Deadly Spirits

by Michelle Scott

  Ethan was considering a hunt for his laptop when his phone rang. It was Christian. “I took a look at the artwork David drew up,” he said. “I like it.” When Christian had first proposed the idea of Ethan joining him in his PI business, Ethan had been reluctant. After all, the otherworld was a dangerous place. But it was also an exciting place. Much more interesting that the classes he’d been taking. So, after talking it over with David, he’d agreed.

  “We still need a name,” Ethan said.

  “I’m telling you, we can’t go wrong with H & R Investigations,” Christian said. It had been his idea to use their last names: Humboldt and Rhodes.

  “It lacks pizazz,” Ethan said. “I like Ghostbusters.”

  “That’s taken.”

  “I know.” Ethan sipped some of his water. What he really wanted was coffee, but that meant going into the kitchen and making some. He was getting around better, but too much standing was painful. No, it would be best to wait for David to get back.

  “How are you doing?” Christian asked.

  Ethan groaned. “I’m so restless!”

  “A restless spirit,” Christians said. Then, “That’s it! Restless Spirits Investigations.”

  Ethan grinned. “I like it!”

  “Good. I’m glad that’s settled.” Christian paused. “I wanted to thank you for the invitation to Christmas dinner, but I’m going to decline.” He sounded like he’d rehearsed that message quite a few times.

  “You sure?” Ethan asked. “David is a good cook.”

  “No, you three celebrate. I’m going to Florida to see my folks.”

  At least Christian wouldn’t be by himself. Lately, Ethan worried about Christian’s loneliness. In fact, he felt partly responsible for it. He could have saved Sophie over David and hadn’t. This was why he was throwing himself into his necromancy studies. He was holding out hope that maybe someday he could bring Sophie back, too.

  The front door opened. David and Mike entered, each of them carrying a bag that smelled heavenly.

  “David’s here,” Ethan said.

  “I’ll let you go then,” Christian said.

  “How about you come over for dinner?”

  “Naw. I’ve got things to do,” Christian said. He avoided David. Ethan was pretty sure that awkward kiss had something to do with it.

  Ethan told Christian good-bye and hung up. “You brought me food!” he asked David.

  “Wings,” David said. “Turns out Mikey is a huge fan.”

  Mike bobbed his head in agreement. “Medium spicy,” he said. “And look!” He excitedly held out a DVD. “David got me the new Avengers!”

  “Sounds like our evening is planned,” Ethan said. He and David had been working hard to keep Mikey’s spirits up. The poor guy had lost so much over the past month. He still woke with nightmares, but had started to understand that his mother wasn’t coming home again. The worst time was in the evenings when he said he wanted to go home to his own bedroom.

  “Tomorrow, we’re going to get a Christmas tree,” Mike said. His eyes glowed.

  “We’ll find a way to wedge it in the living room,” David said. He eyed the narrow room which was dominated by the huge hospital bed. “I hope.”

  While Mike unwrapped the DVD, David sat on the edge of the bed and took Ethan’s hand. “This is good, right?” Ethan asked.

  “This is good,” David agreed. He smiled, but nowadays there was a tiredness to him that Ethan had never seen before. Although David claimed to not remember anything that had happened during the coma, Ethan didn’t believe him. He’d catch David staring off into space, and when he asked what he was thinking, David would get angry. Ethan had learned not to press him.

  David kept his eyes on Mikey. “I wondered if you’d want to stay here permanently.”

  “Are you up for that?” Ethan asked. The two of them had skirted around the idea for the past several weeks, but had never spoken of it outright.

  David nodded. “Yeah. I think its long overdue.” He nudged Ethan. “But I’m holding you to your promise. The universal TV remote belongs to me.”

  Ethan laid his head against David’s side. His only regret was that he hadn’t been able to witness David coming back to life. According to Tessa it had been like Lazarus arising out of the tomb. David’s parents still thought it was a miracle. Which it was. Or nearly so, at any rate.

