“What are you two doing here?” Roland emerged from the van, staring from me to Oscar in disbelief, and my throat went dry. I glanced around him, but the van was empty. Cyril stepped forward and thrust something at Roland—the note Margot had given him. Oscar and I exchanged anxious looks as Roland skimmed the letter. When he finished, he gave us a calculating look.
“So what’s the emergency?”
“Uh . . .” I glanced helplessly at Oscar. “I need to talk to my dad.”
Before Roland could respond, Cyril cleared his throat loudly. “You stay?” he asked me pointedly, already taking a step back.
“Just wait one minute.” Turning, I squinted at the prison entrance, but there was no sign of Dad or anyone else.
“They’re setting up in the mess hall.” Roland leaned against the van, eyeing me. “Something wrong?”
“I need to talk to my dad,” I repeated. My palms were starting to sweat. “I’m not—”
“Hey!” Oscar yelled. I spun around to see Cyril sprinting toward his cab. We stared as he threw himself inside and slammed the door. The tires spun on the gravel as the cab turned in a sharp circle, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake as it sped back toward the main road.
Shaken, I exchanged a panicked look with Oscar. Roland waited to speak until the sound of the taxi’s engine had faded.
“You two really shouldn’t have come here. It’s too dangerous.”
I shivered, but managed to keep my voice steady. “I want to talk to my dad.”
Roland nodded slowly. “All right, hang on. I just need to grab the extra flashlights.” Casting a quick glance around, he hopped back into the van. “Stay right there.”
My breath grew shallow. Reaching out, I touched Oscar’s arm and nodded at the door. He stared blankly for a few seconds, then his eyes widened in understanding.
Quietly, we edged closer to the van. Oscar pressed his hands to the sliding door, I grabbed the handle, and we yanked hard. Roland spun around just as the door slammed shut.
“Hey!”
I stumbled back as he tugged at the door, but the exterior locks worked just as well as they had on Mi Jin. Turning, Oscar and I left Roland yelling and pounding on the windows and ran flat out to the prison entrance.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE THING 3: ESCAPE INTO THE ABYSS
Alarm: TAKE YOUR MEDS!
“Okay.” Oscar leaned against the metal double doors, breathing heavily. “That was dumb. That was really, really dumb. Aunt Lidia’s going to freak out.”
Smiling shakily, I rubbed a stitch in my side. “Yeah. We’re so dead.” Oscar half-laughed, half-groaned. Neither of us spoke for a full minute. I imagined I could still hear Roland, yelling and pounding on the windows of the van. Oscar was right—Dad was going to flip when he found out what we’d done.
Well, whatever. Saving him from a psychopath—possibly two—would be worth the punishment. Hopefully.
“Okay,” I said at last. “He said they’re in the mess hall. Let’s go.”
Oscar nodded. “Which way?”
For the first time, we took a good look around. Directly opposite the entrance, another pair of double doors was bolted shut with a rusted chain. The corridor extended to our left and right, both paths equally dark. Tiny patches of dim, gray light along the floor marked where the moonlight seeped in from the slit windows in the cells. Silence hung in the air like a heavy curtain.
Oscar and I edged closer to each other.
“Should we just yell? Maybe they’ll hear us,” Oscar suggested.
“What if Emily hears us first?”
He made a face. “Good point.”
“So which way looks less creepy?” I asked.
“Let’s see.” Oscar squinted down the hall. “To our left, we have Serial Killer Avenue, and to our right is Rue de la Zombie. Coin toss?”
“Nah, easy choice. We can outrun zombies.” We started down the hall on the right, arms bumping together as we walked. “Unless they’re those really fast zombies,” I added. “You know, the ones with superhuman strength that can run up walls and stuff. Of course, the good thing about them is they move so fast, we’d barely have time to feel scared before they were eating our brains.”
“Thanks, Miss Sunshine.”
“No problem.”
