The West Wing was awash in ants, and Nelly had been the only one to notice it. All afternoon she’d monitored the ant army as it had amassed its troops in the foyer, and she had waited for them to do something that would explain why they had all decided to meet here in the burned-out West Wing.
Her eyes goggled in astonishment as she stared at all the insects marching by her feet. She realized that she had never seen so many of the little suckers in one place at one time in her whole life (or death). Of course, being the avid arthropod lover that she was, she’d had an ant farm back home in Michigan before she’d come to the New Newbridge Academy, but her extra-large plastic terrarium was nothing in comparison to this. There were so many ants that she couldn’t have counted them all, even if she’d wanted to.
Nelly wasn’t sure whom she was supposed to tell this important ant army information to—it wasn’t like when she was in school and could just tell a teacher whenever she had a problem. Nope. Now that she was dead, she was on her own.
When she’d tried to point out the ants’ strange behavior to Trina, her friend had only made fun of her, teasing her about the hardworking ants eating asbestos—like they don’t know asbestos is poisonous! They’re ants, not dummies, Nelly thought angrily.
But she knew better. She suspected that these ants were up to something… something different. And she was determined to discover what that something different was.
So while Trina had looked for Henry—he hadn’t been in his room, where he normally hid out during his nasty black moods—Nelly had gone off to find the answer to the ant army mystery. Besides, the search for Henry hadn’t really interested Nelly all that much, anyway. She’d always liked insects way better than people—and you could go ahead and lump ghosts right into the people category, as far as she was concerned.
In the end, Nelly hadn’t had to do too much discovering. She’d just followed the line of ants all the way out to where it started by the lake. She’d stood by the edge of the water and watched as more and more ants trooped out of the woods and joined the ever-growing line.
Next she’d followed her own footsteps back to the West Wing, stopping to examine the place where the ant line curved by the archery field, because there seemed to be a smaller line of ants intersecting the bigger line there. She’d wanted to follow the smaller line back to where it started, but something inside her brain told her that it was a dead end, that the ants were going to the New Newbridge Academy, and it didn’t matter one little bit where they were coming from.
When she got back to the West Wing, she did what she should have done in the first place: She looked to see exactly where the ants were going. She followed the line over to the base of the brick fireplace that stood across from the portrait of the school’s first trustee, Eustant P. Druthers, and found that, one by one, the ants were disappearing into a small hole in the hearth just below the fireplace grating.
After that, Nelly could find no trace of the ant line, no matter where she looked.
She was so busy trying to discover exactly where the ants were going that she didn’t notice the cold at first, but gradually she realized that she was feeling something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
“What in the—,” she started to say, her teeth beginning to chatter like a pair of windup teeth as all the drapes in the foyer dropped down, blocking out what little light was sneaking into the room through the windows.
It was so cold that when Nelly looked down at the ant army, even the insects seemed to be shivering on their stalklike legs. Suddenly a strange silence filled the empty air. Nelly looked up and saw a shimmering, golden orb materializing by the fireplace. As she stared at it, it grew larger and larger, until the orb was just big enough for Nelly to climb through.
She floated toward it, her mind and body drawn to the glowing thing like a kid to candy. Obviously, it was her turn to enter the light.
She wondered if when she got to the other side, her old dog, Brandy, would be there to greet her. She’d been so heartbroken when a car had hit the big golden retriever just days before she’d gone off to start her first year at the New Newbridge Academy.
It was a strange last thing to think, she decided, because she hadn’t thought about Brandy even once in almost fifteen years.
As she felt her essence beginning to merge with the glowing orb, Nelly had another strange thought. And for the death of her, she couldn’t have said where it came from.
What if this isn’t the real light but a fake light? One that doesn’t lead to the other side but to somewhere else entirely?
And then she was gone.