Nightmare

by Robin Parrish

  "Or if their final destination is eternal paradise in heaven," he continued, "why would they want to stay behind here on earth, a place that in comparison to heaven is wretched at best?"

  "All right," I replied, my wheels spinning, "say that's all true. Die and go directly to heaven or hell, don't pass Go, don't collect two hundred dollars. Who's to say, then, that those escorted to heaven after they die aren't allowed to come back and visit from time to time? Don't look at me like that-I'm serious! I can accept that hell is a prison, but is heaven a prison, too? Redeemed souls check in, but they don't check out? The Bible offers precious little information when it comes to the workings of heaven and eternal life. How can we say with absolute authority that occasional visits to the mortal realm aren't allowed?"

  Derek squinted his eyes. "We can't," he conceded.

  A moment of silence passed as I enjoyed my brief triumph. But he rallied with a new approach.

  "Tell me something. What belief system do you subscribe to? Spiritualism? New Age?"

  I grimaced. Why did everyone always assume that if you were open to the existence of ghosts, you had to be a Spiritualist?

  "In my experience, people who trust in those kinds of belief systems tend to practice very dangerous things. Rituals and such, that-whether knowingly or not-often invite unwanted things into their lives."

  "Unwanted things," Derek echoed. "Like demons."

  "For example."

  He almost smiled. It was the first time I'd seen his eyes light up since Jordin had gone missing. "That's a starter for a whole other conversation right there," he said. "But before we get sidetracked ... You never answered my question. What do you believe in?"

  "As it happens, my mother raised me Catholic."

  Derek noticed the distinct phrasing. "So you don't practice?"

  "Not since I became an adult. My mother required it of me, regularly taking me to mass, enrolling me in catechism and all that. My father thought it was nonsense, but he knew better than to argue. He's agnostic, and the two of them settled long before I was born on letting each other cling to his or her own belief without trying to change the other."

  "But your mother believes what you believe-about ghosts. Doesn't she?"

  Has he seen my parents'show? I wondered. The differing views of my parents were a unique aspect of the show, and one that made it so popular. "My mother was born and raised in Mexico City, where Catholicism mixed freely with mysticism and superstitions like the Day of the Dead. I suppose you could say she's fashioned her own beliefs that take into account both the teachings of the Bible and the paranormal things she's seen and experienced for herself."

  "And is that what you've done?" Derek asked. "Formed your own belief system by picking and choosing the tenets of various theologies that you find most fashionable?"

  I was sure I'd just been insulted, though I couldn't quite put my finger on the exact spot where it'd happened. "It will no doubt surprise you to learn that I believe the same things that you believe, about the Bible and God and Jesus. I just believe ... a bit more. And don't act like I'm unusual or something-there are plenty of Christians in the world who believe in ghosts.

  "Even the disciples believed in ghosts. That was their first thought when they saw Jesus walking toward them on the lake. And also when He was resurrected. I know that one by heart. He said, `Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.' He doesn't lecture them on whether ghosts are real or not. He's alive, that's what matters. And that's just the New Testament. Don't get me started on Saul using the Witch of Endor to conjure up Samuel. Are you telling me Samuel was a demon?"

  Derek stared at me with slitted eyes for a very long time. "I don't know," he finally admitted. "But Saul's choices were evil. Nothing good came of it."

  It was my turn to lean back in my seat. "I don't like a religion that doesn't leave room for questions. Don't sit there and tell me that ghosts are an absolute impossibility when the very text your entire belief system is based on not only doesn't rule out the notion that they exist, but actually refers to them more than once as if they're real."

  Adrenaline was coursing through my system as I finished my little speech, and I almost felt bad for Derek. He looked as though I'd slapped him across the face.

  "My biggest question," he whispered, "is what's happened to Jordin."

  As if in answer, my phone rang. I checked the screen and this time it was a real call.

  "Hello?"

  "Ms. Peters?" said Dr. Eccleston. "Is your friend with you? I need to see you in my office at once."

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "I deciphered your symbol. I believe you're going to be very surprised at what I found."

  I looked at Derek meaningfully. "We'll be right there."

  On Eccleston's computer screen was something remarkable. It was a perfect rendering of the complicated symbol from the back of Carrie Morris's neck, which the professor had somehow extracted from its original image and manipulated in three dimensions.

  "I kept thinking," explained Eccleston, "it was so complex, it was like looking at more than one symbol at a time. And then it hit me...." His index finger reached out and stabbed a single key, and the symbol on the screen rotated ninety degrees sideways to reveal three distinct black shapes, stacked on top of each other. All three were fashioned out of a similar iconography. "It is more than one symbol," he finished, clearly proud of himself. "Three, to be exact, intertwined and overlapping each other like a tied knot. The image you supplied was so small, it took some creative extrapolation to see all three symbols in their original state. There are several lines-like this vertical one down the center, and this outer curve-that overlap perfectly. Once I realized this, I recognized all three immediately. Then it was just a matter of modeling-"

  "What are they?" Derek interrupted. "What do they mean?"

