by Hunter Shea
Its appearance stunned them all into paralysis. Jessica didn’t dare to come any closer to it, lest she chase it away again. Eddie held his breath.
Slowly, it brought its arm up and placed its hand flat against the door. There was a sudden change in the ambience of the entire house. It was as if it had been electrified with a wild, untamable current that set invisible fires in the ozone, raising the hairs on their bodies and pricking their skin like a tattoo artist’s needle. Now, with the appearance of the doppelganger, that surge of unchecked energy had been cut off, the breaker closed, the source of the surge contained, though still a danger.
There was a loud thump, as if something heavy had landed on the floor in the bathroom, followed by a piercing wail that sounded like a silent scream finally set free.
When they heard Selena’s scream, Greg dropped the flashlight. He bent down to snatch it back up. When he shined it back near the door, his daughter’s spirit double was gone.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Selena had resigned herself to endure whatever horrors the invisible entity had planned for her. She felt it envelop her body, could see the depression of fat, strong fingers on her skin as it kneaded and pinched her arms, thighs, belly and breasts. An uncomfortable, barbed heat pressed between her legs, seeking entry to the one place she feared the most. When she tried to close her legs, pain shot through her hips as they were forced apart.
She was still sitting on the toilet, exposed, helpless, gagging from the effort of trying to draw a solid breath. Her shirt had been ripped down the middle and she was forced to watch the inexorable progress of the ghost as it worked its way down her chest, focusing all of its attention below.
Her father and Jessica yelled and pounded against the door and she couldn’t understand why it hadn’t smashed to splinters. Hot tears ran down her face and she desperately wanted to beg aloud for her parents to save her.
She stiffened even more when she felt a gush of hot breath blow against her inner thighs.
Please, God, no, no, no, don’t let this happen to me! Help me, God, please!
Her legs were pulled farther apart, bending up toward her chest. She struggled to break its grip, rocking from side to side, frantic to stop the growing heat between her legs before it entered her, where she was sure she would burn to death from the inside out.
The toilet seat slipped, snapping off the bolts that held it in place, and she fell sideways onto the floor. For an instant, she was free. She screamed so hard, she thought for sure she had severed her vocal cords. When she tried to pull herself up using the side of the tub, the ghost pounced on her, driving her to the cold tile floor. It pressed hard on her face, grinding her cheek until she tasted blood as her teeth shredded the tender flesh within.
Her eyes were blinded by a fresh wave of tears, but not enough to block the vision of a pair of luminous legs standing before her. For a moment, she thought her father and Jessica had broken through. Her terror escalated when she saw the door behind the legs very much intact. Straining against the pressure on her head, she managed to look upward, settling on her own face staring back at her with an expression of unbridled anger.
In that moment, she knew its ire wasn’t directed at her. It was as if she had entered the soul of her mirror image. For the first time, she was grateful to see her double walker. It wasn’t here to scare her. It had never intended to do that. Selena had just never known how to process the experiences.
“Help…me,” she pleaded with her double walker.
It reached into the space around her, stopping inches from her back. She felt relief from the malicious weight that had pinned her to the floor.
There was a flash of light, white and hot as if it had come from the quick snapping on and off of an aerial spotlight. Both the ghost and the double walker disappeared in the brief flicker between dark and light, and dark again.
She scrambled to a sitting position, drawing her legs close to her and sobbing.
The door split in half as her father drove the pry bar down its center. He pushed through the shattered remains of the door and rushed to her.
“Daddy!”
She held out her arms to him and he gathered her up like he used to do when she was just a small girl. Her mother and Ricky were waiting right outside the door. There was a lot of commotion as he carried her into the living room. Her sobs made it hard for her to talk or even swallow and her mother, to her credit, kept a brave face and did her best to calm her down. Even her little brother kept his cool, running to get her a glass of water and a blanket.
“We have to get out of here, now!” her father snapped.
Eddie tried to talk low, but she heard him say, “If you do, it will just follow you. We have a perfect window to get it now.”
The rest was lost to her as she fought to regain her composure, but every time she tried, she felt the cold, determined hands roughly fondle her body, and all was lost.
Jessica knew she had to get away from the Leighs as fast and far as she could, but first she and Eddie had to talk Greg down, convince him that his running was not the answer.
They went into the yard, where the cooling night air sent a shiver across her shoulders.
Eddie said, “I know where he is.”
“He? What do you mean he?” Greg said, his patience visibly short.
“The man who’s doing this to your family…to Selena. I made a solid connection with him upstairs.”
Greg walked away a few steps, then came back sharply, stopping close to Eddie’s face. “Then tell me where he is. I’ll kill the mother fucker.”
Jessica stepped forward, trying to wedge herself between them. “Greg, the man he’s talking about is dead already.”
Eddie added, “We need to find his body.”
Greg swayed, looking like a man just coming out of a dream after a late night sleepwalk. “Find his body?”
