Sinister Sanctuary

by Colleen Gleason

  And with that, Teddy had her arm gripped tightly by the taller, far-fitter-than-she Misty, and a gun pointed at her as they began to climb.

  Please don’t trip, she thought, imagining what would happen if she or the gun-toting Misty did so. A bullet in this small, cylindrical space, and so close to her body… She shivered.

  All right, just concentrate on getting up there in one piece.

  “So, you decided to try and haunt us out of here,” Teddy said. “The scream, the ghostly green projection, and so on. But you only did it outside—why not ever inside? That probably would have been more effective, to be honest. And how did you get the door up top to lock and then unlock? And the freaky chill?” Teddy slowed her pace a little to catch her breath and so she could talk.

  “One of you was always here,” Misty said. “You never left the damned cottage, so we couldn’t set up anything in here. It wasn’t hard to break in when we finally had the chance. But we’d have gotten more serious if the other stuff didn’t work to get rid of you—but this here is a much better solution. Keep moving.”.

  “So.” Teddy puffed. “The first night we were here—well, technically the second night, but it was the first night we were up on the lighthouse—how did you even know we were going to be up—”

  “Shut up,” growled Rob from behind them. “Just stop talking and keep moving. This isn’t a goddam book club.” He shoved at Teddy, and she barely caught herself from taking a header into the steps in front of her.

  After that, she kept her mouth shut because, one, she was getting out of breath, and two, there was the nerve-racking element of the gun near her side. She probably should be more terrified, to be honest, but Teddy had done enough research for her books to know that oftentimes in the most trying and desperate of situations, one’s mind became cool and calm. It was only later that it fell to pieces.

  Still. She felt clammy under her arms and her stomach was in knots. She could only see Oscar from behind, so could only imagine what he was going through.

  The storm battered the exterior of the lighthouse. Lightning flared, sending shocks of illumination through the random windows in the tower, and rain—no, hail—pelted the glass. Thunder rumbled angrily, and Teddy fancied she could feel the circular stairs swaying a little beneath her feet from the force of the wind.

  There were only another dozen or so steps to go. Her legs were trembling—not so much from the exertion of climbing, but from sudden nerves.

  “All right. You and me first, mister,” said Misty as they reached the door to the lantern room. “You stay here,” she added, giving Teddy a little shove toward Rob, who was two steps below her. Misty turned back to Oscar, aiming the gun at him. “Keep it slow and easy—no funny stuff—or you get a bullet in your side. I hear that’s a long, painful death.”

  Oscar cast Teddy a quick look behind him—a meaningful one, as if he was trying to tell her something—and her heart swelled with emotion as she watched him take the last step up, cradling his hand as Misty followed right behind him.

  Then, just as he opened the door, she realized what he’d wanted to tell her—to remind her.

  The bats.

  He opened the door and ducked quickly into the lantern room as the bats erupted.

  Misty screamed and jolted backward, but Teddy had already slipped up next to her by the door. She pushed past Misty, pulling her out of the way and using her frightened momentum to shove her off the top of the steps. Teddy ducked into the lantern room, keeping low beneath the flurry of bat wings. Oscar slammed the door behind her as she heard the shouts from Misty tumbling into Rob as they fell down the stairs.

  “Great,” Teddy said as she heard the sound of a gun firing followed by the ugly sounds of people falling. “Now what?”

  “We get the lantern working, Teddy, and send an SOS. Lock the door. They’ll be back.” Oscar was already moving toward the massive pod of lenses in the center of the room.

  “There’s no lock,” Teddy shrieked in a whisper, wriggling the knob as if she might manifest one.

  Oscar swore and spun, looking around for something to blockade the door—but there was nothing up there but a broom.

  They both saw it at the same time. “I’ll wedge the handle under the door. It’ll help keep it from swinging open,” Teddy said, conscious of Oscar’s injured hand. She heard the sounds of angry footsteps pounding back up the stairs. “Now would be a really damned good time for Stuart Millore to show up and have his revenge,” she muttered as a huge, horrible flash of lightning lit the sky as if it was noon.

