Spirit by Graham Masterton

and necktie. He was a lean, good-looking, but rather reticent kind of boy, like a young Jimmy Stewart. He was summer-suntanned, with a distinctive mole on his upper left cheek, and his hair short and shiny and quiffed at the front.
    â€˜Go on, Lizzie, go talk to him,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘He could use some friendly talk.’
    Elizabeth went out onto the verandah. Lenny was obviously aware that she was there, but he continued to coo and tweet to his canaries, and prod a bone-white cuttlefish shell through the bars of their cage.
    â€˜Lenny?’ ventured Elizabeth at last.
    He looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, from hay fever, maybe. Lenny had always suffered from hay fever.
    â€˜I didn’t know you’d been drafted,’ she said.
    He shrugged, and pulled a face. ‘Oh, sure, of course I was drafted. These days, you have to be a loony, or crippled, or dead already.’
    â€˜You didn’t
tell
me,’ she repeated.
    He pushed the last fragment of cuttlefish shell through the bars. ‘Lizzie . . . you would have found out sooner or later.’
    â€˜But you would have gone! And I wanted to give you a present, and everything!’
    â€˜Hey, come on kid,’ he told her, and stood in front of her with his thin arms folded, and smiled. ‘I don’t need no presents, not from you.’
    Elizabeth couldn’t stop her throat from tightening. ‘I wanted to give you something, that’s all, to remember me by.’
    He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I don’t need nothing to remember you by. How could I forget you?’
    She stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘You mean that?’
    â€˜What kind of doofus do you think I am?’
    Mrs Miller called out, ‘Lenny – why’n’t you take Lizzie down to the orchard and fetch me some of them pie-apples?’
    â€˜Okay, ma!’ Lenny called back. Elizabeth had never seen him act so obliging. He was always grumbling that his mother and father took advantage of his good nature, and made him run errands whenever his favourite radio show was on; or made him wash the dishes when he wanted to go fishing.
    They stepped down from the verandah into the thick hot glare of the garden. The sun was so bright that Lenny had to keep one eye screwed up. Their ankles rustled through the grass; the birds sang an inquisitive, spangled song.
    â€˜Aren’t you afraid?’ asked Elizabeth. There were very few secrets between them. In spite of the difference in their ages (which in anybody older, would have amounted to nothing at all), they both believed in mystery, they both believed in magic. They had once leaned on the railing of the wooden bridge where Lake Candlewood darkly emptied its waters into a lush and overgrown stream, and Lenny had said, ‘You may not think it . . . nobody may think it . . . but trolls live under this bridge, sure as eggs.’
    â€˜Trolls?’ she had asked him, peering into the gurgling shadows. ‘What are trolls?’
    â€˜You don’t know what trolls are? Trolls are what you’re afraid of.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ she had challenged him.
    â€˜Exactly that, stupid. Trolls are what you’re afraid of. Anything. Being embarrassed, coming last in maths, making a fool of yourself in front of your parents. Drinking your first beer and puking. Wrecking your father’s car. Dying. All that stuff.’
    â€˜Dying?’ she had asked him; and that was what she was asking him now. Only this time the danger of him dying wasn’t just an idle conversation on a bridge. This time, the danger of him dying was real and immediate. She had seen newsreels of fully-laden GIs dropping out of DUKWs into ten feet of water, and never coming up again. She had seen men lying on the roads of Normandy, as if they were sleeping. But who would sleep in the middle of the road on a summer afternoon, when there was a war to be won?
    Lenny picked a