Beyond Read online

  Also by Graham McNamee

  Acceleration

  Bonechiller

  The author acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Graham McNamee

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Sara Jarrett/Arcangel Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

  visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McNamee, Graham.

  Beyond : a ghost story / by Graham McNamee. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Everyone thinks seventeen-year-old Jane has attempted suicide more than once, but Jane knows the truth: her shadow is trying to kill her.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89759-7 [1. Near-death experiences—Fiction. 2. Ghosts—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M232519 Be 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011043610

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  About the Author

  I remember dying.

  After I got injured my heart stopped and I flatlined.

  I was done and gone. But I wasn’t alone.

  There was something waiting for me when I died. Something dark and cold tried to take my soul away.

  When they brought me back to life I escaped from it. Left it behind.

  But what if it came back with me, followed me home like a hungry stray?

  Don’t think about it.

  I keep telling myself that.

  Today I find out what they’re going to do with me. I’m counting down the hours till my doctor’s appointment.

  My best friend, Lexi, is doing her best to distract me. So on this stormy afternoon she drags me out in my backyard to try a new trick shot with her camera. “We’re going to stop the rain.”

  That would be a real magic trick out here on the Rain Coast, in the town of Edgewood. Never heard of the place? I’m shocked. We’re famous for our wet weather.

  Lexi gets me to stand under the tree in back. It doesn’t give me any shelter, with all the dripping branches.

  “What do I do?” I ask as she sets up her tripod on the grass.

  “Just stay still, Jane. Facing me. I need to get the focus perfect.”

  Most days are gray around here, where the sky is always crowded with clouds and the rainy season never seems to end. Makes you feel color-blind sometimes, starving your eyes. Only the bloodred of Lexi’s lipstick saves the world from fading to black-and-white right now.

  “Ready?” she says. “Okay, the camera’s set for superquick shots. Don’t move for a minute. And close your eyes. This flash is really intense.”

  I shut them, and Lexi starts shooting as the wind shakes cold raindrops from the branches above. Through my lids I can make out the flashes, like rapid-fire lightning. When it feels like a minute’s gone by, I open my eyes and catch the last blinding flares.

  “Done,” she says.

  We run to the back porch and check out the results. As I blink away the afterimage fireworks, my vision clears and I see Lexi beside me.

  Always in black, she looks like the Grim Reaper’s hot little sister. Right now she’s wearing a hooded slicker over her miniskirt and tight sweater. Raven-dark hair frames her pale face.

  “Got it.” She shows me the image on her camera. “Took a hundred shots to get it, but we tricked the rain.”

  There I am. Brown eyes wide, frizzy blond hair blown wild by the wind so it seems like I got zapped by lightning. Makes me look witchy.

  But the magic is in how the raindrops are stopped in midair. They show up as streaks around me, but where the focus is tightest right in front of my face a few are frozen. Caught in the split-second flash, they seem solid, as if you could pluck one out of the air and hold it. Crystal clear pearls.

  “You stopped the rain,” I say.

  Lexi shrugs it off. “A minor miracle.”

  “I could use a miracle right about now.”

  “The rain falls too fast to really stop it. But the drips from the branches are slowed down enough to catch.” She hands me the camera. “Now you try.”

  We experiment some more, capturing the dribbles off the porch roof, suspended before gravity splashes them to the ground. Cool special effects.

  But Lexi’s best trick is to take my mind off everything. And it works wonders.

  Playing with the camera lets me breathe for a while. Before everything unfreezes, the drops start falling again, and the clock counts down.

  That’s me.

  The X-ray on the wall shows the ghost image of my skull. Me skeletonized. No eyes, no skin, no hair.

  It’s like seeing my reflection in Death’s own mirror. Spooky.

  The neurologist is talking to Mom and Dad, but I only catch fragments of what he’s saying.

  “No intracranial swelling … no bleeding … no infection … no change.”

  Skeletons are so anonymous. Hard to tell a guy from a girl, old from young. Stripped down to my bare bones, the only way I can really tell this is me is by that little white sliver buried inside the skull.

  I’m so fascinated by my naked bones that it takes a few seconds before I realize Mom’s talking to me.

  “Jane?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  I glance at their faces, all grim and worried.

  “Just one,” I say, pointing to the X-ray. “Does this make me look fat?”

  The neurologist frowns, Dad sighs, Mom looks pissed.