  “After all, they did murder you, didn’t they, Stuart?” she said.

  The violence of the storm raging about the lighthouse was a sight she’d never seen, and it set the hair on her head standing straight up. Being this high, inside a room completely sided by glass—it was both awe-inspiring and terrifying to see the power of the storm.

  And Rob and Misty wanted to put them outside, up here, in that maelstrom.

  Oh God, we might actually die.

  The door heaved a little as one of their attackers crashed into it, and Teddy swallowed back a scream. She had to find something else to stave them off. Misty and Rob had only a small space to work with on the other side; just a tiny landing and the very dangerous steps—but there were two of them, and they were much stronger than she was.

  Even with his bad wrist, Oscar had somehow climbed down inside the center of the lenses, and she could barely make out his figure behind the beehive-shaped, rippled glass. In a moment of wild incongruity, it struck her that he looked like a caterpillar inside a beautiful glass cocoon.

  Suddenly, light flared from behind one of the lenses. It filled the darkness, blinding Teddy because she was near that side. She stumbled away, moving to the opposite side of the lantern room as the door heaved again. This time, it was accompanied by the sounds of splintering.

  Come on, she thought. I know it’s not that easy to break through a damned door!

  But she saw nothing that would help her strengthen the door any further.

  “Now would be a good time for a miracle,” she said, putting her weight against the door as it heaved again.

  It occurred to her, randomly and hilariously, that Misty and Rob hadn’t even tried to open the door by turning the knob—they’d gone directly to breaking the door down, and thus the broomstick wasn’t doing much good at the moment.

  Oscar had the light flashing from behind the Fresnel lens—shockingly fast work!—and Teddy counted the dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dots he was somehow making with the lantern. But the door was weakening, and even the SOS might not help them—the Coast Guard, even if they saw it, wouldn’t be able to get to the lighthouse in time, would they?

  When the door gave way, Teddy stumbled back and fell to the ground as Rob barged in.

  Scrambling to her feet, Teddy ran around to the side of the lantern room where the light was the brightest, facing away—out into the dark storm—and hoping Rob would be blinded if he came after her.

  But before she got far, strong hands grabbed her and threw her to the ground. Teddy hit her head on the glass wall, and saw stars along with the lightning blossoming in the night sky.

  “Get out of there now or I’ll shoot her,” Misty ordered Oscar, brandishing her weapon. “Turn that damned light off.”

  “All right, all right, don’t shoot,” Oscar said. “Small quarters in here—the bullet could ricochet and hit any of us,” he added, climbing out from behind or beneath—Teddy wasn’t certain—the lenses.

  “Outside,” Rob said, yanking Teddy to her feet by a hank of her hair. “Now.” She cried out in pain and moved along as quickly as possible.

  Rob reached for the glass door. Just before he touched it, it burst open with a gust of rain and chill.

  But it wasn’t just rain. It was ice.

  And Teddy’s breath immediately frosted, hanging in the air like a dense cloud.

  The world turned eerily frigid.

&n
bsp; And that was when she saw it: the amorphous blue-green shape, billowing just outside the doorway.

  Twenty

  Oscar froze at the sight of the shape glowing against the thrashing night sky.

  It was bluish-green, and as he watched, it stretched, lengthening into a tall figure that loomed over them. It had the vague, undulating shape of a human, but not a normal human: an elongated, horrible, furious creature with a cavernous black mouth and fiery yellow eyes.

  Oscar’s breath—what he managed to exhale, for his lungs had frozen (as had the rest of his body)—hung in the air, and what should have been rain were sharp, frigid needles that pounded him and everyone around him.

  “What the hell…” whispered Misty, stepping backward, goggling at the apparition. “Is that…?”

  In spite of himself, Oscar already knew the answer to that, and somehow, he had the wherewithal to grab the fascinated Teddy’s hand and yank her back from the tableau in front of them.

  A horrible scream—more of a cry of anger and fury rather than one of terror and fear—filled the air. It came from the apparition, he thought, and it rattled the glass windows, swelling in the lantern room as if attempting to combust the enclosure.

