Prom Night in Purgatory(70)

“But...”

“Maggie! You tried to help me. Now,” she said tiredly, rising to her feet, her back bent and her head bowed in exhaustion. “We need to get you out of this house.”

***

Maggie had slept restlessly ever since coming home from the hospital after the fire. Dreams of Johnny and burning hallways made sleep a minefield, and though she had longed desperately for the relief unconsciousness would supply, she found that she no longer felt safe in her bedroom.

Maybe it was because she had been awakened twice in the last few weeks to see Roger Carlton, the aged and overweight Uncle Roger, sitting on the benchseat pouring over his old pictures. Both times, she had reached for her glasses on her night stand, pushed them on her nose, and forced herself to concentrate on the details of the room she knew existed in present day, which did not include a ghostly fat man. Both times Roger had flickered out almost immediately without even raising his head.

That night, the drain from the conversation with Irene had Maggie stumbling to her room and falling into a deathlike slumber. Irene had wanted to leave and check into a hotel. She was afraid that Maggie would slip away if she slept in the house again. Maggie thought of the tongues that would wag in the small town if she and her aunt suddenly checked into the Honeyville Suites right on Honeyville’s Main Street. Plus, Irene didn’t have the funds to waste on a hotel room when there were four perfectly good bedrooms right here.

Maggie was convinced it was the talk of 1958, combined with the furnishings in Irene’s old room and the dress Maggie had donned, that had precipitated the shift. She had practically stepped back in time before she even fell asleep that night, and she told Irene as much.

“We have to get you out of this house,” Irene said again, wringing her hands desperately, but she had gone to bed after a little coaxing and reassuring. Irene looked as if she were ready to collapse. Both of them needed rest before making any rash decisions.

Maggie had been pulled from sleep suddenly. She became completely and fully awake as if ice water had been poured over her, bringing her instantly and alarmingly from the depths of unconsciousness. She sat up and reached for her glasses on her bedside table, but the space was empty. She felt up and down, trying to connect with the surface of the table in the darkness of the room, knowing that she should be feeling the little knob on the drawer and the pointed edges of the table top. She felt a shift, a sense of falling, and then her legs folded and the surface beneath her changed. She was sitting upright in a chair. The chair was hard and the rungs dug into her shoulder blades. Goose flesh rose on her arms as she felt the cool against her bare feet which curled disbelievingly against the flat surface of her bedroom floor. It was still so dark. She looked toward where she knew the window should be and watched as they sky beyond lightened instantly by several shades, as if she were watching a time lapse on the news where the weather of the entire day is captured in seconds.

Roger sat at the window, his head bent over his scrapbook. The light beyond him was dusky, as if dawn had ascended while he read. He was younger, his hair thick and dark, his body still lean and his clothes reminiscent of a different decade. Maggie longed for her glasses. She didn’t dare move or even breath, knowing that she was no longer observing him in her room. She was with him.

She must have exhaled too loudly, though she hadn’t felt the release. Or maybe it was simply the sense of being watched, but Roger’s head jerked up suddenly, and he screamed, a strange, high pitched cry that had Maggie flying up and out of the chair to cower in the corner.

“It’s you!” Roger hugged the wall like a jumper on a ledge, easing around the room toward her. She had to get out of there, but could she run screaming through the house? She didn’t know why she was here or what year it was. If Irene and Roger were living in the house it was after Irene’s father had passed, after Billy had died and Johnny became trapped in Purgatory. She felt for something to shield herself with as Roger crept steadily closer.

“Are you some kind of a witch?” he breathed, his green eyes wide with fear and fascination. He poked at her with his foot. His shoe was pointed, and he shoved it into her as if she were an animal on the side of the road. She curled her legs into her chest and wrapped her arms around them, closing her eyes and willing herself home. She pictured Johnny in this very room, as she had seen him only hours earlier. The kiss that they’d shared, and the heat of his hands.

Roger kicked her. And then again. She cried out but kept her eyes squeezed shut and prayed for deliverance. She pictured the room, the pictures on her walls, the blanket on her bed, the fat yellow rug on her floor.

“I’m talking to you, witch! What are you doing in my house?” She felt his hands on her throat. He was pushing her back into the wall, forcing her head up. Her eyes popped open as he bore down on her, choking her, his eyes crazed yet eerily flat. The green was all one shade, without the striations of color and the golden flecks that made up the human eye. It was as if a child had taken a light green crayon and colored them in. Little spots of white started to flicker at the edges of Maggie’s vision. He was going to kill her.

Then she remembered the pendant around her neck. She released Roger’s hands and felt for the medal. She rubbed at it desperately.

“Johnny!” she gurgled, gripping the necklace Johnny had given her for protection. And then she recognized the sensation, almost like a carnival ride, of being pressed by centrifugal force into the wall behind her. Then she was falling away from Roger’s hands as the air was forced out of her lungs and the pressure built inside her until she was no longer conscious.