Zach spit at Paramour. Then, in one fluid motion, he spun and slid Joey across the wood floor away from him so that he stood between the boy and the entity.
Paramour screeched, but held his ground. The anguished cries echoed throughout Rosewood’s lobby.
“John,” Zach said, calmly. “You’re not a demon, John.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t have—maybe Zach should have merely trusted, however he spit at him again. Paramour seemed to wince, but that might have merely been Zach’s wishful thinking.
From his open mouth, a thousand voices cried. “This is my place. My place!”
“Saint Michael the Archangel,” Zach began. The others, all of them, joined in. “Defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.”
Evelyn and Dr. Johansson stood side by side—their translucent figures wavered and glowed. She looked young, but her hair was long. Dr. Johansson, spectacles resting above his high cheekbones, appeared healthy and determined.
The voices of his friends rose. “May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host.”
It was time. Time for Zach, filled with holy water, to make the leap of faith onto John Paramour—the wicked man who wanted to be a god. Onto the evil spirit that wished to become a demon.
The police chief version of John Paramour stood just a few feet from Zach.
Confidently Zach said to him, “You’re not a demon, John, but you’re going to hell.”
Paramour’s eyes blazed. “You don’t have the strength.”
“This is not your place,” a female voice said. “You must leave.”
“It is time for you to go,” a male voice confirmed.
Zach sensed Evelyn and Dr. Johansson now flanking him on each side. Between their strength as spirits and Zach’s physical body infused with holy water, Paramour didn’t stand a chance.
Zach took a few quick steps and dove headlong onto him. There was a deafening squeal. High pitched and rancid to the ears, it masked the sizzle of flesh. Zach hoped it was not his flesh; he felt warmth—not a burning sensation, but it seemed all the moisture was being drained from his body. He thought of his dying mother, he recalled her sadness and pain. He remembered her confusion and anguish as her illness insidiously stripped away all remnants of the person she had been. Her good part. Tears poured from his eyes. Holy water tears.
The Paramour thing dropped to his knees.
“This water is holy water,” Zach said, although he couldn’t hear his own voice. “Now go to hell.”
From seemingly far away, voices cried out, “By the Divine Power of God—cast into hell, Satan and all the evil spirits, who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.”
Despite his emotional and physical pain, with all his might, Zach screamed, “Amen!”
A tormented cry, presumably from the souls that Paramour had collected, arose around them—woeful resignation and wasted rage tainted the voices as they faced damnation.
Sounding far away, Hunter and Rebecca yelled, “Be gone!”
Chapter Forty-Two
It was over.
The lobby of Rosewood was dark and silent. It vaguely smelled of sulfur. The candles had all been extinguished, and Zach’s face felt sunburned. Hair had been singed from his arms, and he could tell that he was dangerously dehydrated. There were vague worries that he might be badly burned, but he felt his face and arms. No charred flesh. Everything else seemed intact.
The first face Zach saw was Dr. Johansson. His thin countenance bore an approving smile. Then, his blond white hair took on the hues from a radiant glow from where Rosewood’s ceiling should be. Bright and yellow, it felt warm as the late-morning sun. Slowly, Dr. Johansson melded with the light beams. Evelyn stood just a few feet away gazing while the apparition evaporated upward. When he was gone, and as the light receded, she turned to Zach.
She smiled too, but it was an odd, sad smile. When she began slipping through the floorboards into the basement, Zach waved at her to wait. “Evelyn, you don’t need to stay at Rosewood now. You can leave, depart.”
Evelyn grimaced. “Oh, no. I’m glad to have helped make things right for Dr. Johansson, but I’m not going just yet,” she said. “Thomas will come back for me one day.”
She vanished downward.
Ray knelt beside him. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“Evelyn, the ghost who’s been protecting this place.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“I did. A woman.” It was Hunter. He and Rebecca were making their way down in darkness. “I saw the doctor depart into the light after that…that thing was abolished. The woman though, she went downward. She’s waiting for a lover who is never coming back.”
Zach pulled out his cell phone and opened it up. It lit up more of the lobby than he expected. Fortunately, spirits rarely drained lithium ion batteries. He crawled toward the stairs and moved up a couple of steps providing light for their descent.
They met at the spot where Winkler lay.
“He’s dead isn’t he?” Rebecca asked.
He swore there was a trace of Sailor Black in the air as he somberly inspected Winkler’s body. While probably pointless, Zach checked for a pulse. There was none.
Next time, it will be one of your own.
Zach was far too drained to deal with premonitions of that sort. Later, he’d question if it had even been his godfather’s voice at all. He just wanted to get out of Rosewood and help his friends out safely as well.
Rebecca noticed him using his cell phone as a miniature lantern and she started doing the same. Ray’s good hand fumbled for his cell with Joey wrapped awkwardly in his other arm.
Zach approached and reached for Joey, who at first resisted. Once he saw who it was however, he stretched his arms out and clung to Zach’s neck.
