Nightlight

It was his father's birthday yesterday, Adrian remembered as he unclipped Jessie’s lead from her collar and let her loose to run. Dirk had left for work even earlier than usual, the sky still dark, the city still asleep, but where Adrian grew up, half a world away, it was late enough that most people already awake and alert. He checked the time again to be sure and called the house, hoping to catch his dad before he had to leave for work.

He watched Jessie while he waited for his father to pick up. She ran back and forth between him and the smells that lined the path as he walked slowly. He could only smell trees and fresh-cut grass, but there were infinitely more interesting smells for Jessie, judging by the amount of time her nose spent on the ground.

His father answered, as though he knew who was calling, and Adrian dragged his attention back to the phone, first apologizing for missing his birthday and then asking all the expected birthday questions. Adrian’s sister called him last week, to tell him how much his share of the present was, so his dad had just thanked him for a present Adrian never saw and had no role in choosing. Adrian assured him it was no problem at all. It must have been nearly time for his father to leave for work, but instead, he continued onto the usual subjects for his weekly calls. Adrian let his mind drift, answering the questions by rote, thinking instead of the day ahead of him.

"Do you remember," asked his father, deviating from the expected script and surprising Adrian, "when you were very little, how the attic got haunted, and we had to get it blessed, and you cried for days on end?"

"I liked the ghosts," Adrian said, following Jessie's plumed tail along the path. "I stopped telling you about them after that since you'd made them go away."

He could see his father shrug as though he was standing next to him.

"Whatever. Anyways, your sister Beth; her oldest boy is seven this year, and told us stories at lunch yesterday about the person who lives in the mantelpiece."

"Percy."

"No, no, that doesn't sound right, thought I wouldn't put it past Beth to name a child of hers something like that. Still, I think the boy's named something else."

"The ghost is named Percy. The boy is named Peter." When Adrian was a baby, a ghostly lady sang to him as he rocked in his cradle. As he grew older, the ghosts moved through his dreams as they did through his life, walking from one state to another with no indication that he was there at all. He would get frustrated in his dreams, and wake up yelling at them. His parents thought they were nightmares and had arranged a Requiem for the room.

"Yes, that's it. Peter. I don't know why I always forget it. Anyways, since we're going to have to get the Guild in to fix up the room, I thought maybe you could get us a discount."

"You're not in my chapter, Dad. It's not as simple as it sounds. I'll ask around, but you'll probably have to pay full price." The first Requiem had lasted six months, he'd figured out later, but they had been six long, quiet months. He'd not known, until then, that he was different. He'd thought everyone heard voices where there wasn't anything, held conversations with dead people, or heard them talk about how they died over and over again. He stopped talking about them after that, for fear he'd lose them again.

"Well, I know. I just thought it might be possible, that maybe there was some benefit to having that condition of yours." It wasn't until he was in school that he found there was a name for his condition. Sensitive. "You were a pain and a half to raise, I'll tell you what, and I just thought you could help us out a little here." His father sighed loudly. "Don't trouble yourself. I'll tell your mother you called." The line clicked.

Adrian cursed under his breath. He'd call back later, when they'd both calmed down, or his mother would call him while his dad was still at work and apologize for him.

"Here, Jesse," he called to her suddenly, seeing a broken branch lying on the grass by the shoulder of the path. "Jesse! Fetch." He leaned over to scoop up the branch, and felt a sudden shock running up his arm and across his chest.

Mommy? said the voice now in his head. Mommy? I'm lost. I stayed by the tree, like you told me, but you're not here.

He dropped the stick automatically, but it didn't matter. His senses were now attuned to her, and he could hear her whimper even without the physical contact. He picked up the stick again, still ignoring the cries, and threw it for Jesse. She, being rather less Sensitive than he was, had no problem with the stick and carried it off to worry at in the shade by his favorite bench. He followed the dog at a slower pace.

He could feel the volume of voices around him picking up again, the stick-girl's presence having been enough to tune his senses to the myriad outside ghosts that he usually could ignore.

Mommy? The stick grazed his arm as Jesse dropped it on his lap, and he was jolted again by the strength of her cries. You're dead, he thought directly at the image of a little girl, lanky and tomboyish, the same as Beth had looked at her age. Go away. Your mother will find you when she dies.