  Mike finally got the DVD out of the wrapping and expertly loaded it into David’s PS4. If there was one thing Ethan had learned about Denise’s son, it was that he loved all things Mario. David got more comfortable on the hospital bed next to Ethan while Mike curled up in the big chair by the fireplace. Outside, puffy clumps of snow lightly fell. All things considered, it was an excellent way to spend December 12.

  The End

  Ready for more supernatural suspense? The Soulless is now available!

  Twin Rivers is a quaint, little town with a sinister secret.

  Kristen McDowell knows that her new teaching job in Twin Rivers will be challenging. After all, it was an unspeakable tragedy that brought her there in the first place. The town, and its teens, have been devastated, and it will be her job to help them get past their trauma.

  What she doesn’t realize is that the calamities are only just beginning.

  Soon, Kristen starts to hear whispers and see strange visions. As her paranoia grows, she feels that she is being followed…no, hunted…by something she doesn’t understand. All she knows is that the thing wants the unborn child growing inside of her.

  As her life unravels, Kristen searches for answers and discovers that Twin Rivers has always been plagued with tragedy. Missing children, murderous parents, freak accidents…they all lead back to one, terrible mystery…the soulless.

  It is only when Kristen stumbles across Twin Rivers’ oldest, living resident and hears of the town’s history that she begins to piece things together. However, the truth will be even harder to believe than the mystery which hid it..

  Enjoy a sample of The Soulless!

  Prologue

  Margaret Wechsler sat in her bedroom with a pair of binoculars in one hand and the telephone in the other. Through the parted lace curtains, she could see Jonathan’s house across the street. She’d been watching it for days, waiting for a sign that the boy had survived his terrible ordeal. But this morning, while most of the windows in his house shone with a welcoming light, his bedroom remained dark.

  Margaret dropped the binoculars and began punching numbers on the telephone, thinking to ask Jonathan’s mother how he was doing. But before the phone rang even once, she hung up. She’d already called too many times this past weekend and was aware that her concern over her ailing student was making her appear strange.

  But she just couldn’t forget how Jonathan had looked on the last night she’d seen him. Friday night, it had been (though it seemed so much longer ago than that now). The two of them had sat side-by-side on the settee in Evander’s old fashioned parlor while Evander proudly showed off a tiny, glass vial of black blood, holding it out to them as if he were a sommelier in a fine restaurant. Then he’d uncorked it and coaxed (no, Margaret corrected herself, bullied) Jonathan into drinking its contents. And, visibly trembling with fright, Jonathan had obeyed.

  It was the memory of that young man – six foot two inches tall, shoulders as broad across as a cement truck, a defensive lineman for the Twin Rivers Huskies – shaking like a toddler who’d had a nightmare, that plagued Margaret the most. Though what had happened afterwards (Jonathan collapsing onto the floor, his skin turning a pale violet color, his lips growing bloodless) wasn’t much better.

  Margaret fingered the strap on the binoculars as her cat, eager for breakfast, threaded his silky body through her ankles. If only she could call Evander! But the stubborn old skinflint didn’t have a telephone, and nothing she had said to him over the years had persuaded him to get one. So unless she wanted to drive out to his house before school started, she couldn’t talk to him.

>   The sound of a car engine followed by sweep of headlights across her bedroom wall made Margaret lean forward to peer out of the window. Jonathan’s mother was pulling out of the driveway. Margaret let out her breath in a sigh. Surely this was a good sign. As far as Carol knew, Jonathan’s illness was a bad case of the stomach flu and nothing more. She’d probably checked on her son, saw that he was feeling better, and decided to go to work.

  Margaret’s spirits rose. Maybe Evander was right after all. He’d told her not to worry; that the sickness and nightmares and fevers were all a part of the process. She’d remained doubtful, but he’d insisted that it took several days for the dark blood to work its magic. There must be, he told her, three days of suffering before Jonathan could be rebuilt into something better than he had been.

  As if to add proof that things were indeed improving, the lights in Jonathan’s room suddenly flared on. Margaret grabbed the binoculars once more and peeked into the room, watching as Jonathan pulled a red hooded sweatshirt over his head. It seemed that he was getting ready for school.

