Ghost

by Charmaine Ross

  “Exactly. You knew I was in trouble, Elliot, and you came instantly. You felt something and that was translated into a burst of energy that pushed me out of the way.”

  "I should have thought about it before, but it didn’t click until you put it that way. I should have known. I’m in this business.” Laura faced me, “I think you have something there, Cassie. There is energy everywhere in all things. It flows around and through all of us, connecting us. Plants, animals, even the earth. Through my research, I’ve identified that each one of us has an energy signature. You following?”

  “Not really.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “In all things living, energy is tightly packed. Our bodies have very densely packed energy because we are physical, whereas, with Elliot, I think his energy is less densely packed because he has no physical signature. You can see the less dense energy patterns, Cassie, whereas most people can’t. Emotion must be the conduit through which to make energy dense. Like the old saying, if there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  “Are you saying that emotion is what can allow Elliot to pack his energy more tightly together?”

  “Maybe. If he really wants it.” Laura twisted in her seat and glanced to Elliot sitting in the back seat before returning it to the road in front. “I don’t really know if this will work, Elliot, but if you can try and pack—yourself—as tightly together as you can it might be enough for us to see you or feel you. Or me at least. Cassie can already see you. I know it sounds like a long shot but...”

  “But it’s something!” I leant over to Laura and kissed her on her cheek. I took the seat belt off and twisted to face Elliot. “It’s worth a try.” Anything was worth trying if only I touch Elliot again. “Do you think you could try, Elliot?”

  Suddenly, my gift was a whole lot brighter. And maybe, just maybe…my mind spun with possibilities. Near impossible possibilities, but not insurmountable. Surely if Elliot did that once, he could do it again.

  Elliot looked doubtful, but he nodded anyway, “I can try.”

  “Take my hand. Remember when Laura walked through Henry and he became energised. Do the same with me. Take my energy and try to use it. And really want to do it. Remember the emotion.”

  He looked uncomfortable and I knew he fought with his inner sense of morality using me like this. I kept my hand where it was and my gaze steady. Slowly he reached towards my hand with his own. We merged, hand in hand. My skin tingled as though it had pins and needles. My limb cooled feeling as though ice was spreading in my veins.

  “He’s doing it,” I said the Laura.

  Laura said, “Now, think of something that connects with a strong emotion, then bring that memory into your hand.”

  Elliot closed his eyes as he lost himself in his thoughts. I concentrated on my hand, thinking about him, how he made me feel, as though I was truly alive for the first time in my life. In a few short days, knowing him had placed an indelible mark on me. And I wanted to feel him again, God how I wanted that.

  Moments passed, then minutes. I felt nothing but the strange tingling coolness of his energy merging with my body. No warmth. No hand. No touch. Elliot opened his eyes and I fell into the great depths of his emerald eyes. Eyes that mirrored my disappointment before they clouded with defeat.

  “You’ll do it again, Elliot. We’ll practice. Keep trying. Until it works.”

  “But what if it never does?” he whispered.

  Moment passed. I wanted to say something hopeful. Something bright. Something to make me feel better. But no words came to mind, let alone my tongue. Instead, I rested my head on the edge of the seat and simply gazed at him. The only thing I could do. “I don’t know, Elliot. I really don’t know.”

  Chapter Nine

  We slowed to a stop at a set of traffic lights. Lucy’s house in Doveton wasn’t the safest location at this time of night and neither was Dandenong along this stretch of a lonely freeway.

  “Do you smell that?” I thought the motor had caught fire, but the stench grew stronger with each passing moment. But it wasn’t fuel. More like-decomposing flesh. Goosebumps rose on my skin.

  Laura made a choking sound. “God, that’s revolting!”

  “I smell it, too,” Elliot said.

  If Elliot and I could smell it, it could only mean that there was something belonging to both worlds coming close. A howl spewed into the night. The fine hairs on my neck rose as I tried to see what made the sound. But there was nothing more than the lights of the road and secret shadows of the night.