The girl ignored him. Mommy? Where are you? I want to go home!

He sighed and laid his hand on the stick, bracing for the impact of her touch. Your mother isn't here, child, he thought gently. You're a ghost. I could help you find her, but she wouldn't recognize you anymore.

She was quiet again. He could hear the other voices trickling in around her. Sometimes he heard ghosts so old and powerful they shook him to his core, as if they were the ghosts of gods or supernatural beings. But they were old and timeless. He wasn't used to little girls--no more than eight, if he had to guess--being strong enough to punch through any defenses, let alone argue with him.

Mommy? she finally asked one last time.

The plaintive tone of her voice, the sheer strength of her presence, the memory of the tomboy with a skinned knee--something about her resonated in him. He sighed. I'll help you. We'll find her together. Where'd you lose her? How old are you?

She was silent. For a very long moment, he thought maybe she'd left. He rested his hand on the stick, felt the pulse of a presence still there. I'm seven, she announced, finally. Mommy was supposed to come get me. She said if I got lost, I should wait right there and someone would find me, and everything would be okay again. But I waited and no one found me, not until you came by.

He sighed again. Not the most helpful of answers. What's your name? What year is it?

Her answers were much faster for these questions. My daddy always calls me Puppy. It's the Year of the Pig, 'cause my brother is still new, and Mommy says he's a little piglet and that's why he eats so much.

The problem with ghosts, other than the obvious ones, was that for them, time stopped when they died. He'd never met a ghost who kept track of the date. Year of the Pig was the year that had just ended, but it was also ten years before that, and ten before that, and so forth.

He sat in silence for a long time. The stick in his lap stayed quiet for a while, then began her litany over again, crying for her mother. He rested a hand on the stick, ran soothing phrases through his mind, endlessly repeating. She quieted then, and he rose to leave. He slipped the stick--now covered with dog spit and dirt--into a plastic bag from the collection tied to Jesse's leash, and then into his pants pocket.

He could still hear her, but less immediately. She was whimpering more than crying now, just occasional sniffles. He whistled for Jesse, clipped on her leash, and headed back to the house.

#

He left the stick in the bag on his dresser when he left for work. There’d be enough ghosts at work, he didn’t need to import another. He was still in Requiems, anyway, and that wouldn’t solve the problem, just delay it. He’d promised Puppy he’d find her mom, and he felt obligated to live up to the promise.

He put her out of his mind on the bus ride to work, concentrating instead on preparing himself for work. It was the last day for this rotation, and he couldn’t help but be grateful.

He liked the voices whispering through him, the pieces of lives and deaths he walked through every day. He didn't like having to silence them. And he didn't like the headaches he'd get from such close contact to so many ghosts everyday.

Today was the practical exam, and hopefully would be a short day. A house had cleared probate, and the family wanted to get it ready to sell. It was pre-war, and had never been Blessed as a whole before, so the whole place crawled with ghosts, enough that even the most insensitive could feel his skin crawl, and anyone who slept in the house had nightmares. Ghosts lingered in the unprotected wood of the house, in the cracks and knotholes of the floorboards, in the studs and slats in the walls, in the beams that stretched across the house and down into the foundation. Even when they were silent, Adrian could feel them in his bones, that cold, quiet shiver that sent goosebumps up his spine.

Each of the novices had been given a handful of rooms to Bless, and when he stepped into the last of his, he realized that it was the focus of the ghostly attention, a site of violence and death that had to have been there for years. If it hadn't been his final exam, he would have found someone to trade with. As it was, he worked as quickly as he could.

The incense burner was set up first--the thick white smoke given off burned his eyes, and the strange, spicy fumes made him cough, but it would permeate the walls of the room as he worked and displace the ghosts that had settled there.

He could feel them weeping in his bones. Her, mostly. I didn't know it would hurt so much, she cried. I didn't know there would be so much blood.

He tried to block their voices as he shook a thin layer of the banishing powder on the floor, tried to concentrate instead on getting the grains into every crack of the floorboards, evenly covering every inch of the floor.

