The Urban Fantasy Anthology by Peter S.; Peter S. Beagle; Joe R. Lansdale Beagle Read Free Book Online Page A

pictures of a happy child growing into a happy young woman over the years, always holding trophies, smiling at the camera.
    She wasn’t in the last picture. That photo was of a car, crumpled up against the side of an apartment building, under a headline that read “Drunk Driver Kills Redding High Student.” The date on the clipping was over thirty years old.
    “Come sit with Mama,” the old lady said.
    I crossed the room and sat cross-legged on the bed. When she reached out her hand, I let her take mine. I closed my fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.
    “I’ve missed you so much,” she said.
    She went on, but I soon stopped listening. It was much more interesting to look at her because, even though she was sitting up and talking, her eyes open as though she was awake, I realized that she was actually still asleep.
    Humans can do this.
    They can talk in their sleep. They can go walking right out of their houses, sometimes. They can do all sorts of things and never remember it in the morning.
    Zia and I once spent days watching a woman who was convinced she had fairies in her house, cleaning everything up after she’d gone to bed. Except she was the one who got up in her sleep and tidied and cleaned before slipping back under the covers. To show her appreciation to the fairies, she left a saucer of cream on the back steps—that the local cats certainly appreciated—along with biscuits or cookies or pieces of cake. We ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn’t help her with her cleaning. That would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the fact that we weren’t fairies at all.
    After a while the old woman holding my hand stopped talking and lay back down again. I let go of her hand and tucked it under the covers.
    It was a funny room that she slept in. It was full of memories, but none of them were new, or very happy. They made the room feel musty and empty, even though she used it every day. It made me wonder why people hung on to memories if they just made them sad.
    I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got off the bed.
    When I came back to the living room, there was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.
    Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.
    “Who are you?” I asked.
    He seemed surprised that I could see him, but made a quick recovery. “Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the other child.”
    “The other…”
    “Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”
    There didn’t seem much I could add to that, so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”
    “Why not?”
    I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial enough, for one thing.”
    “That’s true. Normally, people can’t even see me, never mind talk to me.”
    “And for another,” I went on, “you’re usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any fun.”
    He didn’t argue the point.
    “Well, I know why I’m here,” he said, “haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing here?”
    “I like visiting in other people’s houses. I like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they were mine.”
    I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.
    “So you were brother and sister?” I asked.
    He nodded.
    “Does she ever come back here?”
    He laughed, but without any mirth. “Are you kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any school club and sports team that would have her? She’d do anything to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that she couldn’t fart without first asking for permission.”
    “But you’re