“C’mon little man. Let’s go find your mom.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Without Mother’s rose trellises, the Kalusky backyard looked barren, stripped naked of character. Once they cleared away the remains of the deck, the yard would be almost empty. Dad planned on building a wide and sweeping back porch in the spring. The way his father procrastinated and worked in bits and spurts, Zach doubted it would be constructed before July 4th, maybe not until Labor Day weekend.
“I’ll be able to sit out here and read,” Dad said, describing the imaginary porch. Short but stocky, Gary Kalusky had big ears and a round face. “I might even take up smoking a pipe.”
“Why would you do that?” Zach asked.
“Why not? Your uncle used to smoke one. I kind of liked the smell.”
“Why didn’t you ever start?” Ray asked.
“Okay there, funny guy. If you think the wife got hysterical when I drank, you should have seen her the time she caught me smoking.”
Ray assisted Zach in lifting long white wood planks that had once been rose trellises and laying them onto the bed of his pickup truck. The other stuff could be thrown in on top.
“I hate the smell of pipe smoke,” Zach said flatly.
“Another country heard from,” Dad said. “It must run in the family.”
The three men worked in silence for a long time. Although that reference to Zach’s mother had been the first, it would also turn out to be the last. Regardless, the deck destruction project had a somber undercurrent. It felt like somehow a level of closure was slowly being achieved.
Zach hadn’t needed the reference to his godfather to awaken thoughts of him. He’d been ruminating over little else since Evelyn’s words: “He said we needed to wait and let you figure most of it out on your own.”
When he was a youth, his godfather’s voice brought comfort to him and helped him deal with his stigmata, that thing Zach sometimes referred to as a curse. Over the years, Uncle Henry had provided Zach so much support that the two things, the religious miracle and the spirit pos
session, felt indelibly linked—but they weren’t.
They couldn’t be.
The stigmata and the visions it gave Zach, bettered him. He’d not only learned how to cope with the condition, but had learned to use it in conjunction with his talents. It had been an uncomfortable affliction at first but, like any other positive human quality, practicing it worked to his betterment.
It was a something good.
The possession, Zach wasn’t so sure about. Uncle Henry’s spirit had remained to help Zach cope with the stigmata—he knew that. Before his godfather passed away, he too may have experienced the bleeding. He too may have experienced some sort of visions attached to them. The condition may be a sort of generational family legacy. His uncle had died prior to bearing any children. He had no one, for lack of a better word, to heir the stigmata to. He’d passed away before Zach was old enough to have the condition explained to him. Zach’s mother, Uncle Henry’s sister, was too mentally unstable to deal with the details of the gift, if she’d ever known about it in the first place.
Regardless, Rosewood had served as ample reminder to Zach what happens when spirits remain in this dimension instead of passing on. Uncle Henry’s spirit, not to mention his eternal soul, was in jeopardy. He was trapped in Zach much like Evelyn was attached to Rosewood.
“Hey, Mr. Popular TV Guy,” Zach’s dad said, his tone lighthearted. Zach fully expected to be the butt of some joke. “All your friends, all those fans, I ask you to bring me one person to help with construction and you bring me a cripple?” He nodded in Ray’s direction.
“Ah, Dad, don’t worry about it. This is quality time, right Ray?”
Ray frowned and rolled his eyes.
“Besides,” Zach continued, “look! He hammers with his left hand.”
“Today I do,” Ray called out. He knocked a plank of wood away from the other boards with a mallet. “And in the boxing ring, whenever I’m able to get back.”
Ray had broken both his pinkie and ring finger of his right hand. He didn’t need a cast but instead, wore a metal splint that kept the fingers together and held them in place.
While Ray wasn’t looking, Dad flashed Zach a facial expression that clearly communicated the idea Zach shared, but would never say—how long will he let this delay him from turning pro?
Zach discreetly shrugged and went back to working. And thinking. The words of his uncle haunted him. Next time it will be one of your own.
Not “next time it might be one of your own,” or “if you’re not careful, next time it will be one of yours. No. Next time it will be one of your own.
Zach stared at Ray banging away at the deck and then tossing wood scraps into his pickup truck. He did all the work with one hand and never complained. Zach thought of the other Xavier Paranormal Investigators. They were all good people—young people trying to make a positive difference. To lose one conducting the type of paranormal work that they did would be a tragedy.
What did the voice of Uncle Henry mean? Next case? Next time they encounter an evil spirit? Next time they investigate an asylum? Next time they set foot into Rosewood? Perhaps they were just rationalizations, but what was he to do, cancel the show? Tell XPI they all had to quit because of a premonition? That wasn’t going to happen. Why worry about things he had no control over?
Exactly. So then, why did his godfather say it? It went back to the heart of the matter. Uncle Henry’s spirit was playing games—causing stress. He could warn Zach when a flashlight was to be shone in his eyes, but not which member of his team’s life was in danger?
Then again, as much as Zach knew of ghost hunting, he knew nothing of what it was like to be a Spirit. It was possible that feelings, intuitions and fleeting visions came to this godfather and only so much of it could be communicated. Regardless, the longer Uncle Henry’s spirit possessed Zach, the harder it would be to live without him.
But worse, the more his spirit, his soul would deteriorate.
