Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz
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been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.
Leaving the last few bites of the meal on her plate, she went into the living room, where the gas fireplace featured an electronic ignition; she switched it on with a remote control. Hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans, she stood at the hearth, basking in the heat, staring into the blue-and-yellow flames that leaped around the ceramic logs. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire, and that was a good thing.
When the shakes passed, she decided to walk to the park along Ocean Avenue and sit on the bench at Inspiration Point, even if the fog still largely obscured the Pacific. The sea always calmed her, even just the scent of it and the soothing sound of waves dashing against rocks and splashing across the sand. But as she stepped onto the front porch, even before she pulled the door shut, an unexpected flood of tears spilled from her. She was not a girl who wept in front of others, and she retreated into the bungalow.
She didn’t wish to understand this bitter emotion any more than she had cared to analyze the cause of her shaking. She wanted only to stop crying, to shut off the flow before it might wash into view a reason for this grief, if it was grief, or this dread, if it was dread. When she realized that the tears might be as persistent as the shakes, she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.
Although her mother thought that Bibi had stayed up all night reading The Secret War in the Garden, which was the third young-adult novel in a beloved fantasy series, she had not yet begun the story. Now she snatched the book off her nightstand, hurried with it to the living room, switched on a floor lamp, dropped into an armchair, and sought refuge in the tale: The first rumors of war came from the field mice, who traveled daily between the garden behind the Jensen house and the world below, which was far larger than our world and still unknown to most people, though known to certain children.
At first, as Bibi read, she wiped her tear-streaked face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Soon, however, the blurred print became clear, and her eyes stopped sabotaging storytime.
And so it was that hour by hour, day by day, she moved away from the disturbing knowledge that she needed to put behind her. The eerie and unsettling experience in the attic became about nothing more than an apparition or hallucination. She rejected the revelation that had been part of the incident, cut it from the cloth of memory and sewed shut the hole it left—or thought she did.
She read books and wrote stories about Jasper, a black-and-gray dog who had been abandoned by his owner and sought a new home along the coast of California. A couple of weeks later, when a golden retriever came to her out of the rain, she kept him and named him Olaf. As kids do, she made a confidant of her dog and told him all her secrets—as she knew them. She told him about Captain, how wonderful he had been. She told Olaf that the apartment above the garage was an evil place, but she didn’t tell him why.
BIBI HAD FOLDED THE PAJAMAS AND THE ROBE into her drawstring bag and had donned the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing when Nancy had brought her to the hospital. This was an expression of confidence in her belief that the brain cancer had gone into remission, that the glioma hadn’t merely shrunk but had vanished.
When Dr. Sanjay Chandra entered the room, Bibi was pacing not to work off a bad case of nerves, but with impatience to get back into the world and reclaim her life. He halted at the sight of her, and his expression was so solemn that something caught in her throat, as if she had tried to swallow a large bite of meat without chewing it, though she hadn’t eaten anything.
What appeared to be solemnity, or even distress at the news he had to deliver, proved to be awe. “Nothing in my years of practice, nothing in my life, has prepared me for this. I’m not able to explain it, Bibi. It’s not possible, but you are entirely free of cancer.”
The previous day, Nancy had said that Dr. Chandra reminded her of Cookie, the gingerbread cookie that had come to life in an old children’s book that she had shared when Bibi was five years old. The resemblance owed more to Nancy’s sense of whimsy than to fact, and it certainly wasn’t so pronounced that some snarky magazine would pair Dr. Chandra’s and Cookie’s photographs in a “Separated at Birth” feature. However, everything about the physician—his boyish face, chocolate-drop eyes, musical voice, humility, and charm—made her want to like him. Upon his confirmation of remission, she loved the man. She flew to him like a child into the arms of an adored father.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she gushed, exhilarated even as she was embarrassed by her exhilaration.
He returned her embrace and then held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, smiling broadly and shaking his head slowly, as if marveling at her. “The first diagnosis was not mistaken. You did have gliomatosis cerebri.”
“I’m sure I did. I know I did.”
“Other tumors can break down and be absorbed, and the remission can be surprisingly quick. It’s not common, but it does occur. Except with this cancer. Never with this hateful thing. I’ll want to see you for follow-up. Quite a lot of follow-up.”
“Of course.”
“Oncologists specializing in gliomas will want to study you.”
“Study me? I don’t know about that. I don’t think so.”
“What is it about you that made the impossible possible? Is it genetic? A quirk in your body chemistry? A higher-functioning immune system? Studying you might save uncountable lives.”
She felt irresponsible for having shied from the prospect of being studied. “Well, if you put it that way …”
“I do. I put it that way.” He released her shoulders. His happy expression was infused with wonder again. “Yesterday, when I said you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d go home today.”
The Poison-Ivy Itch of Intuition
BECAUSE NANCY AND MURPHY WERE COMING FOR a long visit at four o’clock, Bibi hadn’t called to tell them what had happened in the night or that her death sentence had been miraculously commuted. Although she’d known that her health had been restored, she hadn’t wanted to pop the champagne cork with them, figuratively speaking, until she had Dr. Chandra’s confirmation. Besides, she wanted to see their surprise, their disbelief, their joy when they walked through the door and saw her in street clothes, her former glow restored.
Fifteen minutes before Bibi’s parents were due, Chubb Coy, chief of security, peered through the open door. His pale-blue shirt with epaulets looked fresh, and his dark-blue slacks still held a sharp crease. He said, “Got a minute?”
Rising from a chair by the window, Bibi said, “Suddenly, I have millions of minutes.”
Failing to match her