SHE LOOKED AT THE TV and listened to the rest of the report. They lived on the east coast of Florida. They’d been missing since Friday afternoon. They’d taken Archie’s dad’s boat without permission. Not a single person had seen them since. The parents were asking for anyone with a plane or a boat to volunteer their time to look for their kids.
“That’s who you saw in your dreams?” she asked. Her voice was sharp and steely.
I nodded. “Archie. I talked to him. He seemed delirious.”
“I need to go.” She disappeared in a flash of blue light, leaving me alone in the family room as Archie and Helena smiled at me from the TV.
The screen switched to footage of two sobbing women, one of whom was holding a little girl a year or two older than Ella.
“Please . . . please . . . if anyone knows anything, call the hotline,” the one with the daughter said, her voice tinged with a Haitian accent. “We’re desperate. We miss our babies.” She broke into more heaving sobs as her daughter stared at her in confusion. I couldn’t believe they were using this footage on TV.
The other woman was too distraught to say anything, and a big burly hand, its owner off-screen, was massaging one of her shoulders.
“How is this happening?” the first woman continued. “I never thought anything like this would happen to me.”
“Baylor, what is that?” my mom asked, suddenly appearing in the family room. “Oh, turn that off! It’s devastating.” I flipped the TV off, trying to process what I was feeling. It was pure shock.
“That poor woman,” my mom continued, sitting down next to me on the couch, gazing at me with wide eyes. “I can’t imagine what she must be going through. She must feel like her soul’s been torn into pieces.” She shook her head. “Just horrible.”
The words from the mother’s interview’s repeated themselves over and over in my head.
If anyone knows anything, call the hotline. We’re desperate. We miss our babies.
I swallowed down vomit. I had to call that number immediately. Really, I had to head straight to Florida so I could help the parents figure out whether their kids were still alive or not. I needed to be in their proximity so the kids’ ghosts could appear; that’d at least give them some kind of closure. But it was the day before Thanksgiving. What could I really do?
And . . . weren’t they alive? Hadn’t I seen them? Could what I’d experienced really have been a dream? It didn’t make sense, though. If they were alive, then Kristina was right—I shouldn’t have been able to access living people’s dreams. What was the logic there? And if they were dead, I was too far from any of their loved ones for me to channel them.
They couldn’t just show up whenever they pleased. That was one of the main rules Kristina had established with the other side. Otherwise billions upon billions of ghosts would try to access me all the time, trying to get me to deliver messages to the seven billion people scattered around the planet.
But the fact remained: I’d seen them somehow. And for all I knew, they were still alive. If they were dead, they wouldn’t have been lying on the boat so helplessly. Unless Kristina was right about the oceans—what if they were worried about getting sucked away into the vastness of the sea, and they clung to the boat because it was the last vestiges of humanity they had left?
My head was throbbing. My heart was pounding. Why did Kristina have to leave so suddenly? I needed her help.
“Baylor?” my mom said cautiously. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“I . . . I, uh, I think I needed to lie down,” I stammered.
“Oh no,” she said. “Are you feeling sick?”
“No. I mean, yes, sort of, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine tomorrow,” I managed to blurt.
“Baylor,” she said, the caution in her voice replaced by suspicion, “is this a ghost thing?”
I nodded slowly.
“Got it,” she said. She reached for the double-wick candle on the table and lit it up. “Do you need me to say anything or can you handle it?”
“I’ve got it,” I said, and I imagined the light surrounding my body. It wasn’t a necessary protection at the moment, but I was impressed my mom was trying to help in the first place, so I decided to go along with it.
“Let’s get you upstairs,” she said, putting my arm around her shoulders and grabbing me by the waist. “There we go. One step at a time.”
We managed to get upstairs, and after I crawled into bed, she lit candles and placed them around the perimeter of my room.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said as she tiptoed out.
“You’re welcome, sweetie. Get some rest.”
But I couldn’t rest just yet. I needed to call the hotline. I found the number online and it went straight to a voice mail instructing me to leave a detailed message with my name and phone number.