And then there was the matter of Evelyn. With all the terrible visions and experiences the case of Rosewood Asylum had left him with, two things kept him awake at night: Uncle Henry’s warning and Evelyn’s final words.
“I’m not leaving just yet,” she said. “Thomas will come back for me one day.”
She wouldn’t depart. Her perception had become so clouded over a century of deception and deceitful acts. Evelyn Paramour—the young woman who, with high hopes had married a policeman, but had instead gotten a monster. The lady whose lover was murdered, and who was eventually killed by the evil husband she’d wished to escape. Well intentioned as it may have been, her haunting of Rosewood had weakened her awareness to a point that she likely couldn’t move on without assistance. If she didn’t move on, if she couldn’t pass over to heaven, or the other realm, the great beyond or whatever one wished to call it, she would unwittingly have made herself John Paramour’s final wasted soul.
Zach couldn’t let that happen. After having discussed options with Hunter, Zach had ruled out fire as a means of destroying Rosewood. Not only was there the chance that fire destroyed spirits, Evelyn’s death by fire and century-long battle against it had earned her a better fate. Zach hoped to begin a chain of events that would slowly set things right. He intended to enact the plan that very afternoon. In fact, he had already set the wheels in motion.
“Hey Ray,” Dad called out. “You want something to drink?”
“Nah, I’m okay for now, Mr. Kalusky.”
“Well keep yourself hydrated. The pace my son is keeping, you two are going to be here until after dark.”
“Subtle hint delivered, Daddy Dearest,” Zach called out.
As Dad and Ray continued to remove plank by plank of the termite-infested deck, Zach set to digging up huge chunks of his mother’s old garden and carrying them to Ray’s truck. His dad just stared.
Dad had made nearly an identical expression when Zach had asked for the garden dirt as a return favor for helping tear down and haul away the deck.
“What the hell do you want it for?” Dad asked.
Zach was tempted to say, “A science experiment of sorts,” with the “of sorts” having inserted a sliver of truth to an otherwise white lie. Instead, he had just shrugged and said, “If it’s all the same, I’d rather just not say.”
“So you think we’re gonna be okay just driving right up in broad daylight?” Ray asked as they drove down 115th Street past the two century-old oak trees that towered on Rosewood’s front lawn. One still clung to its brown leaves despite the upcoming winter; the other was barren and blackened with soot. Zach imagined that at some point soon, a tree care crew would cut it down and haul the trunk away.
“Yep. The more you look like you belong somewhere, the more people just assume that you do. Why do you think I told you to wear both gray pants and a gray shirt today?”
They turned onto Pine Avenue, and pulled up to Rosewood’s main gate. Zach exited and swiftly unlocked it. They’d been fortunate, or blessed, that the cops hadn’t thought to get Winkler’s keys from them. Of course the Rosewood custodian’s death had been “sold” as an accident. They had reported to the police that he’d been helping them search for Joey when he slipped on a mysterious wet spot on the stairs. Ironically enough, the only drama had come when a detective called to grill Zach about the “bruise and swelling” on Winkler’s jaw that appeared to have been a punch. Zach was grateful that he didn’t need to answer in person, lest his stretching of the truth be detected. He told the cop that Winkler might have been in a bar fight since his jaw was already swollen when they entered Rosewood.
Later, he confessed all his white lies and told the whole truth to Macginty. The monsignor had ordered him to say more rosaries than he ever had before.
Ray roared his truck up to the Rosewood front door and swung it around so the bed of the truck faced the asylum. “You really think this is gonna work?” he asked.
“I believe it will. Once the asylum begins to crumble, and more so once it’s tor
n down, Evelyn will move on to the other side.”
“No, I meant will this termite thing work?”
“Oh. It should,” Zach said. “Chlordane treatments used to protect old buildings like these from termites up to twenty years at a time, but it was really bad for the environment and outlawed in 1998.”
They began unloading a number of the pieces of infested wood to carry into Rosewood’s vacant lobby.
“Yeah, and?”
“And the new stuff they use only protects up to five years at a time.”
They made their second trip.
“So it protects up to five years at a time,” Ray said. “When was the last time this place was tented?”
“Five years ago last month.”
“Well then, won’t they be doing it again like any day now, brainiac?”
Had Hunter been present, he would have been impressed with Zach’s paraphrased quote from the movie, Die Hard. “You ask for a miracle? I give you the State of Illinois.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, apparently the “Insecticide Unions” don’t have much power in the Illinois State Capital. During the budget wars a few years back, the geniuses in Springfield voted to save money and only spray deserted buildings for termites every seven years. Our little termite friends may have up to two years of an ‘All you can eat’ buffet.”
“Why do I ever doubt you, pal-o-mine?”
“Because you’re stupid?”
“Brave words while my hand is broken.”
“Aw, does yer poor little pinkie hurt?” Zach teased.
“I’ve got a finger for you,” Ray said, with fake contempt.
After spreading planks of wood throughout the first floor of the asylum, Zach slid the rose trellises down the basement steps. Symbolic he was. Ready to go back down there, he was not.
Ghosts of Rosewood Asylum Page 28
