by J L Bryan
“I'm fine with it. I'm shocked, can't believe she wants to, thought she totally hated me...but definitely fine with it.” I checked the time. “I should probably get going. Want to caravan out early in the morning? Maybe seven?”
“I was thinking about four.”
“Four?”
“You said 'early.' If you want to sleep late, though, seven's fine with me.”
“I'll see you in the morning.” I hugged him before leaving. Apparently I was on hugging terms with the whole family now.
And I was fine with that, I reflected as Michael walked me down to my van. I even felt myself smiling a little, almost looking forward to the case, and even the long drive up into the mountains.
Chapter Seven
We got up dark and early in the morning and met for a predawn breakfast at The Country Barn, mainly so we could send Stacey pictures of ourselves posing with the seven-foot plastic Grandpa Rooster statue by the cash register. Melissa posed with her eyes crossed and pretended she was trying to steal the corn-cob out of Grandpa Rooster's feathered plastic grip.
Afterward, Melissa rode shotgun in my van. We followed Michael's ancient but lovely red truck out of town; presumably I was letting him lead the way because I trusted his navigation skills or whatnot, but really I was just worried that his lovingly restored antique vehicle was going to leave him lovingly stranded by the road.
“Sooo...” Melissa sat back, apparently approving of my choice of music, or at least not complaining. She looked into the cluttered cargo area in the back, where containers of ghost-nabbing gear occupied shelves, all of it strapped down and locked into place. “Those are your weapons, huh? Against the...you know.” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Ghosty-wosties.”
“I wish they were more like weapons,” I said. “Most of it's just for trying to detect and study the ghosts.”
“But you have some weapons back there, right?”
“Just defensive ones, mostly. We use powerful lights and religious music to drive ghosts back temporarily, and usually that works, unless the ghost is really focused on what it's doing. But we're supposed to remove the ghosts permanently, so it's not exactly case closed just because we got a hostile ghost to lie low for a while. Actual ghost removal is trickier.”
“You use some kind of traps, too, right? How do those work?”
I went into it, telling her all about the craft of ghost-catching. She seemed eager to learn, listening intently, peppering me with questions.
It was nice to feel warmth and friendliness from her, but I began to worry, too. She was almost too interested.
“Melissa,” I said. “You know I'm doing the investigation on my own, right? It's just vacation time for you and your brother.”
“But I can help a little. Right?” Her smile faltered.
“I promised myself that I wouldn't involve Michael in future cases. He has enough danger in his life without me adding to it. That's a choice I made to protect him, and to protect you, too.”
“I'm not some helpless kid, you know.” There was a fiery glint in her green eyes for a moment. “I'm moving to another state in less than a year. And I'll be on my own.”
“And hopefully not chasing restless dead people in rotten old basements.”
She smiled. “But if I do run into a ghost, how will I know what to do with it? If you don't teach me?”
“I had no idea you were so interested. I kind of thought the opposite—that you wanted no part of it in your life or Michael's.” And no part of me, either, I could have added, but I kept it to myself.
“But it brings up so many crazy questions, doesn't it?” she asked. “Like...what do people do after they die? Does everyone linger around as a ghost?”
We reached the bridge over the wide blue Savannah River, the bridge that made it clear we were leaving the city and the state, too, heading into the farms and pine woods of South Carolina beyond.
“No, not everyone,” I said.
“Yeah, cause there'd be billions of ghosts. Gum?” She took a pack of Juicy Fruit from her beach-style purse made of woven bamboo and bright artificial flowers.
“Sure, thanks.” I didn't really want the gum, but I liked the idea of accepting a little gift from her. It was a funny moment of communion, unwrapping the treats and popping them into our mouths.
The gum was so sweet that I winced a little when I bit into it, but I assured myself that the overwhelming artificial flavor would surely vanish in a minute or so, leaving me with a dull, flavorless wad to chomp.
“So, if most people don't hang around here, where do they go?” Melissa asked.
“I'm afraid I don't have a ton of insight into deep religious questions like that,” I replied. “I only know about the ones who stick around. And they usually have some kind of trauma keeping them here. Something that happened in their lives that they can't let go of. They can be insanely obsessive. It's like, hey, you're dead, all your problems are over. Move on. Literally. Move on from the world.”
Melissa's face flushed a little and she looked away. Great. I'd upset her.
I thought I could guess why.
“Are you thinking about your mom?” I asked.
She drummed her fingers and kept staring out the window. The roads had grown noticeably rougher across the state border, as if a cheaper contractor had been used, or maybe the roads were just older.
“Believe me, I know,” I said. “Both my parents are gone. And spending all these years walking the line between life and death...sometimes I wonder. Can I reach them somehow? Can they reach me? And...sometimes I think, if all these other freaks and monsters cared so much that a part of them sticks around after death, what about my parents? Neither of them wanted to stick around near me after they died? Not even for a while?” I shook my head and fought against the stinging feeling in my eyes. “I don't think I've ever said anything like that aloud. But I've definitely thought about it.”
