Ghost Trackers

by Grant Wilson Jason Hawes

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked away. Drew watched him go, dazed and struggling to reorient himself to his surroundings.

  You’re in the hotel lobby, he reminded himself. You were sitting and talking with Greg when . . . when whatever it was happened.

  His shirt was damp under the arms and at his lower back, and he felt drained, as if he’d sprinted a mile without stopping.

  “Contemplating the mysteries of the universe?”

  He looked up to see Trevor and Amber standing in front of him. Trevor smiled, but it seemed forced, much like his opening comment, and Amber was looking at him with an expression of concern. Drew wondered how bad he appeared. If it was even close to the way he felt, he figured it was pretty damned bad.

  “You just missed Greg.” Drew was surprised by how steady his voice sounded. “We had a nice little chat. And in the middle of it, I . . . experienced something.”

  Trevor exchanged looks with Amber. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around,” he said.

  Amber and Trevor sat, and the three friends spent the next half-hour catching each other up on what had happened since they left Flying Pizza. They kept their voices low in order to prevent being overheard by anyone passing through the lobby. When they were finished, Trevor said, “Still doubt something paranormal is going on?”

  Drew gave him a weak smile. “Let’s say that while I retain the right to be skeptical, I’ve decided to concur with your diagnosis.” He hadn’t told his friends that he’d been considering leaving before his—for lack of a better word—vision of the Lowry House. Whatever was going on here, it had become clear that the three of them were bound not only by what had happened to them fifteen years ago but also by what was happening now. Regardless of the outcome, he would no longer consider abandoning his friends. As he’d so often told his patients, sometimes the only way out of a bad situation was to plow ahead and get through it. And one way or another, the three of them would get through this—together.

  Trevor grinned. “This may be the first time you’ve completely agreed with me. Can I get it in writing? I’ll have it framed and hang it in my office.”

  “Do you think that Greg is involved in all this, too?” Amber said.

  “He said he wasn’t with us in the Lowry House the night it burned down,” Drew said. “And while we have some vague sense that he showed up there at one point, we remember going without him.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t show up later,” Trevor said. “It wouldn’t have been the first time. We’d tried to ditch him before that, and somehow he always managed to find us. I used to say he was like a broken maraca, because we couldn’t shake him.”

  Drew smiled. “I remember.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe he was there and was traumatized like the rest of us. His memories might be blocked, too.” He frowned then. “But that wouldn’t explain why he wasn’t found at the Lowry House with the rest of us when the emergency crews arrived.”

  “Maybe he got out before anyone else arrived,” Trevor said. “He still could’ve been traumatized, just not injured like we were.” He sighed. “Or maybe he wasn’t there. We don’t have any evidence one way or another, so unless our memories return—all of them—we may never know.”

  “You’re both missing another possibility,” Amber said. “Maybe he’s lying.”

  Drew and Trevor looked at her.

  “When did you become so cynical and distrusting?” Trevor said, sounding as if he was only half joking.

  She smiled. “Just trying to cover all the bases. But think about it: Greg is the one who called me about the reunion, and I in turn called you, Trevor, and you called Drew. Basically, we’re here because he invited us. It’s like he wanted us here.”

  “He could just have wanted to reconnect with some old friends from high school,” Drew said. “Still, you make a good point. He did give off more than a few weird vibes during our conversation, and the entire time, he projected a sense of mocking superiority, as if he had some kind of secret knowledge he enjoyed keeping from me. If he was at the Lowry House that night and did retain his memory, that could account for his strange attitude today. Maybe he does know something we don’t.”

  “But if he did remember anything, why would he keep it from us?” Trevor said. He turned to Amber.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe he’s not sure what he should do. Maybe whatever’s happening to us is happening to him, too. Maybe he’s scared.”

  “I don’t know,” Drew said. “He didn’t seem frightened to me. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem stressed at all, despite his talk about how much work helping out with the reunion is. He seems calm and relaxed, like someone who’s got it all together, or at least thinks he has.”

  “So what should we do?” Trevor asked. “Go find him and force him to tell us what he does and doesn’t know? I’m afraid I forgot to pack my thumbscrews this weekend.”

  Drew smiled at the joke. “I don’t know if we could force him to admit anything. He seems to keep himself under pretty tight control. But before he left, he told me that he’d see me at the banquet. Maybe if the three of us sat down and talked with him, he’d open up to us.”

  Drew glanced at Amber, and although he didn’t say anything, she said, “You mean open up to me.”

  “He did admit to me that he was . . .” He didn’t want to say jealous, because that would be admitting that there was an attraction between himself and Amber, one that had been there since they were kids and was as strong today as it had ever been. “Fond of you in high school,” he finished.

  Trevor rolled his eyes. “That’s one way to put it, I suppose.”

  Amber ignored him. “The banquet’s scheduled for five o’clock, which means we have several hours to kill.” She paused, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry. Given the way things have been going this weekend, that’s a poor choice of words, isn’t it? What should we do until then?”

  “Whatever we do, we should stick together,” Drew said. “So far, the two people who’ve died don’t appear to have any direct connection to the Lowry House, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe. If something happens to one of us, the others will be there to call nine-one-one, if nothing else.”

