Ghost Trackers

by Grant Wilson Jason Hawes

  For the second time that day, Greg watched his friends get into Trevor’s car and drive away. He’d been present the entire time they were at Flying Pizza, sitting alone and unseen at a nearby table. Having the power, as the cliché went, to cloud men’s minds not only came in handy but was also really amusing sometimes. He hadn’t expected Jerry Cottrill to be there, too, but his presence was serendipitous, and offing the son of a bitch and having Drew, Amber, and Trevor discover his body, especially after killing Sean in front of them the night before, well, life—and death, too, for that matter—didn’t get much better than that.

  Things were moving along quite nicely, and everything was on track for the big event tonight. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little more fun in the meantime.

  He headed for his own car, humming along with the dark music playing in his head.

  The Ash Creek Historical Society was housed in an old building cattycorner from the downtown post office, only a few blocks from where Trevor’s parents lived. The main room of the building wasn’t much to look at. The plaster on the walls was yellowed and cracked, and the warped wooden floor creaked so loudly he feared the boards would give way beneath their weight as they walked.

  Framed black-and-white photos lined the walls, displaying images from the town’s past: the first firehouse, several covered bridges, farmers posing next to what at the time was brand-new state-of-the-art farm equipment, the first high school. There were no pictures of the Lowry House, though. It wasn’t the kind of place that the civic-minded citizens who served on the Historical Society wanted to commemorate. There were also framed front pages of the town newspaper, the Hue and Cry, mostly dealing with national events, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assassination, and the first moon landing. There were several local stories represented, but again, nothing about the Lowry House.

  Most people who visited the Historical Society—and there were a handful here today, mostly people back in town for the reunion—didn’t go past the main room. But as far as Trevor was concerned, the best part of the Historical Society was the smaller room in the back, where the reference library was housed. He’d made a beeline for it the instant he entered the building, and Amber had followed, a little reluctantly, he thought. Maybe she was tempted to linger and check out the pictures. Or maybe she was still bummed about Drew ditching her.

  On the drive over, he’d tried to cheer Amber up by telling her about a recent interview he’d done for a paranormal magazine with a woman who claimed not only that she saw ghosts everywhere she went but also that they were always naked. Amber had smiled a couple of times, but he could tell she wasn’t paying attention, and he’d fallen quiet and stayed that way the rest of the drive.

  Now the two of them sat at a small table in the reference room, Trevor on one side, Amber on the other, three huge bound collections of the Hue and Cry between them. The woman who’d retrieved the volumes for them looked as if she was 112 and wore a head bun so severe he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it had been coated in shellac. She’d wanted to hover while he read, especially once she’d learned that he was a writer there to do research, but he’d told her that he and his “assistant” worked better when they were undisturbed, and she’d gone out into the main room, a disappointed expression on her ancient face.

  Amber eyed the large volumes of newsprint with an air of disbelief. “Haven’t these people heard of scanning and digitizing text?” she asked. “Or at least microfiche?”

  Trevor, glad that she was talking again, smiled as he flipped back the stiff cover of one of the volumes and began turning pages. “They probably don’t have the budget for it. Besides, I like the smell of old newsprint. It smells like history, you know?”

  “Smells more like mold to me.”

  “That, too,” he admitted. He continued turning pages.

  Amber watched him for several moments before selecting one of the volumes for herself. “What are we looking for?” she asked.

  “I want to refresh my memory about the incidents with the Lowry House,” he said. “There are no detailed records of the Native American massacre you dreamed about, but the paper’s been around for more than a hundred years. It should’ve covered the bootlegger serial killer, the Lowry murder-suicide, and the fire. I’m looking through the volume of issues from the year the serial killings took place.” He glanced at the volume she’d selected. “You’ve got the year of the Lowry killings.”

  For a moment, it looked as if she was going to put that volume aside rather than dig into it in search of the grisly specifics of how Lowry murdered his family. But then she asked, “Do you remember what month it was?”

  “November.”

  She nodded and began turning pages. Before long, they’d both found the issues they were searching for and fell quiet as they read, Trevor occasionally writing a note in the small pad he always carried.

  After a bit, he looked up from the page he’d been reading. “It’s weird. I don’t have any specific memories of this place, but it feels familiar, like I almost remember it.”

  “Maybe you do,” Amber said, looking up from her volume. “I think the three of us coming home and being together has jolted our memories, kind of given them a jump start, you know?”

  He smiled. “Sounds like one of Drew’s theories. Has he been giving you private headshrinking lessons?” As soon as he said it, Amber dropped her gaze to the table, and he regretted opening his damn mouth. It wasn’t that he was jealous of Drew. He cared about Amber, but as a friend. It was just that, no matter how hard he tried to watch what he said, his internal censor was too often asleep at the wheel.

  He wanted to say something to make her feel better, but he had no idea what might work. It might have helped if he had a clear idea why Drew had not so subtly told her to accompany him to the Historical Society. Drew was usually so good with people—that was one of the main requirements of his job, after all—but from the way he’d dealt with Amber outside Flying Pizza, he’d seemed clueless. He probably hadn’t been thinking straight, Trevor decided. Hell, he doubted any of them had. They had just discovered a dead body—the second in two days—and had been questioned by the police about it. Even someone with Drew’s training would be shaken up after that. Especially if he thought he might be falling for Amber too fast. That was it, he realized. Drew was a good man, and he wouldn’t want to take advantage of Amber or make any impulsive moves given their current situation.

