Past Midnight Read online

  “Please? I want to leave.”

  Dad was gazing at his EMF reader. “One more minute, hon.”

  Annalise swallowed. “I can’t. I can’t stay here one more minute. I’m done.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “Sure, of course. You can go. We’ve got enough,” Dad said, but he furrowed his brow. I knew he wanted as much recording time as he could get.

  Mom walked over to me. “Go with her,” she whispered. “I can take the mic.”

  I followed Annalise into the main dining area. She sat on the floor and covered her face with her hands. I sat next to her.

  “You okay?”

  She shook her head. “It was so strange, Charlotte,” she whispered. “I mean, I was fine, and then suddenly I felt so—so sad.”

  I rubbed her shoulder. “How do you feel now?”

  She sniffed and looked up. Her eyes were slightly red. “Better, actually.” She looked at me. “The second I left that room I felt a little better. I have goosebumps, though.”

  I pulled off the pink sweater she’d let me borrow. “Here. I stretched it out for you.”

  She laughed. “Thanks.” She looked past me, toward the other room. “Did you feel anything? I mean, besides that you were cold?”

  “No. And the cold I felt, well, that was just the room.”

  Annalise frowned. “But the room was warm. Hot, actually.”

  I thought my sister was out of sorts and I didn’t want to disagree with her about temperature. We both knew that feeling cold was often a sign of paranormal energy, but we also knew that sometimes it was just that—cold. People often read too much into it.

  Within a few minutes the team finished up, and we all helped put the tables and chairs back the way they had been, thanked Mrs. Paul for her time and headed out for a late lunch. Annalise remained quiet for most of the afternoon, and I tried to reassure her that everything was fine.

  “Just think,” I said. “You’ll never have to step foot inside that place again.”

  I didn’t know it then, but I was dead wrong.

  two

  It’s all about energy. That’s what my parents say, at least. The theory that drives them, the single idea that makes their career possible, is that ghosts do not exist but energy does. The way Dad explained it to me when I was little is still the way I like to imagine it. I had been having a hard time sleeping in the house we were renting at the time because I could hear footsteps pacing outside my door. Dad came in and sat on my bed.

  “Think of time as an ocean,” he said, smoothing my hair. “And think of yourself as a small stone tossed into that ocean. What happens when you throw a stone into water?”

  “It sinks?” I wanted Dad to stay as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to listen to the footsteps alone.

  “Well, yes. But it also creates tiny ripples on the surface, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad’s theory was that some people created greater ripples than others. Their energy, he said, echoed long after they’d died. At first, he believed that only strong or intense emotions lingered, which was why places where a death had occurred seemed haunted. But then Mom discovered something that changed his mind.

  Mom met Edith, a woman who lived down the street. Edith claimed that an evil spirit was trying to force her out of her home. “It grabs my feet at night,” she said. “It tries to pull me out of my bed.”

  Edith was nearly hysterical. She’d been living in the house for only a few months and she didn’t want to move, but the paranormal activity occurred every week, and she couldn’t take much more. My parents investigated and noticed some strange readings in the master bedroom. While Dad spent a week at the house, Mom contacted the former owners, who had lived there for over thirty years before retiring to Florida. They’d never had a problem with anything strange, they said. Their daughter, now in her forties, still lived in town, and Mom invited her to the house one day.

  “I loved this place,” the woman said. “My family was so happy here.”

  Mom didn’t tell the woman what had been happening, only that she was researching the history of the house. When they walked into the master bedroom, the woman told Mom how she used to wake up her parents every Sunday morning by running into their room.

  “I’d grab their feet,” she said. “I’d try to pull them out of bed so they’d get up and make me pancakes.”

  The revelation changed the way my parents looked at their research. They’d been working under the assumption that only people who died left behind energy, usually after a single powerful event. Now they realized that perhaps simple repetition could also leave an imprint. It explained doors opening, or the sound of footsteps. Their new goal was to determine what triggered such energy. Why didn’t Edith feel the pull at her feet every single night or only on Sundays? They never figured it out completely, but they did introduce Edith to the woman and explained the story and their theory. The solution was actually easy: Edith moved her bed, and the tugging stopped. My parents reasoned that the trigger was the position of the bed because Edith had placed it in exactly the same spot as the previous owners.

  “The truth is that the paranormal is normal. It’s just a normal we don’t understand yet,” Dad liked to say.

  I thought about Edith’s story as my parents continued to investigate Charleston. They would spend a week at a place, filming in both the daytime and at night to get the best possible results. They tried to coax Annalise into returning to the Courtyard Café, but she refused. Mom and Dad backed off, but I knew they were just waiting, hoping that she would change her mind before the end of the summer.

