Spooked

by Sharp, Tracy

  “I may let you go someday. I may not. Your best chance of staying alive and unwounded is by making yourself very useful to me.”

  I nodded, a tear sliding down one cheek, and then the other.

  He watched me and tilted his head slightly. “It is unfortunate that you have your special ability. It makes you extremely rare and highly sought after by people like me.”

  So he was a collector, of sorts.

  I looked at his hands. They were long fingered. Pale. Inexpressive.

  “You’d better hope that this talent you have doesn’t fail you now.”

  With that, he got up from his chair and stood in front of me. “I’m sure you’ve figured out that you’re not the only person here with special talents. Don’t call out for help or try to reach out to them. Believe me. They know better.”

  My heart ached as the realization that Delia was gone forever fell over me. The thing that had taken her place seemed to have settled further into her body. If the thing hadn’t taken over her body, but had mimicked her likeness, then Delia’s body was somewhere, hidden, and may never be found.

  “Get some sleep,” he told me, clearly feeling nothing for my devastation. “We start tomorrow.” He turned and walked out of the room, letting the door click shut behind him.

  ***

  I lay awake a long time with my bedside lamp on. I was fortunate, I supposed, that they had afforded me that. The blanket was acrylic and rough, and I had trouble getting comfortable, but that was the least of my troubles at the moment.

  Where was Mick? Was he looking for me? Was he even alive?

  The possibility that the Delia thing had killed him lay heavily on my heart, and I swallowed down bitter grief and regret. I had known that Delia wasn’t quite right, but I’d gone with her anyway, and I might’ve gotten Mick killed because of my stupidity.

  Don’t trust anyone, she’d told me. I’d had no idea that anyone had included her.

  I knew that tears wouldn’t help me now, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I cried into my pillow until my sinuses were so swollen and blocked that I couldn’t breathe through my nose. I opened my mouth and took long shuddering breaths until I fell into the sleep of the hopeless and utterly forlorn.

  ***

  Sometime in the night I awoke to the alarming sound of a female screaming and crying. I sat straight up and listened.

  The words were muffled because of what I imagined was soundproofing of the walls. But even if I hadn’t been able to make out the words, the tone was unmistakable.

  What I was hearing was abject terror.

  I remembered the first man to enter the room, and felt my stomach clench.

  The cries became more muffled, and after a while sounded helpless.

  I wondered how long my act would work on him, to keep him from raping me.

  Maybe there were others like him whom the act wouldn’t work on.

  I began to tremble.

  ***

  When the door opened the next time, it was early morning. A young woman came in, maybe a couple of years older than me, her white blonde hair all jagged edges around her head—a modern shag that required a lot of hair product to keep it standing outward. Her eyes were such a pale blue that they looked almost silver. She was pretty in a cold way, her features sharp.

  She moved smoothly, her lean frame clad in red: jeans, red turtleneck, black knee-high flat boots. She walked up to the bed and tossed some clothes on the foot of it. I blinked. She’d moved so quickly she was almost a blur. I was tired. My mind was playing tricks with my perception. I looked down at the clothes she’d dropped on the bed. A pair of jeans and a pink sweater. A pair of clean underwear and a beige bra.

  “Get dressed,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion.

  I stared at her as she stood looking down at me, her arms crossed.

  “Now,” she said.

  I pushed the blanket off me and shivered in the chilly room. A flash of Delia’s warm kitchen smelling of morning coffee made me feel like crying again, but I swallowed back the tears.

  She took a step back as I stood, and watched me undress.

  I looked at her face as I slowly unzipped the jeans I wore and began pushing them down my legs.

  She exhaled a harsh breath and rolled her eyes. “We don’t have time for your modesty. Hurry up.”

  I moved more quickly; the not knowing what was coming next was making my nerves shiver and my breathing quick and shallow. When I had finished, I crossed my arms over my chest. My bladder was ready to burst. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  She turned and the thought of jumping on her back crossed my mind, but I had a feeling she’d seen it all and had moves I hadn’t even dreamed of for disobedient guests.

  She opened the door, stepping aside so I could go before her, a smirk on her face. “Smart girl,” she said. “I’m not one you want to screw with.”

  I walked past her, saying nothing.

  “The bathroom is just beyond that door.”

  I walked to the end of the white hall, past other closed doors.

  “Who is in those rooms?” I ventured to ask her.

  “Other people who have rare talents, such as yourself,” she said.

  I was surprised she’d actually answered me.

  “Right there,” she said when we’d reached a blue door.

  I opened the door and was surprised when she walked in after me. “I don’t need any help.”

  She snickered. “Get used to it, sweetheart. You don’t get to do anything on your own now. Even when you sleep there’s always someone watching you on camera.”

  I looked around the bathroom, horrified. “There are cameras in here, too?”

  “Yes there are, which means that they are watching me, too, so I have to do what I’m told. Get it?”

  I got it.

  I unzipped and paused. She sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

  I pulled my jeans down and performed the humiliating act of urinating with unseen people watching me.

  How could it get much worse? “Where am I?”