  Margaret’s little prayer was like a sigh: Thank God. Tears of relief welled in her eyes. Everything was going to be okay.

  But even as she fought to reassure herself, a grim, secret voice deep inside of her refused to be silenced. Don’t be so sure, it said.

  When she arrived at school, Margaret went through the motions of preparing for the day. She took the papers from her mailbox, fetched coffee from the teachers’ lounge, and hung her coat up in her classroom’s closet. Everything is okay, she told herself, repeating it over and over again like a mantra. Everything is just hunky dory. Yet doubts like cobwebs clung to the corners of her mind. She simply couldn’t erase the memory of Jonathan, ashen-face, lying on Evander’s floor and crying. Even if he did heal, would he still be the same grinning, sweet boy she remembered?

  When advisory period ended, and her first hour students filed in, Margaret immediately passed out the quiz she’d warned them about the previous Friday. Several students complained loudly, one let out a terrific fart, four asked to borrow pencils, and two immediately put their heads down on their desks and closed their eyes. Margaret sank into her chair and massaged her temples. Things were going to be okay, she told herself. They really were.

  Down the hall, a locker door slammed so loudly that the entire class looked up from their quizzes. A moment later, another slammed. The sound was sudden, explosive; the silence trailing after it strangely concussive.

  Two students started for the door, but Margaret ordered them back to their desks. Stepping out of the classroom, she saw that the locker-lined hallway was empty. Then a third door slammed. Someone screamed.

  Not locker doors, Margaret numbly realized. Gunshots. The dark, whispery feeling that had been nagging her all morning suddenly grew as keen as a buzz saw’s whine, and she knew as plainly as she knew her own name who had pulled the trigger. Jonathan hadn’t gotten better. On the contrary, he’d gotten much worse.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, Jonathan walked into the hallway. Though he had lived across the street from Margaret his entire life, she hardly recognized him now. The animated spark in his blue eyes and his shy grin had been replaced with a blank-eyed, slack jawed expression. Blood, like war paint, covered his face and matted his blond hair. He carried a shotgun at his side. He was the grim reaper. The angel of death in jeans and Nikes.

  Dear God, she thought, what did we do to him?

  A whimper forced its way up her throat, and she clamped her hands over her mouth to silence it. He hadn’t seen her yet, but she knew that when he did, her life would be over.

  Margaret stumbled backwards into the classroom, pulling the door shut. The voices of her students were garbled and meaningless as if she were listening to them from the bottom of a swimming pool. “We have to get out,” she said. And when they continued to babble, she screamed it, “We have to get OUT!”

  She floundered across the room to the windows and yanked hard on the handles. But they only opened a few inches. They were made for letting in a breath of fresh air, not for letting out terrified students.

  The gun sounded once more, closer this time, throwing the room into panic. Several girls backed into a far corner of the room and huddled on the floor. An ox of a boy, a farmer’s son with hands like shovels, picked up a desk and at Margaret’s tight nod, heaved it through the window. Another boy cleared away the jagged glass with a textbook, and moments later students began wiggling through the narrow space and falling to the ground.

  Only half of the class had escaped when the door exploded inward so forcefully that the hinges bent with a metallic shriek. Jonathan, blood covered and panting, loomed in the doorway. His eyes fixed directly on Margaret.

  He raised his gun. The farmer’s son grabbed his shoulder, but Jonathan pushed him aside as easily as a child brushes away a gnat, throwing the other boy into a desk where he hit his head and lay still on the floor.

  Margaret’s knees refused to support her any longer, and she sank to the floor. She tried to speak, but her voice hitched unsteadily. Jonathan towered above her like an angry god, his eyes as hard and merciless as the gun’s bore he had pointed at her face. This was some other boy, she thought, it had to be. Her Jonathan could never do this. “Please,” she begged. The word bubbled through the mucus clogging her throat. “Please, Jonathan.”

