Butterfly Girl
Dawn came slowly.
Jesse had bunked down on the floor in Chance’s room, unwilling to share with Dale. Shannon still had the mattress where I’d been sleeping before she arrived. Unable to doze off, I lay on the soft, sunken sofa, staring up at the dusty ceiling. The guys had been taking turns, and since I was feeling better, I figured I could do my part.
Around three a.m., someone tiptoed along the hall toward me. I shifted and saw it was Shannon. She wore a T-shirt that came nearly down to her knees, and I was struck by how young she was, no matter how readily she’d adapted.
“Can’t sleep?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “I keep thinking about that girl you saw locked in the attic.”
Though it hadn’t been my primary concern, I wondered what happened to her. The idea of being confined in that attic for being different made me shake all the way down to my bones. If my mama and I had lived a hundred years earlier, our lot might’ve been even worse. Judging by the way she’d been dressed, the poor kid was probably long dead.
“Maybe you can ask her,” I offered, lifting my legs so she could sit down.
“I’ve never contacted a spirit I didn’t know in some way.” Shannon sounded doubtful, but interested.
“I don’t see what it would hurt to try. Doesn’t look like we’ll be sleeping much until we resolve this, one way or another.”
“Agreed.”
We crept through the house. I climbed onto a chair to let down the ladder by increments, so softly it made no noise at all. Getting upstairs took some doing, and I was a little concerned that we’d wake the guys with our clambering overhead, but it seemed as if the night itself wanted us to do this.
Sounds seemed muffled, cloaking our movements. Not entirely understanding the impulse, I tugged the ladder back up after us. I felt like this was a private ceremony between females, and the guys shouldn’t be a part of it.
In a low whisper, I explained how to traverse the boards without bouncing them. We inched toward the windowsill, but I didn’t touch it. This was Shannon’s show.
As if in concert, we sank down opposite each other. The girl turned her radio on low, and the static hiss filled the dark space. Maybe I was just tired and suggestible, but I sensed something. The hair on my forearms stirred; my skin prickled.
Shannon whispered to the girl’s spirit as she fiddled with the knobs. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it sounded imploring. I sat quietly, trying not to distract her.
I don’t know how long we sat in the dark, but as she spun the dial farther along the bar, a tinny voice finally crackled into focus. “Hello. I’m here.”
A hard shudder wracked me. This was a child no older than the one I’d seen by the window. Whatever happened to her, it hadn’t been long afterward. She hadn’t escaped or lived to a ripe old age. She wasn’t an angry ghost, or she would have tried to take her wrath out on us, but she didn’t rest in peace, either.
“Who are you?” Shannon asked softly.
“Martha,” came the slow, crackling reply. Her words carried impossible distance, echoes of the grave. “Martha Vernon. It’s dark in here. Have you come to let me out?”
Oh God. Sucking in a sharp breath, I wrapped my arms around my knees. She thought she was still trapped in here. And, well . . . she was.
Shannon looked very pale, arms wrapped around the radio. I could tell she was as chilled as I was, but her answer sounded composed. “We’re going to try. What happened to you, Martha?”
“Same thing that happens to everyone who’s different around here.”
In the stillness, I heard the soft shuffle of someone who wasn’t there. The boards creaked lightly beneath Martha’s invisible weight. As she’d done for countless years, she paced her prison. I thought my heart would explode when the footsteps, accompanied by terrible cold, stopped beside us.
Shannon managed to ask, “What’s that?”
The non sequitur came, low and almost toneless, full of hissing, static snakes. “They found I can call things to me, things that fly, things that crawl. I can fill a tree with butterflies, spell your name in lightning bugs, or send a plague of locusts to their houses, but I cannot get out of here. Won’t you let me out?”
I ached for her. Kilmer wasn’t a good place to be different. That had still been true in my time. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like in hers.
“I’ll try,” Shannon assured the child’s ghost. “But I need to know what happened to you first.”
“Same thing that happened to Holly Jarrett, Timothy Sparks, David Prentice,” Martha sang out. An eerie, tuneless humming poured out of the radio, and it made my head feel strange, almost disconnected from the rest of me. Eventually, the sound evolved back into words again, leaving me numb and frightened. “And more, and more.”
“Tell me what that was,” Shannon begged.
“They fed us to the thing in the woods. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—’ ” the ghost in the machine whispered, “ ‘I took the one’ . . . ‘I took the one’ . . .” Her tinny little voice repeated, a scratched phonograph phantom.
Mr. McGee must’ve been researching the dead children and he’d located Martha Vernon on his radio—not because he was Gifted, but because he was old and near death. He’d said I could understand the whispers, whereas Chance could not because I was soon to die myself . . . and I did.
He’d scrawled down the poem at some point, and Curtis Farrell took it with him. Maybe I didn’t know all the reasons why yet, but I was starting to find connections. Once I had all the pieces, the big picture would take shape.