Each time we passed a cell, I felt a chill—not from fear, but from cold. Somehow, the air coming from the cells was cooler than in the hall. We reached the end of the corridor and headed left, combating the oppressive silence with nervous jokes about vampire bats hanging from the ceilings and corpses in solitary confinement. I was describing my favorite scene in Grandma’s fifth movie, Return to the Asylum, when Oscar stopped and grabbed my arm.
“Listen.”
I held my breath. A distant beep, beep, beep was just barely audible over my too-loud heartbeat.
Oscar glanced at me. “The crew?”
“Probably.”
We set off at a faster pace, and the beeping grew louder. When the corridor ended, we stepped into a small foyer. I scanned it quickly—a window crusted with grime, a dilapidated staircase, and a pair of doors propped open with mic stands.
“There.” My voice cracked a little as we hurried to the entrance. But my relief didn’t last long.
The mess hall extended in front of us, row after row of heavy-looking steel tables. Rusted, broken chairs were strewn in the aisles, legs bent or missing. A lone, battery-powered fluorescent lamp stood on the other side of the hall, surrounded by cables, bags, and other gear.
But the crew was nowhere to be seen.
“Perfect,” I muttered, stepping back when a rat scurried out from under a table and fled into the shadows. “Just perfect.”
Oscar groaned. “I just realized what that noise is,” he said angrily, heading down the aisle. “Aunt Lidia’s phone alarm. Again.”
I hurried to keep up with him. “For her pills?”
“Yeah.” We reached the lamp and began digging through bags, looking for Lidia’s phone. Oscar grabbed a backpack with more force than necessary, knocking over the lamp. I caught it, raising my eyebrows at him as I set it upright. “You okay?”
“No.” Furiously, Oscar dumped the contents of another bag on the table. “You’ve seen how awful she looks lately. She keeps forgetting her pills—it’s not like her. Jess is making us go home for a few weeks after this episode so she can rest.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, right?” I asked tentatively. “She needs to get better. And you’ll come back.”
“Yeah.” Oscar shoved aside a few folders and a walkie-talkie. “But if we go home, I’ll have to visit my dad. And if I visit my dad, I’ll have to tell him why I got expelled. And I—I just can’t. Ha.” Oscar slammed the bottle of pills on the table with a sort of savage triumph.
Glancing at him, I unzipped a small pocket on the outside of a dark green backpack. “Here’s her phone.” I swiped the alarm off. “No reception.”
Slowly, Oscar started stuffing everything back into the backpack. I took a deep breath.
“I know how you feel,” I said. “I can’t go back to Chelsea, either.”
“Because you’re mad at your mom for getting remarried?”
“No.” I squeezed Lidia’s phone. “Well, yes. But it’s not just that. When she went to Cincinnati, I figured she’d either come back like she did the first few times, or finally focus on her photography, like she kept saying she wanted. But now she’s marrying some guy, and he has a—a daughter, and . . .”
My throat tightened. Oscar quietly stacked the folders and slid them back into the backpack. I took a deep breath.
“The thing is . . .”
The Thing. I never said it out loud, not to Trish or Mark or Dad or Grandma. Because I knew how they’d respond.
Your mom loves you, Kat.
&n
bsp; “She loves me,” I whispered. “But she doesn’t like me. Everything I do disappoints her.”
That’s not true.
“The first time she took off, I believed her when she said it was to give a real photography career a shot.”
And she changed her mind. She came back.
“But photography had nothing to do with it. The real reason she left is . . .”
Don’t say it!
But the Thing finally broke loose.
“. . . me.”
For a split second, I thought I saw a shadow flicker near the entrance. Not rat-size. Human-size.
“I used to think maybe she just never wanted kids at all,” I said, still gazing at the entrance. “She’s always trying to change how I dress, what I eat, everything. She’d hate my hair like this.” I touched the back of my head self-consciously. “But it’s not that she never wanted a daughter. It’s that I wasn’t the daughter she wanted. That’s why she kept leaving. And now she’s getting married again—and she’ll have a stepdaughter. Elena.” I closed my eyes. “Mom seems to like her just fine.”
