River of Ghosts (Haunted Florida Book 2)

by Gaby Triana

  I’d seen enough episodes to know how this would end up in post-production. These were the snippets when the host, in a voiceover, said things like, Suddenly, our medium, Linda Hutchinson, who’d been sitting peacefully at our camp, began channeling messages from beyond the grave…

  But Linda didn’t seem to be acting to me. She continued to scratch the paper with her pencil point following the same grooves, over and over again—DIE, DIE, DIE—her eyes wide and full of a panicked emptiness.

  Sharon reached out and placed her hand over the paper to get Linda to stop. “Linda? It’s okay. Come out of it, dear. We’re all here,” she said then louder into the air, “You want us to die, spirits? Is that what this message means? Well, we’re not here to do that. We’re here to find out who you are and what happened here in 1967.”

  If they asked me, the spirits did not care to discuss why they were trapped here or what happened to them. My tribe members had said it many times before—the restless souls at Villegas House were not eager to go into the light. They were eager for us to join them.

  I shook my head and told myself that all was fine, that the poor woman obsessively scribbling the word DIE on the piece of paper was not in any way freaking me out whatsoever. I needed to get out of here a minute and clear my head space.

  Walking toward the airboat, I briefly imagined taking off in it all by myself and leaving them behind. I could never do that, yet I couldn’t shake the image. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t.

  “Avila?” It was Eve calling to me.

  I held a hand up while walking and stopped to catch my breath.

  A moment passed, and she muttered, “She just needs space. It was too much for her.”

  Maybe it was. I’d never seen such a thing in all my life. Had that been real-life possession or acting for the camera’s sake? Who would tell us to die like that?

  Once at the riverbank, I stopped cold. Lined up near the airboat were three alligators—large, perched on the mangroves, black bumpy snouts with mouths open, hissing the moment they saw me. It wasn’t unusual to see alligators in the Everglades—I saw them every day. What was strange was that they kept their distance. Alligators loved to climb up onto the land to bask in the sunshine when they were tired, but these gators seemed to want nothing to do with the house and remained resting half in the water, half on the cypress roots.

  It made me think about how police were surprised to find the dead bodies here untouched by alligators after the massacre.

  “I don’t blame you,” I told them. The hissing stopped, but they continued to keep a wary eye on me. If they could get past their fear of Villegas House, they would be all over our camp. After a few minutes of clearing my head, I trudged back and informed Kane, “We need to move closer to the house. At least four feet above the water level.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Gators. But don’t tell the others. Trust me.”

  Last thing these people needed was to know that predatory reptiles surrounded the airboat a mere thirty yards from camp. They weren’t hurting us and didn’t seem like they would come nearer. Still, non-Florida people always freaked out about alligators, and we didn’t need more alarm. After seeing Linda channel the word DIE from an unseen spirit, assuming it hadn’t been theatrics, it was better that way.

  By six o’clock, the crew had not yet re-started filming, and I was beginning to think we would stay the presumed “last resort” night over.

  They’d spent the better part of the day trying to get the faulty camera working, only to discover their interior spare not turning on either. The last camera was for exterior shots, which they refused to take inside the house. I could feel Kane’s frustration growing the more our daylight sank beneath the horizon.

  Staying out of the way for most of it, I decided Linda looked like enough time had elapsed to approach her about what had happened. I pulled up a camp chair next to hers where she sat reading a book. “No pencils this time, huh?” I asked.

  She gave me a sheepish look. “Sorry if that scared you.”

  “Hell, yeah, it scared me. I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Was that you writing?”

  “It was me, my hands, but no, that wasn’t my message.”

  “Were you aware of what you were writing? It almost looked like you wanted to kill someone the way you were stabbing that pencil into the paper.”

  “I wasn’t aware at that moment, no. It’s like meditation when you’re in an alpha state. Have you ever meditated?”

  “Not in the yoga sense, but I do zone out on the boat sometimes. It’s my sacred space.”

  “You see and hear what’s going on behind a sheet of glass?” she asked.

  “Yes.” That was a good way to describe it. But I didn’t want to talk about the way I sometimes tapped into the other side, because it scared the shit out of me. I switched focus. “Linda, who was telling you to write ‘die?’” I asked, picking up a blade of sawgrass and running my thumb along its jagged edges.

  “Something dark. I don’t know who it is. It’s in charge of this house, maybe of this whole island. We do many of these investigations where I warn them about an evil presence, but it’s their job to proceed. Still, I can’t help but wonder if one of these investigations won’t be their last.”

  The lines around her eyes told of years’ worth of witnessing odd things. Even though I didn’t envy her job, I envied how many places she’d been and the world she’d seen. And if I zoned out and looked at her hard enough, I saw something else…

  Disease…

  I sat back in my folding chair and stared at her.

  Where that word had come from, I didn’t know. But there it was. I looked at Linda. Linda looked at me like she knew that I knew something about her. Until she mentioned it, though, I wouldn’t. Still, it did make me wonder why she was here to begin with if, in fact, she was ill. Her dark, kind eyes reminded me of someone I couldn’t place.

  “That’s why I’ve never come here before. I have too much respect for the other world.”