  “What?” I shrug, like I can’t help it. Nobody ever gets me. I mean, if I don’t joke about this a little I’ll curl up in a ball in my room and never come out.
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  “Okay, seriously then. Are you gonna cut the thing out, or will I be setting off metal detectors for the rest of my life?”

  The doc glances down at my chart. “Eventually it will have to come out, but right now, the situation is stable. You’re doing remarkably well. It might be more dangerous to go in and remove it. We’ll have to run some additional tests.”

  Great. More tests.

  They start going over all the pills I’m taking.

  As the doc writes some new prescriptions, Mom grills him on side effects and complications.

  I turn back to my X-ray. Lexi always said I was wrong in the head, and here’s the proof. But really, I can’t lay all my weirdness on that little white sliver there. I was twisted long before that showed up.

  The nail in my brain.

  On the drive home everybody’s all silent and gloomy.

  “Call off the funeral!” I say to break the tension. “I’m still breathing.”

  Mom grunts and shakes her head. Dad frowns at me in the rearview mirror.

  “You age me, Boo,” he says. That’s his pet name for me, Boo, because my big, wide-open brown eyes make me look permanently startled. “I got my first gray hair the day you were born. If I hadn’t been there to see you come into the world with my own eyes, I’d swear the devil switched babies with us and gave us a little screaming demon.”

  He glances over at Mom with a weak smile, but she’s not playing along.

  So we go back to gloom and doom.

  Dad was just getting off work when he picked us up for the doctor’s appointment, so he’s still in his police uniform. He’s a constable here in Edgewood.

  The Edge is a small town on Canada’s west coast. The Rain Coast. From autumn to spring we get about eight months of wet weather. And even when the sun does break through, all we see is liquid sunshine.

  Right now the downpour is drumming on the roof of the car. During the rainy season you tune out the constant drip-drip-dripping—that never-ending background of white noise—the way you forget the sound of your own breathing.

  The windows in back are all steamed up. I wipe a patch clear as we pull off the coast highway onto the road that runs along the ridge above town.

  Edgewood is spread out below us. Not much to see now after dark, unless you can read the constellations of streetlights. They map out the neighborhoods, with a bright cluster in what passes for downtown, scattered sparks farther out in the hills and a curving line marking the seawall. Past that I catch the bobbing glimmers of boats tied up at the docks.

  I’m trying to spot where our house is in this galaxy, but right now the trees block my view as the woods swallow us up.

  The Edge is surrounded by ancient forest, giant century-old evergreens. The town was carved out of their turf. And the way they tower over you, leaning in together to eat up the light, it’s like they’re plotting to take it back.

  We pass a sign that says BLIND CURVE AHEAD, and I know exactly where we are. Through the windshield I see a familiar stretch of road.

  And I get a little shiver. Like they say, as if someone’s stepping on my grave.

  This is where they found me on a drizzly night last month, walking blindly down the centerline.

  I started sleepwalking after my brain injury.

  At first I just wandered around the house in the dark. Harmless.

  Until I escaped one night and woke up standing outside, in the rainy dark. The cold hit me like a slap. I was soaking wet.

  What is this? Where am I?

  Looking down, I saw asphalt under my bare feet, and a painted white line.

  I was in the middle of a road.

  There was a light coming from behind me. And a voice calling.

  “Jane?”

  I spun around. Caught in the glare of headlights, I stumbled backward, holding my breath, bracing to get hit.

  “Jane.” That voice again, familiar. “Calm down. It’s okay.”

  Shielding my eyes, I made out who it was.

  Constable Granger. Dad’s boss, standing beside his squad car with the roof light flashing red and white. “What’re you doing out here? Are you hurt?”

  I could only shake my head, shocked speechless and trembling.

  Looking down at myself, I suddenly realized I was wearing next to nothing. Just what I went to bed in: a long, ratty old T-shirt that stuck to me now like a second skin. And you could see right through it to my underwear with the little red hearts.

  I crossed my arms to cover up my chest, wanting to die right there. Total unsurvivable embarrassment. But before I lost it and started crying, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried the old trick Dad taught me.

  Bulletproof heart, he calls it. When I was little and the kids at school were bugging and bullying me, he showed me the Kevlar vest he wears on duty. “This is my armor,” he said. “Keeps me safe when I’m out there. You need to grow your own armor, on the inside. Make your heart bullet proof.”

  So I forced myself to take a slow, deep breath.

  Bulletproof. Then I opened my eyes and found my voice.

  “Guess I got lost on my way to the bathroom.” Sounding crazy, I know, but in control.

