by Marc Layton
We filled the bathtub with a layer of water and discovered a large metal bucket in the corner. As we carried the bucket out of the bathroom, Meredith screamed.
The hair on our necks stood. The lights flickered above us, and the ground shook.
We turned to find Meredith pinned on the ground by an angry Abigail. She had her hands on Meredith’s shoulders as Meredith flailed her legs, trying to fling the ghost off. As we ran to help, Abigail turned and looked at us. We were both flung back and hit the wall by the door.
Barely able to move from Abigail's power, Damian and I attempted to stand but were unsuccessful. Struggling to get up, we looked at each other in defeat. The feeling arose in me again of being buried, unable to breathe. My heart raced, the floor becoming sand I was unable to move in. My lungs collapsed inside of me from my body pushing against a force much stronger than my own.
Abigail threw her head back towards Meredith, staring into her eyes. Meredith tried to shut hers and moved her head from side to side. Abigail concentrated, and Meredith's head turned back toward her.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS ME!” she screamed into Meredith’s face, less than an inch away from her.
Meredith managed to keep her eyes closed as she wailed, “Do what?!”
Abigail had her hands out before us, trapping us where we were. The weight was almost unbearable, and I could hear Damian struggling to breathe as much as I was.
“YOU...YOU...MY HUSBAND IS TRAPPED. YOU SAID YOU WERE MY FRIEND!”
“Abigail, I am your friend. I’m trying to free you, reunite you with your children!”
She got even closer to Meredith’s face. “I just want to be with my husband,” she whispered into her ear.
With an angry cry, Abigail let the two of us free and pushed Meredith's body into the sidewall, smacking her face as she whipped her around. She looked larger now, taller than each of us, and she crawled in a squatting position as if to get closer to our faces. Eye contact seemed important to her, to look into our souls and determine who she was going to kill.
As she let go of Meredith, she shifted her focus to lifting me into the air against the wall. She screeched as loud as she could, ambling closer. Damian covered his ears, doubling over in pain from the sound.
She eyed me, getting too close for comfort. I turned my face to the side, and she snapped it back forward, causing me to let out a painful grunt. Damian came up behind her, whacking her in the head with a metal pipe from the bathroom. It distracted her long enough for her to drop me to the floor. I heard a snap and felt a burning pain shoot up my ankle. She now fixated on Damian, chasing him into the bathroom with a manic smile.
He tripped over the bathtub and fell, landing hard on the outer edge. Lifting her hands, she flung his head into the side of the tub and then abruptly turned around, screaming in pain. Her body became pale, small, and slowly drifted away.
Damian peeked his head out of the bathroom, blood running down the side of his face from a large gash. I turned around, still on the floor and gripping my ankle, to find Meredith standing with a burning bone in her hand.
I stood and limped over to her. In shock, she stood facing the bathroom door, still looking where Abigail had stood.
I gently took the bone from her hand and threw it into the tub. One by one, we burned the bones to ensure they were all able to leave. As we finished, we stared at each other for a moment, speechless, proud of what we had overcome and accomplished.
We sat together on the front porch waiting for backup for Meredith and local police detectives. We were all exhausted. Meredith seemed still troubled by something. I don’t know if she was happy about having to force Abigail to leave.
While we waited, Meredith confirmed, “I feel bad for her. She was so nice.”
“She was,” Damian responded.
* * *
"Why did she come back for us? For him?"
I imagined what would happen if my father had left my mother. Would she have gone after him? He wouldn't have ever left her, they were so happily in love. But if he had left, I liked to think she would follow. She would chase her love. She was motivated to keep the family together, planning fun game nights. Camping trips were always her idea. My father wasn't Ben. I couldn't imagine chasing after a man who forced you to eat your own children to stay alive. He was a whole other monster.
“Have you ever had a friend that keeps going back to a man she doesn’t belong with? That’s what it’s like.”
Damian was right. People like Ben stuck their claws into others. They captured them with charm and then forced them to stay when things got bad.
“I guess so,” she sighed.
* * *
"Sometimes, it's just time for people to go. Even if it's not peacefully."
She nodded slightly.
I tried to lighten the mood. "Hey. You saved us in there. You helped us escape, and otherwise, we could have died. One more hit to the head, and Damian could've been a goner. You were an equal part of everything we accomplished. The research, that fight back there, the theories, everything. You were there for all of it. And we did a good thing back there."
She smiled, sat up, and hugged me. The police and paramedics arrived. They must have had to figure out a way in from the forest, having taken quite a while. Damian helped me up, and we walked off of the porch and out to the paramedics.
They checked us out while the police searched the property and asked us questions. They cleared the house and the shed and announced no one was present. We pointed them to the graveyard. We had decided not to tell them the full story. We would sound crazy, and they would never believe us.
They taped off the area and began documenting and photographing the scene. By now, the sun was long past the horizon, and we were standing in the cold, illuminated by the artificial lights erected around the scene. We were removed to get checked at the small hospital in town. They discharged us quickly with only a few scrapes and a brace for my ankle.
