Blood Ghost (The Hunting Tree Book 2)

by Ike Hamill

“No,” she said, laughing.

  “Hey,” Wes yelled.

  “Not at first,” Chelsea said.

  “You gotta start somewhere,” Kyle said. “Might as well be at the bottom.”

  Chelsea laughed.

  “That wasn’t a joke,” Kyle said.

  Chelsea laughed harder.

  “Okay,” Wes said, sitting back down with his bowl of ice cream. “What are we playing next? Should we play hearts until your mom finishes in the kitchen?”

  “Ugh. I hate hearts,” Chelsea said.

  “If you didn’t always try to shoot the moon, you wouldn’t lose so bad,” Don said.

  “Whatever,” Chelsea said.

  “He’s got a point, dear,” Wes said. He held up two fingers in a lopsided gesture. “Sometimes it’s better to hold back instead of trying to get it all at once. I’m not trying to discourage ambition or anything like that…”

  “Oh man,” Chelsea said, “he’s lecturing again. Are we done playing games?”

  “What about hearts?” Wes asked.

  “You guys play hearts, I’m wiped out,” Gwen said from the counter. She was wiping her hands with a dish towel. “Honey, I left a few things to soak. Could you take care of them for me?” she asked Wes.

  “Of course,” Wes said. He pushed his chair back and the legs shrieked against the floor. Wes crossed to his wife and planted a delicate kiss on her lips. “G’nite, darling.” He watched her walk down the hall before he came back to the table. “Did someone say hearts?”

  Kyle chuckled.

  “You guys play something. I’ll finish up Mom’s work,” Chelsea said, getting up.

  “Aw, Chelsea, leave that. I’ll get to it in a minute,” Wes said. She kept moving towards the kitchen and he let her go.

  With only three players, they couldn’t settle on an interesting game to play. Chelsea banged around in the kitchen while the men sat at the table. They talked about baseball, and the neighbors, and Wes asked about the health of Kyle’s family.

  “I didn’t help with the dinner. I should really go help with the cleanup,” Kyle said.

  “Wait until it’s ninety-percent done and then swoop in as a hero?” Don asked.

  “You know me too well,” Kyle said.

  Chelsea took out her earbuds and joked with Kyle as they scrubbed the two crusty lasagna pans.

  Wes turned to Don and lowered his voice so only his son would hear. “Do you want a small loan? Maybe pick up a cheap car for the summer?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I won’t be making that much. It would take me forever to pay you back.”

  “We could get something cheap and fix it up. As long as it’s from before nineteen-eighty or so, I can figure out the engine. As soon as they got into all that electronic stuff, I’m lost.”

  “That would be a pretty old car, Dad.”

  “There’s another word for cars that old. They’re called ‘classic.’” Wes said. “What do you think?”

  “I’m not ready for that. Besides, I can ride my bike to work.”

  “That’s not really a solution. You think about it and let me know.”

  Kyle came back to the table and flopped down in his seat. He stretched out his legs and propped them up on the back of an empty chair.

  “Well, the hard work is done and Chelsea is off to study for an exam,” Kyle said.

  “Oh?” Wes asked. He turned towards the door where his daughter had already exited. “Goodnight dear. Study hard,” he called to no one. He shrugged at his son and his son’s best friend. “Before you know it, they have no use for you at all.”

  “She worships you, Pops,” Kyle said.

  “It only appears that way because she hates her mother so much,” Wes said.

  “Teenage girls are fickle. I’m sure she loves both of you.”

  “Spoken like the father of none,” Wes said. “It’s okay. She’ll grow out of it. I remember when I was in high school my parents got divorced. I was furious with my mom for years. I didn’t care whose fault the divorce was. I blamed my mom for everything. Probably just because my father wasn’t around.”

  “Where was Grandpa?”

