“Now, hold on a minute. Just let me explain.”
“No, Reverend, I don’t have time for another story.”
“Katie, just hear me out.”
“No, if you aren’t going to help--"
“Bring me back to the Inn. I want to see for myself.”
That stopped her before she could storm out of the church. “What did you say?”
The Reverend chuckled. “I said, bring me back to the Inn. Show me these ghosts. Prove it to me. I’m willing to admit there are things I don’t understand, and things I don’t know. No one is perfect except God. So show me.”
Riley reached out to shake Brent’s hand. “That’s the best offer we’ve had all week.”
“All right then. Should we drive, or walk?”
Chapter 23
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Brent said after a moment of looking around the front room. “Didn’t there used to be a wall there?”
“Yes,” Riley told him. “It wasn’t loadbearing, and taking it out really opened up the space. Glad you like it. That’s not what we wanted you to see, though.”
“Right, right. The basement.” He still sounded skeptical, but he had agreed to come here with them, and that was all that Katie cared about right now. “Well. Lead on.”
The guests, including the very nosey Jason Maldeeves, weren’t around and Katie once again thanked God for small favors. If photographs of a broken wall in an empty basement got them off, then she could only imagine the fits of sexual ecstasy they would fall into if they saw the local pastor going down into the basement to investigate the ghosts of Heritage Inn.
Riley handed Katie the only working flashlight. When he saw it, Brent lifted an eyebrow in an unspoken question.
“It’s just in case,” Riley explained.
“Oh yeah? In case of what?”
Katie clicked the flashlight on and off to be sure it worked. “Let’s hope,” she said, “that we never have to find out.”
The basement was locked, just like they’d left it. When Riley opened the door, Katie tensed, ready for anything.
It was just the stairs, and the harsh glow from the ceiling lights, and nothing else.
“After you,” Brent said, motioning with his hand. “This is your show.”
Katie wished he would take this a little more seriously. The story that he’d told them, about the death of that little boy, still echoed in her memory. How did you live with yourself after knowing you’d taken another life, especially a child’s.
Katie had never had to experience that. Hopefully, she never would.
At the bottom of the steps it occurred to Katie that she never reset the breaker on the fuse box. Last night when she was down here, and the lights had gone off, she’d sat here with her flashlight afraid to move. The lights should still be off.
They were working now.
Brent looked around the open space, through the empty metal shelves, craning his head to see over where the break in the wall had exposed Anna Vykroft’s grave.
“Is that safe?” he asked.
“Yes,” Riley answered. “It’ll be fine as long as we repair it soon. This place is actually in really good shape considering how old it is."
Brent looked at him skeptically.
“I have another contractor coming in tomorrow to give me a second opinion, if that makes you feel better.”
Brent nodded. “It does, actually.” He made his way around some of the shelves, getting maybe ten steps closer to the broken wall.
Then he stopped.
Katie watched as he lifted his hand out in front of himself, fingers splayed, like he was feeling something that they couldn’t see.
“There’s a feeling...right here. I can’t explain it.” He took another step. “It’s cold. It’s...wrong.”
“Wrong?” Riley asked him.
“Yeah. That’s the only way I can think to say it. Kind of feels like there are thousands of spiders crawling all over my skin. Is this what you guys were talking about? Is this your ghost?”
Riley shook his head. “We haven’t felt anything like that. We saw the ghosts, plain as day.”
“Saw them, and heard them,” Katie added.
Brent closed his eyes, and took another step. “You don’t feel this? It’s so cold. Like somebody dropped ice down the back of my shirt.”
At the same time, he was beginning to sweat. Beads of perspiration leaked out from under his hairline to trace the line of his jaw, and the top of his collar showed an uneven line of dampness.
He took another step.
“There’s someone here...” he whispered.
Katie took an involuntary step back behind part of the maze of empty shelves. Riley was there to hold her hand. She turned the flashlight on, holding it ready.
Together they scanned the entire basement, everywhere they could see, looking for the ghost of Anna Vykroft.
In the back of her mind Katie wondered why the Reverend could sense the presence of something in the basement when they couldn’t. Katie didn’t get a warning before the ghosts arrived. They were just there and gone again.
Brent could feel them lurking. Maybe it was his dedication to God. Or maybe he was just sensitive to the other side, like she and Riley seemed to be, but in a different way.
They watched as he took another step.
The hand he was holding in front of him snapped back, like he’d felt an electric shock.
He put it out again, slowly, flexing his fingers as they reached out into the space between him and the broken wall.
Katie saw something dark and shadowy swat that hand away. Brent cried out, and brought his hand in tight to his shoulder, curled into a fist. He held it there, staring at the empty air in front of him.
Blood trickled from his fingers, down his wrist, thick and dark. The presence standing in his way had hurt him.
“You two should leave,” he said to them, his voice tight. “I don’t know what this is. I’ve never felt anything like this. There’s something...feels wrong...I can’t...Hell. Damn it all to Hell!”
