by Val Crowe
I heaved a huge sigh, looking down at my palms. “I want to believe it, you know. I want to believe it wasn’t my mom.”
Wade was quiet.
I sucked in a sharp breath and walked away from him. I leaned against the counter in my kitchen area, studying my boots.
“You know, when my dad went to AA, he told me it was kind of like being possessed. He said that the guy he was when he drank wasn’t the real him, that it brought out the worst in him.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Wade. “Only… I mean, haven’t we all done things when we were wasted drunk that we would never have done sober?”
“Not beaten up our own flesh and blood.” I still wasn’t looking at him.
“Maybe not.” A pause. “But the thing with Olivia. I was really drunk then, and I betrayed you. I thought I’d never do that.”
I blinked. I didn’t know what to say.
Several long moments of silence passed.
When Wade spoke again, there was a tremor in his voice. “We’re never going to get past that, are we?”
“We will,” I said, but my voice was flat. “I’m already over it.”
And then it was quiet again for an even longer time.
“Sorry,” he said. “You were talking about your mom.”
“There’s else nothing to say,” I said.
“Well, she never did it before,” he said. “You said she acted completely different than she ever had. Like a switch had been flipped. It lasted for months. And then that one day, she switched it off again. Now, she won’t acknowledge it happened. Won’t apologize. And has never laid a hand on you again. So maybe she was possessed.”
“And then, what? The thing inside her just left?”
“Maybe.”
I straightened and turned to him. “I want it to be true.”
“Then you could have your mom back.”
I nodded.
“And you don’t have anyone else,” he said. “You had me, but now…”
“I still have you,” I said.
He nodded.
And then we didn’t look at each other.
“I should let you rest,” he said finally.
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t leave town without saying goodbye.” He started past me. He put a hand on my shoulder.
There was a pause. We looked into each other’s eyes.
And then he shuffled past me and out of the Airstream.
* * *
“Jesus, Mads, where the hell have you been?” It was the next morning, and I was just out of the shower, tucking my towel around my waist.
Mads had appeared in the air in front of me. “I’m sorry. I was looking for some way to help you, and I got stuck somewhere.”
“What do you mean, stuck?”
“Just stuck,” she said. “I figured a way out. I’m back. You look good. The barnacle’s gone.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a long story.”
“I got time.” She spread her hands.
I looked her over. Actually, I wanted to ask her about the stuff with my mother, and I wanted to see if she’d ever heard of someone named Negus. “Yeah, I’ll tell you all about it. But can I get dressed first?”
“Sure,” she said, not moving.
“At least turn around or something,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, but she flitted out of the room and reappeared outside the window of the Airstream, pointedly with her back to me.
I laughed softly and then toweled off. I got dressed and then called for her to come back in. While I rustled up a breakfast for myself—eggs and cheese and some bacon—I told her everything that had happened.
By the time I had finished, I was sitting at the table, which was at the far end of the Airstream which had a wraparound cushioned bench seat around it for seating. I was halfway through my breakfast.
I pointed at her with my fork. “So, you said before that you were there, and you remembered what happened. Is it true? Was my mother possessed?”
She set her hands down on the table. Well, kind of. They hovered a fraction of an inch above the surface. “When I tried to tell you before, you didn’t want to know.”
“It’s not something I like thinking about. The whole experience was understandably traumatic.” I stabbed at my eggs.
“But you want to know now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, yes, it’s true. She was possessed.”
“By Negus?”
“I never knew its name,” she said. “I guess that’s a thing we could have done before I drove it out, exchanged names, but I wasn’t interested in being polite with the thing.”
“Wait, what?” I said. “You drove it out of my mother?”
She nodded. “It wasn’t easy. It weakened me.”
“Oh,” I said in understanding. “That’s where you went. It was about the same time. My mom went back to normal, and you disappeared too.”
“It took a lot out of me. It was some time before I could manifest again. But I watched over you, Deacon. I never left you.”
I set down my fork. I wasn’t hungry anymore. “So, it’s all true. It wasn’t her.”
“No, it wasn’t her.”
“Then all this time, I’ve cut her out of my life and she didn’t deserve it,” I said.
“Well… what you went through, it’s like you said, pretty traumatic.”
“And I guess she doesn’t even remember it.”
“Why would you say that?” said Mads.
“Because she acts like it never happened.”
“I can’t see why she wouldn’t remember,” said Mads. “When the spirits took control of your body and made you walk to the playground, you were inside there, watching it all happen. You remember everything.”
* * *
“Deacon!” said my mother’s voice over the phone. “This is quite a surprise. I can’t remember the last time you called me. Usually, I have to leave you twenty messages just to get a one-word text. Are you okay? Are you dead?”
“Look, I need you to be honest with me, Mom.”
“That was a joke, sweetie.” She tittered on the other end.
“Mom, this is serious.”
