A/W: I do not own DP

Hello all! I hope you had a great vacation because I sure did! So here's your next update it took me a few weeks. I think I might have been on something like vacation jet-lag (not wanting to do anything during summer break). So these past couple of weeks I've just been chil'in. Anyway enjoy the update guys. And sorry their getting further and further apart.

~Previously DPROV~

"Alright," I interrupted before anything else could be said. "Dad you read next."

CPROV

"Actually," Aunt Lauren said glancing at her watch. "It looks like I need to make a run to the store and get some more food and stuff before it get too late." Mr. Bae started to get up about the same time Tori call out, "Can I go?" Aunt Lauren shooed them both down. "Actually I was wounding of Derek would like to go with me?" She asked, turning towards us.

I frown as Derek body went ridged for half a second. "Aunt Lauren you can't-" "Alright," Derek grunted interrupting me. "Excellent," She said. "I'll meet you in the car." I cant believe she just did that. "Derek you don't have to-." He interrupted me again. "It's okay Chloe I'll only be gone a few hours tops, besides maybe she just wants me to carry the bags."

He said lips tilting up and the ends. "Ha, ha," I said sarcastically back as he left. "Well," Tori said once he was gone. "No point wasting time." She picked up the writing pad from where Derek laid it and passed it to Mr. Bae.

After Lunch, it was time for math. That was one class where the tutor needed to know exactly where I was in the program and my math teacher hadn't sent over my work yet, so I was allowed to skip it for now. Math was also the class Derek had been sitting out the day before, and he did so again, taking his course work into the dining room as Ms. Wang gave a short lesson. I guessed he was doing remedial work and needed the quite.

Simon laughed, "Derek doing remedial work?" "Hey," I said. "Cut me some slack, I didn't really know you guys yet." Mr. Bae laughed as well. "I have to admit," he said. "That would be odd. Derek has always been the top of his class. I think one year one of his teacher had to create whole new lesson plan for him because she thought he was cheeting when he had gotten a one-hundred on every test."

He went his way and I went mine, into the media room to write that e-mail to Kari. Getting the words right took time. The third version finally seemed vague but not like I obviously avoiding anything. I was about to hit Send when I stopped.

I was using a communal account. What would come up in the sender field? Lyle Group Home for Mentally Disturbed Teens? I was sure it wouldn't be that, but even just "Lyle House" would throw Kari off, maybe enough for her to look it up.

"I wonder what would come up if you actually searcher for it on the internet." Simon said. Tori snorted, "Knowing Chloe we're about to find out." I rolled my eyes at Tori bluntness, but well she wasn't wrong.

I switched to the browser and searched for "Lyle House." Over a million hits. I added "Buffalo" and that cut my hits in half, but a scan of the first page showed they were all just random hits-a mention of a house on Lyle in Buffalo, a list of Lyle Lovett songs including the words "house" and "buffalo," a House representative named Lyle talking about Buffalo Lake.

"Ironic," Mr. Bae said with an amused look on his face.

I moved my mouse over the Send button again, and stopped again. Just because Lyle House didn't have a cheerful Web site with a daisy border didn't mean Kari couldn't find it in the phone book. I saved the e-mail as a text document with an obscure name. Then I deleted the message. At least with a phone call, I could probably block call display.

"I bet you don't ever know how. What would you do then?" Tori asked. I shrugged, "Find someone like you to do it for me." "Excuse me," she said while Simon snickered behind his hand and she glared lightly at me.

There were no telephones in the common area, so I'd have to ask to use the nurses' phone. I'd do that later, when Kari would be home from school. I shut down Outlook and was about to turn off the browser when a search result caught my eye-one about a Buffalo man named Lyle who'd died in a house fire.

"I wonder if that has anything to do with the original owner of Lyle House." Simon questioned sounding curious. I shrugged, "Maybe."

I remembered what Rae had said last night about looking up my burned custodian. Here was my chance to settle the battle between the side that said you're hallucinating take your meds and shut up and the side that wasn't so sure. I moused to the search field, deleted the words, then sat there, fingers poised over the keys, every muscle tensed, as if bracing for an electric shock. What was I afraid of? Finding out I really did have schizophrenia? Or finding out I didn't?

"Both," I said. Tori and Simon gave me a strange look. "What? One option I'm labeled as schizophrenic and another I'm labeled as just plane crazy." "Seeing ghosts doesn't exactly mean you're crazy," Simon says. "Well yeah but it makes people think you're crazy," Tori said in response. I scowled at them both hopefully one that was worthy enough to would make Derek proud.

