She stood there for several minutes, looking at her meds, thinking. Maybe what she needed most right now wasn’t pills. Maybe what she needed was a friend.
She turned away from the nightstand, slipped on a pair of flip-flops, grabbed her room key, and headed for the door.
Greg opened his eyes and sat up. He’d been lying on his bed on top of the covers, hands folded over his stomach, while he’d paid his little psychic visit to Amber. Her room was on the same floor as his, as were Drew’s and Trevor’s, as he’d arranged it. Not that he needed close proximity to initiate mental contact, but it did make things a bit easier.
His room was dark. He didn’t need light to see by, hadn’t since that night in the Lowry House. He was most at home in the dark, belonged there like a fish in water or a bird in the sky. The Darkness was both parent and lover to him. It filled him, sustained him, completed him, and he would do its bidding forever and ever, amen. But even the Darkness couldn’t be everything to him. He wanted more, needed more.
And what he wanted most was Amber.
He’d almost had her, too, but she’d pulled away from him and broken the psychic contact. He could have held on to her mind if he’d wanted, could have forced her to remain linked to him. She was mentally strong, stronger than she knew, but her strength was nothing compared with his. Still, he didn’t want to take her by force. He wanted her to come to him willingly, to accept the Darkness, submit to it, give herself over to it body and soul, as he had. And that would take some time. That was OK. He could be patient. He’d waited fifteen years, and he could wait a little longer.
What wasn’t OK was Amber’s reaction to her nightmare. Instead of taking some pills and going back to sleep, she’d decided to go talk to an old friend. She was going to see Drew.
Jealousy surged through him. His hands balled into fists, and he gritted his teeth. Sensing his mood, the shadows in the room thickened and began a slow swirl around the bed, like clouds churning in advance of an approaching storm. Amber had always been attracted to Drew, and he knew that Drew felt the same way about her, although the idiot had never admitted it, not even to himself. Typical psychologist, he thought. Good at understanding everyone’s feelings except his own. But the last thing Greg wanted to do was drive Amber into Drew’s arms and perhaps get them to acknowledge their feelings for each other.
The shadows swirled around him like ebon sharks, and they whispered in voices as cold as the ocean depths. Then why don’t you do something about it? Go to Drew’s room and confront them. Batter down their psychic defenses and claim their minds as your own. You have the power. You can do whatever you want, take whatever you want . . .
Yes. He could do that. It would be child’s play, and there was nothing Amber or Drew could do to stop him. And when he was finished, he’d go to Trevor and claim him, so he would have the full set. It was tempting, but if he gave in to that temptation, all he’d have in the end would be shells of his friends, their bodies hollowed out and replaced with Darkness. And he didn’t want that. He wanted more.
So, as much as he hated it, he’d leave Amber and Drew alone—for now. But that didn’t mean he had to stay in his room seething with jealousy. He had two main goals for this weekend, and his friends only factored in one of them. What reasons did anyone have for attending a high-school reunion? To rub your fellow classmates’ noses in your success and, if possible, settle old scores. The latter was his other motivation for coming to Ash Creek this weekend. A lot of people had treated him like shit back in high school, and he was here for some long-delayed but well-deserved payback. High time he got to it.
He drew the shadows into him, rose from the bed, and headed toward the door. He grinned so wide his mouth hurt.
This was going to be fun.
SEVEN
Sean Houser lay on his bed, shoeless but still wearing a polo shirt and slacks. He was watching an extreme-sports competition on ESPN2 with the sound off and thinking that this was way less fun than he’d thought it was going to be. Not the TV program; he was barely paying attention to that. But the reunion. Sure, technically, it was tomorrow night and hadn’t really started yet, but he’d come in tonight expecting something to be happening. Maybe some people dancing in the bar or at least a few room parties going on. But no one was doing anything in the bar except talking.
