Connection

By Morgan Locklear

Olivia McCourtney knows a terrible secret, ghosts are everywhere, and they're furious at the world.

When she leaves her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, to study in New York City, she is confronted by billions of sour spirits. But on the subway train from Queens to NYU, Olivia meets Patrick, a traveler trapped on the Broadway Line.

Olivia is obsessed with helping her newfound friend, but soon realizes that she's the one who needs to be saved when she draws too much attention from both the living and the dead.

Can Olivia and Patrick help each other survive the perils of two different worlds that share a connection?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan Locklear
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780997860764

Book preview

A photograph of a girl riding a bicycle clung to the humming, yellow refrigerator in the McCourtney family kitchen. A magnet shaped like a carrot chaperoned the picture, already stuck to the surface with age. Frozen forever, the radiant girl looked at the camera, her eyes gleaming. Ribbons, once fluttering from her handlebars, were now as stiff as the shadows captured on the road.

The child’s name was Mattie Boyer, now Mattie McCourtney, but most people mistook her for her eldest daughter, Pepper Marie. The two shared a redheaded resemblance that didn’t so much as glance at Mattie’s youngest daughter Olivia, a girl with hair as black as her pupils. That picture had fascinated Olivia since before she was tall enough to reach it.

Mattie always told people that she was singing along to the little transistor radio dangling from her wrist, but in truth, she had dropped that radio only moments before and broke it. She’d sobbed as she pedaled home, expecting a severe reaction from her dad.

Her oblivious father snapped the photo when Mattie approached the front yard. The calm façade misled him for a few seconds, but then he comforted his little girl with one knee on the hot driveway and his arms around her thin body gulping air. Later that night, he fixed the radio, and her captured grimace, disguised as a smile, was a secret they kept when the picture was developed into an artful and stunning image.

Olivia envied the carefree girl in that photograph. Maybe if she had known the truth, she wouldn’t have felt so isolated. Instead, she identified more with that little radio dangling in the breeze and picking up strange frequencies.

She had a secret too, and like that picture, it was hidden in plain sight.

Everything began in late October of 1970. Led Zeppelin had just released their third album in eighteen months, leering pumpkins guarded the front porches of Savannah, Georgia, and Olivia was daydreaming in her fifth-grade classroom. Her teacher, Miss Frost, was reading James and the Giant Peach, to the moon-eyed children fresh from a chilly recess.

The sun was famous in the windows and spilled warmth across desks, shoes, books, and arms. Olivia closed her eyes, enjoying the errant flashes of light occasionally blocked by the branches trembling in the wind outside.

She floated within the kaleidoscope of neon graffiti behind her eyelids. Recess was invigorating, but not so much that she was sweating. The book was compelling enough to keep her awake, and she loved when she could watch shadows move with her eyes closed. The visions reminded her of riding in her daddy’s pickup truck with her sister.

The orange patterns became smoky, then milky, and then coalesced into human shapes. At first, she thought she was just slipping into a dream about fire monsters, but their color quickly shifted from eyelid orange to ghostly blue with swirls of green.

They swam through the air like dolphins, and Olivia began following their progress around the room. When she opened her eyes, they were gone. When she closed her eyes, the shapes were back again.

They were beautiful, like ice dancers. She wished she was seeing this in music class.

Two of them stopped, met Olivia’s gaze, and rushed up to her together with blue teeth bared.

Only the boy in front of her heard Olivia’s gasp, and he fidgeted in his seat. She kept her eyes wide open for a while after that, not wanting to know what might be mere inches from her face.

She risked closing her eyes when she could no longer bear the pain of ignorance and was greeted by seething spirits. They were throwing their fists through her head and screaming at her. She couldn’t hear their words, but cold breath, imagined or real, made her cheeks twitch.

Frightened eyes opened, and a small hand shot into the air.

Yes, Olivia? Miss Frost looked up from her book. She couldn’t miss the sudden movement.

Can I go to the bathroom please? Olivia hid the fear in her voice, but panic was stamped on her face.

Fortunately for Olivia, little girls her age often look panicked when they suddenly raised their hands to be excused to the restroom. Go right ahead, Miss Frost told her. Do you need to see the nurse?

No. Olivia’s feet hit the floor. Maybe, she amended and left the room as her teacher resumed reading. The act was a kindness that immediately drew the class’s attention from the departing student. Olivia managed not to run until she got into the hall.