“Of course it is,” she said, and she sounded as if she was humoring me, like I was still a kid. “Sorry. What was I thinking? No, I’m all ears. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? It really is so good to hear your voice. I miss you, kiddo.”
My jaw worked. I clutched the phone tightly. My eyes were stinging. “I need you to be honest with me.”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“You lie for a living,” I said.
“Oh, I do not. I perform for a living. If I’m lying, so is Angelina Jolie.”
“Mom, please. Can you listen?”
“Sure, sure. I’m here. Go ahead.”
“It’s about… uh, it’s about those few months when I was ten. When my arm got broken?”
She was quiet on the other end.
“I know it wasn’t you,” I whispered. “I know that now. So, it’s okay. You can admit that it happened. It was some thing inside you.”
My mother still didn’t say anything.
“Mom?”
“Deacon, sweetheart.” Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you come and see me? We could meet up someplace. I’m going to do a job at this old amusement park. Try to help some people find closure with their sister who passed away. You could come there. I’d love to see you.”
“If I come, will we talk about this?”
“I…” She made a funny noise, not exactly a laugh. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
My lips parted. She was still going to deny it?
“Why you insist on saying that I broke your arm is beyond me,” she whispered. “You know that I would never—”
“It was a lot more than the broken arm, Mom,” I said, and now anger was rising within me. “All those bruises and cuts. I still
have scars, and you know that—”
“All little boys get bruises and cuts.” Her voice was getting higher in pitch.
“Did you block it out? Were you unconscious for all of it? Or can you just not accept it? Whatever the case, if you really do care about me—”
“Deacon, you are my son. You are my life. Of course I care about you. I love you so much.”
“Then you’d care about… about what it did to me.”
Nothing from her.
My mouth twisted. I waited for her to say something.
She just breathed.
I hung up the phone.
Damn her.
HIGHWAY TO HELL
Highway to Hell
Vengeful Spirits, Book Two
Val Crowe
HIGHWAY TO HELL
© copyright 2018 by Val St. Crowe
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
Join my email list
To find out information on new releases and all the Val Crowe news first!
Join here.
CHAPTER ONE
“Honey, look,” said my mother as she puttered around in the kitchen in her motorhome, the same one that she’d driven around when I was a kid. The thing was at least twenty years old. It was amazing she kept it on the road. “Lord knows I wasn’t a perfect parent. Who is?”
I was sitting at the table in the motorhome, toying with a cup of coffee that my mother had served me, and wondering why the hell I was even there at all. My mother was never going to admit a damned thing to me. She’d made that clear on the phone when we’d spoken. And yet, here I was, like a dumbass, sitting in my mother’s motorhome and listening to her run her mouth.
Partly this was because I just… missed her. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my mother over the past ten years, not voluntarily. A few forced meals here and there, occasional phone calls, that sort of thing. But I never came to see her to visit.
She set down a plate of cookies in the middle of the table. “These go great with coffee. They’re made with almond flour. Did I tell you that I went gluten free?”
“Mom, if you could just sit down so that we could talk?”
“It’s made an enormous difference. You wouldn’t believe it. I think wheat is probably the devil.”
I flinched. The devil, huh? Well, maybe that was what had possessed my mother and taken control of her body, hurting me for all those months back when I was ten years old. Wheat. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that was the end of it.
“No one should be eating wheat,” said my mother. “Actually, I’m thinking about going grain free too. It’s only that’s so tough when you’re trying to eat out, and I sometimes have to do that for days on end.”
“Mom.” I eyed her.
She looked older than she did the last time I saw her. But that made sense. I had made it a point not to see her. The way I saw it, she’d abused me, and I needed to get away from her before she hurt me again. But I had recently found out that it hadn’t been my mother who had done those things to me. She’d been possessed by some entity. I didn’t know anything about the possessor, except his name. Negus. And that he wanted to suck me dry, which was kind of a thing that most spirits wanted to do to me.
“Lord knows I wasn’t a perfect parent,” she repeated. “I mean, I left that necklace lying around and let you play with it while I was intoning something in another language, and it burrowed into your skin and turned you into… into… a ghost magnet.”
“That’s one way to put it,” I said.
“And I never forgave myself for that,” she said. “I can’t believe that I could have been so irresponsible as to allow that to happen to you.” She sat down at the table opposite me. “But, sweetheart, I didn’t know any of this was real.” She gestured around her head, mostly pointing to the curtains, which were striped pink and gray.
I knew that she didn’t mean the curtains. She meant the supernatural. She had built her career on pretending to communicate with the dead. My mother was a fake medium. When she’d accidentally invoked some ancient talisman I’d been playing with, it had attached to me, and ever since, I’d been able to see ghosts.
“If I’d had any inkling, I would have been so much more careful. And I’ve been trying, ever since that day, to fix you, but I’ve never found a way to do it yet. It hasn’t helped that you won’t let me help you. Anytime I find a spell or a ritual—”
“You’re not a magician, Mom,” I said. She was just a bumbling fake psychic who did seances with a smoke machine. I didn’t trust her not to screw things up worse.