“Uh, hi. My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who have crossed over. Except, sorry, no, I shouldn’t have said that because I don’t think your kids have crossed over. I guess I found another way to communicate with them, and I just wanted to tell you that they’re both still alive and definitely lost at sea. They’re lying on part of a shiny white boat. You need to find them soon, though, so please keep looking. Don’t give up. Sorry. I wish I could be of more help.” I left my phone number in case they wanted to call back, and I hung up.
I sighed with relief. I did my best to help, and now I could rest easy.
It seems like a week can’t go by without Keene’s resident nuisance, Baylor Bosco, meddling in the lives of innocent people. After my special report from last week, I’m saddened to bring more news of Bosco’s devilish exploits.
I’m told that Bosco attacked a group of second-graders shortly after purposely disrupting Keene’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Saturday morning.
“It seemed like an accident,” said Mr. Gilbert, the band instructor at Keene Middle School. “I doubt he did it on purpose.” Gilbert’s judgment can understandably be called into question, however, thanks in large part to his hairstyle: a greasy mane of curly red hair.
After ruining his band’s performance, Bosco then proceeded to attack a group of second-graders, with isolated reports stating he went so far as to set a demon after the kids.
“Who knows what that guy is capable of,” reports my source, who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of any repercussions. “All I know is he scared my little brother to death.”
Perhaps most shocking, though, is Bosco’s most recent grab for attention. Sources tell me Bosco called the hotline for missing Floridian children Helena Papadopoulos and Archie Perceval, first saying the children had crossed over, and then retracting his claim, stating that the kids are still alive and he had somehow managed to communicate with them.
Needless to say, the parents of the missing children are not amused with Bosco’s tricks—especially today, of all days, when our country is celebrating Thanksgiving. For someone whose job is to pass on healing messages, Bosco sure seems bent on causing as much pain as he possibly can.
—Carla Clunders, editor-at-large, NewEnglandRealNews.net
“Stop it, Connie,” Dad said calmly as he tried to grab my mom’s phone out of her hands. “We don’t have time for this. And it’s Thanksgiving. We’ll take care of it tomorrow. Just try to relax.”
“Let go, Doug,” she growled. “I need to track her down and kick her a—”
“Connie,” he said through gritted teeth, “your younger son is now up and watching you behave this way.”
She froze, turning her head to see Jack staring at her from the hallway leading into the kitchen.
“Happy Thanksgiving, honey,” she sang, her voice unnaturally high.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said, letting Dad take the phone. She rushed over to Jack and guided him to join me at the table. “Cereal? Toast? What do you want to eat?”
“Toast, I guess.”
“Coming right up!” she said frantically.
I could tell she was about to lose it. She’d been up since six, chopping and mixing and baking, and when I showed her Carla’s new article, she went absolutely ballistic. I’d been obsessively checking that website twice a day and was horrified to a find an update this morning.
“That woman . . .” Mom muttered under her breath as she jammed two pieces of bread into the toaster so forcefully you’d have thought she had a personal vendetta against gluten. “Thinks she can write whatever she wants.” She scoffed. “And on Thanksgiving? What monster raised her?”
Jack looked at me in confusion, and I just shook my head, feeling guilty. “Sorry, bro. Didn’t mean to upset Mom on Thanksgiving. I keep messing things up for you.”
She buttered the toast and threw it in front of Jack, who took small, tepid bites.
“Is the turkey ready to go in?” she asked Dad. “If it doesn’t go in soon, we’re going to be off schedule.”
“Right,” he said. “We have a schedule to stick to. Okay, just another minute. I need to finish stuffing it.” He stared at her cell phone, and for a moment, I thought he was going to jam it into the turkey so my mom wouldn’t be able to look at the article again or attempt to contact Carla Clunders. But he set it aside and reached for the bread and lemon peels.
“Everyone’s arriving around one,” Mom said. “Jack, you need to strip your bed and put on new sheets for Uncle Horty. He’s sleeping in your room, and you’ll have to sleep in Baylor’s room.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “Why can’t Baylor sleep in my room?”
“Because his room is bigger and your cousins need to fit in there too.”
“Slumber party?” Jack said, his face lighting up.
Mom smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Slumber party. Finish your toast and go fix up your room.”
Jack wolfed down his toast and ran upstairs, leaving me alone at the table.
