Spirit

by J. P. Hightman

  Downstairs, she had to move past the collapsed body of Malgore, and as her legs crossed past those withered fingers of knotted bone, she saw them twitch. The Thing was awakening. Its claws still had hold of a blue silken mist. Its grip was tightening. Panicked, Tess felt her leg rub past the white mane of Malgore’s hair, and she suddenly heard the witch breathing, speaking.

  Tess reached the boys, grabbing the first one’s hand.

  He was screaming. “What is happening—”

  She had to get them all outside.

  “Link hands,” she screamed. She pulled them out into the snow. She glanced back, seeing Malgore crouching in dim light, chanting, but the blue-tinged spirit in the witch’s claws tore loose. The witch howled, then began rising in rage, as the mist expanded. They left the house in the distance but she could still see light, pale blue from the swirling mist at the ceilings, Abigail’s frenetic spirit, pouring out. Tess stared, transfixed. The boys were running, stumbling, trying to get away. Tess grabbed hold of one student, but the children were too scattered now. Gathering them was like catching birds.

  “Follow my voice,” she called, backing into the woods. “Come with me.”

  They made their way to the sound. She was rounding them up. Just another minute and she’d have them. She stared back at the abandoned building.

  From out of the dead house, the illuminated mist became a female figure entering the night. It was Abigail, gathering the last of her strength; Tess could see her in a long cloak, fleeing, the most alive and most substantial the spirit had ever appeared, made solid and corporeal by sheer desperation. Tess’s heart leaped in fear for her. Striding from the house, just after the girl, there came a vague, deformed shape—Malgore—quick, but with an unnatural, hobbling gait.

  Tess saw the Thing snatch Abigail. It had her, like a fish on a hook. And just as helpless, she flailed.

  The Thing reached into her, reached into her back, and its fingers closed around her spine.

  Abigail screamed soundlessly. The witch could not kill her, but it could punish her, send pain to her with a devilish magic, her most cherished form of torture. And Abigail fell apart, hearing her Mother shrieking with a voice part animal, part woman, in some indefinable way.

  Tess stared as Abigail’s form dissipated into strands, drifting through the forest, nothing more than mist and wind.

  The witch-thing shivered with uncontrolled bloodlust.

  Tess let out a moan.

  The wretch looked up—eyes flashing red—it had found her.

  Tobias squinted hard as he rode through the snowfall. His horse shot past a fallen tree near the rails, and behind him the snow breathed upon him in a fast-traveling wall of wind. He was being pushed onward. In his head he became aware of Tess again, sensing her far ahead of him, drawing him like the tide to the shore. She was out there somewhere, and he would find her.

  Tess’s eyes fixed on a figure in the distance behind her and she begged herself to look away, but could not.

  The wretch, half buried in darkness, was snarling a call. Her massive cat crawled from the blackness. Malgore snapped a whip brutally, slashing its eye. The animal moved to her, low and whimpering, a thing of flesh and bone.

  Tess tore herself loose from the mesmerizing sight, and she led the group away. She had recovered all the boys, but there was nowhere to go, they were just running, directionless.

  Snowdrift surrounded them. Ethereal light began weaving behind it: a vast flying ghost, like a mirage swimming through the air, rattling trees. Abigail.

  Tess felt the spirit’s emotion, You have failed us. You have failed us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Tess brought the children back to the train tracks, where the dim hulks of the ruined cars lay waiting. And now the ghostly figure—its shape coming together, tightening—descended, a glassy spirit Tess could barely see in the darkness.

  The spirit began to circle the children. Tess couldn’t move.

  “Let go, let go, it doesn’t want us,” cried one boy, pulling free of her. “It wants you.”

  “You have to go with me,” Tess cried to the boys, terrified to the bone.

  She stood alone now. The spirit closed in on her, its dim face visible. The ghostly shape—it was somehow still feminine—soared around Tess, smelling her, sensing her, preparing to strike.

  Out from the veil of snow, Tobias, on horseback, came speeding into view.

  Everything was healed in that split second. He swept by, grasping her hand, pulling her onto the horse, as behind him the wind dissipated the ghostly form of Abigail and battered the trees ferociously. Something had driven her away.

  The horse reared onto its back legs, screeching in terror.

  Malgore rode from the darkness on her immense jaguar beast.

  The witch roared, right along with her familiar. As she passed, her grotesque arm slashed Tobias from his horse, which panicked. Tess grasped wildly to hold on.

  The couple fell to the ground.

  Instantly, Malgore’s clawed hand closed around Tobias’s face. He struggled to breathe as Tess screamed. She had lived to see him die.

  The witch dragged him, dropped him, then stood, raising a long, curving knife to destroy him. But all of a sudden Malgore screamed, letting loose a terrible wailing. Tess had come from behind, stabbing the metal hook into her back, and out, tearing at the wretch.

  Tess hissed, breathlessly, “Your weapon—” and as Malgore turned, Tess plunged it into her heart. “Yours.” She executed the move perfectly, just as the witch-hunter had instructed her in the book. She was stunned at herself.

