Ghost Trackers

by Grant Wilson Jason Hawes

  “What made you decide to make pictures like that, Rick?”

  He shrugged again, but the gesture was different this time. Smoother, almost sinuous. It put Drew in mind of the way a reptile might shrug.

  “It gave my hands something to do while I imagined burying an ax in Ms. Shewalter’s head.”

  Despite himself, Drew felt a chill at Rick’s words. No, he realized. The sensation of cold was more than a simple emotional reaction. The temperature in the office had dropped by several degrees in the last few minutes. He could feel the cold on his face, his hands, the back of his neck, and inside his mouth, throat, and lungs as he breathed. He’d known cold like this before, cold that did more than chill the flesh. Cold that penetrated deep into the core of your being, wrapped its icy fingers around your soul, and began to squeeze.

  Drew? Trevor? Why is it so cold?

  “You miss them, don’t you?” Rick said.

  The man’s voice yanked Drew out of the memory. “Who?”

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard Drew’s question. “You miss both of them but especially her.”

  He lifted a bandaged hand to his mouth and began tearing off his adhesive strips with his teeth, spitting them onto the carpeted floor one by one. He continued speaking as he worked, the words muffled at times but clear enough.

  “You really haven’t had any friends since them, have you? Haven’t allowed yourself to get close to anyone. Oh, you have dozens of acquaintances, and you date now and again, but you’re going through the motions, aren’t you? Pretending to live, when in truth, you’re hiding behind walls so thick and high that nothing can get through. Better that way, right? Safer.”

  Rick finished uncovering the last of his scarred fingertips. He examined his hand for a moment, looking like someone checking out a manicure he’d just received. And then he inserted the tip of his index finger into his mouth.

  The room felt as cold as an Arctic plain now, and Drew saw his breath turn to wisps of vapor as it hit the frigid air.

  This isn’t possible, he told himself. I’m experiencing some sort of delusion. But even as he thought these things, he knew he was lying to himself. Whatever the source of the cold, he did his best to ignore it. He had more important things to worry about right then.

  “Don’t do it. I understand that you’re feeling a compulsion to hurt yourself. It’s OK to feel that way, but it doesn’t mean you have to give in to that compulsion.”

  Rick’s gaze locked onto Drew’s, but he didn’t remove his finger from his mouth as he talked. “You’re going to see them again. Your friends, I mean. Very soon.”

  Rick bit down on his finger, gently at first, and then with increasing pressure. Drew began shivering from the cold. Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t—

  Natural.

  —helping Rick. He wanted to leap to his feet, rush over to Rick, grab hold of his arm, and yank his hand away from his mouth. But he forced himself to remain seated. He didn’t want to sit and watch while Rick mutilated himself, but he knew from both training and experience that it wasn’t a good idea to make any sudden moves when a patient began exhibiting violent behavior.

  Drew rarely felt threatened when he worked with patients, whatever their pasts, and he’d never felt any threat from Rick during their previous sessions. But he could sense the potential for violence in the air now, like the energy that gathers before a powerful thunderstorm, and for the first time in his career as a psychologist, he was afraid. Afraid for himself and afraid that Rick might hurt himself far worse if he tried to stop him.

  And so he watched as the already raw skin on Rick’s finger split under the pressure of his jaws, and blood began to flow, running over his lips and onto his chin in a thin trickle. Rick’s eyes glimmered with madness, and, still biting down on his index finger, he grinned at Drew.

  “I’m starting to get the feeling that our session is about over, but before you send me back to my room wrapped in a straitjacket and carrying a circulatory system full of tranquilizers, allow me to leave you with this. She will call for you again, just as she did before. Only this time, you won’t be able to help her.”

