82. Things in My Head

I’ve lost someone else.

This is what runs through my mind as I’m calling out her name and directing my light in a hundred different spots trying to see her.

I’ve let someone else I care for get taken.

And still out of breath and still in a state of shock, my voice cracking because I’m losing it, I hear a ghost call out my name.

“Chris.”

Of course, it’s not a ghost. It’s Poe standing at the edge of the woods we came in from.

I reach her, and she clasps on to both of my arms.

“What’d you see in there?”

“Nothing. Just—my imagination is playing tricks. I just thought—when I came out and you were—”

“I felt weird standing by the empty church.”

Oh but it’s not empty not at all Poe.

“Did you find anything inside?”

“Let’s go.”

“Chris?”

“It’s already too dark, and I don’t want to get lost.”

“That’s why I’m standing over here,” she says. “To make sure we know which direction to head.”

I want to tell her that it’ll be a miracle for us to find our car again.

Yet just a few minutes later—ten or twenty or maybe thirty, I can’t tell because my mind is too full to compute time—we’re getting into her car.

“What happened?” she asks before starting it up.

“That church is like a shrine to somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

I tell her to start the car and go. As she drives, I tell her what I saw.

“What did the French say?”

“No clue.”

I would’ve forgotten even if I hadn’t seen whatever it was I saw.

“We need to go back.”

“Maybe in broad daylight,” I say. “With others.”

“Okay, fine. But this person, maybe he has something to do with everything that’s going on.”

“I sure hope he doesn’t. Since he’s, you know, dead.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah.”

But maybe you’re right, maybe he’s still around and haunting this place.

“Why would they stick a gravestone in the middle of a church?” Poe asks.

I don’t want to tell her what I’m thinking.

But I’m thinking …

No, stop thinking. Stop thinking and leave it alone.

“Chris?”

“I don’t think we want to know the reason.”

“Yeah, maybe not.”

The drive home seems long and quiet and troubling. I tell Poe I’ll see her tomorrow.

I don’t say all the other things in my head.

Things like Make sure you lock your door tonight.

Things like Tell me tomorrow if Jocelyn comes to you in your dreams and suddenly turns into an old, dying man with really bad dental hygiene.

Things like

Enough, Chris.

The voice shutting me up sounds like Mom or Dad but is obviously my own.

This whole haunting and creeping and nightmaring business sure helps a boy grow up.