The bathroom seemed like a trap, so she flew right past it and toward the cafeteria. On each side of her, paper ghosts and flat black cats taped to walls ducked in and out of misshapen pumpkin patches. Above her head, fall leaves in all colors hung from the ceiling by fishing line. Olivia barely disturbed them as she scurried by.

The empty lunchroom still smelled like wiener wraps. Most of the lights were turned off and the tables had all been folded up and wheeled to the perimeter walls. Olivia blinked slowly, and saw only the dark floor.

She let out a grateful breath but stayed where she was for a while longer. That stillness would become a comfort to her, as would this spot on many future afternoons. She came to think of it as the Cafeteria Club. There was only ever one member.

Books were left at Olivia’s desk that day. She walked home, looking over her shoulder, expecting a savage face leering behind her.

Everything in her life had changed in the span of a paragraph in James and the Giant Peach. Olivia was now living between two worlds, and a sickening weight settled right in the middle of the little girl’s chest. The knowledge crowded her heart.

The first years of Olivia’s awakening were the hardest. She went through a phase where she debated whether or not the creatures she was seeing were ghosts or aliens.

She also went through a phase where she thought adults knew about their existence but were keeping it a secret until a coming of age ritual. Ghost puberty. For a while she even thought she was their queen.

"I don’t feel crazy," she told herself.

By junior high, her conclusions were fairly cemented. She wasn’t crazy, they were ghosts, and she was not their queen.

Being a child made her less believable. Still, she floated a few observations and inquiries at home and among close friends until she was in danger of earning a reputation as a weirdo. So, the gift or curse—whatever it was—remained a secret.

Ghosts were beautiful in a grim sort of way like a dead tree or the skeleton of a bird. When the McCourtney family went to strange places, Olivia saw exotic movements and strange faces. A never-ending dance of the dead not even afforded the dignity of music.

Roller-skating gave her joy, and she wheeled around her large driveway with skill and speed. There she did some of her best thinking.

While rolling around and between two cars, she theorized that the key to seeing ghosts was to let go of the idea that she was trying to see something through her eyelids. The trick was more nuanced like trying to see behind her.

She decided to catalog her observations of the brooding intruders. Her first notation was that they didn’t appear to speak to each other. Perhaps they were telepathic.

The second and more obvious notation was that they were far more active at night. An understandable cliché in Olivia’s opinion since their curiosity for the living was rivaled only by their apparent desire to be rid of them. When people went to bed, ghosts reclaimed the world with their eerie midnight glow. They swept through the houses like mad cats but remained as quiet as flowers.

It was only a matter of time before the phantoms in her house realized she could see them. Once her cover was blown, it was all out war against the air breather.

One evening, a large Native American woman who haunted the family kitchen, charged right through her like a rhinoceros.

Olivia jumped back and dropped the empty cup she was returning to the sink. All she had to do was keep her eyes open, but curiosity was contagious.

The wide smoky woman towered over Olivia, an angry apparition with bones in her ears and black eyes stitched with fire. Olivia ran away and did not return to the kitchen until a few nights later.

She crept into the room when only moonlight and cinnamon sprinkled the tiled floor. Her bare feet were cold but quiet, and only her timid whisper disturbed the stillness.

I’m sorry I looked at you. Olivia’s voice was little more than a flutter. You’re very beautiful, but I won’t look again if you don’t want me to. She opened her mouth, closed it, then turned, and ran down the hall and up the stairs to her room. Fear was a sharp bone pulled from the ear of a pursuing ghost and stinging her backside.

Sitting on her bed and keeping her eyes firmly open, Olivia whispered, I’m sorry, until her mouth went dry.

The woman didn’t attack Olivia when she closed her eyes a week later to scan the room at dinnertime. She did, however, give her the stink eye for another six months. Eventually they got used to each other.

The ghost in the living room tolerated Olivia a little better. His curt acceptance seemed like a victory by comparison. She called him Butler because he wore a dress shirt with a tiny collar and could usually be found standing in the corner with a hand towel over one cocked arm. He was always as far away from the television as he could get.

All ghosts avoided television sets with gusto. It was the third observation Olivia made. They scowled at the static boxes like misbehaving dogs.

Of the many other ghosts in her house, only two others were named, an old man she called Howard because he looked like a Howard, and a boy her age who spent most of his time in the attic. Howard was the most lecherous ghost of the bunch. He skulked in the laundry room and the bathroom but was also partial to lurking in her parents’ bedroom.

She called the boy in the attic Deputy because of a little tin star pinned to his perpetually misbuttoned shirt. He flailed whenever anyone went into the attic, so she left him alone. Beginning each Halloween, Olivia felt especially sorry for the timid lawman because her dad was constantly up and down the folding stairs to retrieve and repack three holiday’s worth of decorations.

