Speaking of standing up. She pushed to her knees, and then slowly to her feet. She took stock of herself, all the aches and pains. All the bruises. Every part of her hurt. Her head throbbed. If she wasn’t already in a hospital, she’d say that she needed to go to one.
The hospital gown was ruined. She untied it from behind and dropped the sopping rag to the floor. It settled with a wet plop and began soaking up more of the muck.
Her panties were worse. She stood there for a long, long moment with her legs apart, feeling the ick dripping out of her. Then, slowly, she hooked her thumbs into the waistline and peeled them down. They had been cute once, cotton and comfy with little gold stars all over them. Now they were torn, and they were fouled by stains that weren’t natural.
She dropped them next to the hospital gown. When she did, they sponged up the black liquid from the floor with a slurping sound that set her teeth on edge.
Her stomach threated to rise up on her again, and she turned away. She was naked, and she was filthy, and she was in pain.
And, she was alive. She realized her thoughts had wandered in a complete circle and brought her right back to that again. She was going to have to be happy with being alive because that was all she had left.
A tear streaked a line down the gore on her cheek. She wanted Riley back. That was what she wanted more than anything else.
Stepping into the bathroom, still trembling and half-dazed from shock, she held her breath, and turned on the light.
There was nothing there. Just a little room, with a toilet and a closet-sized shower with a faded yellow curtain on a rod. It was closed, and she had to force herself to take ahold of the one side, and pull it across.
The shower was empty, too.
Nothing was waiting to jump out at her. There really was nothing here. The nightmare was over.
Her hand reached for the knob to turn on the water. Her bandages were ruined too, she saw, sopping with the black liquid residue. Tears rolled down her face freely now as she unpinned and then unwrapped each finger, one at a time.
They were the cleanest part of her now. The fingernails had started to grow back on the two where the doctor had removed them. The cuts were healing. She could flex them without pain. She nearly laughed through her tears. She was tougher than she thought.
Then she turned the hands over, and looked at the palm of the one.
The heat from the cross had melted the little thing right into her skin. It was melted, and distorted, and somehow she had the feeling that whatever protection it had ever offered her was used up now. It was just a useless bit of warped metal.
With her other hand, with the unwrapped fingers, she took hold of the cross by its one edge, and peeled it away.
Ow, ow ow ow. It stung more than hurt. There was a little blood, too, but not much.
What was left behind when she was done was the red, puckered impression of a cross, scarred into the skin. Katie wondered if maybe it would be there forever.
She dropped the ruined cross to the floor. It tinked against the tiles, and lay still.
Well, that was it then. Nothing left but to clean up.
“Katie...?”
She gasped, and turned around so fast her feet slipped and she had to grab the curtain to keep herself up.
That voice.
It had come from out there in the room. Her legs started to give out on her. She hadn’t imagined it. The voice was real.
And it was Riley’s.
“No,” she heard herself croak. “No, please no please please no no no no no.”
It couldn’t be Mark Keats’ ghost again. Get a grip, she told herself. The wraith was gone. The proof of that was all over her. He’d imitated Riley before and fooled her and scared her to death and hurt her but it couldn’t be him this time. Not this time. She’d just destroyed his ghost. It was gone.
Gone, damn it.
Oh. Which meant...
She slipped and nearly fell twice on her way out to see for herself. It was impossible, but that word had lost all meaning in the last few days. Maybe, she thought, it had ceased to have any meaning for her the moment she arrived in Twilight Ridge.
Near the foot of the bed, sitting there covered in the same black ick that she was, Riley was waiting for her.
He blinked at her, wiping at the gore over his face. “I think I fell asleep.”
She laughed. It was a raw sound, barely a whisper, but nothing could stop it. She laughed because she had to. It was all she had left.
She threw herself into his arms, there on the floor. She barely noticed how the floor was clean and bare now, the dirty remnants of her clothing having taken in all that the wraith had left behind. It was just them now, and the muck over their bodies.
Riley was back.
“Where...” she tried to ask. She cleared her throat, and spit out more black-tainted saliva. “Where have you been?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I went into that well, and there was a darkness. A presence. It swallowed me up. It...took me...it...made me do things...” He shivered against her. “It wasn’t me, Katie. It wasn’t me.”
“Shh,” she said, seeing how upset he was. She thought she understood what he was trying to say. “It’s okay, Riley. It doesn’t matter. I knew it wasn’t you. I know you, Riley Harris. I know every inch of you and that thing...it was a ghost. No, worse than a ghost. It was some kind of wraith.”
“Wraith?” He tried the sound of it out in his mouth. “Wraith. Yeah. That about sums it up. When it, um, burst like that it left me behind. It dropped me right here. Damn. I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.”
“Me either,” she admitted. “Come on. I’ve got just the thing.”
It took them longer to strip off his clothes. They weren’t just soaked with the black gore. They were stiff with it. They peeled away from his skin with a lot of effort, but then they were gone. The two of them were naked together under the shower’s spray.
