Cal shook his head, trying to remain focused.
“Okay,” Shelly said, her voice soft. “Call out to her. Tell her you are by her grave.”
Walter closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, something had changed in him, something was different.
Cal felt a sudden impending sense of dread.
“Lorraine?” Walter said softly. “Lorraine, I’m here. I’m here by your grave. I came because you called.”
Almost instantly, there was a rustling off to the man’s left, just behind a large oak tree. Shelly had set up several portable lights by the clearing, but had turned all but one of them off to avoid spooking Lorraine. But now Cal wished that she had kept them all on. He squinted hard, but there was barely any moonlight illuminating the tree, and even less the shadows behind.
His heart started to race.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He felt the familiar tingle in his fingertips, and sweat began to form on his forehead despite the cool temperature outside.
“Lorraine?” Walter asked, the pitch of his voice increasing ever so slightly. “Is that you?”
A raccoon suddenly darted out of the shadows, and Cal felt all of the air in his lungs whoosh out. He hadn’t meant to exhale loudly, but he had, and it spooked the nocturnal creature, which quickly scampered into the darkness.
“Walt?” The voice was thin, wavery, bordering on tinny.
Cal whipped his head around to the other side of their setup, this time the air getting stuck in his throat.
There was a woman in a white, nearly iridescent nightgown, walking toward Walter and the urn. As Cal watched, she moved further into the clearing, her feet seeming to slide across the grass as opposed to stepping through it. Her eyes were fixed on Walter, and as Shelly had predicted, the woman with long black hair that ran nearly midway down her back didn’t even notice them.
In fact, she didn’t appear to notice the light that Shelly had set up, either.
Wait for the signal, he chided himself.
His finger was twitching uncontrollably, mere millimeters above the shutter-release button.
Walter was facing the wrong way, but at the sound of his wife’s voice, he swiveled to face her. When their eyes met, he dropped the urn on the grass.
“Lorraine!” Walter rubbed his eyes like a kid on Christmas morning. “Lorraine, is that really you?”
The woman’s pace increased and her face, even more heavily lined than the old man’s, brightened.
“Oh, Walter, it is you! I’ve been—I’ve been so confused ever since you left me.”
Left me?
Cal felt his heart beating wildly in his chest as Walter pushed himself to his feet.
They were only five or six feet apart now.
Cal let his finger brush up against the trigger, but didn’t press it, not just yet.
‘Wait until she is at least within two feet of Walter—no earlier,’ Allan had instructed.
With bated breath, Cal waited, so rapt in the scene unfolding before him that he didn’t even consider looking over at Shelly or Allan.
“I’ve missed you, Walt. Really missed you. Every night I come here, wander in these woods, among the tombstones, looking for you. I’m so sorry about what happened.”
Lorraine took another sliding step forward, then another.
Four feet now, maybe less.
Cal had never fired a gun before, but he had heard of an itchy trigger finger. That was exactly what he had now: an itchy trigger finger.
He just wanted to snap the picture and then tell Walter to get the hell out of there.
“Where…where have you been? Why did you leave me, Walter?”
It dawned on Cal that Walter hadn’t spoken for several minutes, and he suddenly feared for the man’s heart. His face was pale, seemingly drained of all blood, and his eyes were wide. Even Cal, despite everything that he had seen, everything he knew about this world, he still had a hard time digesting the fact that this woman was dead—his mind rejected the idea, reverting to the tenets that he had been indoctrinated with at an early age. You live, you die, you go to Heaven or Hell. There was no coming back. And if he felt this way, he couldn’t even imagine what poor Walter was thinking or feeling.
“I hear this voice, a voice calling to me…a man’s voice, telling me that I need to come to the Sea, that he can help me learn the truth. He calls himself…he calls himself the Goat, Walter. And I’m scared.”
Cal felt his blood run cold.
The Goat. Robert’s father.
“What does it all mean, Walt? Why don’t—?”