He’d seen a few people he recognized, including those three weirdos who chased ghosts back in high school and that feeb who hung around them sometimes. But he hadn’t seen anyone cool, so he’d left and gone in search of room parties, going so far as to wander up and down the hallways on various floors, hoping to hear the sound of music playing too loud and people talking and laughing. But all he’d heard were a few TVs playing and a baby or two crying. So he’d retreated to his own room, flipped on the TV, muted the sound, stretched out on the bed, and moped.
He’d been looking forward to this weekend for months, had gotten good and jazzed about it the last couple of weeks. He’d been hoping to reconnect with some friends he hadn’t seen for years, relive some of the glory days, get a little wild and crazy. He hadn’t gone to college, opting instead to enter the workforce after graduation, and he’d worked in construction ever since. He was employed by a plastering and drywall company, and he had a wife and two kids, with one more on the way, and while he didn’t hate his life, he didn’t love it, either. He sometimes felt as if he didn’t live so much as exist, but that was the way it went, right? Most people were in the same boat as him. Just going through the motions one day after another, taking care of business, paying their bills, marking the days off the calendar one by one. So, this weekend wasn’t only a chance to escape his family for a while but also an opportunity to escape himself. The self he’d become over the last fifteen years, anyway. For a couple of days, he’d be able to go back in time and become teenage Sean again, without any worries or responsibilities.
But now that he was here, he was feeling let down. When he’d been growing up, his dad had told him to enjoy his high-school years. “They’re the best days of your life, kid,” his old man had said. “The last time you really get to live it up. So make sure you do it right.” Whenever his dad talked about high school like that, which was often, he’d get a wistful tone in his voice and a faraway look in his eyes. Not sad, exactly. He’d seemed more tired than anything, like a man who knew that his best days were long gone and never coming back. When his dad got like that, it scared Sean, and he’d vowed that whatever else he did with his life, he wasn’t going to grow up and look back on his high-school years and wish he’d done more. Lived more. He was going to take his dad’s advice and Do It Right.
And he had. He hadn’t been big man on campus or anything like that. Hadn’t gone out for any sports or wanted anything to do with creative activities like band or drama. He hadn’t belonged to any clubs and certainly hadn’t belonged to the honor society. He’d barely paid attention in class, doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get by. As far as Sean was concerned, high school had one purpose only: to give him opportunities to party. He’d spent those four years drunk or high more often than not, and while he hadn’t gotten laid as often as he bragged about to his friends, he’d done OK with the girls. But if there was one thing he liked more than partying—or at least as much—it was playing practical jokes.
He’d started his career as a jokester in middle school with the usual. Taping “I suck” signs on the backs of unsuspecting victims, leaving dead mice in teachers’ desk drawers, dropping M-80s into trash cans, that sort of thing. He stepped it up a notch when he got to high school, taking the tires off teachers’ cars in the parking lot and putting them up on blocks, running an inflatable sex doll up the flagpole in front of the school, and replacing the soda in the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge with cans of beer. He was slick about it, too, and while the school administration suspected him, he was never caught. He’d come close, though—just once.
He’d taken biology during his junior year, and t
he teacher, Mr. Bryant, had been a real hard-ass. No matter how hard Sean worked—admittedly not very—he couldn’t seem to pull a passing grade on assignments. When it came time to do a term paper for the course, Mr. Bryant, expecting another lackluster performance on Sean’s part, assigned him a tutor: Greg Daniels, the feeb he’d seen down in the bar earlier. Greg might have looked like a potato that some mad scientist had evolved into human form, but he was no dummy, and Sean scored a B-minus on his report. Still, he was pissed off at Mr. Bryant on general principles and decided to indulge in a little revenge.
He photocopied a picture of Bryant, made a couple of dozen copies, and cut out the image of his head. He then snuck into the bio lab after school, removed all of the frogs from the storage cabinet, placed them on the dissecting tables, opened them up and spread out their organs, and—for the pièce de résistance—glued the pictures of Mr. Bryant’s face onto the frogs’ heads. Then, for no other reason than because Bryant had assigned Greg as his tutor, Sean put the leftover photocopied images of a headless Mr. Bryant into the lab drawer Greg had been assigned.