  “Whatever is out there is getting close. Tell Laura to drive away. Now!” There was an edge to Elliot’s voice that made my hands shake.

  There was a blur in the shadows near the car, a deeper black that flickered. At first, it was an indistinguishable shape, then it morphed, extending as though it was reaching for us. The ends of the shadow thinned and protruded as though there were fingers, but they curved into hooks. No, not hooks. Claws. I’d seen this creature before. A shadow like this on the front of the bus that drove through the spirit boy. Back then I really hadn’t realized what I’d seen. Everything was a shock, but now watching this creature, I knew I’d seen pure terror.

  “Do you see that?” My voice was shrill, alarm triggering my fear-meter. I was in a trance, caught between wanting to scream, run, and watching with horrified paralysis, as though the shadow had cast a spell over me and it was all I could do but sit and stare and await my destiny.

  Legs separated from the shadow but there were no feet. They simply joined with surrounding shadow so that none really ended or began. A formless head morphed between the arms. A pair of hollow eyes blinked open, no more than the absence of shadow, but they bored into me as it glided towards us.

  “Drive Laura!” I screamed.

  “I...I can’t!” Laura's voice was hoarse, strained. “I can’t move!”

  The stench was unbearable, so strong I tasted it. The acrid smell burnt the inside of my nostrils and my eyes. Blood pounded my hearing, surging through my system by powerful beats of my heart, but I couldn’t move a limb even though every sense screamed to run.

  “Cassie. Get out of here!” I knew Elliot spoke, but I was locked inside my body, unable to respond. Another shadow crossed the road in front of us. No, not a shadow. A man, hunched against the cold, smoking a cigarette, unaware of the horror that held us captive in the car.

  Terror had me in its grip and I couldn’t move a muscle. I tried to speak, to warn him to turn away, run for his life, but my throat closed over, heat billowed inside me, making my skin prickle with sweat.

  “Cassie! Laura! Drive!” Elliot yelled now.

  Hollow eyes darted to the man when he stepped in front of the car. The shadow raced over the road, sinking its claws into the man, twisting him into its arms, like a spider pouncing on a fly. The man screamed, a sound borne of pure agony and filled with indescribable fear. He struggled, but he had no hope. Claws sunk into flesh, ripping and renting. Bile rose in my mouth.

  A smoky shape was torn from the man’s chest. His body crumpled, boneless, onto the road. There was a golden flash of light. A winged, golden warrior blinked into existence. A helmeted man that could have been from ancient Roman times he was dressed so similarly. Yet he was so otherworldly beautiful that he couldn’t possibly be a mere ghost. He held a glowing sword to the creature's chest and slashed through it.

  The shadow creature reared back its head and a howl obliterated the silence of the night. It reached into the chest of the warrior, claws hooking through the skin. The warrior threw his head back in agony, his body going limp, impaled on the hand. His golden aura diminished to a dull bronze. Then all three vanished, taking the stench with it.

  Moments passed and with them came the movement of my body. “What…what the hell just happened?” My voice was breathy as shaky as my body.

  “I...I don’t know.” Elliot said, as well as Laura.

  “You saw that…shadow thing. You smelt it. Both of you?”

&nbs
p; Elliot nodded. “I haven’t seen anything like it before. I didn’t think there could be such a thing. It was…”

  “Evil,” Laura murmured.

  “I thought it was coming for us. It looked at both of us, like it was going to take us.” I shuddered. “It was so cold. So...distant. It was coming for us, but when it saw that man ...” I swallowed hard. His body was still crumpled, lifeless, on the road. The cigarette still burnt red in his hand. “It tore something from his body. It killed him.’

  “The man’s soul. It took the man’s soul,” Laura said.

  “Then the other man. Golden… That shadow thing took both of them. Why?” I couldn’t seem to form a coherent sentence.

  “They were easier prey than us in the car,” Elliot said.

  “Maybe that’s why we’re still sitting here alive. It got their souls before it could take ours,” Laura said.