  “Who knows,” Wes said. “He was AWOL for the better part of ten years. He didn’t reappear until I was in college. That was awkward. He offered to pay off my student loans, but I turned him down. You couldn’t pay ahead on the loans I had. I could have just taken the money and paid off everyone on the schedule, but I was too proud and angry to take his money. I should have. We wouldn’t be living in this shithole.”

  Kyle laughed and Don objected. “What are you talking about? This is a great house.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Wes said. “It is a nice house, and there’s nowhere I’d rather live. You and Chelsea got to grow up in the country. That’s something I never thought would be possible in this world, but we did it. And this place is about a thousand times better than the tiny place where I grew up. I went and looked at that house last fall, did I tell you that?”

  “No,” Don said.

  “Yeah. I went and walked in the yard. You could get from one side of that house to the other in five good paces. Do you believe that?”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “The problem comes when you try to do everything yourself. You need a new roof? You put it on. You want to finish the basement? You hang the drywall. New furnace? Before you know it, you’re responsible for everything in the whole goddamn place. For about ten seconds, you feel pride. Then all you see is the mistakes. All you think about it is what you should have done differently.”

  “You do amazing work, Mr. Covington,” Kyle said. “You should see the shitty improvements my dad has tried. He just hires a guy now.”

  “That’s the way to do it,” Wes said. “You get someone else to do it and then you have someone else to call when it goes to hell. Who do I call when the roof leaks?”

  Don looked over to Kyle as if to apologize for his father’s rambling, but Kyle didn’t return the glance. Kyle just smiled and nodded at Don’s dad, absorbing the wisdom.

  “You have to forgive yourself constantly,” Wes said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

  Don opened his mouth to answer yes, but Kyle somehow knew what he was about to say and shot him a look.

  “You’re going to make mistakes,” Wes said, “a lot of them. Everyone makes mistakes, especially when they’re young. They key is to learn whatever you can, and then forget. You think Jordan thinks about the shots he missed? No!”

  Don raised his eyebrows at Kyle. His friend just smiled.

  “He thinks about the shots he hit. The ones he made. What you do is forgive yourself and move on. You have to realize—you’ve spent so much of your life just waiting. You were waiting until you were eight and you could get a big boy hamburger at McDonald’s. Do you remember that? You never wanted a kid’s meal, neither of you. We said you had to wait until you were eight. Then Don turned eight and for eleven months he lorded that full-sized hamburger over you, Kyle. We told you it was okay, but you said no. You enforced that rule yourself. You said you had to be eight.”

  “I remember that,” Kyle said.

  “Then it was riding the mini-bike with nobody watching. You had to be twelve for that. Then it was going out in the woods alone. Then you were waiting for high school, waiting to drive, waiting for graduation, waiting to be able to drink. Wait, wait, wait. You’ve been trained to wait, but you can’t live your whole life like that. If all you do is wait, you’ll never achieve anything. Patience is important, it’s a good skill to have, but you can’t let patience turn into killing time. You have to enjoy what you have right now, or the waiting is never going to end.”

  “Dad, what are you talking about?” Don asked. He was serious, but Kyle was covering up a laugh.

  “I’m dropping knowledge, son,” Wes.

  “For Frank’s sake,” Don said, “how much wine did you drink?”

  “A ton of it,” Wes said. He laughed. “No, I’m to
tally serious. Think about what I said, and remember not to wait too long.”

  “For what?” Kyle asked.

  “For anything,” Wes said. “You guys are Y-D-F-O-C. You’re young, dumb, and full of charm. Enjoy what you have now. Don’t wait for a good job, or more pay, or when you can get an apartment, or anything. Just enjoy what you have.”

  “That’s good advice, Pops,” Kyle said. “I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for that.” He smiled. “We should get going. We have to pick up Amanda before the movie.”

  “Let me get my sweatshirt,” Don said. “You okay to get upstairs, Dad?”

  “Please. I’m fine,” his father said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nightmares

  DAVID WOKE AND OPENED his eyes slowly. He tried to orient himself—which way his bed faced; where the door was; which way the street ran in relation to his bedroom. It took a second. It always took a second. He’d spent the first eleven years of his life in the same house, the same room, and the same bed. Now, everything was different. Even after a year, he couldn’t get used to waking up here.