  “And if any of us has another psychic experience, the others will be there to observe,” Trevor said. “Maybe we’ll learn something that will prove useful later.”

  “Useful for what?” Amber said.

  “For understanding what’s happening,” Trevor said, as if it were obvious. “That’s the whole reason we started investigating paranormal incidents in high school, wasn’t it? To gain a deeper understanding of our world—and what might lie beyond.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not enough, not this time. This has gone beyond mere curiosity about the paranormal and even beyond getting our memories back so we can finally understand what happened to us the night the Lowry House burned down. Two people have died already, and who knows how many more might follow? We don’t need just to understand what’s happening; we need to stop it.”

  Trevor looked at her. “Not only did I forget my thumbscrews, I left my proton pack and ghost traps at home, too.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him, but there was no malice in the gesture. It made Drew smile. It reminded him of how the three of them had teased and bantered with one another back in high school. The more things change . . .

  “In that case,” he said, “we should research methods of nullifying negative psychic energy. It seems the Lowry House is an archetypal Bad Place, a storehouse of . . . the scientist in me is reluctant to use the term evil, but I can’t think of any word that’s more appropriate.”

  “But the Lowry House was destroyed that night,” Amber said, and then she frowned. “Wait a minute. Maybe we really did set the fire. Maybe we were trying to . . . I don’t know, exorcise the place or something.”

  “Possibly,” Drew said. He searched his feelings to see if he had any reaction to Amber’s words, but he co
uldn’t find anything. If they had set the fire on purpose to cast out the evil infesting the Lowry House, his memory of it remained buried.

  “Well, if we did burn the house down on purpose, it didn’t work,” Trevor said. “The evil’s stronger than it ever was. Now it can reach out to touch minds and even kill people.”

  “Amber’s vision was of a massacre on the site where the Lowry House would one day be built,” Drew said. “Maybe the house itself wasn’t the nexus for the negative psychic energy that became stored there over the years. Maybe it was the land it sat on.”

  “The land’s still there,” Amber said. “And now there’s a rec center on top of it.”

  “When they open the center and people start going there . . .” Trevor said.

  They fell into silence after that. The implications were clear. The negative energy that permeated the land there would have hundreds of new victims to prey upon. They had to do something to prevent that from happening.

  “Let’s go back to one of our rooms,” Drew said. “We’ll keep an eye on one another until the banquet, and we can brainstorm ideas for our next move.”

  “I know some experts I can ask for advice on conducting psychic cleansing,” Trevor said. “Don’t look at me like that, Drew. They’re not kooks. They’re serious professionals I rely on to supply information for the books and articles I write. When we get to the room, I’ll fire off a few e-mails, leave a few postings on message boards, see if I can’t get someone on live chat. Maybe they’ll be able to give us some information we can use.”

  Drew wasn’t comfortable with consulting Trevor’s “experts,” but at this point, he was willing to explore any option. The more knowledge they had to draw on, the better, he supposed. The trick would be separating the wheat from the chaff.

  “And at the banquet, we’ll talk to Greg and see if we can’t get him to tell us what he remembers,” Amber said.

  Drew nodded. “And afterward, I think a nighttime visit to the rec center might be in order. Since that’s where everything started, it makes sense that that’s where it has to end.”

  “I wish you’d phrased that differently,” Trevor said. “There are lots of ways things can end, and not all of them are good.”

  “Always the optimist.” But he didn’t smile, for he shared his friend’s misgivings. What could the three of them hope to do against the force that had killed Sean Houser and Jerry Cottrill? But they had to try. After all, who else was there?

  “Keep the flashlight steady.”

  Amber felt Drew’s hand wrap around hers to keep it from shaking. She wasn’t scared so much as cold, but the moment his flesh came in contact with hers, a warm flush suffused her body, and she forgot all about the temperature.

  She looked at Drew’s face, illuminated by the side glow from the flashlight’s beam, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the gravestone in front of them: “Lucille Dessick, 1898–1966. Beloved wife, mother, and grandmother. Well may she rest.”

  “I think this is it,” he said.

  It was early May, and although it had been warm during the daytime, it had gotten cooler after the sun had gone down. It was closing in on midnight now, and the breeze blowing through the cemetery made her wish she’d brought a heavier jacket. The sky was clear, the moon half full, stars glittering like scattered diamonds. It might have been romantic—if they hadn’t been standing in the middle of a graveyard checking out a dead woman’s headstone.

  She looked at Drew again. She liked the way the stars in the sky framed his head, liked the way the breeze ruffled his hair, liked the intensity in his gaze. And she especially liked the feel of his hand on hers.

  She couldn’t help smiling to herself. Maybe this was kind of romantic, in a weird way.

  “I need to take a picture.” Drew let go of her hand—which she did not like—and removed a camera from the pocket of his jacket. She made sure to hold the flashlight steady as he took a couple of pictures of Lucille Dessick’s headstone. When he was finished, he tucked the camera back into his pocket, then turned to her and smiled. “That proves one part of the story, at least. There really was a Lucille Dessick.”

