Past Midnight

I turned on the light to my room and gasped. My parents had all their equipment out—the ion meters and recorders and even the thermal camera. They brought the thermal along only if they felt confident that it would capture something on-screen. Something paranormal.

Dad set the thermal reader down on my bed. “It’s time we showed you something,” he said.

I couldn’t help feeling dread. Dad turned on a video screen. I immediately recognized the Courtyard Café in Charleston.

“Do you see those white shapes?” he asked.

I sucked in my breath. “What is it?”

Mom shook her head. “We’re not sure yet. But Charlotte, whatever they are, it appears they followed us home.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

Dad turned to me. “We think something powerful was triggered back in Charleston. We’re getting readings stronger than anything we’ve ever recorded.”

My legs felt shaky and I gripped the back of Dad’s chair. The still images on the screen stared back at me. “Do you know what caused it?” I asked. No one said anything. I looked at Mom. “What triggered it?”

“You did,” she said gently. “We think you’re the trigger.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A sincere thank-you to my wonderful agent, Tina Wexler, and equally wonderful editor, Tara Parsons.

A round of applause to Ed Davis, Marguerite Demarse, Karen and Patrick Dulzer, Heather Foy, Kimm Gildea, John and Martha Lohrstorfer, Nancy McDaniel, Rita Owen and Kathy Payerchin.

A standing ovation to Robert Lettrick (Web site guru) and Kristi Purnhagen, who read the first draft.

And a special shout-out to my guys: Joe, Henry, Quinn and Elias, who keep me busy, make me proud and remind me that I am never alone.

Dedicated to four people who have always lived far from normal: Sayrah, Christine, John-Paul and Matthew

I know a lot about ghosts. More than the average person and way, way more than any other seventeen-year-old. Except for Jared and Avery, but most of what they know they learned from me this year, when things got crazy. I know a lot about things going crazy, too, thanks to my parents. They’re paranormal researchers, and let’s just say they like to bring their work home with them. And sometimes, their work follows them home.

For good.

Contents

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

one

I was never normal, but I liked to pretend that I was. It usually took a few months before everyone else caught on. School would start out just fine, then Halloween would roll around, my parents would be all over the local news, and suddenly I would find myself exposed as Charlotte Silver, Princess of the Paranormal. I don’t know why I thought this year would be any different, but I did. And maybe it was different, but not in the way I had hoped. If anything, it was much, much worse.

We had spent the summer in Charleston, South Carolina. My parents were producing another one of their documentaries, this one called Haunted Hospitality. They spent their days researching old hotels and restaurants that claimed to have ghosts, while I relaxed at the beach and took walking tours of the city with my sister Annalise, who was a sophomore at the College of Charleston. She worked part-time at one of the supposedly haunted local restaurants during her summer break.

“The only spooky thing about the place is my boss,” she told me as we spread towels out on the sand. “He can get a little handsy, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t, but I could guess. Annalise was strikingly beautiful with large hazel eyes and glossy black hair, just like our mom. Growing up, everyone talked about how she would become a model, but she was just over five feet tall, which is definitely a drawback in the modeling industry. Still, my parents had used her a few times for reenactments in their documentaries. Annalise would pull her hair into a bun, slip on a white Victorian dress and walk slowly in front of a green screen. When special effects were added later, she would appear as a transparent figure floating above the floor. She made a great ghost, which was ironic because in real life she was the one everyone seemed to notice while I was the one who slipped by, barely detected.

While Annalise resembled Mom, I took after Dad—tall and wiry, with dark hair that hung so straight it was infuriating. There wasn’t even the hint of a curl. I kept it just long enough to tuck behind my ears and secretly resented it when Annalise complained that her glossy locks were simply “too bouncy.”

During our third week in Charleston we decided to spend the morning at Waterfront Park. It was a warm Friday in June, the breezy air tinged with the sharp scent of seawater and the shrieks of gliding gulls. We walked along the pier searching for a place to sit and watch the boats. Tourists occupied all of the wide wooden bench swings that lined the dock, so we waited until a couple laden with cameras lumbered to their feet, then claimed the swing as our own. We sat back and rocked slowly, enjoying a clear view of the docked cruise ships and darting birds.

“This is nice,” I said, pushing down on my feet to sway the swing.

“Summers are the best,” Annalise murmured. She sounded drowsy. I felt tired, too, and worried that we might both fall asleep on the swing and wake up hours later, our arms bubbling red with sunburn.

“Maybe we should walk down to the beach.”

“Can’t. We have to meet Mom and Dad in less than an hour, and it’ll take that long to walk to the beach and back.”

I stopped swinging. “They didn’t say anything to me about filming a scene today.”

Annalise smiled. “They called me this morning. They need more chum.”