Meredith drove us back to our campsite, where the only thing we had left was our truck. Proud of our work, we stood outside for a few minutes staring at the mess of ashes. The sun began to rise. It felt strange to be finished, to have accomplished our extremely crazy goal. To avenge our parents and save the entire community. We made sure that no one would need to be afraid of these woods again. And we were good at it, it made us feel happy and proud.
“So what now?” Meredith asked us.
"Well, I guess we'll go home and figure that out. What are your plans?" Damian questioned.
She thought about it. “I will have a lot of paperwork to complete after this one. And I have some business to take care of in the city.”
I was hoping that by business in the city, she meant visiting us. You don’t have a night like we did and never see each other again. The weekend had been life-changing, everything shifted. We had to keep in touch. We were the only ones who would understand.
“Oh, do you?” Damian smirked.
"I do. There are some people there that I like, that I think I need to see," she smiled.
“Well then, I guess we’ll see you there.”
* * *
"Maybe you will."
She got back into her car as Damian watched her drive off. He smiled at the thought of her coming into the city for him. That strong woman had him wrapped around her finger, and she knew it.
"I felt them," he said after her taillights disappeared.
“Who? Mom and dad?” I asked.
"Yeah. I felt them say goodbye. They told me they were proud of us. That we did a good job. That we finally set them free. They were really happy to go."
He smiled a genuine smile and chuckled a bit. Looking at him made me chuckle too. Our work here was done. We had done it all for them, and they were proud and finally released to the beyond. I couldn't imagine sharing a better moment with the one person I loved the most in the world.
“Shall we?” I asked, gesturing to the truck.
“We shall.”
10
On the car ride home, we listened to music and watched the sunrise. As we entered the city, I invited Damian to stay with me in the apartment. At least until he knew where he was going next. He still didn't have a job and didn't know what to do from here. And, to be honest, neither did I. Before all of this, I worked at a desk job in bookkeeping. It all seemed so insignificant now.
The police called a few weeks later and informed both Damian and me that they found over twenty different corpses and human remains in the backyard. They identified almost all of them with carbon testing and possible time matches, including our parents. We had helped solve over twenty missing person cases from the area. It was crazy to think about.
The weight of our parents' death seemed to be lifted off of our shoulders. We didn't feel bogged down by the unknown. I didn't miss the panic attacks or gasping for air in my sleep. I didn't seem to mind remembering Abigail's face running at me, or Ben grasping my brother's neck because they were no longer here. We conquered them, we beat them. They weren't going to terrorize us any longer.
I never had those nightmares again, but sometimes I would see my parents in my dreams smiling at me. Proud of who they raised, who my brother raised, who I became. I was proud to be me and to have a brother who talked me into something so insane and so liberating. I couldn't stop thinking about that weekend.
One day, Damian entered the kitchen and put his head in his hands just as he had done before our trip. I knew immediately that something was up. He stared at the counter and said nothing.
“What’s up this time?” I asked with a sigh.
"Nothing, nothing...it's just. I think I figured out what I want to do," he shrugged, playing with his coffee cup on the countertop.
Intrigued, I asked, “Oh? Do you?”
* * *
"I do. I would like to do what we did for mom and dad."
* * *
Confused, I asked, "What do you mean? We already did that. We can't do it twice?"
“I know, I know. I mean, do what we did for mom and dad, but...for other people.”
“You want to become the ghost whisperer?” I joked.
He shrugged. "I want to figure out what happened. Lots of people go missing or turn up dead, and no one takes the time to find out what actually happened. Does it always involve ghosts? No. But sometimes it does, and that's where I come in. Come on, you can't tell me you haven't been thinking about it."
I had been thinking about it. A lot. So much in fact that I had already created a business and applied for a private investigator license so we could officially charge clients. I had been dropping clues to Damian for weeks. Talking about how much fun we had, how good we were at it, and how good it felt that we accomplished something so great. I was just waiting for it to be his idea, for him to ask me to join him.
“I have been thinking about it. The business license came in yesterday.”
* * *
He stood abruptly, shocked. "Are you kidding me? You've been planning this for weeks?"
* * *
"I knew as soon as we got home that we needed to do something like this," I smiled.
He dug through the pile of mail and found the paperwork. Staring at the papers in his hands, he shuffled through them, tearing up.
“You named it, ‘Whisper Investigations’?”
“I did. It fits, don’t you think?”
He laughed. “It really does.”
With a smirk, I turned toward him, “Remember that summer camp we went to in middle school?”
"Uhm...Yeah, I guess." He wiped his tears away and shot me a confused look.
“A boy mysteriously died there a few years after we stopped going,” I mentioned nonchalantly.
His eyebrows shot up. “Maybe we should talk to some of his family.”
“Maybe I already did.”
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About the Author
Marc Layton's passion for writing spine-chilling stories full of intrigue and suspense was born out of his travels around the globe. He felt inspired by the places he visited and the people he connected with and was motivated to pursue writing so he could share these stories with the world. A voracious reader of thriller and horror stories himself, it was only natural that he would dive into this genre.
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Copyright © 2021 by Marc Layton
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or location is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
