“Katie...”
“I know, watch my attitude. Whatever. I don’t care! I just want to know who’s been wandering around shouting at me all day.”
The planchette made a sudden, abrupt circle around the entire board. It settled on several letters, one after the other, and then it repeated the same word, and repeated it again, until Katie finally got what it was saying.
S-O-C-C-E-R.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
From under Mel’s bed, they heard a thumping. It was a sound that Katie was very familiar with by now. She shouldn’t be hearing this. Not here, in the Heritage Inn. The ball couldn’t be here now.
It could not be here.
Especially not now that Martin Keats’ murder had been solved, and his body found. His ghost could rest in peace.
From under the bed, the soccer ball from Vera Keats’ house came rolling across the floor. Katie wanted to move away, or run from the room, but she knew she couldn’t break the contact with the Ouija board. If she did that, then she might never get back this one particular connection.
She might lose the answers she needed about Riley.
The ball rolled across the carpet.
The planchette moved.
S-O-C-C-E-R.
It came halfway into the room, and then it stopped.
As Katie watched, it rotated in place, white and black pads turning, as if searching for something.
Or someone.
Then it started rolling again. In Katie’s direction.
She started to pull away from the board, a tension building as the connection started to snap...
Then Gary reached over and grabbed up the ball.
“Damn it,” he yelped, practically throwing the ball away. “It’s cold. Like, dry ice cold! Damn!”
He held his hands up, flexing his fingers stiffly. Katie could see the red on his skin. Frostbite.
The ball bounced off into a corner, and then lay there, perfectly still.
“Katie?” Mel asked, “what the hell?”
“I know. It’s complicated. Just stick to the board--"
The planchette moved, dragging their hands to letter after letter in quick succession.
“I didn’t ask a question,” Mel whispered.
“Shh,” Katie warned her. “Let it speak.”
She realized how crazy that sounded, but she didn’t care. There were things going on here that were beyond her understanding. Beyond her belief. Her nerves were on edge, raw and jangling as she watched the planchette move.
Just three letters, over and over.
R-U-N
Over, and over.
“Are...you guys doing this?” Gary asked.
The planchette slid across to the top corner.
NO.
This was too much. Too much. “Where’s Riley?” Katie demanded of the wooden board. “Tell me now! Where is Riley!”
The planchette spun violently around in a circle, slipping itself out from under their hands, leaving Katie’s fingers stinging, spinning faster and faster and faster until it stopped in the exact center of the Ouija.
Then it scuttled across the board, bouncing on its corners, until it got to the edge.
There it sat, with the top point quivering.
Facing toward the door.
Very slowly, Katie turned her head, just enough to look over her shoulder.
In the doorway, she saw Riley.
The lights went out. Not just in the room. Everywhere in the Inn.
Everywhere went dark.
Chapter 13
All Katie knew, was that she had to move. Now.
R-U-N.
There was a rush of adrenaline as she got to her feet and ran with no direction in mind. She heard scuffling, knew it was Mel and Gary bolting as well, and then the doorway was there and she was out and through and still running.
Blindly she got to the stairs, and then she had to slow down or risk killing herself by tripping and falling headfirst all the way to the bottom. She counted the steps. There were exactly fourteen of them from the top floor down to the first, where she could find a flashlight behind the check-in desk and then wait for Mel and Gary and get out of here together.
Nine steps, ten steps.
Wasn’t there another guest here now? No, more than that. Damn it, what was she supposed to do about them?
Twelve steps.
Hopefully they would just stay in their rooms because there was no way in hell that she was going back up there to find them. What would she even say to them? Evacuate now before my boyfriend kills us? And oh by the way, I’m not sure it’s really him. He might be a ghost.
Thirteen steps.
Or something else...
Fourteen steps.
Fifteen.
Katie put her foot on the next step, and then the next.
This didn’t make sense. She knew her Inn. She knew how far it was from floor to floor. The only stairway that had this many steps was the one leading down to the basement. That one had twenty steps.
Nineteen.
Twenty.
Katie stopped, and held her breath. She did not want to be in the basement. She couldn’t be in the basement, damn it, because she’d just been on the top floor and she didn’t come down here.
She felt around her in the dark until she found the metal shelves just off the stairs. The shelves where they kept their canned goods, and extra blankets, and things like that. The basement was all storage. It was also where the water tank and the furnace were.
More than that, it was where the previous owner of the Inn had stacked the bodies of her victims. It was where a madman had buried his wife behind the walls decades ago, and then sealed himself in as well.
It was an evil place, and one that Katie avoided whenever possible.
Only now she was here, standing at the bottom of the steps.
“No,” she heard herself muttering. “No, no, no. Please, God, no.”
In the darkness around her, something moved.
She turned and ran up the stairs, blindly feeling along the walls to keep her balance. A little sound welled up in her chest like an animal trapped in a cage.
Eighteen steps, nineteen, twenty.