  Drew felt a pit open up in his stomach at Rick’s words, but before he could ask the man what he meant, Rick bit down on his finger as hard as he could, and the blood began flowing in earnest. Rick laughed at first, but his laughter quickly faded to silence. His eyes rolled white, his jaw went slack, and his bloody finger slipped out of his mouth as his hand fell to his lap. At first, Drew feared the man had gone catatonic or worse, suffered a stroke, but before he could get up to go check on him, the man’s eyes came back into focus, and he blinked in confusion.

  “What . . . happened?” His voice was soft, little more than a whisper. “I remember we were talking about something. Pudding, I think, and then . . .” He frowned. “Why does my finger hurt so bad?”

  Before Drew could explain, Rick raised his hand and saw his wounded finger.

  “Aw, no . . . And I was doing so good . . .”

  He began to cry, and Drew rose from his chair and—professional distance be damned—walked over to him, leaned down, and put his arms around the sobbing man.

  A half-hour later, Drew was back in his office, sitting at his desk, typing up his notes from Rick’s disastrous session. A chill still lingered in the air, real or imagined, and he’d turned up the heat.

  He had typed several paragraphs so far, but he read over them, scowled, and deleted all but the first couple of lines. He kept At first, Mr. Johansen appeared to display signs of progress in dealing with his obsessive-compulsive hand mutilation, and our initial conversation proceeded along the usual lines of making small talk about his day. But he didn’t know what to say after that. At first, he’d tried to describe the events as objectively as he could, but when he reached the part about the room temperature dropping, he’d stopped and started hitting the delete key.

  Drew was a rational man who used his intelligence and education to help him deal with sometimes very irrational people. In a way, he saw his patients as sailors lost at sea, their ships surrounded by fog and night. Therapy was a lighthouse, a shining beacon of hope that could help them find their way out of the darkness, and he viewed himself as the lighthouse keeper.

  He could explain Rick’s cryptic pronouncements—You miss them, don’t you? She will call for you again, just as she did before—as the ramblings of a deeply troubled mind. It had only seemed to have meaning because he himself was tempted to ascribe meaning to it. Basic psychology, the kind of stuff undergrads learned in Intro to Psych. And the temperature drop could be explained as easily. It wasn’t uncommon for people to experience sensations of cold during traumatic events. Given his specialty in posttraumatic stress disorder, he knew this better than most. Just because he was a psychologist didn’t mean he was immune to experiencing trauma himself. It was always tough to watch a patient have a psychotic break. He’d had an emotional reaction to Rick’s meltdown, one that had manifested as a sensation of cold. Simple as that.

  But that was his mind talking. His instincts, his feelings, told a different story, and over the years, Drew had learned to rely on his feelings as much as his intellect when it came to dealing with patients. And his feelings now told him that whomever he’d been speaking to, it hadn’t been Rick, and the temperature drop he’d experienced had been real, not a symptom of intense stress. So that meant . . . what? That Rick had been possessed?

  He gave his head a quick shake. No way. It was ridiculous. That was the sort of crazy theory that Trevor might come up with for one of his books. Drew was a man of science. He—

  His cell phone sat next to the computer on his desk, within easy reach. It rang, and he picked the phone up and answered it, grateful for the distraction. And while he supposed he should have been surprised to hear Trevor’s voice on the other end, he wasn’t.

  FIVE

  Amber knew She shouldn’t have a second glass of merlot, not with the meds she was on. She told her
self she’d just sip this one slowly and make it last.

  The hotel bar was upscale for Ash Creek: chrome, glass, and black-lacquer décor, lighting pitched at just the right level, not so dim as to be depressing but not so bright as to be garish. A banner hung behind the bar, “Welcome Back, Ash Creek Grads!” written in red letters that looked a little too much like blood for her taste. Nineties pop music played in the background, programmed for the reunion crowd by the hotel staff, she guessed. “The Sweetest Taboo” by Sade was on now, the song the aural equivalent of a syringe full of Thorazine, but the effect was lost on her. As nervous as she was, she doubted the real thing could have calmed her down.

