Free I Will Come for You by Suzanne Phillips Page A

pales in comparison. But as he turns away from the window, he catches his reflection in the glass, and beyond it a flash, a ripple of white that could have been a sheet hung out to dry, lifting in the wind, except they have a dryer. Isaac steps closer to the door, until his nose is almost pressed to the glass, and watches the flurry of white draw closer.
    It’s not a ghost. It has the levity and the transparency of a spirit, but Isaac has never seen a ghost. Not ever. When the dying draw their last breath, when they let go of this world, they do it quietly. They are simply gone and what remains is a loneliness that is so much more than what even Isaac feels in his mother’s absence. He knows they are gone. They are not waiting around for the right moment to spook someone.
    Isaac flips the switch for the outside light and the darkness is instantly pushed back. A man is standing in the backyard, as casually as if he’s waiting for a bus. His hands are pushed into the front pockets of his jeans; his down vest is buttoned against the cold and as the wind stirs, the guy’s white hair lifts, waves like a flag.
    As though taking the light as an invitation, the man treads across the grass, mounts the cedar steps and crosses the deck to the back door. Isaac’s breath fogs the glass. He wipes at it but doesn’t take his eyes off the man, who is familiar in a way Isaac doesn’t yet understand.
    This isn’t good. Isaac is responding to the energy the man gives off, which is not the bright, clean light of someone who is led by an open heart; he’s responding to the steady, almost hypnotic gaze of the man who stops in front of Isaac and places his hand against the glass, where Isaac’s hand wipes at the cool vapor. What Isaac didn’t clear away evaporates. Heat seeps through the glass and touches Isaac’s palm like a flame.
    Isaac snatches his hand away and the man’s lips pull back in a smile that is full of discovery.
    “Yes,” the man whispers. ”This is right.”
    He looks into Isaac’s eyes, holding him within the intensity of his gaze. And it feels like a prison.
    “What role do you play in all this, Isaac Marquette?”
    Did he say the words? Or did he put them in Isaac’s mind? He doesn’t remember the man’s lips moving beyond the knowing smile. It’s his eyes. They’re distracting and seem to pull Isaac closer with a sensation of moving through the paned glass as easily as if he was a ghost. Moving until he thinks he could be pulled into those eyes and lost.
    Isaac forces himself to look away. He steps back from the door, wonders if this man can move beyond the glass his way. Enter the house without an open door.
    “Who are you?”
    “Not the devil, but don’t take my word for it.”
    From the corner of his eye, Isaac watches the man shift on his feet. A hand falls loose from his pocket, rises and taps against the glass.
    “Sorry about that, Isaac. I don’t usually use the voodoo on someone I’ve just met. But then, you have a few tricks yourself, don’t you? I wonder what they are?”
    Isaac says nothing. He concentrates his energy on trying to get a deeper feel for him. Evil, the way it fell off the man in Ms. Iverson’s house, isn’t present here. But neither is the light he’s seen in children, in Mr. Frik, who lives next door; in the good among them. That’s one of the tricks Isaac has up his sleeve. He can see, sometimes, if a person is good or bad.
    The man knocks again. “Are you going to let me in?”
    “No.” And to make himself perfectly clear, because in some of the reading Isaac did
    on the supernatural he came across what seemed like fairy tales to him at the time but what may have been based on a kernel of truth: that some spirits can only enter a home with permission, he states it again, “You’re not invited in. You’re not welcome here.”
    The man laughs, softly. Isaac can tell he’s amused, not chiding him.
    “Don’t put your life into those old tales, Isaac. If someone