All agree that life beyond is for a limited period, after which they pass on to yet other phases,
but apparently there is more communication between these phases than there is between us and
Spiritland.
I think it's an interesting fact that the creator of the scientific-minded and hyper-logical Sherlock Holmes would have been such a fierce advocate of spiritualism. My novel posits the story of how that interest was initially born and how it grew, through the time-traveling visit of a fifteen-year old boy from the late 20th Century named Waldo Prospect. I've been sending out a few queries to agents recently and here's the part of it that talks about what Between Us and Spiritland is about (and I would be remiss if I didn't say I owe Katie Wright, who manages the "Submissions Mailbox" group on the social media site for YA authors, YALITCHAT, a huge debt of thanks for her help in crafting this part of my query)
A ghost is talking to fifteen-year old Waldo Prospect. Since
their father disappeared a year ago it’s always been his older sister, in what
Waldo calls her “psycho-nutso trances,” who talks to spooks, not Waldo. Never
Waldo. So he finds it pretty weird when
a ghost of a 5th-Century Chinese explorer pops into his life to tell
him that only he can save his father from some dude named Calibane, and,
oh yeah, no pressure, the fate of Spiritland depends on it.
Waldo’s never heard of Calibane, and he certainly doesn’t
know how to find him. He’s getting nowhere fast, just one more disappointment
added to his ever-growing list: missing father, sister who hates his guts,
depressed mother, new school in which he’s treated like a total loser, and a
gorgeously hot girl, Melinda Chemise, who doesn’t even know he exists. So it’s
just another day in paradise when bullies stuff Waldo into a locker. Then the
walls fall away and he finds himself falling… into the past, 1893, 1610, and
1270, to be exact. Waldo’s finally getting somewhere, but where exactly he’s
not sure. With the help of Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame Curie, and William
Shakespeare, Waldo puts together clues that his father has left him and
discovers why he was hiding out in the future of 1970, as well as why spirits
are so freaked out by his disappearance. But only Waldo can face down the real
psycho-nutso case, the renegade sorcerer Calibane, and maybe screw up enough
courage to ask out Melinda Chemise.
Chapter 1: Los Angeles, September 23, 1970
My sister Polly is
talking to ghosts again.
I
get home from school, grab a glass of juice and an apple, and I’m lugging them with
my book bag back to my room to start digging in on my chemistry homework, when
I hear her. It’s hard not to in this crummy apartment. The walls are so thin
you could hear a flea fart through them.
“It’s
called ‘The Door.’ I hope you like it.” Even though she’s three years older
than me, Polly is talking in that breathy little girl’s voice of hers that she
has when she wants something. I mean, she’s just turned eighteen, but it’s like
she’s reverted back to her stupid ten-year old self again. This can’t be good,
I think, as I stand in the hallway shadows in front of her bedroom door. I hear
her bedspread rustle; then she begins:
There
is a door.
It
is a wooden door,
a
door made of wood.
Am
I the door, I wonder,
as
I walk through the door,
this
wooden door,
this
door made of wood?
On the other side
I look up.
There are stars in the sky
There are stars in the sky
in the shape of a
door!
I
gag on the piece of apple in my mouth. I swear, Polly writes the dreariest
sounding poems in the whole universe of dreary sounding poems. They’re about as
moving as a centipede wearing concrete overshoes shoved into a bucket full of
glue.
“Polly?
You okay?” I say through the door, the wooden door, the door made of wood that
is definitely NOT myself. Then I chuckle. I can’t help it.
“Shut
up, Waldo, you little shit! I’m busy!”
“Okay,
okay. I was just asking.”
I
hear the bedspread rustle again and the metallic tinkle of wind chimes that
sound what I imagine fairy bells would sound like if there were ever fairies
and if fairies had bells. I walk into the living room and look out the patio
door. The wind chimes are gone. They used to hang over the lime tree that
shades the balcony. Mom won’t notice they’re gone for like another month or so,
and Dad’s not around anyway, so it’s cool, I guess. They were just a gift I
bought for them two Christmases ago at Winter Fair. Who cares, right? I walk
back to stand in front of Polly’s door and rip a bite out of my apple.
“Oh,
Hui Shan, you shouldn’t say that,” Polly says. “It’s not that great a poem.”
Hui
Shan is this ghost that Polly’s been talking to the last few days. I mean, she’s
been talking to a lot of spooks since our dad disappeared a year ago, but
lately it’s all been Hui Shan. Polly says he was like this Buddhist monk
explorer in the 5th Century or something. Maybe it’s true, but how should
I know? I can’t hear ghosts like she can, or claims to, when she’s in her psycho-nutso
trances or whatever the hell they are. They all sound like a bunch of loopy one-sided
conversations to me, until today.
