Hearts of Darkness: A Valentine's Day Bully Romance Collection

by Joanna Mazurkiewicz

  -He doesn’t want to go,- Betsy told her. The settler’s ghost appeared beside her, staring at the policeman’s spirit. -He acts like he doesn’t even hear us. He’s lost.-

  We have to help him.

  “Is the spirit still here?” the professor asked. “The cold spot is...”

  “He’s still standing right there. He was staring at Quinn.”

  She stood up and walked toward the ghost. He turned and looked at her, and his eyes were black and sunken. A massive bullet wound marred the side of his head, and what was left of his skull over his ear was peeking through his skin in shards. It was one of the most gruesome things she’d ever seen.

  “Sir, I need you to...”

  -Shh.-

  The policeman’s spirit shushed her, and Professor Montcalm’s eyes went wide. “I heard that!”

  Betsy, Craig... Penelope... can one of you take him, please? she begged her guides. If you can’t get him to the Light, can you at least get him out of the room?

  -We’ll try,- Betsy confirmed.

  Professor Montcalm watched Emma carefully, and she flushed under the scrutiny. The spirit of the policeman flickered, then was gone, and the room’s temperature returned to normal. Emma turned to the professor with a wan smile.

  “My guides are trying to take him to the other side,” she told him.

  He nodded. “That was... impressive. I’ve never had an experience in a classroom before.”

  “My fault,” she said. “Sorry about that. If they’re around, they’ll sense me, and they’ll come to get help. Or just to appear. I’m not always certain of their motivations.”

  “That must be tiring.”

  Emma nodded. “You have no idea. And disturbing, especially when they’re like that man, and they’re still in their death states. I don’t like seeing the wounds that killed them, especially when they’re really horrible. It’s... unsettling.”

  Professor Montcalm took a step toward her, a sympathetic look in his blue eyes that his glasses could not conceal. The door opened and a set of students came in, and he stopped short. Emma sat down again and tried not to worry about Quinn.

  BRENT WAS COMING INTO the building where Montcalm was teaching his class, and as he opened the door, Quinn plowed into him at speed and knocked them both to the ground.

  He picked himself up. “Jesus Christ, dude!”

  Quinn’s face was red, and his eyes were wet and haunted. Brent stopped complaining and stood aside to let his friend get back up.

  “Sorry,” Quinn said. “I’ve gotta go...”

  He speed-walked away, his shoulders hunched. Brent scurried after him.

  “Hey, wait up.”

  “No.”

  He’d never been one for taking no for an answer, so he grabbed Quinn’s elbow and stopped him. “Hey!”

  His friend was nearly vibrating with roiling emotions. “I don’t want to...”

  “You don’t want to, but you need to,” he interrupted. “Let’s go to Bailey’s and you can tell me what’s going on.”

  Bailey’s was an Irish pub situated just outside campus, and they walked there in silence. They were fixtures there, and the hostess greeted them with a wide smile as soon as they walked in.

  “Hey, boys! Seen any ghosts today?”

  Brent glanced at Quinn, who slid his public face into position and smiled back. “As a matter of fact, I was just investigating a hell of a cold spot in Harper Hall.”

  “No kidding!” she said. She led them to a side booth, and Brent watched her hips swaying as she walked. He loved a girl with a wiggle. “Wow, I have a class in Harper Hall later today. Think I’ll see a ghost?”

  “If you’re lucky,” Brent grinned.

  She left them with their menus and their solitude. Quinn’s false amiability fell away instantly, and he ran a hand over his face.

  “Fucking Emma Ray,” he finally said.

  “Yeah. She’s in your criminal psych class, isn’t she?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “What did she do?”

  “It wasn’t what... it was...” He put his hands over his face.

  Brent watched in concern. He had never seen Quinn so discombobulated, and it was disturbing. The waitress came with glasses of water, and Brent ordered an appetizer to buy time. She went away again.

  “So what happened?”