  "They are ancient alchemical symbols," Eccleston replied with a hint of reverence in his voice. He tapped another key and they swiveled back to a front-on view, but slid apart so we could see all three more clearly. He pointed to each in turn as he explained. The first looked like a lowercase m with a strange little curl at the end. "This one is commonly known as the zodiac sign for Virgo. In alchemical terms, it essentially stands for distillation or separation," he explained.

  He pointed at the second one, which was a circle with a vertical line running down its center. Breaking off from that line to the left was a horizontal line, which was looped with a second circle. "This one is less common than the other two. It appears to be a representation of lodestone. Lodestone is a natural magnet, so I believe that in this context, it represents the magnet's ability to bind one thing to another."

  Eccleston's finger hovered over the final symbol. It was the simplest of the three, merely an inverted triangle with a horizontal line passing through it. "This is the alchemical symbol for earth."

  The two of us were silent as his explanation sank in. It made no more sense now than it had before the professor had untangled the symbols.

  "So what does it mean?" Derek asked.

  Eccleston shook his head. "Well, the fact that it was found on human skin is significant. The ancients believed that symbols were more than just a language; they thought that the symbols themselves held power. Where did you say you saw this on your friend, again?"

  "The spot on the back of her neck where her neck met her skull," I replied.

  "Where the neck meets the skull..." he muttered. "Hmm."

  We both looked at him. "What?" asked Derek.

  "Well, this place that you describe on the back of the neck ... It's long been theorized by pagans and parapsychologists that that could be the seat of the human soul."

  The human soul...

  I crossed myself involuntarily as a terrible thought began taking shape. I couldn't believe I was even entertaining such an idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it added up. Every piece of this crazy puzzle suddenly fit perfectly.

  He
allowed us a moment to process this before continuing. "If I didn't know better, I might think someone was using this trifold glyph trying to bind a human soul to something."

  "Bind it to something?" Derek asked, not catching on. "What do you mean?"

  But it was all coming into focus for me.

  "Well, grammatically the word `bind' is used when something is tethered or anchored to a specific thing or place."

  That was it. I understood. I knew what was happening.

  "A specific thing or place-like the earth," I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  "The third part of the symbol?" asked Derek.

  My thoughts were spinning fast now, my heart pounding like mad, and my mouth barely able to keep up with what I was thinking. I faced Derek and tried to pretend Dr. Eccleston wasn't there. "All right, okay-what if ... listen, I know how this sounds, but just think about it ... let's say for a second that somebody, through, I don't know, some kind of advanced technology or something, found a way to extract a soul from a human being? The third symbol stands for distillation or separation, right? What if the combined symbol stands for a process of physically separating a soul from its body? And then binding that soul to the earth."

  Derek stood silent, dread filling his eyes.

  I nodded slowly, my eyes big and fearful. "A disembodied soul."

  Derek shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs. "You're saying that someone out there did this on purpose. To Jordin and maybe Carrie? And they could be doing it to more people right now?"

  I wasn't sure I was ready to commit to endorsing this altogether, because it sounded ludicrous. But it fit the facts. So I took a deep breath and said it out loud.

  "What if somebody's found a way to create a ghost?"

  It was getting late, and our heads were dizzy with many thoughts of what all of this could mean. More than likely, it was just nonsense, so we agreed to turn in for the night and consider it all again with fresh perspectives. But before parting ways, we decided that our next avenue of investigation had to be finding Jordin's journal.

  "I've looked everywhere," Derek told me. "Her dorm room, her condo downtown. Everywhere she normally hangs out. No one's seen it. You suppose it could still be somewhere up in Martha's Vineyard, since that's where she disappeared from?"

  I nodded, thinking. "Maybe we should take a ride up there. Do you know where Jordin and her friends were staying?"

  "Jordin owns a vacation home up there," said Derek.

  "Of course she does," I said wistfully.

  Going there ourselves might be the only way we would ever discover what path had led her to wherever she now was-or whatever she had now become.

  I still don't think Derek believed me about that, even after all that'd happened. I decided to put it aside until tomorrow as I crashed in a sleeping bag in my old roommate Jill's room for the night.

  I wasn't asleep yet when my phone vibrated, thanks to a very unexpected caller.

  "You said in your email that you have a friend among the missing students," said Boston Herald reporter Pierre Ravenwood, playing it cool and turning his paper coffee cup slowly in his hands as he talked.

  In the rush of hearing from Jordin, I'd forgotten to expect his call. He'd made his way down from Boston and we arranged to meet in a popular coffeehouse just off campus. It was almost midnight, so the place was packed with students in need of a caffeine fix for study purposes, but we located a tiny table off to one side in the crowded room and spoke in hushed voices.

  I had arrived first, but Pierre followed in less than five minutes. He was on the short side, with dark, straight hair that he wore a little longer on top than was currently in style. But he had on designer jeans, a crisp button-up shirt, and black sunglasses with lenses that were nearly clear inside the building.

  I could see from the way he carried himself that Pierre was going to keep his cards close.

  "At the time, I did," I replied. "Now I know two."