For the first time ever, I saw the Thing clearly, face-to-face. It had my eyes and nose and mouth, my old, long braid hanging down its back. It wore a pretty sundress, no Crypt Keeper in sight. It preferred fashion magazines to horror movies, and shopping to paintball. The Thing was exactly what my mother wanted.
The opposite of me.
“I’m sorry.”
I blinked, startled. “What?”
“Sorry about your mom,” Oscar said again, staring at the walkie-talkie in his hands.
“Oh.” I let out a shaky laugh. “Sorry. That’s it? Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘That’s not true, she’s your mother and she loves you no matter what, blah blah blah’?”
Oscar lifted a shoulder. “Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe some parents just—”
Creeeak.
We both jumped, staring around the mess hall. I stepped away from the fluorescent lamp and tripped a little on a roll of cables. No movement, no sounds . . . but I had the overwhelming sensation someone was watching.
“We need to find Lidia,” I whispered.
Oscar stuffed the bottle of pills in his pocket before picking up the walkie-talkie. “Lidia?”
Nothing. Flipping the dial, he tried a few more times. “I don’t know which channel they’re using.”
“Keep trying while we look for them,” I said, itching to leave. The mess hall was creeping me out.
We crept toward the entrance, arms pressed together. I half-expected a pair of hands to shoot out from under every table and grab our ankles. But we reached the foyer safely.
“Back the way we came, or upstairs?” Oscar asked.
I studied the rickety staircase. “Not upstairs. Let’s try to find the courtyard.”
We hurried back down the dark corridor, both of us glancing over our shoulders every other second. Oscar kept flipping channels on the walkie-talkie, listening for the crew. Goose bumps broke out on my arms—the temperature in the hall was dropping. The Thing was right on my heels. I could sprint for hours and I’d never outrun it.
“Oscar?”
“Yeah?”
“Why can’t you tell your dad you got expelled for fighting?”
Oscar didn’t respond right away, and I wondered if I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Then he sighed.
“Because he’s going to ask why Mark and I got in a fight in the first place.”
I squeezed Lidia’s phone again, my eyes darting into each shadow-filled cell we passed. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being watched. “So, why did you?”
“Because . . .” Oscar hesitated. “He was my best friend, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I . . . I liked him. And I told him, and he . . . kind of freaked out. And told everyone. And—”
“Wait, told everyone what?” I interrupted, confused. “That you liked . . .” I trailed off as I realized what he meant.
Not liked him. Liked him. A crush.
“Oh. Okay,” I said. Oscar glanced at me uncertainly, and I tried to smile in a reassuring way. “So—”
Beep! Beep! Beep!
I gasped, nearly dropping Lidia’s phone. Oscar leaned closer and we stared at the screen.
KEEP HER AWAY <3 KEEP HER AWAY <3 KEEP HER AWAY <3
The beeps bounced off the stone walls, unnaturally loud in the tomblike prison. Frantically, I pressed a bunch of buttons at random. Oscar grabbed it and popped the batteries out, and the beeping stopped.
“Okay, seriously,” he said. “What’s going on? The phone, the GPS in the taxi, the laptop . . .”
“It’s the show’s ghost. He likes me.”
He stared at me. “I honestly can’t tell if you’re kidding, Kat.”
“Neither can I,” I said wryly. “Look, Sam said the ghost of a boy haunts the show. The one in the photo next to Lidia, remember?”
I started walking again, and Oscar kept up at my side. “Oookay . . . so what are these messages about? Keep her away . . . Who’s her? Emily?”
“I guess . . .” I trailed off, picturing the way the ghost boy had reached for Lidia as she’d crumpled. Ever since we’d left Crimptown, he’d been trying harder and harder to tell me something. And Lidia had been getting sicker and sicker. “No. It’s about Lidia.”
“What? Why?”
We passed the entrance and headed down the other hall. “The most haunted show on television,” I said, thinking out loud. “It started with the dead air in the first episode—the séance. What if the show is haunted because the ghost from the lighthouse never left?”
