“Vera Keats told us that her husband disappeared, same as her son. We thought it was a lot of tragedy to visit on one woman, but at the same time, we didn’t figure it was anything other than the truth that she was telling us. So. How is it that you think Mark Keats is actually dead?”
I can see ghosts, she almost told him. I can see them and Mark Keats’ ghost is out to get me and he isn’t exactly a ghost but he’s something worse and please God find my boyfriend because I don’t know where he is or what’s being done to him and...and...
She almost said all of that, all in a rush, before she stopped herself.
Looney bin, Katie, remember? She folded her hands over her stomach, and forced herself to look him in the eye.
“I guess I made a mistake.”
He kept watching her, making her feel uncomfortable, for a very long moment. Then he shook his head.
“No, Ma’am. I don’t think you did. Thing of it is, I think he’s dead, too. I worked that case at the start of my career. Now, I was leaning towards saying that Vera may have killed her husband as well--"
“No!” Katie couldn’t help herself. “That’s not what happened. Not at all. He was an abusive husband. He beat both Vera and Martin and when Martin tried to run away he, um.”
Very purposefully, she bit down on her tongue. She’d already said too much. If she said anything else it would be hell trying to explain herself.
Norstrom’s eyes went wider. Not in disbelief, but because he realized that what she was saying made sense.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Why didn’t I see that?”
Katie sat there silently, watching him deep in thought. Every time she was about to say something she clamped her lips closed to keep the words in. Let him come to his own conclusions, she told herself. She knew Martin was guilty of murder because she’d seen it with her own eyes, albeit in a vision. The rest of the world would need convincing.
Officer Norstrom might be a good place to start, however. Maybe then, young Martin’s ghost would get the rest he deserved.
If only Riley was here. He’d know what to do. And if he didn’t, then they would figure it out together.
A tear fell down her cheek. She wanted to wipe it away, but she didn’t, because if she did then Officer Norstrom would certainly see her doing it and know she was crying over more than just the money she was going to have to spend out to repair Vera’s house.
Only, when she looked back at him, his eyes were fixed on her. He saw everything, this man did. He knew what she was thinking.
She wasn’t going to be able to keep her secrets with him around. He was going to find out everything and then it wouldn’t just be the looney bin for her. She’d wind up in jail right next to Vera Keats on suspicion of kidnapping or murder or something.
So she did the only thing she could think of.
“Get out,” she told him. “Leave me alone.”
He looked at her like she’d gone crazy. “Excuse me?”
“I said get out. I want you to leave.”
“You want me to what?”
“You heard me!”
She was holding back tears. She didn’t want to yell at him. She wanted his help. To free Vera. To find Riley. She wanted to get down on her knees and beg him to stay, but if she slipped and said anything about ghosts, or the monster that Mark Keats had become, he would ask questions, and keep her lying here until it was too late to save Riley. Or worse, he would take her away to a jail somewhere.
No. He had to go.
“Get out!” she repeated, punctuating her words with a gesture toward the door. “I want you to get out of here! Right now, before I call the nurses to have you escorted out. Go. Go!”
It took him a moment, probably because he was deciding whether to take her seriously or not, but then he eased his way out of the chair. His face was impossible to read, set in grim lines that Katie did not think would bode well for her.
She waited for him to say something. Anything. Every muscle in her body was so tense that she could feel her heart beating in her chest.
Looking down on her, he tapped two fingers to his forehead in a sort of salute.
Katie couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled that freaking soccer ball out of his pocket.
“I understand,” he told her. “Probably more than you know.”
Then he just turned around and walked to the door.
When he was almost gone, he stopped and looked back at her. “Good luck, Katie. I’m sure Riley will turn up. Let me know when he does, won’t you?”
Before she could answer, he closed the door.
She made herself count to twenty after he was gone, just to make sure he wasn’t going to come back. When she had gotten all the way to twenty, and then twenty-one, she finally let her emotions go, and cried for real.
Chapter 19
When she woke up again, it was night.
At least, she thought it was night. It was dark in the room and the blinds were drawn and the room had that feel that rooms get when the world is asleep and you’re not.
Her mouth was dry. Her ankle ached and her hands were...itchy. Good to know something on her was healing. All of her bruises felt like they hurt worse. She was stiff and aching all over and she felt like she might never be whole again.
Especially since the best half of her--Riley--was still missing.
Damn her throat was dry. She’d spent hours crying after Officer Norstrom left. She’d cried until she didn’t have any tears left.
Katie sat up in bed, pushing the pillows up behind her so that she could be comfortable. Then she fumbled for the red call button that would let her summon a nurse. It felt like her throat was full of sand. She desperately needed a drink. She was hoping for whiskey, or some of Mel’s good wine, but she had a feeling the best she could hope for here was water with chips of ice in it.
Right now even that sounded really good to her.
