Standing for Weirdo

Chapter 34

That afternoon, I sat in front of my laptop, entrenched with a chocolate mug to chase away the shivers brought on by the downpour that had caught Trevor and me on the way home from our lunch date. I would have preferred to be with him, but I wanted my parents to see that he wasn’t a bad influence, which meant being back in time to address Monday’s homework.

Once I was ensconced in my room, however, I couldn’t keep up my responsible enthusiasm. Trevor and I had gone over what little we had learned while we ate and had agreed on staying Monday after class to go together to the library, which seemed to be the best possible solution.

Not really the only one, though.

I shut down my literature paper in progress and fired up Google.

It’s not going to take too long. I won’t really research. It’s just a quick peek. I’ll relax and focus on school stuff then.

That’s what I told myself.

I punched in the keywords “Nightray” and “Chesterfield” and waited for a deluge of information that never quite came. There were a few entries, but Google mostly believed I had mistyped my query. I shook my head and checked the ones that matched. Two were from sites offering to do a genealogic tree for me; another one was from the civil registry and the census. No Wikipedia entry.

I tried just “Nightray.” The results were similar, for the most part, except that most data came from the UK. Scrolling over, I checked dates and places. Birmingham, London, York… 1800s, 1700s, and even further back. But I had figured that it was a rich, old family if they’d owned the mansion as I had seen it, so the information wasn’t useful.

One last try: “Beatrice Nightray.” More government and genealogical pages surfaced, most of them because of the Nightray part of the query. I cast a quick glance to the computer’s clock. Dinner wouldn’t distract me for forty more minutes or so.

I really should be doing my homework.

I clicked for the next page of results anyway.

Nothing, nothing, nothing…

Wait.

I double-checked the link for the entry. It led to a blog, and the text didn’t sound like gibberish so it might even be a real match. I clicked and landed in a website called “Spookshire.” A quick overview showed it to be some kind of compilation of legends and ghost stories and macabre history.

Great, just great.

The post was titled “Beatrice Nightray”. No fanciful bylines to make her story more endearing. The body itself consisted of about ten lines or so of text and a picture, which couldn’t amount to much information. But the picture froze me.

It was black and white, old and scanned for some registry or other, but it was the mansion I’d been to. Except that it was in Derbyshire. And the footer said it had burned to the ground in the 1900s after the family moved out some years prior.

I fired up a new window and backtracked to my first search. First census entries were from the 1900s.

Okay. It’s perfectly normal. There was the big war coming up soon, and people emigrated. This is perfectly logical.

If I could only believe myself.

I headed back to the blog’s window. The contents weren’t nearly enough to satisfy me, but apparently Beatrice was the name of a ghost that haunted the lands of the destroyed house. She came out by night, yada yada, appeared in front of random people, yada yada, and generally complied with standard ghostly behavior.

As far as leads went, it wasn’t much. It turned my blood to ice, though, because of one measly word.

Ghost.

If the situation weren’t so bizarre to begin with, I’d laugh the whole post off and keep on looking for another explanation. As it were, I copied and pasted the contents, picture included, into a word document and then headed back to Google.

“Local ghosts Derbyshire,” I typed.

The list of links wasn’t huge, but it kept me scavenging until dinnertime. When Mom called me downstairs, I put the laptop to sleep and took a short break. Perhaps I’d get a fresh view when I came back.

I didn’t, but I did manage to fall asleep on the desk.

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