Page 50 of Middle of the Night

There are also the baseballs to consider. No one else knew about them. Yes, Ragesh does now, but he didn’t until I told him after the first one appeared in the yard. Before that, the only people aware of their existence—and their meaning—were me and Billy.

Then there’s the unnerving fact that one ball had been placed unnoticedwhile I stood there. How could I not see someone enter the yard and drop a ball there? How was that even possible?

I picture the way Vance Wallace looked an hour ago as he stood in my backyard. Not only confused and disheveled, but something else. Something more troublesome. He looked haunted—a fact made worse by what he mumbled to me.

I saw him. I followed him here. He’s back.

Despite Ashley’s assurances that it’s the disease slowly eating away at her father’s mind, I can’t help but think something else is at work here. Something too strange and scary to be real.

I stop again, this time in front of the former Barringer residence, reminded of the trail cam. It had sent three alerts to my phone earlier tonight. The first was an opossum. The third was Mr. Wallace, led into my yard by someone he claimed to be Billy.

Between them was another picture. One I never bothered to check—a regrettable choice because it might show me who Vance Wallace followed into the yard.

I dig the phone from my pocket and open the trail cam app, which still displays the befuddled form of Mr. Wallace standing in the yard, his gaze aimed at the trees. The image makes my heart thud dully in my chest. Whatever he was looking at could be in the previous picture.

My finger starts to tremble as I resume swiping it across the phone’sscreen. And when I check the picture on the app, it’s through eyes half closed in an anxious squint.

Not that there’s cause for any of it. Because the image transmitted from the trail cam shows…nothing. Just the gray-green lawn spreading to the woods and the thicket of trees beyond it.

I keep scanning the image, searching for what triggered the trail cam. But I can’t find anything that could have done it. There are no animals to be seen. Not a night bird or a large bug or even a falling leaf.

I’m about to close the app when I spot something at the forest’s edge, faintly visible among the trees.

A shadow.

A human-shaped one.

Which doesn’t mean it’s really a person there. For all I know, it’s always there, cast by the slant of moonlight through the trees. I swipe between the three pictures the trail cam took within a couple minutes of each other. The shadow only exists in the picture showing the empty lawn, destroying my theory that it’s a consistent thing.

Whatever this is, itmoved.

I bring the phone closer to my face, trying to see if it might be an animal standing on the cusp of the yard. A deer, most likely. Although the shadow is barely distinguishable from the rest of the night-shrouded woods, I can still make out its general shape. Head, neck, rounded shoulders.

This is no deer.

It’s a person.

A short one, from the looks of it. Based on the nearby trees, I estimate the shadow to be about four and a half feet tall. About the height of a child. But not just any child. I’m struck by a memory of being in the fourth grade and learning about weights and measures. Our teacher, Mr. Richardson, lined all of us up against the wall to see how tall we were. My height then was four and a half feet.

So was Billy’s.

I hurry the rest of the way home, my sneakers scuffing the sidewalk. Inside, I head upstairs, not stopping until I reach the door to my old bedroom. I can’t remember the last time I set foot inside. Just like the backyard, I’ve avoided the bedroom for years, for all the same reasons. Too many memories. Ones I’d love to forget. It takes all the effort I can muster to twist the handle and open the door. Once I do, I cautiously peer inside, as if my younger self is waiting for me there.

Stepping inside feels like being hurtled to the past in a time machine. Nearly everything about the room is the same as it was when I was ten. Same wallpaper of cowboys, horses, and pines that I picked out during a weird Western phase when I was six. Same twin bed. Same desk by the window where I’d look out onto the backyard instead of doing homework.

And the same bookshelf.

It fills the wall opposite the bed, still as tall as I remember. When I was young, I needed a step stool to reach the top shelf. Now, no stool is required, but it’s still a stretch.

The book I’m looking for is easy to find. It’s the one with its spine facing inward. I pull it down, wipe away what seems like a half inch of dust, and examine the cover.

The Giant Book of Ghosts, Spirits, and Other Spooks.

I sit at my desk, filling a chair built for someone thirty years younger, and open the book. Inside are page after page of vibrant illustrations. Some of them have been circled in pencil, presumably by Billy.

I leaf through the book, noting how it’s been organized alphabetically, starting with Amadlozi, figures from African folklore, and ending with Zuijin, Japanese spirits that are said to guard the gates of shrines.

I flip back and forth among the pages, encountering revenants and wraiths and a standard apparition dressed in old-timey clothes and surrounded by a bluish-green glow right out ofScooby-Doo.

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