The Haunted - Jessica Verday [80]
Turning, I saw the outline of a dark figure in the doorway with the sun behind him, casting a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his features.
“But Kristen, Thomas is dead.…”
And then the balloons were back, clustering around me, sweeping me away. They brought me closer to the door, and I cried out, “Thomas, help me!” Kristen was there by his side. Wearing a black mask now. “He can’t save you,” she said.
“He couldn’t even save himself.”
I woke from my dream shaking and covered in sweat. After changing into a pair of jeans, I paced around my room. Why had I dreamt about Kristen like that? What did it mean? And why was Thomas there?
Weak morning light filtered across my floor, and I kept pacing back and forth. Lost in my own head. Every way seemed wrong and I just couldn’t figure it out.
Then I realized something. I padded over to my desk and scanned a calendar that was sitting there; then I checked my phone to be sure.
It was July twelfth. Thomas’s birthday.
I went back to pacing around the room, feeling all out of sorts. Last year I hadn’t gotten the chance to spend the day with Kristen because she’d been missing. But this year it would be different.
I threw on some shoes and a sweatshirt and went to my closet to grab a blanket. I was going to the cemetery, and the grass there might be damp.
Caspian found me an hour later.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked him, not looking up from Kristen’s grave.
“I don’t know. I just sensed it. When you weren’t at the bridge, I came to check here. I guess you make my Spidey senses tingle.”
I knew he wanted me to laugh or smile, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“Hey,” he asked. “What’s wrong? Did something happen last night?” I looked up then. “At the movies? No. It’s not that. I just had a bad dream last night about Kristen and…” A car drove slowly up the path next to us, and I stopped talking, trying to look like I was just a normal teenager sitting alone by a tombstone.
Like there was anything normal about that.
“Do you want to go sit under the bridge?” Caspian asked quietly. “I don’t think we’ll be bothered there.”
I nodded and stood, folding the blanket as I went. Resolutely, we walked past the church.
“Wait just a minute,” I told Caspian, when we reached the bridge. “Let me check on something.” Dropping the blanket, I walked over to the section where Kristen and I used to sit.
Then I grabbed on to the support pillar, used several chunks of exposed concrete as footholds, and climbed up under the bottom of the bridge. “Come on,” I called softly down to Caspian. “We can sit up here.”
He climbed up as I settled myself on the support beams. An extra beam had been added near the front, so it wasn’t as open and as much of a drop down into the water below as it used to be when Kristen and I would sit there, but it was still a long way to fall.
Caspian wedged himself in next to me, and for a moment his knee disappeared into mine.
“Sorry,” he said, readjusting. I shrugged and looked out over the water, falling back into my dark mood. “So, what about this dream?” he asked.
“It was a weird birthday dream about Kristen. But this time her brother, Thomas, was in it.” He waited for me to continue. Never once prodding me to speak faster. I liked that. “Today is Thomas’s birthday,” I confessed. “I think that’s why he was in the dream.”
“Okay.”
Just one word. One simple sound, and it completely undid me. Suddenly, the words were spilling out of me. “Ever since he died, Kristen and I used to spend his birthday together every year. But last year we didn’t get to because she was… gone. And I missed her birthday this year because I was at Aunt Marjorie’s. It was Mayfifth.” Caspian just watched me with wide eyes, patiently listening.
“I feel terrible,” I said. “I mean, I thought about her, and I wrote her a note. I even sang
‘Happy Birthday’ to her before I went to bed that night. But I wasn’t here. With her.”
“I’m sure she knew you were with her in spirit,” Caspian said.
“Maybe.” I dug one finger into the fabric