WE HAD NO TROUBLE getting past Jeremy’s mama and back up to his room. It was just evening, and we had the shadowy upstairs to ourselves. Tiffany wasn’t home. The mall hadn’t closed.
The dark corners made the place more like the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse. Once in his room with the door closed behind us, Jeremy reached for the light switch, but I drew his hand away.
“I might get back better in the dark,” I said.
He turned away from me and eased the fishbowl off his head. “Oh, wow. I’m glad to get out of that thing. I guess this is about my last year for Halloween, the costume part at least.”
His head of hair was faintly red in the failing light. It stood up in peaks. He slipped off his hubcaps and massaged his knees. Then he took off his spectacles and breathed on them. He was only playing for time.
“I’ve had a real nice visit, Jeremy. Many thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he said politely. I reckon his voice was changing, for it cracked then. “Come back any . . . time.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I guess I can figure how I happened to pay this particular call.”
“There were the electrical storms,” he said, “one at my end and one at—”
“I doubt it was the weather, Jeremy. I figure maybe you needed a friend.”
He wasn’t sure. “Looks like you came a really long way just to spend a little time with me.”
“Well, there’s nothing more important than friendship,” I said. “I get a little lonesome now and again myself. Maybe I came for us both.”
“Seems like you just got here, and now you’re leaving.”
“Well, that’s me all over,” I told him. “Busy every minute. Tonight I’ll be at Old Man Leverette’s town residence, teaching Alexander’s bunch a lesson. Then tomorrow night I’ll be right here in this very house, telling fortunes.
“Did I tell you we of the freshman class are running your place as a Haunted House? We’re going to stretch Champ Ferguson out on the drainboard as a monster and run a crackerjack dungeon and model torture chamber in your cellar. We’re going to have ghosts in your corners and bats in your belfry. We’re going to charge ten cents.”
“It sounds great,” Jeremy said with his head down. “Wish I could come along.”
But he couldn’t, and he knew it.
“You can be there in . . . spirit,” I said. “You can think of us tomorrow night seventy years ago. I could even tell my fortunes right here in your room. Shall I?”
He nodded. His eyes were glistening. Maybe mine were, too.
“Blossom, since you’ve got to be going, I guess I can tell you this.” Jeremy rubbed one of his padded legs with his big boot. “I haven’t had too much experience with knowing girls. But I really like you, a lot. Of course, you’re . . . different.”
“Oh, well, shoot,” I said, my face a little warm, “I’ve been called different even in my own time.”
Jeremy smiled a little and scratched his red thatch. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if I was Alexander Armsworth, it wouldn’t be Letty Shambaugh I was taking to the . . . moving pictures.”
The last light left the room then. There was nobody to see, and with any luck I’d soon be gone. So I thought: Oh, well, shoot. Then I stepped forward and gave Jeremy a little kiss good-bye.
He took it real well. Then he said, “Blossom, when you’re gone, how will I know you were ever really here? I see you’re real now, but later I might wonder.”
“Like I was only a stage you were going through?” I asked him. “And later you outgrew it?”
“Like that,” he said, “basically.”
I chanced to glance down at my spelling medal then. It was hanging by a thread from Mama’s old ratty coat. I’d sworn to wear that medal till it fell off me. I gave it a little tug, and it came loose in my hand.
“Here.” I held it out to him. “I was the champion speller of Horace Mann School. This medal was at one time my most prized possession. Take it to remember me by. It will always remind you that you have a friend, a good old friend.”
Jeremy reached out and pulled back. “Tell you what, Blossom. Take it along with you on your trip and hide it somewhere in this house, somewhere I can find it later on if I begin to forget. Sometime when I’m lonesome again, like I was before you came.”
“Let me see,” I pondered. “Where’d be a place safe for seventy years?” Then it came to me. “You know that china closet down in your dining room? Roderick hid in there one time and liked to scare the wits out of Alexander Armsworth, though it didn’t faze me.”
“China closet?” Jeremy said. “Oh, yes, we keep the stereo components in there.”
“First time you get lonesome, check around in there. You’ll find this spelling medal of mine under a loose floorboard. That’ll be a sign I’m thinking of you.”
“Is there a loose floorboard?”
“There will be.”
It was time to go then, and we both knew it. Jeremy drifted over to his machines. They looked dead as doornails to me, and I don’t suppose he could get a beep out of them. But he said, “I could try a little patching and looping to . . . help you off the launching pad.”
But I told him I’d better try to do it my way. It was almost night then, and we were two dark shapes in the room—three if you count Darth Vader. I fastened my beanie tight with the hatpin and arranged Mama’s fur piece so it wouldn’t strangle me if I got up speed.
“This is the part I’m never sure about,” I admitted. “I have to give it my all.”
It grew darker then, dark as a pocket. I heard a distant sighing sound. It was the wind pump out past the chicken coop on the old abandoned Leverette farm. I cocked my ears to hear it clearer and let my brain go blank. I commenced to Vibrate, and I felt my mysterious Powers take charge.
Wind blew through Jeremy’s window, for there was no glass in it now. A whirlwind circled my form and gave me goosebumps. There was a shower of sparks, but cold and white as snow. Or maybe these were the white pages torn from seventy calendars. Whatever they were, they gusted into a tremendous cyclone.
I never moved, and I traveled like the wind.
It was a gentle landing as these things go. There was no carpet on the floor now. The heels of my boots bumped on bare boards. They were gritty with plaster dust.
I’d kept my eyes tight shut, though not from fear exactly. When I looked around me, I was in the empty, ruined upstairs room of the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse. Pale moonlight fell through the broken window. My spelling medal was in my hand.