When she took another step toward the silent man, Cal could hold his finger no longer.
He clicked the trigger button, and he heard the camera shutter close.
At first, nothing happened. The viewfinder still showed a bright red-and-orange outline of Lorraine’s form, which in and of itself was unsettling. The actual man, the living, breathing man, showed up as a blurry outline, but this quiddity, Lorraine’s confused, disoriented soul that was solicited by Leland Black, was as vibrant as a supernova.
“Now!” Allan shouted, and Cal, who had jumped the gun, just kept on mashing the button.
“Walt? Whaaaaaaaaaat issssssssss happppennninng?”
Her voice slowed, the individual words drawn out. It wasn’t as deliberate as what had happened at Seaforth when Robert had demanded the quiddity to stop, but something was clearly happening. It was as if Lorraine was suddenly moving through ether.
“Shel? Allan?” Cal shouted, still unwilling to take his eyes off Lorraine and Walter. “What’s going on?”
There was no immediate answer.
As he watched, Lorraine suddenly stopped moving entirely. It appeared as if her entire being had frozen solid, her eyes still open, her lips pressed together as if in mid-word.
“Shel?”
“Move away from her, Walter,” Shelly piped up. Cal, drawn by the sound of her voice, was alarmed to see that she had stepped away from her camera and was moving toward the clearing.
“Shelly? What’s happening? Stay behind the camera, Shelly.”
“Lorraine…how I’ve loathed you,” Walter suddenly snarled. “After what you did, I came back here to kill you again.”
Cal whipped his head back toward the scene, and was shocked to see an expression of sheer fury on Walter’s face.
“What the fu—?”
“No!” Shelly suddenly screamed, and then she started sprinting toward Lorraine and Walter. Cal, still confused, was helpless to prevent himself from doing the same.
“I found the letters, you slut. It wasn’t just one time, was it? I can’t believe that you—”
Then Walter did the unfathomable. Despite countless warnings, Walter reached out and grabbed his dead, frozen wife by the throat.
“No!” Cal shouted. But he was too late.
With his long, thin fingers grasping the wrinkled skin of her throat, Walter’s head suddenly snapped back and his mouth opened in a long, horrible wail.
Then he started to shake and his eyes started to go black.
Chapter 10
“Parole,” Carson said with a laugh.
Bella gaped.
“No.”
Carson’s continued to laugh.
“No, of course not.”
Bella took a sip from the new drink that the barkeep had made for her, all the while staring at him. Her reaction wasn’t exactly the adulation that he had expected.
“Bella,” he said, leaning in close to her. When she pulled back, he had to use all of his willpower to resist the frown that threatened to surface. “It’s me Bella. It’s really me.”
But despite his claims, Bella seemed unconvinced. When he reached out to touch her hand, she pulled back so quickly that she nearly toppled off the barstool. And then he understood; the fear in her face said it all.
“Ha, okay, I get it now. I’m not dead, Bella. I am not one of them.”
Bella squinted
at him.
“How can I know? I mean, before you were put away…you remember the dreams, don’t you? The ones you told me about? About the”—she lowered her voice—“the sea?”
Carson rubbed his chin.
“Bella, I know so much more now, so much more about this entire existence than you can ever imagine…I’ve seen—I’ve seen it, Bella, I’ve seen the shores of the Marrow. And I’ve seen him, Bella. There is so much more that you don’t know.”
He could see the sparkle return to her eyes, but she still wasn’t smiling. Her guard was still up.
“Fine,” Carson said with a wink, “I know how to prove to you that I’m real. Barkeep?”
The man gave a curt nod and came over. His thin lips were twisted into a sour expression, which was odd given the fact that Carson and Bella were his only patrons.
“What can I do you for?” he said, eying their nearly full drinks.
“Tequila. Best you got.”
When the bartender didn’t move right away, Carson remembered what Michael had called him when they first met.
‘You look like an anorexic convict.’