“Your dead parents?” Melissa asked, still looking away. The harshness of her tone startled me. Hadn't we been bubblegum buddies just a second earlier?
I kept my tone calm, resolving to be the adult in the situation. She'd been through some rough things, and I'd been through similar rough things.
“We both lost our parents too early,” I said. “I was fifteen. Mine both died in a fire. I know you were fourteen when your mom passed. And two when your dad left.”
She stared out at the road, her hair like a golden curtain concealing her face from my gaze.
“If you ever want to talk, you know...I'm here,” I said softly. It didn't sound like much, but honestly it took more courage to open myself up that way to her, even a crack, than it had to face many of the twisted, powerful ghosts I've confronted in my career. I swallowed, feeling nervous. As usual, I was more flummoxed dealing with the living than with the dead.
“Talk?” She turned to me, and she was smiling, wide and toothy. “What was it like for you?”
“Just...horrible.” I didn't know how to sum it up.
“Were you there? When the fire happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn't you die with them?”
“I...got out. My dog led me out.”
“And you didn't go back for your parents?”
“I couldn't. I was collapsing from the smoke. I don't think the firefighters would have let me, anyway.”
“But on your way out?” she asked, gaping at me like she couldn't understand. “You didn't look for them? You didn't try to help them?”
“I didn't...I couldn't...” I was trembling, feeling horribly churned up on the inside, feeling welling up as if to drown me. “I would have, if I'd known. I was a stupid kid...”
“Kid? At fifteen? I used to visit my mom in hospice when I was fourteen. I watched her wither up, watched her shrink away until there was...nothing.”
“I know. I'm sorry.”
“I wished the whole time I could just reach out and save her, and I couldn't. But you co
uld have, maybe. How do you live with that?”
“Not very well.” I shivered. This was most the honest and open conversation I'd had about this in recent memory. I reminded myself to keep it together, to not give into the urge to let my feelings run wild, or I might become an emotional wreck. And a literal wreck, considering I was driving down the highway at the van's grand tip-top speed of sixty-four miles an hour (when it's got enough runway).
“Do you think about it much?” she whispered, staring closely at me. “The loss?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yeah.” This conversation was going sour fast. I had thought I might somehow blindly grope my way toward comforting her. Instead, it felt like she was poking at me with a long, rusty length of barbed wire, and I was helpless to defend myself.
Those questions are really about her, I reminded myself. It's just easier for her to project those feelings onto you.
Thank you, psychology degree.
“It hurts,” I said, trying to regroup. “But it gets better over time. The pain isn't so...constant. Honestly, I think you've handled it amazingly well. You're so on top of your life. At your age, I was just angry, bitter, hateful, thinking only of revenge—”
“Revenge?” She smiled, but looked perplexed. “Against whom?”
“Against...” I hesitated. Of course I hadn't really discussed it with her before. “Against the ghost that set the fire. The same one who possessed your brother.”
“Really?”
“I saw him the night my parents died but didn't know who he was until later. He was a plantation owner who died in 1841...” I told her the quickest version I could summon—Anton Clay, his fiery murder-suicide of a death, the other fires that had come in later years, to destroy later families. Then I told her about my recent efforts to track him down.
“So you don't have any idea where he is?” Melissa said.
“Not much anymore. He's been missing since that night your brother got hurt, out at that farm.”
“Why didn't you capture him before? All those years when he was still haunting the grounds of your old house?”
“Calvin said he was confined there. Trapped there. As long as nobody else moved in...but some construction company's been at work over there. I think that's what released him, somehow. Maybe they dug up something. Knocked an old bone loose or something.” I hesitated, then added: “Calvin thought going after Clay was too much for me.”
“Because he's so dangerous?”
“And because of my personal connection to him. I think Calvin was saving that job until I was really ready—maybe as a sign I'd really graduated, so to speak, really mastered my skills as a ghost trapper. And I wasn't there yet...and now Anton's escaped...”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Of Anton Clay?” I thought of the years of nightmares I'd suffered, filled with fire and screams, my parents trapped and just out of reach. In my mind, that night went on and on, me trapped in one smoke-filled hallway after another, lost in a smoke-filled labyrinth of hallways, the doors stuck shut, my parents screaming behind them, my dog already dead and burned but still walking somehow, his flaking black tongue dangling out of his charred skull. I thought of Clay's mirthful voice and cold laughter. I thought of him looking at me through Michael's eyes, predatory, ready to kill us all. “Yes,” I finally answered. “I'm more afraid of him than of anything else in the world.”
“Do you think he's going to find you?” Melissa asked, looking a little worried now.
“I have no idea where he's gone,” I said. “Maybe he's moved on. One thing I do know: he has no known connection to Foxboro, or to Tennessee generally. So I don't think we're likely to encounter him on this trip.”
“Okay.” She settled back into her seat and fell quiet for a little bit.
I was tempted to pry, to ask about her apparent change of heart toward me, but I also didn't want to look a gift horse too deeply in the mouth. Why remind her that she'd previously wanted me out of their lives? What else did I want other than peace and happiness among us all? Why be uncomfortable when we seemed to have it?
