He looked as if he was considering it, and then shrugged. “I’ll turn it off.”
Emma’s phone had only ever been off when she’d forgotten to recharge the batteries. She grimaced. “Or that,” she said.
She made her way off the road, over the dead patch of lawn that was usually bracketed by sidewalk and curb, and onto the sidewalk itself, and then she began to walk toward the second house from the end.
“Where are you going?” Eric asked, following her.
She pointed to the house. “Do you know what street we’re on?”
“Rowan Avenue.”
Emma took her phone out of her pocket, and made a note to herself.
“It’s two words,” Eric said, raising a brow. “You’re not going to remember two words?”
“Probably not.” She slid the phone back into her pocket and headed up the walk. “Do you think this is safe at all?”
Eric said nothing. It was a lot of nothing. And to be fair, the obvious answer was No. “Emma, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “But I think—I think the child’s in that building.”
“He’s dead.”
“Very funny.”
“Only by accident,” he replied.
“Stay here.”
“Emma—”
“Just let me check the floor.” She moved very slowly up the walk, and then detoured to the lawn, to get closer to the ruined building. It was at least two stories in height; a third floor might still exist, small rooms cramped beneath the peak that was suggested by the buildings, farther down, that seemed in better repair. The fire must have occurred recently; the building was still standing. There was no evidence of bulldozers; no evidence of people’s handiwork beyond the haphazard boarding that had been put up. As she approached what had once been windows—the facade was damaged enough that the frames on this floor looked a lot like big, black holes—she felt heat and saw, for a moment, fire.
They weren’t ghostly flames; they were hot, and high, and adorned by billowing smoke as air moved from the outside of the house toward them.
She heard, again, the screams. But she heard them at a distance, and she turned to where Eric was standing, expecting to get a glimpse of the woman—for it was a woman’s voice—that had once been capable of uttering them. The street, except for Eric and a couple of cars, was quiet.
“Eric?” She waved him over.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked slowly toward her.
“Pretend that you won’t have to kill me if you answer my questions.”
“Emma, do you understand how serious this is?”
She looked up, to the second story. “Yes. I need to know something about the dead.”
He waited, and after a minute of silence, she said, “I saw a student in the cafeteria the other day. He looked alive to me. I realized something was really wrong when Allison sat through him.”
“Go on.”
“But he seemed to notice me. He smiled at me,” she added, “just before he disappeared. I can see the fire,” she added softly. “I can feel its heat.”
“You’re right. It has to be recent.”
“What I need to know is if the child—”
“The dead child?”
“The dead child. Will he be able to see me and react to me?”
The silence was longer and more marked, but Eric eventually said, “Yes.”
“Will he be able to see you?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not unless you touch him.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Is he stuck there?”
“He’s dead.”
“Eric.”
“Emma, it may come as a surprise to you, but I’m not dead.” He took his hands out of his pockets; they were fists. He relaxed them slowly, but it looked like it took effort. “But yes, there’s a good chance that he feels he can’t come out.”
“Can we make him come out?”
“Why?” The word was sharper, and harsher.
“Because he’s stuck in a burning house, and he’s four years old.”
The phone rang.
Emma’s eyes widened. “I thought you said you shut it off?”
Eric shrugged. “I did. Welcome to my life.” He slid his hand into his jacket pocket—school jacket, for formal day—and took the phone out. “I can’t talk right now,” he said, as he lifted the phone to his ear. “No. I left early. Someplace downtown.” He rolled his eyes. “Rowan Avenue. No, I’m with another student. Yes. No.” He glanced at Emma, and then said, “It might not be a problem. Look up Rowan Avenue. No. Because I’m not near a computer. Look, I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
He hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket.
It started to ring again. Eric raised a brow in her direction and she grimaced and threw up her hands. “You win,” she told him. “Ignore it.”
“Why, thank you.”
She walked up to what was left of the house and raised her arms to shield her face as the flames leaped out of the windows, driving her back and into Eric. He put his hands on her arms to steady her. “Fire?”
“You can’t feel it?”
“No.”
“See it?”
“No. You may need to wait this out,” he added softly. It was loud anyway; his lips were beside her ear.
“If you can’t see it,” she told him, gritting her teeth, “it’s not real.” She shook herself free of his hands, and approached the building again. She forced herself to approach the fire. It singed her hair, and she jumped back again.
“Emma—”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“The fire is real, in some way, for you. It’s not real for me.” He exhaled sharply and then said, “In twenty years, you’ll see it, but it won’t sustain the ability to burn you. Or it shouldn’t.”
“Twenty years?”
“More or less. Come on, let me drive you home.”