“I’m going to stay with you while Jessica goes out to find it,” Eddie said. “His body isn’t buried. I could feel it above ground, for lack of a better term.”
“No offense, Jessica, but it sounds a little crazy, sending a kid like you out to find some dead body,” Greg said. She knew he also wanted to add that she was a girl, and a young one at that. She didn’t blame him for feeling that way, and she didn’t want to tell him why she had to be the one to get away from his family.
“Don’t worry about that. Look, I’m sure what just happened weakened it, but that will only last so long. We have to move, now,” she said.
Greg pulled at his hair. “Jesus fucking Christ. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Then lose it later. Right now, your daughter needs you.”
Her sharp words stunned him, and he fixed her with a dubious stare before grunting and heading back into the house.
“Harsh,” Eddie said.
“We don’t have time to be nice. You said you know where he is. Tell me. I’ll find him.”
As they walked to the front yard and her Jeep, Eddie described the house.
“It’s a split level house with dark blue shingles. There’s a red brick chimney on the right side and an attached garage with a solid white door on the left. The Thunderbird’s in the garage, if you want to check that first to make sure you have the right house. I’ve seen a lot of split level houses in this neighborhood, and in the dark, it’s going to make it even harder to discern one from the other.”
She opened her door and climbed in. “Then give me something else to go by. Is there a lawn gnome in the front or some other odd feature that’ll make it easier for me to spot?”
Eddie closed his eyes and thought, then snapped his fingers. “Yes! The top five or more shingles on the upper right hand side of the house are partially torn away. Must have been from a storm or something. The house is close, I’d say within ten blocks. The EB got toasted by Selena’s doppelganger, so it’s gone back to lick its wounds. That’s not to say you have all night, but if it does make another attempt before you find it, I t
hink it’s weak enough for me to hold it back.”
“Have you ever stopped a spirit from attacking someone?”
He shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, but I can always try. I’m learning more about myself in just a few days with you than I ever did at The Rhine. We go together like gunpowder and matches.
“Are you okay with this?” he asked. “I mean, knowing that if all goes well, you’re going to find yourself in a house with a dead body and his very pissed off spirit? He died in the throes of his twisted fantasy about Selena. It’s not going to be pretty.”
He looked sick with worry. She needed him to be able to concentrate all his efforts on Selena and her safety, and not waste a single iota of energy on concern about her wellbeing. It was time to tell him about her father and Alaska, at least the abridged version. It took her a moment to collect her thoughts, because this was a story that was shared with no one, aside from Angela, so she’d had no practice in its telling.
She said, “As bad as this has been, Eddie, I’ve seen worse. Much worse. If you really want to know who I am as a person and why I do what I do, then you have to know about Alaska.”
He held up a hand, assuring her that she didn’t have to tell him anything she didn’t want to. She continued anyway.
“My mom died in her sleep when I was just a baby. Her death broke my father. Even though they had just won the lottery, nothing could change the fact that he had lost the one woman he ever loved, and was now a single father to a baby. He felt if anything ever happened to him, I would be left an orphan, and was in fear of dying just like my mother. Her death showed him that it could come at any time. I think that’s part of the reason why he stepped into studying the paranormal. By surrounding himself with stories of death and what lay beyond, he was searching for proof that my mom was still somewhere, waiting for him, and he was also hoping to face his fears enough to make them go away.
“When I was six, he took me, my aunt Eve and my cousin Liam to live in a huge mansion of a cabin in this town called Shida, Alaska. It was part of his therapy, leaving the house where my mom had died and taking on a sort of adventure. The house was said to be haunted, so he thought it would be great to live in it and study it for a couple of months. It was a vacation for me, as much as it was work for him. Things didn’t take long to fall apart. I remember seeing weird lights in the hallway at night and talking to a man in the yard who just up and disappeared. My aunt says a lot of other things were happening, but when you’re six, you only notice the things that directly affect you. The town itself didn’t want us there. It was exclusively Native American, with the exception of this guy, Judas, who was the one who had asked my father to come in the first place.”
“So you lived in a haunted cabin, surrounded by living people that didn’t want you there?” Eddie said. “How come your father didn’t take you all right back to New York?”
There was a split second where she was going to ask him how he didn’t know all of this when he had made contact with her father, a contact stronger and more intimate than she had been able to make over the years, including her annual pilgrimages to Alaska. Then she realized that her father had been a man who played his cards close to his vest, showing them only to those he loved. He had found Eddie so he could guide him to her. Maybe he saw tonight coming, and knew she would need Eddie to get them all through to the dawn.
She shook her head slowly, her eyes looking past the Leigh house in front of her, back to the cabin nestled amidst the forest in Shida, reliving the last night she had seen her father alive. “Eve said that when things went bad, they went bad fast. My dad realized that there were different forces at odds in the cabin, and that some of them were attracted to the townspeople. So, he planned a final night where he invited a bunch of guys and girls, like our age, who were some sort of gang or something, but on the outer fringes of the town itself. No one else would talk to us, much less come to the house.”