  Rob and Misty fell back, petrified, their faces frozen as the apparition swelled, engulfing them, while its livid cry battled with the roll of thunder and the howl of the wind. Rain and sleet whipped up, spinning into the lantern room like raging icicles pummeling them through the fog of their cloudy, icy breaths.

  “Watch out,” Teddy cried over the ferocity as Misty screamed and turned to run, eyes blind with terror.

  She bolted from the apparition—past Oscar and Teddy—and spun out of the lantern room door. Over the tornado around them, Oscar heard another cry, a more shocked and terrified one that was suddenly, horribly cut off. He heard the ugly, unpleasant noise of someone falling.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  As Teddy and Oscar stood there, holding hands, watching in horror, Rob seemed unable to move for a long moment. He placed his hands over his ears as the ghost’s scream continued to fill the night, malevolent and bloodcurdling, and then suddenly, somehow, he was airborne…into the night, over the edge of the railing.

  If he screamed, the sound was drowned out by the wild storm and the fury of the specter.

  Oscar squeezed Teddy’s hand, yanking her behind him when the blue-green entity roared wider and louder in front of them. His fingers were so cold that they hardly moved, and his wrist, which had been hot with angry pain, felt slightly better. His eyelashes and nose felt tipped with ice. The arctic blast of the furious ghost roared around them, and for a moment, he thought they were to be the next victims.

  But from behind him, Teddy shouted, “Thank you, Stuart! Now you can rest in peace! Be off with you!”

  Oscar would have rolled his eyes if the moment hadn’t been so desperate, and when the ghost shivered violently, he tensed, prepared to defend them—how he would do so, he had no idea—

  Then suddenly, it eased.

  The noise, the storm, the energy in front of them. It softened—if one could use that term to describe an amorphous object—and then, all at once, it was just gone.

  The freeze in the air also disappeared instantly, the rain and normal storm wind returned, and even the lightning and thunder seemed to lessen.

  The only sound was the drum of rain on the roof and glass walls and the unsteady breathing of Teddy next to him.

  His hands still shaky, his wrist now a mottled purple and blue balloon with no mobility to speak of, Oscar nevertheless managed to pull Teddy into his arms.

  “That was…” Words failed him.

  But, of course, Teddy had plenty to spare: “A real ghost, Oscar! A real ghost. Even you can’t deny it.”

  He laughed and buried his face in her sweet hair. No. Even he couldn’t deny it now.

  “So there was a real ghost after all,” Iva said, preening a little as she looked at Oscar.

  They were gathered at Orbra’s, of course—but after hours this time, so no one would interrupt—because the Tuesday Ladies insisted on hearing all of the details. It was three days after the shattering events at Stony Cape Lighthouse. Oscar’s Jeep had been extricated from the mud, and the power had been restored. And Teddy and Oscar had had two days of uninterrupted time to heat up the sheets, walk the beach, and otherwise enjoy being together without the specter of Marcie, the Sargent Blue book, or a ghost.

  “There was a real ghost and a fake ghost,” Teddy said, settling back with a cup of something called a matcha latte that Orbra had insisted she try. It was very green, but it was frothy and sweet, and though there was an underlying taste of grass, it was going down pretty well. “And that was what confused me at first. And what caused some of us to question the idea of a supernatural element.”

  She looked at Oscar, who was watching her as she held court—as, for once, Maxine was actually listening. His wrist was wrapped up (according to the emergency room personnel, it was badly sprained, but not broken), and he had a mug of tea in front of him that smelled floral and sweet. When their eyes met, he had the grace to appear a little abashed. He was so adorable.

  “I told you I could sense the ghostly presence,” Iva said firmly. “I have an uncanny ability for these sorts of things.”

  Maxine opened her mouth to say something, but she was interrupted as Declan and Leslie came through the door in a blur of activity.

  “Wait, wait, don’t say anything else. I want to hear,” Leslie said. As she took a seat next to Iva, she murmured, “Did you bring it?”

