Someone laid a cold hand on my shoulder. It was cold enough to rouse me from my stupor and I blinked heavy eyelids at a wavering figure that was familiar. A young boy stood at the side of my bed, dressed in deer skins and leather moccasins. He was small, but wiry with yellow curls and serious blue eyes that pierced my own.
I could almost see through him, he was transparent, yet his hand on me was solid enough to feel its weight and chill.
“Cris,” he said in a whisper. “You gotta get out of here.”
Crispin shook me, and my head wobbled with the motion. I had no control over my own limbs, not that I could have walked anywhere with a broken leg.
“Crispin,” I mumbled. “I’m doped up. I can barely think, no way I can escape.”
“I know, Cris. But your father, Johannsen, he’s moved you here, to an asylum in the swamps where no one can find you. If you stay here, you’ll never come out. Here.” He handed me something that I would never have expected to see in a ghost’s hands. Especially one from the 18th century. A cell phone. An iPhone.
I giggled at the thought that whisked through my mind. ‘Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!’
“No,” he sounded sharp. “The man who’s following you, looking for you since the school. He’ll save you. The man who was your real father.”
“I don’t know his name,” I pointed out petulantly. “Or his cell number.”
“This is his phone. He lost it looking for you and I picked it up. I brought it here. His name and number are in it.”
“Won’t do any good to call him if he doesn’t have it,” I said snidely. “How can you touch it and me? I thought ghosts were…intangible. Incorporeal. Wisps of vapor.”
“Know a lot about ghosts?” he sneered at me. “I’ve been one for over two centuries. I’ve learned a few tricks since then. Besides, you’ve heard of poltergeists, haven’t you?”
I nodded, I knew about the spirits that threw things and could move objects in a home when they were agitated. I moved my hands to fumble for the cell. An iPhone. The battery was dead. I said so and Crispin sighed, held it and I watched as it sparkled blue as if electricity bled from his hands into the phone. Turned it on to a full charge and four bars so wherever I was, I had cell coverage.
I sat up a little more and that helped my head clear some of the fuzziness that plagued me. Able to see my surroundings for the first time, I noted a small room with a bed, chest of drawers, recliner and a closet. No mirror, TV, no books, no games. The door out was steel, closed with a glass insert window that ran down the side so that I could see out on a corridor and they could see in.
“Where am I?”
“A respite home for the mentally ill. Children, mostly. Somewhere out in a swamp. Run by a family that also houses young people with legal problems,” he answered.
“Juvenile delinquents. Reform school,” I mused. I turned the cell on and scrolled through the contacts. I was surprised that it was unlocked. Whoa. This dude was a cop. A detective out of New York City and he knew a lot of people. A lot of cops, firemen and girls. More girls than I could count.
He made a lot of calls, too but the number that came up the most was for a big dude that was a lawyer and some relation to the cop.
“How can I call him?” I asked. “When I have his phone?”
“He has a work number. Call where he works. Tell them you found his phone. They’ll connect you to his new one,” Crispin shrugged. As if I were the backward dummy from the past.
I texted a message to the name Captain Jaeger. Simply wrote, ‘found Eachann’s cell. Trace this call. John Doe.’ I slid the phone under my thigh. No sooner than I had finished, the door opened with a click and a tall, spare woman in a dingy white coat walked up to my side. She totally ignored Crispin as she pulled at my eyelids and shined a penlight into the irises. I slapped her hand away and she grabbed mine, twisting until I cried out in pain.
“Awake, are you? Feeling feisty? I have orders to keep you comatose, boy. Behave or I’ll whip your ass,” she threatened. Her eyes were deep, shadowed and black. She wore her hair up and it was solid gray. Looking like a witch from Grimm’s fairy tales, she made me shudder in terror.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your daddy’s Great-Aunt Elmira. I run this home for wayward boys. Your daddy put you here for safe keeping and told me how to treat you. I won’t put up with your lying, stealing and cheating ways. No fire starting either. Any bad behavior will only bring reprisals down on you.”
“Reprisals? You mean beatings.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” she cackled. “Didn’t hurt your daddy none. That and drug therapy will work to keep your attitude calm in my home.”