I shook my head and tried to stop psychoanalyzing myself. I have intimacy issues because, deep down, I expect everyone I care about to die horribly at the hands of a ghost. There, I just saved myself ten thousand dollars in therapy bills.
So I turned up the music, and we picked up speed as we hit the open road, leading us away from the city and the shore and deep into the hinterlands.
Chapter Eight
Our trip seemed amicable enough, for a while. Melissa and I even agreed on music, for the most part, certainly more than Stacey and I ever had. I didn't have to hear a single cheesy boy-band song the whole way.
Conversation went in and out, as it can on long drives, and we managed to keep it pretty light, avoiding topics of death and destruction. We kept it to happier topics, like Jason Momoa. I learned Melissa had no boyfriend nor any current desire for one. “May as well not get attached, since I'm leaving as soon as I get a chance,” she explained.
We crossed into North Carolina and started to climb into the mountains about halfway through our six-hour drive, and Melissa began to shift restlessly in her seat, like she had too much nervous energy and couldn't stand sitting still much longer.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Just sick of this stupid drive,” she said, her mood apparently spoiled now.
“It should get more interesting soon,” I said. “It's definitely getting steeper.”
“Yeah.” She kept twitching, looking out the window like she expected a bear to attack us. Bears did live in the mountains, but they weren't generally known to assault moving vehicles on the road. “How much longer?”
“About three hours.”
“Ugh.” She started messing with the music, jumping from one song to another, seemingly unable to find anything she liked. “I wish we could just be there already. I hate sitting down.”
“Want to get out and walk the rest of the way?” I was joking, of course, but she didn't laugh.
“Maybe.”
The road grew steeper. I kept an eye on Michael's old-timey truck ahead to make sure it didn't slip or conk out, but the old thing took the steep road fine. The highway snaked through the mountains, and signs that things were getting a little more iffy kept cropping up. Many of these were actual traffic signs, telling me to watch for falling rocks or runaway vehicles. Sure, no problem, I could just tap into my expert stunt-driving skills, maybe leap a few boulders with my sluggish cargo van.
The signs grew more exciting as the mountains grew taller. RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP, one of them reassured me, placed just beside a long, steep dirt track leading up and away from the road. Just in case an eighteen-wheeler came barreling down from the mountain above and its brakes weren't powerful enough, it could just run up that side road and burn off some steam...hopefully not clobbering anyone in the process.
The curves became tighter, and sometimes I'd go around one to find myself looking over a drop of hundreds of feet, just beyond the guardrail at the edge of the road. Thank goodness for the guardrail, because the drive would have been terrifying without it.
Of course, if a runaway eighteen-wheeler whipped around the curve, it would probably plow us right through that guardrail and over the cliff to certain death. It was kind of hard not to visualize it, once I started.
My hands grew sweaty as I steered us up around another tight bend, past another huge drop to distant trees and rocks below.
Then it started to snow.
“You're kidding!” I snapped as fat white flakes spattered my window. “I hate driving in the mountains. I've just decided it.”
“Me, too.” Melissa was looking almost ill. I felt the same way.
“This is why I live on the coast,” I said. The snow began to fall more heavily, as thick as confetti at a parade celebrating wasteful uses of paper. “And in the South,” I added. “Though I guess we're
still there, somehow. I hope I packed warmly enough. I don't own a lot of cold-weather clothes. What about you?”
“I hate it, too,” Melissa said, almost growling as she glared in disgust at the falling snow outside. There wasn't even a hint of hey at least we're in this together, either. “I need a break.”
“Maybe we'll hit another town soon,” I said. “Do you need another bathroom break?”
“Yeah, and a fresh air and leg-stretching kind of break,” she said, fidgeting badly and drumming her fingers on the passenger-side window sill. “I pretty much can't wait any longer.”
“I'm sure we'll be to a town soon. You can check the map on my phone.” I indicated where it sat in my cupholder, charging off the dashboard.
She grabbed it up and looked. “No signal right now.”
“The map should work offline.”
“But it doesn't know where we are!” Melissa snapped. “So it can't tell us how far to the next town. I have to get out. I'm going crazy.”
“We can't just stop on the side of the road. Plus we'd have to tell your brother, and I don't like the idea of calling his phone right now. With all this coming down.” The snowfall was getting faster and thicker. “You call this 'light flurries,' Weather Channel?” I grumbled.
“It's just going to get worse, though,” Melissa said. “I need a break.”
I sighed. “Okay, that last sign says there's a 'Scenic Overlook' ahead. I guess we can stop for a second...”
“That's all I need.”
Feeling unhappy about it, I pulled off the road to a spot with a small row of parking places and a couple of benches looking over a guardrail to a huge drop below and the fog-enshrouded mountains beyond.
“Thanks!” Melissa was out of the van almost the instant I put it in park.
“Wait, I have to call Michael.” I hated the idea of distracting him as he drove through falling snow on the mountainside, but I knew he wouldn't want us to get separated.
There was no signal at first, but I had some luck with holding the phone up at a weird angle. One bar. I dialed.