Night Wraith

by Christopher Fulbright

  She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes, glancing around the apartment. The glare of sunshine off snow outside the windows beamed through the wooden slats of Karen’s Venetian blinds. Her apartment was brightly decorated. Sharp, clean, and feminine. Carly smiled at her father snoring away on the couch nearby, mummy-wrapped in a blue blanket.

  Karen was in the kitchen in a fuzzy pink robe. She looked over the bar counter between the kitchen and living room.

  “Good morning,” she said. The clatter of a spatula against a pan echoed.

  “Morning.” Carly yawned. “What time is it?”

  “About 6:45.”

  Carly knelt next to her father. Looking at his sleeping features, she realized he must not have slept most of the night. There were blackish pools in the sagging skin beneath his eyes, and the wrinkles in his skin had deepened since the last time she really looked at him this closely. It was a strange moment for it perhaps, but she suddenly had a sense of her father’s age, of how much he’d been through. She couldn’t bring herself to wake him up. She tucked the blankets closer around him, planted a soft kiss on his forehead and stood.

  Carly went to the bar and leaned with both elbows atop the counter. She looked over at Karen, who smiled at her as she finished picking strips of bacon out of a pan, buttered some toast, and watched over a pan of scrambled eggs.

  “Be done in a minute,” Karen said. “I’ll bring it in to you.”

  “Thanks, it smells good, but ... I’ve got to get home and get ready for school.”

  “I think your father was hoping you’d be willing to call in sick today.”

  “I would, except I have a test in fourth period world history. I guess I could go in late, but if I miss that test, I’ll be in hot water with Mr. Cutting. History isn’t exactly my best subject.”

  “I’ll take you, sweetheart.” Her dad’s voice boomed, raspy with sleep from the couch. He sat up and ran a hand through his wild hair, salted with gray. When he blinked over at his daughter, his eyes were so shot with blood she felt a pang of concern.

  “It’s okay, Dad. I can go in a bit later.” Carly sat next to him on the couch, pulling him into a hug. He held her in a firm embrace, so tight for a moment that she had trouble breathing. It felt good though, and it was symbolic of the way they felt for each other. Hanging on tight. They were really all each other had when it came down to it. And although Carly had begun to entertain the notion of Ethan being her soul mate—The One—she couldn’t count on anything of the sort.

  “How are you doing?” he asked her. Karen brought them both plates of food and brought Dad a cup of steaming creamed coffee. He took a drink and looked up at her gratefully. “You are an angel,” he said to Karen. She smiled and went into the kitchen to get her own food and join them.

  “I’m okay,” Carly said. She dug gratefully into her breakfast, crunched a piece of toast. My god, how long had it been since she’d eaten? She was ravenous. Her stomach grumbled as she swallowed. “Thinking back, it’s hard to believe what happened, sitting here in the light of day with you guys. It seems so ...” she paused to swallow, looking at them both. Karen sat on the love seat across from them, taking small bites of her own food. Dad held the coffee in his hands, regarding his daughter with concern. “It seems so surreal.”

  Dad nodded and took a few bites.

  “Carly, your dad told me what you saw. I told him that I’d seen something similar the morning I came over to watch you while he was gone.”

  Carly froze. Her heart skipped with fear. She hadn’t told her father about Ethan, and she hoped to God this wasn’t some kind of test right now, because she sure as hell wasn’t up for that. She looked stonily across at Karen, and Karen looked back at her. A silent communication passed between them, and Karen quickly added what she said next, which was only somewhat of a relief.

  “I think I saw the same thing in the doorway of the kitchen that morning, when you’d gone upstairs to take a shower.”

  Carly stopped eating, her mouth hanging open slightly.

  “You saw her, too?”

  Karen shrugged and set down her plate after only taking a few bites as if she was already done.

  “I saw something. More than a shadow. I had a sense of someone standing there, watching me. As I turned, I caught the shape out of the corner of my eye. When I went to look into the living room and see if it was you, no one was there. It had disappeared.”

  Carly looked to her dad, whose tired eyes regarded her seriously, sadly, wearily. “Then we’ve all seen her,” Carly said quietly.

  Dad just blinked and took another drink of his coffee.

  Karen spoke, careful with her next words. “Carly, I know that sometimes, when people have paranormal experiences, it’s not always benevolent, or harmless. Can you be absolutely certain that it was the ghost of your mother that visited you last night?”

  “The reason she asks, sweetheart, is that we were talking last night, and I’m a little afraid, because of some of the things your mother had been involved with before she died, that this ... entity might be something other than what it appears to be.”

  Carly’s gut kicked like a bass drum. She instantly felt anger rising at the implication of her mother’s name being sullied—only Dad had ever said she’d been involved with anything weird, and even then he’d never gone too much into detail. But for Karen to start in on this—well, she had no right! Carly felt her cheeks flush. Her hands balled into fists.

  Dad laid a hand on her knee.

  “Carly, I’m just worried about your safety. The way things have been going in town lately—”

  “Dad, I told you it was Mom and I mean it. I think I’d damn well know one way or the other.”

