by Val Crowe
Just like before, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t struggle. I couldn’t do anything.
I was screwed.
Oh, I tried, of course. I willed my arms to move and they didn’t. Last time, when Bunny Buster had done this, I’d been rescued by Wade, but Wade wasn’t going to do anything to help me, and Rylan…
Rylan was probably dead.
I was going to die, too.
The edges of my vision were turning gray. Even the sun overhead, filtering through the trees, seemed washed out. All the color was going out of the world.
And I couldn’t breathe.
I could hear the sound of my heartbeat, splashing blood through my veins, but it was slow and getting slower. It sounded tired and old. Poor heart. Never got a rest from beating. I couldn’t blame it for giving up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was dark.
I woke up and it was dark, and I was lying on the forest floor.
I sat up, gasping.
Why wasn’t I dead?
Maybe the specter thought it killed me and had just left me here for dead? No, not likely. Probably decided that it didn’t want to gorge on me all at once. Wanted to save a little snack for later, like taking home a doggy bag from a restaurant.
“Mads,” I whispered. My lips were dry and cracked. I looked around for her, expecting she’d just appear, but she was nowhere. I was on my own.
The moonlight filtered through the branches of the trees, and I saw Wade’s motionless form. I pushed to my feet.
And fell right down again, dizzy. I didn’t know if it was from whatever the specter had done to me or from something normal, like dehydration. My head hurt too. I crawled to Wade instead.
Wade’s eyes were closed. There was blood everywhere. His shirt was a sticky mess. His pant leg was soaked from the knee down. But he was breathing. Not strong breaths, but shallow, painful ones, in and out.
I shook him.
He didn’t respond.
Hell. I bowed my head. “Come on, Wade,” I whispered. Man, this was all my fault. He didn’t even need to come here. He didn’t have a barnacle, and I should have insisted he stay behind. Why had I let him come?
Of course, say I did get him awake. Neither of us could stand. Could walk. What were we going to do, crawl out of here?
“Mads,” I said again, louder. Hell, where was she? Why wasn’t she here when I needed her? I mean, I didn’t know what exactly Mads was going to do. After all, she couldn’t touch anything. She had no body, and she couldn’t affect the physical world.
Which begged the question, why could the specter do that?
I touched the blood on Wade’s shirt. Lifted my finger, rubbed its warmth between my thumb and middle finger. How had it shot my best friend with a gun?
When we’d left Bunny Buster’s, I’d wondered the same thing. How had it been so strong, so real?
And I’d thought to myself that it wasn’t real. And then… when I’d looked back, nothing had been there. Bunny Buster had gone back to his statue self and everything had been untouched.
I thought of shaking Rylan as she was under the influence of the barnacle, and how she’d shaken it off.
It wasn’t real.
“Deacon?” came a voice. A female voice. A rustling in the underbrush.
The specter was back, and she was still my mother.
I tried to stand up again, and didn’t make it. I managed to stand for ten seconds, maybe twenty, which was more than before, but it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t go anywhere. I crumpled back down to my hands and knees.
And when I looked up, it was Rylan, not the specter. She was staggering through the woods, and her head was bleeding. Her hair was matted, and there was dried blood all over the side of her face, down her neck. Her shirt was soaked in it. She looked half dead. Her eye on the bloody side was bright red and bloodshot. She reached for me.
“You’re… you’re alive,” I said.
“I’m a lesbian,” she said. “It’s cliche as hell to kill the lesbian. Besides, who else is going to be the final girl, you? Wade?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. She sounded delirious. She was probably half crazy from the loss of blood. Except, wait, what had I just been thinking? “It’s not real,” I said.
She made a face at me. “What?”
“It’s in your head.” I tapped my temple. “You believe it’s real, but you can snap out of it. They’re ghosts. They can’t hurt us unless we believe they can.”
She furrowed her brow at me. “Like Freddy Krueger, huh?” She shook herself.
And she was healed. There was no blood on her face. Her eye wasn’t bloodshot. She stood up straight. “Whoa.” She looked herself over. “Neat.”
Well, that had worked really well for her. Why not me? I’d had the epiphany that everything was fake, so why wasn’t I better?
Probably because whatever the specter had done to me, taking my essence or whatever, it was real. I had a connection to the supernatural. Maybe that made me more vulnerable.
Rylan was shaking Wade’s shoulders.
“I tried that,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead.
She hauled back a hand and slapped him across the cheek.
Wade stirred. “The hell?” he said sleepily.
“Wake up,” said Rylan. “Get on your feet.”
Wade blinked. He looked at me. He looked at Rylan. “Hell, I’m still here.”
“Get up,” she repeated.
“I can’t,” he said. “You don’t think I tried? I lay here and watched Deacon over there, baking in the sun, and I tried to get up, and I couldn’t. I’ve lost too much blood.”
“It’s in your head,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not real. The ghosts are screwing with you.”
Wade blinked.
There was a long moment where nothing happened.