The corridor dead-ended, another hall stretching out to our right. “Lidia passed out at the first séance, when the lightbulb exploded,” I continued. “And then again in Crimptown—and she’d been with Sam right before that. The message says the medium. It’s not that Sam is dangerous, it’s that he contacts ghosts. He contacted the lighthouse ghost, he contacted Sonja . . .”
I stopped again, and Oscar faced me. “What?”
“Sonja possessed Lidia,” I whispered. “Mi Jin said it takes a ton of energy for a ghost to possess a person or objects . . . but ghosts can manipulate electricity.”
Oscar glanced down at Lidia’s smartphone. “So?”
“The hearts,” I said softly. “Her heart—Lidia’s heart.”
“What do you . . . ?” Oscar trailed off, and I saw the realization dawn on his face before I said it out loud.
“Her pacemaker. That’s why they can possess her.”
Oscar exhaled loudly. The temperature had dropped so low, I could see a wisp of his breath. “Okay. And now she’s running around a prison with hundreds of ghosts. Perfect.”
We walked toward the end of the hall, neither of us speaking. I was so lost in my thoughts about Lidia that we were almost in front of the last cell before I heard the rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape.
Abandoning all pretense, I grabbed Oscar’s hand. We exchanged a terrified look before taking the last few steps and peering inside the dark cell. A filthy cot was bolted to the wall on the right, directly below the sad excuse for a window letting in a weak ray of moonlight.
But my eyes went straight to the figure crouched in the corner, scraping at the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE RETURN OF RED LEER
P2P WIKI
Entry: “Cold Spots”
[Last edited by beautifulgollum]
Cold spots are various spots in a haunted location with cooler temperatures, often thought to indicate the presence of ghosts which have not materialized.
My skin felt like ice. All my instincts screamed at me to run, but my feet were frozen to the ground. It was a woman—a woman with long hair hanging in her eyes, head bowed, sliding something over
a board lying on the ground . . . a board with letters, numbers, and a tiny light flashing red . . .
Oscar squeezed my hand so hard I cringed. “Aunt Lidia?”
My knees nearly buckled in relief. He was right—it was Lidia, crouched over Mi Jin’s Ouija board. But she didn’t stop moving the planchette when Oscar said her name. He approached her slowly, letting go of my hand to kneel down next to her. “Can you hear me?”
Scrape-scrape-scrape.
“You forgot your medicine again.” Tentatively, Oscar touched her arm. I stared down at the board, a chill of dread slowly creeping down my spine.
“Oscar . . .”
“Look, it’s right here.” Oscar handed me the walkie-talkie and pulled the bottle of pills out of his pocket. “Aunt Lidia, can you stop for a second, please?”
“Oscar.”
“What?”
I pointed at the board. “Look at what she’s spelling.”
F R E E T H E M E N—F R E E T H E M E N—F R E E T H E M E N
“Free the men?” Oscar glanced nervously at Lidia. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I swallowed. “Remember the Ouija board? Gather the women. And the other one—free them.”
“So?”
“Oscar, think about it.” My voice cracked with fear. “She’s been sick ever since Crimptown.”
“Yeah . . .” Oscar stood slowly, lowering his voice. “Wait. You think Sonja is still possessing her?”
“Not Sonja.” Kneeling down, I grabbed both of Lidia’s hands with mine. The scraping stopped, and suddenly the cell felt too quiet. Lidia didn’t look up, though I could see her shoulders rise and fall with each quick, shallow breath.
“Who are you?” I whispered, then let go of her hands. I knew the name she would spell before the planchette slid over to the first letter.
R E D L E E R
The scraping stopped. Oscar and I backed away as Lidia lifted her head. Slowly, her lips stretched into a wide, wide smile.
But not Lidia’s smile.
She lurched forward, shoving us aside with freakish strength. I slammed into the wall as Lidia burst out of the cell and took off down the corridor.
Dead Air Page 17