It was a surprise to hear him swear like that. The strain in his voice was so thick that Katie could feel it. He was scared.
No. He was terrified.
Brent Keller was a man coming face to face with the impossible. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ghosts weren’t real.
Only, they were. Now he could see that fact--and feel it--for himself.
Around them the basement shook. It was an earthquake, but worse. The floor tried to rock sideways out from under Kate’s feet. Dust shook down from the heavy ceiling beams. The stones of the wall groaned.
Around the break and the exposed dirt, more of the stones fell away. The hole got wider.
More dirt poured through.
“God help us,” they heard Brent say in a hushed, reverent tone.
Chapter 24
With his injured, bloody hand, Brent reached into his pocket. Unsteady as the shaking of the basement continued, he fumbled out a small object, and held it up high enough for Katie to see what it was.
A small wooden cross, just a simple little thing, held together with a leather string wrapped around the two pieces. It was as simple and plain as the bigger version hanging in his church. It was a symbol of his faith, of how he believed God should be represented.
The blood from his cuts stained the cross red.
“By the grace of our Lord God,” he said, his voice trembling, “I ask that whatever soul is trapped in this space, um, leave this space.”
Whatever that was supposed to do for them, it failed. The shaking got worse as Katie traded a look with Riley. “I don’t think that’s a textbook exorcism. Is he making this up as he goes?”
Brent heard the question, and raised his voice over the rumbling sounds of the basement coming apart. “I’m doing the best I can. They didn’t exactly cover this in pastor college!”
He put one foot in front of the other, pushing himself forward against some u
nseen power that tried to force him back. It was like watching a man try to move through a hurricane, or a barrier of invisible energy.
Or like some massive, ghostly hand was trying to block him.
He tucked his head down low, and hunched his shoulders, and held that cross out like a shield. Step by step, he advanced by inches.
Around the little icon of faith held tight in his torn fingertips, the air began to glow. It was a cold light, the color of frost on a windowsill in the dead of January.
Where it touched the blood on Brent’s hands, smoke curled upward.
The strain showed on his face. The muscles in his neck stood out in chords.
“Leave,” he said, and it wasn’t clear whether he was talking to Katie and Riley, or to the ghost of Anna Vykroft.
He managed another step forward before the invisible presence pushing itself against him drove him down to his knees.
“Riley?” Every instinct in Katie told her to run, but she stood her ground. “We need to help him. We need to do something.”
The energy building around the Reverend began to press on them now, too, and Katie leaned into it, squaring her feet and pressing herself up against Riley for support.
In front of Brent the air swirled into inky blackness that spun and roiled and then shaped itself into the form of a woman. She wore a long black dress, and a medallion necklace with a spiral pattern engraved on it, and the empty holes of her eye sockets burned with fire.
Anna Vykroft.
Tendrils of darkness flowed outward from her, streaming around the basement, wrapping around Brent’s chest and arms and legs. This was the anger of Anna Vykroft made visible. This was the fury of a ghost who died when she could have been saved.
“Brent!” Riley called out to him. “Watch out. She’s right there. Right there!”
The Reverend’s head came up, weakly, his eyes growing wider as they focused on the impossible. The ghost of a dead woman reaching out to him with fingers that were withered and burnt.
Her appearance shifted as they watched her. One second she was the transparent image of the beautiful but tortured woman she had been in life, and in the next she was the desiccated and rotted corpse that had fallen out of the wall just one day ago.
She faded to shadow, and back again, and the bitter intensity of her emotions continued to batter against them and to rattle the foundations of the Heritage Inn.
“I hate him,” they heard her moan, like the sound of the wind howling from a long distance away. “I’ve always hated him. I will always hate him.”
The intensity of her anger rushed through the basement, trying to drive them back. It was all Katie could do to keep her eyes open against the force of it. Riley held onto her, and even together they couldn’t make it more than a few inches closer to Brent.
They weren’t going to be able to get to him.
With a supreme effort that showed on his face, Brent stood up again. He got to his feet, and he shoved the cross in his hand out as far as he could, closer to the ghost, even though it hissed with steam and began to turn black from a heat that was supernatural.
“Leave this place, spirit!” he shouted at her. “Leave this place where you no longer belong. Move on to the next place. Move on. Go. Leave!”
She looked at him with a sneer curling her dried, cracked lips. “Leave,” she said, the word echoing in her dead chest. “Leave. Leave. Leave, leave, leave leave LEAVE LEAVELEAVELEAVE!”
In that instant, Katie knew what was going to happen. She knew, and she was helpless to stop it.
Anna Vykroft flicked her arm to the side, and Brent was lifted up off the floor and thrown across the room, crashing into not one but two of the metal shelving units. They twisted under the impact from his body and he landed in a heap with his one arm folded awkwardly behind him and his eyes open and staring at the ceiling.
Katie saw the gash to his forehead, where the skin had been peeled back to reveal the bloody sheen of bone. Red streaked through his gray fringe of hair.