Mom was shaking her head at me. “That woman, Baylor. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to track her down and tell her exactly what I think of her, and her journalistic integrity, and her . . . her . . . stupid website.”
“Connie,” my dad said quietly, a hint of warning in his voice.
She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, and then glanced back at me.
Tomorrow, she mouthed, her eyes wide.
I nodded, giving her a thumbs-up.
“I’m going to shower,” I said, heading upstairs. Really, I planned on reading the article ten more times. When I pulled up the website again, I was pleased to find a bunch of comments defending me.
Baylor4ever, 9:21 a.m.: Carla Clunders, you are a hack. Writing inflammatory gossip articles about a 13yo boy? SAD.
BigBayliever11, 9:45 a.m.: Can you say “AGENDA”????? Clearly biased article. Amazing that Baylor was able to make contact with the missing kids. He is so blessed!!! Hope I can meet him soon, I miss my momma so much.
CamTheMan, 10:01 a.m.: the part with the anonymous source seemed really legit, Baylor scares kids for no reason, what a weirdo.
I rolled my eyes. The last commenter was clearly Cam Nguyen. How on earth had she tracked him down for this nonsensical article? No, seriously, could this even be called an article? It sounded like a flame piece written by one of my classmates trying really hard to seem like a grown-up.
I read over a few more comments, embarrassed by the different usernames that incorporated part of my name. I knew there were people who called themselves Baylievers, but I didn’t think they were rabid enough to be defending me on random news articles.
I searched for “Baylor Bosco Bayliever” and was shocked to discover the first result was for a website called BaylieversUnited.com. I clicked on it, and my cheeks burned. An image of me popped up. It looked like a screenshot from one of the news segments that’d aired shortly after the Sheet Man incident. I was looking off into the distance, focusing hard on something, and my arm was raised, with my hand turned up slightly, fingers spread evenly apart. It looked like I was performing a magic spell.
The home page looked like some sort of message board, with several different threads.
RECENT NEWS
SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE
PRESS
PHOTOS/VIDEOS
I clicked on RECENT NEWS, and the Carla Clunders update was the first one listed. I glanced down and saw there’d been a crazy hubbub of activity the last few weeks, with all sort of different articles posted about Rosalie and Alfred.
I clicked on the post about this morning’s article. There were already seventeen comments on it.
OhioMom1212: Baylor is THIRTEEN and so gifted. It must be such a burden for him sometimes to have so much power. I can’t imagine.
TranscendentXX: She seems like a pleasant woman . . . NOT!
GhostBoy11: sounds like a mean jerk to me, he should just mind his own business
BondedByond1980: Wonder if he delivered a message she didn’t like and now she’s out to get him. Poor kid. He helps so many people, doesn’t deserve this treatment.
I was happy to see the vast majority of comments were in my defense. I guess it wouldn’t make sense for a lot of people to hang out on a website called BaylieversUnited.com if they weren’t actually united. Well, unless they were united in their dislike of me.
Part of me wondered if there was an opposite forum somewhere on the web—some sort of hate site, like BaylorsABrat.com, and it would just be a bunch of people talking about how they thought I was a fraud and hoodwinking people left and right. I didn’t bother to check, though. That kind of negative energy was the last thing I needed.
I’d nearly forgotten I had to shower and clean my room, so I jumped into high gear and did everything I needed to do in less than twenty minutes. Jack slinked into my room and rolled out his sleeping bag on the opposite side of the room from my bed.
“Oli and Gillie can have the middle,” he said, smoothing out the top part.
Kristina and Colonel Fleetwood materialized out of nowhere, and I jumped back, not expecting them to pop up so suddenly. Jack looked up and frowned.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, catching my breath. “Kristina just surprised me.”
Jack’s face fell a little more. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot my pillow.” He slinked out of the room.
“What’s his problem?” Kristina asked.
“Everyone’s a little on edge today,” I said. “Carla posted another article, and Mom’s not happy. And when Mom’s not happy, no one’s happy.”
“She’s the best,” Kristina said with an adoring sigh.
“She really is a delightful woman,” the colonel said.
But I didn’t know what to say, because my attention was squarely focused on the uninvited ghost standing behind them, hunched over and staring back at me with shadowy eyes.