  Annalise and I spent the next few weeks of our vacation going to the beach or taking walking tours of the historic downtown. She didn’t talk about what had happened and I didn’t ask. I hated to see her so quiet, though. She wasn’t simply my sister—she was my friend. We’d spent our lives moving from place to place and, besides my parents and Shane, Annalise was the only truly constant person in my life. Despite the fact that I sometimes felt overshadowed by her beauty and the attention she received, I was closer to her than anyone. I had missed her terribly when she left for school, and I knew I would miss her even more after the summer ended and we moved to our next destination while she began her junior year of college.

  “Where are you guys going after this?” she asked me one afternoon. We’d stopped at a little park to enjoy a picnic lunch. I was sitting against the trunk of a huge tree, eating pasta salad out of a paper bowl. Annalise was sitting cross-legged in the grass and poking at a Cobb salad with her plastic fork.

  “No idea. They’d better figure it out soon, though. I need to register for school.”

  “You’ll be a senior,” Annalise said softly. “Wow. That’s kind of hard to imagine.” She fastened a foil lid on her bowl and set it inside the beach bag we’d brought. “How many high schools have you been to?”

  I did a quick calculation. “Five? No—six. I guess Florida doesn’t really count, though, because I was only there for a few weeks.”

  Annalise shook her head. “You know, it’s not fair. To you, I mean. You should be able to stay in one place for more than a single semester.”

  I sighed. “That would be nice.”

  I had learned how to leave a place behind without leaving a piece of myself along with it, but more important, I had taught myself how to be detached. I never joined teams or clubs, and I doubted my picture appeared in a single yearbook. I was, in a way, a ghost: no one could prove I had ever existed once I physically left a location.

  “You should say something,” Annalise said. “I mean, aren’t you tired of Mom and Dad dictating your life?”

  “Why didn’t you ever say something? You’ve been to more schools than I have.”

  “Honestly? It never even occurred to me that I had a choice.”

  “But you think I do?” I wasn’t sure what my sister thought I could accomplish. Did she want me to pick a fight with our parents? Did sh
e want all of us to move permanently to Charleston?

  “I think that if we approached them together, we could change things.”

  “Change what things?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to join Annalise’s revolution. Things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. I could live with that.

  “It’s time we had a voice,” Annalise said. “Whatever Mom and Dad want, they get. If they want to move across the country, they do. If they want you to stand in the middle of a room and allow negative energy to hurt you…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

  “What really happened?” I finally asked. She was plucking grass from the ground.

  “I don’t know, Charlotte. I really don’t. But I don’t want to feel that way ever again.”

  “What way?”

  “I just felt this sadness. This terrible, awful sadness, and it seemed to come from inside me and fill me up until I could hardly breathe.”

  I watched my sister for a while. She was staring at the grass, slowly running her fingers over it. I wanted to help her get over the experience, and there was only one way I knew how to do that.

  “You have to go back,” I said.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “If you don’t face it—whatever it is—it’ll bother you. And you can’t escape it, exactly, because you live here now. What if your friends decide to go to the Courtyard Café for lunch one day? You can’t avoid this. Not forever.”

  “I know,” Annalise said softly.

  “We can go in the daytime, with the entire crew and everything, so you won’t be alone.”

  “That didn’t help me before.”

  “I’ll be with you, too. I’ll stand right next to you and I won’t leave no matter what.”

  “I know you won’t, Charlotte. But you didn’t feel what I did. You’re not afraid because you don’t think anything’s really going to happen.”

  She had me there. Annalise was the sensitive one in the family, a sponge soaking up other people’s emotions. I was more like a slab of concrete. I believed she’d felt something, but I didn’t think it was anything more than random energy. If she went back, maybe she’d realize that and she could stop feeling so frightened.

  We sat in silence for a few more minutes. I knew she was coming to a decision and that I shouldn’t push her. I looked around at the park where we were sitting and realized that we were just a block from the Courtyard Café. Horse-drawn carriages clopped steadily down the road while happy tourists snapped pictures and peered into the windows of specialty shops. Everything in Charleston felt so old, as if it was stained with history. I rested my head against the tree and wondered how long it had stood there. More than a century, I guessed. Its trunk was huge, and its thick branches curled up toward the sky.

  Finally, Annalise looked at me. “You really think I should do this?”

  “I do.”

  She stood up. “Okay, then. Let’s get it over with.”

  Our parents were thrilled that Annalise had reconsidered, but revisiting the café proved to be difficult. Mrs. Paul, the restaurant’s owner, had seen a surge in customers after my parents appeared on the local news and proclaimed the Courtyard Café “one of the most haunted locations in the city.” We had to schedule a time when business was likely to be slower so we could close off the side room and not affect the dinner rush.

  Two weeks later, right after the Fourth of July, we returned. Our visit was supposed to be short—less than an hour, Mrs. Paul declared—and we couldn’t move any of the furniture. Dad grumbled that they’d done a lot for the business and this wasn’t the way to be thanked, but Annalise was relieved—no matter what, the whole thing would be over and done with soon.

  “Ready?” I asked her. We were sitting at a small table in the main room as the crew set up their equipment.

  Annalise nodded. “Yeah. I mean, you can’t ever be ready when you don’t know what’s about to happen, but I’m as ready as I can be.”