  Malgore stumbled back, gasping.

  The huge, horrific shape of her body was blown back as if it were nothing but a sack of skin. Tobias reached for the curved knife—and they fought for it, the witch fighting for life with brazen intensity.

  Tobias wrenched the long knife free—and swung it into Malgore’s thin midsection, nearly bisecting the witch with a single blow. The wretch came apart like old dust and dried bone, still thrashing in death.

  Tess reached for a boy’s fallen lantern and hurled it at the witch’s heart, and fire burst upon the body. The witch-creature writhed in flames. Still afire, it crawled toward Tess, though weakened and dying.

  The jaguar creature saw this—and rushed in—its huge jaws closing on Malgore’s head and thrashing about, exacting its revenge, as nearby the horse jolted madly, neighing in fright. Old Widow Malgore, she keeps a devil slave…

  And then the black predator pulled her remains into the darkness, disappearing into its domain.

  It would devour the witch.

  Old Widow Malgore, your devil will break free…and vengeance you will see…

  Tobias ran with Tess toward the tracks as fast as they could.

  Tess glanced back and was astonished. From the darkness a torrent of vague shapes were flowing downward—swooping in upon the witch’s corpse—and breaking it into fiery pieces as the wind grew.

  The long-dead phantoms of this place, held here by the witch’s power, wanting revenge for their unholy deaths, were at last receiving it.

  But there was something yet unfinished. Both Tess and Tobias felt a deadness behind them, and they turned to see one of the blind boys slowly engulfed in light-blue mist, his eyes clouded with the same subtle color. A hard, malignant male voice came oozing out of him.

  “Thou hast done us a service,” said the boy.

  Tobias and Tess looked at him in fear.

  “Know you this: she held our tongue ’til now,” the boy said, and his face briefly flashed with light but there was a calm to him, and to the moment as well. “We were hoping for you. You are special among all others. Your fine gifts are a blessing to us as well.”

  The boy’s hands at his side worked nervously. “You’ve been made tender for it, over the years. Possession…is no easy thing to endure. The body fights it…but not yours.” His voice broke apart as he coughed. His breathing was labored.

 
Possession. Tobias stared in disbelief. “You wanted us…”

  “We want what anyone would. To be flesh and blood again.”

  It was Wilhelm.

  Tess watched the boy step closer, his eyes glazed, not his own.

  “All we wanted was to be together. Denied by everyone. Denied by her,” said Wilhelm, speaking through the boy in that burning voice. “We would not be damned to live as spirits forever. We would take hold of new bodies, have a life free of this torture. But her mother was always here. Always, she killed the flesh before we could take it…”

  The boy’s face began to stretch, as if another face were underneath. The blind child choked, and the spirit was unleashed out of him, tunneling toward Tobias.

  Abigail’s shape came from behind and knocked Tess to the ground, as a frost settled upon them both.

  “Fight them—Tess—”

  Tobias got no other words out.

  He braced himself. Eyes tight, he shook his head; it was like a swarm of bees inside him, his brain fighting against it, and finally, the mist pushed harder, ramming him into a thick tree.

  He hit the ground gasping. He could no longer feel the world around him, or hear it. Something was in his head, searching, rifling through memories and dreams and emotions and thoughts, looking for a way to drive him further into fear, to scare him truly out of his mind.

  He felt it find a place inside, where he kept the pain over his mother and father’s deaths. Tobias had lived through the theater fire, and his guilt for surviving shone brightly among his memories. He had ached to know why he hadn’t been killed, and the spirit inside him took hold of this bit of him and crushed it until he felt a flood of emotion—sorrow, hopelessness—and the spirit wanted him to feel it, wanted him to want to die.

  Tobias felt himself becoming the Wilhelm ghost. He lost any sense of his bond with Tess. She was gone from him, and he couldn’t fight anymore.

  For Tess, there was nothing but a searing blue-white incandescence in her vision and filling her senses. She fell, as the mist invaded her tiny frame, and she clenched her eyes shut, fighting it.

  Tess knew Abigail’s spirit wanted her. It was searching Tess, tearing through her subconscious, battering at her beliefs, driving her to the sense that she was nothing, had nothing, did not even deserve to exist. It was like a frightening, repeating music, and Tess could feel the triumph, of the wraith inside her.

  All that she was, everything she’d ever been, was about to be stripped of her flesh and bone. She would join her mother and father, the ones she had left in that theater in New York, left to the agony of the fire while she had run.

  With her eyes blinded, she listened hard to know if Tobias had made it through alive—if she knew this, it would give her some strength, perhaps enough to fight back….

  It was morning now. The sun was rising.

  Tess’s eyes lifted to Tobias, who knelt down, embracing her.

  “It’s all right, we’ve made it, we’ve made it through,” he was telling her, but she could hardly hear him, her heart was thundering so hard. He took her face in his hands, gently. “It’s all right.”