  She regarded me with an almost bored expression, her silvery eyes shuttered against me. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Look,” I said. “It matters to me. I was kidnapped by a woman I thought was my aunt, but wasn’t.” My voice became thick with emotion. “She’d changed into something…bad.”

  The girl’s expression didn’t change, like this didn’t surprise her at all.

  I stared up at her. “Please help me.” I didn’t know why I was asking her to help me. She clearly didn’t care about me, and obviously found the task of babysitting me to be a pain in the ass.

  Then something almost human passed over her face. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to, sweets.”

  “Why not?”

  Her face hardened again. “Hurry up.”

  She took me up four flights of stairs to a room much different from the one that had become my cell. Warm and inviting with plush red carpet, there was a black leather couch, loveseat, and chairs placed around a large, round coffee table. The walls were painted a coppery, sparkly gold. Soft instrumental music drifted around the room from unseen speakers.

  “Sit there.” She pointed to the loveseat.

  When I didn’t move right away she gave me a little shove, and her touch felt like a small electric shock.

  Walking lightning, I thought. Terrifying and fascinating all at once.

  I moved to the loveseat and sat.

  A man dressed in an expensive-looking charcoal suit and silky red shirt carried in a tray of small cut sandwiches and a pitcher of water. He found a glass on a shelf inside the coffee table and placed it in front of me. Wordlessly, he left.

  “Eat. Then we get busy,” the girl said to me, sitting in one of the leather chairs. She watched me and tapped long red nails on the armrest.

  I thought that because she had access to luxuries like hair product and nail polish, she must be a higher ranking captive.

  Nibbling
on a small, triangular cut sandwich—turkey and cheese, it turned out to be—I decided to take the risk and try to get some information on her.

  I sent out my psychic feelers, probing. I got a single vision of this girl getting into an expensive car with a leather interior, and replaying, in her mind, her plan to steal his wallet after he drove into the alley. Her name, Morgan, flashed in my mind.

  Then she was next to me so quickly, one hand clutching my throat, that I almost choked on a piece of sandwich I hadn’t yet swallowed.

  Her face was a mere inch from mine, and her furious eyes burned into me. “Don’t,” she said through gritted teeth. “Ever.”

  I stared at her, my eyes as big as quarters. I nodded as best I could with her hand clamped on my throat.

  Slowly she leaned back, and then suddenly she was back on the chair, her nails tapping the armrest, as if she’d never moved.

  I started to talk, and then coughed. I tried again. “How are you doing that?”

  “It’s my talent. Super speed. That’s why they got me.”

  Surprised that she’d shared this with me, I asked something else. “But you’re not really a captive now, are you?”

  “I stay because I want to. But if I wanted to take off, obviously I could do it, but they would find me eventually and end me.”

  The little I’d learned from stealing one of her secrets told me that she’d been living on the streets as a prostitute. “You had it bad out there, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t a day at the park,” she said.

  “You only pretended to be a hooker though, right? You could pick their pockets and not have to…perform for them.”

  “Are you done?” she asked me, refusing to answer my question.

  I nodded.

  “Okay. This is the deal. I’m leaving this room. I’ll come back with someone. Your only job is to steal secrets from them. It should be easy. It’s what you do.”

  “Every secret the person has? That could take a while.”

  She fixed me with an “as if” stare. “There will only be one worth taking. You’ll know what it is when you see it.”

  Then she was a blur, and the door opened and closed so fast it was as if she’d only been a figment of my imagination, and I was sitting in the room alone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Minutes later a middle-aged man sat in front of me. He was in good shape, chest and shoulder muscles bulging under his Henley shirt. Thick blonde hair streaked with gray was cut neatly and combed back. He was handsome behind stylish tortoiseshell rimmed glasses.

  He leaned forward on his knees, looked down at his clasped hands. “I have a secret I need to unload. I can’t keep it any longer. It’s killing me.” He looked up at me. “A close friend told me about this place…”

  At the very least there were psychics here.

  My heart went out to the man, even though I didn’t know him or what his secret was, yet. I nodded. “Okay. I can help you.”

  He lifted his hands. “How does it work?”

  “Just think of your secret and give me a few moments.”

  He lowered his head, shame pulling the corners of his mouth down as he thought of his secret…

  …of being molested by an uncle, Barry, from the time he was nine years old until he was fourteen. The boy’s name was Tim. His mother was raising him alone since she and his father split two years ago. She appreciated her brother taking such an interest in Tim. One day it all changed.

  And eventually Tim formulated a plan. During the ride on one of their many trips to Barry’s isolated cabin on the river, Tim suggested a ride in Barry’s speedboat.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool in the boat?” he’d said to him in the truck on the way to the cabin. “We never did that.”

  Barry glanced at him, surprised and grinning. They never talked about it. “Risky.”

  Tim pasted a grin on his face. “That’s part of the fun. We can pull it off.”

  “You’re a crazy kid, Timmy.”

  To this day he hated being called Timmy.

  “Can we bring some beers on the boat?”

  Barry chuckled. “Sure.”

  “We can pour them into thermoses so nobody will notice. We won’t attract attention.”

  Barry nodded. “You’re smart, you know it?”

  Tim shrugged, faking pride. “I have my moments.”