  “But you were afraid. You said you were afraid, Carly.”

  “Well, of course I was afraid, Dad!” Carly dropped her fork. It clattered to her plate. A flash of sun from the window glinted off her glass. She felt her vision blur and she was far too emotional for this all of a sudden. Calm down, she told herself. Breathe. “Weren’t you afraid when you saw what you saw?”

  He rubbed his face and set down his mug.

  “Look,” Karen said. She spoke with a soothing, placating tone. “Your father’s just worried about you. I’m worried about you. Both of you. Being together in that house, and with your emotions so high right now. I know it’s tough. I want to be there for you guys, but we were just talking about options to make sure this isn’t something malevolent. Something masquerading as your mother.”

  Carly felt tears burning in her eyes, but she heard the sense of what they were saying, gauged it against the logic of what she’d heard about the deaths of the kids at Rainbow Falls, and now Lucas and the others. A memory of Abi and her insistence that they could use witchcraft to deal with Sadie came back to her. And what she’d said to Abi before they’d separated last. That she didn’t care what Abi did—she just wanted Sadie dead.

  “Oh my god,” she groaned. She wiped her own tears and swallowed the ache in her throat. “How? How can we tell?”

  “A medium?” Dad said. “Karen, I don’t trust that sort of thing. My experience tells me that can cause more trouble.”

  “What about a priest, Gavin?” Karen asked.

  Carly looked at her dad. He’d seldom looked so stricken with indecision. So weighed down by the world.

  “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.

  Karen nodded. She picked at her food. “I’m worried about you guys. If you want to stay here, it’s okay with me.”

  “I appreciate that, Karen, but we’ll have to go home sometime, and whatever’s there isn’t going to change. If the place is haunted, we need to assert that it’s our home and we want to be left alone. And if it’s Beth ...”

  Carly watched him, the battle in his heart waged as turmoil reflected deep in his
eyes.

  “If it’s Beth, then we need to let her know it’s okay for her to go on. That we’ll be okay without her.”

  Carly put her hand on Dad’s thigh.

  “We can handle this on our own.”

  He lifted his head and looked at both of them. The women who loved him. Karen seemed concerned, but nodded out of respect for his decision.

  He added quietly, “I hope.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They left Karen’s house at nine so Dad could get her home in time to shower and dress and be in history class for her test by eleven o’clock. They took the north exit out of Karen’s apartments. As they waited for the security gates to open, Carly admired the ridgeline of snow-dusted mountains in the near distance, patched with outcroppings of rock. The highway that turned into the main road through town snaked around Bluebird Hill and led past the new Country Inn hotel and the site of the new Walmart. This side of town had once been a forest of foothills, fields and tree swept hillsides. Roads had been dirt, homes tucked away from the highway in private nests of forest until the old guard of ancient city council people died in their seats, and the influx of youth as city leaders meant an influx of new development. Karen’s apartment complex had been part of that effort. They were fancy, fashioned after mountain resorts to keep the rustic, touristy feel of the town, but Carly felt a tug of nostalgia remembering how beautiful it had been driving through here when the wild still ruled these slopes. Or perhaps it was just a longing for a time before things had begun to get crazy ... before Mom died, and everything had begun to fall apart.

  Is everything falling apart now?

  Carly stared out the side window and felt deep inside like everything certainly was falling apart. Her relationship with Ethan. The awful encounter with Mr. Holman in the dark hallway of Abigail’s house, which gave her a glimpse into her best friend’s life that she’d not had before. The visitation of Mom ... or whatever it was. She had to admit the thought of last night’s phantom being anything other than Mom sent a thrill of fear through her that she didn’t know how to deal with. And it signaled the collapse of peace in their home, the place that had been a sanctuary for them while they’d recovered from the tragedy of her death.

  And we were almost there. Almost healed. Everything was almost right again.

  The timing of it was terrible, but it was dead-on. Friday—two days from now—would be the anniversary of Mom’s death. She told herself it wasn’t a coincidence. While Dad hadn’t said anything along those lines, she figured he probably felt the same. To speak it aloud might have given more weight to the terrible possibility that it really was Mom’s ghost, and Carly thought Dad desperately did not want that to be true.

  Dad turned onto the highway and headed down Midland Boulevard. Slush hissed under the tires through the heart of Carson Lake, toward the old part of town where they lived. Dad had the heat cranked, his classic rock station playing “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin on low.

  They turned the corner from Washington onto Elm and came within sight of Abigail’s house.

  The Holman home was swarmed with police, patrol cars along the curb. Some of the neighbors were out front, talking to sheriff’s deputies. Crime scene cordons fluttered yellow in the brisk wind. One of the patrol cars was a Carson Lake Police Department vehicle.

  “What the—” He reached down instantly and shut off the radio. He dug deep in his coat pocket for his phone. The battery had died. “Damn it!”