  He turned his head to the right. It was two in the morning.

  It’s the Stage of Possibilities, David thought. That’s what his dad called it once—that time in the middle of the night where anything was possible. You need only imagine it, and anything terrible could happen. David pulled his covers up to his chin. He used to enjoy scary stories.

  David whispered to himself, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.”

  He shot his hand out from under the covers and turned on the light. The shadows retreated to the corners of the room.

  Dr. John had asked him to write down his dreams. David pulled his little journal from the nightstand and flipped it open to where the ribbon marked the next blank page. He wrote about the woman, Mare, who refused to drink. She wasn’t in the desert anymore. People had come after her in the desert and chased her over the dunes. She ran and ran, staying just ahead of the pursuit until the sun went down. Then, as the sky turned red and the desert air became cool, the people stopped chasing. They stopped at the top of a hill of sand and looked down at her. Mare was kneeling and weeping, but no tears would come out of her dry eyes.

  She looked up at the people and raised her hands, pleading to them. They only watched. Then He came forward—the thing living inside Mare. He darkened her eyes and clenched her hands. She couldn’t resist. The people could see the change in her and they backed away, but they were too late.

  Controlled by the thing living inside her, Mare ran at the people, screaming for them to run. Her voice was the only thing she could still command and she used it to shriek, “Please, run from me. Or I will drain your blood.”

  It was no use—the people couldn’t outrun the beast inside Mare. One by one, she caught them and stole their blood. Or, rather, the thing inside her fed on them.

  David wrote all of this down in his journal. The end of the dream was starting to slip away, so he skipped all the details of each person that Mare left drained. He skipped to the end.

  As night fell and the thing inside Mare finished draining the last of her attackers, Mare once again found herself in control of her body. She raised her face to the sky and screamed her anguish. The man at her feet wasn’t quite dead, but he was unconscious. Mare knelt and took the knife from his limp hand.

  She took the knife to her skin. She used the blade to circle her wrist and then sliced a straight line all the way up to her armpit. At the top of her arm she made another circle. She put the knife handle between her teeth and bit down on the wrapped leather. With a desperate scream she tore at her skin. She pulled it back, and tugged, and ripped until her whole arm was bare muscle, black and shiny in the moonlight. Mare repeated the process for her other arm. The only way to get rid of the dark companion living inside her was to shed her skin, she thought.

  Mare peeled herself bare. She cut little circles around her eyes, mouth, nose, and ears, so she could remove her face and hair. She finished with her hands. The knife kept slipping out of her right hand as she peeled the left last. When she finished, she collapsed backwards, away from the pile of skin, into the sand.

  Mare didn’t bleed. The thing inside her had stolen all the blood. It wanted even more.

  David put down his pencil and draped the ribbon across the page. He closed the little journal and put it back on his nightstand. Writing down the dream had solidified it. The process of writing had firmed the images and burned them into his eyes. When he closed them again—the light shining red through his eyelids—he only saw the shiny, black, skinless body of Mare. How could he go back to sleep knowing that she lived in his dreams?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Amanda

  “YOUR PARENTS GO TO bed early, huh?” Kyle asked as the two boys headed across the drive.

  “Just my mom. She’s had those headaches for a few years, but they’re getting worse. My dad will go check on her and then he’ll go back to his office for awhile.”

  “Hey. We should take your dad’s car,” Kyle said. He stopped behind the SUV.

  “I don’t want to drive,” Don said.

  “Just over to Amanda’s house. I already told her she had to drive from there. I’m planning on being in no condition.”

  “I’d still rather not,” Don said, going around Kyle to the path to Kyle’s house.

