed the road.
“Are you okay?” Mindy asked.
“Yeah, great. But next time, let’s try a ghost building with no fence around it.”
“Sure.” Mindy looked back at the vacant lot, her eyes wide. “And maybe . . .”
I nodded. “Without anything scary in the basement.”
“I don’t know what that was. Sorry!”
“Going inside was my idea.” I touched my right knee. My jeans were ripped, but not bloody. “Anyway, thanks for showing me how this works, Mindy.”
She looked up at me. “Really?”