I didn't know she'd found out, cried the man. I thought we'd hidden it from her well enough. I never thought she'd followed me.

He made notes as he worked, to write down later. Until these two were Mourned, they’d keep coming back, and bringing others with them. In six months to a year, the room would need Blessed again. In less than 5 years, the house would be back to its current haunted state. If these ghosts were Mourned, the Requiem for the house might last as many as ten years. Forensics, and their historians, would track down the likely candidates for the victims, but the more details he provided, the easier it would be for them.

I meant to miss, she cried one more time before he completed the room. I meant to tell you, he said, his voice fading Adrian scattered the last of the powder. He could still hear voices calling to him from the laths in the plaster walls, the beams in the ceiling, but the smoke would take care of them as well.

When the entire floor was covered, Adrian stepped out into the hallway, taking the incense burner with him. He paused just on the other side of the door frame to dump out a coal from the burner onto the floor of the pantry, shut the door quickly and began counting under his breath.

Right on schedule, ten seconds later, he felt the whumph of the mixture igniting across the floor of the whole room. He packed his supplies back into their respective bags, closed the burner and set it against the wall of the hallway next to the packed bags for pick up that evening, and locked the door so that no one would disturb the room before the vapor dissipated. Adrian dropped the key off with the journeyman supervising the outside work, and caught the bus across the street from the site with seconds to spare.

#

Dirk was home. Adrian could hear pots and pans rattling when he walked in the front door. Jessie greeted him gleefully, and then raced off back to the kitchen as soon as he’d finished rubbing her ears to see if anything had been spilled on the floor while she’d been distracted. Adrian paused to hang his coat in the coat closet, and to put away the leash that Dirk had draped over the banister. He put his phone back on the charger on the bookcase by the stairs, and headed down the hallway into the kitchen.

"Bad day?" he asked. Dirk approached cooking in a more violent manner when work had been particularly trying, choosing recipes that called for lots of slicing or pounding things flat.

"Oh, you should have been there," Dirk talked while he cooked, gesturing with a knife at one point, explaining what the doctor he assisted had asked him to do. Adrian didn't understand the finer points of the story, but he got the gist of it, just like he knew Dirk wouldn't always find the details of his job as interesting as he did.

Adrian interrupted Dirk when he paused for a breath.

"Do you remember? I had a box of my grandfather's stuff when I moved here. Where could we have put it?"

Dirk paused in mid-stir. "A wooden box or a cardboard box? There was an old cardboard box that you brought, but it was a really old box and I think it fell apart while you moved in. It was all old musty stuff. It probably was your grandfather's. You should check the attic. I think we put everything extra up there.”

#

Someone else had been in charge of putting the boxes in the attic, so he'd never had cause to climb the ladder before. The attic was hot and airless, smelled strongly of sawdust and polish, and rang with the cries and complaints of the ghosts residing in it. Besides the crude board floor and the exposed rafters that made up the walls, there were old wooden chests and various old pieces of furniture too old to have brass feet, so he wasn't surprised that even the Deaf friends who'd worked in it had complained their skin crawled and hair stood on end. His head was filled with many different voices but few distinct complaints.

I'm sorry, most of them said. It hurts, said others. I'm so lonely. I want the pain to stop. He wouldn't treat me this way if he didn't love me. Each voice had echoes, copycats. In the end, there were few unique messages. Death was universal, and rarely novel, though people usually thought it was. The children cried, the adults apologized for themselves or others, or made excuses for themselves or others.

He picked his way through the attic, trying not to touch any of the furniture. The boxes were against the back wall, tucked into the space where the roof sloped nearly to the floor. Most of the boxes in the attic were their landlord's, but the nearest stacks were the stuff he and Dirk had brought with them when they moved in.

He had to rummage through several boxes first, but he finally found the box with his grandfather's belongings in it. As he'd remembered, among the photos and memorabilia was a ghost-proof bag. It was small, heavy, and ugly, made of a dull reddish cloth that sparkled slightly from the threads of copper and tin wire woven throughout it. Heavens knows what someone might have that a ghost would want, but there'd been a passion for ghost-proofed items when it was all still new. Assuming the bag actually worked--and theory, it should--he thought it would be invaluable for handling Puppy.