  "Two," he repeated.

  I nodded. "And I know for a fact that both of them experienced something very, very odd shortly before they vanished."

  Pierre shifted forward in his seat a hair. "How odd?"

  "Odd enough to defy conventional explanation," I told him. "I even have photographic evidence."

  He took a moment to absorb this, and I saw a multitude of thoughts whiz through his brain. He pierced me with his dark eyes and said, "I'd like to see this evidence."

  I interlaced my fingers and placed them on the table. "Tell me what you know. About the disappearances. And about Durham Holdings. And I'll give you the exclusive-including my photo."

  I expected an argument, but he merely leaned back in his seat and considered my terms, not changing his facial expression a single tic.

  There was something about watching him think that I found captivating. Everything about him seemed so even-keeled, confident, thoughtful. I wondered if he ever played poker.

  He displayed several qualities I admired, and ...

  Well...

  He was kinda cute.

  "How old are you?" I asked, not caring about how brazen the question might come across.

  "How old are you?" he fired back without missing a beat.

  "Twenty-one," I replied.

  "You look older," he noted, and I couldn't tell whether he was intentionally trying to provoke me or if he was just socially inept. "I'm twenty-six."

  "Hmm, an older man," I remarked before I could stop myself.

  I should probably interject here that whenever I meet a guy I like, I have a tendency to be a little too forward.

  Okay, more than a little.

  I was about to ask him if he was currently seeing anyone when he reeled the conversation back in, having decided to accept my terms.

  "The disappearances have been going on for more than a year," he said. "The rate at which it happened started very slow, with just one or two students vanishing from a couple of colleges in a single state over three months' time. But it built and according to my research there's over three hundred students unaccounted for. Not very many from one place, but the total is frightening. I don't know if I was the first to pick up on it, but I was the first to write about it."

  "Why isn't this all over the news? There should be Amber alerts and all that."

  "Well," he said, leaning forward again and growing a teensy bit more animated, "whoever's doing this knows how to be discreet. Every person that's vanished has had a good reason for not drawing a lot of attention to their absence. Many of them are young people who are estranged from their parents for one reason or another. Others have no immediate family to miss them. Sometimes they even go to the trouble of leaving notes behind for roommates and friends to find, claiming the `need to get away' and `find themselves' and so on."

  I let out a long breath as I considered this. I knew how the stresses of college life could get to people; I saw it every day. It wasn't inconceivable that someone out there could be taking advantage of that.

  "So how did DHI fall onto your radar?" I asked.

  He threw me a dark, threatening look, a nonverbal communique that he'd find a way to chop my head off if I repeated to anyone what he was about to say. "I have an inside source. A few days after I published my story, I started getting anonymous emails from someone claiming to work at DHI's corporate offices in Copenhagen. I doubted its veracity, of course, but over time, this person convinced me that they were legit. But DHI's security makes Fort Knox look like a day care-this company is not just vigilant, they're paranoid in every sense of the word-so my source has to be very, very careful.

  "I still don't know anything about him or who he is. I don't know if he is a he. But I know they're scared out of their minds by something that's going on inside the company. And that something is directly related to the disappearances, or so this person's told me. Meanwhile, DHI is impenetrable. I can't even get them on the phone, and my editor thinks I'm getting paranoid, so she won't pay for a flight to Denmark. I've bee
n trying to hire some locals in Copenhagen to do some snooping around for me, but so far I can't find anyone willing to go anywhere near these people.

  "Now. I've been more than generous in what I've told youmostly because I'm at a dead end and in desperate need of something to justify continuing this line of pursuit to my editor. So if you can connect these dots for me, let's hear it."

  "The connection," I replied, "is Ghost Town."

  "That amusement park?"

  "Yes. I don't know how, but Ghost Town is at the heart of all of this."

  From there, I told him what I knew, leaving out the heaviest paranormal bits because he didn't seem the type to swallow it. I told him about Jordin and what we knew of the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. And I told him about Carrie Morris, and how she'd vanished from Columbia literally overnight.

  Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket, I said, "I don't know if I can connect every one of those dots for you, but I can show you what one of them looks like." I handed him the phone, which had the picture of the symbol on its screen.

  "What is that?" he asked, taking the phone and examining the image up close from behind his heavy-rimmed rectangular glasses.

  "It appeared on Carrie Morris's neck the morning before she disappeared."

  He looked up at me with a strange expression, like he was trying to figure out if I was putting him on.

  "There's more," I said. "A lot more. I think I know what DHI is up to, and I have a pretty good idea of what's become of all those missing students."

  He eyed me carefully. "And what's that information going to cost me?"

  "A willingness to believe in the impossible," I replied.

  By the time our meeting ended, I couldn't tell if Pierre was humoring me or if he was simply dazed at such an outlandish hypothesis. Either way, I knew I'd given him a lot to think about.

  As I walked through the brisk New York night, my thoughts returned to Dr. Eccleston's discovery and our theory about what was behind all this. Manufacturing ghosts? Were Derek and I grasping at the implausible just because we were desperate to solve this mystery?