Carson reached into his wallet, and pulled out the wad of cash that he had persuaded Michael to take out of the ATM. He tossed a fifty onto the bar.
Unsurprisingly, the bartender’s expression suddenly changed, his eyes going wide at the sight of the cash. He quickly reached down, pulled a bottle of Tequila Bang Bang from somewhere out of sight, and put it beside two shot glasses on the bar.
“Seriously?” Bella asked, her thin eyebrows lifting.
“You don’t want it?” the barkeep asked, the grimace threatening to return.
“No, it’s fine. It’ll bring us back, what do you say, Bella? A shot for old times’ sake?”
Bella shrugged. She was pretty, in a non-traditional sense. It was her hair, Carson realized, that made her bump the line from average to pretty, what with it being so shiny and straight. When he had first met her all those years ago during her internship in the juvie facility that Carson was held at, he had longed to touch that hair, to feel if it was as silky as it looked.
It was.
Since that day, he had touched a lot more than just her hair.
Staring at Bella, Carson felt an unfamiliar tightness to the front of his pants. It had been a long, long time since he had been with a woman.
The barkeep poured the shots, but just as he was finishing the second one, Carson, eyes still locked on Bella, reached out and grabbed the man’s hand that was holding the neck of the tequila bottle.
“Hey!” the barkeep cried, and immediately tried to jerk his hand away. Carson’s grip held fast. He turned his attention to the bartender, who was oblivious to the fact that the shot glass was overflowing, spilling sour-smelling tequila all over the bar.
The man’s wide eyes were locked on Carson’s sneer.
“Next time I ask you for a drink, you best get it right away. Got it? That, you can do me for.”
The bartender again tried to pull his hand away, but Carson’s fingers dug deep into his wrist.
“Got it?” he repeated between clenched teeth.
“G-g-got it,” the man stammered.
Only then did Carson release his hand, which sent the barkeep stumbling backward. Carson ignored him as he righted the bottle, then set about cleaning up the spilled tequila without another word.
“See? I’m very much alive, Bella. And there is so much we I need to tell you. So drink up, because it’s gonna be a long night.”
***
“This will do nicely,” Carson said as he looked around the dingy basement of Scarsdale Crematorium. The walls were covered in grime and years of ashes from burnt bodies, and the lights were so dim that they barely cut splinters through the gloom. It looked different from the last time he had been here, when the fire had been raging. It would never be featured in Home and Garden, but that suited him just fine. “And you’re sure that the other guy that works here—Vinny—won’t give us any problems?”
Jonah scratched at his stomach and grunted.
“No, no problems from him, that’s for sure.”
“And they’ll just keep bringing bodies?”
“Yep. They bring ‘em, I burn ‘em.”
Michael scoffed. Clearly, he was less impressed by Scarsdale than Carson.
“Look, Carson, are you going tell me what we’re doing here? Let me in on what the fucking plan is? Because I get the feeling that I don’t quite fit in here, if you know what I mean?” Michael looked down at his bespoke navy suit, then glanced over at Jonah, who was wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt that was speckled with moth holes and was a couple sizes too small.
Carson smiled.
How wrong you are, Michael. How very wrong—you are definitely right where you belong.
Carson leaned over and wrapped his arm around Bella’s waist. He pulled her in tight and kissed her on the forehead.
Alone time—we’re going to need some alone time soon.
“Look, Michael, you belong here. We—” He made a grandiose gesture to include all four of them. “—we are all the same.”
He looked down at Bella when he spoke again.
“It’s a new time, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the dawn of a new era—and we are responsible for opening the floodgates. Soon everyone like us, every single person who is sick of conforming to societal norms, of hiding in their skin, of burying their self, will be free—both living and dead.”
Carson smiled broadly as he finished his unplanned soliloquy. The response wasn’t quite what he’d expected: Michael just stared at him, unblinking as a fish.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” the man exclaimed at last. “What in God’s name are you saying?”