  He looked at me like I was speaking Martian, then took off his rain slicker.

  “Here. Cover up. Come on now, I’ll drive you home.”

  Granger didn’t ask any more questions on the way. The whole town knows my story.

  Another time I escaped, Mom caught me while I was still in the driveway. She steered me safely back inside.

  It’s freaky and frightening to totally lose control over what your sleeping brain is getting you into. Makes you paranoid to take a nap, in case you wake up staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck. Because that wasn’t the only time they tracked me down wandering along the same road out of town.

  My late-night strolls were giving us all sleepless nights.

  Everybody has a theory about why I’m doing it. Dad thinks it’s some kind of death wish. Mom worries I want to run away. The doctors think it’s a symptom of my injury.

  I tried to cure my nightwalking by wedging a doorstop under my bedroom door. I even got Dad to put a lock on it so I could seal myself in. But my dozing brain just kicked the doorstop out of the way and opened the lock.

  Dad finally came up with a solution. He gave me a ring. A plain silver band with a microchip embedded in it, a GPS locator chip.

  It’s the same technology they use to keep tabs on crooks on probation or under house arrest who have to wear ankle monitors. They have these alert systems in nursing homes and maternity wards too, in case some old-timer wanders off or somebody tries to steal a baby.

  Now I wear my magic ring to bed. And if I get ten feet from the house an alarm gets sent to Dad’s cell phone so he can go capture me. It’s worked a few times already. I never make it to the end of the driveway before he catches up.

  Now I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to wake up anymore.

  My sleep is under house arrest.

  My phone rings at midnight, so I know it’s Lexi. I told her to wait till later to call, to give me time if I needed to squeeze in a panic attack after my doctor’s appointment.

  “What’s the verdict?” she says, no hello or anything. “You going under the knife?”

  “Not yet. They want to wait.”

  “Wait for what? Do they think you’re just going to sneeze that nail out one of these days? Or scoop it out with a Q-tip?”

  I smile, lying back on my bed. Me and Lexi, we get each other. No heavy gloom-and-doom crap.

  “They showed me on the X-ray. It’s in there pretty deep. Digging it out could be more dangerous than leaving it for now.”

  I run my fingers over the shaved patch behind my left ear. I can feel the stubbly fuzz of new hair and the little dent in my skull where the nail entered. I was too far gone for the doctors to even try taking it out right away. Too risky, with me flatlining. So they stopped the bleeding, got my heart beating again and
put the surgery off till later.

  “You should get a copy of that X-ray. We could put it online. You’d be famous. ‘Nailed Girl Cheats the Reaper.’ Or, how about ‘The Girl with Nine Lives’? We’d get you on the Discovery Channel or something.”

  “No thanks.”

  “How many lives have you got left, anyway?” she asks.

  Getting nailed was just my latest close call.

  “I must be on my last one now.”

  “I read about this girl,” Lexi says, “who didn’t even know she had a sewing needle stuck in her brain till she went to the doctor, after six months of headaches. She worked in a sweatshop where the needle snapped out of the machine and went right through the edge of her eye socket. She felt the jab but didn’t realize it had penetrated. True story.”

  “Great. Maybe me and her can start our own freak show.”

  “So did the doctors clear you for school?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” I’ve been off for two months, recovering. “They say I’m good to go. No danger signs. No bleeding, fevers, swelling or anything.”

  “So I’ll drive by tomorrow morning and pick you up?”

  “Sure. How bad is it at school? Should I be worried?”

  “Well, they were calling you Psycho Jane for a while. But that was getting kind of old, so they’ve been trying out some new material.”

  “Like what?” I hate to ask.

  “I heard Zombie Slut. You know, because you’re back from the dead. That’s getting some play. And Reaper Creeper, which is pretty catchy. And what else …?”

  “Enough,” I groan. “Don’t ruin the surprise.”

  “I was thinking of something more like Lady Lazarus. If you go with that, we could start an online ministry and get donations. Maybe sell miracle springwater straight from your kitchen tap.”

  I shake my head. If I don’t cut her off, she’ll go on like this till dawn. Lexi’s a major insomniac. She’s so naturally wired, it’s hard for her to sleep. She can’t get her mind to shut down or her thoughts to shut up.

  But it’s been a long, long day and I’m ready to crash, so I give her a hint by yawning loudly.

  “Okay,” she says. “I hear you. Just called for the update. Sweet dreams, then. And hey, no playing in traffic tonight.”