I mean, it
certainly doesn’t sound like my whiny old sister in there. Her voice has turned
into a raspy whisper that sounds like an old rusty swing or a gate swaying back
and forth in the wind. Her voice is kind of lonely like that, and it’s speaking
in broken, stilted English, as if Hui Shan has to think about framing each
syllable before he utters it. Maybe ghosts don’t talk a lot where he comes
from.
“No,
so true, what you say, Polly. And you read
with such sweet voice. Like nightingales I remember,
in garden of Zu Chong-zhi long ago. And your skin
so soft.
Here, I touch, like baby bird.”
Is
Polly touching her privates for a horny old spook? Next thing she’ll be doing
lap dances for him and he’ll be stuffing ghost dollar bills into her underwear.
I burst open the door.
Polly is sitting
on her bedspread in candlelight, fully clothed, touching that little stretch of
peach fuzz on her upper lip with one hand and holding the wind chimes with the
other, gently tinkling them. But her upper body is rigid, like she’s had a
seizure or something. This is new. Usually I just see Polly as her stupid old Polly
self, staring into space, talking in her stupid old Polly voice into thin air.
I’ve never seen this seizure thing before. Still, her arm is loose, and she
winds up and wings the wind chimes at me. Most of Polly’s head might be lost in
Hui Shan, but the reptile reflexes in the part of her brain that controls her
body are all hers. I duck and the chimes sail into the hall and knock our dad’s
photo off the wall. Orange juice sloshes onto my hand. I throw my apple at
Polly.
“Hey!” I cry.
“Hey!” I cry.
“Waldo Little Shrit I meet you
finally.”
“No, Waldo,” I
say, “just Waldo.” My half-eaten apple lies in Polly’s lap, as she blinks at me
through almond-shaped eyes. It’s like my sister has been possessed and turned
into a 5th Century Chinese ghost before my eyes.
“Ah,
Little Shrit No Just
Waldo. I look so long.
We talk, yes?”
I
have to read about the law of conservation of mass for Mr. Drum’s class, but it’s
like not every day you get to talk to a ghost. “Sure, man,” I say, licking
orange juice off my knuckles. “What do you want to know?”
“Little Shrit No Just Waldo,
please come. Here. 1. 2. 7. 0.
Queen. Califia. Court. Aril need
you. Your
father...” Hui Shan pauses. His
voice is getting fainter now, like it’s being squeezed out of Polly like
toothpaste from a tube. “Help her,” he continues, “Calibane bad.” When he says that name the last part
sounds like “bonnie,” “Calibane, he very bad. Aril...”
I see tears beading
up on Polly’s cheeks. You wouldn’t notice them except for a slight glistening. Polly
is sitting ramrod straight, cross-legged on her green denim bedspread, words
plunking out of her mouth in a wheezy whisper. “You only
one, Little Shrit. Little. Shrit. You only one…”
Then Polly gets
up, walks over to me, and stands so close that I can almost feel her breath. It’s
like the closeness-I-dream-about-with-Melinda-Chemise-in-the-moment-just-before-I
kiss-her close, but it’s my own sister! “Yuck!” I think, but it’s like a squared-to-the-thirtieth-power
kind of yuck, and I’m about to turn away and retreat to my room, when Polly stops
me. She takes my hand and uses my forefinger to rub off the glistening that is coursing
down her face and then gently rubs it onto my cheek. This is definitely not the
reptile part of Polly’s brain that hates me. This must be Hui Shan, who
proceeds to lean down and kiss me where his ghostly tears dissolve into my skin.
My yucky feelings dissolve like bathtub water swirling down a drain.
The kiss is
gentle, but it tingles, too, sort of like when you put a SweetTart mixed with 7
Up on your tongue. I step back in surprise. More juice sloshes out of my glass,
and I drop my book bag as I bump into Polly’s dresser. I can feel the tears
branching out, all moist and sweet and clingy. And for a moment there seems a veil,
like a piece of lace laid over my eyes. I see a crowd of shadow people beyond
it, all crammed into Polly’s room. These must be ghosts, I think.
I mean, they look
like people, but they’re so faint, a huddled mass of faces, each one covered in
what looks like a hoodie or a boxer’s robe, but it’s only for a few seconds,
and then they’re gone, the ghostly shadow people, the veil, Hui Shan – all gone.
I can tell because Polly straightens up and looks at me, her face twisted in
disgust, like she’s just realized that she’s licked a pile of dog poop. But I
can still see a trace of a tear coursing down her face, though her eyes are in
their normal roundness now.
Still, I know that
tear isn’t hers, but Hui Shan’s. I think about what he said. He mentioned Aril
before he mentioned my dad, and then he didn’t mention him again. “Help her,”
he said, not “help them.” Would helping the one help me find the other? I don’t
know, and Hui Shan is gone. All that’s left of him is this one last tear.
“Hui Shan,” I say
to myself. “Hui Shan!”
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