He tried it out once he was back downstairs in the protected areas of the house. When he put the stick in there, he was cut off from her completely, and just as importantly, she was cut off from the outside world as well. He couldn't sense her at all, and she didn't know there was anything she should be sensing.

#

After dinner, while he cleared the table, he told Dirk had an errand to run.

He shrugged. “I’ve got journals to catch up on. Maybe you can meet us in the park later.”

“I hope so.”

Once in the park, he started by the path where he'd found her, and circled out in an increasingly large pattern. None of the ghosts he could sense seemed to remember Puppy. He was all the way to the far side of the park before he got any sort of clue. Puppy--not in her travel bag as he wanted to be able to keep track of her reactions to the environment--got excited about the same time that the ghosts that he was talking to--dead heartwood in a grove of trees--thought they remembered a little girl playing in them.

She liked climbing, said one.

She talked to us, said another.

Did you talk to them? Adrian asked Puppy. Can you talk to ghosts?

Yes! she shouted. He winced, wishing he could just muffle her a little. Yes! I talked to the trees.

He followed the path by the trees towards the west entrance. It wove through a number of child-oriented areas--a jungle gym, a swing set, and a merry-go-round.

Home home home, Puppy chanted in his head. We're going home now.

He paused at the gate, looking out at the half-circle of houses that faced him. These or one of the side streets?

Home home home, Puppy chanted again.

Puppy? he asked. Puppy, did you walk to the park?

She stilled. He reached in to his jacket pocket, touched the stick directly. Yes? she said finally. I think so.

One of the houses--White house, Puppy?--was right across the court from him. He stood on the walk, looking at the honeysuckle tree that grew up along the fence by the property line.

Is that your tree, Puppy?

Yes, she sang. Yes, yes, yes! Home, home, home!

The lawn was ragged around the edges. There were toys on the porch and a hole in the screen door. The front door was open, so he knocked on the screen door, peering through into the dark interior. There was a couch in the living room--he could just see the corner from this angle, grey-brown and shabby, and a littering of toddler toys from one end of the hallway to the other.

Bingo.

B - I - N - G - O, chimed in Puppy. We sing now?

No, Puppy, no singing now. He knocked again, tilting his head to listen for any sounds inside.

"Yes?" The voice, young-ish and female, sounded like it was from the top of the stairs. He ducked his head to see, but the risers for the second flight blocked his view. He stooped down, finally, crouching and looking up the stairs. She was not much older than him, and looked tired and slightly damp.

"Um, I had a few questions to ask you."

"If you're selling something, you'll have to come back later. I'm trying to put the baby to bed."

"No, sorry. I'm here about your daughter." He shouldn't have been able to see her pale, but he could, the stark white of her face glowing against the dimly lit background.

"What happened? Is she dead? Ted? Ted! Please, come here." She sat clumsily at the top of the stairs.

A man joined her at the top of the stairs. "He's asleep now, Mandy. Who was at the door?"

She nodded towards Adrian. "There’s a young man here..." Her voice caught and she stopped speaking.

Adrian opened the door and stepped into the hallway so they didn't need to shout. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to concern you. I'm just here about your daughter." Was this the right place? They stared back at him in confusion.

"Margaret? What's the matter? Why didn't the hospital call us if something's the matter?"

Daddy? He could feel Puppy stir again. He didn't know if she slept at times, or just stopped paying attention. She was paying attention now though.

Hospital? "Maybe I don't have the right place? I'm a Sensitive. I found a ghost yesterday. She's UnMourned and I thought she was your daughter. I'm sorry. I must have made a mistake."

"She said she was Margaret?"

Mommy!

"No, she can't remember her real name. It's common among ghosts. She's around seven years old, likes to climb trees. She calls herself Puppy."

Ted paled in turn, and joined his wife on the step. "She's named after her grandmother, but she couldn't say Peggy when she was little. But she isn't dead. She's in a coma, but she's alive."

Peggy?

Yes?

#

Her parents were distraught.

"She's dead." Mandy kept saying "She's a ghost, she's really dead, we should have believed them and pulled the plug when they said there wasn't any hope of her coming out of the coma. Our baby is gone." It was like the ghosts all over again, stuck in the same rut, the same phrase over and over again. It's all my fault.

