The Memory Thief Read online

  Germ stares out the window, thinking. “On Los Angeles Pet Psychic they got rid of a bad spirit by burning something called a smudge stick all around the house. It had, like, oregano in it or something.”

  I blink at her. Los Angeles Pet Psychic is one of her favorite shows. She’s always waiting for them to do a segment on an iguana, but it has never panned out. Still, I doubt how much burning oregano could help if I do end up seeing a ghost again.

  Walking into the house, I see that half the groceries I ordered online earlier this week are scattered on the counter: eight of the same Swanson frozen dinners, four boxes of Pop-Tarts, four frozen pizzas, a box of spaghetti, eight cans of soup. There’s a whole bag full of candy—Twizzlers and caramels and all sorts of treats I order too because my mom doesn’t care.

  Some of the bags have been unpacked, but it looks like Mom got halfway through and then forgot and moved on to something else. Even after all these years being friends with Germ, I flush with embarrassment. But Germ briskly crosses the kitchen and starts putting things away as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, and I help her, gratefully.

  After we finish, we find Mom upstairs in her attic room, staring out the window at the sea, as she does for hours every evening. The pull to the ocean and this window view of it is so strong, she starts muttering nervously to herself whenever she has to leave the house, and we always have to hurry home.

  “Hey, Mrs. Oaks,” Germ says, behind me in the doorway.

  “He’s out there swimming,” Mom says automatically, her eyes on the sea.

  “Yeah,” Germ says, turning a kind smile to me. “His legs must be tired.” Germ reaches out and gives my arm a squeeze. I know she feels bad for me, but she also tries to be funny about it. I think she understands that you only have the mom you have.

  “Germ’s sleeping over,” I say. “And I have some progress reports I need you to sign.” My progress reports always have some variation of the same note at the bottom: Rosie is very bright but doesn’t speak very often. Rosie daydreams too much. I know my mom will sign them without reading them.

  Mom gives a vague smile to both of us. “That’s nice,” she says, and then looks away from us in silence.

  Outside, the sun is low and distant in the cloudy sky. Dusk will be here quickly, and Gram and I have both agreed that night is the best time, probably the only time, to see a ghost. Germ has to get home at the crack of dawn tomorrow for soccer practice.

  “I guess we should get online and find out everything we can about warding off spirits,” I say. Germ nods.

  “If we even see any spirits,” she adds, to manage expectations.

  So we spend the next hours digging up information on charms and ghost repellents (ghosts don’t like silver, apparently) and exorcisms. Since exorcisms need a priest, and we don’t know any priests, we get a bunch of silver spoons from the kitchen and hang them from strings on doorknobs and wall hooks, making do with what we have.

  In my room, Germ goes to my closet to get the spare pajamas she keeps on hand, and notices that my stories are missing from where they’re usually piled up on the floor. She turns to me quizzically.

  “I burned them,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m finished with stories.” Her eyes widen significantly, but she doesn’t say anything. Tact is not really her strong suit, but sometimes even Germ knows when to keep her thoughts to herself.

  “Now what?” she says.

  “Now we station ourselves at the basement door. And wait, I guess.”

  “You know you get low blood sugar,” Germ says. “You’re gonna need some snacks.”

  * * *

  In the living room, in a fort we have built from pillows, Germ and I sit and stare at the basement door while eating Little Debbie cakes and Twizzlers, and wait, our legs up the wall beside each other. We are having a burping contest, which is hopeless on my end, given Germ’s innate gift for burping. As the sun gets lower on the horizon, I grow more and more nervous, chomping the Twizzlers so hard that my teeth clack together, and even Germ has to tell me to slow down or I’ll go into a sugar coma.

  Mom drifts through at one point and nearly trips over us. She stares down at us in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks. And I wonder if she means here on the floor or in her life in general.

  “We’re trying to see a ghost,” I say.

  Mom nods as if I’ve said we’re doing our taxes, and circles past us to get a snack from the kitchen. Germ shrugs at me.