Her feet hit the basement floor again.
She was disoriented, and off balance, and grabbing hold of the shelves was the only thing that kept her upright. The Inn had brought her down here. She was sure of it now. It wanted her down here, in the center of the evil that infested this place. Maybe the center of the whole town.
Footsteps shuffled across the bare dirt floor. Someone was down here with her. Coming for her. There was nowhere to go, and nowhere to run.
Shuffle. Shuffle.
“Who’s there?” she called out. “Who is it?”
Shuffle.
Katie took a step back, up the stairs, keeping her eyes facing into the dark.
Shuffle.
She took another step backward. “Who’s there!”
The sounds stopped.
Katie gripped the railing of the stairs as hard as she could with her bandaged fingers.
She waited.
The only thing she could hear was her own breathing.
Then from behind her, from up the stairs, came a new sound.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Each time it was louder. Closer.
Thump.
Katie couldn’t move. She knew what it was.
The ball. The soccer ball was rolling down the stairs after her.
It bumped against the back of her leg, and spun on the stairs as it rolled lazily around her, and then continued down to the basement floor.
Thump, thump.
Then...silence.
The lights snapped on.
Riley stood there, holding the ball.
He smiled at Katie. “There you are.”
She turned, and ran back up the stairs. With the lights on everything stayed where it should be and she made it to the door at the top and she grabbed ahold o
f the handle with both palms and twisted it open, and shoved her way through.
Mel was standing there in the front room. So was Gary. They looked surprised to see her coming up from the basement.
“Katie,” Mel said, “what is going on?”
She couldn’t even begin to explain it. All she kept thinking about was what the Ouija board had told them.
“Run,” she told Mel. “Just...run.”
“Because I don’t know what else to do, that’s why.”
They were parked in the driveway of Vera Keats’ house. When they’d gotten out of the Heritage Inn, Mel had rushed them into her rental car and out onto the street. It was an ugly two-door with a beige interior and the smell of wet socks, and dangling from the mirror was a plastic rosary with a crucifix dangling from the end.
Can’t be too careful, Mel had told her.
Katie understood that all too well.
Without really knowing why, she had told Mel to come here, to the Keats house, where this whole nightmare had begun. They’d been sitting here for ten minutes or more, waiting for Katie to decide what to do.
Only, she wasn’t sure what that should be.
Gary leaned forward from the backseat. “I wish I’d brought some of my ghost hunting equipment. I can’t imagine what I’d find in a place like this.”
“Did you find anything in my Inn?” Katie asked him.
His face paled. “You mean, other than a soccer ball materializing out of thin air and a man who just disappeared into darkness?” He rubbed a hand across his mouth. “There’s things going on in your Inn. Things I don’t understand and even as a paranormal investigator...I’m not sure I want to try understanding them. Kind of scares the hell out of me.”
“I thought ghost hunters were supposed to be fearless?” Mel teased him.
“There’s more to me than that,” he promised her. “I’m also a certified tax accountant, an online ordained minister, and a substitute teacher.”
“Boring, exciting, and socially responsible, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’m lots of things. Right now I’m just scared.”
“Then you might want to stay in here,” she suggested. “I’m not sure what I’m going to find in the house.”
“Probably nothing, chickie,” Mel told her.
“Then you can stay here, too,” Katie snapped. “Riley isn’t himself, and the Ouija board said to look here to find...you know. To find him.”
“It did?” Mel asked. “Did I miss that part?”
Katie stared through the windshield at the house. “Soccer. It said soccer. This is what it meant.”
“Because of Vera’s son?”
“Yes. He loved soccer. That ball of his has been everywhere.”
“Like under the bed in my room.”
“Yes. And down in the basement. I can’t explain it, but I know this is where I’ll find Riley. The real him. Whatever’s happening to him, I’m going to find the answers here.”
“Then I’m coming in with you,” Mel told her.
Katie gave her friend a quick hug. “Thank you, Mel. I knew I could count on you.”
Together the two of them got out and went up to the house. Vera was still in jail, still under arrest for having her own son dead in her backyard, buried at the bottom of her well. There would be no one here to stop them from looking around.
There was yellow police tape across the door, telling them to keep out. Katie didn’t have time to obey the rules. Snapping one side of the barrier tape she grabbed the doorknob in her injured fingers and went inside.
It had been the middle of the afternoon when she opened the door. Stepping inside, she found all the lights were on. Dark pressed against the windows from outside. Night had fallen in the space of a step.
She was alone, too. Mel was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 14
Katie reached out for the handle of the door again. Her bandages slipped around the metal. She wanted to get back to Mel. She wanted to get back to where she had just been two seconds ago.
Before she could, she heard a voice from the other end of the hall.
“I don’t want your excuses! I said do it! That’s all that matters! Why won’t you ever listen to me? Don’t make me teach you a lesson again!”