  “Did you see those wings? The man had…golden wings.” I swallowed hard. “And a sword. Helmet. Muscles. Plenty of muscles.” He looked like a total badass as though nothing could beat him.

  “An angel,” Laura whispered.

  Were there such things as angels? I didn’t know. But now that I’d seen…what I’d just seen, I wasn’t so sure about anything. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  Elliot let out a long sigh, “You should know by now anything’s possible, Cassie.”

  “We’d better get out of here. I don’t want to get caught with a dead body within arm’s reach,” Laura said.

  “But...” The doctor in me screamed, straining to get out of the car and over to his body to do something—anything that would preserve his life.

  “Cassie. There’s nothing more we can do. He’s dead. Nothing’s going to bring his soul back. You’ll never save his life because there’s no way his soul can return to it,” Laura said.

  Laura drove off, the sound of the motor rumbling around me and my mind spun to reason what had just happened. I’d seen his death. I’d seen his soul taken. And there was nothing I could do to change it, but it still didn’t stop me from at least wanting to try. I wanted to crumple in on myself, to scream and vent that this was so unfair, but all I could do was sit there in silence and let the horror of the situation wash over me.

  I didn’t know what that thing was, but now I knew what it did. And it wasn’t good. Not good at all. If this—thing–that people couldn’t even see coming for them could attack and steal a soul, where was the justice in that? Where was the choir of angels striking from Heaven to stop this from happening? Where was—well, God? It was just so unfair. What if this happened to more people? No-one would stand a chance of survival.

  We drove in silence. No-one spoke for a good long while. The sound of the tyres on the road was a comforting sound, almost lulling me back into a false sense of security. Laura’s voice was a whip crack. I jumped, my heart pounding in my chest. I guess I wasn’t as calmed as I thought I was. At least hearing her speak gave me something else to concentrate on. I forced the image of the man lying dead on the road with the lit cigarette still clasped between his fingers from my mind and focussed on her profile.

  “I wrote an article a couple of years ago about a woman found dead, just crumpled to the ground like that man. Not a scratch on her, no marks what-so-ever. She had lots of friends. No enemies, no motivation for murder. She was well-liked in her community. The police never found her killer.”

  “Except that her house had a history of this type of death, which everyone put down to superstition? The police didn’t lend it any credit to it, but we were asked by the woman’s brother to provide some sort of supernatural answer when the police came up short. We were the last resort as we often are,” Laura added with a tight smile.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We really didn’t find anything solid. But one of the walls of the lounge room contained a slight electro-magnetic field. And when I say slight, there was only a blip when we ran the EMF meter over the wall. And the smell. Only faint but it was there. Just like tonight. That’s what brought it all back. It got into the curtains. The carpet. The rest of the house smelled okay, but we could never find the source of the smell in the lounge. The brother smelled it, too, but he said his sister had air freshener in that room, so he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t always there. We did a story on it, anyway. Called it The Soul-Eater of Surrey Hills.

  “The Soul-Eater.” I shuddered. That’s exactly what it had looked like. The creature had ripped the soul out of the man’s body and eaten it.

  “God, I need coffee.” The night was taking its toll and Laura sounded as on edge as I felt. “Good idea.” My phone rang as we drew into a Maccas. I looked at the number. “It’s Mum.”

  “Don’t answer. I don’t think I could take it,” Laura said.

  “She knows something’s up. We’ve got to talk to her soon.” The phone rang out. There were twenty missed calls. I stuffed the phone into my bag before guilt would prod me to call her.

  “I know. But not yet. Too much to explain." A part of me felt sorry for my mother, but this situation was urgent and Mum would only want us to come home and be safe.

  Laura grabbed the laptop and swung out of the car. “You two coming in?”

  “Cassie. Wait.” My whole attention was riveted to Elliot and I settled back into the seat. I gave Laura a gesture to go ahead and she wandered into the McDonalds. “Cassie—I just wanted to say—thank you. So much. For everything. I want to let you know I know what you’re doing for me. How much you’re giving up to help me—and I appreciate it. And if there ever comes a time, I swear to you, I will repay you.” He reached out to me, touching his hand to my cheek but of course I felt nothing but thin air.