  The thing about going to Barry’s cabin was that he always acted as if they were just two guys hanging out, until he’d had a few too many and got his courage up. The first time, Tim thought that Barry had been drunk out of his skull and that it would never happen again. But then it did happen again. And again. And again.

  And it was still happening. All pretenses about it being the alcohol were long gone. But Barry still needed the drink to shed his inhibitions. Apparently, he did realize what a scumbag he was. He just needed the booze to make it so he didn’t care.

  When they got to the cabin Tim poured beer into two thermoses. When Barry went into the bathroom to “shake the dew off his lily pad,” Tim opened the small pill bottle which held ground sleeping pills—four of them. The pill bottle was swiped from one of the many in his mother’s purse. The sleeping pills he’d swiped from Barry’s medicine cabinet. In addition to feeding his raging addiction to prescription drugs, the pills were how he got Tim to “loosen up” when Tim argued with him about doing the things that Barry wanted him to do.

  Recently, Barry had been talking to Tim about bringing a friend along. Someone a little younger, like Tim’s eleven-year-old next-door neighbor, who liked to hang out with Tim sometimes and shoot hoops in the driveway. Barry had been watching the kid pretty closely lately. Tim hadn’t liked the look in his eye.

  He poured the powder into Barry’s blue thermos. His was red. Didn’t want to mix them up. Hells, no.

  They went out onto the boat and when they got to a nice, quiet area, Tim handed Barry the blue thermos.

  “Thanks, Timmy.”

  Tim nodded, looking out at the water and taking a long slug off his beer. He tried not to watch as Barry sucked down a good part of the beer in his thermos. To hide his grin, he wiped a hand over his mouth and coughed.

  “Getting a cold, Timmy?”

  “Not sure. My throat’s a bit sore. Maybe.”

  “That sucks, buddy.” Barry finished the beer.

  “Let me give you a refill, buddy,” Timmy said, reaching over and taking the container from him.

  “Thanks Timmy. You’re a really good kid, you know it?”

  “Thanks, Uncle Barry.”

  Barry gave a satisfied nod and scanned the water—there was nobody around. The booze was making him feel horny already. It usually didn’t take long.

  Tim handed him a newly filled thermos.

  “Thanks Timmy.” He tipped his head back and swallowed half the beer, his eyes not moving from Tim’s face as he drank. “Nice out here today.”

  Tim nodded, looking over the horizon at the sinking sun, which left orange and pink streaks in the sky. Tim would never forget the way the sky looked that day as he prepared to kill Uncle Barry. “Going to be a nice day tomorrow.”

  “Sailor’s delight,” Barry said, still watching Tim.

  Tim put the top on his thermos and watched as Barry’s eyes drooped. He giggled.

  Barry lifted his eyebrows. “What’s funny, kiddo?”

  “You look like you’re about to pass out, Uncle Barry.”

  “Little tired, but I won’t fall asleep on you. Don’t worry. Come on over here, buddy.”

  Tim felt the smile spread on his face. “You want a little sailor’s delight, good buddy?”

  Barry sat back, spreading his legs. He unzipped his jeans and leaned back, the smile on his face obscene. “What do you think?”

  “’Nuff said.” Tim moved to him. “Stand up so I can get these down.”

  “You can do it like this. We don’t need to pull them down.”

  “Come on, buddy. I can’t really delight you li
ke a sailor should be delighted with your jeans still up like that. Stand up for just a second for me.” Tim tugged Barry’s arms.

  “Okay.” Barry careened upward, trying not to stagger. “If you—”

  Tim shoved Barry in the chest, putting his weight behind it.

  Barry’s arms pin-wheeled and he went in backwards, reaching and grasping for Tim.

  Tim almost fell forward but caught himself, falling backward into the boat.

  He turned away, listening to the splashing and the sputters, and the cries for help and the gasps for breath, and thought of all the times Barry made him do things to him that had made him gag, unable to breathe.

  Barry hadn’t cared about his cries, before he’d stopped bothering to cry.

  Then the splashing just stopped.

  Tim called the police on his cell and told him that his uncle had fallen into the river, and he hadn’t jumped in after him because he couldn’t swim, and besides that Uncle Barry had given him a lot of beer to drink and he was feeling pretty tipsy.

  All this I saw in mere seconds. I sucked in his secret, pulling it out of him and into me in long, black, sinewy swirls, and fell back on the sofa with the weight of it.

  When I opened my eyes he was watching me, his green eyes wide with wonder. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God.”

  I sat up, breathless. “There are others here with various talents. There may be someone who can clear your memory of your uncle completely.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s right to forget it. But I think I can carry it now. Thank you.”

  I thought of asking him to help me, but I knew there were cameras all over that room. “You’re welcome.”

  ***

  In minutes the door opened again and a tall, black-haired boy of about seventeen came into the room with another man. The man was balding and roundish, and wore thick glasses, which he seemed to push up his nose as a nervous habit. The boy held the door open with one long-fingered hand as the man entered.

  Morgan came through the door after them, moving in the same languid, long-limbed way. “Lorelei, this is Jude. You’ll be working together to help this gentleman today.”