Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

“I say I don’t know how to make a golem, necromantic or otherwise.”

“You use clay, duh!”

“Where do you get this stuff?” he asked. “Clay. Okay. And then … ?”

“Then … then … I want a body! I’m sick of this non-corporeal crap. Check out the library’s occult section. Check out Harry Potter. I don’t care!”

With the last outburst, Samantha flickered like a candle flame going out and disappeared. Cooper shrugged and turned back to see if the apples were salvageable. He wasn’t worried about Samantha. She often disappeared, and always came back.

Maybe he should have been concerned about himself since he was the only person who could see her, but he wasn’t. He knew better than to tell anyone else about her, though; they would probably lock him away in a padded room somewhere. Could he really blame them?

The fact of the matter was, he was being haunted by the color-coordination-challenged ghost of a teenage girl. She had appeared by his bedside when he had woken in a hospital last July, and neither of them knew why.

He finished cutting the apples and started laying them into tarts. The work was soothing, mechanical. His father was in the next room, kneading bread dough; occasionally, his soft humming reached as far as this room, but mostly it was quiet, the way Cooper liked it. He appreciated the routine of waking up at four in the morning, getting to the shop by four-thirty to bake bread and pastries and brew the coffee before they opened at seven. Then—at least on weekdays, like today—he hung up his apron as his father spoke to the first of the morning’s customers, rolled down his sleeves, and trudged fifteen minutes to school.

Before this summer, he would have laughed at the guy he was now: quiet, reserved, and living very much in his own head, instead of constantly surrounded by outgoing friends who only managed by sheer luck not to get kicked out of every public place they entered.

It was only the fourth day of his senior year of high school. It was going to be a long year, and not because the day started when he had already been awake for more than three hours … often longer. …

The problem was, he couldn’t find it in him to care about this year. He used to care about things, people. His room, his stuff. His friends, especially the other guys on the Lenmark Ocelots football team, including John, who had been his best friend since sixth grade. He had barely seen any of them since the end of the previous school year. Then there was his car, a 1993 Dodge Colt hatchback—more than a decade old with more than a hundred thousand miles on it, but it rode like a dream, like his dream, like freedom.

Cooper didn’t have that anymore, either, and he didn’t miss it, even yesterday, when he had walked from his father’s coffee shop to school in a fine drizzle. His father had offered to let him take the family car, but he hadn’t minded the cold or the rain or the way it made Samantha sparkle as it fell through her.

Necromantic golem. Maybe he should look into that. How, he wasn’t at all sure. He didn’t know if Samantha’s idea was possible, but then again, he didn’t used to believe in ghosts. He knew a few people at school who claimed to be witches, but most of them seemed to be more about earthy religion or pissing off their parents, and he was pretty sure they would respond negatively if he asked them if they had any recommendations for how to deal with the undead.

He probably shouldn’t start at the school library, either. That seemed like a good way to get pulled into the counselor’s office for an emergency meeting.

“Cooper, you’re late,” his English teacher announced as he walked through the door, and slipped to the back of the classroom.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and reached in his bag for his copy of The Color Purple, only to realize he had left it at home that morning. His teacher shook her head with a sigh before turning back to discussing the book.

Cooper’s mind wandered. Necromantic golem, indeed. Maybe he could start with myths?

Why was he focused on this, of all things? He wished he could help Samantha, but the bottom line was, she was dead. He had watched enough horror flicks to know that if you wanted to help a ghost, you did it by telling them to go into the light, or helping them let go, or whatever. You didn’t do it by making them new bodies; that was the way to B movies and red corn syrup.

Maybe he should talk to a priest? He didn’t know any, but his mother went to the Unitarian Universalist church. Or were ghosts more of a Catholic thing?

He jumped violently when someone’s cell phone rang across the room, a screaming jangle of noise. His chair skittered backward and crashed to the floor, turning all eyes his way.

“Sorry,” he said again. He pulled his chair upright and sat back down, trying to hide the fact that he was shaking and sweating, and his heart was racing so loudly he could barely hear the people around him murmuring comments. Across the room, he saw John mouth the words, “Are you okay?”

He nodded, then hunched down lower in his seat and picked up a pen to pretend to take notes.

“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” the teacher said. “Put your books away. We’re having a quiz.”

The whispering turned to grumbled protests. Cooper just shrugged and put away the notebook he hadn’t yet opened. He hadn’t read the book past the first couple of pages, but that was fine. Samantha reappeared after the quizzes were handed out, and reported on the variety of responses from around the room, noting which were most common and so were more likely to be right.

It wasn’t a good way to start the school year, but if he was going to be haunted, he might as well get something worthwhile out of it.

“I think I’ve read this book,” Samantha announced as the quizzes were collected. The idea seemed to excite her. “No, I’m almost sure I’ve read this book! I remember it! I mean, I remember what it’s about. But I don’t actually remember reading it.”

She sounded deflated. Cooper fought the urge to groan.

The problem with helping Samantha resolve whatever issues were tying her to this world was that she had no memory of who she was, just random details that may or may not have been from her previous existence. She didn’t know why she was relegated to this half-life, without the ability to touch or affect anything in the world. She remembered snow despite not having seen it since her death, and sometimes remembered books or movies. She didn’t have a heavy Boston accent, so probably wasn’t from the city, but she could easily be from any other area of Massachusetts. She was also obviously well-versed in movies, especially horror movies. She knew her own name in the same way; she was certain she was Samantha, but couldn’t recall anyone but Cooper who had ever addressed her that way.

She and Cooper had sat at the computer for hours at a time this summer, reading all the obituaries for the area in an attempt to find out who Samantha might be. There had been deaths in the accident that occurred immediately before Cooper had met Samantha, but none that felt right to her. And not just because they were men.

They didn’t even know if her physical description would mean anything. Her basic coloring, height and age usually remained more or less constant, but everything else seemed to change from one manifestation to the next. Samantha said she had no conscious control over it.

After spending most of the month of August searching, they had kind of given up as Cooper had prepared to return to school. So far as Samantha was concerned, she had been born that July, at the moment when Cooper had woken in the hospital.

He knelt down to slowly put his notebook away at the end of class, using it as an excuse to avoid his classmates as they filed out, and so was surprised when he looked up to find a 227-pound linebacker hovering above him. He slammed his head against the desk leg as he tried to stand up.