Ghost Trackers

by Grant Wilson Jason Hawes

  They’d still seen nothing as they circled around to the rear of the Lowry House. No hint of movement from within the building, no glimmer of light shining in any of the windows, as it had been on that night so many years ago.

  “I understand there’s an art to the building of suspense,” Trevor said, “but this is really starting to drag on. I wish Greg would do something and get it over with.”

  Greg’s voice seemed to echo from the air around them: Careful what you wish for.

  SEVENTEEN

  A fresh wave of vertigo gripped Amber, this one so strong that she feared she’d fall to the ground for sure. But it passed, and when it did, she saw that their surroundings had changed. The house and barn were gone, and more trees covered the grounds. The three friends stood in a clearing in the midst of a dozen dome structures made of bark, mud, and thatch. The air, which had been so silent a moment ago, was now filled with the sounds of struggle, the harsh crack of gunfire, people shouting, screaming, sobbing, and in some cases laughing. There were no other people visible, but the noises made it sound as if they were surrounded by bloody mayhem. It was awful to hear the clamor of people suffering and dying and not be able to see them, not be able to help them.

  Drew turned to her and spoke loudly enough to be heard over the din. “This is the setting of the dream you had, isn’t it? The massacre of Native Americans by British hunters.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t see outside, though. I was inside one of the homes.”

  A crazy thought passed through her mind then. If she were to go from home to home and peek inside, would she discover herself within one, her mind inhabiting Little Eyes’ body? And would Greg be in there, too, masquerading as one of the hunters? Should they search for him here and try to confront him? She started to ask Drew, but then Trevor spoke.

  “This isn’t just the setting of Amber’s dream,” he said. “We saw this the night we came to the Lowry House.” He frowned. “At least, I think we did. I don’t have an actual memory, but this feels familiar, you know?”

  Amber knew exactly what Trevor meant, for she felt the same way. She looked at Drew, and from the expression on his face, she knew that it was the same for him, too.

  The sounds grew louder then, and images began to form, just shadowy figures at first, but they soon took on distinct features. White men garbed in simple fur-lined jackets, trousers, and boots wielded flintlock rifles, knives, and hatchets. Bodies lay scattered on the ground, mostly Native American men, although there were a few women and even children. Most of the bodies had blood on them, sometimes copious amounts, and more than a few had been savaged to the point where it was difficult to tell that they were human, let alone what gender. Only their clothes, blood-soaked and rent by sharp blades, remained to provide any clue to their identities. And the bloodshed was far from over. Hunters aimed their rifles at anyone who wasn’t white and put a round in them, fought hand-to-hand with the village’s men who sought to protect their wives, mothers, and daughters, while others entered unguarded homes in search of easier prey.

  The sights, sounds, and smells of wholesale slaughter sickened Amber to her core, and while she’d only imagined being a member of the tribe, had never been a Native American girl called Little Eyes, she nonetheless felt a deep kinship with these people and their plight, and she felt a mounting white-hot anger at witnessing the unspeakable crimes being committed against them.

  “We have to do something!” she said. “We have to stop them somehow!”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Drew said. “This isn’t happening now. It’s a . . . a replay of events from the past. These people died a couple hundred years before we were born.”

  Intellectually, she knew that Drew’s analysis was true, but emotionally, it was unbearable to stand there watching and do nothing to help.

  As if by some unspoken agreement among the combatants, the fighting stopped, and an unsettling silence fell over the clearing. The hunters, most of whom had blood on their clothes, hands, and sometimes their faces, turned to look at Amber, Drew, and Trevor. The hunters glared at the three friends and gripped their weapons but made no move toward them.

  “It’s like they’re waiting for us to do something,” Amber said.

  “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast,” Drew said. “This may not be real, but we know Greg’s hallucinations can kill. It doesn’t matter if the ax that gets buried in your skull is real or illusory—either way, you’re just as dead.”

  The hunters exchanged no words, didn’t even look at one another, but they all started forward. They came slowly, not running, walking at a measured pace, and somehow that was worse. It was as if they felt there was no need to run because there was nothing their prey could do to escape them. They grinned with bloodlust as they approached, eyes glowing with dark hunger, weapons held tight, blade edges dripping with blood, flintlocks reloaded and ready to fire.

  And then things got worse.

  As they walked, the hunters raised their heads and drew in deep breaths through their noses, as if they were animals scenting the wind. With every step the hunters took, they changed. Their faces, already unshaven, sprouted dark fur, and their mouths and noses joined and lengthened to form snouts. Their teeth became fangs, and long pink tongues lolled out the sides of their mouths. Their hands became fur-covered claws with long black talons, and their eyes turned feral yellow and fixed on the three friends with a savage hunger. As they continued forward, their bodies hunched over, as if their spines had re-formed and they were no longer capable of standing upright, and their legs bent at strange angles. A chorus of low growling came from the hunters as they approached, and the sound caused a ripple of atavistic fear to run down Amber’s spine.

  The hunters—no, the pack, for that’s what they’d become—growled and snarled as they came, white froth flecking their muzzles, eyes dancing with wild delight in anticipation of the slaughter to come.

