by Val Crowe
But, hell, the whole thing was incredibly creepy. Somehow, the film managed to capture the power of this cabin, its hulking weight and presence. It was uncomfortable to watch on every level. I wasn’t sure how she’d done it. It was like she’d somehow gotten a ghost into the film.
And that was impossible. You couldn’t capture ghosts in pictures or video or audio.
“Anyway,” Rylan was plowing on, “my name is Rylan Vincent.” A pause. “You have? You do? That’s crazy. I didn’t think anyone watched my channel. I mean, I know people do, but I’ve never met anyone who watched it without already knowing me first. This is, um, wow.” She turned to me, giving me a big thumbs up.
I gave her a thumbs up back.
She was talking again. “Well, I was kind of wondering if you’d be interested in doing some filming for me. I’m, um, I’m going to the Sunny Day Campgrounds in Virginia—you have? You’ve heard of it?… Yeah, it’s a crazy story. I’ve been interested in going ever since I heard about the things that have happened there…. I know. It sounds mind-blowing, right?”
I tapped Rylan on the shoulder.
She gave me an annoyed glance. Apparently, she was really enjoying this conversation with Dominique. You wouldn’t know that Rylan had to be strong-armed into it to see the look on her face.
“Don’t forget about the money.”
Rylan furrowed her brow, confused.
“Yeah, I can pay her,” I said. I told her an amount. “See if Dominique will take that much.”
“I can pay you,” Rylan announced into the phone. A pause. “Well, you have to let me compensate you somehow….” She turned to me, hand over the receiver. She whispered that Dominique had requested a rate about half of what I’d offered. “How much should I give her?” she whispered.
“Uh, just agree to her rate,” I said. I guess I’d keep the rest of the money.
Rylan nodded. “That’s no problem at all. We would be happy to do that for you.”
“Tell her we’ll paypal it to her,” I said.
“We’ll paypal it to you,” said Rylan. “Oh, yeah, give me that email address.” She took a break from doodling flowers to write it down. “Okay, great. Well, this is going to be awesome. I can’t wait to meet you.” She listened and then laughed self-deprecatingly. “Oh, no, you made my day. Really. It’s been so amazing talking to you.” Another pause. “Yeah, excellent. Talk soon. Bye.” She hung up and got off the bed, grinning at me. “She is a fan, Deacon. An honest-to-goodness fan. I have fans. Can you believe it?”
Honestly, having watched Rylan’s videos, I could not. But then, I wasn’t much impressed with camera tricks and fancy editing and spooky music. I knew there were people who were, though. They were the same people who believed that my mother could actually contact the spirit realm and talk to ghosts.
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Where’d you get the money?” said Rylan.
“My mom gave it to me,” I said. “She helped me make the plan to try to hire Dominique.”
“Oh, so your mom knows all about me and my youtube channel,” said Rylan.
“You and my mom would probably get along,” I said.
“I actually think this is going to be really great,” said Rylan. “I’m so glad you put me in touch with Dominique. She’s amazing. She’s going to make this video so, so cool.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I’m going to find my answers.”
“Right,” said Rylan. “Everything’s great. It’s all coming together. It was easy.”
It was easy. I couldn’t help but be a little wary. I didn’t suppose that the ease of it all meant anything, but I was worried that it did. We didn’t know anything about this Dominique person except for the fact that Negus had been obsessed with her.
Honestly, that didn’t do much to recommend her as a trustworthy sort of person.
We didn’t know who she was.
Why had she been able to make that creepy and powerful short film?
Who was she? What was she?
CHAPTER TWO
True to my word, I paid a visit to Olivia’s grave. I hadn’t been there since the funeral, and it had been different then. Now, her headstone was in place, surrounded by professionally-created bouquets of flowers with artful sprays of baby’s breath accenting their arrangement. The wildflower bouquet I’d picked didn’t seem to fit.
I set it down anyway, and then I stared down at the headstone, hands in my pockets.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing here. I’d never really visited a grave before. Both of my grandparents were dead, but they’d been cremated, and both times, my mother had scattered their ashes while on the road, just letting them pour out the window while we drove.
I came from a family of drifters, people who lived on the road and made their living that way. (I supposed I’d also had grandparents on my father’s side, but I’d never known them.)
We talked about my grandparents after they died, but we never “paid our respects” or anything like that. Visiting graves was not a thing that we did in my family. I wasn’t sure if there was a protocol.
It probably didn’t matter, I supposed. After all, no one was here to see me.
If Olivia was there, I didn’t see her anywhere.
I didn’t think ghosts were the trapped spirits of the living, anyway. I thought they were simply imprints of traumas and violent incidents that had come before. That helped to explain why I saw ghosts of living people. But it didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain Negus, for instance. I didn’t know what he was. He wasn’t simply an imprint. He was stronger than that.
So, coming here, it wasn’t for Olivia. I knew that. It was for me.
I crouched down, eye level with the grave. I started to talk to her. I wasn’t talking to her so that she could hear, but just so that I could work through some things on my own.
