Mum called me for dinner. I checked my window one last time, making sure it was locked in case Suzie decided to take that route.
I couldn’t stand the chilling sensation of the Stone in my pocket. I had to get it away from me and put it somewhere Suzie wouldn’t find it. I chose my underwear drawer. I wrapped the Stone in my Superman boxer shorts, then buried it under layers and layers of underpants and mismatched socks. I stirred up the mess so it would look even messier and added a few T-shirts on top, making one of them hang partway out. I backed away to appreciate the chaos I’d created. It looked like the Bermuda triangle of clothes, and I decided no human being in her right mind would get anywhere near it.
I closed the door on my way out. It was an old door with a keyhole, but I’d never thought about locking it. I decided to ask Mum for the key in case Suzie got into the house from downstairs.
“You’ll never get to it,” I said to an imaginary Suzie.
An incredible smell floated up from the kitchen. Mum had baked one of her vegetarian pies—she was ace at them. I went to the table and sat with my back to the veranda. Normally, I ate facing the view of the beach, but since I’d seen the ghost lady in the attic, I’d tried my best to avoid whatever hid out there in the dark.
Mum brought the pie to the table and sat down. She took a sip of wine and sighed happily. “We could go to the pier after dinner if you like. Breathe some fresh air.”
“I’d rather stay here,” I said, trying the pie. She’d decorated it beautifully, with leaves and flowers and vegetables she’d sculpted from leftover dough, and it was delicious, just like all of her cooking. “Hey, do you know where the key to my room is?”
“You want to lock yourself in?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Actually, yes, it is a problem.”
“Why?”
She drank some more wine, thinking about it. “What if you fall? Or get stuck? Just close your door. I won’t disturb … whatever you’re doing in there.” She blushed.
“That is totally not the point.”
“Oh, Harold,” she said sadly. “You’re changing so much and so fast since you met Ilona Goolz. Though it’s a normal process, I suppose.”
“What process?”
“Growing up. Wanting new things. Changing who you are.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Skipping school? That’s not you at all.”
I didn’t want to talk about that. I’d already lost my computer and phone to that conversation. “Will you give me the key, then?” I snapped.
“No,” she snapped back.
I was getting frustrated fast. I just wanted to keep Suzie Goolz away from the Stone, but Mum insisted on having this big awkward talk about it.
“Maybe I didn’t like who I was before I met Ilona.” We were both playing with the pie on our plates, moving it around, but not eating.
Mum stopped fiddling with her food and let her fork drop onto her plate. “I like who you are, Harold. You’re a great kid. You always were, and you always will be.”
“Can I go eat in my room?” I asked, pushing away from the table before she could say no. She sighed and took my plate to the sink. She noticed the roll of tinfoil we had left out, ripped off a piece, and used it to cover my slice of pie.
“Here,” she said, handing it to me.
I snatched it, dropped it on my lap, and went to the stairs.
“Harold?” she said.
I stopped. “Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I know,” I said, shifting myself onto the lift and squashing my takeaway pie in the process. I held onto my chair and pushed the button. She kept looking at me while the lift took me upstairs.
“I love you, too,” I said midway.
“Well, fine, then.” Her voice was shaky. She forced a smile and went back to the sink, but I could tell she was trying to hide tears.
I opened the door to my room, and immediately knew something Goolz-ish had happened while I was downstairs. And it wasn’t just a feeling—there were obvious clues that I had been robbed. The most obvious was my Superman boxer shorts lying in the middle of the room.
“No way,” I said, going to check the window. The latch was open. “How the heck did she do it? These people are unbelievable.”
I threw my squashed pie on the bed and went to the drawer even though I already knew the Stone wouldn’t be there. She’d taken it and left the tinfoil behind. I cursed. Ilona had asked me to do one simple thing and I’d failed. I went back to the window to see if Suzie was up in the attic, taunting me with the Stone. It was nighttime, and watching the Goolz’s attic window wasn’t exactly my favorite activity, even in the light of day.
But I didn’t have to. Suzie was walking down the road toward the pier.
“Suzie, where’re you going?” I muttered to myself.
I rushed out of my room, then got really frustrated with the slow pace of the lift. I was losing precious seconds.
“Do you want some more pie?” Mum asked from the sofa, where she was reading a Frank Goolz novel.
I transferred my body back into my chair and grabbed my jacket on my way to the door. “I’m going out.”
“To see Ilona?”
“No! Just getting some fresh air like you said!” I shouted and slammed the door before she could slow me down with more questions.
I went to the road at top speed, hoping to catch up with Suzie. I decided not to stop for Ilona. I wanted to fix this all by myself. I could get the Stone back, and she would never know I’d lost it. I would keep it on me at all times like she had asked. “Please, please, please!” I begged, speeding from one streetlight to the next.
I was gaining ground on her. I could see her passing the pier and starting down the road toward Newton.