She looked back into the house. There were people there. She saw the man first, tall and blocky with the cords standing out in his neck as he screamed at the woman in front of him.
Then she looked closer at the woman. There wasn’t as much gray in her bright red hair as there had been the last time Katie had seen her, but this was Vera Keats. A younger version of her.
Then she saw the boy trying to stand between them.
Martin Keats, in his blue soccer uniform with the number eight on the t-shirt.
They shimmered and faded, and then came back into focus. Around them the house...pulsed. Katie didn’t know how else to put it. The walls flexed with rhythmic precision. Like a living thing taking in deep, deep breaths.
This wasn’t real. This was a vision, an image that she was seeing from the past. Katie didn’t understand how these things happened to her. Seeing ghosts? Having visions? What in the hell was she supposed to do about that? She didn’t understand what she or the universe or God himself had done to make her this way, but she knew a vision when it stepped up and slapped her in her damned face.
Their voices were tinny and hollow, like they were speaking from a vast distance even though they were right there, in front of her.
Katie shrank back a step, trying again to get a grip on the doorknob. Even from the end of the hallway the ghosts of the past were too close.
“Mark, please,” Vera said to her husband, this man with his angry face and his accusing finger that he jabbed in her chest. “Please, I told you, he tried his best.”
“No he did not!” Mark roared back. “I told him to clean up that mess in there before my boss arrived for dinner and it was a pigsty! I have never been so embarrassed in all my life!”
“Dad I tried,” Martin practically wailed. It was a childish sound from a boy his age, full of fear and tinged with an anger all his own, passed down from father to son. “Please stop shouting. Please?”
“Go to your room,” was the terse answer. “This is between your mother and me.”
He shoved Martin by the shoulder, and the boy fell over, into the wall.
The pictures of him on the sideboard tipped over, falling down flat on their face.
“Stop it!” Vera wailed, finally getting up her courage now that Mark had hurt their son. “Martin’s a good boy. He’s a good boy!”
“He’s a bastard and no son of mine will disrespect me like this! He can’t win a damned soccer game, he can’t do his chores, he backtalks me and mouths off and...and...I blame you, Vera! You turned our boy into a little pansy. He needs discipline!”
“You can’t teach him anything by hitting him!”
“I will damned well do what I please!” Mark roared. “He’s my son and I will teach him to grow up if it’s the last thing I do!”
So much for the public image of the good father, Katie thought to herself. She’d seen this a number of times herself, where a man would smile and be all friendly when there were people watching, and then turn into a tyrant behind closed doors. There were ghosts in the world, and Katie knew that for a fact, but there were real life monsters like this man as well.
She didn’t know which one was scarier.
Mark raised a hand into a fist and took aim at his wife’s jaw.
Katie rushed forward now. Image or vision or whatever this was, she was going to at least try to stop this.
The walls of the house flexed again, and twisted, and Katie found she was further away than she had been three steps back. As fast as she ran, she couldn’t get close enough.
Little Martin was closer, and he was faster.
He put himself between his parents even though there was no way he could do anything. He shouted for his father to stop. He s
tumbled into his mother. She fell backward into the wall.
And his fist struck his son.
He spun and fell to the floor in a blur, and then he sat there, feeling at the blood dripping down his cheek.
Katie tried to take another step towards them, knowing there was nothing she could do, but horrified by what she was seeing. This little boy would end up dead. This was how it happened. This was what she was seeing.
The vision wouldn’t let her go. It was forcing her to watch.
And it wasn’t over.
Martin got to his feet, his whole body trembling as he glared at his dad. “I hate you.”
Before his parents could stop him he ran down the hallway to the front door.
And right through Katie.
She felt the tug of it inside of her when he did. It spun her around, and then she was staring at the boy, face to face.
“This is why I’m dead.”
He said it to her so calmly that Katie felt chills running down her spine.
Then he was facing the other way and running again, like he’d never stopped at all. He didn’t turn around. He was just there, out the door.
“Get back here!” Mark bellowed at him. “You little bastard, get back here!”
Katie turned in time to see him charging down the hallway like an enraged bull and there was no time to get out of the way. He ran into her, through her...
And dragged her along in his wake.
Katie was helpless to stop the scene from unfolding around her. She was pulled out onto the front lawn, and she watched with Mark as Martin ran down the street, his little arms pumping. It was deep in the night, and no one was out, and no one was watching as Mark jumped into his car and started the engine.
Katie was there, standing somehow in the passenger seat as the whole thing played out. In a rage, Mark backed the car out of the driveway and smashed into his own mailbox. Swearing, he threw the gear shift into drive. Things crunched in the engine as he hit the accelerator and the car shot forward.
She heard him promise to break every bone in Martin’s body.
The car raced up the street.
Then Martin was there, standing in the middle of the headlights.
His face horrible as he realized what was going to happen a moment before his father did. A moment too late. A moment before the brakes squealed and the whole world came crashing down to this one moment.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 67