It felt so good to be held by him as they got warm, and clean. He found the cross impression burned into her hand, and kissed it gently. It tickled more than it hurt. The pain of all her injuries faded away, actually, with the drum of the water against her skin, and the feel of his skin against hers.
They filled their mouths with water and slushed it around and spit it out again. They scrubbed each other down with washcloths and their hands, and every single time he touched her, Katie’s heart raced. They were at it for hours, well past the point when their bodies were clean. Katie felt his love for her, and that more than anything else cleaned away the taint of the last few days.
He was feeling the same way, based on what she was feeling between his legs. She hadn’t been sure, after what the wraith had done, if she would ever be able to feel this way again. Flashes of what Mark Keats had done to her came and went but she didn’t care. Having Riley with her made it okay. She was ready, and wanting. She licked the water off his shoulders, and then his chest, and swallowed.
Then she went lower down his body.
The bathroom door opened.
The shower curtain was thrown back, and a nurse stood there.
Katie tried to cover herself up behind Riley but the woman had already gotten an eyeful. She stared at the two of them, holding each other tight in the cramped shower. Her face went through a whole range of emotions before finally settling into an angry glare.
“We,” she told them, “are not that kind of hospital.”
Chapter 21
The end of the week couldn’t come soon enough.
Katie breathed a sigh of relief when Saturday morning rolled around and she woke up in bed next to Riley. She pulled his arm around her tighter, and refused to move.
The guests who had been scheduled this week came and left again, without a single problem. Gary Wargo extended his stay through Friday so that he could spend more time with Mel. The two of them had hardly come out of her room the whole time.
In a way, Katie was glad to see it. She wa
s worried Gary would be angry when he regained consciousness and heard that she and Mel had put the blame for the car accident on him. Instead he took it in stride, with a little shrug and a wink.
From what Katie gathered later, Mel had more than made it up to him.
She rolled over onto her side now, still in the circle of Riley’s arms, looking at the sunlight streaming through the window. No guests today. Just chores. They had to put the rooms and the Inn back in order for the three people coming in tomorrow to check in.
That left her with a lot of time. Maybe today she would go over to Vera Keats’ today, and try to make some amends.
Vera had been released from jail. There wasn’t any evidence that she had actually killed her son. Nothing that said she knew he was there, either. Now the official police theory was that Mark Keats had killed the boy, and disappeared soon after to hide from the law.
It was close enough to the truth. Katie didn’t feel the need to fill in any of the details.
Riley shifted, and stretched in his sleep. She put her leg through his and made sure wherever he moved, she was right there with him. This was all she really wanted. She could have all the money in the world, and none of it would be worth this moment, right here. All the ghosts in the world couldn’t spoil this.
Although, Mark Keats had come close.
She closed her eyes again and tried to forget. The nightmares had been bad the last few days, but she kept them to herself. There was no sense to stressing Riley about them.
Because she was pretty sure that he was having nightmares of his own.
Right now he was breathing evenly, and she felt the rise and fall of his chest against her back. Yes. This was perfect.
From the corner of her room she heard a thumping noise.
She lifted her head against the pillow, just enough to look that way, but she already knew what she was going to see. She knew that sound.
From nowhere, Martin Keats’ soccer ball had dropped into their room.
It stared her down, and Katie was too afraid to move.
Slowly, it began rolling. It went across the floor, an inch at a time, in more or less of a straight line.
When it got to her open closet, it rolled itself inside.
Of course, Katie thought to herself. That was where she had her keepsakes from all of the ghosts they had seen here in Twilight Ridge. A man’s wristwatch. A necklace with a spiral design on it.
Now, a child’s soccer ball.
She closed her eyes. The ball was harmless now. Just another memento.
Now, it was over.
At least, until the next thing that Twilight Ridge sent them.
Putting the key in the lock of his front door, Officer Timothy Norstrom went inside his apartment, and shut the door behind him.
“Mom,” he called out. “I’m home.”
A man his age, living with his mother, would have seemed strange to his buddies on the force. State Troopers didn’t typically live with their moms. This was a special circumstance, though. Not one he talked about at work, to be sure.
It was kind of a secret.
“Mom? Are you here?”
He kicked his shoes off at the door and dropped his gun belt on the kitchen table. In the fridge he found he was down to just four longneck beer bottles. That was enough to get him through the night. He’d have to get more tomorrow.
He popped the top off one and headed for the couch in the living room. His apartment wasn’t big, but everything was set up just the way he liked it. The flat screen television was waiting for him to turn it on. Tipping up the beer to drink a long swallow, he picked up the remote and aimed it at the screen.
It was yanked out of his hand. It went sailing across the room, and bounced off the wall to land on the floor. The back panel popped off when it did and the batteries went flying.
“Great,” he muttered to himself. For a moment he dropped his head against the back of the couch, and stared at the ceiling.
It was going to be one of those nights.
He stood up, and started to retrieve the remote.