  “It’s Abigail’s house,” Carly said distantly. Dread crawled inside her, wearing her like a body bag. She felt an unnatural chill at the condition of the house where she’d gone to play with her friend since they were young. The front door stood open. The huge picture window in the front wall of the lower level was completely shattered. She could see a photographer inside, snapping pictures with a flash. She was dazed, still half-unbelieving that such tragedy could have focused itself here, now. And yet, another part of her said it made a terrible kind of sense.

  Things are definitely falling apart.

  Dad pulled the truck over to the curb. He looked over at her. “Stay here.”

  “No way, Dad. Abigail—”

  “Stay here.” He leveled a dark gaze at her. He rammed the gear shifter into Park. “I’ll come back and tell you what I can.”

  “Dad!”

  He climbed out and slammed the door. He left the truck running, the heat her only companion. She watched him stride purposefully toward the small cluster of police officers. An awful feeling filled her like black poison. Everything had changed, now.

  Everything.

  * * *

  “Sergeant Oliver’s inside the house, Chief.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gavin strode carefully up the walkway, mindful of evidence markers, taking in the details of the scene. The picture window in front of the house was shattered outward, vague impressions on the snow in the yard leading past a bushy pine tree, tracks veering toward the street. As he mounted the front porch, the door stood open and a slick of dark, coagulated blood covered the tile of the entryway. There was already a small group of investigators inside. He carefully stepped in. He put his hands in his pockets to keep from touching anything. Gavin’s chest filled with tension, it gripped his heart, narrowed his throat, and the smell inside the house didn’t make anything any better. It smelled cold, crisp, the vague scent of excrement and coppery blood. It smelled like death.

  As he stepped inside the door one of the county deputies looked up and noticed him.

  “Whoa, whoa!” He held up his hand. “This scene is secure, sir. I’m afraid I’ll need to ask you to step outside.”

  Gavin extracted his wallet and displayed his badge. The deputy inspected it as two men came down the stairs into the front entry. He recognized Detective Rice, with Oliver lumbering behind him.

  “Chief Wagner,” Rice said. He shook the black man’s hand. He was glad to see him here among so many strange faces.

  “Detective Rice.” Gavin felt the heat of shame creep into his cheeks. Damn it, why hadn’t he checked to make sure his phone was charged? He hadn’t even thought about not being home to take an emergency call last night in the wake of everything that had happened with Carly. But he should have. With everything the way it was, he damn well should have expected that things would get worse long before they got better. “Oliver,” he paused, wanting to apologize but not wanting to give what felt like a flimsy excuse for not being available in front of Detective Rice. He and Oliver had worked together and been friends for so long, he could see from the look in Oliver’s eyes that no apology was necessary. “What the hell happened here, gentlemen?”

  Detective Rice slid his big hands into his coat pockets and nodded at the living room. Gavin took a look beyond the photographer and a second detective combing through the carpet with plastic gloves. The room was destroyed. The entertainment center had been emptied of most of its contents, including the television, which lay broken on the floor. Blood marred the edge of one of the shelves. The worst part was on the inside of the front wall, where it looked like a giant rag soaked with blood had been smeared like a wicked child’s idea of modern art. The wallpaper was saturated, and squiggled strands appeared here and there, as if entrails had smacked against the wall as well, leaving their grotesque imprints. The wall near the door was a horror all its own. A coat rack and its hooks were caked with gore. The floor around its base was thick with blood and remnants of corpse meat. Gavin could see the impression where a mass of flesh had lain.

  Gavin looked up the stairs.

  “There’s a girl that lives here. My daughter’s best friend.”

  He looked at Oliver, glanced at the detective.

  “She’s okay,” Oliver said. “She and her Mom, Rebecca, got away. They called nine-one-one from their car out front. Locked the doors and sta
yed inside. But they said the killer didn’t seem interested in them. Just the father.”

  “Landon.”

  “Yes, sir. He’s the one that got the worst of it. All of it, in fact. The attacker didn’t touch either one of them.”

  “Where did the attacker go?”

  “Out the front window.”

  “Did they recognize him?”

  “Well.” Oliver sighed. “That’s the thing, Chief. The woman, Becca, was all but incoherent when we questioned her, but she out and out said the thing was a monster. Like a human, but, well ... not.”

  Gavin groaned.

  “Sounds familiar, eh, Chief?” Detective Rice’s deep voice was a comfort in the creeping sense of despair Gavin had begun to experience. Whatever the hell was going on in this town was either the work of some very elaborate, very sick con artist, or downright supernatural evil. He was ready to admit to either, but not willing to say it aloud. At least not with Detective Rice in the room. “I know they closed your case on the Rainbow Falls deaths saying it was the work of a wild bear.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “And what were your impressions of that resolution, Chief?”

  “Well, I’m not sure that I agree, considering the eyewitness testimony pretty much contradicted that hypothesis. But I also see that the sheriff’s department had a responsibility to wrap things up so that people feel safe and don’t panic needlessly.”

  Detective Jesse Rice gave him a wry smile. “I didn’t close the case, myself, Chief. The chief investigator did. I saw what you saw, remember.”

  “Okay.” Gavin narrowed his eyes at the taller man, trying to read him.

  “Come on upstairs, Chief. There’s something you ought to see.”