Out of the Pocket

4. Into the Pocket

Into the Pocket

By quarter past midnight, I hadn’t decided what to do.

For the first hour or so, I’d been so angry with Mom that I was convinced I’d go just because she wouldn’t want me to. If she was going to insist on treating me like some prisoner hell-bent on escape, then that was what I’d give her.

After that, I’d started to get nervous. A guy I’d just met (however cute) had snuck into my room while I wasn’t there. A guy whose name I didn’t even know.

True, it wasn’t exactly my room, and it probably wasn’t that big a deal. I’d seen him in the house before, and he’d said he was a family friend. In fact, I was sure he’d been back here since the funeral, because my grandmother had mysteriously found her glasses next to her favorite sofa. Someone had probably let him in, maybe even knowing he wanted to leave me a message.

Now I was wishing I could apologize to Mom for what I’d said. I was the one who’d dragged her back here to the family she’d run away from, after all. Most of them had been awful to her ever since, my grandmother especially, worse than they had been to me, and I hadn’t been helping at all. But if I spoke to her, I knew I’d tip her off that there was something going on, and no matter how sorry I got, I didn’t want to do that.

Because — and this was what had become increasingly clear all evening — this wasn’t just about her or us or me being angry. This was about me, and the Poe collection in my lap, currently open to “Ligeia,” and the fact that I’d spent the last five hours reading the ravings of dead man who’d spent his life pining for his dead cousin, because that was the closest I ever got to feeling like a living person with a friend.

Books were the best thing in my life, and I could never stop loving them, but they would also never be enough.

I’m sneaking out tonight.

I realized it at half past midnight. Because for the first time, someone had offered to be my somewhere to sneak to. I couldn’t miss it.

I spent what I’d freely call a ridiculous amount of time brushing my hair, debating between the two non-funeral outfits I’d brought with me before settling on the cleaner t-shirt and jeans, and hunting down my half tube of cherry lip balm, reminding myself the whole time that there was no reason to expect him to like me in that way.

But it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.

Which was why I also put the book in my purse, in case I was about to get stood up, and checked for my mace, disguised as an electric toothbrush, in case… well, mostly because Mom would want me to have it.

I pulled on my zip-up sweatshirt, climbed onto the window seat, swung one leg through the liberated window, grabbed the nearest branch, and quickly realized several things.

First, bougainvillea bushes have a lot of thorns.

Second, the branches of the bougainvillea that could reach my third story window weren’t cut out to carry the weight of the kinds of girls who snuck out of their windows in movies, much less mine.

Third, I wasn’t sure I could climb down three stories without falling or getting stuck even if I’d had a rope ladder, let alone something not intended to be climbed at all.

So I let go of the bush, pulled my leg in out of the window, very quietly opened the door to my room, latched it behind me, and crept down the stairs, past Mom’s door, where there was no sound of movement, down the main staircase, and out the front door. That door only locked with a deadbolt that could be opened manually from the inside, so I’d just have to re-lock it when I came back. Or if someone locked it in the night, I’d stay out until morning and then knock, saying I went out to enjoy the garden before breakfast and accidentally locked myself out.

Silly me.

This wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured my first sneaking out experience going, but the important thing was that I was sneaking out. I was sneaking out to meet a gorgeous guy who wanted to go ghost hunting or cold case cracking or something, something fun, with me.

I retraced the few blocks from the mansion to the cemetery, or tried to, lapsing into several minutes of panic after getting lost under the everything-looks-different glow of the streetlights along the route I’d been down once, backwards, in the back of a limo, with no idea that I’d need to memorize it. It was mainly by luck that I eventually managed to wander into sight of the cemetery’s stone wall.

The longer I traced the sprawling perimeter looking for an entrance, the more I started to think about things like whether cemeteries closed their gates at night, and why I hadn’t brought a warmer jacket, and how late it must be getting, and how much I wished I had my phone or even a watch, and how long he’d be willing to wait for me, if he was even really here in the first place…

“The tardy bell rang ten minutes ago, Miss Ironwright.”

