The Haunted - Jessica Verday [45]
He hesitated, then started pacing back and forth. “I must have slept… or something… for a while, because I think it was a couple of days later when I woke up. I’m not sure why, but time passes differently for me now. Faster.” He glanced over at one of the boxes, and I followed his gaze to the alarm clock sitting in there.
“That’s why I have that,” he said, pointing to it. “I had to set it to go off every time I was supposed to be meeting you.”
“Time moves faster? How?”
“I can’t explain it. But when I close my eyes, I kind of fall into this void. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s my body going to an astral plane, or heaven… or wherever it is I’m supposed to be.”
“Do you find yourself visiting yourself in the past or future?” I joked. “Are you wearing chains? Or do you hang out in the attic of old houses?” He looked at me blankly.
“You know. Ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Future? Haven’t you ever seen that Bill Murray movie Scrooged ? And the chains and the attic are from haunted houses. Technically, you are a ghost.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Caspian said.
Open mouth, insert foot.
“But no, no chains or haunted houses. Just calendar pages flipping faster and faster.
What’s a day for you can be a week for me. Or a month. Whenever I said I’d meet you at a specific time, I’d have to set the alarm to make sure I didn’t miss it.”
“Why close your eyes and go into this black void thingy at all then? Why not just stay awake the entire time? Do you need to sleep?”
He looked me directly in the eye. “It’s not like when I was alive. I don’t need sleep. Sometimes, this weariness comes over me…” He paused, then said, “Have you ever felt time crawl-ing? Have you ever been so desperate to make the hours disappear that you’ll do anything?
Do you know what that feels like?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “When Kristen died. After her funeral. After I met you… I couldn’t sleep. My dreams were awful, so I forced myself to stay awake. It got so bad that I started to think that Kristen was there with me. That she’d… come back.” His eyes were understanding. “Sometimes I’d go weeks at a time and not wake up.”
“What changed?” I held my breath waiting for his answer.
“You,” he said. “I saw you and Kristen here, and around you I could see color. I knew that meant you were different.”
I cracked a smile. “What did you see—my aura?”
“No. I saw your beauty.”
My heart lurched and started beating triple time. It was thumping so hard that I put one hand to my chest, afraid it would break right through.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Do you need to sit down?” His concern for me was adorable. “I’m fine. I don’t need to sit down. You just need to give a girl some warning when you’re going to say something like that. It sends my heart into quivers.”
Caspian suddenly looked all bashful and shy. I liked that almost as much as I liked him being worried about me. But I took pity on the poor boy. “Tell me what happened with your dad.
When you finally woke up.”
“I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer. I thought maybe he was just pissed about the car thing, so I went outside to give him some space. Saw some people on the sidewalk and said something to them. They ignored me too.”
He paced over to the bench and sat down. He looked sad. I moved toward the bench too and sat next to him.
“For days… or weeks… I don’t really know which, I walked the streets. Screaming at the top of my lungs. Trying to stop every person I came across. Searching for someone to tell me what was going on. I even went to the police station. Threw myself in one of their chairs and waited all day. Nothing changed.”
I shook my head, horrified at what he was saying. “Did you… did things… people… pass through you?”
Caspian didn’t answer. Just looked at me. I wanted to touch him so badly that I locked my fingers together so I didn’t forget again and reach out. “You must have felt like you were going crazy,” I whispered. “Like everyone around you was a part of something connected, but you had broken loose.”
“That’s exactly what it felt