by Val Crowe
“The entity that possessed Deacon’s mother,” said Rylan.
“What?” said Dominique.
“It was obsessed with you,” said Rylan. “It looked at pictures of you all the time.”
Dominique looked disturbed and confused. “What?”
“Don’t act surprised,” said Rylan. “You must have known what would happen if you came here. You must have realized that you’d get everyone killed. Their blood is on your hands.”
Dominique flinched. “Fuck you,” she said quietly.
“Oh, right back at you,” said Rylan.
“We need to stop this,” I muttered. “We’re not doing any good by fighting.”
“I’m sorry about Mundy,” said Dominique, her face twisting. “I really never thought—”
“But she’s still dead,” said Rylan.
“You know what?” said Dominique. “Maybe it would be better if I went off on my own.” She drew in a breath, gathering herself. “After all, you both lied to me.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “It’s stupid to split up.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Dominique. She started off into the woods ahead of us.
“Hey,” I called after her. “Is that because you called for help? What was that?”
“I wouldn’t want to kill anyone else!” yelled Dominique without turning around.
“Damn it,” I breathed.
“Let her go,” said Rylan.
I rounded on her. “What is your problem?”
“My problem?” She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that I’ve just watched a bunch of my friends get butchered? Maybe that’s had a teensy bit of an adverse effect on me. I wonder why.”
I sighed. I started after Dominique.
Dominique went faster. She turned and disappeared behind a thorn bush.
I hurried after her, but when I turned, she was nowhere in sight.
Damn it.
* * *
“Let’s just go to the bridge.” Rylan sounded sulky.
I was staring into the woods, trying to figure out which way Dominique had gone.
“That’s where she’s going to go, anyway,” said Rylan. “What do we care about her, at any rate? If she dies, maybe the ghost will just go back to being a normal ghost that can’t actually stab people. I think that would be a good thing.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “You’re dealing with a lot right now. You don’t mean that.”
“Like you care about her,” said Rylan.
“I don’t want her killed,” I said.
“Right,” said Rylan. “Because if she’s dead, you might never get her to admit that she knows more about Negus than she lets on.”
“Not just because of that,” I said. “And maybe she doesn’t know. Either way, I don’t want anyone else to die.” Of course, we probably all were going to die, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. It was too bald and hopeless to admit. Frankly, however, I was more interested in surviving than finding out about Negus. If I was dead, it didn’t matter if he was trying to hurt me, did it?
“Oh, aren’t you noble,” Rylan sneered at me. “Fine, you go after her, then. I’m going to the bridge.”
“We can’t split up, Rylan,” I said. “You leave me, then all three of us are on our own, and—”
“Maybe I’ll be better off without you,” she said. “Maybe between the two of you, you’re creating all the danger.” She turned on her heel and stalked off.
“Rylan!” I called. “Wait!”
She didn’t wait.
I hesitated, looking in the direction that Dominique had gone, and then looking after Rylan, who was getting further and further away with each passing moment. There were more and more branches between her and me, and it was hard to make her out.
Damn it.
I started after Rylan, leaving Dominique behind.
“Wait, Rylan, I’m coming!” I called.
Of course, she didn’t wait.
And then the forest seemed to swallow her as well.
I lost sight of her, and when I got to the spot where I’d last seen her, there was no sign of her. I yelled her name a bunch of times, but there was no response. I yelled for Dominique too, but I didn’t hear anything from her either.
Feeling drained and hopeless, I sat down on the leaves in the forest and leaned against a tree trunk. What the hell? Had we done this to ourselves, or had the ghosts divided us somehow? Whatever the case, this sucked.
“Mads?” I called. “Mads, are you out there?”
She flickered in front of me, her lips moving. No sound came out.
I scrambled to my feet. “Is something blocking you?”
She nodded.
“Do you know where Rylan is?”
She shook her head. “…find her, I think.”
“Can you?” I said. “Go and find her, then. Make sure she’s okay. And then tell me how to get to her.”
“Deacon… else is here,” said Mads.
“What? Something else is here? Like what?”
“It’s strong… familiar to me, but…” She continued to speak, but I couldn’t make any of the rest of it out.
“I can’t understand you,” I told her. “You’re going in and out. Is there anything I can do to make the connection stronger?”
“Do you have the box?” she said.
“The box you gave me?” I said. “The box for Negus?”
Mads nodded furiously.
I tried to remember what I’d even done with that box. “It’s in the closet in the Airstream.”
“Damn it, Deacon… it back.”
“You want me to go all the way back for the box?” I said. “What do I need the box for? Why are you—”
“Who’s she?” said another voice.
I whirled.
It was Dominique. She was behind me, pointing at Mads.
“You can see her?” I said.
Dominique raised her eyebrows.
Mads gave us a mock salute. “I’ll look after Rylan,” she said to me. “Get the damned box.” And then she disappeared.
I rubbed my forehead.
“What the hell?” said Dominique. “She’s a ghost? She’s not corporeal? I made the ghosts take solid form.”