"She fell out of a tree in the park," her father explained to Adrian. “We hoped she'd wake up, some day."

"I'll call my mother, I suppose." Mandy's eyes were puffy. "We'll have to have a wake, I guess. We can talk to the doctors at St Andrew's tomorrow; see what to do with Peggy's body.” She grabbed his hand desperately. “I know it’s not usual, but...could you do it tonight? Here? Mourn her, I mean. We can have the wake any time, but I don’t like the thought of her being lost like that any longer.”

It was unusual, but not unorthodox. They left the door open, and set the baby monitor on the edge of the deck. He’d spent six weeks performing the ritual—he would have sworn he could do it in his sleep, but he was wrong. He finished the ritual, her parents said their pieces, and he touched the stick, only to find she was still there, still vocal, still lost.

“I’m sorry,” he said, over and over again. “I’m just an apprentice journeyman, but it still should have worked. That was my first rotation, I know how they work, but I don’t know what went wrong.”

Oddly enough, Mandy looked stronger despite the lack of results. She had color in her face again, and no longer looked so sad. “It’s okay,” she said, in a mother voice, “You did your best. You probably were just overtired. It’s been a busy day for you, hasn’t it? We’ll take her to our priest tomorrow, a few more hours won’t hurt.”

He still felt guilty as he walked away. He could feel them standing together by the tree, watching him as he walked back to the park.

Dirk was waiting for him at the gate.

“We got bored, and Jessie tracked you. How did it go?”

"They didn't know she was dead. Her body's still on life support. They thought she was in a coma, didn't believe the doctors when they told them Puppy was dead. I did a Mourning for them, since they said they just wanted it to be over, finally, but it didn’t work, I probably messed it up too."

"Wait," said Dirk. "You skipped a little too much there. Tell me the whole thing again." They strolled slowly towards their side of the park as he listened to Adrian's explanations. "What hospital?"

Adrian blinked. "Um...St. Andrew’s, they said."

"And she's been in a coma for 6 months now?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"There’s a neurology wing at Saint Andrews. Fanciest place you’ve ever seen, and yet not a single trauma coma victim has recovered at Saint Andrews in 15 years. Do you know what they did 15 years ago?" He paused for a moment, staring at Adrian expectantly. "No? They put in ghost-proof rooms."

"Ghost-proof rooms?"

"Yup. We were talking about this in my Neurology class a while ago. Twenty years ago, this guy goes into the hospital, unconscious. They check him out, and he's had a stroke. So they clean him up, he comes to, they send him home. Stroke victims, they often end up with personality changes--it's one of the standard hazards. So the guy goes home, lives another 2 years, and dies of another stroke. His wife, meanwhile, is firmly convinced that it's someone different in his body. Till the day she dies, she swears he was taken over by someone else while he was unconscious. So, being rich as well as crazy, when she dies the following year, she leaves money for a neurology wing. And she leaves some impressively detailed requirements for the wing, the top one being that it must be ghost-proof. This is a lot

of money. This is a state of the art Neurology Lab. No one complains. They build the wing. No one gets better."

Adrian tried to figure out what Dirk was saying, beyond the words he was using. "So, she's not dead?"

Dirk sat down on a park bench and unclipped Jessie’s leash. "I don't know. Her body is alive, we do know that much. And it seems to me that if you can’t dismiss her the way you should be able to, you're saying she's not dead. There’s something called an out of body experience. Where sick/injured people would think they were dying, and they'd see their body below them, and 'go towards the light' and all that. The neurology chief is fascinated with it. Calls it "concussive detachment." A blow to the head, and then the victim never gets better. No worse, but no better. Maybe he is right."

“I’d say that was just a crack pot theory...”

“But?”

“But it makes at least as much sense as anything does here.” He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bench, thinking out loud. “Say I perform a requiem, seal her out of the wood. If I drive the ghost out of the wood in a ghost-proof room, she should try to go into the body, right? That’s the whole theory, right? And if it doesn't work, well, then we'll have proven it's not likely to happen accidentally either."

"Makes sense to me."

