Homecoming by Amber Benson Page A

bedroom. She rapped her knuckles gently against the polished wood grain of the door and waited.
    No answer.
    After a minute of hemming and hawing, she tried again.
    Still no answer.
    Well,
she thought, standing in an abyss of uncertainty, fist poised to knock again.
Do I just open the damn door, or do I stand here like an idiot because I’m too scared of what I might find inside?
    Imagination was a strange thing. It could play amazing tricks on a normally sane person.
    As she waited outside the threshold of her great-aunt’s bedroom, Lyse’s mind was dizzy with possibilities—some good and some horrifying. Would she open the door to find her great-aunt resting peacefully on the bed, or would she discover a corpse—
    Stop thinking this ridiculous shit,
she yelled inside her head.
You’re being an
idiot
.
    The last twenty-four hours had been overwhelming: Eleanora’s call, almost no sleep, a break-in at her house in Athens, the bizarre afternoon nightmare, and the nutty teenager at the coffee place . . . Now her great-aunt was probably lying dead on a bed, and Lyse was too chickenshit to go in and find out.
    Schrödinger’s cat.
    The words came unbidden, the phrase from a Quantum Physics for Artists course she’d taken in college. She’d chosen it thinking it would be an easy way to fulfill one of her science requirements but instead found herself really enjoying the theories the professor presented to the class. One of the thought experiments they’d discussed was Schrödinger’s cat: Put a cat in a sealed box with a decaying radioactive particle, and the cat was both alive and dead at the same time—until you opened the box, and then all bets were off.
    This shouldn’t have given her courage, but for some strange reason it kind of did.
    â€œOkay, let’s do this,” she murmured under her breath, and pushed open the door.
    There was a groan of hinges giving way, and then she was inside. The room was pitch-black. She couldn’t see two feet in front of her. She felt around the wall until she found the switch plate and flipped it on, bathing Eleanora’s bedroom in incandescent light.
    The bed. There was someone in it. A lump where a body was curled into a fetal position.
    â€œEleanora?” Lyse said, taking a tentative step farther into the room.
    â€œEleanora?”
    She spoke louder this time but still got no response. She took another step.
    â€œEleanora? I’m not trying to scare you, but I’m coming in the room . . .”
    She grasped the edge of the star-patterned quilt covering Eleanora’s bed and yanked it back in one swift movement to find . . .
nothing
. No body, no corpse, no skeleton—just a pile of bunched-up blankets on top of the mattress.
That
was her lump. Something touched her shoulder, startling her, and she screamed.
    It took Lyse a moment to understand that the hand belonged to Eleanora.
    â€œWhat the
hell
?” she shrieked, terrifying her great-aunt, who was holding on to the wall for support, her breathing labored as she watched Lyse cycle through rage, anger, and shame in the space of a few seconds.
    â€œWhat is
wrong
with you?” Eleanora sputtered, waving a shaking finger in Lyse’s direction.
    â€œYou scared me,” Lyse said, beginning to feel really stupid for letting her imagination work her up into such a hysterical frenzy. “It was dark and I thought someone was in the bed, and you were gone . . .”
    Lyse felt the tears starting. She didn’t want to cry, but she’d been so keyed up that a good cry was probably the best way to calm her down.
    Eleanora squinted at her grandniece, seeming to decide that maybe Lyse was justified in screaming at her, after all. She offered Lyse her hand and guided the two of them over to the bed, settling Lyse, then herself, down on the edge of the mattress.
    â€œOh my God, you scared the bejesus