“I guess, maybe…” I stammered, caught off-guard.
“Maybe, nothing,” Mom said fiercely, leaning forward with a look of grim determination in her eye. I knew that look only too well. I’d seen it before a hundred times, maybe more. Every time since Dad’s death that she had been forced to do the work of both parents, raising me on her own and making more than one decision that she knew full well was going to make me resent her, even as she knew with every bit as much certainty that it was for my own good…that was the look Mom had given me. Every single time. “Daniel, Becky is an incredible special young lady. She’s one in a million. Don’t ask me how, and don’t ask me why, but I have this…sense about her. Mothers simply know, although I don’t expect you to understand such things.” She frowned, which made her face look even sterner. “But you are right about one thing, at least.”
“What’s that?”
“If you keep treating her like this, you are going to lose her. Whether as a friend or as a girlfriend, either way.”
I let out a long, slow breath. Neither of us broke eye contact. Finally I said, “I know.”
Mom nodded, seemingly satisfied with the admission.
“Then the only question now is: what are we going to do about it?”
Without meaning to, I broke into a broad grin. Mom had said “we.” We. Not you. We.
Mom and I were in this together, just like we were with everything else. I don’t think I’ve ever loved her more than I did just then.
“I need to tell her how I really feel about her, Mom.” My cheeks flushed red with embarrassment, but I kept on going regardless. “I need to make it up to her. And I need to do it right now. Today.”
“Yes, you do,” Mom agreed.
This was where it got tricky. I didn’t want her to feel like I had ambushed her or anything like that, but if I was going to go and help protect Becky from the Dark Man, I knew it couldn’t be done without Mom’s help.
“But I can’t get to see her, Mom. She’s staying with her cousin and volunteering in a haunted house.” I explained to her all about Snare of Souls and that Becky was doing it to help her come to terms with what had happened to us up at Long Brook.
I don’t know that she was buying it one hundred percent, but it seemed to make at least some kind of sense to her. “How far away is Tyrant’s Grove?” she asked at last.
“Three, maybe four hours drive.” I had mapped it already online.
Mom sighed, then finished the last of her coffee and set the cup down firmly on a coaster. She stood up.
“You’d better throw a change of clothes together pretty quickly then. We’ll need to be on the road before lunchtime if you want to catch her before dark.”
Man, I could have kissed her.
So I did.
CHAPTER NINE
We were on the road in twenty minutes.
“We’ll find a nice hotel and stay for the night,” Mom told me as she hit the accelerator and guided the Prius onto the Interstate by way of an entrance ramp. We blew past a huge Safeway truck as if it wasn’t even there, quickly moving into the far-left lane. Mom set the cruise control for eighty, five miles an hour above the limit and about as fast as she could get away with if a friendly neighborhood State Trooper decided to pull us over, she always said. I was impressed that a Prius could even reach eighty, and when I told her, I had to duck a friendly swat.
“Are you sure we can afford it?” I asked, feeling a little guilty about making Mom part with her hard-earned money for gas and now a hotel room too. I knew she wasn’t made of money — that was why she worked two jobs, just to make ends meet.
“You let me worry about that,” she answered firmly, her eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror in annoyance toward some jerk in an F-150 who was tail-gating us. “Some things are worth it,” she added under her breath.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
Normally, I’d have dreaded taking a road trip with Mom — something else I should probably have felt guilty about, because once you got past the whole “Mom” thing, she was a really awesome person in her own right. Now I was kicking myself for ever having forgotten that. We laughed and talked and told one another stories. Some of them involved Dad, and the laughter was mixed with a tear or two for each of us. We both really missed him. I hoped that some day soon, he’d be able to make contact with Mom in her dreams and take away some of that brutal loneliness I knew she was feeling — loneliness which she mistakenly thought she was hiding from me so well.
We took a break once along the way, at a small truck stop just outside of Sterling. While she gassed up the car, I bought Mom a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, and a hot chocolate with whipped cream for myself. Heading east on I-76, it was mostly flat plains and scrubland, broken up every few miles by another small little town. If we’d kept going on the Interstate, I-76 would have merged with I-80 (at least, that’s what the mapping app on my phone said) and taken us all the way into Nebraska; instead, we took the exit for Highway 6 just outside Sterling. The towns got smaller, and the emptiness separating them got bigger.
It was just past three o’clock in the afternoon when we finally arrived at Tyrant’s Grove. Although it was a small town, it was a little bigger than I was expecting for something this far out of the way. The imaginatively-named Main Street was home to a few stores, including a 7/11 and a Denny’s. There was also a gas station and a post office, though it wasn’t nearly big enough for a Walmart or a Target. Then again, it’s not like we were here to do any retail therapy; this was just a flying visit to see Becky, give me the chance to apologize and to warn her about the Dark Man, and then hopefully (if she saw sense) boogie out of here just as soon as I could talk her into it. I already had a bad feeling about the town, but I couldn’t come up with a single good reason as to why.