“Chum” was what we called anyone who was brought in specifically to draw out paranormal energy. Some people claimed that a ghost would appear only if a certain kind of person was present, such as a curious child or a pretty girl. I didn’t have to guess what kind of person my parents needed, and I felt a familiar twinge of jealousy. I was never asked to serve as ghost bait. Maybe I should have been grateful, but part of me wondered if it was because our parents didn’t think I was good-looking enough to attract the interest of some dead, disembodied guy. It was insulting, really. Of course, no one in my family truly believed in ghosts, but still. Before I could get myself too wound up, Annalise spoke.

“They said they needed you, too.”

“Really?” Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe my parents did see me as chum.

“Mom said the sound guy is sick. She needs your help.”

Of course. Need a beautiful girl to lure reluctant spirits from hiding? Call Annalise. Need a plain and reliable worker to pick up the slack? Call Charlotte. Or don’t even call—just tell Annalise to drag her along. After all, I couldn’t possibly have anything else to do on a summer afternoon. I shook my head.

“I’ve got to stop thinking like that,” I muttered.

“Huh?”

I sighed and rocked the swing harder. “Nothing.”

We sat a little while longer before strolling through the old section of town, our flip-flops slapping against the sidewalks. The air smelled like jasmine and felt cooler than it had been at the pier. Guys stopped to gawk at Annalise while I pretended not to notice. It was actually easy because there was so much to look at: the historic mansions, the moss-draped trees, the horse-drawn carriages pulling noisy tourists through the streets. I looked for black bolts on the outside of houses, the telltale sign that the structure had been damaged in the earthquake of 1886 but had survived. There was something amazing about those homes, I thought, that they had been strong enough to survive devastation and were still standing today. “It’s so beautiful here,” I sighed.

Annalise adjusted her bikini top. “Yeah? I forget. I guess I’m used to it, though.”

I didn’t think I would ever get used to living in a town like this, and I’d lived in a lot of places. Any time my parents received funding for one of their documentaries we picked up and moved, sometimes for just a few weeks. The place we had lived the longest was England, when I was four and Annalise was eight. Our parents spent a year researching ancient castles. I don’t remember much about the trip, but my parents liked to tell stories about how Annalise and I climbed up dark towers and napped in basement torture chambers. Not exactly a typical childhood. Of course, we didn’t have typical parents.

Mom and Dad met just after college. They’d both studied psychology at Ivy League schools and were attending a national conference when they bumped into each other—literally, Mom claims—outside a lecture about parapsychology. Neither one believed in ghosts or hauntings or telepathy or anything else about the field, but they were interested in one aspect: disproving it. Within a year, they’d married and had set about debunking some of the world’s most famous ghost stories, from wailing women in hotel hallways to confused Civil War soldiers roaming empty fields. They cowrote a book, Ghost of a Chance, explaining the scientific causes of most “hauntings.” Their careers took off, and soon they were being recognized as the world’s foremost ghost debunkers. Then, when my mother was three months pregnant with me, something happened.

They were filming one of their documentaries inside an abandoned insane asylum. Dad was repositioning a camera when he felt something brush past his leg. When he looked down, he didn’t see anything, but later, when he checked the tape on his thermal camera, it showed a small figure, about three feet tall, sliding past him. When Dad checked the sound readings and matched them to the exact time he felt something against his leg, a clear voice could be heard saying, “Pardon me.”

I guess everything changed after that. It was the one thing my parents couldn’t explain. Dad became obsessed with EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomena. They’re sounds that are too low for a person to hear but can be picked up by recording devices. He found natural causes for some of them, like local radio interference, and proved many to be hoaxes, but he could never fully explain what had happened to him at the asylum that day.

Dad once told me that the trick is not to prove something is real, but to prove that it is not real. My parents spent their lives trying to prove things were not real, and for the most part, they were successful. Very successful, judging by their book sales and TV deals. But I wondered sometimes if what they really wanted was to believe beyond a doubt, to have a clear and absolute answer to the question of what happens after a person dies. Personally, I didn’t think I wanted to know because there was nothing you could do to change it, but I could understand how the question consumed people.

By the time Annalise and I found the restaurant our parents were investigating, I was starving and my forehead felt slick with sweat. All I wanted was some lunch and a blast of air-conditioning. When I opened the door to the Courtyard Café, I instantly knew I’d get neither.

Inside the restaurant it was dark and stuffy. A few ceiling fans churned the thick air slowly, creating only a hot breeze. All the tables had been pushed against one wall, with the chairs stacked at the other end. I knew most of the crew and guessed the rest of the crowd consisted of employees waiting for something to happen.

“Girls! Thank goodness you’re here.” Mom rushed toward us. She was wearing her work clothes: a pair of khaki pants and a black T-shirt. “We’re way behind schedule,” Mom said to Annalise. “The owner is getting frustrated and we’ve had absolutely no readings today.” Mom lowered her voice and nodded in the direction of a dark-haired woman standing in the corner. She was wearing a long apron with “Mrs. Paul” stitched across the front. “She claims this place has a green lady.” Mom smirked. “Right.”