  We were wearing black T-shirts and khaki pants like everyone else. I’d grabbed my sister’s pink sweater as we were heading out, just in case she got cold, and tied it around my waist as we walked into the side room. Both cameras were focused on us as Annalise and I weaved around the tables and made our way to the center of the room. I took hold of my sister’s hand and squeezed. She smiled at me then began to speak out loud.

  “Hello. My name is Annalise and I’d like to know if anyone is here with us today? If there’s someone here, could you give us a sign?”

  The room began to feel cooler to me, and I almost let go of my sister’s hand so I could put on the sweater, but she was holding on to me tightly and I didn’t want to pull away from her.

  “How are the readings?” Mom whispered to someone.

  “Normal so far.”

  “Keep talking,” Dad directed.

  Annalise took a deep breath. “Hello? Do you remember me? I was here a few weeks ago. I felt—something. Was it you? Is someone here?”

  Nothing happened. Twenty minutes passed, and all the readings remained the same. I could tell my sister was feeling calmer because she began to loosen her grip on my hand. Maybe she thought her first encounter had been a fluke, a surge of energy that had nothing to do with her presence.

  “See?” I whispered. “This isn’t so bad.”

  I felt an icy breeze against my cheek and wondered if the air-conditioning had kicked on. I let go of Annalise and quickly slipped her sweater over my head.

  “Charlotte.” Annalise’s voice was strained. “It’s happening again.”

  “We’re getting something!” Dad announced.

  I grabbed my sister’s hand. “I’m right here,” I said. “Not going anywhere.” Annalise nodded, but her face was frozen with panic. I decided to do the talking for her.

  “Whoever you are, we mean no harm,” I said loudly. “What do you want?”

  I paused. Mom was holding a digital recorder to catch EVPs, and she nodded at me. I asked a few more questions, but as I did I was aware of two things. First, my sister looked pale and her hand was shaking. Second, something felt weird to me, as if the air had gotten heavier or somehow thicker. I didn’t see anything strange, but I felt absolutely certain something was standing in front of us. It seemed to move closer, and I could feel a breath of frozen air against my cheek. Annalise whimpered.

  “That’s it,” I declared. “We’re done.”

  I pulled my sister with me, guiding her around the tables and chairs and various crew members. I didn’t stop until we were standing on the front porch of the restaurant, where the frozen feeling from inside instantly melted away in the muggy evening air.

  Annalise slumped onto the porch steps and immediately began to cry. “Did you feel it, too?” she asked. “Did you feel how awful it was?”

  “I felt something,” I admitted. “But it wasn’t horrible. It was just—unusual, I guess.”

  Our parents came outside, and I was surprised to see that they were both smiling. “Great job, girls,” Dad said. “I can’t wait to listen to the EVPs from this one.”

  “The ion meter was all over the place,” Mom added. “Highest numbers we’ve had so far.”

  “How wonderful for you,” Annalise said bitterly.

  Dad looked confused. “Are you okay?”

  Annalise stood up. “No, I am not okay,” she said, her voice loud. “You dragged me into something terrible and you don’t even care. Well, I’m through. I’m never doing this again! Ever!” She stormed off before my parents could respond.

  “What on earth was that all about?” Mom asked me.

  I didn’t have an answer. I’d never seen my sister react so furiously to one of my parents’ sessions. I didn’t know what was happening, but I had the uneasy sense that whatever it was had just begun.

  three

  When I was eight, we lived in a house where you could hear the steady squeaking of a rocking chair nearly every night, even though we didn’t own a rocking chair. When I was ten, we
lived in a house where the TV changed channels on its own so often that it was useless to sit down to try and watch something. And when I was thirteen, we lived in a house where you could hear violin music drifting up like smoke from the empty basement. I lived in all these places, and none of them truly scared me, although it could feel creepy at times. I would get ready to take a shower and then pause, wondering if something was watching me undress.

  Mom and Dad were drawn to these places. The older, the better, and they often rented a house without having ever stepped inside. And although they constantly reassured us that it was all just random energy and nothing that could really hurt us, my sister and I longed for a new house, something completely devoid of history or rumors or sudden, unexplained deaths.

  That’s why, when Dad pulled the moving van into the driveway of 1227 Copper Court that August, I had to restrain myself from yelling with joy. It was everything I’d always wanted in a house, right down to the beige aluminum siding.

  “We’re home.” Mom sighed. She was less than thrilled and had spent the two-hour drive from Charleston reminiscing about all of the other places we’d lived and how none of them had been less than a hundred years old. I’d spent the drive trying to tune out her stories and take a nap. I must have slept for a little while because I remembered dreaming about a dark-haired girl reading a book. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned dress as she sat against a tree, and I had the distinct impression that it was the same tree where Annalise and I had eaten lunch a month before. It was just a brief vision, but the image of the girl slowly turning the pages of her book stayed in my head until we arrived at our new house.