“Wade said something to me about how he thought you wanted me, not him,” I said. “He said you were waiting for me, and that you took him as a consolation prize.” I took a deep breath. “I really hope that wasn’t true. I hope you were happy. Because I would hate to think that you spent your short life pining for something you never got.”
There was no response, of course. It was silent except for the sound of a flock of birds going overhead, heading south. The trees around me were turning yellow and orange and red. Some were still green. The autumnal foliage seemed at odds with all the bright flowers around Olivia’s grave.
“I always thought you meant more to me than I meant to you,” I said. “I mean, I was a big loser, and you were…” I searched for words. “You were Olivia Shields.” I sighed. “I… I never got a chance with you. We never had a chance together. But I can’t hold onto that forever and let it make me bitter. I’m not going to spend my life pining either.”
I gave the headstone a short nod, as if I’d just said something profound. But maybe I’d just made up some justification for moving on.
A person had to do that, though. That was what my mother did for people, when they paid for her services. She told them to move on with their life, and to let the dead rest in peace.
I touched the top of the headstone. “I hope there is peace after it’s all over,” I whispered. “I hope you’ve found it.”
* * *
“Hey, there,” said Mads, sitting on the counter in my Airstream. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, but she still looked hot. Lately, she’d been on a kick not to show too much skin. It was funny, because it used to annoy me that she’d prance around in short shorts and low cut tank tops. But now, I was annoyed that she covered up. It didn’t make any difference now, didn’t she understand that?
Mads was a ghost. Maybe she was my guardian ghost, like a guardian angel. She was always around to help me out of trouble when I needed her.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m getting a beer.” I made my way to stand in front of her, but I didn’t actually bend down to get to my mini-fridge, because her legs were in the
way of the fridge.
“Not stopping you, Deacon,” she said. “I’m not corporeal, or did you forget?”
“Move,” I said. “It’s weird watching the refrigerator door go through your legs.”
“And what if I don’t?” she said. “I think you’re in denial about what I am.”
I sighed. “I’m not in denial.”
She lifted her chin, challenging me.
I just gazed back at her, not saying a word. Things between Mads and me had always been weird, but now I thought they were even weirder. She was making me crazy.
“How are you?” she said.
“Fine,” I said.
“You were at Olivia’s grave,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d be… upset.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You were watching me?”
“I cleared out. I thought you’d want privacy,” she said. She pulled her legs up away from the fridge and wrapped her arms around them.
“Thanks.” I bent down and got out a Newcastle. I opened it and then I went over to the table to sit down.
Mads joined me, sitting on the opposite side. “Are you upset?”
“No,” I said. “I was… saying goodbye.”
“Oh,” she said. She inspected her fingernails.
I eyed her, waiting for her to vehemently deny that she was jealous of Olivia and the shadow she cast over me, but Mads didn’t. Now that she was wearing baggy sweatshirts, she liked to pretend that none of that had ever happened with us.
As if I couldn’t remember what it had been like to touch her hand, or smooth my hands over her waist or feel her lips on my forehead.
“Well, that’s good. I mean, I think it’s healthy,” said Mads. “And you can meet someone else soon. And the two of you can settle down together, and—”
I just snorted.
“What?” she said.
“I can’t have a normal relationship, Mads, not when I see ghosts all the time.” And not when you’re around, baggy sweatshirts notwithstanding.
“Well, what if you didn’t see ghosts?” she said.
“I do, though,” I said.
“Look in your storage area, behind your C batteries.”
“What?” I said.
“Just do it,” she said.
I got up from the table and went over to pull aside the shower curtain that I’d affixed over the shelves I’d made for storage. There were the batteries she was talking about, all right. I pushed them aside. There was a small wooden box behind them. I pulled it out, turning it over in my hands.
It was square, each side about the size of my palm. It was made with dark wood, and there were symbols burned into the wood. I didn’t know what they meant, but they reminded me of the symbols I’d seen on the spell that my mother had used when she summoned Negus—which she’d done because she thought she could help me, except it had backfired, just like everything did for her.
“What is this?” I said. “Where did you get it?”
“Well, back before you went beyond the gate of Point Oakes Park,” she said, “you and your mother spent a night outside the fence, and I went through her camper. I found that. I had a hunch about it, so I took it.”
“Took it? You picked it up?”
“Well, it wasn’t easy,” she said. “I had to expel a lot of energy to get it. And then I didn’t want to say anything about it until I was sure. But I’ve been looking into it, and I’ve found out what I could about this box. Your mother got it at one point, before she summoned Negus. Using this box in conjunction with Negus, she thought she could help you, make it so that you couldn’t see spirits anymore. She was right.”
“Wait, she’s had the cure in her camper all these years?”
“Well, it doesn’t work on its own. Anyway, after how badly things went with the summoning, she probably was afraid to experiment.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” I muttered. Considering her luck and all.
“She picked up a lot of other stuff too, and most of it was junk. So, it’s really just blind luck that she found this thing.”