I walked toward the moonlight right through the emptiness where Jeremy’s machines had been—would be. Torn wallpaper hung down in curls, and I smelled the smells of an empty old house far from town: the mildew and wood rot and dead field mice in the walls.
I chanced a look out the window. There I saw the black branches of Leverette’s Woods beyond the gate to Lovers’ Lane. The wind pump was back too, singing and turning in the night breeze. There was the chicken coop, right where it should be. In one of its windows was a coal oil lamp. The lamp burned low, for it was past Roderick’s bedtime.
I looked for the blanket of glittering lights as far as the eye could see. I looked for the golden arches and “40 BILLION SOLD.” But they weren’t there, not yet. It was the night before Halloween. And it was 1914. My next thought was of Mama.
I cut and ran for home.
“Girl, where you bin?”
Before I could get across the threshold, she came down on me like the Johnstown flood. I was out of breath from . . . much traveling, and I sagged somewhat in the doorframe.
Mama’s teeth were out, but she was speaking clear. “You was gone all night and all day, too! I’ll larn youoph.”
She reached for Paw’s razor strop that hangs over the pitcher and bowl. She saves this back for special occasions. Believe it or not, I was glad to see her.
“Well, Mama,” I said, hoping to distract her, “have you had your supper?”
“Of course I ain’t! And I see you come back empty-handed. I couldn’t eat a bite anyhow.” At least she seemed to forget the strop. The dice dangling down from her ears danced, and her flinty eyes bored into me.
“Why, Mama, I think you were worried about me,” I said, pushing my luck.
“Worried you wouldn’t come back?” she asked. “Or worried you would!”
She regarded me slyly. “Where you bin anyhow? You look like three sheets to the wind and somethun the cat drug in.”
Still, I hoped to distract her. “I’m half-starved myself,” I remarked. “I haven’t had a thing to eat all day but whole-grain high-fiber product and a chaser of vitamin C concentrate.”
“Talk sense,” Mama said.
She dragged me to the table and dropped me in a chair. When she turned up the flame on the lamp, its reflection flared in her crystal ball.
“Now then.” She settled into a chair opposite. “I asked where you bin one time. I won’t ask agin.” She pointed at Paw’s strop. “I’ll let that thing do the talkin’.”
“Much as I’d like to chew the fat with you all evening, Mama, I have a busy night ahead of me and no time.”
She squinted at me over the crystal ball. “You got all the time I say you got.” Reaching into her shroud, she pulled out a plug of Bull Durham and commenced to jaw it at her leisure. “Start at the beginnin’.”
“Well . . . it’s like this, Mama. Last night I nipped back to the high school to get some homework I’d left in my desk. And lo and behold, if the janitor didn’t come along and lock up all the doors! I was stuck in that high school all night, Mama. Why, I had to sleep under Miss Blankenship’s desk. I overslept as it turned out, and the first thing I knew, it was morning. Miss Blankenship was taking attendance! So of course, all I could do was go through the regular school day as usual. That’s about what happened . . . basically.”
There was a disturbing pause before Mama said, “That ain’t even close.” She made a point of staring into her crystal ball like she could read the truth in it. “Try agin.”
I fetched up a sigh. It’s always difficult to explain anything to a mother, as I’ve often said. “The truth is, Mama, I did something you told me not to do.”
“That don’t come as a shock to me,” she remarked, drumming her long fingers on Paw’s strop.
“I went out to the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse last night.”
Mama’s eyes flashed, but she looked deep into her crystal ball. “And what did you find out?” she said cautiously. She was staring hard at the ball, but she was seeing nothing. She was all ears.
I thought of a way to flatter her somewhat. “I found out you were right, Mama. Remember that time you went into one of your trances and said, ‘Not all the Unliving are dead’? You hit the nail on the head that time.”
Mama folded her arms across her front and made a satisfied sound. “I’m never wrong,” she remarked. “What did I mean exactly?”
“You meant that while some of the Unliving are dead, the rest of the Unliving haven’t been born yet. They’re the people of the future.”
Mama gave this some thought. “That’s real interesting, ain’t it? Them trances of mine is a marvel. I don’t know how I do it.”
“Me either, Mama. When it comes to Powers, you don’t know your own strength.”
Mama almost beamed. I figured this was as good a time as any to make my exit. “However, even with my puny Powers,” I told her, “I can read your mind this minute.”
She froze. “Git outta my head, girl.”
“Oh, yes, Mama, I read you like a book. You just as well hand over that gunnysack at your feet. You know yourself you’re fixing to send me out into the night to borrow a nice, plump frying chicken.”
Mama looked uncertain, but hungry. She could all but smell that chicken frying now, though she had unfinished business with me.
I had unfinished business with her, too. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never tell me how strong her Powers are. She’d half known the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse was haunted by the future, so to speak. But I bet you a nickel my Powers are stronger. I can’t picture Mama traveling through a time warp. Not to mention what they’d think of her if she turned up in Bluffleigh Heights. I am no oil painting, but Mama would scare a bulldog off a meat wagon.
Mama had stood at the door of the Dreadful Future. There was no doubt in my mind about that. But I had crossed the fatal threshold!
She fished up the sack and scooted it across the table to me. When I reached out for it, I palmed her set of false teeth that were resting by the crystal ball. I slipped her teeth into my pocket and said, “I’ll be off now to pay a call on Old Man L—”
“Hush yore mouth,” Mama commanded. “Don’t never tell me where you git them chickens. What I don’t know won’t hurt me!”
“Oh, Mama.” I sighed. “I’m glad you said that.”
Then I hightailed it out into the night.