He then went home and looked forward to the next day.
He had biology second period, so the frogs were gone when he got to class, but Mr. Bryant was livid, and the story had already spread throughout the school. Bryant had searched the lab, just as Sean figured he would, to check if anything else had been vandalized, and in Greg’s drawer he’d discovered the photocopied pages from which the images of his head had been cut.
He confronted Greg in front of the rest of the class, and of course, he denied committing the prank. Bryant didn’t believe him and got more and more agitated as he questioned Greg, his face turning beet-red, spraying spittle from his mouth as he shouted, until Sean thought the son of a bitch would blow a gasket and drop dead right there. Finally, Bryant told the rest of the class to open their books and review chapter eighteen, and he hauled Greg’s ass down to the office. Sean felt a little sorry for Greg but only a little. Watching Bryant lose it like that had been way too entertaining.
But his amusement faded when Bryant returned a few minutes later and told him the principal had requested the honor of his presence as well. It turned out that Greg had told the principal that he suspected Sean of playing the prank, so he had to submit to an interrogation for the better part of an hour. He kept his cool, though, knowing there was no evidence to prove he’d done it, and the principal let him go, but not before giving a month’s detention to everyone in Mr. Bryant’s biology classes, no matter what period they attended. Parents raised holy hell about that at the next school-board meeting, and the detention ended after a week and a half. It was a great joke, one of Sean’s best, but he knew he’d gotten a little too close to being burned, and so he laid off on the pranks for a couple months after that and was careful not to target specific teachers anymore.
Greg didn’t say anything to him about the joke, and the two of them never spoke again. Now, fifteen years later, Sean found himself feeling sorry about what he’d done to Greg. The guy had helped him pass that report, after all, and he’d already had enough trouble, being such a loser and all. Of course, it didn’t look as if he was a loser any longer. When Sean had seen him in the bar, he hadn’t recognized him at first. He was fit, dressed well, and carried himself with confidence. He looked better than Sean did these days. Sean had been a beanpole in high school, but years of too much fast food and too much beer had filled him out and given him a significant gut.
It occurred to him then that he’d become his father, a man on the slow, downward slide to the grave, looking back at his youth and wondering where the hell it had gone.
Greg looked like the opposite kind of man, someone whose present was better than his past, someone who’d found the secret to living well. Maybe he should head on back to the bar, see if Greg was still there, maybe ask if he’d like to sit down for a drink. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do. Who knew? Maybe he’d even apologize to the guy for trying to frame him for the frog prank.
Sean turned off the TV and slipped on his shoes. He grabbed his wallet from the dresser, tucked it into the back pocket of his slacks, and walked to the door. He gripped the handle, opened it—
—and stepped into the biology lab.
For a moment, he stood there, staring as he inhaled the sour-sharp odor of formaldehyde. Everything was as he remembered it. Fluorescent lights, tiled floor, long black tables set up in rows, high wooden stools for students to sit on. The teacher’s desk was up front, behind it the chalk-board, and on the other side of the room a series of windows, blinds up to show the grassy field outside, the sun shining down on it.
Sun? But it was well after eleven P.M. For some reason, this shift from night to day disturbed Sean even more than finding himself standing in the high-school biology lab. After all, a room could be faked. As difficult as it would be to accomplish, it could be done. All it took was some furniture, false walls, lights . . . like a set constructed for a play. How someone could put it up in a hotel hallway—and in the short time since he’d entered his room and zoned out in front of the TV—and why were different questions, but the fact of the matter was that it could be done. But the world outside those windows—the sunlight, the grass, the breeze blowing through the trees in the yard, the clouds in the powder-blue sky—he didn’t see how those things could be faked. They seemed too real. Felt too real.
Sean’s initial reaction was that this was some kind of joke. Yeah, that was it. Had to be. The reunion organizers were pranking attendees by recreating settings from their high-school years. It was a wild idea, genius, really, and Sean admired the hell out of whoever had come up with it. How could the reunion committee afford to build something so elaborate? How did they get hold of that kind of money?