  Tess was breathless, almost giddy, laughing in disbelief, “We’re alive…”

  He kissed her, desperate with relief.

  As they kissed, the wind blew ice across the ground. It cut into them deeply, maliciously, to remind them who they were, and then it settled.

  It was over.

  The blind boys had fallen to the ground a distance away, huddled down in the storm, survivors, useless to the spirits.

  Far off, the lamp of the train engine finally faded in the snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  He had questions but no answers.

  The police officer watched Tess Goodraven sitting quietly on the seat in front of him. She had hardly spoken throughout the questioning.

  The rescuers had taken the blind children into safe custody in an empty residence in Blackthorne. They had placed Tess in one room, Tobias in another, for there were serious concerns that something involving the occult had happened.

  They were the only true eyewitnesses to survive.

  And they were not talking.

  Tobias Goodraven proved no more helpful than his youthful wife. The two of them seemed to have had their fill of horrors, and asked only to move on.

  “If they are victims of something, what are they victims of?” asked the policeman. “Was there something in the forest that…lost its strength after the storm?”

  Tobias looked off into the distance.

  “I don’t know how to ask about any of this,” said the policeman, embarrassed to confront the question. “I suppose I’m asking if there’s such a thing as ghosts.”

  “There is but one thing I know of ghosts.”

  Carefully, the constable watched Tobias’s empty expression.

  “There are two kinds,” Tobias Goodraven went on. “Ones who want to make their peace with life and move on. And those who want life so badly they’ll do anything to get it again.”

  The constable replied, “Did you see something out there, Mr. Goodraven? The only other survivors, of course, saw nothing. So we rely on you. Were these murders?”

  “If indeed there be spirits here…they could no more be blamed for these deaths than a child for breaking his toys. They meant no more harm than a storm passing over.”

  Tobias stopped talking, and allowed the policeman to stare at him. “I’ve heard from people in Salem that you have a vile sense of humor, Mr. Goodraven, and if you’re being funny…,” he said severely. “There are bodies out there; we’ve lost near a hundred souls today.”

  “They might’ve lost their bodies. They didn’t lose their souls,” Tobias said. “Fear not for them.”

  And that was all he said. The policeman let Tobias out into the hall, and Tess came out with the officer who had questioned her. They all moved away to confer as Tobias and Tess joined hands—nerves frayed, tired and relieved.

  They heard one policeman say, “I’m not sure what they remember. They’re just so very disturbed….”

  The men looked toward the couple.

  Several male rescue workers entered at the door, one carrying a shattered cello, the second, a case. “I got them out,” the first man said proudly. “One of them came through in serviceable shape.” He motioned to the intact cello case and looked at Tess solemnly. “I’m sure this meant a lot to you. Would you want to take it with you now?”

  Tess eyed it emotionlessly. “No,” she said, for it no longer held any meaning to her. It was a thing of the past, an outdated prop Tess Goodraven no longer needed to smooth out the jagged edges of life.

  Outside, Tobias and Tess moved past the rescue workers, safe at last.

  EPILOGUE

  Tess and Tobias Goodraven settled in Salem, their new home, their new beginning, after all the chaos.

  They took a small apartment, and it was enough for them, with a window view of the city in the growing light of spring.

  To watch them on a typical evening, one would say they needed little from life except each other’s company. Every night Tobias and Tess sat down for a meal together. The room would be quiet, often somber.

  Then Tobias would look up and talk to Tess.

  He would speak German.

  She would answer him, saying something about the richness of the food they were eating, and she’d go to the kitchen, bringing back tea. They would appear to be an ordinary couple at home, enjoying simple pleasures, except for one thing.

  He might stare at his hand, pondering the lines there that he had not made, and she might take his hand in hers, as she sat beside him.

  She might say—in German, of course, “Feels good to touch you again, after so long…”

  The room would grow colder, and they might look up ominously at something almost beyond consciousness, something there just for a moment…as books were rattled off the shelves…as dust was blown from the windowsill of a closed window. The two wo
uld be staring ahead as ghostly strains of cello music would cascade down around them. It would pass, and the two would prepare for another uncomfortable meal, alien in their own skins.

  The haunted having become the haunters, Tess and Tobias were now only shadows in this world, spectres whose unseen eyes would bear down upon those who had taken their flesh to possess as their own.

  They’d stand there boldly, invisible and watchful. They had left behind their physical selves in that frigid land. And no one knew it.

  Their lives had been stolen.

  The couple at the table, the ones that called themselves Tess and Tobias Goodraven, would stare back blankly into the emptiness of the room.

  These were not the same people who got on that train in Salem.

  Only their bodies remained the same.

  About the Author

  J. P. HIGHTMAN is a professional screenwriter and the author of THE SAINT OF DRAGONS and SAMURAI. He divides his time between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. You can visit him online at www.jasonhightman.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Cover art © 2008 by Douglas Mullen

  Cover design by Michelle Gengaro

  Copyright

  SPIRIT. Copyright © 2008 by J. P. Hightman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.