Halloween night was long over when they arrived at the Snare: it was All Saints Day, and that seemed like a good omen for two ladies who were out to kick the ass of an evil entity. It took a little poking around the perimeter, but they finally found a restroom window that was propped open. Having the slimmer frame of the two (by far) Mom slithered through it, then looped around to the closest door and let LaWanna in. Despite it having been years since her childhood adventure, the hotel clerk was able to find her way back to the basement as easily as if it happened only yesterday.
And the rest, you know.
“The police are gonna have a field day with this one,” LaWanna laughed, downing the last of her third cup of coffee. “Maybe we’d best get our stories straight.”
“Why?” Mom asked. “We were busy at the time, but I didn’t see any CCTV cameras in there. I still don’t get exactly why those two creepers disappeared, but they seem to be pretty much gone for good. It’s not as though there are any bodies to find. At best, they’ve got a missing persons case on their hands…but I’d say that Malachai Falconer doesn’t have much of anybody left to miss him, so they’re probably not going to look all that hard for him.”
“Speaking of that…who was he talking to, there at the end in the chapel?” LaWanna’s brow furrowed as she thought back just a few hours, but to what was already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. “It was almost as if we were getting one end of a phone conversation.”
“Beats me,” Mom shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m still trying to take it all in. Ghosts, evil spirits, dark forces…I always thought the place for all of that was in horror movies.”
“I wish that were true, Mrs. Chill,” Becky said with a shudder. Then she winced, adjusting the pack of frozen peas that LaWanna had liberated from the small hotel kitchen and pushing it a little harder against her ribs. “I guess the world is a darker and scarier place than any of us ever realized.”
I flashed her a smile, and then looked across at Jessica, who was leaning way back on the couch and beginning to snore gently. The fact that she’d made it this far without running out of steam was nothing short of a miracle. Who could begrudge her a few ZZZs now? In fact, now that the adrenaline was starting to wear off, I was beginning to feel dead tired myself.
“So what happens next?” I wanted to know, yawning and stretching my arms out theatrically.
“Sleep,” Mom said, catching the bug and yawning herself. “LaWanna, can you arrange an extra room for the girls? You can put it on my card, of course.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, Rachel,” she said, getting to her feet and heading back over to the check-in desk. “Let me see what I can do.”
It took me a minute to stand up, because my legs felt about as steady as Jell-O. I offered Becky a chivalrous hand, which she surprised me by accepting. Pushing my luck just a little further (hey, after all we’d gone through tonight and survived, I should have bought a lottery ticket!) I slipped an arm about her waist, and then felt like a billion dollars when she leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder.
It had been the night from hell, yet somehow I felt more blissfully content than at any other time of my life.
As LaWanna pecked away at the keyboard with a look of intense concentration on her face, Becky and I wandered over toward the fireplace. There were a bunch of framed historic photographs hanging around the fire, most of them depicting scenes from Tyrant’s Grove’s history as a mining town. My eye drifted to one in particular, a sepia-toned shot showing a crowd of miners — roughly twenty or so, each of them holding pickaxes and other tools of the trade — gathered around the camera. Their expressions were grim to a man, and each dirt-streaked face had a thousand-yard stare that spoke of the horrors they had seen over the space of their relatively short lives.
One of the faces stood out. I squinted through tired eyes, craning my neck to look closer.
Well, I’ll be damned.
There was no mistaking it. There, at the very back of the crowd, was the one and only perfectly clean and un-dirtied face in the entire picture. The man’s face was thin, wearing wire-framed spectacles, and stared back out of the photograph with a haughty arrogance that was absolutely unmistakable.
It was Malachai Falconer.
I looked down at the engraved plaque beneath the frame. It read October 31st, 1872.
Well, I’ll be damned again.
Now I knew why those miners really looked as though they had been to hell and back. It wasn’t just the dangers of their chosen trade. The lich had been working his twisted dark magic on the town even back then, well over a hundred and forty years ago.
But not any more. Malachai Falconer’s curse was lifted, and for once, things were looking bright. The two women I loved most in all the world were alive and well, both safely within arm’s reach, and best of all, they loved me right back. All of the spirits who had been forcibly bound to the Snare of Souls by that evil Englishman had been set free, and there was a soft, warm bed with my name on it just an elevator’s ride away.
Tomorrow could look after itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
If you have enjoyed this book and would like to see further adventures in The Deadseer Chronicles, dear reader, then I would ask a favor of you, if you would be so kind: please leave a review or a rating on the Amazon.com site from which you bought or borrowed it. After all, the better the series does, the more of Danny, Becky, and Lamiyah’s adventures will follow in future. You have my utmost thanks for parting with your hard-earned money and for taking the time to step into this paranormal fantasy world.
As some readers may already have guessed, the Snare of Souls is based upon a real place. In 2015, I was conducting research for my non-fiction book The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals. During that process, I chanced upon a haunted hospital located in Tooele, Utah, not too far from Salt Lake City. The hospital had been closed down more than a decade before, and it had been purchased by private owners, who set about turning it into a haunted house attraction for the Halloween season.
They named it Asylum 49.
The owners were kind enough to invite my paranormal research team and I to move in for the better part of a week, and to conduct an investigation into the ghostly activity that regularly takes place there. Readers who are interested in the true story behind the Snare of Souls are advised to read The Haunting of Asylum 49 by myself and co-author Cami Andersen. I shamelessly stole large chunks of their hospital (which really is built next to the cemetery, incidentally) as a setting for this work of fiction. Fortunately, Asylum 49 is not the lair of a lich — to the best of my knowledge.
Some special thanks are due.
To my wife, Laura, for helping to proof the manuscript. Thank you for suffering eyestrain in pursuit of finding and eliminating typos.
To the men, women, and children who make Asylum 49 so very special, including (and not limited to) Kimm and Cami Andersen, Dusty Kingston, Misty Grimstead, Cathy Blank, Tyson Lemmon, and the many performers who give up their time and effort in pursuit of scaring the hell out of their visitors. What these guys are doing out in Tooele goes far beyond running a haunted house attraction: they are a true family, and if you happen to find yourself in their neck of the woods, I can’t recommend the Asylum 49 experience highly enough. By the way, they really do offer a cash bonus when a customer is so frightened that they lose control of their bodily functions…
The Deadseer, his friends, and his ghostly enemies, have been fortunate enough to have gotten some real support from some readers who went out of their way to get news of Agonal Breath out to the world. Linda Faye Allen, Lesley Bridge, Shannon Bradley Byers, Dibe Hall, Catlyn Keenan, Doris McCrery, and Katy Wheatley, I thank you!
are this book with friends
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 22