“You beat your patients? And drug them into compliance? You’re evil,” I said. “Where is this place?”
“Somewhere you’ll never get to leave,” she smiled. “Your doctor stated you’re a danger to yourself and others. You’re to be kept in solitary if your schizoid paranoia is evident and kept on lithium, Haldol and Thorazine. In fact, it’s time for your next dose as you’re entirely too awake for me.”
She jammed her thumb into my jaw and forced my mouth open, flicked in several pills and pinched my nose as she shoved my jaw shut. So hard that my teeth crunched. The pills stuck in my throat without any liquid and made me gag but she wouldn’t release my jaw until the pills dissolved.
As they melted onto my tongue, I felt my mood alter, my vision wavered, and I slipped back into a world of nonsense where even Alice was lost in wonderland.
Crispin saved me again. Not much later after I had swallowed the pills and the demon lady had left, he stuck his finger down my throat and made me vomit. I came to with bleary-eyed confusion and the putrid smell of puke staining my pajamas and bed linens.
He shook me and when that failed to rouse me sufficiently, he...slid inside me. It was weird, I could feel him inside as he took over my motor skills and forced my body up, out of bed and stood. I could see what he saw but my limbs did not react as I ordered them to obey me.
"Just hang on, Cris," my voice said out loud, but it wasn't me saying it. It was Crispin. "Relax, I can't keep your body for long, just long enough to get us out of here."
I was screaming in my head, an outsider in my own body. He waited until I had stopped yelling before he walked over to the closet. Opening it, he checked out the clothes hanging there and found slim pickings. Jeans. T-shirts and a pair of ratty sneakers.
"This will have to do," he muttered and proceeded to dress me. I protested that I had a broken leg and using it would damage my recovery. "Staying here will end your life," he returned. "Your...father – Johannsen won't let you live. Already, he's making headway on the Trust Fund. You don't have many choices left."
"What about the cell phone? Won't the police trace the call and come after me?" I asked.
"Not soon enough. We have to get out of this place before he comes back, and the aunt returns for your morning meds. We have 12 hours to reach a hide out in the swamp."
"What hide-out? What swamp?"
"A place I lived when I was with my Indian foster mother. She took me there and we hid from those Frenchies that wanted her as a slave and a whore. It's a safe place, fresh water, lots of game and good cover."
"You sure it's still there? After two-hundred years?"
He let me catch glimpses of his actions as we shared my eye – he was dressed and slipping down the hallway as if he knew where he was going. When I asked how he knew his way around, he told me that he had haunted the house and knew all its secrets. That it had resident ghosts of its own. Murdered slaves, mental patients and unwed women who had died in childbirth. No children haunted the antebellum mansion for which I was happy, as one of Crispin was more than enough.
He took my body to the back stairs, down into a huge washroom and slid out the back door onto a covered porch loaded with stacked and split firewood. Stepped down three treads onto the soft grass. Seven strides along, the ground turned boggy and wet. To the irritating whine of mosquitoes, we entered the swamp on a narrow deer trail that was just barely firm enough to carry our slight weight. My broken and casted leg did not seem to bother him any nor was I able to feel any pain from my injuries. I could hear skeeters yet not feel the blood suckers as they feasted on me. Crispin was somehow able to bypass the pain and weakness that should have laid my body flat, yet we kept walking. I just hoped that whatever damage he did wasn’t permanent.
He held a conversation with me; speaking aloud and my answers were internal. I could just imagine how crazy anyone would think if they heard him talking to what was himself.
“How come we don’t feel any pain, Crispin?” I asked.
He replied, “I’m holding it back, so you don’t. If you did, you’d be unconscious, trapped in your mind and unable to move. I’d let you try to have more control, but we’d fall over. Just relax until we get to the island. I’ll turn it over to you. Now, we must be quiet, so the gators and snakes can’t hear us.”
“Gators? Snakes? Snakes can’t hear, they feel vibrations and taste the air,” I protested. I felt squeamish, yet I could not even look around, see anything or do anything except trust him to protect us.