  “I do, too, Avila. But something about having me here makes them feel better. The messages which come to me corroborate their findings. They get hunch feelings that dark presences exist, and I verify them.”

  “Then, why bring you on at all?”

  “Sometimes they have trouble communicating. Their Ovilus III will stop working, messages won’t come through, they need somebody sensitive.” She scoffs. “It’s funny. Any one of them could do what I do. It takes years of meditation and practice. We all have psychic ability to varying degrees. Still, they prefer their techy things.”

  “It’s easier,” I said.

  “And faster. But you…” The waning light had turned her eyes a shade of golden amber. “You could do what I do.”

  I shook my head. “Oh, no. I can’t. I’m too chicken shit. I mean, I love telling ghost stories. I love ghost lore from afar. I could never be hands-on involved with them, day in, day out like you.”

  I said the same thing about giving airboat rides.

  What can I do day in, day out?

  At least Linda employed her talents by helping others, warning them, facing the unknown. When I reached her age, I hoped to be as useful to others, but the way my life was going, I didn’t see that happening.

  “You’re young, Avila,” Linda said, glancing at me. “I didn’t develop my skills until much later in life. Middle age has a way of making you face things you never wanted to face. You’re better off in the end, though.”

  She closed her eyes for a much-needed break, and I got up and walked toward the woods, hoping to ground myself again. Being in the camp made me feel claustrophobic. Normally, I’d love spending the day on a cypress island, checking out wildlife, searching for animal tracks, observing nature at its finest, but this particular island felt devoid of life. Oppressive. Something stagnant in the air sucked the vitality right out of it. It felt like it needed a good sage energy clearing.

  As I felt the
first drops of rain, the air cooled down significantly. The storms had come late today. Afternoon rain in the Everglades were an everyday occurrence in the summer. With so much heat, marsh water evaporated when the sun was at its hottest, then the clouds, unable to contain their fill, spilled every afternoon. Sometimes it fell in torrents, and tourists would ask if this was normal.

  It was.

  Except as the droplets began falling, I could tell this would be a hard torrential rain. I could hear Kane giving orders to put all equipment into the cases and bring them into the tents for the duration of the storm. Even with all the hubbub around me, I felt myself distancing from the rest of the team. I walked toward the edge of the property where the denser woods began.

  Something was in there.

  Someone was…

  …calling me.

  Most likely, it was in my mind, but I heard my name echoing from a distant place. When I paused to listen with closed eyes, I felt my whole body trembling—no, vibrating—gently. It could’ve been the earth underneath my feet, spiking energy through me, especially with the rain pounding, soaking my patchwork blouse, the elements coming together to amplify sensations. But the vibrations got stronger until I felt they were coming from me.

  Avila.

  I opened my eyes, stared ahead. The cypress trees with their long, thin trunks and bulbous roots reaching into the watery ground looked like people standing there, legs apart, facing off with me. Cognitively, I knew they were trees, just like I knew this was rain falling, but I couldn’t help feel like they were alive. Of course they were alive, Avila, but alive, in the human sense, as though they were watching me, inviting me in.

  Get away from those people. They are not like you.

  They want to exploit the house, this land, but you respect it.

  Come with us.

  I didn’t hear these words like I’d hear normal words. They coursed through my veins, whispered to me suggestively, like a flowing river or an electrical current.

  People.

  The trees looked like people, and the darker the sky got, the heavier the rain, the more insidious their shapes appeared. Hunched over… The more the gray clouds took over, creating a hazy neutral tone over the woods where it was difficult to tell what was what.

  Avila…

  Was that…

  My brother?

  I knew that voice. I’d know it anywhere. I’d heard it at least a hundred times a day when I was a kid. I’d even wished he’d stop calling me so often, as older sisters often did wish their pesky little brothers would go away. But at this moment, I felt myself wanting to hear him again.

  “Billie?” My voice shook. Was it really him?

  If it was, would the dark energy be with him? To this day, I still didn’t know what I had seen lingering in the background the night he visited me in my sleep, but I always imagined that I’d see it again if Billie returned.

  I waited.

  It definitely sounded like him, but why would he, or his spirit, be in this place? Billie had died on the roadside of US-41, and I always thought ghosts lingered wherever they were known to have passed away. Maybe he was a figment of my imagination.

  “Billie, is that you? I’m sorry for what happened…” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m sorry I let you sit in the front seat. I shouldn’t have switched with you.” It should’ve been me on the other side, not him.

  The trees continued to be nothing but trees while channeling human energy at the same time. I knew I wasn’t alone, had never been out here or anywhere. No matter where I went, someone was always watching. From the moment we’d arrived on this island, they’d been watching us from the woods.

  They’re out there—the dead.

  It’s not fair…

  “What’s not fair, Billie?” I narrowed my eyes so my vision could focus on one particular tree that seemed to move, take slow steps, until a little boy came around the bend, emerging from the shadows. A little boy I had loved so much, my heart ached every day just knowing I’d never see him alive again. He wore the same clothes as the day of the accident—blue jeans and the sewn traditional top my mother had made him.

  You got to live.

  I knew it.