  And then Amber felt a strange calm come over her. “I’m not running,” she said. “One way or another, I’ve been running for the last fifteen years, and I’m sick of it.”

  The hunters seemed to grin upon hearing these words, as if pleased that she was going to spare them the effort of having to chase her down. She knew she should have been frightened by the sight of them approaching, knew that Drew was right. Illusions or not, they could still kill. But she’d been afraid for so long, and she supposed she just didn’t have any fear left.

  “This isn’t a real place,” she said. “It’s all in our minds. The hunters aren’t real, and neither are the people they killed. The only real things are Greg and us. And if that’s true, then if Greg can make things happen here, so can we.” She spoke more loudly then as she addressed the hunters. “This was their land. You came here to take it from them by force, but you had no right to it. Their blood was always in this land figuratively, but thanks to you, it’s literally there now. And it calls out for justice.”

  She crouched down and jammed her fingers into the ground. Grass and soil gave way before her hands as if they were no more substantial than water, and her hands sank up to her wrists.

  The hunters hesitated when they saw what she’d done, expressions of confusion on their bestial faces. But when nothing happened right away, they grinned and started forward once more.

  They didn’t get very far, though.

  Tendrils emerged from the ground around their feet, as thick and sinuous as serpents, but instead of green, they were a deep, dark crimson. The tendrils coiled around the hunters’ legs as they stretched up their bodies, wrapped around their waists, chests, necks . . . The hunters let out animalistic roars of frustration at being bound by the blood tendrils. Those who reacted swiftly enough to keep their arms from being pinned to their sides fought back, slashing at the tendrils’ rubbery surfaces with their claws, while others bent their heads down and tried to bite their way free. The crimson substance turned to gore beneath their hands and in their mouths, but the tendrils repaired th
e damage, new blood filling their gaps until they were whole and strong once more.

  Amber felt a cold satisfaction as she witnessed the hunters’ futile struggles. “You know the old saying about how blood is thicker than water? Well, it’s stronger than steel, too.”

  Tendril tips stabbed toward the hunters’ mouths and slithered inside. The hunters’ eyes bulged in panic and pain as the tendrils forced their way down their throats, plunging deep into their bodies. And once they were deep enough, the tendrils went to work. It didn’t take long.

  The hunters thrashed and jerked for several moments but eventually fell still, and the tendrils retracted. As they released their grip on the hunters, their corpses slumped to the ground, and the tendrils returned to the earth from which they’d been born.

  She pulled her hands free from the ground and stood, wiping bits of soil from her fingers as she did.

  Trevor and Drew looked at her. “Damn, girl,” Trevor breathed. “That was hard-core!”

  She gave him a weak smile. Now that it was over, she felt shaky and more than a little queasy at the thought of what she’d done. “I didn’t plan that out,” she admitted. “It just kind of happened.”

  “Your subconscious mind tapped into the virtual world Greg created,” Drew said. “And it found a way to counter the threat he’d sent against us.” He reached out and gave her shoulders a loving squeeze. “Thanks to you, we now know we can fight him on his own terms.”

  The Native American village and the forest that surrounded it began to fade then, and the dark shape of the Lowry House reappeared.

  “Looks like we’re back to square one,” Trevor said.

  Drew shook his head. “No, we dealt with one challenge. If Greg is playing a game, then we just scored our first point. That means it’s time for the next move.”

  “Greg’s using our past as a model for his game,” Amber said. She glanced at the old barn on the side of the property. “If the hunters chased us fifteen years ago, we would’ve run. And if that’s the case, the closest place to hide is there.” She pointed to the barn.

  “I don’t remember going to the barn,” Trevor said. “Do either of you?”

  “No,” Drew said. He turned to Amber.

  “Me, neither. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “All right, let’s go see what Greg’s got planned for us next.”

  Drew took her hand. Despite the circumstances, she smiled, and the two of them headed for the barn, Trevor walking alongside them.

  For the first time since Greg had revealed his powers to them, she felt as if they might have a chance not only of surviving but of actually beating him. Of course, the game was far from over yet.

  They continued walking toward the barn and whatever waited for them within.

  They’d experienced a lot of weird stuff this weekend, but Trevor thought that the walk to the barn was in some ways the strangest of all, and not just because the three of them looked and sounded fifteen years younger. This was, in a sense, the third time he’d been there. Once during the previous hallucination that Greg had caused him to experience when he’d been at the Historical Society with Amber and once before that, when the three of them had been there as teenagers. And now here he was again, heading for the location where the bootlegger Stockslager had buried his victims.

  He wasn’t at all certain that they were doing the right thing by following the path Greg had laid out for them. Sure, they’d made it through the first scenario he’d set up, and Drew and Amber were emboldened by that victory, but Trevor wasn’t quite as encouraged. Greg might not be a god, but he’d do until the real thing came along, and Trevor had a hard time believing that the three of them had escaped the Indian massacre so easily. He suspected they’d been able to do so only because Greg had wanted it that way, that he was playing a deeper, more subtle game than they were aware of. How could they hope to fight Greg if they didn’t understand the rules he was playing by? How could they hope to survive, let alone win?