I whirled around for what felt like at least two full rotations before spotting him, sitting on one of the raised stone pillars of the wall, still in his funeral shirt and suit pants, his jacket missing and hair less meticulously arranged. I’d walked right past him.

As soon as our eyes met, he dropped the mock-stern tone and reached down to me.

“Come on.”

I reached up toward him without any clear mental image of how this was going to work beyond the fact that his hands were about to touch my hands. That part turned out nice; his were warm and papery dry in a soft way, and the contact gave me different goosebumps from the cold, but then came the getting over the wall part.

He was strong, surprisingly strong even for his muscular build, but I wasn’t, so lifting my hands as far as the top of the wall didn’t cut it. He had to pull me almost halfway over before I could do the rest myself. Still, he didn’t comment, not even with a look.

Once I was up, he leapt down into the cemetery, rolling once over his shoulder to disperse the impact, the momentum putting him neatly back on his feet. I lowered myself until I was hanging from my fingertips before dropping, but at least I didn’t need help for that.

Didn’t need it, but I didn’t mind the way he half-caught me around the waist to steady me.

“We have to start at the monument,” he said, finding my hand to lead me by.

And soon I was running, hand in hand with this guy whose name I really needed to ask, weaving between headstones at one-something in the morning, toward the memorial to Green Beach’s favorite ghost story, not regretting for one moment not being home in bed.

“Start what?” I asked. “You really know what happened to Joshua and Sarah Thorne?”

“No,” he said. “I want you to help me find out what happened to us.”

“Wait.” I stopped, maybe ten feet from the monument, and after a step or two he stopped too, rather than let go of my hand.

Us?

“Are you really trying to tell me you’re the ghost of Joshua Thorne?”

“I don’t know what I am,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know if I’m a ghost. I know I’m Joshua Thorne.”

The rush was gone. It was laugh-or-cry time, and I picked my usual preference.

“Ah. Ha. Of course you are.”

I turned and started back toward the wall.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in ghosts. I liked to believe in a lot of things, but my very solid, opaque company tonight had a much simpler explanation. I should have known it the moment someone like him talked to me, and I should never have stopped knowing it for a moment.

Someone told this guy about my love of gothic lit, and he decided to have some fun on an otherwise tedious funeral weekend testing out how gullible it made me. Apparently, he didn’t even need an audience to make it worthwhile, unlike Lisa, when she’d had the very funny idea of getting one of her minions tell me that Michael Lotte had a crush on me and dare me to ask him to the formal.

The way Michael had laughed, the way every one of his hangers-on that I hadn’t been able to corner him away from had laughed, it was like they couldn’t believe a joke as great as me could be real and there in front of them.

I owed Lisa one thing, though. If it hadn’t been for her, I might still have been gullible enough to take this further.

In a flash, my new would-be puppeteer was in front of me, blocking the way.

“Angela, wait.”

I pushed past him to keep walking and then stopped, realizing the position he’d put me in, and wondering if I would be able to keep myself from teetering over into tears after all.

“Will you give me a boost back over the wall?” I said. “Please?”

“Well, yeah, if that’s what you really want,” he kept the charade going, “but what’s it going to hurt to hear me out first?”

I sighed. I was good at knowing when I’d been cornered. When it was easier just to stop running and take it, until I became boring.

“Fine, let’s get this over with.”

He didn’t like this answer, but he nodded, took a breath in preparation, and started talking very fast.

“Okay. My name’s Joshua Thorne, I told you that. And I told you about Sarah, and the elopement, and the fire. Well, after the fire, I got trapped in this… place.”

“The cemetery?” I asked.

“No, another place. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I call it the Pocket.”

“So you weren’t trapped very well,” I said.

“I can leave,” he explained, “but only to Green Beach, and I can only show myself to one person at a time when I’m here.”

“Aww, and you picked lil’ ol’ me.”

