Becky was taking long strides and not looking back. Without even thinking about it, my hand clenched into a fist and slammed into my thigh hard enough to hurt.
What did you have to go and say that for? I raged at myself, feeling my already-simmering anger starting to rise higher. You are such a freaking idiot.
I kept watching, looking out past my own anguished reflection in the small circle of window that I could see out of. The sidewalks on Broadway were already pretty busy, full of university students out for a few drinks on a Saturday evening, or people just generally enjoying the Boulder weekend nightlife. Just before she disappeared into the passing crowds, something weird happened. A man fell into step behind Becky. He was tall and lean — as in, really, really thin, eve for a Boulderite. Boulder was an outdoorsy town where a lot of the resident measured their body fat in microns and Whole Foods was hands-down the biggest retailer.
I hadn’t noticed him before, but when the bus started moving again we soon caught up with them both and I got a much better view. The man was dressed very formally, as though he was going to a wedding or an awards ceremony, something like that; his suit looked like it was expensive, and yet at the same time very old, like the outfits you would see the actors wearing in historical movies like Lincoln or Tombstone (I don’t like westerns much, but that last was one of Dad’s favorite movies). He wasn’t wearing a hat though, and I could see dark hair combed neatly and carefully across the back of his head, with not a single strand out of place. He had taken up a spot on Becky’s left side, and there was just something that felt a little…I don’t know, off about him.
The thin man reached out with his arm and draped it gently around her shoulders. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw her shiver just a little. She didn’t turn to swat him away or anything, though, and I wondered if she really knew what he had done. From where I was sitting, it looked as if the arm was resting there very lightly, with the fingers of a black leather-gloved hand pushing their way creepily through her long red hair.
How on Earth was she not noticing that?
And then it hit me. It was so obvious.
The man wasn’t a flesh and blood man at all. The man was a spirit.
The bus put on a sudden burst of speed. For just a second we were parallel with them both, and then the next they were both behind us as we headed north on Broadway.
That was when I saw it.
I rose up out of my seat with a sense of growing horror, gripping the back of the one in front to support myself — not because of the bus bouncing on every pothole along Boulder’s busiest street, but because my legs were threatening to buckle.
Becky’s eyes were downcast, and looked as though she was on the verge of crying. She was walking quickly, in that way that people do when they’re angry or upset and allowing it to bleed over into their pace. She still wasn’t reacting to the stranger’s arm around her shoulders. But that wasn’t what had sent the jolt of fear down my spine.
It was the ghostly man’s face…
…because he didn’t have one.
There was just a black, oval mist where the face should have been. Two blue-and-white circles shone out of what, on anybody else, would have been the eye sockets.
Then he turned his head and they looked straight in my direction.
The man — no, the thing — smiled at me. It saw me, somehow, and stared directly at me through my little circle of de-misted window.
Don’t ask me how I know. I mean, the thing had no mouth, a black face, and to cap it off, it was night. But somehow, I could just tell that this hideous creature was smiling at me, leering at me from somewhere beneath those shining, malevolent orbs of light.
I was stunned. I couldn’t move. My legs were rooted to the floor. All I could do was watch as a distraught Becky made her way through the bitter cold, with a phantom passenger clinging to her and keeping up with every step she took.
Then the bus took off, leaving them both far behind us in the cold October night.
CHAPTER FOUR
When the bus dropped me off just a short distance from home, my hands were still shaking.
Carefully, I pulled out my phone and punched in the four-digit security code to unlock it. Becky was top of my Recents list of contacts. With trembling fingers, I tapped the button that would dial her number.
It rang straight through to her voicemail.
“Hi!” said her breezy, cheerful voice coming out of the speaker. “You’ve reached Becky, and you know what you do. Kaythanksbye!”
Beep.
“Becky, this is Danny. Please call me back. It’s important, OK? Like, really important. Call me. Please. As soon as you can.Thanks.”
I hung up.
She never called back.
I tried twice more on the walk back, but there was still no answer. It wasn’t a long journey back to the trailer park, but it sure felt like it was to me. I tried texting her next. Same deal.
Silence.
Because it was Saturday, Mom was enjoying a night out with her friends. The house (yeah, I know it’s a trailer, but Mom and I have always called it the house) wasn’t totally quiet, though. Although Mom didn’t know it, Dad had sent us a very special gift directly from his new home in the Summerland — Moggie. Moggie (real name Magua, but also known as Magua the Jaguar) had been my cat when I was growing up. He had developed a brain tumor, and the vet told us he was going to die within a few weeks. One screaming and wailing fit from me later, Mom and Dad went up to their ears in credit card debt and took Moggie to the very best specialist vets in the world, up at the University of Colorado School of Veterinary Medicine. They zapped the tumor with a precisely-targeted radiation beam, and just like the Death Star obliterating Alderaan, the beam left left nothing behind it apart from a few scattered bits and pieces of matter. Moggie was left with a shock of brilliant white hair running from his jet black forehead, down between his eyes, and ending just above his little button nose, where the beam had gone in and done its thing. If anything, it made him look even more handsome than he had before the procedure.