Mom didn’t believe in apparitions of any kind. She said people thought they saw something, and their brains tried to connect it to the familiar, and that in twenty years of research she’d never once confirmed an actual, stereotypical ghost.

Annalise smiled. “I’m here for whatever you need.”

“Me, too,” I chimed in. “Could I just grab some lunch first?”

Mom glanced at me. “No time. We’ll go out to dinner later, though, okay? Great. You know where the sound equipment is, hon.”

I trudged away to locate the boom mic while Annalise pulled a black T-shirt over her bikini top and got ready to serve as the day’s chum. Everyone on the team wore a black shirt because it made it easier for the cameras to pick up light around a person. I was wearing a white cover-up over my bathing suit, but it didn’t matter too much—the sound person always stood behind everyone else.

Dad came into the room and clapped his hands together. “Attention, please!” he said. “We’re going to be moving into the next room. We’ll set up and start rolling.”

He saw me across the room and waved. I tried to wave back, but I was holding the boom mic and accidentally knocked Shane, our main camera guy, on the head.

“Watch it,” he snapped, but when he saw it was me, he smiled. “Oh, hey, kid. Filling in?”

“Unfortunately.” I sighed.

Shane had been with us for so long we considered him to be family. He was thirty, stocky and a devoted fan of low-budget horror movies. He was trying to film his own slasher flick when he met my parents, who promised him a steady paycheck and strange adventures, so he stayed with us instead of running off to Hollywood. Shane was the only crew member who had been with us since the beginning. Most people stayed with us for a project or two, then settled down somewhere like normal people. Shane was like us—definitely not normal.

We all moved as one slow, sweaty herd into the adjoining room. As in the front room, all the tables and chairs had been stacked against the walls and the drapes had been pulled shut to make it darker. It took a second for me to register, but the room was much cooler than the first one. In fact, it was downright cold. Within minutes I had goosebumps.

“Do you have a sweatshirt I could borrow?” I whispered to Annalise.

She gave me a funny look. “There’s one in my beach bag.” She went to the corner of the room and came back holding a pink sweater. “Try this. It’s long on me, so it just might fit you.”

I carefully set the heavy equipment down and pulled on the sweater. It was a little short but it fit, and I began to feel slightly warmer.

Dad asked everyone to quiet down and get ready. Then he had Annalise stand in the middle of the room. After checking all the cameras twice, he gave her the signal to start talking.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was confident and friendly, as if she was simply introducing herself at a crowded party. “My name is Annalise and I’m wondering if anyone is here with us today.”

One camera focused on Annalise while one stayed on my parents and the rest of the team. They held up their heat-sensing monitors and EMF (Electro Magnetic Field) readers while I positioned the microphone above their heads.

“Okay, we’re getting something,” Mom said. “It’s faint, but it definitely wasn’t here last night.”

I felt my nose begin to tickle and knew a sneeze was coming on. I tried to hold my breath.

“Keep talking,” Dad instructed. “I think it’s working.”

Annalise kept up her conversational tone, asking simple questions and then waiting a moment as if she expected an answer. My sneeze was building, I could feel it. I tried not to, but just as Annalise asked again if anyone was present, it happened. I sneezed so loudly that half the team jumped, startled, and the sound echoed off the walls. Dad shot me a disapproving look while a few people tried not to giggle.

“Sorry,” I said, loud enough for the entire room to hear. “My bad.”

“Charlotte, please, if you could just—” Mom was cut off by sudden activity on all the readers. “Wait a minute. We’re getting something.”

I could see the lights of the equipment dancing wildly. It was rare to get so much activity so quickly. My parents were smiling and everyone seemed excited.

Everyone but Annalise.

“Um, guys? Something feels weird.” She looked around the room and grimaced.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know, but something’s not right.”

“Just a few more minutes, okay?”

I was watching my parents so I knew where to position the mic, but I was also keeping an eye on Annalise. Her open, casual demeanor was gone, and her patient smile had been replaced with a slight trembling, as if she was cold and scared at the same time. I had never seen her frightened before. In fact, I’d never seen anyone in my family scared. We were all rational, logical people who knew that a simple scientific reason was waiting to be discovered behind nearly everything. Something was causing massive activity in the room, but my parents would figure out what it was once they had collected all their data. Annalise had done this enough times to know that. But she was obviously freaked out. She shook her head and looked down.

“Please? I want to leave.”

Dad was gazing at his EMF reader. “One more minute, hon.”

Annalise swallowed. “I can’t. I can’t stay here one more minute. I’m done.”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “Sure, of course. You can go. We’ve got enough,” Dad said, but he furrowed his brow. I knew he wanted as much recording time as he could get.