  After a couple of hours we start to get bored. Eventually my mom goes to bed—I listen to her familiar shuffling tread in the hallways above, as if she doesn’t know quite where she’s going until she ends up there. We lie with our feet up the side of the parlor couch.

  “Do you think D’quan or Andrew Silva is cuter?” asks Germ. Germ is increasingly boy crazy. To me, boys seem as uninteresting as they always have.

  We wait. And wait and wait. In fact, we wait for half the night, long past midnight, and no ghost appears. No creaking, no booing, nothing. We watch part of a PG-13 movie that Germ’s not allowed to watch. We wait because we want to see something, but also, we’re afraid to go to sleep. Eventually we do sleep, though, me lying in one direction in the fort and Germ the other.

  I only stir when I hear the whispering. For a moment, I can’t move. I slide my eyes to the clock. It’s two a.m.

  “Hate her,” the voice rasps. It’s coming from the direction of the basement.

  My body goes hot and cold. My heart thrums, my stomach drops like a roller coaster, a heaviness and coldness comes over me.

  I nudge Germ with just the slightest movement, and feel her stir awake.

  Slowly we sit up, facing each other.

  “Do you hear that?” I mouth silently to Germ. She looks at me, head cocked, then shakes her head.

  “My house,” the voice says. It gets louder. I wait for Germ to acknowledge it, but she only gazes at me with wide, confused eyes.

  We move slowly to the entrance to our fort, and crawl halfway out. I stare at the basement door.

  There’s no doubt; the voice is coming from behind it. And there is a glow. And as the voice gets closer, as if its owner is climbing the stairs, the glow gets brighter.

  I can feel my hands begin to tremble.

  “Rosie, what is it?” Germ whispers. “Are you okay?”

  “You can’t hear it? Really?” I whisper, low.

  She shakes her head again. But instead of looking like she doubts me, she appears to listen harder. I’m panicked. I need Germ to hear it. I need to know I’m not crazy, at least.

  “Never tell, never tell,” the voice says, growing ever closer.

  Germ looks to be straining her ears with all her might, though the voice is as loud and clear as day. I reach for her hand, terrified, and squeeze it tight.

  “Serves them right.”

  At that moment, Germ’s eyes widen.

  “I hear it,” she mouths. But she’s straining, even though the voice is loud by now.

  I point to the door, to the glow coming from under the crack.

  Germ stares hard at it. She squeezes my fingers harder. And then the glow flares, as if in anger. And we both jump, and Germ grasps my sleeve.

  “I see it,” she whispers.

  We both cower in the blankets, facing the door, clutching the spoons we’ve hung around our necks.

  “The yellow-haired one is never quiet,” the voice says suddenly, suspiciously. Its owner has reached the top of the stairs, just on the other side of the door. He knows we’re here.

  And then Germ, for some reason, startles and looks over my shoulder, not toward the basement door but over the top of the fort, and slowly she stands.

  “Um, Rosie?” she says, not whispering anymore. “What does a ghost look like, exactly?” She sounds sick, panicked.

  “Like, um, dead and see-through-ish,” I whisper back, eyes glued to the basement door, thinking, Everyone knows what a ghost looks like.

  “Um. Rosie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think there’s more than one.”

  I notice now, what she’s talking about, and I feel sick with fright. The glow isn’t only coming from in front of us, but all around us.

  I swivel, slowly.

  A woman stands in the parlor staring at us, a ball of yarn in her hands. A man is just behind her wearing a yellow rain slicker, sopping wet and pale, starfishes stuck to his arms. There is another woman by the couch, very old, all in white. And closest—just inches from us—is a boy with floppy brown hair and a dour expression, like he’s just tasted something rotten. He’s a dreadful sight: maybe thirteen or fourteen, wide brown eyes, a furrowed forehead, pale, his dark hair plastered wetly down around his ears, bluish skin. He glows with a bluish light that casts a dim glow onto the wall behind him.

  We’re surrounded.