  She’d chosen a corner table and sat with her back to the wall. She liked having something solid behind her, liked being able to see the entrance. Less chance of someone sneaking up on you from behind this way, and easier to make a fast escape if you need to, she thought. She knew it was only partially a joke, and not a very funny one, but she forced a smile and took a sip of her wine.

  She managed two more sips before deciding that the alcohol was, if anything, only increasing her anxiety level, and she was about to get up and leave when Drew walked into the bar.

  Although she hadn’t seen him in fifteen years, she recognized him instantly. He hadn’t changed much. A few more pounds, the skin beneath his eyes a bit puffy and discolored, as if he hadn’t been getting enough rest. But the changes in Drew’s appearance were minor. All in all, he looked as handsome as she remembered. More so, because he carried himself with a casual confidence that she not only found attractive but also envied. It had taken all of the courage she could muster to force herself to leave her room after she’d checked in.

  Drew stopped inside the entranceway and looked around. He wore a white polo shirt, dark jeans, and running shoes. He looked more like a grocery-store clerk than a psychologist, but then Drew had never cared what other people thought about him. Another quality he possessed that made her envious.

  The bar was about three-quarters full of people drinking, talking, and laughing, and Amber half hoped that Drew wouldn’t notice her among the crowd. After all, it had been fifteen years, and those years hadn’t been kind to her. She was afraid of what Drew would think when he saw her, and she regretted letting Greg talk her into coming here. But then Drew saw her and smiled with such warmth that her regrets melted away. As he approached her table, she rose to meet him.

  “Hello, Drew.” She held her hand out for him to shake, but she wasn’t surprised when he ignored it and gathered her in for a hug. He’d always been a touchy-feely kind of guy but in a genuinely affectionate, noncreepy way. She felt so fragile in his embrace, as if she were made of paper skin and brittle twig bones, but he held her gently, and for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long, she felt safe and protected. But then he let go and stepped back, and she was surprised to feel a pang of sadness as the contact ended.

  “It’s great to see you, Amber.” He sounded sincere, but there was a flicker of concern in his gaze, and she guessed that he’d noted her sallow complexion and too-thin body. She’d done her best to disguise her condition with a liberal application of makeup and an oversized black sweater to hide how skinny she was, but it wasn’t enough to fool Drew’s trained eye. She felt a wave of shame and once again regretted coming here. But then, as if sensing her emotion, he reached out to clasp her hand and said, “Really great.”

  “Same here,” she said, and smiled. And then, without thinking, she added, “I was a little afraid that when I saw you, I’d . . .” She’d been about to say, Have a flashback to that night, but she didn’t want to talk about that, not yet, maybe not ever. So instead, she said, “Make a fool of myself somehow. You know, accidentally spray spit on you when I talked or not realize I had a big piece of spinach stuck in my teeth.”

  “What are you talking about? Making a fool of myself is my specialty!”

  Amber and Drew turned as Trevor approached them, a wide grin on his face. He wore a gray suit jacket over a light blue shirt. The extra pounds he carried, along with his thinning hair, made him look as if he were in his early forties instead of his early thirties, but the premature-aging effect was ameliorated by the boyish enthusiasm in his smile and the delight that shone in his eyes upon seeing them. For an instant, she caught a glimpse of the teenager he used to be, and seeing him that way made her feel young again, too, if only for a moment. It was a good feeling.

  He gave her a quick but warm hug and then took Drew’s hand in both of his and gave it an energetic double pump. When he finished, he stepped back and regarded Amber and Drew.

  “Man, it’s good to see you two again!” he said.

  Drew grinned. “Same here.”

  Amber smiled and nodded. And then silence descended over the three of them, and they stood there, smiling at one another. She wasn’t sure what to do next, and she experienced a small flutter of panic, accompanied by an urge to excuse herself and flee back to her room. Here they were, the three of them, together again for the first time in fifteen years, for the first time since that night. She’d been more than a little afraid of what might happen when she saw Drew and Trevor. What she might feel, what she might remember. But there had been no flashbacks, no nightmarish images, no disturbing memories of any kind. It was something of a letdown, and she thought she could see the same feeling mirrored in her friends’ faces.