I lowered my fingers to the keys and typed. A. R. Gurney school arts Buffalo death custodian. Thousands of hits, most of them random matches to A. R. Gurney, the Buffalo playwright. Then I saw the words tragic accident and I knew. I forced my mouse up the screen, clicked, and read the article. In 1991, forty-one-year-old Rod Stinson, head custodian at Buffalo's A. R. Gurney School of the Arts, had died in a chemical explosion.

A freak accident, caused by a part-time janitor refilling a container with the wrong solution. He'd died before I'd been born. So there was no way I could have ever heard about the accident. But just because I couldn't remember hearing about it didn't mean I hadn't caught a snatch of it, maybe someone talking in class, and stored it deep in my subconscious, for schizophrenia to pull out and reshape as a hallucination. I scanned the article. No picture.

"Yeah, of course you did," Tori said. "Well, she might have Tori." Mr. Bae said. "Sometimes your brain can project an image or picture of something that we never remember seeing but had, ended having a glimpse of, allowing our brains to store it into memory."

I backed out to the search page and went to the next. Same basic information, but this one did have a picture. And there was no question it was the man I'd seen. Had I seen the photo somewhere? You have an answer for everything, don't you? A "logical explanation." Well, what would you think if you were seeing this in one of your movies? I'd run to the screen and smack this sill girl who was staring the truth in the face, too dumb to see it. No, not to dumb. Too stubborn.

"Though I would go with dumb," Tori said leaning back and crossing her hand behind her head. "Tori," Simon snapped. "You don't have to be such a-." "That's enough." Mr. Bae said cutting them off. "Now I want you two, to both be supportive of Chloe throughout this. It's obvious that this was a though time for her, and I'm sure its not going to be any easier reliving some of these things." I blushed to the roots of my hair and glanced down at my hands feeling uncomfortable. I didn't like having Mr. Bae stick up for me, even though part of what he said is true.

You want a logical explanation? String the facts together. The scenes. Scene one: girl hears disembodied voices and see a boy who disappears before her eyes. Scene two: she sees a dead guy with some kind of burns. Scene three: she discovers that the burned custodian is real and died in her school, just the way she saw it. Yet this girl, our supposedly intelligent heroine, doesn't believe in ghosts? Give yourself a shake.

Still I resisted. As much as I loved world of cinema, I knew the difference between reality and story. In moves, there are ghosts and aliens and vampires. Even some who doesn't believe in extraterrestrial can sit in a movie theater, see the protagonists struggling with clues that suggest alien invasion, and want to scream "Well, duh!"

Simon laugh, "I want to scream that about half of the time I see a movie." I laughed with him, "I know right." Tori rolled her eyes at us and made a noise of disgust, while Mr. Bae just looked amused.

But in real life, if you tell people you're being chased by melted school custodians, they don't say "Wow, you must be seeing ghosts." They put you in someplace like this. I stared at the picture. There could be no question- "Is that who you saw?" I spun in my chair. Derek was there at my shoulder.

"Silent as a cat," Simon chuckled. I glanced at him, "Wouldn't he take that as an insult?" "I don't know I'll have to ask him." Simon said and I shook my head.

For someone his size, he could move so quietly I'd almost think he was a ghost. Just as silent . . . and just as unwelcome. He pointed to headline over the janitor's article. "A. R. Gurney. That's your school. You saw that guy, didn't you?" "I don't know what you're talking about." He fixed me with a look. I clicked off the browser. "I was doing schoolwork. For when I go back. A project." "On what? 'People who died at my school'? You know, I always heard art schools were weird. . . ." I bristled "Weird?"

Mr. Bae shook his head. "Only Derek would say something like." We all laughed we'll expect for Tori who glanced at us with a frown. "Oh hey Dad I've been meaning to ask can we go to an art school?" Simon asked. Mr. Bae pretended to bt really interested in the story. "Dad?"

"You want something to research?" As he leaned over to take the mouse, I caught a whiff of BO. Nothing flower wilting, just the first hint that his deodorant was about to expire. I tried to move away discreetly, but he noticed and glowered, as if insulted, then shifted to one side, pulling in his elbows.