  CHAPTER 5

  The boy raises one finger and points at me, frowning. My heart pounds in my fingers, my feet, my ears.

  “You,” he says, “can see us?” His voice is as clear as a bell, like a real living boy talking to us, but there’s nothing living about him—he’s pale and limp, a shadow of a person who looks half-drowned.

  I swallow, and nod.

  He stares at me for a long moment, and then he seems to crumple into himself, hanging his head and shaking it. “No,” he says. “No, no, no.”

  Germ and I gape at him, exchanging a look of confusion and fear. I don’t know what to say, or if I should say anything, or if we should run. I eye the silver spoons we’ve dangled all over the room. Whatever they are supposed to do, they are not doing it.

  The boy looks Germ up and down, uncertainly. Her face is pale white, her freckles drained. “You see me too?”


  She hesitates for a moment, then nods furiously.

  The boy lets out a long, slow sigh, his eyes full of sadness. “Well, I guess you’ve really done it now,” he finally says. Germ and I exchange another confused look.

  Then a voice behind us makes us leap. “Done it now!”

  I swirl around to see the man I saw last night, who is now standing on the landing on this side of the basement door. He grins at me, then lets out a loud, mad peal of laughter. “Danger now. So much danger now.” He laughs again. I flinch at each barking sound, but try to steady myself. His eyes glow like coals as he glares at me, full of hatred.

  The dead boy floats up beside me and glowers at the man.

  “Don’t worry about the Murderer,” he says. “He’s harmless.” But then he pauses, and appears to rethink his words, because he adds, “I mean, everybody does call him ‘the Murderer,’ and he does want to murder you, and he’s pretty territorial. But it’s not your fault.”

  The boy reaches an arm toward me. I leap back and let out a small scream, but not before his arm has sliced right through me—with no effect, just the faintest feeling of a cool breeze running through my stomach. “See? He can’t touch you. None of us can.” He frowns, and glances at the man—the Murderer—again. “Still, don’t go into the basement at night. Some ghosts do sometimes figure out… alternatives.”

  Germ and I are both too scared to respond. There are too many questions swirling in my head, and my heart is beating too hard for me to speak.

  The other ghosts hover around us, staring at us intently. I try to steady my breath enough to settle on one question, the one that burns the most. “What are you doing here?” I manage to whisper. It sounds more like a croak.

  The boy looks at me a long moment. “We’re always here. We’ve been here your whole life. I’m Ebb,” the boy says. He looks around the room, his mournful eyes wide, as if deciding something. “Well,” he finally says, resigned, “I guess you’d both better come with me.”

  He begins moving toward the stairs, and casts a dark, strained look back at us. “If you could keep up, I’d appreciate it.”

  Germ and I eye each other, bewildered.

  Ebb pauses at the landing, then floats halfway through the banister toward us. “Night won’t last forever,” he says, “and we disappear at dawn.”

  Germ looks to me, her eyes questioning if we should follow. I shake my head uncertainly.

  “You couldn’t have always been here,” I make myself brave enough to say. “This is impossible.”

  Ebb sighs, hovering impatiently.

  “I was afraid of it happening when I watched you burn your stories.”

  I give a small start. The thought of being watched the other night prickles my skin all over, makes me sick to my stomach.

  “I guess you’ve given up on writing them,” Ebb continues. “It happens all the time; people give up on fanciful things as they get older. But for people like you, from a family like yours… If you push magic away in one place, it will find you in another. I think probably when you burned your stories”—he pauses, trying to think of how to explain—“you closed a door and opened a window. And that window is the sight.”

  “The sight?” I whisper.

  Ebb shakes his head, as if we are wasting time. “It’s how you can see me now, all of a sudden. You must have triggered your sight.”

  I’m still trying to grasp what he’s saying, when Germ says nervously, “What about me? What triggered my sight?”

  But Ebb only floats up the stairs, pausing in the upper hallway at the top, staring darkly down at us. He floats back and forth, as if pacing.

  “It’s very important that you come,” he insists. “There are things I need to show you.”

