AT FIRST, WALTER KEW hardly knew he was being haunted. His mother’s voice came so softly, like a thought that might have been his own. He would be walking home from school or slouching on the front steps of his house, and the wind would ruffle his hair like an invisible hand. Then he would hear her.
Not “Hello, Walter, how are you doing down there on earth?” Or “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, dear. Are you remembering to brush your teeth?”
Walter’s mother didn’t talk like other mothers. She had died nine years ago when he was a baby, so her words had to travel across dark oceans of time. When they finally reached Walter, they were as faint and uncertain as ghosts.
She spoke in tones that Walter sensed more than heard. He would sit perfectly still, head cocked to one side, and her voice would come whispering into his mind. Then it drifted off before he quite caught her meaning, and nothing he did would bring her back again. He was sure of one thing. She wanted to tell him something.
“How do you know?” Walter’s friend Georgina Rusk asked him. “How do you even know it’s your mother? You can’t remember what her voice sounded like. You were too little when she died to remember anything about her. This voice could be anyone’s, from anywhere. Or maybe it’s no one’s and you’re making it up.” She gave him a narrow glance.
Walter pulled his baseball cap down low over his eyes. “I know it’s my mother,” he said. “People don’t make mistakes about things like mothers.”
“Since when?” asked Georgina. “They’re like everyone else.”
“No they aren’t. You don’t know. You see yours every day. All these years I’ve been trying to get through to mine. I’ve tried spells and dreams and crystal balls. Even when I asked the Ouija board, I was never sure I got her. Now, at last, she’s making contact with me—except there’s some kind of interference on the line.”
“Interference! What is this, a credit card call?”
Walter sighed and took off his cap. Georgina’s mind was of the practical, earthbound sort. Unknown things like ghosts were too shadowy for her. As for ghost voices trying to get through—
“You mean dirt interference?” she asked him, suddenly serious. “From your mother being, you know, buried underground?”
“Not dirt. Something outside this world.” Walter’s eyes flicked away. They were the palest blue, almost white in certain lights. “Spirit-seeing eyes,” their friend Poco Lambert called them. At school, teachers snapped their fingers under his nose: “Control tower to Walter! Please come in!”
“It’s an ages-old communication problem,” he informed Georgina now. “I’m not the only one who’s had trouble. Only a few people in history have ever heard what the dead were trying to tell them.”
“That is certainly okay with me,” Georgina said. “Who needs a lot of ghosts calling up and telling you things? There are enough living people trying to do that already … Nothing against your mother,” she added quickly. “I’m sure she was a very nice person.”
“But that’s the whole point. She still is!” Walter cried. “My mother’s still out there, and now she wants to come back.”