“No!” I said to no one in particular. Because now I had a pretty good idea where she was going: back to the abandoned church. I didn’t want to follow her. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the Hewitt grounds at night, not with the dogs and Alex and his gun haunting the area. It was the stuff of nightmares. I wheeled even faster. Suzie was a little dot moving toward the full moon. My throat tightened. I thought about going back to get Ilona, but I didn’t want her to think I was weak.
“This sucks,” I said.
The closer I got to the church, the more I could hear the dogs barking wildly, the sound echoing all around me, as though they could sense a perfect meal on wheels coming straight to them.
I stopped at the church. Suzie was nowhere to be seen, which meant she’d already crawled inside. I smacked the wooden wall with the side of my fist.
“Suzie!” I yelled, knocking hard.
“Go away!” she said from inside.
“I won’t go away until you give me back the Stone.”
“Tough luck.”
I banged on the wall again. “Suzie! Can’t you hear the dogs?”
I looked up as something fantastically large and white slid off the roof and took to the sky. My heart froze solid until I realized it was a white owl flying away from all the noise we were making. I started breathing again and banged on the wall harder.
“Suzie!” I barked. “Just let me in and we can talk about this.”
“You’re too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I already turned the Stone. Lots of times.”
“Oh.”
“She’ll be here soon.”
“My mother. You’d better leave.”
Honestly, I thought leaving was an excellent idea. “Can you unturn it?”
“Can you just go?”
As she said that, the dogs stopped barking.
“This is not good,” I said, and suddenly the moon and all the stars switched off. I found myself in complete darkness. It was silent, too. Totally silent. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the dogs anymore. Dogs were an ordinary fear and I was rapidly entering an uncharted territory of terror.
“Suzie?” I called. I reached for the wall of the church, but didn’t feel anything at all.
“This is SO NOT GOOD!” I yelled.
I put my hands over my ears as an awful sound burst out of the silence—painful, like a dental drill hitting all the wrong spots. And then someone moaned right behind me.
“Suzie!” I shouted.
I turned around. Suzie was on the wrong side of the wall. Whomever—whatever—she had brought into our world with the Stone wasn’t in the church. It was out there with me.
“What’s that?” I whispered, as a tiny white dot pierced the darkness right in front of me. Its glow felt warm and hypnotic. It was steadily growing, as if I were moving toward it, or even worse, as if it were coming to me. I put my hands on the rims of my wheels. They weren’t turning. The dot was moving toward me—and it was definitely accelerating. It became a ball, the ball became the size of a window, and the window became a door so bright I could no longer see the darkness around it. And then it stopped.
“Suzie, if you can hear me, I need you to say something.”
“Say something,” my own voice repeated from out of nowhere.
“Who’s talking?” I asked.
“Who’s talking?” my voice repeated.
“Stop it!”
“Stop it!” said the echo.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Say something,” my voice responded.
I wanted to throw something into the light. I put my hands into my jacket pockets and found my earphones. I hesitated a second, then threw them toward the light. They froze in midair then, zoof, the light sucked them in like spaghetti.
“Crap!” I said. But somehow, even though I was still sort of scared, I wasn’t totally terrified anymore. The more I looked into the light, the more it fascinated me, and I found that the brightness no longer hurt my eyes. I searched my pockets again to see if I had anything else I could throw.
“You don’t need to cry,” said my own voice. “It was a really old chair.”
I stopped searching my pockets. “What did you just say?” I asked the light.
“What did you just say?” responded the echo. Only it wasn’t just an echo, I knew now. It was something playing with my memories, searching my mind, remembering things I’d heard and things I’d said.
“This is not funny,” I said. My wheels started turning, and I rolled toward the light. I grabbed the rims to stop myself, but the wheelchair kept sliding forward, sucked in like my earphones had been.
“No way,” I said, twisting around to escape the light. I tried to roll away from it, but it was as if something had already grabbed the handles on my chair and was dragging it with a great force. Like the earphones, my chair froze just before reaching the light. I pushed myself off and dropped onto the dark, cold ground seconds before my wheelchair got sucked into oblivion. I looked over my shoulder. The light was right behind me, and I knew I was next. I started dragging myself away but stopped when a long-gone sensation filled my body.
“This is not possible,” I said. I was crawling on all fours.
“This is not possible,” repeated my voice.
It felt like rediscovering the taste of a food I missed or a smell I liked. I didn’t want to move. Not because I was scared of the light, but because I didn’t want this magic to vanish. I never wanted it to end.
“You don’t need to cry,” my voice said. “It was a really old chair.”
“I … I have to try,” I said. I put one foot forward, and pushed myself up on my legs. I looked down at my feet. “I’m standing,” I whispered.
I could feel it, all the sensations of standing up.
“I’m standing!” I yelled at the light, and it immediately sucked me in.