Then I remember. I’d seen the little man before. I’d seen him changing from a pony into a man, falling out of a tree with Lizzie. She said he was a doonie. That he’d helped her.

Del made him vanish with a wave of his hand. But that doesn’t explain where the monster came from.

Then the monster speaks. It looks right at me with those weird seashell eyes and says, It’s me, Jilly.

All I can do is stare.

That was Geordie’s voice I heard. It’s so improbable that I’m sure I didn’t hear it right.

“Geordie . . . “ I say anyway, and hope flickers inside me.

Finally you can hear me. I kept trying and trying before, but it was like I was just a ghost.

I’m having a real problem equating my dear Geordie with this shambling thing put together from seaweed and shoreline debris.

“But you’re . . .”

I can’t say the word. Dead. He’s dead.

It’s really me, the voice says in my head.

Hope changes from a flicker into a bright light inside me.

He’s here.

While he might be inhabiting some freaky seaweed creature, it’s still him, speaking in my head.

But I’d seen what Del had done to him. And then I’d gone and dropped his remains off the side of this mesa.

“But aren’t you a ghost?” I have to ask.

I . . .

The thing that claims to be Geordie, that has Geordie’s voice, looks to Timony, but the doonie only has eyes for Lizzie.

“What have they done to you?” he cries.

He doesn’t give Lizzie or any of us a chance to answer. Running over to her, he puts his hands on her temples. It’s the strangest thing to watch—like when the Nature Channel shows you a flower opening in slow motion. One moment, she and the doonie are of equal height. In the next, he has to reach up to keep his hold on her as Lizzie returns to her normal size. Most wonderful of all, her mouth reappears.

Just like that, everything’s back to normal.

“Oh,” she says.

Then she puts her hands to her mouth and starts to grin. Grabbing the doonie, she gives him a big hug and dances him around, laughing, her mouth wide open. When she finally lets him go, he comes up to me, a question in his eyes.

I don’t say anything, but I guess he reads that as my agreeing because now he’s got his hands on my temples. I feel the oddest sensation, a tingling from head to foot as though a static charge is running through me, but nothing changes in me. We’re still at each other’s eye level.

His brow furrows as he concentrates harder.

The tingle is sharper now, but still nothing.