And then suddenly, he was getting to his feet and he was healed, everything whole again.
I smiled up at the two of them tiredly.
They gazed down at me. “Hey, come on,” said Wade. “Let’s go, Deacon.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. Laboriously, I managed to get to my feet.
The world started to spin.
Wade caught me. “I thought you said it wasn’t real.”
“Apparently, for me it is.” I sagged against him.
Rylan got on the other side of me.
Together, the three of us began to walk out of the woods.
“Which way’s the truck?” said Wade.
“This way, I think,” said Rylan.
A shotgun blast interrupted us. Rylan crumpled to the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mosely materialized in front of us, pointing the shotgun at both of us. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Rylan got up. Half of her head was a mess of bone and brain matter. She grimaced with what was left of her face, concentrating.
And she was whole again. “Nice try, dickwad,” she said.
Mosely lifted the gun again. “All I want is Deacon. You two can go. Just leave him here.”
“No freaking way,” said Wade. Hauling me after him, we went straight for Mosely.
Mosley pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit Wade in the stomach. He doubled over, grunting. Blood arced out of his back, spattering all over his shirt before he straightened and it all faded.
But it was long enough for me to be on my own.
Mosely tackled me, knocking me back to the forest floor. His grinning face loomed over mine. “Just hold still.” And then our faces were close and everything was blurry, and I could feel myself being tugged through all my orifices.
I thrashed—well, I tried. Nothing really happened.
I was weaker than before. It was only moments before everything was going gray again. My heart slowed down again. It ached when it happened, as if it was sore from the effort of continuing to beat under this kind of pressure.
I was slipping out, slipping away—
Mosely went to black smoke over top of me.
Wade stood there, holding a giant tree branch which he’d used to hit Mosely. Hadn’t connected, of course. Wade made a face, offering me a hand up. “Handy how he’s corporeal when he wants and not when he doesn’t, isn’t it?”
“He’s not corporeal,” I managed. “But I make him stronger.”
Rylan was there. They both had me, and they were dragging me through the woods.
Ahead of us, they all flickered to life. Mosely, the sunken-eyed people from the post office, the little girl with half her skull gone, Heather Olsen in a torn and dirty shirt, one of her breasts hanging out, my mother grimacing and reaching with her claw-like blue fingernails.
Rylan and Wade exchanged a glance. Then they let go of me and rushed the ghosts, yelling at the top of their lungs.
They collided with them, slashing through the specters with branches, turning them into smoke.
I crawled after them, getting to my feet every couple of seconds and then not being able to sustain it and falling to my knees again.
The ghosts gone, Rylan and Wade were back for me, hauling me up between them again.
“Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,” said Wade.
They ran, pulling me along.
I did my best to keep up.
* * *
We encountered phantoms more than once on our way out of there, but the further we got from Boonridge, the less strength they had, the harder it seemed to be for them to materialize.
Eventually, we got back to the truck, and I crawled into the back seat.
Wade went to the driver’s side.
Rylan was right behind him. “How come you get to drive?”
“It’s a standard. Can you even drive a standard?”
“Yes, screw you,” she said. “Just because I’m a girl, I can’t drive a manual transmission? I can’t drive the big truck? What the hell? You are some kind of sexist asshole, you know that?”
Wade let her drive.
But then she got in and put the key in the ignition and the car wouldn’t start.
In the back seat, I chuckled darkly.
“Great,” she whispered. “This is like before, when none of my equipment would work.”
A crash. Mosely collided with the hood of the truck and pulled the trigger of his shotgun. The glass of the truck shattered everywhere, and we all cried out in surprise.
“Not real!” screamed Rylan.
Yeah, okay, the glass hadn’t shattered after all.
But Mosely was crawling through the truck toward me, moving in that same animalistic way that my mother had when she had climbed onto the table to feed off me that first time. “All I need to do is attach to you again, and I can ride you out of here,” he said, reaching for my neck.
Summoning all my strength, I scrambled backwards away from him, into the corner of the back seat.
Mosely’s face morphed. Not into my mother, not into anything I’d ever seen before—some semblance of a visage, distorted eyes and a hole of a mouth, something angry and inhuman and endlessly hungry. I gazed into its depths, I felt the edge of madness there, something that would rip into my soul and destroy me.
Rylan reached back and put her fist through the thing’s head.
It didn’t disintegrate. Its cold, cold hand seared into my upper thigh.
I fumbled at the car door handle.
The specter raked claw-like fingers over my chest.
The door gave. I fell out onto the ground.
It was coming after me.
I kicked at the car door, slamming it on the thing.
This made it fall apart—two pieces, each dribbling black smoke from their tattered edges. But it was still coming towards me, still reaching for me.
I backed up, dragging my ass against the ground, forcing my limbs to work even though everything in me was weak and tired.
“Deacon!” yelled Wade, running around the car for me.
The specter seized my foot. It was so cold that I felt as though my blood froze.
I kicked at it with my good foot. I launched myself backwards as hard as I could.