  Yet the gesture was so achingly tender. I handed a chip of my heart over to him right there and then. My eyes filled with tears I refused to let fall. I blinked them back, not taking my gaze from him. His lips twisted, “I mean it, Cassie. You are, literally, my light.”

  I swallowed. Hard. Emotions caught in my throat and my heart, threatening to spill tears I didn’t want to fall. I normally wasn’t an emotional person, but somehow Elliot had managed to slip beneath all of my defences which no other man had ever managed to do. “Wow. No-one has ever said anything like that to me,” I sighed.

  “Then this ‘no-one’ is a fool.” His gaze reached out to me, warm and friendly and what’s more than anything else, with hope. “We’d better get to Laura, she’ll be wondering where we are.”

  I nodded and stepped out of the car. The sweet, warm air smelling of fries enveloped me as soon as I stepped through the doors and I met Laura at the counter. We ordered coffee and then found a table in the corner. Elliot stood behind us as Laura fired Paul’s laptop up.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Cookie path. Internet searches. Files. Anything that might make a compelling case.”

  “We’ll need a whole lot more than he likes to read up on valium. We still need to find the will. What if we missed it in his bedroom?” I thought of the sheaf of papers I’d thrown at the dog. It could have been somewhere in one of those.

  Laura shook her head, “I don’t think he would have had it there. The room was too messy. If he wanted something so important kept secret, it would be put in a very safe place, not in piles of rubbish.”

  “I found the box of papers. They looked pretty important.”

  “As much as that’s a possibility, I’m sure he would have wanted to find a safer place than his bedroom. I think he would have hidden it away from Lucy to make sure she’d never find it. He’s way too messy to have it at his house. It would get lost all too easily in that amount of crap.”

  I watched as she clicked on the C drive and systematically work her way through the folders. There were a few filled with photos. I took a closer look, “That’s disgusting!” Images of scantily clad women filled the screen in dubious positions.

  “Fits in with his personality type,” Laura said.

  “Probably a
loner. No friends. Lacks the ability to form a friendship and this is the only way he’d feel close to people,” Elliot said.

  I glanced at him, brows raised. “I profile personalities,” he said.

  “Remembering more?” I asked excitement snapped deep down in my stomach.

  He shook his head, “I just know that I know.”

  “Do you remember anything more about the plane crash at Mount Dandenong. That must be important. It’s the first thing you remembered.” I worried my bottom lip, debating whether to tell him what Thadius had found on the police computer and decided that I didn’t want to send him over the edge learning about the death of a wife and a parentless child. His child. This just wasn’t the right time. “What about Leonard Abrahams? You gave me his name.”

  Elliot paced the walkway, hand on his waist, face drawn in concentration. He spun on his toe, excitement making his eyes gleam, “He was coming to give me something. For my case. I was waiting for it.”

  “Can you remember what it was?”

  Moments passed as he concentrated. The line between his brows furrowed deeper. I was coming to know that this was his look of introspection, “I have the feeling it was very urgent. Vital that it was a secret. And it was. The only people that knew about it was myself, my partner, and Leonard.” He paced faster, his strides quick. I caught the excitement he threw off with each step. “I remember a face...” He glanced at me, face flushed, his eyes bright. “My partner. He dressed like me,” He indicated his clothing. “Looked like me. Just a little smaller.” Elliot stopped pacing, “Funny bastard. Made me laugh all the time.”

  He remembered a life. His life. With people he’d been friends with. People he’d worked with. What would happen if he remembered his wife? His child? I bit my lip until it hurt, not knowing whether it was best I tell him or that he remembered by himself.

  “What was his name?” I didn’t want to ask. But I needed to know.

  “Sam...Sam Sloane.” Elliot snapped his fingers. “His name was Sam Sloane. Can you tell Laura? Ask her to research his name?”