A book flew off the shelf and sailed past his face, missing him by bare centimeters.
“Mother, that’s enough!” he snapped.
Ten years ago, someone had murdered his mother. He and several other Troopers had investigated, and still he had no idea who was responsible. He had almost gotten past the pain of that. Almost.
Then things had started to happen.
He would feel cold in the dead of summer. Things would move around his apartment. There would be whispered words, deep in the night.
His mother’s ghost was here, and she was angry.
The beer helped him sleep but it didn’t take care of the problem. Things were getting worse. He didn’t know how much longer he could take this.
Once, a few weeks ago, he’d gone to work with a split lip from a frying pan that had jumped off the counter without warning. That had been hard enough to explain. If he started showing up every day with bruises people were going to start talking.
He needed help, because he didn’t know what to do.
There must be someone out there who knew about these things.
Someone, maybe, who could see ghosts. Someone who lived in Twilight Ridge.
He drank from his beer again, and watched the wall bulge out and shape itself into his mother’s face.
She screamed, and he braced himself for another night of hell.
The Curse Of The Ivory Lady
Dedicated to my loyal readers
Chapter 1
Ghosts. Everywhere Katie Pearson looked, she saw ghosts.
Halloween had arrived in the sleepy New Hampshire town of Twilight Ridge. Or nearly so. The stores on the main street were decorated with orange and black streamers, hoping to attract business from tourists and locals alike. People dressed like witches and vampires smiled and waved to her, even though it was actually still five nights from All Hallows Eve.
People went crazy for the holidays. Stripped of their religious significance and any real meaning, they were just excuses to sell cheap junk and make money.
The local restaurant, The Good Eats Diner, was offering something called the “Devil’s Revenge,” a hamburger layered with ghost peppers and garlic sauce. The thought of it turned Katie’s stomach.
Her own business didn’t need to attract people with gimmicks. That didn’t mean she was above a little glitz, though. She loved Halloween. There was going to be a party and decorations, and punch that smoked thanks to some dry ice. They were going to invite their neighbors, and it was going to be a lot of fun.
All around town, from lamp posts, and from wires strung carefully across the street between buildings, and from decorative poles erected in the town square, dozens and dozens of ghosts flew in the late Autumn breeze. They were everywhere. All around town.
The mayor of Twilight Ridge had decided that dressing the town up with life-sized “ghosts” was going to get everyone into the spirit of the holiday. They were basically white sheets draped over plastic mannequin skeletons. They billowed in the wind. They rattled when they moved. More than once, Katie was sure that she saw some of them watching her through blank eyeholes.
Creepy, and a little ridiculous.
In Katie’s life, ghosts weren’t just things that came out of the storage closet once a year to dance on the end of wires. She’d been able to see ghosts--real ghosts--her entire adult life. It was a gift, of sorts, and sometimes it came in handy.
Sometimes, it scared the hell out of her.
For the longest time, Katie had made a living by flipping houses. She would buy them, sight unseen, pour a few thousand dollars into renovating them, and then sell the finished property for three or four or sometimes five times what she had paid out. It had been a good living, one that suited her carefree life. One that she had always enjoyed.
That is until she found herself falling deeper and deeper into the world of the paranormal, one haunted house at a t
ime. More than once, those adventures had nearly cost Katie her life. It had been time for a change, so a change was what she made.
She didn’t like to use the term “adventures” to describe the things she had been through. “Adventure” implied having fun, and doing amazing things that made for great stories to tell your friends. Katie’s ghost stories had been full of excitement, and death, and horror...not the sort of thing you talked about over a few bottles of beer.
A new life had been waiting for her here in Twilight Ridge. A fresh start that would not involve things that gave her nightmares and a desperate need for therapy.
At least, it should have been that way. The town of Twilight Ridge was not what it had appeared to be at first. When she had accidentally stumbled onto this place during a carefree vacation drive, it had looked quaint. Tranquil. Picturesque. It was like walking into a Thomas Kinkade painting.
In reality, it was exactly the opposite. Little had she known about all of the evil laying just below the surface. The secrets that seemed to lurk in every home. Murders. Accidental deaths. Untimely passings of every kind imaginable.
The ghosts associated with those events were still here, and one by one, Katie was finding them. Whether she wanted to, or not.
Katie had purchased the town’s one and only Inn. That was her business now, and she thought it would make a good investment. If she could get it fixed up and thriving, then she could sell it at a profit. Or, she could make a life out of it. Recently, she’d even given some thought to settling down.
That was before she and her boyfriend had discovered the problems with the Inn’s foundation. And by problems, she meant the bodies buried in the walls down cellar. The previous owner had killed most of her guests, and kept their bodies down there, talking to them as if they were living friends.
There had been other deaths in the Heritage Inn, as well. Old deaths. Other ghosts. Every single one of them had been angry, and dangerous to remove. She could see them. Riley could see them. Sometimes she wished that she couldn’t.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 71