  He was still having trouble accepting that Greg was the dark guiding hand behind the supernatural occurrences they’d experienced this weekend. He hadn’t seemed like the evil-genius type back in high school. Ever since Greg had revealed himself back at the dance, Trevor had been sifting through his memories of him, fragmented and incomplete as they were. He remembered him as a hanger-on who’d professed an interest in the paranormal but had really just wanted to be a member of their little group. He’d rarely contributed anything, never offered any ideas, hadn’t even kicked in any money when they ordered pizza. And he’d often gotten in the way during investigations.

  He’d seemed nice enough on the surface, especially to Amber. But Trevor had detected a mean streak in him, one that manifested in small ways—a snide comment here, a curled lip there, a look as if you’d just said the stupidest thing a human being could express. Amber hadn’t seemed aware of it, which didn’t surprise Trevor, since she had a tendency to see the best in people. But what had surprised him was that Drew had never seemed to notice. Even as a teenager, Drew had been more empathetic and perceptive than most people, but, like Amber, he tended to be optimistic and give people the benefit of the doubt. Trevor was more pragmatic and clear-eyed, if not cynical. But even so, he had a difficult time seeing how a kid like Greg had turned into a stone-cold killer. But he hadn’t done it on his own, had he? The Lowry House had had everything to do with it, which begged a question: If fifteen years ago, Greg had been corrupted by the evil that inhabited this place, why hadn’t they? And that led to an even more disturbing thought: Just because they’d escaped corruption last time didn’t mean they’d do so this time.

  They reached the barn door, and Trevor saw that the wood was far more weathered than it had been in the vision he’d experienced at the Historical Society. The night air was warmer, too. It was still April, not January as in the vision, and there was no snow on the ground. This must have been the way it had been fifteen years ago, the night they’d investigated the Lowry House.

  “The door was unlocked,” Amber said. “At least, I think it was. But I still don’t remember what we found inside.”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Trevor said. “Let’s get to it.”

  He stepped forward, gripped the barn door handle, and slid the door open.

  The barn was dark inside, and the air that wafted out smelled thick and musty, as if the barn hadn’t been opened in decades. There was a faint sour-sweet underscent that made him think of old decay, like leaves rotting on a forest floor, and his stomach did a somersault because he knew where the smell came from.

  Drew shone his flashlight beam into the gloom to illuminate the way for them, and then the three friends stepped into Stockslager’s barn.

  Drew panned the flashlight beam around the barn’s interior, revealing it to be empty. The homemade still was gone, and the bare earth of the barn floor had been smoothed over, leaving no signs of the fire pit or the still or the graves that had once been there.

  “The police must’ve cleaned out the place,” Drew said. “And removed the bodies to bury them elsewhere.”

  The door slammed shut behind them. Trevor tried to open it but without success. The door, while not locked, refused to budge.

  The barn lights were still intact, and they came on now, filling the place with sour yellow illumination.

  “Something’s coming,” Amber said. “I feel it. Something bad.”

  The ground in the middle of the barn began to bulge upward as if something was pushing from underneath. It pulsed once, twice, and then, on the third time, soil burst upward and an obese form dragged itself into the light. It was Stockslager. The front of his clothes was soaked with blood, a result of the multiple gunshot wounds he’d suffered when the police ended his life, Trevor guessed. His head lolled on his fat neck, and his eyes . . . his eyes were gone, replaced with flickering orange-yellow light, as if a fire burned inside his skull.

  Once he’d fully emerged from the eart
h, Stockslager stood and regarded them for a moment. At least, that’s what Trevor thought he was doing. It was hard to tell with his eyes glowing like that. Waves of heat emanated from the man’s body, and the interior of the barn became hot. Trevor sensed what had happened. Stockslager had emerged from the exact spot where his fire pit had been, and he’d somehow internalized the flames that had once burned there. Beads of sweat formed on Trevor’s forehead and began trickling down his face, and he felt sweat roll down the length of his spine. The heat continued to increase and reached the point where it felt painful on his exposed skin, as if he was being stung by tiny insects. Stockslager’s dead flesh fared far worse. It began to redden and sizzle, as if being cooked from the inside out, and the smell of burning skin and meat filled the air. Trevor felt his gorge rise, and although he told himself that this was all part of the illusion and that he wasn’t really smelling anything, it didn’t help.

  Stockslager opened his mouth wider, and the heat coming off him increased even more. Trevor had a bad feeling about what was going to happen next, and he shoved Drew and Amber to the side as a gout of sharp-smelling clear liquid shot forth from Stockslager’s mouth. The liquid missed them and splattered the sealed-shut barn door. He feared that Stockslager wasn’t finished, and he pushed Drew and Amber even farther away. Stockslager made a harsh coughing sound then, and a stream of flame blasted outward from his mouth, blackening his dead lips, and struck the barn door. The alcohol ignited, and a mass of bright orange flame whooshed into life and began devouring the wood.

  Stockslager had internalized more than just the fire pit, Trevor realized. As bizarre as it sounded, he had the still inside him, too.