“I know that,” she said. “But I got you into this mess. I want to get you out of it. At least you do try that oil I gave you, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s useful.” It allowed me to summon powerful spirits, which could absorb other spirits that were nagging me. Sometimes. It was kind of hit and miss. Also, it took a long out of me. Knocked me out for a whole day.
“I’m glad.” She patted me on the shoulder.
“But there’s more than that,” I said.
“Deacon, please.” She threw up her hands. “I know that kids feel the need to blame their parents for everything. Lord knows, I spent years of my life being angry with your grandmother for not being perfect, until I finally realized that she had done the best she could. Lord knows that. But this idea that you have in your head, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Mom, it’s not an idea. It happened. I guess you don’t remember for some reason.” But I didn’t know why that would be. I had been possessed once, and I had remembered everything that happened while it was going on. Maybe she’d simply blocked it out. Maybe it was too horrible for her to remember—being out of control of her body while some other being used it to bruise me and hurt me.
“I would never raise a hand to you.”
“It wasn’t you. I know that now,” I said. “Something took possession of you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You thought ghosts were ridiculous, but they aren’t. Possession is real too.”
“Like… what? Demons? Next you’ll be telling me that I can sell my soul to help make it so that you can’t see ghosts.”
“No, not demons. I don’t know that they are. What he is. Mom, please, try to focus. Negus. Do you know that name?”
“No,” she said. “That sounds like the name of some kind of rum punch I read about in a book once.” She got up from the table.
“Well, he’s still after me.”
“Who is?”
“Negus. The spirit that possessed you.”
She went over to the counter and refreshed her coffee cup with fresh coffee. “Here’s what I think must have happened. You were so upset by the ghosts back then, baby, and I was too. I wanted to make them go away for you, but I couldn’t. And I remember that you started having really bad nightmares about them. I don’t know if they were invading your dreams or if it was just so traumatic for you that you didn’t know what to do, but I think this all must have been a really bad dream you had. A dream so real that you thought—”
“I did not dream months of my life. And I have scars to prove it.”
“Oh, Lord, of course you have scars from being a kid. You were an active little boy. You skinned your knees. You wrecked your bike. Do you remember that bike I found you at that rummage sale? We attached it to the back of the motorhome and took it with us everywhere. You loved that thing. You’d take off on it and ride off for hours on end—”
“Yes, because after all this happened, I only wanted to get away from you,” I said. “I didn’t feel as though I could trust you. I thought you were going to snap at any time and turn back into that thing.” I’d had it backwards. I’d thought that my mother was really a monster who pretended to love me, when she had always loved me and a monster had taken her over. But because I didn’t trust my mother, I had run away from her around the age of sixteen, and I’d kept my distance ever since. It was onl
y after this revelation that she had been possessed that I trusted her enough to try to rekindle a relationship with her. “Why do you think I ran away?”
She turned back, stirring more cream into her coffee. “You were sixteen. You were rebellious. You didn’t want to live under my rules.”
“Oh, come on, Mom. You know that—”
“You were my little boy,” she said, “and we were close. And then you grew up, and we grew apart. And it hurt me, but I figured that was the way things usually went normally. I figured you’d be back, once you found a girl to settle down with, once you started to have your own kids. Are you having a kid? Is that why you’re back now?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. This is about Negus and the possession. It’s not some kind of normal teenage rebellion I went through.”
She bit down on her lip. “Oh, you’re always so serious about this stuff. I guess you really can’t let it go.”
I sighed. “Can you admit that it happened, even if you don’t remember it? You had to have noticed that you lost nearly three months of your life, didn’t you?”
Her lips parted.
I waited.
She sipped at her coffee. “When was this again, kiddo?”
I snatched up a cookie. Forget it. We were getting nowhere here.
There was a knock on the door of her motorhome.
She straightened. “Who could that be? I’m not expecting anyone until tomorrow.” She set down her coffee and went over to open the door. “Hello?”
“Cora Garrison?” said a male voice from outside the door.
“Yes?” said my mother, sounding confused.
“It’s me, Oscar Milton.”
“Oh, Oscar!” said my mother in recognition. “Come in. You’re early.”
“I usually like to get to a location a little early to scope everything out. If I can find the center of the haunting, it makes for a better podcast overall. I can sometimes pick up some amazing sounds before everyone arrives. Truly eerie stuff.” A man climbed into the motorhome’s interior. He was older, maybe my mother’s age. He had a straggly goatee, streaked with gray. He was wearing ball cap on his head, and no hair was peeking out of the front, which probably meant he was trying to disguise a bald spot. And I wasn’t sure what the hell he was talking about, because the truth was that ghosts didn’t show up on recordings. Not video, not sound recordings. So, sounded to me like this guy was another hoax creator, just like my mother.