  Quinn sat back and closed his eyes. “We were sitting there, waiting for class to start, and then the temperature of the room dropped by, like, at least twenty degrees. Boom. Cold. And she said there was a spirit there, a policeman, and that she heard a person on a radio saying...” He choked. He grabbed his water, took a swig and cleared his throat before he tried again. “A person on a radio saying, ‘shots fired at Book and Main.’”

  “Cool! So you think she’s the real thing?”

  “I think they told her to say that.”

  Brent frowned. “Who told her what?”

  “Rogerson. Avila. The network. Somebody.” He scowled. “I don’t know how they did the cold spot thing - which totally set off my K2, by the way - but I know they had to have put her up to that.”

  “I don’t get it,” he confessed. “Put her up to what?”

  Quinn fixed him with a look that was hard with bottled rage. “My dad was a cop, and when I was three, he was gunned down at the corner of Book and Main.”

  His jaw dropped. “Dude, you never told me that.”

  “I know. I don’t talk about it.” He ran his hand through his dark curls. “I mean, it’s a hell of a downer, and I don’t like thinking about it. But part of why I hate psychics... my mom was desperate to contact my dad. Went to card readers, psychics, seances... you name it. Bought a Ouija board and used it all the time. She spent thousands of dollars on these fucking readings, and the whole time, she never made contact with him. Never. Oh, they tried to feed her lies, but she knew that’s all they were. And we were broke most of the time because of them.”

  “Uh... wow...” He frowned. “And you really think they provided that information to her?”

  “You can Google it. Some asshole on one of my fan pages found a copy of the newspaper story about it.” Quinn’s hands curled into fists.

  “That’s a pretty shitty thing to do,” Brent opined. He was slow to anger, but he was starting to feel it burning in his gut. “What a bitch to do that to you!”

  “Right? I hate psychics. I fucking hate them.”

  He bit his tongue when the waitress returned with their appetizer and took their lunch order. They ordered a pitcher of beer for the table, with every intention of adding refills.

  “This is messed up,” Brent said. “Shit. How do we get back at them for this?”

  “At the network? We can’t. At her? I’ll figure something out.” He frowned. “Maybe we can Google her, see what skeletons we can drag out of her closet.”

  Quinn pulled his phone out of his pocket and started his search. “She came here from Arizona, right?”

  “That’s what it sounded like.”

  Brent used his phone to start an internet search, as well. Virtually nothing turned up, although he was able to find her Facebook page and an article about her attendance at a psychic fair in Tucson. He put his phone aside with a sigh.

  They finished their lunches and drank two pitchers of beer between them by the time they were done. Brent and Quinn walked back to their apartment, complaining bitterly about the network’s demands. Tyler was home when they arrived, sitting in front of his desktop and researching case law for one of his classes.

  “Hey, future lawyer,” Brent greeted, pulling a chair over to sit beside Tyler’s desk. “We got a question.”

  “You smell like a brewery,” he complained. “What’s your question?”

  “Can you dig up dirt on Emma Ray?”

  He looked at Brent as if his friend had lost his mind. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because I think the producers primed her with painful personal details from our lives,” Quinn
said as he flopped onto the couch.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “So she can win us over.”

  Tyler nodded. “Ah. Drunken conspiracy theories. Very sound basis for the beginning of a working relationship.”

  Quinn rolled his eyes. “You know what? Fuck you, man.”

  “We don’t have a choice about this. The network says we work with her or we lose the show.” Tyler gestured at the game system, computer and huge flat-screen TV. “We lose the chance to keep living like this.”

  Brent put his arm around Tyler’s shoulders and hung there like a sack. “Come on... we know you have access to legal records and stuff...”

  “Or at least the attorney you clerk for does,” Quinn pointed out.

  “I’m not going to investigate her.”

  “You’ll change your mind when she brings up something bad out of your past,” Quinn told him. He sat up and swung his legs off the couch so his feet were on the floor. “I’m telling you, man, they told her things.”

