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with my familiar green and blue friends from my earlier experiences; the green and blue lights mated
with one another like partners of two different species, merging, melting into one another, reforming,
dissolving, and dying away, then reappearing before my mesmerized eyes.
"You seem to get around," I remarked, for the first time clearly associating these lights with Lona's
presence. In the past, the lights had always appeared when I thought of her, and now the process was
working the other way around; when I saw the lights behind my closed eyelids, I automatically,
instinctively, thought of her.
I was immediately filled with a strong chill.
Susan flipped through a magazine by my side, but it was nice to have this extra, inner company. I
remarked to my lights that they must feel at home in a plane, and there was another faint response, a
chill that began in my toes and slowly worked its way up to my head, like a small breaker sliding over
the shores of my senses.
I thought about Lona outside the plane, plummeting down toward the ground, and found it possible
now to imagine the thrill that must be involved in skydiving - the earth spread out before one's gaze
like an immense patchwork quilt, the clouds flying by like swatches of a dream, the air silent and crisp
with blueness.
"It must be beautiful," I observed, and the chills returned.
I felt like someone who has invited guests to his home and finds them so agreeable that he invites
them to stay; but the sensations were more reassuring than exciting. I found myself being lulled into a
pleasant, warm sleep and allowed myself to drift along the tropic river.
When I awoke a few miles north of Columbia, it seemed that I might easily have imagined the entire
experience. The impressions had been so delicate, so tender, that even when they were most vivid, I
was being anesthetized, convinced of the unreality of them. I got off the plane thinking that it had
been a beautiful and particularly compelling daydream, but a dream none the less.
If Lona still existed in some unexplained fashion, I was sure that she had no desire to visit Columbia,
South Carolina. It might well be a beautiful city, I thought, but ghosts were supposed to stay near the
scene of their death, or to linger around those they loved. I could imagine Lona stopping by my home
on occasion in order to look in on her daughters, but couldn't believe that she cared enough about me
to make an eighteen-hundred-mile trip. I was convinced that if there was such a thing as a spirit with
Lona's name tag on it, I'd left it safely behind in Massachusetts.
I hoped that Julie wouldn't have any unpleasant encounters with it while I was gone, but secretly
savored the notion of at least being on my own - no kids, no wife, no spirits of ex-wives to plague my
steps, to monitor my moves, to tell me what they needed when all I needed was a good rest.
The trip seemed to live up to my fondest expectations. Susan and I drove on to Florence, a small,
largely rural community in the southeast part of the state where our two murderers had originally
come from, and began to run down their friends and relatives and enemies, both legal and personal;
we were very lucky, and found most of them anxious to talk to us about the mother and her son. The
days passed by without incident, and I realized that my search for Lona was finally over. I'd returned
to the heart of my existence, to the safe sanity of journalism, and felt a million times better for it. No
more playing with the paranormal; now it was business as usual, and I was grateful for it.
I called Julie and the girls every other night, and everything seemed to be fine in Massachusetts as
well. My grandmother was visiting at the time, and kept Julie company in the evenings after the girls
were in bed; I was glad that Julie had someone to rely on in an emergency.
When I phoned on the evening of September 16, six days after I'd left, Julie was nearly hysterical. She
said that for the past few days strange things had been happening in the house that she was unable to
explain. She had taken a nap one afternoon, and awakened to find the bed shaking beneath her; she
was petrified and afraid to move, but tried to rationalize the experience away as either a minor earth
tremor or the shock of a passing truck. Then she had realized with some anguish that nothing else was
vibrating. The walls and windows, the framed pictures that hung beside the bed, and the other
furniture in the bedroom were all completely still; it was only the bed that was vibrating.
I immediately thought of the night that I'd lain in that bed, and been convinced that my body was
vibrating, only to discover that it wasn't, that I was experiencing something that wasn't reality. It
seemed that the same thing had happened to Julie, but she seemed to believe that the bed really had
been shaking epileptically; she had been too terrified to move, had clutched at the bed as though she
were on a raft in a storm-tossed ocean, and had finally drifted off into a fitful sleep.
Instead of reminding Julie of my own experience, I told her that I was sure that it had been a passing
truck and that, because of the way the house was constructed, the bed might shake while other
portions of the room remained still; it was a completely implausible explanation, but one that I hoped
would reassure her.
She also noted that while we were talking on the telephone, the hair on the back of her head was
standing up on end like that of a frightened cat, and that she was feeling faint chills; I suggested that
she shut the windows.
I knew that Julie wasn't inventing phenomena for my entertainment. What I'd felt had frightened her to
death, and she wanted absolutely no part of it. She didn't want to see it happen to me, let alone have it
happen to her. If she was sensing things were out of place in her home, that somehow the psychic or
emotional furniture was being arranged, I'd bet money that she was right; Julie had been an excellent
reporter, and I'd never had reason to doubt her ability or her veracity. I hung up the phone, wanting to
be with her, to take her in my arms and comfort her with the warmth of my body, but realized that
there was still enough work to require three or four days of digging. I fell asleep, regretting for the
first time that I was lying in a motel room in Florence rather than in my bedroom at home.
Julie and I loved each other deeply, and this was always apparent in moments of need. We gravitated
toward each other during a crisis like a fireman gravitates toward a hose. We might not have patched
every flaw in our marriage, but the foundation was strong and deep; I had no doubts that the marriage
would survive, merely wondered how many scars it would take to resolve our differences.
I drifted off into sleep quickly, easily, tired from the day's activities, and was soon engrossed hi a
series of lifelike dreams. Each of the dreams began in the motel room; I awoke and saw something
unusual happening, was startled by it, but fell back asleep, only to awake once more and find myself
confronting yet another abnormal situation. Finally, though, at about three in the morning, I really
awoke, and found myself lying on my back staring at the pale-gray ceiling.
The air conditioner groaned away beneath the windows - a detail that was missing from my dreams -
and in the bathroom a leaky faucet played a drum solo on the bottom of the sink. I glanced around the
room, saw the furniture sitting opposite me, the lone print on the wall; everything was exactly as it had
been when I'd climbed into bed.
I rolled over, clutching my pillow to my chest, and tried to go back to sleep, but found myself wide
awake and still suspicious of my surroundings, as though a thief had sneaked into the room and was
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