“Yes.” He ignored my sarcasm. “When I woke up in the Pocket, my memory of that night was gone. It… merged with the place, the pieces of it got mixed up. I’m trying to put them all back together, but I can’t do it by myself, and I think you can help.”

“So, are you dead, or…?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m out of sync with spacetime or-”

“If you maybe-died in eighteen ninety, how do you know a twentieth century sci-fi concept like ‘out of sync with spacetime’? For that matter, how do you know the word, ‘okay’?” I asked, hoping to c***k this act a little faster.

“The Pocket,” he said without hesitation. “There are other people there too, people who came after me, and it changes with them. Thoughts become part of it, like my memory. It has parts of me, parts of them, new things, old things, things from their childhoods, there are aliens there now, and dinosaurs-”

“Great, so now I get ghosts, aliens, and dinosaurs. Maybe you should have led your pitch with that.”

“I know it sounds fantastic,” he said, in a way that didn’t mean cool. “But I can show you. I can take you there right now. It’s dangerous, I should tell you that, but I know all the pieces of that night are there somewhere, and I need someone like you to help me put them together.”

His hands were out slightly in front of him, as if he were considering clasping them together to beg.

I held mine out as well, and clapped. Slowly.

“Bravo. Are we done?” I asked.

He dropped his hands, disappointed and thinking fast.

He was a very good actor.

“Will you answer one question?” he asked.

“There’s one way to find out,” I said.

“If you believed me, would you say yes?”

“If…” The fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d stayed up this late was starting to hit me, and I just wanted to crawl under the blankets. “If I believed that you’re an undeadish local legend from a magical world of imagination who’s been trying to solve the mystery of his death for almost a hundred and thirty years and thinks for some reason that I’ll be able to do better? Yes. Okay? Yes. You pushed all the right buttons. I’m that girl. You got me figured out. Yes. Happy?”

“Yes,” he said much too excitedly. “I’ll show you now, and then, if you still want, I promise, I’ll walk you home myself, but if you mean that, you won’t want me to.”

He took my hand and pulled me back toward the monument.

“All we have to do is run around it three times and then touch Sarah’s left shoe.”

I stared at him. “You’re really going to make me do this?”

“I’m asking you to,” he said. “And I promise-”

“Yeah, I know, you’ll take me home,” I said.

And so we ran. Hand in hand again, round in a circle, mostly because it would be the fastest way to make this joke of his run out, but partly because I knew that once I was home and safe, and the sting of the trick had faded, and I started to think about the fact that I had been here, in the Green Beach cemetery at night with a guy who really, really looked like the statue of Joshua Thorne and swore that all I had to do was run around a memorial three times to discover the secrets of his story, I would eventually wonder what would have happened if I’d done it. Because I was that girl, and that was how thoroughly perfectly he’d gotten me.

Once around.

Twice.

He had the longer legs and the inside track, and I stumbled to keep up.

Three times, and when we reached together for Sarah Thorne’s left shoe, by the pure conviction on his face, I almost expected… something.

Our fingers wrapped together around the cold marble and held, while the opposite of something happened.

After a few seconds, he looked up at the monument, as if surprised. “What the…?”

I withdrew my hands and started walking. If he would drag it out past this, he’d go on forever. I’d have to find a headstone to stand on to try to jump out. I’d stand by the gate and scream until someone called 911 if that was what it took.

I’d taken three steps when a rush of air and a flash of sparkling light forced my eyes closed.

When I opened them, the cemetery was gone. A meadow of uncut grass stretched around me in broad daylight, the temperature suddenly ten degrees warmer and perfectly comfortable, the edge of a forest beginning some forty feet in front of me. A sheer, high rock face stood farther on, casting everything in a pleasant shade. When I looked back, the only things that remained from seconds ago were the monument and him, standing nearly doubled over with silent laughter next to it.

“Just kidding,” he said, straightening up. “Sometimes it takes a moment.”

5.