But even as he thought these things, part of him knew they were desperate attempts at rationalization. There was no way this was some sort of prank. It was impossible to re-create the bio lab in such detail, and in a hotel hallway yet. The damn thing couldn’t even fit in the hall. And there were those windows and the sunlit world that lay beyond them . . .
He wanted to believe it was a joke, but he knew it wasn’t, and that knowledge chilled him to the core of his being. Because if it wasn’t a joke, then either this was real or he’d gone crazy. Neither prospect held much appeal.
No, he thought. You’re asleep. You conked out watching TV, and you only dreamed you got off the bed and left the room. You were thinking about Greg Daniels and the prank in the bio lab right before you drifted off, and that’s why you’re dreaming about them now.
The thought was a reassuring one, until he realized that he’d never in his life been aware that he was dreaming while in the middle of a dream. He supposed there was a first time for everything, but somehow, despite his hope that this was all a dream, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was really happening.
He heard the soft sound of chalk moving across the chalkboard, and he turned to see letters appearing on the board as if by magic. There was no chalk visible and no hand to wield it. The letters appeared one by one of their own accord:
“This isn’t a dream, Sean. This is karmic retribution. More simply, paybacks are a bitch. Love and kisses, Greg.”
Sean stared at the message for several seconds and finally decided that, dream or not, he’d had enough of this shit. He turned back to the door, gripped the knob, turned it, pushed . . . and found the door locked. He shoved harder, even rammed his shoulder against the door, resulting in a very realistic burst of pain, but it refused to budge. He gave the knob one last shake before giving up and turning away from the door. He looked at the windows on the other side of the room. They’d probably be locked as well. Wasn’t that the way it always was in dreams? If one exit was blocked to you, all the others were, too. But the glass could be broken, and then he could crawl through and get outside. Outside to a world of sunlight that shone when it should be dark.
That way of escape might have been open to
him, but at that moment, it didn’t exactly appeal.
The lab’s back wall was lined with a row of metal storage cabinets, and the doors began rattling, as if something inside was trying to get out. Sean heard a soft whimpering sound and wondered where it came from. It wasn’t until he heard it a second time that he realized it was coming from his own throat.
The cabinet doors flew open, and misshapen creatures stepped out, thick-bodied and squat, not quite as tall as an adult man. Their naked bodies were covered with mottled green and white rubbery flesh, and their bulging eyes fixed Sean with cold, inhuman appraisal. The frogs, a half-dozen in all, came toward him, walking with an awkward lopsided gait. They were, after all, not creatures designed to stand upright on two legs. Their skin was coated with a liquid sheen, and the smell of formaldehyde in the air grew stronger, making Sean’s stomach turn. He covered his nose and mouth with a hand in an attempt to blunt the awful stench, but the stink was too thick for the gesture to do any good.
The frogs made soft little thrumming sounds in their throats as they approached, and Sean found the noise oddly soothing. In their right hands—if hands was the correct word—they held gleaming metal scalpels. In their left hands, they carried paper masks with loops of string attached. The frogs now donned their masks, slipping them over their bulging eyes and protruding mouths as best they could, and Sean saw that the image printed on the paper was the face of Mr. Bryant, the biology teacher. But unlike the picture Sean had photocopied from the yearbook so long ago, the expression on Bryant’s face was one of contorted hatred: eyes wild, mouth open, teeth bared.
The frogs continued toward Sean, their tiny feet making wet slapping sounds on the tile as they came. Sean noticed that the pale flesh of each of their abdomens was bisected with a single vertical line, like old scars that hadn’t quite healed all the way. The frogs’ pudgy little bellies jiggled with each awkward step they took, and seams opened in their abdominal scars. Grayish-green organs peeked through, just a hint at first, but the seams widened, split open all the way, and frog guts splayed forth to dangle in front of the creatures and be dragged across the floor as they continued toward Sean.
Ghost Trackers Page 7