She found the call button easily enough, attached to the wall on a long cord. Scooping it up in her bandaged fingers, she thumbed the button a few times, and waited.
Outside in the hall she could hear the faint bing bing bing that was meant to alert the nurses someone was calling for their help. Katie had been in hospitals before and she knew that sometimes those call buttons could go off for several minutes before someone had the time, or the desire, to come and check on the patient.
So, when no one came right away, she wasn’t worried.
she waited some more. Why had the doctor wanted her to stay for the night, anyway? Bumps and scratches didn’t mean she was in danger of dying.
She nearly laughed when it occurred to her that the doctor had probably wanted her to stay put so she didn’t hurt herself again, worse than she already had.
Finally, the door to her room opened. Someone came in humming a tune that Katie thought she recognized. Something catchy, although she couldn’t quite place it. Something from her childhood, maybe.
The song continued as the nurse closed the door. Katie tried to say hello but her voice wouldn’t work. She’d stopped even trying to swallow at this point. That’s how much it hurt.
She turned toward the humming. At least she’d be able to pantomime that she needed water.
There was no one there. It was just a dark room, and the humming.
Katie blinked. She strained her eyes in the dim glow from little electronic monitors scattered around the room, trying to see where the sound was coming from.
Something rippled across the space in front of her eyes. It shimmered darkly as it grew bigger, taller, deeper. It was like looking into the depths of a pit. Like looking down into the well in the backyard of Vera Keats’ house.
And the thing down there.
It twisted into view, turning sideways, stepping out of the seam in reality where it had been hiding. Tall and dark and misshapen and humming that song.
The song turned to laughter. The thing cackled demonically, and the sound of it coiled into Katie’s b
rain. It was impossibly loud. Too loud for no one to have heard it. The nurses. The doctors. Someone must have heard that...
A part of her brain screamed. Someone must have heard that. Please, let someone hear that and come save me!
One of its arms lifted up and slipped along the ceiling, slithering like a snake, coiling and ready to strike. Katie watched the fingers taper out in long ribbons that were barbed at the ends. It dangled above her, quivering as it inched closer.
And closer.
The face floated there, blacker than the shadows except where the eyes glowed with a deathly luminescence. Its jagged teeth parted and Katie was staring into the depths of its open mouth, a hole that went on forever.
The dangling fingers raked her scalp.
She felt its breath, hot and oily, sliding across her skin. It couldn’t have breath. It was a ghost. It was a damned spirit, the remnant of a dead thing. It could not breathe.
But it did.
This was more than a ghost. She could admit that to herself now. It terrified her to think of what it might be, or how Mark Keats had come to be this thing. She’d never encountered anything like this. It was more than just a hollow spirit. In the midst of her terror her mind searched for a word to describe it, and one came to her.
Wraith.
This was something evil. Something from the world of the dead that could touch her, and hurt her.
Black saliva dripped from its lips. A voice from a child’s nightmare spoke to her.
“Don’t make me teach you a lesson...again...”
Katie remembered the words that Martin Keats had told his wife. They were the same words that he had just said to her.
She wanted to scream. Oh, damn, why couldn’t she scream!
One hand stroked her scalp, the claws dragging through her skin. Its touch burned with a fierce cold. She remembered Gary Wargo tossing aside the soccer ball, and saying it was cold, like dry ice cold.
That was what she felt now.
The other hand of the wraith slid up from the floor and along the bed, under the blanket, up her bare leg under the hospital gown. She felt the pinpricks of its fingertips walking their way up her thigh.
She knew, without a doubt, where they were going.
No no no no no no no n o n o n o...
As she tried to twist away, to escape that touch, the hand above her head slithered down around her skull and squeezed. She felt a pressure building in her brain. Mark Keats’ ghost was going to kill her.
But it was going to torment her first.
Its hand slipped up further, the fingers lengthening and becoming grotesquely thick. They squirmed against her skin, all five of them, and pressed against the thin material of her panties.
Katie threw her hands out to both sides, trying to find the nurse’s call button again, trying to grab hold of something that she could use to pull herself away from this nightmare, trying to do anything, anything, anything to get away.
Her panties ripped, and darkness forced its way into her.
Above her the face loomed, eyes drinking in her terror and disgust. She arched her back as pain blossomed between her legs, and Keats’ smile split his face from ear to ear.
She gagged when his fingers began to pulse.
Katie’s hand slapped down on the table next to the bed as she rasped and choked and made a noise that was barely a squeak from a throat that was raw and tight. The specter laughed at her again, twisting its hand at an impossible angle.
Under her injured fingers, she felt something familiar.
Blindly she picked up the little thing she’d found on the table and held it tight against her palm. She held onto it for dear life as the most private part of her body was invaded. It felt like liquid fire was being poured into her, like she was being scoured inch by inch with sandpaper.
Like she was being turned inside out.
His ghost held her gaze, trapping her in its eyes. More of its body uncoiled from itself and spread around the room and Katie knew that before too much longer it would fill the space around her and then she would suffocate while it violated every...single...part of her.