I came back over to the table and set it down. “How’s it work?”
“You need the power of a very strong phantom. You have to trap the phantom inside the box. I don’t know exactly what makes a phantom the right kind for the box, but I know that Negus qualifies. I don’t qualify, or I’d do it for you. I don’t have the right sort of power.”
“How do you know Negus qualifies? You don’t know what he is.”
“I just do,” she said. “If you can find him, and you can trap him in this box, you can be free of seeing ghosts forever.”
I raised my eyebrows. I couldn’t believe it. Here it was, the answer to all my problems. I touched the box. And then I looked up at Mads. “But if I do this, I won’t see you anymore.”
“I know,” she said. “But that’s probably for the best, don’t you think?” She got up from the table.
I got up too. “No, I don’t think that.”
She wandered down the middle of the Airstream, her back to me. “You’ve always wanted to be free of the ghosts.”
“I know that.” I was following her. “But I didn’t think about how it would mean that you’d be gone.”
She stopped at the edge of the camper and turned to face me. The door to the camper was at her back. If she was flesh and blood, I could press her into the door, trap her with my body. I could touch her. Kiss her.
Instead, I stopped short. There was at least a foot of space between us.
“I haven’t been fair to you, Deacon,” she said. “I was selfish. You should have a real relationship with someone you can touch.”
My lips parted. “At the amusement park—”
“That was a trick.”
“So, how do we do that trick?” I said. “If we could make it happen, then—”
“We can’t,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Even if we could,” she said, and her voice was hard, “it still wouldn’t be right. Even if we could touch, it wouldn’t make me a person. You need to be with someone who’s as real as you are. What I did with all this, starting this, it’s not fair to you. I’m lonely, and I latched onto you, and I took you away from other people—”
“I’m lonely too,” I said.
“You never even tried to be with Olivia—”
“That was because of the pact I made with Wade, not because of you,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, her face falling.
“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t mean…” I tried to touch her, like an idiot, and my fingers went through her. All I felt was cold air, and her image got distorted.
She flickered out.
“Mads!” I called. “When I was around Olivia, you weren’t here. That’s not fair. You can’t be hurt because of that.”
She didn’t reappear.
And anyway, she was probably right to be hurt, because if it came down to a choice between Mads and Olivia, if Olivia were still alive and I had Wade’s blessing, and if Wade hadn’t slept with her and made it all weird… then I’d probably pick Olivia. But that was a lot of ifs.
Maybe it wasn’t even true.
Because if all those ifs were met, but I could touch Mads, I’d pick her. Because she knew me better than anyone on earth.
But all of those thoughts were dumb anyway. I wasn’t the kind of guy who got my pick of women. I didn’t get women at all, in fact.
I went back to the table and picked up the box again. “Hey, you have to come back,” I said. “You haven’t told me how to trap Negus.”
“Don’t know how to do that,” came her voice, but she didn’t reappear.
“Great,” I said, picking up the box and shoving it into the closet. “Then this is just a worthless trinket, and we got all worked up for nothing. We don’t know how to use it, and we don’t know where Negus is.”
No response to that.
I snagged my beer and took a long gulp. Who was I kidding? I ha
d said over Olivia’s grave that I wasn’t going to spend my life pining over something I never got. But what the hell did I think I was doing with Mads?
CHAPTER THREE
The Sunny Day Campgrounds were located out a long, winding, neglected road in the middle of nowhere. To get there, we had to drive over a rickety, one-lane bridge that spanned two mountains. Far below us, a sparkling river wound between the mountains. It was a long drop.
As I drove my truck and the Airstream over it, I had to admit that I wasn’t sure this was such a great idea after all. This bridge didn’t seem all that sturdy. What if something happened? What if the Airstream was actually too heavy to go over this thing and I fell to my death? Any second it could break.
I wasn’t sure if I should drive faster to try to get over it more quickly or go slower to be more careful.
But I did make it over the bridge.
I looked back at the other side, and I had a sinking feeling that we were going to end up stranded here.
That was when I looked to my left and saw that there was another bridge in the distance. I couldn’t quite gauge how far away, but it was there. That was incredibly reassuring. This was not the only way out.
Taking a deep breath, I continued to drive through the woods. With all the tree branches, the place was really anything but sunny, which made me wonder why it was called what it was called. Maybe if all the trees lost their leaves, which would probably happen over the next few weeks, a person would be able to see the sky, but as of now, there were only patches of blue visible.
The road was atrocious. It was dirt, and it had obviously been washed out more than once, and the water had dug out grooves and dips into the road. It was no problem for my truck, but the Airstream wasn’t really made for off-roading. I probably should have left it behind. Everyone else was going to be sleeping in the cabins that were out here in the campground.
I wasn’t intending to use power off grid. No generators or refrigerators or electricity. I was going to rough it with everyone else in that respect. But I felt more comfortable sleeping in the camper, and it was home. I was used to dragging it with me everywhere.