Michael’s perfectly manicured brow suddenly furrowed and he took a step toward Carson. Jonah immediately moved to intervene. This time, unlike at the park by his office, Michael took notice.
“Look, I agreed to come here, to pick up your girlfriend, to give you some cash, but unless you let me in on your little secret, then this is where I draw the line. Tape or no tape.”
Carson looked from Jonah to Bella, and then finally his eyes returned to Michael.
It wouldn’t hurt if they knew the truth, he supposed. After all, they will find out eventually—everyone finds out in the end.
But it didn’t have to be that way. If they got their shit together, they could change things…if they could only draw his brother out again, they could use him to open the gate.
An image of Robert suddenly flashed in his mind, the man’s hand trembling as he aimed the gun at Carson’s head. But Robert hadn’t found it in himself to pull the trigger, to kill his brother.
Carson, however, wouldn’t have the same issue if the tables were turned.
It had been clear, in that moment, with the hole in Father Callahan’s head still smoldering, that Robert thought he was different than Carson. Better, maybe. But the fact was that it was Robert who had shot and killed Father Callahan, not Carson. Sure, in doing so he had closed the gate, and the priest was practically dead already, but Robert had murdered him.
And now that his brother had had a taste, Carson Ford very much doubted that he would be able to go much longer before he was compelled to do it again.
Once you felt the power, the euphoria of watching their quiddity pass out of their shell…
“Take a seat, Michael—we need to chat. Then we need to get started. Time is of the essence, my good folk. And it’s a-wasting.”
Chapter 11
“Fuck!” Shelly shouted as she sprinted toward the clearing. Cal ran after her, but in the back of his mind, he had no idea what he was going to do once he got there.
“Shel! Wait!”
But Cal was spared a difficult decision; Walter and Lorraine faded before Shelly could make it to them, their bodies reduced to a thin mist reminiscent of the ashes that rested in the urn on the grass. And then that too disappeared, leaving Shelly alone in t
he clearing.
She turned back, and Cal saw a deep sadness in her eyes.
“Shit,” she said softly. Her shoulders sagged, her head drooped.
Cal stared at her, barely recognizing that Allan had suddenly appeared at his side. Part of him felt like it was all Walter’s fault—after all, he had been explicit about not touching his wife—but the nagging guilt wouldn’t go away, not completely.
They had put him up to this crazy plan.
“We shouldn’t have done this,” Shelly whispered.
Cal bit his tongue, and thankfully Allan spoke up before he said something he would probably regret.
I fucking told you—and if I’m the voice of reason, Shelly, then we have real fucking problems.
“What have we done?” Allan asked, his voice airy.
Shelly’s eyes shot up.
“We sent that man to the worst possible hell. And you heard what Sean said, every person that goes there, every person that stays on the shores, fuels Leland—gives him power.” Her eyes went dark, her guilt transitioning seamlessly to anger. “You guys think that because of what happened at Seaforth that this is all over?” She waved her hands around, gesturing to the red urn first, then the cameras, then to them. “It doesn’t matter that Carson is dead—Leland won’t stop. As long as he is still in the Marrow, he won’t ever stop.”
She sighed. When she spoke again, it was as if there was a massive weight on her chest, pushing down on her, constricting her breathing.
“Not ever.”
Cal swallowed hard. He knew her words to be true, despite the fact that he was still thoroughly confused as to what exactly had happened in Seaforth.
What he did know was that he and Allan had been lured to the prison by that bastard Sean; he had manipulated him—them—had used their own emotions against them, and then sequestered them in the small room, forbidding them to exit. Allan had been terrified, and it had taken much cajoling to convince the man to enter into the hallway. Three times they had ventured out, but his camera had revealed quiddity everywhere—more than he had ever seen, or so he claimed. Like cowards, they had remained holed up for hours, a day even, as the lights flicked on and off, as the screams echoed up and down the prison walls.
Scarsdale Crematorium (The Haunted Book 4) Page 5