“You mean that child is going to be trapped in a burning building for twenty years?” She turned to face him, and grabbed one arm to prevent him from walking away. “Eric, if the fire isn’t real to you, you can enter the building.”
“If the building has any structural integrity, yes.”
“If you can make it in without feeling the fire, I might be able to go with you. And if I collapse because of smoke inhalation, you can drag me out.”
She heard the screaming again and turned. Street and cars. Nothing else. Frowning, she said, “I don’t think the voice I can hear is a dead person’s voice.”
Eric said nothing, which was starting to get old.
“I think—I think it might be his mother’s voice.”
“Emma, let it go. Please. If it’s strong enough that you can hear her voice, he is too strong for you.”
“He’s four.”
“A living four-year-old and a dead four-year-old are not the same. Trust me.”
“I can’t.”
Silence. Then, “No, I don’t suppose you can.” He looked away, toward the house. “Even if I get you into the house, I probably won’t be able to get you up the stairs. I don’t think enough of them are left standing to support my weight.”
“But enough is left standing to support mine?” The quality of his silence was as good as an answer. “Because it was standing, or almost standing, when he was trapped there. I’m where he is, when I approach the house. Some part of me is walking to where he is.”
“Yes. And no. You’re here,” he added softly. “This isn’t like the hospital.”
“No. In the hospital there were two of me.” Her eyes widened slightly. “The one part sees the dead,” she said softly, as if testing the words. “And the other part sees the living. Why aren’t there two of me now?”
“You only get that dislocation at the beginning,” was the quiet reply.
S
he looked at the burning house carefully and then said, “All right. We need a ladder. A big, solid ladder.” And she turned and walked back to the car.
“Why is he trapped in the house?”
“He’s not.”
“Why is he staying in the house?”
“Better question. I honestly don’t have the answer.”
“Why are any of the dead here at all?”
Eric glanced at her in the mirror, but otherwise kept his eyes on the road. He had to, since Emma had no idea at all of how to get home. “Where should they be?” he asked at length.
He was testing her somehow, and she knew it. She had always been good at tests, but this test was decidedly unfair; she didn’t even know what the subject was. “I don’t know. Heaven? Hell?”
“I’m not dead. I don’t know either.”
“And you don’t care.”
“No. I care. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“There must be something I can do about it.”
His silence was long, and she watched the way his jaw tightened into it. “If this is your idea of trying to stay out of things,” he told her, “you fail.”
“Full of fail. That happens when a four-year-old is going to be trapped forever in a burning house, reliving the moment of his death.”
The phone rang, but it had been doing that on and off since they’d gotten back into the car. “You could change the ringtone,” Emma suggested.
“This is the shortest ring I could find.”
ERIC DROVE EMMA HOME and parked on the street. Emma opened the car door and then turned to Eric. “If you need to go home before Amy’s party, I can send you the directions to get there.”
He blinked. “Amy’s party?”
“Remember? We spoke about it before we left school?”
He shook his head. “You’re crazy.”
“If you think she looks good in school, you’ve never seen her when she’s actually trying.”
He didn’t smile. “And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go hit the computer and then call Allison.”
“And?”
“Get ladders,” she replied quietly. “And go back to Rowan Avenue. If we’re lucky, we can figure out what needs to be done before Amy’s party.”
“And if you’re not?”
“If I’m not,” she said starkly, the half smile deserting her face, “I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about it.”
“Emma you can’t go in there blind. You have no idea what you’re doing!”
“No, I don’t. I’m going to try to find out more before I head out there.” She turned toward the door and then turned back again. “I don’t understand what you’re afraid of, Eric. I don’t understand what’s going on with you. What I understand, at the moment, is that that child is somehow stuck in that house. And I want to get him out.”
“To what end?”
She stared at him. And then she got out of the car without looking back, and shut the door.
The phone rang. Eric listened to it, his hands still gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white. Prying his fingers free, he picked up the phone and stared at the screen while the ring died into silence. He looked up to see Emma and got a brief glimpse of her ridiculously named rottweiler before her front door closed.
When the phone rang again, he answered.
“Yeah.”
“Eric—”
“Rowan Avenue?”
“Ten days ago.”
Eric whistled.
“Eric?”
“Ten days. I would have guessed three, tops.”
The silence was cold. “And why would you have guessed that?”
Eric shrugged. He realized that this wasn’t likely to convey itself over the phone and decided he didn’t care enough to put the gesture into words.
“Eric, what is happening there?”
“Not much. I’m going to Amy’s party tonight,” he added, just for the momentary amusement of silent outrage on the other end of the line. It came and was followed by brief spluttering, an added bonus.
“Eric, did you find the Necromancer?”
Eric counted four uses of his name in six sentences, which was about as far as he could push it without things getting ugly. “Yes.”