“So I’d just need to get me, my stuff, and

Puppy into her room, and we’d know in like, 15 minutes if I was right or wrong.” He dug in his pocket for his phone. “I should call her parents.”

Dirk slipped the phone out of his hand and whistled for Jessie to return. "And get their hopes up again?”

“Well, we’ll need them to get into the hospital. I mean, what are we going to do, sneak in there and do this on the sly?” Dirk cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “This is all playing into your childhood dreams of being some sort of secret agent, isn’t it?”

Dirk laughed. “And you love it. We’d better get home now. I've got a few calls to make, and I need to change back into my work clothes. You should wear a pair of scrubs as well. It'll be easier to get you in like that."

#

It wasn't quite as easy as Dirk had made it sound, but it didn't seem to take much time at all for the two of them to be standing in Puppy's room.

She was smaller than she thought she was, but she looked more like her mother than Adrian had thought she would, fine-boned and pale. She lay completely still in the bed, blankets tucked in around her, hands folded across her chest which rose and fell evenly. Her hair was cut boy-short, brown and spiky around the sensors stuck to her scalp. He'd expected more machines, for some reason. Dirk laughed when he said that and picked up her chart.

"She's not that badly off. Her heart works correctly, she's breathing on her own, she's pretty much the same as she would be if she was alive. She's just not here. All the EEG is doing is confirming that there's no brain activity, at least none that counts. She's not on oxygen, so you don't need to worry about that when you light the incense." He put the chart back down and looked expectantly at Adrian. "Well? What now? Do you need my help?"

Adrian set down the bag holding Puppy, and dug in his pockets for the incense. "Get this lit, I guess. I'll try and figure out how to get her to try to go in the body." He drew Puppy slowly out of the bag. She was distracted as she often was when he put her in the bag. Puppy. Can you hear me?

She slowly turned her attention back to him. I can always hear you, she said smugly. Except when I'm in the bag. I can hear everyone. Except this room feels wrong. Like I'm in a really big bag, with you.

Puppy, do you see where we are? Do you see who's in the bed here?

That's me, she said wonderingly. Am I really dead?

I don't think so, Puppy, but you're going to have to help me. I'm going to make you get out of the stick.

No! she cried, No, no, no! I can't leave the stick.

It's okay, he soothed. I'm going to get you out of the stick, but then I need you to work with me. I need you to try to get back in your body. Okay? Can you remember that? And if you can't get into the body, you can come back into the wood. But you have to try first.

I don't want to!

He wracked his brains for something to entice her into trying. Puppy, don't you like climbing trees? If you get back in your body, I'll take you climbing anywhere you want to go.

He took her silence as agreement.

"Here," said Dirk, appearing at his side with the stick of incense. "Took a couple tries. I'd forgotten how to light the damn things since the last funeral I was in."

Adrian took a deep breath. "I don't know if this will work."

"Only one way to find out."

"Guess so." He placed the wood on the backs of Puppy's folded hands. "Damn but I hope this works. I don't want to have to explain to a piece of wood why we're not going climbing." He brought the incense closer to the wood. "Keep your fingers crossed." She was crying again. He could hear her, getting fainter and less distinct. He touched the wood briefly, but felt no shiver of recognition. "She's out of the wood--get me the bag." He slid the stick into the bag, closed it carefully.

"Now what?"

The monitor connected to her beeped suddenly. They both jumped, and Dirk got up to take a look at it. When he turned back to Adrian he was smiling.

"I think it's working. The patterns are changing. I don't know what they're changing to now, but they're different. They look like dream state now, almost."

"Puppy?" Adrian said, leaning over the bed now, watching her carefully. "Puppy, can you hear me? You ready to go climb a tree now?"

She moved, slightly, let her head roll to the side a little. He tried again.

"Puppy?"

She blinked, turned her head again, opened her eyes. The beeping became regular and Dirk took over, moving Adrian away from the foot of the bed and handing him back his phone. “Here. It’s calling her parents.”

He rested his forehead against the window, looking out past the glare into the darkness beyond. They’re probably asleep by now, he thought. Everyone’s asleep now. A small, cool hand slipped into the hand he’d rested on the bed spread, as they picked up on the other end.