The specter dove after me.
But it was coming apart, I could see. It was fading out, having trouble keeping its form.
It needed to ride me out of here, it had said. It needed to attach to me, like the barnacle had, like the spirits at Ridinger Hall had, like Mrs. Michaelson had. Otherwise, it was like all the other phantoms in the town. It was tied to the place it haunted, and it couldn’t follow us out.
I launched myself backward again.
The specter tried to follow, but it dissipated in midair, and an echoing scream of rage reverberated through my brain.
I kept going backward.
It rematerialized again, but a good ten feet away from me. It looked like my mother again. “Oh, Deacon, it will never happen again,” she said in a wheedling voice. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Fuck you!” I screamed at it. “Wade, put the truck in gear and push it back to where I am. If it’s far enough away, the spirits can’t influence it.”
Rylan folded her arms over her chest. “I’m perfectly capable of putting a car in gear.”
“Great,” I said. “Somebody move the damned truck.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Rylan fiddled with her coffee mug. “So, you know what would have been cool?”
I was slouched in a booth at the first diner we’d come to. I felt like death. I had ordered coffee, but it was hard to actually lift it to my mouth and drink it, so I was just staring at it pitifully, too proud to ask for someone to help me lift a damned coffee mug.
“Fine, I’ll bite,” said Wade, sipping at his coffee. “What would have been cool?”
“If I’d gotten all of that on film,” said Rylan, spreading her hands.
“I thought you said that your equipment didn’t work in Boonridge the last time you were there,” I said.
“No, that’s true.” She took a drink of coffee glumly. “But if I had everything we’d been through for my youtube channel, I could do a series of videos, and they would get so many views.”
“Ghosts don’t show up on film, anyway,” I said. “Or digital. Isn’t that what everyone uses these days?”
“You know what I mean,” said Rylan.
“Hey, you doing okay?” said Wade to me.
“Pfft.” I waved a hand at him. “I’m ready to run a marathon.” I forced myself to sit up. “Sorry about your youtube channel, Rylan.”
“I know, right? Here I am, a real life Heather Langenkamp and no one even knows.” She pouted. Then she brightened. “Hey, Deacon, sometime if you’re bored, and I’m going to film someplace, you think you could just show up to get the place kind of… woken up? So that I could get some good footage?”
I laughed helplessly, running a hand over my face. “Seriously?”
She shrugged. “I need that channel to take off, man. Otherwise I’m going to spend the rest of my life working in a coffee shop in Thornford.”
I considered. Tentatively, I reached for my coffee cup. I picked it up. My hand was shaking a little, but it was working. I brought the mug to my lips and took a sip.
Oh.
That was good.
Coffee was civilization or something. It was like, when the first primordial man climbed up out of the primordial ooze, he made a fire so that he could brew some coffee, and then all his synapses fired and he figured out how to make the wheel. Just like that.
This wasn’t even particularly good coffee, and I already felt transformed.
“Okay, Rylan, sure. You want me around to wake up some ghosts, you call me.”
She beamed.
We all drank our coffee and it was quiet.
“The barnacles are gone, right?” said Wade. “In all the confusion, that didn’t get confirmed for me.”
“Yeah, they’re gone,” I said. “It wor
ked. That place was powerful, and it absorbed all the energy of the barnacles. But I don’t think anyone should ever go back there. It was trying to attach to me when we left. I think it could attach again, like the barnacles did before. That place is crazy dangerous.”
“Don’t worry,” said Rylan. “I wasn’t keen to go back there in the first place. And this time, it was about eighty times worse than last time.”
“The important thing is that we made it out of there,” said Wade.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding at them both. “We did.
* * *
“Wait, wait, what are you saying?” Wade arched an eyebrow. “Your mom was possessed? Like by a demon?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what that thing said to me, that she was possessed. It didn’t say anything about demons.”
“Yeah, I was kind of out of it while you were talking to it,” said Wade. “You know, what with bleeding to death and all.”
We were in the Airstream. I was still weak, and I needed to rest and try to recharge from whatever that specter had taken from me, but I wanted to talk about this first.
Wade was still talking. “Which it turns out I didn’t even need to do, right? Bleeding to death was all a trick in my head and it was an illusion.”
“You still could have died,” I said. “You believed it. It’s like if you die in a dream or whatever.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if that’s true,” said Wade. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ve died in dreams before, and I haven’t died in real life.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Point is, it wasn’t entirely an illusion.”
He shrugged. “You’re just saying this to make me feel better.”
“Maybe it was lying to me.”
“What was?”
“The specter thing,” I said. “I mean, there’s so much of everything that doesn’t make sense. We saw ghosts, but this whole time, everything has been turning into my mother. Even Mrs. Michaelson.”
“Who?”
“And my mother isn’t dead. So how can the ghosts become her? And why do they shift form like that, especially when they’re around me? And what do they want from me? And who’s Negus?”
“Okay, slow down, what are you talking about?”