I mean, it’s not as though everything was dark and foreboding. It was a cold but clear day, typical for late October in Colorado. We were lucky not to have snow. The sun was riding high in the sky, and thanks to the relative dryness of the air, you could actually get away with wearing just a T-shirt outdoors for ten or fifteen minutes at a time if you felt like it. Tyrant’s Grove itself looked really fairly nice to me, and nothing like the sort of place where the locals hunted down strangers and newcomers in horror movies for their own evil ends.
So why did things feel so…wrong?
“Where to now, honey?” Mom asked, breaking my train of thought. She glanced expectantly at me from the corner of her eye. Hurriedly, I glanced down at my phone. The moving dot indicating our car was moving slowly from left to right along the thick line which represented Main Street. I scanned for the red pin I’d dropped to mark the location of the Snare. It was seven or eight blocks ahead of us and to the north, our left. Just past it was a Hampton Inn and a Best Western.
“Which one’s closest to the haunted house?” Mom asked, keeping her eyes on the road. There were a ton of construction signs and workers splitting Main Street in half. They seemed to be digging up the south side of the street. I had no idea why. I looked back at my screen and squinted.
“The Hampton. It’s just a few blocks away.”
“The Hampton Inn it is, then,” Mom decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment. “Lead the way!”
We went east for another ten blocks and then I told Mom to hang a left. Although the front part of the Hampton Inn looked out onto Main Street, the parking lot was at the back, according to their website. This was more of a hotel than a motel, and I was pretty stoked to see that they had a pool…not that I’d have much time to use it, knowing my luck.
Heading further uphill, the road dead-ended at the gates of a massive cemetery. When I say massive, I really do mean it: this place was huge, sprawling out for a good quarter-mile or more. It was set back from the road behind a black-painted iron fence, and a good third of it looked to be unused, completely empty of grave markers, benches, or flowers.
Why does a town this small need a graveyard this big? I wondered, marv
eling at the expanse of neatly-trimmed grass in front of us. Mom signaled and turned right, going one block further east and then dog-legging around to follow a bend in the road, until it finally led us into the parking lot of our destination for the night.
There were plenty of parking spaces to choose from. Mom tucked the Prius into a spot at the back of the building, which was just a stone’s throw away from the cemetery fence. I popped the rear door and grabbed my backpack and Mom’s way-classier little roller suitcase. It trundled along behind her as she walked towards the Hampton.
We cut down along the left side of the hotel, between a row of parked cars and the windows of the ground floor level. Sure enough, there was an indoor pool, just like the website had promised, extending out into the parking lot. The windows were steamed up, but we could see a family of what looked like two parents and a couple of young daughters were enjoying the water. There were also a couple of treadmills and a few other pieces of gym equipment, none of which looked anything like fun to me – they were exercise machines, after all, and exercise has never been something I’ve liked all that much.
“In here,” said Mom, finding a side door that led us into the main lobby. The place was warm and welcoming, complete with a breakfast bar and what looked like a rack of free cookies.
Mom checked us in while my eyes wandered around the room, taking in some historic old photos of the town from way back when. It looked as though Tyrant’s Grove was once a mining camp, based on the clothes worn by the old guys in most of the pictures, and the tools they all carried — mostly shovels and pickaxes. There were a lot of soot-streaked faces and big walrus-like mustaches. Mining was a hazardous job, I knew (mainly from watching the History Channel). Tunneling and excavating killed more than its fair share of miners, mostly because of the dynamite that was so often used.
I wondered how many of them were buried out there in that cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the hotel pool.
“Are you guys here to visit family?” asked the desk clerk with a friendly smile, handing a pair of room keys over to Mom in a little paper sleeve. A golden tag on her right lapel told me that her name was LaWanna.
“Kind of,” Mom said, accepting the keys and inclining her head toward me. “My son, Danny, is going to visit his girlfriend.” I winced as soon as she said the ‘G’ word.
“How sweet,” LaWanna gushed, her smile broadening even further. “Does she live around here?”
Mom looked at me expectantly.
“Just for a while,” I volunteered reluctantly. “She volunteers up at the Snare.” LaWanna looked at me blankly, not comprehending. “The Snare of Souls,” I clarified.
“Oh!” Light suddenly dawned. “You mean up at the old hospital.” I nodded. LaWanna’s expression darkened just as quickly. “Y’all wouldn’t get me in there for a million dollars.”
“Why not?” I asked, interested despite myself.
“Yes,” Mom echoed, turning back around to face the front desk. “Why not?”
“Take it from me, that place is haunted, alright.” LaWanna assumed a conspiratorial air. “In fact, it’s the most haunted building in town. Everybody in Tyrant’s Grove knows that.”
“Oh really?” Mom didn’t sound too convinced, but LaWanna was warming to her theme.
“Uh-huh. Yeah.” She nodded enthusiastically to emphasize her point. “When I was a kid, the place was pretty much abandoned. Me and a couple of my friends…well, we broke in, I’m ashamed to say. Broke in and went on down to the basement…”
“Let me guess,” I interrupted, holding up a hand. “You took a Ouija board, right?”
LaWanna’s eyes went wide. “Now how did you know that?” Mom looked at me with the same question written across her face.
“Oh, come on,” I half-groaned, “haven’t you seen any horror movies? Like, ever?”