She wanted to ask if he was dead. She wanted to scream at him to get up.
There was no time.
The ghost advanced, without taking a step, on Katie and Riley.
“Maybe leaving is a good idea,” Riley shouted, close to her ear so she could hear him over the chaos in the basement.
Katie had to agree.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the burning sockets in Anna’s face.
The ghost came closer.
And closer.
Brent was there again, standing between them and Anna Vykroft. He swayed on unsteady legs. His one arm hung limply, and in his other hand he held the cross up high against the onslaught of the ghost’s fury.
Blood forming a mask over his face, the Reverend of Twilight Ridge held his ground between the living and the dead, and tested his faith to its limit.
“I command you,” he slurred, spitting bloody saliva from his lips. “I command you to leave! This house is not your place to--"
The ghost shrieked and thrust both arms toward him.
He shot up and off his feet, thrown at the ceiling with just enough time to duck his head into his chest before his shoulders collided with a ceiling beam.
Katie heard something crack. She wasn’t sure if it was the Reverend’s body, or the Inn.
On the way down, before he hit the floor, the ghost grabbed Brent’s body and threw it across the room again.
In the other direction this time.
Over by the broken wall, and the exposed ground behind it.
When he struck against the stones and crumpled to the floor, he screamed out in pain. He tried to pull himself up by the edges of the broken stones of the wall but his legs wouldn’t support him. The agony on his face speared Katie in the heart.
He was broken. For a moment Katie imagined how it must have been for the little boy that he ran over, broken and bleeding in the street, with no one to save him. How did the child feel that day?
He must have felt just like this.
She wondered if Brent was thinking the same things.
Anna’s ghost swooped closer to Riley and her, pulling her attention away from Brent Keller and thoughts of his past sins. The power of Anna’s anger pressed down on them again and Katie felt her feet sliding backward on the dirt floor. She brought her arms up, scissor style across her face, and wondered why she just didn’t do like the ghost demanded.
“Leave. Leave now!”
Chapter 25
The basement shook and rumbled.
Katie lost her footing altogether and fell to the floor, landing hard on her one hip and her hands. Riley dropped with her, his weight landing on her in a rush.
The ghost screamed without words, in anger...
...and terror.
Then she floated back from them, and the intensity of her rage lessened, and Katie was able to rise up to her knees, even though it took Riley helping her to get just that far.
Something was wrong, Katie thought to herself. It was like Brent had said when they first came down here. Something was wrong. It was more than Anna’s ghost. That was part of it, sure, but even Anna Vykroft was acting scared now. Like her spirit could feel whatever was wrong.
Like she knew something was coming.
She brought ruined hands up to the decomposed features of her once pretty face, and the flames in her eyes changed to a cold blue. She turned toward the break in the wall, where Brent Keller was still trying to lift himself up.
Despite everything, the Reverend was still alive.
The ghost wailed, a sound that sent pins and needles all along Katie’s skin. “You all should have left when you had the chance. I told you to leave. I told you to leave!”
She rose up toward the ceiling, fading back to smoke as she misted through and disappeared. As she did, Katie heard the whispery echo of her voice.
“I hate him. I hate him so much...”
Around them, the basement fell silent. The groaning of the building q
uieted. The dust settled. Everything went still.
Riley untangled himself from her. “Is she gone? Is it over, just like that?”
Katie clung to him. “I don’t think so. It’s too easy.”
Across the room, Brent fell to the floor, one arm and half his body shattered and wrecked. He watched the ghost leaving, his eyes wide and red with burst blood vessels, his face twisted and contorted.
Behind him, something moved.
It took Katie a moment to realize it was the exposed earth inside the break in the wall.
Something in the ground was pushing its way out.
Katie tried to motion for Brent to turn around, to look, to see what was coming for him. The Reverend was in too much pain to even think, let alone understand what she was trying to tell him.
Behind him, through the dense, dark soil, an arm appeared. A body followed, dark bones poking through the dried skin and decayed clothing of a man who had once been the town’s only doctor. Katie recognized his face even now, when most of the flesh had rotted away.
Death had not been kind to Boris Vykroft.
Realization struck Katie like a hammer blow. The book from the library had told her everything about Boris’s life. Everything, except how or when he had died. After the fire, after he had left his wife to burn to death, he had simply vanished from history.
Now she knew why. After what had happened, he couldn’t live with himself. His argument with Anna had started a fire that killed dozens of people, children included. His wife had died when he could have saved her. The guilt had driven him insane.
He’d stolen his wife’s body, and buried her here, where she could be close to him.
Where they could be together forever.
Because he had also buried himself here, closing up the hole in the wall form the other side. She could only imagine how unhinged he must have been to do that, to stand there and place stone after stone as he slowly sealed himself off from the light, and the air.
He would have suffocated to death in a grave of his own making.
The man had gone insane, and now his ghost had been unearthed.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 58