  For decades, people in Ash Creek had reported sightings of a “White Lady,” an example of a supernatural apparition common around the world. A White Lady showed herself to only one person at a time, and her appearance was supposed to herald the death of someone close to those who saw her. White Ladies wore all white, and their hair and even their skin were white, so much so that both were indistinguishable from their clothing. White Ladies tended to manifest in rural areas, and Ash Creek’s was no exception. She was always spotted along a stretch of Route Four that bordered the Dessick family farm. According to town legend, the White Lady began appearing only after Lucille Dessick, whose family had lived in Ash Creek since the town’s founding, had died under mysterious circumstances; of course, legend was vague about why her death had been so mysterious.

  Amber, Drew, and Trevor had begun investigating the White Lady after Amber’s cousin Josh had seen her late one night while driving home from his job at the cinema over in Zephyr, and . . .

  She broke off the thought and frowned. Where was Trevor? And for that matter, what were they doing here so late? There was no reason for them to be skulking around like this. All they’d come to do was find Lucille’s grave and take a picture. The cemetery was open to the public during daylight hours, so there was no need for them to sneak in. And while there was more than a little theatricality in creeping through a graveyard in the dead of night, Drew was a practical person. He wouldn’t have come here this late just for the thrill of it. It didn’t make any sense.

  She turned to him to voice her concerns, panning the flashlight beam around as she did so, in the process illuminating the figure of an elderly woman standing next to the grave site.

  Ice water rushed through Amber’s veins at the sight of the woman dressed in white strips of sheer cloth, like a nightgown that had been shredded—or an old-fashioned burial shroud. She was bird-thin, emaciated, her ivory-colored flesh stretched so tight across her bones that the skeleton beneath was visible. Her white hair stood out from her head like a thick growth of dandelion fluff, and it swayed in the breeze like grass that had been bleached of all color. Her lips were thin and bloodless, and while her skin was so taut it was impossible to determine how old she was, she projected a palpable sense of age. Amber’s parents had taken her to a museum in Columbus a couple of years ago to see a traveling exhibit of Egyptian artifacts. Amber had been fascinated by a mummy lying in an open sarcophagus sealed in a glass display case. The mummy itself wasn’t much to look at—smaller than she would have guessed, its wrappings a dingy gray—all in all, not that frightening. But what had impressed her the most was the feeling that she was standing in the presence of time itself. The White Lady made her feel like that: young, small, and insignificant.

  Worst of all were the woman’s eyes. Given her extreme pallor, Amber expected her eyes to be cold, smooth, featureless orbs like a marble statue’s. But the White Lady’s eyes were nothing like that. Her sockets were filled with a living, roiling darkness from which small tendrils emerged and undulated in the air, as if a pair of strange black sea creatures had taken up residence in the woman’s skull and were reaching out to sense the world beyond. For some reason, those tendrils seemed familiar to her, but that was crazy. She’d never seen anything like this before . . . had she?

  Amber’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart pounded so hard she could feel the veins in her neck throb. She wanted nothing more than to turn and run, but she remained rooted to the spot, unable to make herself move. She could sense Drew still standing beside her, and she wanted to turn her head and glance in his direction, if for no other reason than the reassurance the sight of him would offer, but she could no more turn to look at him than she could pick up her feet to run.

  The White Lady raised her right arm in a smooth, graceful motion that was at odds with the a
ura of age she projected and stretched out her index finger to point at Amber. The finger was long and bony, and the nail was black, hooked, and sharp like a raven’s claw. The woman opened her mouth to reveal teeth of polished obsidian, and a thick tongue rolled forth, also black, the tip ending in a cluster of thin, wavering tendrils. A low, keening sound emerged from deep within the White Lady’s chest, rising in both volume and pitch as it went on. The sound continued without interruption, as if the woman’s lungs contained an inexhaustible supply of air and she had no need to pause for breath.

  What was this creature? Were they looking at the ghost of Lucille Dessick? But this . . . this thing didn’t look as if it had ever been human. Amber became aware of another sound then, fainter than the woman’s keening, a soft huh-huh-huh that sounded almost, but not quite, like sobbing. She wasn’t surprised when she realized that the sound was coming from herself.

  The ebon tendrils protruding from the woman’s eyes and mouth shot forward, extending a trio of writhing, tangled masses toward Amber. The sight shocked her out of her paralysis, and she gave voice to a full-throated scream that split the night like a razor.

  She felt Drew’s hand grab hold of hers then, felt him pull her away from the White Lady. She spun around, dropping the flashlight as she did, and she and Drew ran like hell, the keening of the White Lady following them as they fled.

  She let terror take her then, and she ran without thought or reason, barely aware of the ground she and Drew covered. The cemetery flew by in a jumble of images—the silhouettes of headstones, trees, and mausoleums—and then they were out on the street and still running, past houses, parked cars, and streetlights whose cold illumination provided no comfort. They ran until her lungs burned and her leg muscles felt so weary they might slide off the bone like meat from an overcooked chicken. And then they were on her porch, sitting on the concrete, leaning against each other as they gasped for air, sweat drying in the night breeze.