The chubby little black cat who was only supposed to live on for just a few weeks more, actually ended up living a few years more instead. The Mog finally passed away peacefully in his sleep at the end of my bed one night a couple of years ago, having taken full advantage of the chance to become fat, dumb, pampered and happy until the end of his days.
Dad knew how lonely Mom and I were these days. He was fully aware of how hard it was for us to go on without him. I had always taken comfort in knowing that all of our pets, whether they’re cats, dogs, horses, birds, heck even the snakes, basically any animal that was ever loved by a human, has a place in the next life, not to mention there being no shortage of people to fuss them and play with them; but it was one thing to know it intellectually, and a whole other story when my boy The Mog strolled nonchalantly in through the front door one day (without opening it first) and greeted me with his customary miaowf.
Moggie wasn’t solid in his spirit form, so I wasn’t able to scratch behind his ears or administer the belly rubs that he had always loved so much. He had always been pretty much his own cat, but as aloof as he could be, I also knew that he secretly loved having some human company about the place. I might have been able to see through his body, which was permanently outlined in a luminous blue glow like the force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but other than that he was still the same old Mog, and it always made me better to see him strutting about the place.
“’Sup, Mog?” I asked, closing the front door behind me and making my way across the living room of our double-wide trailer and into the kitchen.
“Miaowf.”
Bless Mom. She’d left me some lasagne in the microwave, along with a note telling me she’d be back pretty late tonight. Well, good for her. She worked really hard to keep us both afloat, and she deserved to cut loose every once in a while if she felt like it.
I hit the start button and tried calling Bec
ky again while the lasagne was warming up. Still no answer, damn it.
Now I was starting to get worried. That spirit with no face — there was no way something like that could have been human — had to be something dark. Worse, it was probably an inhuman entity. The very few human spirits I’d encountered who seemed to have a truly evil nature still had human-like appearances; heck, even that monster von Spiessbach had possessed the face of a man. Whatever this thing was, it had probably never walked the Earth in any sort of living, breathing body at all.
Every faith and culture around the world and throughout human history has got a name for entities like that. Christians called them demons, of course; to followers of Islam they had many names, including jinn and shayateen, to name just two. They’re said to be much older than humanity, and a thousand times nastier — which, when you take a look at some of the heinous things that people have done to one another over the years, is saying quite a lot. I tried asking Lamiyah about them once. Her manner turned steely and cold in a heartbeat, and she shot me a look that told me in no uncertain terms to drop the subject, because there are some things I wasn’t ready to know yet.
So I dropped the subject. Lamiyah has a way of being really persuasive when she wants to be.
Duh duh duh duh duh duh...
The theme music from Star Wars suddenly started playing in my hand, which meant only one thing: a text message. I swiped eagerly at the phone. It was from Becky.
Quit bugging me Danny. I really don’t want to talk to you tonight, OK? We can talk later. B.
I blew out a massive sigh. Usually she signed off with an X or two.
Could I have been wrong about the dark entity — could I have imagined the whole thing? I certainly didn’t think so. But she had gotten home safely, at least, and it didn’t sound as though she was anything other than justifiably angry and in need of a little personal space. Frankly, I couldn’t find it in me to blame her for that, not even a little.
So what were my options now: keep calling and acting like a…like some kind of freaking stalker? That would be like upending a gas can over a burning barbecue grill. I could call a taxi and head over to her house, try to reason with her — but that would be basically the same thing, wouldn’t it? I just had to accept the fact that she didn’t want to talk to me right now, and it was as simple as that. As mad at me as she was, I might end up in some real trouble if I pushed things any further tonight.
The microwave pinged. I grabbed the plate of lasagne, threw in a Blu-Ray of The Clone Wars, and threw myself down onto the couch. For the next couple of hours, I tried to lose myself in the adventures of Obi Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka. By the time that the fourth episode rolled around, I was yawning for all I was worth — and it had nothing to do with the show. I loved Clone Wars. It had been a long day, at the end of a long week, and I was feeling pretty darn fried. When the end credits rolled, I flipped the TV off and decided to call it a night.
When my teeth were brushed, I tossed my clothes on the back of a chair and crawled into bed. For just a few seconds before I turned out the light, I thought about picking up a graphic novel from the beat-up old bedside table, but I was so tired that I knew I didn’t even have the energy to read a couple of pages of something awesome.
I had no way of knowing that it wasn’t going to be a restful night.
CHAPTER FIVE
When I visit with Lamiyah, or pretty much any other spirit that isn’t earthbound, I do it in my sleep. It happens during what would look a lot like a lucid dreaming state, if a doctor happened to be running an EEG on me at the time.
These aren’t exactly your garden variety dreams. They just feel different to me somehow. It’s hard to put into words, but a pretty good analogy would be the difference between watching a movie in 3-D IMAX compared to watching an ordinary 2D version on your home TV. Spirit visitation dreams are way, way more vivid and spectacular, the colors being brighter and more vibrant; the sounds are also sharper and clearer, but perhaps the biggest difference of all is that you just know, deep down inside yourself, that this is all actually happening.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite one of those dreams…but it wasn’t the ordinary kind either.