  I nod to Germ. As dour as the dead boy looks, I don’t think he wants to hurt us. We move toward the stairs, though slowly.

  When we reach him at the top, he pivots and continues down the hall.

  He leads us down the hallway and stops in front of the antique dresser tucked into a nook by a small, octagonal window looking out onto the yard. With pretty turquoise handles and lovingly carved inlays, the dresser has always seemed—like so many things—as if it belonged to someone I don’t know, instead of to my mom. Now Ebb looks down at the floor just in front of it, nervous, uncertain. He glances up at me.

  Upstairs in the attic, I hear my mom’s bed creak. No footsteps, but it sounds like she’s stirring. We all wait silently. Finally, all settles again.

  Ebb stares down at the floor, then at us, as if we’re supposed to know what to do.

  “Um,” Germ says.

  Ebb, exasperated, sighs and rolls his eyes. I’m beginning to notice he sighs a lot.

  “You’ll need to move the dresser. I can’t exactly do it myself.” He pushes his arm into a wall and pulls it out again as if to demonstrate.

  Haltingly, Germ and I sidle up beside each other, then gently lean into the dresser from the right side so that it slides to the left.

  I turn my gaze again to the floor. There’s a gap between two of the boards, only noticeable if you are looking straight at it. I kneel slowly and tuck a fingernail into one of the tiny crevices and pull. To my amazement, the board comes up easily. My heart, already thrumming, begins to skip and flutter.

  There’s a small, dark space here. I grasp my flashlight from around my neck and shine it in. Spiders scatter in the beam of light, and dust whorls fly up around me; the hole smells like old wood and paper, and my light strobes across a shape, rectangular and dusty.

  I reach in to pull it out.

  It’s a book, square and worn, leather bound. On the cover someone has etched an illustration of the earth, with figures in the space surrounding it: men and women, each one with a malicious, angry face. These figures seem to be casting threads from their hands that weave around the world. In the upper right-hand corner is the moon, and a tiny figure standing on its surface with her back turned, tears flying into the air around her head.

  It’s a strange and disturbing etching. And at the top, in familiar handwriting, are the words “The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe.”

  “My mother etched this,” I say.

  Ebb nods. “She hid this here, before you were born. She wanted to keep it close without you ever seeing it. Then she”—he looks at me apologetically—“forgot.”

  “Forgot?” Germ asks.

  He hesitates. “Forgot everything,” he says, his eyes flashing down at mine for a moment, before flashing away. “At least everything that matters. Once they took it all away from her.”

  I feel a creeping, sick feeling. Like I have known something bone-deep all my life but no one has ever named it until now: that there is something really wrong with my mom. Something beyond what a doctor could say.

  “They?” I ask.

  Ebb looks down at me for a long time, hesitant. “There are worse things in the world than ghosts in the basement, Rosie,” he says. “You’ll need to know about them now if you want to live.”

  CHAPTER 6

  In second grade, I stopped talking for a whole month. It just seemed like every day I said less and less until it was whittled down to zero. Germ said it was my quiet way of yelling for help.

  At home, my mom didn’t mind or notice, and when my teachers asked her about it, she said vaguely that the doctor was helping, and when my doctor asked about it, she said the teachers were helping, but neither thing was true.

  Germ minded a lot. She tried to coax me into talking by waving my favorite candy in my face but telling me I had to ask for it. I didn’t budge. So she started talking through all the silences. She talked more so I could talk less. It felt like she was carrying all the words for me that I couldn’t say.

  And then, in the middle of some facts she was telling me about her bike one day, she stopped and took a deep breath and said, “Rosie, tomorrow, things are going to change. You are gonna say good morning to me, and then ask me some things, and that’ll be the end of it. It’s time to rejoin the world.”

  It was an overwhelming feeling, to know that the next day I would have to talk again and try to act like a normal person in the world, again. I wanted it and I didn’t want it at the same time.

  Holding the book with my mother’s writing on it, I have a similar feeling. A feeling of moving toward something I’m not sure I can face.