Free The Awakening by Marley Gibson Page B

so detailed, with gun straps and buttons and everything. Celia, it was sooooo real.
They
were real."
    "You know, I've heard of things like this."
    "Things like what?"
    "Seeing ghosts like that."
    She said the
g
word out loud. "Now, Celia, wait—"
    Her eyes grow wide. "No, seriously!"
    Borrrrrwwwwwhhhh!
Seamus pipes up.
    "Oh, you too?"
    I run my hands through my hair that's messier than anything. "There's got to be a more logical explanation." As soon as I voice the words, I know I don't even believe them myself.
    "Look, Mr. Spock. Logic aside..." Celia rubs her chin with her hand, obviously in deep thought. "It's simple. They had to be ghosts, Kendall. And you saw them clear as day! That is the coolest thing ever. I've lived in Radisson my entire life and I've never had a sighting like that, not for lack of trying or staring out the window with night-vision goggles on hoping to pick up a spectral or a—"
    "Celia. Focus." I'm going to need some serious psychotropic medication now.
    "I
am
focusing," she snaps at me. She pulls up Wikipedia on her desktop computer—her room looks like Circuit City, with a wide-screen plasma TV, two computers, a laptop, a stereo, a Wii, and a DVD player—and continues with her ghost theory. "I think you experienced a residual haunting."
    "A what?"
    "Here."
    Intrigued, I move off the bed and cross to her desk. I read the Web page over her shoulder. "'A residual haunting is thought by some to be a replayed haunting in which no intelligent ghost, spirit, or other entity is directly involved. Much like a videotape, residual hauntings are playbacks of auditory, visual, olfactory, and other sensory phenomena that are attributed to a traumatic, life-altering, or common event of a person or place, like an echo of past events.'" Whoa. That's heavy. "So let me get this straight," I say, standing tall. "I'm not seeing real ghosts, just the memory of something that may have happened, like, a hundred and fifty years ago?"
    "Something like that," she says. "Think of it as an eternal video replay."
    Great, the headache's back. Only this time, it's clearly caused by my tension.
    Celia reaches for a large atlas from the shelf above her computer. She pulls it down and flips through the pages to one particular map.
    She stabs her finger on the book. "See. Look." She's previously marked a path on the map of Georgia, making a yellow-highlighter line from Atlanta all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. "This," she says, "is Sherman's March to the Sea."
    "Oh my God, Celia. You're such a dork."
    She waggles her finger at me. "
History buff
is the politically correct term."
    I elbow her and laugh, trying to make light of the situation. "Whatever, dudette."
    She points to the small dot on the map that indicates my new place of residence. "Look. Right here is Radisson." Grabbing a magnifying glass from her top drawer, Celia zooms in on the town and the specific path of the Union soldiers all those years ago. "This is where the Union soldiers are known to have marched through Georgia. Here is the Spry River. It gets really narrow outside the Radisson city limits and turns into nothing more than a stream that's shallow and flows through here—where the cemetery is."
    "That's literally right where I saw them!"
    Celia claps her hands together. "Hot damn!"
    "What?"
    She grabs my shoulders and squeezes. "Kendall, don't you get it?You saw
actual
spectral evidence. I would
kill
to see that."
    I don't exactly fear for my life here in Celia Nichols's room. However, the reality of all of this hits me like a right hook in the face from Rocky Balboa. "It's all true," I say, my throat tightening around the words. "Everything she said about me is true."
    "She
who
said? What's true?" Celia asks. Exuberance is written all over her face. She's into all of this stuff, so she'll understand if I tell her, won't she?
    Can I trust Celia with this info? I have to or else I
will
go mad. So I start dishing the 411 from Loreen