Wildest Dreams

1

I see ghosts.

This one was a little girl with long blonde hair and a black dress. She sat on a footbridge that arched across a rushing creek, her little girl legs dangling over the side as she gazed down at the cold water rushing below.

I moved toward her, following a fern-choked path through old redwoods, but the little girl didn’t notice me. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes the dead don’t see the living at all. Often, in fact. Often ghosts are no more threatening than old movie clips. They’re helpless specters fixed in time and place, forever repeating some action whose significance was lost long ago, perhaps even to them.

Of course, my footsteps were light. Maybe that was why I went unnoticed. A rusty blanket of dead redwood needles covered the path, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the forest floor was salted with gravel-I can be quiet when I want to. So the sounds I made were hardly sounds at all, and what the little girl would have heard had she been listening was masked by the hollow sigh of clear creek water flowing to the sea.

Masked, until I stepped onto the wooden bridge and my boot heel rang down like a judge’s gavel.

The ghost looked up with startled blue eyes that were as clear as the October sky.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh, I wasn’t scared. Not truly. I just didn’t see you coming. Not many people come here, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be glad you did, though.” She nodded toward the creek. “It’s a nice place. Sometimes you see fish.”

I unslung my backpack and sat down beside her. She moved closer. The nearness of her made me shiver, but I masked my unease with a smile. I didn’t want her to think that anything might be wrong.

We sat there in silence. A bower of heavy redwood branches hid the creek, and the bridge, and the living and the dead from the sun. The shadows did not bother me, and neither did the little girl-there was nothing in her clear October eyes to make me wary, or afraid.

I knew the girl could not say the same of my eyes. But even though I’d frightened her, she hadn’t looked away from me. She had studied my eyes as if she were searching for everything that lay behind them, and she hadn’t even blinked.

I hadn’t looked away, either. Strange. I’d seen ghosts since childhood. Maybe because I was born with a caul-that’s the occultist’s favorite explanation, anyway. I’d learned to ignore the dead a long time ago. First the dull ones with their endless pantomimes, and later those whose actions were less predictable. By the time I was a teenager, I could spend a night in a room with a wailing spirit and sleep like a baby.

But there was something very different about the little girl. I can’t say it any plainer than that. There was a depth to her, an intelligence that was rare in the dead.

An innocence, as well.

It was something I’d never seen before.

Somehow, she seemed very much alive.

And very, very lonely.

I knew what it was like to be lonely.

“Look!” she said suddenly, and her little hand brushed through mine with icy, transparent fingers as she pointed at the creek.

A steelhead shot through the water like a bullet, fighting the current every inch of the way. A flash of scale like living sunshine, a splash of the steelhead’s dark and powerful tail, and then it was gone.

The little ghost leaned forward, straining after the fish. “Careful,” I said automatically, realizing too late that my concern was ridiculous.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t fall.”

I didn’t say anything.

The girl stared upstream and sighed. “Wasn’t he beautiful?”

I nodded.

“He’s going upstream. They go upstream to spawn.”

I nodded again, and she looked at me with those clear, innocent eyes. I wondered if she knew what happened to steelheads after they spawned. I wasn’t going to tell her. If she didn’t know now, she didn’t ever need to know.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Clay Saunders.”

“What’s in your backpack, Clay Saunders?”

Watching the fish, I’d actually forgotten about the backpack. Just for a moment. It was black, and it was canvas, and you couldn’t see the bloodstains on it unless you looked really hard

I’d bought the pack in Baja six days before. It sat between us on the bridge. Already, flies were circling it.

I swallowed hard. I’d made a mistake. I didn’t have time for distractions. I should have ignored the little ghost, and taken care of business the way I’d planned, and gone on.

But instead I’d stopped, and now there were questions.

That’s the way it always is.

Anytime you stop, there are questions.

Questions are never good.

Without a word, I rose and slung the pack over one shoulder. I had to laugh at myself. Silly, getting nervous like that. Way past paranoid. After all, it wouldn’t matter if I told the girl what was inside the backpack. She was dead. She wasn’t going to tell anyone.

Still, I didn’t want her to know.

I’d already scared her once, and once was enough.

A fly buzzed around her head. She swatted at it, not noticing as the insect passed through her hand. “You can trust me,” she said. “I know how to keep a secret.”

“So do I, and I promised I’d keep this one all to myself.”

My words weren’t meant to sound harsh, but they did to the little girl. She apologized quickly, and I could tell that she was both embarrassed and ashamed.

“Maybe you can help me,” I said, hoping to smooth things over. “There’s someone I’m supposed to meet, and I think I might have missed them.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

She giggled, at ease now. “Clay’s got a girlfriend.”

“Not quite.” I laughed, but I didn’t like the blush that warmed my face. Even if I was talking to a ghost, I was talking too much.

The girl didn’t notice my discomfort. She stared into the creek, pretending to watch for another fish. But I knew that she was only pretending now. She hadn’t forgotten me, or my backpack, at all.

She couldn’t keep quiet for long. “I’ve been here all day,” she said finally, “and I haven’t seen any girl. Only you.”

“We’re not supposed to meet here, exactly.” I glanced up at the redwood boughs that hid the sky from view. “I think I’m on the right trail, but I’m a city boy. Put me in the woods and I’m lost.”

“I’m lost, too. At least I think I am. My mom said Daddy would meet me here, but he hasn’t come. It’s been a long time, too. But I just keep waiting, because that’s what my mom told me to do.” She paused, staring at the water. “I don’t mind waiting. Not really. It’s nice here.”

She reached out for my hand.

“We’re alone, just like Hansel and Gretel,” she said, and her voice whispered through the forest like a lonely wind that touches no one. But her fingers were like the wind, too, and though they passed through mine I knew that she had touched me, even if she could not hold my hand.

She kept on trying, though. Without a word. She didn’t give up.

I tried, too. It was like trying to hold a five-fingered breeze. And while I tried, I wondered how long the little girl had been here. Her clothes were hard to place. That little black dress, simple and severe, like something out of The Addams Family, but timeless in its way.

Maybe she’d been here a hundred years, or maybe a hundred days. I couldn’t decide. I only knew that as long as she’d been here, she’d been all alone.

I wondered how long it had been since someone had spoken to her. How long since she’d shared a smile or a laugh, or tried to hold someone’s hand.

I didn’t want to ask those questions. Questions are never good.

But there was one question I had to ask. “I’m looking for the bottle house,” I began. “Do you know where it is?”

“Sure.” Her fingers drifted away from mine. “It’s not far.” She seemed to float away. “Follow me.”

I did.