“Not her, apparently,” I said.
“Who is she?”
“She’s, you know, my ghost friend,” I said. “She, uh, she looks out for me.”
Dominique nodded slowly. “Yeah? I might know something about that, actually.”
“You have a ghost friend too?”
“I can’t see him,” said Dominique. “I can’t make him solid either. But he’s helped me before.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Interesting.” I gestured back the way we had come. “Look, apparently, I have to go back to the campground and get something out of the Airstream. If you came back, does that mean that you want to walk with me?”
“Only if you’re honest with me. Tell me everything,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. “But you have to be honest with me, too.”
She nodded. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”
* * *
I was able to explain everything to Dominique on the short walk back to the campground.
I talked in a quiet voice, even though I doubted it made any difference. Macon was out there, though. He could hear us, probably regardless. But shouting at the top of my lungs was basically asking for trouble. I didn’t like leaving Rylan on her own either, but I trusted that Mads would show up and tell me if anything was wrong.
I explained to Dominique about what had happened with my mother, and about Negus and how he’d tried to suck me dry of whatever energy I had. I told her that other ghosts wanted to do the same thing to me. I told her that Negus was still looking for me, and that I wanted to find him and stop him. I told her about my mother remembering Dominique’s name and pictures, and how Negus had looked at them over and over again.
And then we were back at the
Airstream. I climbed back into the thing and got the box from where I’d left it in the closet. For the hell of it, I tried the generator just to see if I had any electricity. I didn’t. Nothing worked.
I wasn’t really sure why I was getting this box. Mads had told me that I could use it to get rid of my ability to see spirits, but she’d been pretty clueless about how it worked. I wondered why she wanted me to get it now, right at this instant.
But I trusted Mads, and that was why I’d done what she said. Also, the thought of being rid of ghosts forever, it was pretty enticing. It was something I’d always wanted.
Of course I didn’t want to be cut off from Mads…
Yeah, I really wasn’t sure why I’d gotten the box. I had it now, though. I guess I’d see what happened next.
We left the campground and went back into the woods, heading toward the river, moving in a rough diagonal toward the next bridge.
Dominique began to talk. She spoke softly as well, and we both kept our eyes warily on the path around us for any sign of Macon. “I don’t know anything about the name Negus, really. I have no idea why that thing would look at pictures of me. But if you and I are both similar in that we make ghosts stronger, maybe I was going to be his next victim.”
I’d thought that as well. I told her so.
“If so, maybe he’s never found me because I have something looking after me,” she said. “Just like your ghost friend. Once, the spirit even took over someone’s body to look after me.”
“What?” I said.
“It was actually kind of weird,” she said. “I was young, six years old. I was sort of kidnapped.”
“And the ghosts stopped it?”
“No, the ghost kidnapped me,” she said. “He had possessed a woman’s body, and he came to me and told me that I was in danger, and that I needed to go with him away somewhere.”
“And you believed him?”
“He knew things. He had obviously been keeping an eye on me. He said that if I didn’t go with him, that something would come for me, and it wouldn’t only hurt me, it would hurt my mother too.”
“That’s kind of a scary thing to tell a six-year-old.”
“I was used to scary things by then. And I had to protect my mother,” she said. “I was gone with the spirit for three months. And then, his vessel started to, um, to fall apart.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, the woman’s body he had possessed, it couldn’t contain him anymore. Pieces of her started to literally fall off. He told me that I should go and turn myself in at a police station. He said the danger was gone now, and that I could go back to my mother.”
I tried to picture a little six-year-old girl with a woman whose nose was falling off. I wished I hadn’t tried to picture that. It was gruesome.
“Anyway, when I told my mother about it, she tried to tell me that the woman who’d kidnapped me was crazy, that she’d just made it up, but I knew differently. Because any other time I’ve been in danger, there has been something there to take care of me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once, at a party when I was a really little girl, only three years old, I saw a clown out on the edge of the party tent, and I started to follow it. It led me out to the road and into traffic.”
“Geez,” I said.
“No one else saw the clown,” she said in a quiet voice. “Anyway, there I was, out in the road, and something stopped all the cars, just halted them. Put big dents in the front of them, as if they’d plowed into something invisible. No one could explain it. And then another time, when I was a teenager, I was drawn to this house out on the edge of town. It was abandoned and overgrown and there were boards on the windows. But it just… it sang to me. I couldn’t help it. I had to go there. But when I went in, it was like the house came to life. I started getting chased around by this man in funny old-looking clothes. He had a gun, and he was shooting me, and the bullets were making big holes in the walls. He chased me all the way down into the basement and cornered me. He cocked the gun and took aim, and I shut my eyes, and I heard him fire the gun. But… I never got shot. There was an invisible force field around me. The bullets bounced off.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“I have more stories like that,” she said. “It’s as though I’m drawn to dangerous supernatural things, but there’s always someone there to protect me. Sometimes, when it seems like he’s not around, I call out for him.”
