Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,17

memory of the days I had lived as her. I owed her my protection and loyalty now.

The girl jumped at the sound of the doorbell. What was about to happen both thrilled and worried me. I had seen part of what was coming already. Forgetting the obvious, I reached for a towel to wrap around her, but my fingers passed through the cloth. I’d imagined exactly how to protect her, fashioned a detailed plan in my mind as I traveled back to earth. How could I help if I couldn’t even make the towel tremble when I swiped at it?

Jenny was about to be thrown into great difficulties, all my doing, all while her spirit had been away on some mysterious adventure I knew nothing about.

Watching her cower in that porcelain coffin brought me back to my last day as one of the Quick. And that’s where every ghost story begins, with a death.

I didn’t know I was about to die, of course, but even so, my last day held a strange undercurrent that began with first light. The air smelled familiar, although I couldn’t place the scent. I was sitting in the rocker, holding my sleeping baby, as the sun rose with an ominous hue. I wondered if a neighboring farm was on fire, but I smelled no smoke and I’d heard no warning bells or cries for help.

My husband walked past us, displeased with me, as usual, because he thought my answering our daughter’s cries in the night would spoil her. But his coldness toward her made me want to comfort her more. If I could have climbed into her cradle, I would’ve made it my nightly refuge—we were each other’s favorite and only companions.

On my last day, I knew something was not right. Something was approaching—either dangerous, like a storm, or wonderful, like a gift by post. Or better, a sea voyage, an adventure to rival the novels I read again and again. The excitement that was hiding behind the foreboding sunrise, the possibility of a marvelous change, some new opportunity, was the only reason I agreed when my husband said he would be away from home all day. We didn’t need protecting, so I thought.

As I baked the morning biscuits, the screen door creaked but did not open, dust devils danced at the foot of the porch, and the light became more and more queer. The air was thick and yellowed. As my husband walked out of the house, I looked out through the lace curtains to catch the last glimpse of him. He took our mare, but not the wagon. I saw his broad back in a white shirt, his hair blowing as he rode bareheaded through our gate and away.

It wasn’t until that moment, when the weathervane above us squealed to change position, that I recognized the smell of that morning: It was the scent of a mountain of unshed rain. So it was a storm that was coming after all. Uncommonly big, perhaps, but just rain. No impending miracle on the horizon. A bad rain would mean lots of work cleaning up afterward. But I tried to cheer myself—my husband was gone for the day and that freedom always lightened my heart. We had the house to ourselves.

The weather continued to vex us with peculiar scents, vibrations, and utterances. The windows rattled as if some invisible hand played them with a fiddle bow. On the bulging black horizon, flashes bounced like fireflies in the dark cupped hands of the sky.

I took out a bowl and pan, but before I had even scooped out the flour for the cookie dough, the wind that leaked through the windowpane seams blew a puff of white powder off the top of the sack like a tiny specter. I lifted my child out of the wooden highchair and left the kitchen. As I passed through the dining room, the lace cloth on the table was rippled by some mysterious draft.

I headed upstairs with the idea that I would sit in bed with the baby in my lap and the blankets over our heads, but was stopped by a crash, then the sound of breaking glass. A gust of cold air swept over us—a second-floor window must have broken. A branch from our oak tree had probably smashed into one of the bedroom casements. My daughter whimpered and clung to me mightily. I stopped with my feet on two different steps.

I returned to the lower of the steps—should I