  “Yes,” Iva replied, glancing at Teddy. “But first let’s hear about what actually happened that night.”

  “I thought you left Wicks Hollow,” said Declan, looking at Oscar with a quirked eyebrow.

  “I came back,” Oscar replied.

  “And just in time,” Teddy said. “Although if you hadn’t gotten stuck in the mud, I would have probably left before Misty and Rob showed up the next day, and then none of this would have happened.”

  “Which is a good thing,” Oscar reminded her with a small smile. “Otherwise, Misty and Rob would still be doing what they were doing.” His smile faded, and Teddy knew he was remembering the fact that Rob wouldn’t ever be doing anything again. He had, of course, died after his fall off the top of the lighthouse. Poetic justice, maybe, but it was still an awful thing to happen, and a terrible memory to live with.

  Misty, on the other hand, had survived her fall down the lighthouse stairs. She’d broken an arm and had a serious concussion, and would probably spend the rest of her life in prison. But she’d been able to fill in some of the details Teddy and Oscar hadn’t known.

  “All right, back to business,” Maxine said, slamming her hand on the table. “Did you get the lantern working or not?”

  “That’s jumping ahead a little,” Teddy said.

  “Well, not really, as, chronologically speaking, the SOS happened before the real ghost,” Oscar reminded her.

  “Oh. Right.” Teddy spread her hands and gave a little laugh. “Ha. I usually write the denouements, not speak them—so give me a little break, everyone.”

  They all laughed, and she continued. “So, even though we realized there had been some monkey business in causing us to believe there was a ghost—the nightly scream, and the greenish cloud thing—there were still a few things I couldn’t explain.

  “Like, how did Misty and Rob know Oscar and I were going to go up to the top of the lighthouse that first night? There was no way they could have known—and even if they did, they couldn’t have blocked the door to keep us up there.”

  “Did you say block the door? Not lock it?” Maxine demanded.

  “Yes, because the door doesn’t have a lock or a latch on it. None of them up there do. So somehow, that door—and the others—wouldn’t open…and then suddenly it did. And then there was the all-of-a-sudden arctic chill that came and went inexplicably. How could they have done
that? Plus, that chill was just creepy.” She looked at Oscar. “That was why I wasn’t completely convinced, ever, that what we’d experienced that first night wasn’t a ghost.”

  “Those thoughts occurred to me too—as we were climbing up those steps. Plus,” Oscar said, “the greenish supposed ghost we saw the night of the break-in was different from what we’d seen the first night.”

  “Exactly.” Teddy beamed at him, wishing they were sitting next to each other so she could smack a kiss on his cheek. “And once Misty confirmed that they actually had murdered Stuart Millore, and I remembered that we’d been talking about someone being pushed off the top of the lighthouse right when the door slammed shut…I was certain there had to be a real supernatural presence. It just made sense.”

  “After all, this is Wicks Hollow,” Juanita said, petting Bruce Banner enthusiastically as he tried to lick up some of the crumbs on the table in front of her.

  “That’s right,” Maxine said, spraying a new set of crumbs from her cinnamon scone. “It’s like that Hell Mountain on the Tiffany show. But no demons.”

  “Hellmouth,” Juanita snapped. “And it’s Buffy, not Tiffany or Taffy. And it’s the Hulk, not the Hunk. How many times do we have to tell you?”

  Maxine flapped a gnarled hand at her friend and said, “No respect. No respect at all. Now, young man, if you don’t tell me about the lantern, I’m going to get very annoyed.”

  Teddy stifled a giggle, unable to imagine how “very annoyed” could be different from regular Maxine.

  “Well, I didn’t have time to actually try and figure out how to get the real light working—even if it was still possible,” Oscar replied. “Plus, one hand was pretty much out of commission. But I had the flashlight in my pocket, and I knew that even a small light would be reflected eighty times its actual illumination behind those Fresnel lenses, so I used that. It was easy to flip it on and off to do the SOS.” He shrugged nonchalantly, but Teddy noticed his cheeks were a little ruddy.