Keeping her gaze locked with the nausea-inducing glow of its eyes made her sick to her stomach. Sick in her heart. She wanted to die. She wanted to end it right now.
She couldn’t.
Die.
No. Not yet. Not here.
Die...
No.
Give up. Die...
No.
Why? What do you have to live for?
She had a reason to live.
Riley was her reason. She had to find him. If it ended here, she would never know what happened to him.
So, she would not die.
Not if she had anything to say about it.
Bringing her hand over, she rammed it down the throat of a dead man’s ghost.
In her hand, she held her little metal cross.
It was like plunging her arm into murky, icky water. The thing rippled around her. It clung to her skin. She had a panicked moment when she was sure that the specter was oozing into the pores in her skin.
The hand around her skull spasmed, and there were stars blossoming in front of her vision, there in the dark.
The eyes stared at her in shock, with a fury that had no words.
Then the mouth closed around her, and the teeth sank into her flesh. Katie felt her blood flowing down the ghost’s throat.
She threw her head back and tried to scream but all that came out was a whispery sort of hiss that tore at her throat. She was being devoured by Mark Keats’ wraith. He was sucking down her blood and filling her up inside in places that were never meant to be touched and Katie was helpless to do anything.
Helpless.
She was going to die after all.
Right here, right now, she was going to die.
Then, a warmth spread through her hand. The one the wraith had swallowed.
It took her frazzled mind a moment to even register the change. When she did, it grew warmer, and then more so, until it was almost painfully hot.
The wraith’s eyes bulged, the glowing orbs standing out of its distorted face.
The cross, Katie realized. The cross was reacting to the evil of this thing. It was burning.
The wraith was unholy ice. The cross was a pure flame.
Katie was caught between the two extremes.
She could feel Mark Keats trying to push her arm out of its mouth. Trying to regurgitate her. It gagged and it spit and it shook its distended mouth back and forth until Katie’s arm felt like it would come off at the shoulder.
It didn’t matter. There was no separating the two of them now. The cross had melted its way into the wraith and there was no dislodging it. Katie was stuck, as surely as the thing that Mark Keats had become was stuck to her.
Katie was too tired to fight anymore. Whatever the thing was going to do to her, she couldn’t stop it.
Helpless, she told herself again. Helpless...
The cross spread its heat and the deep darkness of the thing slowly began to blaze with light.
Katie lay there, while it tried to crush her skull, and pushed more of itself inside of her, between her legs...
It gurgled and gagged around her arm and its face ballooned with the pressure building inside of it.
Katie had a single moment of clarity. Oh...damn...
One at a time, its eyes popped, spewing gore all over Katie’s chest and face.
Then the rest of it simply turned to liquid.
It dropped into a puddle, like a rain of black ooze, arms and legs and humped back dissolving into an oily gooey muck that splashed down hard against the floor and the bed and everywhere. It was all over the sheets. All over Katie’s hospital gown. It was in her hair and in her mouth and...and...
It was up inside of her. Where the thing’s hand had been, she could feel a gooey residue leaking out, down her thighs, soaking her panties.
It was gone but it was still all over
her. Her stomach began doing somersaults and every part of her cramped, all at once.
She rolled onto her side before the vomit came.
Chapter 20
She got out of the bed, trembling and weak and violently sick to her stomach still.
Everything that had been in her stomach was now mixing into the black residue of the wraith. She couldn’t even remember the last time she ate but there it was, all over the floor.
When her feet hit the floor, they slipped on the remnants of the ghost thing that had snuck its way into her room. She went down on her ass, and any part of her that had been clean before wasn’t anymore.
Getting to her hands and knees, she retched again, over and over, even though there was nothing left to come up. She spit, and spit again, and it was black each time.
She needed a shower. She needed to scrub her skin with a wire brush and maybe gargle with rubbing alcohol to get the taste of him out of her mouth. The part of her mind that could have made sense of what had just happened shut down on her. There was no explaining it. It happened.
It would be years before she could forget any of this, but for right now, she thought maybe she could push it aside.
Her hand squished in the mess on the floor.
No. It was all right here, all right in front of her. The urge to scream was still there. Every little sound made her flinch. No. There was no forgetting this. She would be years getting over this.
If ever.
Mark Keats’ ghost--no, his wraith--had come for her after she found what he had done to his son. It had tried to abuse her, and probably would have killed her, if not for the cross that she brought with her everywhere.
It wanted to silence her so it could keep its secrets.
She was alive, but would she ever be okay?
She tried to say a prayer of thanks for the being alive part, but another violent series of dry heaves took her. When it had passed she figured God had gotten the point.
Off to the side, by the door to this room, was a bathroom with a stand-up shower. That was where she was heading. She was going to stand under that shower for the next week if she had to. However long it took to wash this...slime away.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 70