  “What things?” he asked.

  Brent leaned close, and Tyler recoiled from his breath. “She knew how Quinn’s dad died.”

  The pre-law student turned and looked at Quinn. “Shit, man.”

  “I know. Too close.” He rose from the couch and walked over. “Do me a favor. Let me find out something about her, just to even out the score.”

  Tyler sighed. “You just can’t let things go, can you?”

  “No,” Quinn admitted. “Never have, never will.”

  “Stubborn son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly well.” Tyler ran his fingertips over his forehead. “Let me see what I can find.”

  BRENT AND QUINN WERE both drunk, so it wasn’t long before they were both snoring on different couches in the living room while the television blared. Tyler put his ear buds in and turned up the tunes to conceal the noise, and he started utilizing his less wholesome computer skills to see what he could learn about Emma Ray.

  He found press releases about her work with the American Parapsychological Society and the special program they were running at the University of Arizona, headed by Dr. Ronald Begay, a full-blooded Navajo and fully licensed psychologist. From what Tyler could see, Emma had been Dr. Begay’s star student. She was talked up in the APS’s journals, and there were several psychic conventions and fairs in Taos and Phoenix where she had been the headline act.

  A search of public records yielded Emma’s birth certificate, which was missing a father’s name. There was also her mother’s marriage license and a divorce decree dated only nine months later. Her ex-husband, presumably Emma’s stepfather, was named John Bazzi, and also found Bazzi’s death certificate, showing the cause as suicide. He found no marriages for Emma.

  Tyler dug a little deeper and found an ad campaign for a local department store that featured his target as a model. This was the campaign that the bikini picture they had already seen had come from. He found the name of the photographer and tracked down the man’s webpage, and that’s where things started to get interesting.

  The photographer was named Clive Newport, and he was a resident of Phoenix with a criminal record. Tyler found records of convictions for sexual misconduct, assault, and even kidnapping. Then he found the portfolio.

  On Newport’s page, he found a password protected section that housed the photographer’s “private collection”. The password was easy enough to break, and once Tyler was in, he sat back and stared at his screen in dismay.

  There were dozens of pictures of Emma in a darkened room, her ankles and wrists tied to a chair, while black smoke swirled around her. In most of them, she looked absolutely terrified, but in one, the one that occupied the most real estate on his monitor, her eyes were rolled back in her head, showing only the whites. Her head was tipped back, and standing behind her was a shadow shaped like a man, but blacker than any shadow he had ever seen. It had one hand on her head, its spread fingers covering her forehead. It looked like the thing was hurting her.

  Tyler right-clicked the photos and saved them all to a thumb drive. He needed to talk to Professor Montcalm.

  TYLER LEFT BRENT AND Quinn sleeping in their living room and went to campus. Professor Montcalm’s office was more or less Ghost U’s clubhouse, so he could practically drive there in his sleep. He parked the car in the reserved spot the college had given their show, and a trio of students stopped when he got out, recognizing him.

  “Hey! It’s Tyler!”

  “Hey, man! Ghost U rules!”

  He smiled and waved to them, then hurried into the building. He thought for a moment that they might follow him, but thankfully they left him alone.

  Tyler took the stairs two at a time to reach the proper floor. When he reached the corridor, he was surprised to see Avila leaving Montcalm’s office. She smiled broadly when she saw him.

  “Hi, Tyler,” she greeted. “What brings you here?”

  He considered lying, but then it occurred to him that the young Indian woman might have information that could help. “I was going to show something to Professor Montcalm, but since you’re here, maybe you can have a look, too.”

  She blinked, surprised. “Okay. Sure.”

  He knocked on the door and opened the door without waiting to be invited. The professor was seated at his desk, typing on his laptop. He looked up when they came in.

  “Mr. Sullivan. I see you’ve caught up with Miss Singh.”

  “I thought she might be able to help,” Tyler said. He closed the door and pulled the thumb drive out of his pocket. “Can we look at this? Maybe put it on the projector?”