Both women looked confused now.
“It’s how like ninety percent of them start.” I knew that I was exaggerating for effect, but I really didn’t care. “A bunch of kids get a Ouija board from somewhere – or make their own – and wind up sneaking into some old, abandoned, and above all off-limits place so they can make contact with the ghosts there. Always ends in tears.”
“Well, it sure did in our case,” LaWanna agreed.
“Do tell.” Mom said. She seemed intrigued. To tell you the truth, I was pretty interested too. I was hungry for as much information about Becky’s new (and hopefully temporary) place of work as I could possibly get.
The receptionist’s eyes darted from left to right, her voice lowering as though she was about to let us in on a huge secret. “So we’re down there in the basement. It was full of dirt and water pipes, just really filthy and nasty. There were spiders, bugs, the works.” She shuddered at the memory. “We found this one room, looked like it had been some kind of office, you know? It had a wooden desk and a couple of chairs, couple of filing cabinets.
“Anyhow, we sat down in a circle on that cement floor — man, it was cold — and we laid that board out in the middle. Melissa had the pointer thing—”
“The planchette,” I corrected. Sorry, couldn’t help it. LaWanna shot me an annoyed look.
“—the planchette, on top and we all put our hands on it. Heather didn’t want to do it at first, but me and Melissa told her she weren’t nothing but a chicken if she came all this way down here and didn’t do nothing, you know?” Mom and I both nodded. “We’d made the board ourselves out of some old plywood and paint. Wasn’t the most artistic, but it had all the letters, numbers, and YES and NO. We had only tried it before a couple of times.”
“And?” Mom prompted, apparently fascinated.
“Nothin’ much, at least not then. But down in the basement of that old hospital was…let’s just say we spoke to something down there. Something…wrong.”
“Wrong?” I asked, pressing her. “Wrong how?”
LaWanna waved her hands in the air, searching for words that did not want to come. “Wrong as in wrong,” she said at last, obviously frustrated. “Whatever was speaking to us through that board was—” Mom and I both waited for her to finish, but she simply shook her head. It was as if she’d suddenly remembered that she was an employee of the hotel instead of a woman caught up in a little gossip, and didn’t want to spook the guests.
“Please go on,” I begged her, but she simply smiled and shook her head politely. Her professional mask had gone back up, and she was all business again.
“I sure hope you have a good time visiting Tyrant’s Grove.” The smile never quite reached her eyes though. For want of a better word, they looked…haunted. “If there’s anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
With that, she disappeared into some kind of back office or storage room behind the reception desk. We could hear her busily moving objects around in there.
“Well, that was interesting,” Mom said with a slightly nervous laugh as we waited for the elevator to take us on up to the second floor. With a chime, the doors opened. She trundled her case along the carpeted hallway, which smelled like fresh paint. We were in Room 206. Mom slipped the keycard into the slot, was rewarded with a flashing green light, and pushed the door open. “Ooooh, this is nice!” she said appreciatively.
The room turned out to be bigger than I was expecting. Two twin beds stood side by side in front of a dresser and a mid-sized TV. Over by the window was a round wooden table with a desk lamp perched on top of it.
I can’t have inherited my OCD tendencies from Mom, because she was pretty laid back most of the time, but she was still a mom — which meant that she did the universal mom thing of unpacking her little suitcase and my backpack right away, putting our single changes of clothes on hangers and tucking them away in the wardrobe. I stayed out of her way, knowing better than to interfere with Mom’s patented system for sorting clothes and laundry.
“There,” she said with a satisfied sigh, stepping back to admire her handiwork. “
Now that’s over and done with, would you like to go and find your sweetheart?” She was teasing, but only a little.
More importantly, she was right.
“Okay,” I said, really hoping that I sounded more confident than I felt. “Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER TEN
I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to drag Mom along with me to see Becky, but I just didn’t have the heart to tell her no. After all, she’d just put her entire weekend on hold in order to drive me all the way out here to the back end of nowhere, just so I could put things right with Becky. The least I could do was not leave her behind in a hotel room, no matter how nice a room she thought it was.
We took the rear exit from the hotel, backtracking past our car and turning left at the cemetery fence, then followed it up and over the crest of the hill and down the other side. I glanced at the headstones as we passed. Some of them were really, really old — going back to the late 1800s. Those graves were set further back from the road than the newer ones, and seemed to be less well-tended, which was totally understandable I guess. No family left to take care of them.
The air was starting to turn chilly as the afternoon wore on. It looked like it was going to be a cold night. Mom and I followed the downslope of the hill past an old brick building, not much bigger than a house, at the far edge of the cemetery. A dirt-covered sign announced that it was the medical records building, though it looked pretty much abandoned right now. A couple of the glass window panes had been busted out, probably by the local kids pitching stones because they were bored.
The records building and cemetery boundary fence backed up against a small stand of trees, which were well into the process of shedding their orange and yellow leaves and scattering them everywhere. Looking up, I could just see a brown brick chimney jutting up above the tops of the trees. We were getting close.
And then suddenly, there it was.
The building from my nightmares.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 6