  My head dropped. The tears came.

  “Yes, Billie. I got to live while you had to die. Damn it. I’m so sorry for that…” It’d always lingered in my mind—the debilitating guilt that I’d survived the crash. Sometimes I wondered if I really got the better deal out of it, though. My life hadn’t meant much so far, whereas he got to explore the cosmos, Heaven, wherever he was.

  When I was finished feeling sorry for myself, I opened my eyes again, but this time, it wasn’t Billie I saw coming around a cypress tree like a slithering wisp of fog. For a moment, I worried it was the dark energy that had accompanied him long ago.

  Instead, a young woman stood in the middle of the woods staring at me, long reddish-brown hair hanging down either side of her face. She was beautiful with smooth pale skin, like a porcelain doll made from bone china. My heart raced, not only because this spirit stood there studying me, but because I knew her.

  NINE

  I shouldn’t have recognized her.

  I’d never seen her before, and yet I felt like I’d known her every day of my life. Her hair was long, flowing. Eyes bright and understanding. I knew the way she moved—fluidly, like underwater—the way her dress poured out behind her. She stepped out of the trees toward me, and once she hit the rain, was gone.

  She looked like a much younger Linda. Could I have been seeing a projection?

  Disease…

  Suddenly, I feared it was her. Was Linda okay, or was I seeing a form of her ghost?

  I bolted back to camp, tripping over logs, scampering through the cypress trees. She hadn’t been looking too well all day, and I had an impression of her being sick. The moment I arrived back at camp, Sharon asked where Linda was. I didn’t want to mention just having seen her in the woods as a young woman, so I kept my mouth shut and helped look for her.

  “She was here half an hour ago,” Sharon said.

  “We have to find her,” I said urgently.

  Sharon gave me a cursory look. “Why do you say it like that? Is she okay?” She broke into a faster hustle, searching in each tent and around the house. “She wouldn’t have gone inside the house, would she?”

  Kane stepped up to us. “You guys looking for Linda? I thought she was with you.”

  “I thought she was with you,” Sharon said.

  “Crap.” Kane, Sharon, and I split into different directions, and I found myself hovering near the cypress trees again. I felt drawn to them, though my nerves were shot knowing that one of us would probably find the old woman dead at any moment.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of white and saw a shirt, an arm, a leg scuttling on the ground, like a roach on its back trying to get up from a pile of dry brush.

  “Linda!” I ran to her. She was down but not dead. As relieved as I was, seeing her struggling to get up also left me confused. Who, then, who had I seen out in the trees? “Are you okay? Guys, she’s here!” I called out.

  Sharon and Kane ran over while I helped Linda to a sitting position. She’d had the wind knocked out of her. “Something led me…” Linda struggled to breathe. “Something called me out here.”

  “Something called me, too,” I said. I gave her both my hands, as Kane stood behind her, placing his hands on her middle back. Sharon and I hoisted the woman to her feet. “A young lady. She told me her name, but now I can’t remember it.”

  “Did you fall? What happened?” I asked once she was on her feet.

  “I don’t know. I…lost consciousness.”

  “Let’s get her to the tent and aim a fan on her,” Kane told us. “We’ll plug the one that’s on the tech onto her directly, so she can get some fresh air. It’s stifling out here.”

  We carried Linda to the tents and sat her down, positioning one of the two small portable fans directly on her
, so she could catch her breath. Bringing her a bottle of cold water from the cooler, I twisted it open and handed it to her. It only took a minute for her to regain her color.

  “You scared me,” I told her. I really didn’t know what we would’ve done had Linda passed away out here, and I was at even more at a loss to explain the ghost woman in the forest if it hadn’t been her. I might have witnessed the spirit of either of the women who’d been murdered here in 1967, but I was pretty sure, having seen photos of Elena Villegas on the internet, that she’d been olive-skinned and dark-haired.

  “I’m sorry,” Linda said, eyes closed, water bottle in hand. “I can feel it, though.”

  “Feel what?” I asked.

  I knew her answer before she even said it. I knew because some kind of shift had been happening to me from the moment I arrived here, one that opened me up to currents of information to which I shouldn’t have been privy.

  “My time,” she replied. “It’s coming.”

  In the evening, after an unappetizing dinner of canned pork and beans heated on a portable burner, Kane announced we’d be spending the night. They’d gotten very little done during the shoot today thanks to the faulty equipment but he hoped that tomorrow would be better. If they continued to have issues, they’d cut the expedition short and call it a loss. If anyone wasn’t feeling up to snuff, Kane also said, now was the time to say it so we could return to the village and part ways.

  I asked Linda if she was okay enough to stay. “You sure?”

  “I haven’t felt well in years, dear, but I’m not going to leave. They have work to do in that house,” Linda said, going back to her crossword puzzles. “They don’t make their investment back, they don’t get paid. Kids don’t eat.”

  “Kids?”

  “Kane and Eve. Got a boy back home, a girl just started college.”

  “Ah.”

  It must’ve been difficult for her to come along on these investigations, be the one person who connected the most with psychic energy, but remain neutral on the decision-making part of the process. Linda Hutchinson was their puppet. And their trooper.