  Professor Montcalm frowned. “Of course.”

  He attached his laptop to the projector on the meeting table, the same one they often used for their investigation briefings. Avila sat down, Tyler took control of the laptop. Professor Montcalm sat in his usual seat.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Sullivan?”

  “The boys wanted me to do some background checking on Emma Ray, “ he answered, sliding the thumb drive into the laptop’s USB port. “And I found this.”

  Tyler opened the folder with the images from the photographer’s website. Avila gasped and covered her hand with her mouth, and the professor sat back with his arms crossed over his chest, a frown of consternation on his face. When he reached the photograph of Emma with the shadow person gripping her head, Tyler went to the screen and pointed at it.

  “What is this?” He shook his head. “I’ve seen shadow people. I’ve heard descriptions of inhuman entities interacting with the living. But this? This looks like straight-up torture.”

  Montcalm spoke quietly, his eyes cast down to the tabletop. “That’s because it is.” He glanced at Avila, then said, “Please turn the projector off, Mr. Sullivan, and I’ll explain.”

  Tyler walked back to the laptop, but before he could close the photograph, the door opened. Emma stood there, her hand on the knob, her eyes fixed on the screen. She spoke calmly.

  “Oh. You found it.”

  Chapter Five

  Silence fell over the room, and Emma let herself in. She closed the door and sat down at the table across from Avila.

  “I must say, your timing is...” Professor Montcalm trailed off and shook his head.

  “I called her to say we needed to talk about next steps,” Avila said. “I didn’t expect this.”

  Tyler sat down heavily and turned closed the laptop. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  Emma put her hands on the table, palms down. “Dr. Begay is what happened to me.” She looked down, studying the pink polish on her fingernails as she spoke. “Part of his focus while working with the APS was to resurrect trance and physical mediumship. The old style, sell-tickets-and-popcorn shows, you know? Ghosts apporting trumpets and rapping on walls and things like that. Showy things.” She took a breath. “He wanted to find a medium who could do these things, and then he wanted to take the show on the r
oad like some kind of paranormal P.T. Barnum.”

  “And you can do those things?” Tyler asked.

  “He thought I could.” She looked up at last, looking at Professor Montcalm. “Spirits can use my energy to communicate. They can move things, make sounds, sometimes appear... and always at great personal cost to me. You can’t be in contact with dead energy and not have it affect your health.”

  The professor nodded. “‘I’ve heard other physical mediums say the same thing.” He glanced at Tyler, who was staring at Emma in rapt fascination and more than a little concern. “It can make the medium ill.”

  “Not can,” Emma corrected. “Does. Avila, why don’t you tell them where you met me the first time?”

  The other woman said, “The University of Arizona Medical Center. You were an inpatient at the time.” She looked at the men. “She had a heart attack and nearly died.”

  Tyler was horrified. “And this was because of the experiments that Dr. Begay was doing?”

  Emma sighed. “It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that’s what happened.” She looked at the professor again. “The photographer...”

  “Clive Newport,” Tyler said.

  She nodded. “Clive was my boyfriend for a while, and he does psychic photography as well as remote viewing. He’s not terribly gifted, but he has about a 60% accuracy rate, so he was still in the study by the hair of his teeth.” Emma sat back and dropped her hands to her lap. “He decided he really wanted to catch a spirit on film, so he used me as bait, even when I didn’t want him to.”

  Tyler frowned. “You look so scared in most of those pictures.”

  “I was. I assume you got them from his website.” When Tyler nodded, she continued. “Those were all taken on the same night. I didn’t realize it, but he invited a chaos magician to come in and invoke the spirit that had followed me from the hospital. She was supposedly an old friend, and we were having dinner together, and they surprised me with those manacles...” Emma closed her eyes and her voice turned bitter. “She opened a connection between it and me and called it into this world. She then left the premises to stay out of the fallout while Clive kept taking pictures.”