This was more like a movie that had been directed and edited by a madman.
It started out with an old building, set high up on a hill. From a distance, it was squat and menacing, and speaking of movies, it wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a horror movie. A tall brick chimney towered over the rest of the single-story brick structure. As I got closer — which was weird, because I couldn’t actually feel myself walking — I noticed that two ambulances were parked outside on a concrete platform, surrounded on three sides by a wrought iron fence.
The night was overcast, the low grey cloud layer letting through practically no light from the moon and stars. Don’t ask me how (because I had no sense of temperature) but somehow I knew that the air was cold. Perhaps it was the frost that was already forming on the windshields of those two ambulances. Then I was past them, flying (for lack of a better word) between them both and through the black iron railings toward a set of metal-framed glass doors at the speed of a fast walk. I could just make out a sign above them that said “Emergency Room,” though it was halfway covered in dirt and shadow.
I was more worried by what looked like two bloody hand prints on two of the tinted windows; it looked to me as if somebody with a pretty bad injury had tried to push their way either in or out of the place, though I had no way of telling which it was.
Just as it looked as if I was going to smash into the doors, they both flew open wide, slamming back forcefully against their frames. They hit so hard, I was amazed that the glass panes didn’t shatter. Now I found myself in some kind of lobby or entrance area. The floor was tiled, and off to my right were some glass display cases whose shelves were stocked with souvenirs and keepsakes along the lines of folded t-shirts, mugs, glasses, and other stuff like that. Directly in front of me was a set of closed double doors, and to the left was a long hallway which stretched away further than I could see — the far end of it was just one big pool of darkness.
Something else told me that I wasn’t having a lucid dream: usually, I could control my actions as much as I wanted to, walking (sometimes flying if I felt like it) wherever I wanted to go, and much faster than was possible in the waking world. Not this time, though: someone else was doing the driving. I pivoted to my right, cutting around the display cases and pushing through a pair of hanging curtains that were thick and heavy enough to keep out most of the light.
I was in a dark corridor, standing still for a moment and perhaps giving my eyes an opportunity to adjust. I couldn’t see anything to either side of me, but there seemed to be a source of dim light coming from somewhere not too far up ahead. I could just about make out the edges of the narrow corridor that surrounded me. It was fairly narrow, and the roof was low enough to make me feel a little claustrophobic, so I did my best to shove the idea toward the back of my mind and willed myself to move forward somehow. No matter how much I tried to walk, scoot, or fly forward, the end result was always the same: I just stood there, motionless and helpless.
Waiting.
Time must have passed, but I have no idea how long I spent waiting there. Everything was completely silent. I couldn’t even hear the sound of my own breath rasping in my ears, or the thud of my heartbeat inside my chest. An eon could have passed without me knowing it, or maybe just a few minutes — there was simply no way to tell.
A high-pitched scream made me want to jump halfway out of my skin. It was coming from somewhere up ahead, and from the sound of it, it was a female voice.
Suddenly, I was moving again, floating forward toward whoever had just cried out. The corridor was changing too. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors on both sides of me, and I was able to turn my head to look at my reflection: yep, I was still me alright, wearing the same shorts that I’d worn to bed. My hair even looked mussed from the pillow. Bu
t that was as much control as I had, the ability to turn my head and look around. Apart from that, I seemed to be as powerless as a puppet on strings, dancing to the tune of some invisible puppeteer as I was moved further along the mirrored corridor. The path twisted and turned, sometimes seeming to double back on itself, and at other places even forcing me to swerve around mirrored outcrops and sidesteps. This was all starting to feel like some sort of maze.
I sensed it rather than saw it, at first: there was something else in here with me, and whatever it was, it most definitely wasn’t the source of the scream that I had just heard. That person had been frightened and vulnerable, if my ears weren’t steering me wrong. This thing, whatever it was, wasn’t frightened at all: in fact, it felt downright predatory, because I was getting a definite feeling of malicious glee radiating out from it. What’s more, it felt as if it was a direct response to that same sense of fear.
Looking to my left and right, I caught sight of something in the mirrors on either side of me. At first it was just brief flashes, indistinct but definitely there, lurking somewhere off in the background as the mirror images stretched away into infinite versions of themselves. They sort of reminded me of the opening sequence for the Tom Baker run of Doctor Who.
Then I worked it out. They were figures — human-shaped figures, shadowy and indistinct, a bunch of silent observers who seemed to be every bit as curious about me as I was about them. I kept moving forward through the darkness. Heads peeked around the edges and corners of the mirrors, watching me silently. Some of them were at the height of a grown adult, but others were low enough to the floor to make them either children or very short adults. As I moved from one mirror to the next, some of the shadow forms dashed to keep up, and I caught glimpses of shadowy arms, legs, and heads…but I couldn’t make out any facial features, or any real detail at all. They were more like rough sketches drawn by an artist who was in a serious hurry to get the picture done.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 3