Mom walked over to me. “Go with her,” she whispered. “I can take the mic.”

I followed Annalise into the main dining area. She sat on the floor and covered her face with her hands. I sat next to her.

“You okay?”

She shook her head. “It was so strange, Charlotte,” she whispered. “I mean, I was fine, and then suddenly I felt so—so sad.”

I rubbed her shoulder. “How do you feel now?”

She sniffed and looked up. Her eyes were slightly red. “Better, actually.” She looked at me. “The second I left that room I felt a little better. I have goosebumps, though.”

I pulled off the pink sweater she’d let me borrow. “Here. I stretched it out for you.”

She laughed. “Thanks.” She looked past me, toward the other room. “Did you feel anything? I mean, besides that you were cold?”

“No. And the cold I felt, well, that was just the room.”

Annalise frowned. “But the room was warm. Hot, actually.”

I thought my sister was out of sorts and I didn’t want to disagree with her about temperature. We both knew that feeling cold was often a sign of paranormal energy, but we also knew that sometimes it was just that—cold. People often read too much into it.

Within a few minutes the team finished up, and we all helped put the tables and chairs back the way they had been, thanked Mrs. Paul for her time and headed out for a late lunch. Annalise remained quiet for most of the afternoon, and I tried to reassure her that everything was fine.

“Just think,” I said. “You’ll never have to step foot inside that place again.”

I didn’t know it then, but I was dead wrong.

two

It’s all about energy. That’s what my parents say, at least. The theory that drives them, the single idea that makes their career possible, is that ghosts do not exist but energy does. The way Dad explained it to me when I was little is still the way I like to imagine it. I had been having a hard time sleeping in the house we were renting at the time because I could hear footsteps pacing outside my door. Dad came in and sat on my bed.

“Think of time as an ocean,” he said, smoothing my hair. “And think of yourself as a small stone tossed into that ocean. What happens when you throw a stone into water?”

“It sinks?” I wanted Dad to stay as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to listen to the footsteps alone.

“Well, yes. But it also creates tiny ripples on the surface, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Dad’s theory was that some people created greater ripples than others. Their energy, he said, echoed long after they’d died. At first, he believed that only strong or intense emotions lingered, which was why places where a death had occurred seemed haunted. But then Mom discovered something that changed his mind.

Mom met Edith, a woman who lived down the street. Edith claimed that an evil spirit was trying to force her out of her home. “It grabs my feet at night,” she said. “It tries to pull me out of my bed.”

Edith was nearly hysterical. She’d been living in the house for only a few months and she didn’t want to move, but the paranormal activity occurred every week, and she couldn’t take much more. My parents investigated and noticed some strange readings in the master bedroom. While Dad spent a week at the house, Mom contacted the former owners, who had lived there for over thirty years before retiring to Florida. They’d never had a problem with anything strange, they said. Their daughter, now in her forties, still lived in town, and Mom invited her to the house one day.

“I loved this place,” the woman said. “My family was so happy here.”

Mom didn’t tell the woman what had been happening, only that she was researching the history of the house. When they walked into the master bedroom, the woman told Mom how she used to wake up her parents every Sunday morning by running into their room.

“I’d grab their feet,” she said. “I’d try to pull them out of bed so they’d get up and make me pancakes.”

The revelation changed the way my parents looked at their research. They’d been working under the assumption that only people who died left behind energy, usually after a single powerful event. Now they realized that perhaps simple repetition could also leave an imprint. It explained doors opening, or the sound of footsteps. Their new goal was to determine what triggered such energy. Why didn’t Edith feel the pull at her feet every single night or only on Sundays? They never figured it out completely, but they did introduce Edith to the woman and explained the story and their theory. The solution was actually easy: Edith moved her bed, and the tugging stopped. My parents reasoned that the trigger was the position of the bed because Edith had placed it in exactly the same spot as the previous owners.

“The truth is that the paranormal is normal. It’s just a normal we don’t understand yet,” Dad liked to say.

I thought about Edith’s story as my parents continued to investigate Charleston. They would spend a week at a place, filming in both the daytime and at night to get the best possible results. They tried to coax Annalise into returning to the Courtyard Café, but she refused. Mom and Dad backed off, but I knew they were just waiting, hoping that she would change her mind before the end of the summer.

Annalise and I spent the next few weeks of our vacation going to the beach or taking walking tours of the historic downtown. She didn’t talk about what had happened and I didn’t ask. I hated to see her so quiet, though. She wasn’t simply my sister—she was my friend. We’d spent our lives moving from place to place and, besides my parents and Shane, Annalise was the only truly constant person in my life. Despite the fact that I sometimes felt overshadowed by her beauty and the attention she received, I was closer to her than anyone. I had missed her terribly when she left for school, and I knew I would miss her even more after the summer ended and we moved to our next destination while she began her junior year of college.