His tin star trauma marked each of her own ghostly anniversaries.

In the bathroom she discovered another interesting tidbit. Ghosts did not like seeing themselves in mirrors. They averted their eyes or dissolved into the floor whenever they caught a glimpse of themselves.

Olivia longed to communicate with the apparitions, but their muted words remained with them. It was at those times she felt like their queen again, evil and bent on the toil of her see-through subjects. No wonder they all hated her. No wonder they hated everybody.

That was her honest belief until she made one of the strangest observations while babysitting. Ghosts loved babies. She didn’t blame them of course, but the idea of the deceased cooing over innocent new life once their parents had gone to sleep was unsettling.

However, they revered infants, and she never witnessed questionable behavior in their presence. She could see that being near babies gave them joy.

Whenever the world got too crowded behind her eyelids, she would escape into the fields of Georgia dandelions surrounding her house like an ocean of swaying halos. She would lie on her back, looking up at the tall fuzzy flowers.

The dandelions looked like they were dancing even when there was no breeze. Olivia admired how they trapped sunlight in their feathered heads like a firefly caught in the impossibly big hands of her father.

Daniel McCourtney was a collection of lumps and muscles and nearly as quiet as a ghost himself. Every summer, he took his wife and daughters to his childhood home in Texas where his parents still lived. They always drove, and it was a tour de South.

Grandpa Dave and Grandma Gabby McCourtney lived east of Amarillo near Lake Meredith, in a part of Texas the locals called the pommel.

They ate at greasy spoons, stopped at the occasional roadside attraction, and even indulged in a drive-in movie once instead of going to a hotel. At the end of the double feature, which Daniel had completely slept through, they got back on the road. While his family dozed, he greeted the pink dawn with truck-stop coffee and Johnny Cash quietly crooning on the radio.

The summer of ’72 was particularly memorable for Olivia. The songs on the radio brimmed with an optimism that hadn’t been there in the years before. She soaked up the hopeful notes as the greens of Georgia turned into the tans of Tennessee.

The family had a new Buick Riviera, a uniquely shaped vehicle with a wedge back window that resembled a duck’s tail. Olivia liked how the curved glass distorted the trees. She and Pepper Marie took turns lying underneath it and looking up at the warped world. Olivia would eventually inherit that car in high school when her father finally surrendered to the Jeep craze and Pepper Marie proved incapable of obtaining a driver’s license.

They stopped for the night in Memphis and Daniel splurged for a room with two beds and a pool. The girls played Marco Polo as twilight turned the water purple and the sky a wonderous smear.

When Pepper Marie got chilled, she went up to the room, leaving Olivia to float alone on the air bed they no longer needed to share on the floor. She stared into space until she felt she was no longer looking up, but down into a deep well with tiny lighted boats on the water. It gave her vertigo.

That entire day on the road had been leading up to this one moment of peace and clarity. She was exactly where she needed to be to hear what the universe had to say.

The traffic of the nearby highway added a series of low tones to the trickling water near her ears. She could even hear the Coke machine buzzing next to the concrete stairs.

She waited for destiny’s instructions.

Dad’s going out for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Pepper Marie’s voice bounced along the water and startled Olivia. It was decidedly not what she was expecting from the universe, but she was hungry.

She wasn’t discouraged by the lack of intervention from the cosmos, aware that no news was sometimes good news. After dinner and a family viewing of The Carol Burnett Show, Olivia fell asleep quicker than usual, especially for a new place.

The next day was another ten hours in the car, and they arrived in Texas under the scowl of dark thunderclouds. Their visits always went quickly even though the family stayed for two weeks every year.

The McCourtney sisters always got along at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. They spent their days riding horses around the farm after helping with morning chores and the evenings were filled with glorious television reruns and playing board games as a family. Once they played poker. It felt grown-up to Olivia, who did rather well for herself by winning eleven dollars. That was after she paid her grandpa back the five bucks he’d spotted her.

The Texas ghosts were vastly different from the ones at her house in Georgia. They didn’t have any faces or hands. None of them. It was terrifying. The experience of being trapped in the bathroom with them was like suffocating in old cuffs and collars.

They ignored her insistent shooing and reached for her with hollow arms. Olivia held her breath in the sorrowful air and then ran outside to cry. This was how her bathroom breaks went. The fast ones anyway. The long ones made her body shake and her nose run.

Most of Olivia’s memories of Texas became warm pockets of time to revisit as she grew into