  Don led the way down the narrow path. It was worn down to dirt from years of foot traffic and Don’s feet found it automatically. As boys they had built a little stone bridge over the creek. They had piled up big round rocks on either side and then found a huge flat slab of rock to for the span. With some straps, the tractor had towed the rock all the way across Don’s yard and down the trail. They’d left a big scar of dirt in the lawn. Their rock bridge was still strong all these years later.

  Don jumped and landed on the center of the flat rock. It’s what they always did. They always tested the strength of the bridge whenever they passed. In the dark, he heard Kyle’s feet slap on the center of the rock bridge behind him.

  “That was fun with your family tonight,” Kyle said. “I miss that.”

  “You could still go. They still play games every first Saturday. I’m sure they’d love to have a fourth person. Most of those games are impossible with three.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” Kyle said.

  They didn’t talk much more on the way to Kyle’s house. Don enjoyed the trip. In fact, he’d enjoyed the whole evening. It felt like he was back in high school, back when he was waiting for everything to happen, like his father had said. It wasn’t just the waiting though—it was the potential for everything to turn out perfectly. Somewhere in his heart, what hurt wasn’t the loss of time, but the loss of potential. Like some perfect future was slipping away from him and he couldn’t close his fist around its slippery surface.

  Kyle’s voice surprised him out of his contemplation.

  “You think your sister is dating anyone?”

  “Oh my god, you sick bastard!” Don yelled. “She’s sixteen.”

  “Just kidding, DonCo. Your sister is not exactly my type.”

  “It would be illegal.”

  “Wait until you see Amanda again. When’s the last time you saw her? Pre-boobs?”

  “I saw her at your graduation. What do you mean, pre-boobs?”

  “She got a tit job. I didn’t tell you? They’re stunning.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Would I kid about something so serious?” Kyle asked. Don turned around, but he couldn’t tell anything from Kyle’s face in the darkness. “Hurry up, I’ve got to let Barney out before we go.”

  # # # #

  While Barney marched around the yard, marking all of his favorite spots, Don and Kyle stood on the deck. Kyle fished a small pipe from his pocket and held a lighter near the end. He took a deep, practiced inhale and held it in his lungs while Don leaned on the railing.

  After he exhaled, Kyle’s voice sound raspy and
thin, like he’d burned holes through it. “That’s why you have to drive.”

  “Why couldn’t you just do that at the theater?”

  “Are you kidding? Have you seen the trailers for this movie yet? I’m going to need a big head start to make it through this thing.”

  “Why are we going then?”

  “Amanda has to go see all these movies. She has to study the performances.”

  “For what?”

  “To see who’s good at what, I guess. She’s going to be a casting director.”

  “Really? How does that work?”

  “I don’t know. You should ask her. I’m sure she’ll tell you in great detail. BARN!”

  The dog had disappeared into the bushes.

  “He seems better tonight,” Don said.

  “Yeah, a bit. His energy comes and goes. Those pills make him stumble and then I swear he gets self-conscious. He doesn’t want to look all drunk and stumbly in front of people so instead, he doesn’t move at all.”

  Kyle took another deep drag off his pipe.

  “You better slow down with that stuff. You’re not even going to be awake for the movie.”

  “I might be better off. I’m telling you, this thing is going to be a D-O-G, dog. Good cast though. Besides, this is that high-class prescription shit. I stole it off an old guy with glaucoma.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “They’re not allowed to smoke at the home anyway. They have to get everything as edibles. I didn’t steal it. I traded it to him for some candy bars. Settle down. Hey, Barnyard, what you got? Is that your ball?”

  He reached down and scratched the German Shepherd’s head before he reached under to grab what was in the dog’s mouth.

  “Oh, gross!” Kyle yelled. “Get the light.”

  Don didn’t hesitate. He pushed away from the railing and threw open the door. A fraction of a second later, the outdoor lights blazed, lighting up Kyle who was wiping his hand on the deck. At his feet, Barney was nosing a lifeless squirrel.

  “Oh, sick. Look at that thing, would you? It’s like fresh, but it felt, like, empty or something. Barney, get away from that thing.” He pushed his dog away from the squirrel.