“That was what you did before,” I said. “You looked up at the sky and said we needed help. You called for your spirit.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“And then Mads said something else was here,” I said. “Your spirit. That’s what Mads sensed. But the spirit’s here to help us. Or help you, anyway.”
“I’ll make sure he helps all of us,” she said.
I felt a surge of hope. Maybe we could actually get out of here after all. Maybe we wouldn’t die. I smiled at her. “That’s really great, Dominique. That may be the best news I’ve heard all day.”
She smiled back.
“Now, we just need to find Rylan,” I said. Hopefully, Mads was keeping an eye on her. Hopefully, she would be in one piece when we found her. “If we can keep Macon off of us long enough to get to that other bridge, we might stand a fighting chance.”
* * *
Things were looking up.
We found Rylan about an hour later. She was sitting in the woods, eating stale corn chips. We didn’t have sandwich fixings anymore, so snacks and chips were our best bet. I didn’t see Mads anywhere, but Rylan was okay, so Mads had done her job.
Dominique and I were tired, so we sat down with Rylan.
Rylan seemed drained. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said. “I’d been walking for twenty minutes when I realized I didn’t want to be on my own anymore.”
“Me too,” said Dominique. “I mean, I didn’t want to be on my own, and I’m also sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said. “And I don’t want to be on my own either.”
Rylan handed me her bag of chips. “You seen Macon?”
“Nope,” I said, stuffing chips into my mouth before handing them to Dominique. I chewed for a minute, then said, “Maybe between my ghost friend and Domnique’s ghost friend, Macon’s being kept back.”
“That can happen?” said Rylan, looking hopeful.
“We think so,” said Dominique.
The idea that we might not all die out here energized us. Soon, we were on our feet again, working our way through the forest. It was a long walk, but eventually we reached the river. We emerged from the woods and the ground dropped off in front of us. We could see that we were in between the two bridges. We’d need to go back into the forest and walk down to the second bridge, because of the dense growth by the cliff side. Hopefully, then, we could cross and get out of here.
I wondered why Dominique hadn’t called for help earlier. Maybe I still needed to be wary of Dominque. She might very well be an innocent person, just someone who had abilities like me. But she might be different as well. I couldn’t be sure.
Or maybe Dominique didn’t trust her little ghost friend as much as I trusted Mads. Maybe she’d called something that was going to make things worse.
Boy, I was sure optimistic, wasn’t I?
We couldn’t walk along the cliff because the underbrush was too thick. Further into the woods, however, the trees choked out the growth below, so we could walk under the canopy of leaves. I had Rylan and Dominique walk ahead of me and I brought up the rear. This way, I could keep an eye on Dominique. It didn’t seem wise for me to turn my back to her.
After some time, we reached the bridge.
We were all tired at this point, and the day was wearing long. I wasn’t sure how the others would feel about it, but I thought that we should cross the bridge, try to get some distance between us and the bridge and then maybe find a place to stop for the night. We didn’t have tents or anything to make camp with, but we
had brought along spare blankets and we had some food that we could eat. I wasn’t sure how much longer we could keep walking when we were all so exhausted.
Of course, Macon was standing in the middle of the bridge, knife dangling nonchalantly at his side.
All this time, we thought we’d been getting away from him, and he’d simply been waiting for us.
We stopped at the edge of the bridge wordlessly, just taking him in.
He grinned at us, showing us his yellowed teeth. And then he raised the knife and rushed at us.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Stay together!” I yelled as we all turned to run from Macon.
But Dominique and Rylan both went in different directions. I hesitated for a split second, and then I went after Rylan. As I ran, I justified it to myself. I didn’t know if I could trust Dominique, after all. And besides, she had that ghost thing looking out for her. That thing would make sure she was safe. Rylan didn’t have anyone but me.
We didn’t run fast. We were both exhausted.
I checked over my shoulder for Macon after a few moments, and he was gone. Before I could tell Rylan that we should head back for the bridge, Macon flickered into existence in front of us. He slashed wildly with his knife.
Rylan screamed, and I saw a splash of red.
No, not Rylan. I launched myself at Macon, driving my shoulder into his midsection. We both tumbled backward.
But before we could hit the ground, Macon disappeared, leaving me to thud hard against the cold ground. It was knotted with tree roots and the landing was painful.
I got to my feet right away. “Rylan?”
Her hand was bleeding, but she wasn’t badly hurt. I grabbed her by her other hand, pulled her close, and we started to run again.
We ran back for the bridge, but we didn’t make it far before Macon materialized, growling at us and brandishing his knife.
We turned and ran the other direction, further into the woods. I tried to keep an idea in my head of where we were, but it was too hard to do so, especially with Macon at our heels, laughing as he chased us, slashing his knife at our ankles.
We were both cut more than once. Shallow cuts that bled freely but didn’t stop our progress.
More than once, Macon disappeared only to reappear in front of us, forcing us to switch direction.