The blush that covered my face could not be described with words. "Ha," Tori said. "I didn't know wolfy had puberty problems. Oh, wait I did." "Nock it off Tori," Simon said. "Now, now settle down," Mr. Bae said the started to chuckled. I looked at him like he was crazy. "You should have been their for Derek's earlier years of puberty. Oh, the stories I could tell." He chuckled again, harder. "Dad, I goanna tell D that you're telling Chloe embarrassing stories about him." Simon taunted; Mr. Bae raised an eyebrow. "Oh well then I'll just have to tell a few about you now wont I?" Tori perked up at this, while Simon just sunk lower in his seat.

He opened a fresh browser session, typed in a single word, and clicked Search.Then he straightened. "Try that. Maybe you'll learn something." I'd been staring at the search term for at least five minutes. One word. Necromancer. Was that even English? I moved the cursor in front of the word and typed "define." When I hit Enter, the screen filled. Necromancer: one who practices divination by conjuring up the dead. Divination? As in foretelling the future? By talking to dead people . . . from the past? That made no sense at all.

"So can a necromancer really tell you the future?" Tori asked. "I'm not sure," I said glancing first at Simon than Mr. Bae who shrugged. Apparently he didn't know either.

I skipped to the next definition, from Wikipedia. Necromancy is divination by raising the spirits of the dead. The word derives from the Greek nekros "dead" and manteia "divination." It has a subsidiary meaning reflected in an alternative and archaic from of the word, nigromancy (a folk etymology using Latin niger, "black"), in which the magical force of "dark powers" is gained from or by acting upon corpses. A practitioner of necromancy is a necromancer. I reread the paragraph three times and slowly deciphered the geek talk, only to realize it didn't tell me anything more than the first definition.

"Well not exactly it actually tells you more than the last one." Tori said. We all stared at her. "What?"

On to the next one, also from Wikipedia. In the fictional universe if Diablo 2, the Priests of Rathma . . . Definitely not what I was looking for, but I ran a quick search and I discovered a role-playing game class called necromancers, who could raise and control the dead. Was that were Derek got it? No. He might be creepy, but if he'd misplaced the boundary between real life and video games, he'd be in a real mental hospital.

"He's not the one that should be," Tori muttered. Apparently I was the only who hear her and glanced at her out of confusion, not really sure of what she meant.

I returned to Wikipedia, skimmed the rest of the definitions, and found only variations on the first. A necromancer foretells the future by talking to the dead. Curious now, I deleted define and searched necromancer. The first couple of sites were religious ones. According to them, necromancy was the art of communicating with the spirit world.

"Duh, we knew that." Tori said.

They called it evil, a practice of black magic and Satan worship. Did Derek think I was involved in black magic? Was he trying to save my soul? Or warn me that he was watching? I shivered. Aunt Lauren's women's health clinic had once mistakenly been the target of a militant prolife group. I knew first-hand how scary people could get when they thought you did something that crossed their beliefs.

"What happened?" Simon asked. I looked at him, "Do you really want to know." He thought about it for a second. "No not really. I was just trying to be polite." Tori snorted and he glared at her.

I flipped back to the list of search results and picked one that seemed more academic. It said that necromancy was another-older-name for mediums, spiritualists, and other people who could talk to ghosts. The meaning came from an ancient belief that if you could talk to the dead, they could predict the future because they could see everything they'd know what your enemy was doing or where you could find buried treasure. I switched to the next site on the list, and a horrible painting filled my screen-a mob of dead people, rotting and hacked up, being led by a guy with glowing eyes and an evil grin.

"That's our Chloe. A little master of the dead." Tori said in a fake cherry voice. "Shut up," I told her with a lite glare. Mr. Bae cleared his throat but didn't say anything.

The title: The Army of the Dead. I scrolled down the page. It was filled with stuff like that, men surrounded by zombies. I quickly switched to another page. It described the "art of necromancy" as the raising of the dead. I shuddered and flipped to another. A religious site now, quoting some old book ranting about "foul necromancers" who committed crimes against nature, communicating with spirits and reanimating the dead. More sites. More old engravings and pictures. Grotesque pictures of grotesque men. Raising corpses. Raising spirits, Raising demons. Fingers trembling, I turned off the browser.

"Me next," Simon said. Hastily reaching over and grapping the pad for his dad. "Never thought I'd see the day when you got excite about getting to read a book." Mr. Bae said while Tori snickered. Simon frowned at him at muttered, "This is different." "Sure it is," Tori said. Here we go again. "Uh, guys can we just read."

R&R