  It was Trevor who broke the silence. “Is this awkward or what?”

  “What,” Drew said.

  Trevor frowned. “I said, is this awkward or . . .” He trailed off and grinned. And then the three of them were laughing, and Amber could feel the years and the tension melt away.

  “What happened to Mrs. Peters?” Trevor asked. “I know she quit teaching art halfway through our senior year, but I can’t remember the whole story.”

  Drew took a sip of his vodka sour—his third—and frowned as he tried to recall the details. “It was a sex scandal of some kind, wasn’t it?”

  Amber laughed. “Hardly, though it might’ve seemed that way to people at the time. I was in her class when it happened. She wanted us to do life drawing, you know, like in college when they have models pose nude? But this was high school, so she asked one of the cheerleaders to come in wearing a swimsuit. The girl—I can’t remember her name. Bethany? Barbara? Anyway, she wore a bikini that was more than a little on the skimpy side, and that got the kids in class talking, especially the boys. Their parents got wind of what happened, and the next thing you know, there’s a concerned group of citizens protesting at a school-board meeting. One thing led to another, and Mrs. Peters decided to take early retirement rather than put up with the bullshit anymore.” She took a sip of wine and shook her head. “Small towns, you know?”

  “That’s right,” Trevor said. “I remember now.” He finished off his beer, caught their server’s eye, and signaled for a refill.

  Drew wondered if Trevor really did remember or if he was just saying that. The three of them had spent the last two hours talking about the past, which was to be expected when three old friends got together after fifteen years. The hotel bar was filled with people, many of them fellow classmates back in town for tomorrow night’s reunion, and he imagined that a number of similarly nostalgic conversations were taking place at tables around them. The big difference in their case was that they weren’t taking a simple stroll down memory lane. They were trying to fill in gaps in their memories, for while none of them had broached the subject of that night yet, once they’d begun talking, it had soon become clear that they’d forgotten more than what had happened at the Lowry House.

  Huge chunks of their high-school years were missing, the memories not simply dimmed with the passage of time but gone entirely, especially events from their senior year. So, while it had been great seeing Trevor and Amber again, the three of them were doing more than reminiscing; they were playing a very important game of mental fill-in-the-blanks. But just because some missing data were supp
lied, that didn’t automatically translate into an actual memory. Numerous times during their conversation, they had pieced together stories, like the one about Mrs. Peters. And while the facts became clear, Drew at least experienced no real recollection of the events in question.

  He knew the stories when they were done, but he didn’t remember them. He felt like someone who was learning phrases in a foreign language by memorizing them phonetically, without any real understanding of the words. It was a strange, frustrating experience, in some ways even worse than not remembering, because it pointed out how much they’d all lost and underscored the reason why.

  That night.

  Their server brought Trevor his beer, and the three friends fell into a period of silence. It didn’t take long to start a new thread of conversation, and Drew couldn’t help smiling as Trevor began talking. He’d never been very comfortable with silence.

  “The town’s sure changed a lot,” he said. “There’s a new outlet store off the highway, and did you ever think they’d put a Starbucks in little old Ash Creek, let alone two? And then there’s the new rec center they’re building where the . . .” He paused, and for a moment, Drew thought he wasn’t going to continue, but then he went on, his voice subdued. “Where the Lowry House was.”

  And there it was. It had taken them two hours and more than a few drinks to get around to it, but one of them had finally spoken the words.

  “Did you check it out?” Drew asked.

  “Eventually.” Trevor took a sip of his beer. “I drove around town three times before getting up the courage to go by. You?”

  He shook his head. “I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. I told myself that I was tired after driving all the way from Chicago and just wanted to check into the hotel, but the truth is that I was too uncomfortable to go there.”