“Good. Dead?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You arrived too late.” It wasn’t a question.
Eric was not one of nature’s natural liars. He said nothing, which was neutral. It was also not enough.
“Eric, did you arrive too late?”
“No.”
The silence that followed his monosyllabic confession was long. “…No. And the Necromancer is not dead.”
“No.”
“You need backup.”
“Not really.”
“And I’m sending it.”
“If you send Chase, I won’t guarantee he’ll survive.”
“If he doesn’t, I’ll come myself.”
Fuck.
Emma had to work not to put her fingers through the keyboard. It was almost not worth the trouble. Yes, Eric was a stranger. Yes, they had no history. Yes, he knew something about her that she did not know herself, and he wasn’t about to share. And yes, if it came down to it, she knew somewhere in the back of her hindbrain that if she did something wrong, somehow, he would kill her.
She also didn’t doubt that he could, and that was strange, because it wasn’t something she usually worried about. What she usually worried about was saying the wrong thing, alienating her friends, or pissing off her mother or her teachers. And it was beside the damn point. He knew that there was a child trapped in that house, and he didn’t care.
Google was not slow to load answers to her query, and she looked at them, opening the first five in tabs. She began to read, and as she did, anger at Eric dimmed. She didn’t like to hold on to anger, and she let it go.
Only one person had died in the fire—Andrew Copis, four years of age. Cause of fire: under investigation. From the sounds of it, though, the fire hadn’t started in Andrew’s home; it had started one house down. The walls were not cinderblock, and the fire had spread. Maria Copis, Andrew’s mother, was twenty-eight years of age. She was a divorced single parent; her ex-husband was not in residence. She had—oh.
Three children. Andrew was the oldest; she had an eighteen-month-old girl and a two-month-old boy. She had picked them up, and carried them both out of the house. The little girl had suffered smoke inhalation.
She had not been able to carry Andrew at the same time, and she had screamed at him to follow her. And he had screamed at her to carry him. A brief moment of outrage at all news reporters came and went. How could you ask a mother something like that?
Emma closed her eyes. She knew, now, why Andrew stayed in the house.
It was a few moments before she could read again, but she did. Andrew had died of smoke inhalation; the screaming, the deep breaths required to scream, hadn’t helped. He had suffered burns as well by the time the firefighters reached him, but it wasn’t direct fire that had killed him.
The firefighters had gone into the building; the building at that time had supported their weight. They were all heavier than Emma, especially with the gear they wore. They’d gone in through the second story windows. Check.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. How was she going to talk a terrified, hysterical four-year-old out of a burning building if she was trapped in the same burning building?
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and called Allison.
She told Allison everything.
Everything except the part about Eric not having to kill her—which of course implied that he might have to kill her— because there was no way to say that without causing panic. Then she waited while the silence on the other end of the phone stretched out.
She finally said, “I know it sounds crazy.”
Allison replied, “Em, I saw your father. We all did. I don’t think you’re crazy. But it does sound kind of crazy.”
Emma reminded herself, as her shoulders eased down her back and she relaxed, that there were reasons she loved Allison. “What are you doing?”
“Googling. I’ve got your article on the fire,” she added. “Oh.”
“Three kids. Two of them had no hope of walking out of that place on their own,” Emma said softly.
“Did you write down where Andrew’s buried?”
“I don’t think I know,” Emma replied. “I think there was a service that was open to the public, but I don’t think it mentioned the burial site. Why?”
“Because,” Allison replied, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to get Andrew to leave that house without his mother.”
A lot of reasons why she loved Allison. “You don’t think so, either?”
“No. We can try,” she added. “With what we’ve got here, we can try. But…”
“I know.” Emma got out of her chair and walked toward the window. “We could probably find her in the phonebook. She’s a divorced single parent, now. How many Copises could there be?”
“There could be an unlisted one.” Allison hesitated—her breath was different when she was trying to figure out which words to say. “But I have no idea how we’re going to approach her.”
Emma had avoided thinking about that as well. Pacing in her room, her phone against her ear, she thought about it now. And grimaced. “Me either. But even if we look like a couple of lunatics, wouldn’t it be worth listening?”
“We’re not going to look like lunatics. We’re going to look worse. We’re going to look like the meanest, most vicious, malicious people ever.”
Emma tried to imagine Allison in this context and failed utterly. “We have to try,” she said quietly.
“I know. But we have to find her first, and we’re probably not going to manage that tonight. If we knew where the grave was, that might be the best way to meet her in person.”
“It’d be the worst place to approach her, though.” She glanced out the window again and saw that Eric’s car was still parked in the street in front of her house. She turned, and ran into Petal, who had decided that it was time to be taken for a walk. “Not now, Petal,” she told him, scratching behind his ears.