  He wagged his head from side to side as if thrashing against the dark thoughts polluting his mind. “Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!!” He cried so hard that his shoulders shook. Tears mixed with the blood on his face.

  “Don’t do this. You’ll be better soon, I promise, and it will be over.” She was babbling, she knew, tumbling out words unthinkingly, desperate to say anything that might return this monster to the boy she knew. “We can help you. Evander and I, we can help you through this.”

  Jonathan’s hands trembled. “So help me!” he screamed at her. “Help me!!”

  Margaret thought of what she might possibly say to make him drop that gun. But all she could think of was to tell him that she was sorry. She opened her mouth.

  The bullet, however, was quicker than she was and, with a deafening explosion, it killed both Margaret Wechsler and her unspoken apology.

  Chapter One

  In just two weeks, everything about Twin Rivers High had changed. Ernie had always thought that the school with its uninspired architecture – two boxy stories slapped one on top of the other, each with a perfectly symmetrical line of windows – looked like a prison, but this morning the police cars parked along the street, and the state troopers patrolling the wooded lawn added to the effect. The faculty parking lot was now guarded by a uniformed security guard who had asked to see Ernie’s ID even though the two of them had known each other since kindergarten, and the staff entrance that Ernie normally used was now locked. Instead, he was routed to the main doors where he had to wait in the rain with a few other early arrivals before he could pass through a metal detector. By the time he was finally allowed inside, he already felt worn-out and ready to go home.

  Mary DeGrooter, the French teacher, stood in the lobby shaking rain off her flowered umbrella.

  “There are prisons that don’t use this much security,” he complained. “I was expecting Dale out there to be wearing latex gloves so he could tell me to drop my pants and bend over.”

  Mary’s lips twitched, but it was a parody of a smile; she still looked nervous. “I wasn’t sure that they would allow me to bring my umbrella inside,” she said, folding it and tucking it under her arm. “I think it might be on the list of potential weapons.”

  “Potential weapon? If you’re the Penguin, maybe.”

  She frowned. “Penguin? Oh, right, like Danny Devito in ‘Batman’.”

  Ah, youth, Ernie thought wryly. “I was thinking of Burgess Meredith, but we can go with that.”

  The two of them walked down the hall together. This time of morning, it was mostly empty, and without students it was harder to igno
re the decrepitude. When Ernie had attended school here, the building hadn’t been in such bad shape. But now, twenty years later, it possessed a shabbiness that couldn’t be hidden by the bright red paint on the lockers or the glass cases of gleaming trophies. The floors were covered with scuffed linoleum, the walls were dingy with handprints, and many of the ceiling tiles bore yellowed water marks from old leaks. A pair of dilapidated drinking fountains, their white ceramic basins cracked and stained, were chained together like prisoners in a work gang. A placard hanging between them read: OUT OF ORDER.

  “Seriously, though,” Mary said as they climbed the stairs to the second floor, “Don’t you feel safer with the police and the metal detectors?” The pucker of worry in her forehead made her look years older.

  He shrugged. “I think it’s a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left.”

  “So you don’t think it will happen again?”

  What he wanted to say was, ‘How the hell should I know? I’d never thought it would happen in the first place.’ But she didn’t deserve to be the target of his ill temper. So instead he said, “Of course it won’t happen again. Because now that Smalley’s foolproof plan is in place, nothing can go wrong.”

  He was finally granted a genuine smile. “Mr. Smalligan has a knack for making things complicated, doesn’t he?” Mary said. “I would have thought that a principal’s job was to make his teachers’ lives easier, not harder. Let’s see…” She frowned, thinking, “How does it go again?”

  Ernie tried to remember. “If we hear the announcement over the intercom: ‘Mrs. Redbud, come down to the office,’ we’re suppose to duck and cover because a maniac is in the building. And if they say, ‘Mr. Bluecoat, you have a telephone call,’ then the coast is clear.”

  “I thought it was Mrs. Blueguard and Mr. Redhill,” Mary said, confused. “And that blue was the warning signal and red meant that everything was okay.”