“They were bait,” Eddie said.
“Yes. But there was no way my father could know what they would attract. He was hoping to get voices on EVP, maybe even record a shadow or something, but nothing like what happened.”
Jessica’s stomach cramped and she had to swallow to hold back a rising tide of acid in her throat.
“None of us realized that there were bodies, dozens of them, buried right outside the house. All of them had been murdered over the years when Shida was a growing town. You see, Shida was a kind of hideaway for criminals of all tribes, a place to disappear and get a fresh start. But many of them were tracked, and when they were found, the town took care of them. Their spirits were angry, and having the residents of the town in the house fed their hate. There were shadows, anthropomorphic, but four times larger than any man. They assaulted the cabin, trying to break through like a shark struggling to get at a diver in a submerged cage.”
The caterwaul of two fighting cats broke her concentration. They hissed and wailed at one another, and for several seconds sounded as if they were in a fight to the death. When silence returned to the dark streets, she continued.
“Some of the spirits managed to possess the town’s sheriff, and while the shadows tried to get at us, they had him murder all of the founding members of the town, house to house, one by one. And when he was done, they brought him to our house to finish the job. I was upstairs with my aunt when the worst happened, while the shadow people downstairs started to tear people apart. And that’s when the spirits of another family that had been killed in the cabin before us came to my father, and told him what he needed to do. He knew then, when death was all around us, that he couldn’t get the genie back in the bottle, and there was nothing he could do from this side to stop them. So he asked one of the gang to kill him. I…I’ll never know why he did it, but when he died, my God, the light was blinding, but it drove all of the shadows back to their graves. Everything stopped.”
Jessica wiped a lone tear from her eye and turned the key in the ignition.
“I came back to New York with my aunt, who had been given full custody in my father’s will. She had the Alaska house razed, and the rest of the town collapsed after seeing a good percentage of its population murdered. It’s a true ghost town now, in every sense of the word. I go there every year and when I’m lucky, I can capture my father’s voice as an EVP. If I’m lucky.”
Eddie leaned into her window, unsure what to do or say. She had broken down her wall as far as she ever had for him, and she felt raw and sore in the places where she housed the darkness.
“You see, I’m not afraid of dying,” she said. “Because I know there’s more to come. I know my father and my mother are waiting for me. That’s why EBs don’t scare me. Most of them are just lost and scared themselves. And ones like this? I’m angry, just like I would be if it was alive and preying on young kids. Do whatever you have to and keep Selena safe. It’s time I took care of things.”
She sped out of the driveway, stopping just short of plowing into a car across the street. She saw Eddie in the rearview mirror, still standing there, watching her leave, processing everything she had confessed.
He looked up when the streetlight outside the house suddenly blinked off.
“Oh no you don’t,” she said with a slight growl, punching the accelerator and turning down the first street to begin her search.
Chapter Fifty
When the streetlight died, Eddie felt a breaker of venomous intent overtake him. It was a weak salvo, meant to let him know that it hadn’t gone for good. It would be back, and soon. He ran into the house.
“I need everyone to sit on the floor in a circle, holding hands,” he said.
Several candles had been lit and were spaced throughout the room, creating undulating shadows that danced along the walls. It made him think of Jessica and her family in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, struggling to keep the shadows at bay. He shook the images away. This was not Alaska, and he would damn well make sure nothing else would happen to this family.
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Selena had stopped crying and Rita had a hard look about her, as if she was willing to take on the devil himself to protect her daughter. She hauled the coffee table away and brought Selena and Ricky onto the floor with her. Greg, who had been standing by the front window, joined them.
“We’re going to have to form a ring of protection,” Eddie said. He’d heard about his great-grandfather doing something similar for a woman who was being accosted nightly by the angry spirit of her abusive, deceased father. D.D. Home had been a voracious diarist and the majority of his notes had been kept within the family, handed down to each successive male Home that had shown signs of possessing the gift. Eddie wished he’d been less preoccupied with pretty girls in school and had devoted more time to studying those notes. At the time, they just seemed cool and creepy, like reading Poe or Lovecraft. He didn’t realize then the real life applications D.D. Home’s accounts could have.
“Okay, join hands.”
He sat between Selena and Ricky, the ones most vulnerable to the EB. He hoped that their closer proximity would give him a better chance at fending off any attacks. Selena’s hand was cold and clammy, while Ricky’s was firm, resolute. Brave kid. He gave him a quick smile and Ricky lowered his eyes and nodded, like he would do to his baseball coach when the game was on the line and it was his turn at bat.
“Do we have to close our eyes or something?” Rita asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, it’s best you keep them open, so you can notice if anything happens around us. I’m going to have to close my eyes, but that’s only so I can concentrate.”
There was tension in the room, but it was emanating from the living like summer heat off metal siding. He couldn’t do anything about that. What he had to do was conjure an image of white light around their circle. This wasn’t the searing bright light at the end of the tunnel of death with angels singing, like so many people with near-death experiences reported to have seen.