  Now Trevor knew why his friend had insisted that Amber accompany him to the Historical Society. He started to tell her, but for once he kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if either Drew or Amber had come out and admitted having feelings for each other. They might not have even admitted it to themselves. If he said anything about it now, he’d only end up embarrassing her. So he decided to broach a different subject.

  “You doing OK?”

  She looked up, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not every day you find a dead body, let alone two. How are you holding up?”

  She looked at him for a long moment before answering. “All right, I guess, all things considered. It’s funny the different ways people respond to a tragic event, though. Drew becomes a practical problem solver, while you get excited—not because you’re happy those men died,” she hurried to add, “but because you view their deaths as possible proof of paranormal activity.”

  Despite her attempt to soften her words, they still stung.

  “You’re right. I didn’t really know Sean or Jerry, and I do believe their deaths were too coincidental and bizarre to explain logically. And yes, I’m thrilled by the prospect of being part of a true paranormal experience. But if what you said earlier was right, and we have woken up some force that’s responsible for Sean’s and Jerry’s deaths, then it’s our responsibility to learn as much about it as we can. Only then will we have a hope of stopping it and preventing more deaths.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t m
ean to offend you.”

  He forced a smile. “I guess what you said cut a little too close to the bone, you know?”

  “You’re a good guy, Trevor Ward. Don’t you ever forget that.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze, and then, without either of them saying anything else, they returned to reading.

  Trevor soon found himself getting caught up in the story of Russell Stockslager. In the 1920s, Stockslager, who worked by day as a car mechanic in town, was one of the prime producers of moonshine for those citizens of Ash Creek, and there were many, who viewed Prohibition as an annoying inconvenience. Although there was nothing in the articles he read to suggest it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the town’s police had been aware of Stockslager’s profitable avocation and turned a blind eye to it. After all, the cops had to get their booze somewhere, too, right? But what the police hadn’t known was that Stockslager was able to use his ‘shine for more than making money. It made effective bait for luring women to his home, which in those days was outside city limits.

  The newspaper hinted that he accepted—or, more likely, demanded—sex as payment for booze, and when that thrill no longer satisfied, he’d turned to torturing and murdering his female visitors. He’d slain seven women and buried them in the barn where he kept his still. On January 17, 1923, an eighth woman—a girl, really, as she’d been only seventeen—managed to knock him out while he was raping her and escaped. She informed the police, and they headed out to the property in force. Stockslager tried to fight them off with a shotgun, but there were too many cops, and they were too well armed. And while he managed to hold them off for the better part of an hour, in the end, they stormed the barn where he’d been holed up and shot him dead. Afterward, the police discovered the graves of his victims, and overnight, he stopped being a simple bootlegger and became a town legend.

  Seven women died on Stockslager’s property in horrible circumstances, and while there was nothing in the news articles written in the days following his death to indicate precisely where the murders had been committed, Trevor suspected that they’d happened inside the house and he’d taken the bodies outside afterward for disposal. His closest neighbor lived a quarter of a mile away, but even so, that was close enough for someone to hear screams coming from the barn. No, he would have done his dirty work inside, most likely in the basement, choosing to bury the dead women in the barn, not only so the smell of their decaying bodies wouldn’t permeate his house but also because the odors produced by his still would mask the stink. And who knows? Maybe he liked having his victims near him while he worked.

  Those poor women had experienced unimaginable fear and pain before they died, and all of that negative psychic energy could have remained trapped in the house. Trevor knew from previous research he’d done that the Native American massacre had happened in the general vicinity of the Lowry House. What if it had happened on the exact spot?

  The negative psychic energy released during the massacre could have soaked into the land, remaining dormant until someone built a house there. Maybe Stockslager had been a bad man to begin with, or at least someone with the potential to be bad, and he’d awakened the negative energy on his land and been influenced by it. Transformed from a small-time criminal into someone truly evil. And when his victims died, the negative psychic energy they’d left behind could have merged with the energy already there, making what was already a Bad Place even worse.

  He tried to imagine what it had been like the night Stockslager’s bloody career had ended. It had been January, so it had to have been biting cold, but had there been snow on the ground? Hard to say. Snowfall in southwestern Ohio, like all the weather, was unpredictable. The paper said the police arrived at the house sometime after two A.M. Had it been a clear night, the stars spread across the blue-black sky like glittering chips of ice? Or had it been overcast, the clouds blocking the stars and making a dark night even darker?

  “It’s a beautiful night. A day after the new moon, but the sky’s clear and the stars are out. There’s a couple inches of snow on the ground, but it’s not all that cold, really. Around thirty degrees, I’d guess, though I haven’t checked.”

  Trevor blinked. A moment ago, he’d been sitting across the table from Amber in the Ash Creek Historical Society’s reference room. Now he stood inside a small barn lit by several uncovered light-bulbs hanging down from the ceiling on black wires like glowing spiders dangling from ebon threads. The barn had a dirt floor, and on one side of it sat a still, a simpler-looking device than he expected: a couple of barrels connected by metal tubing to a large metal canister erected above a small fire pit. No fire was burning now, though. The acrid tang of raw alcohol hung heavy in the air, along with another odor, cloying and rank, and in a sickening way almost sweet. The other side of the barn was empty, save for seven raised mounds of earth, marked with simple crosses made of small twigs bound with twine.

  “What can I say? I always was a sentimental son of a bitch.”

  The man sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the closed barn door, which Trevor saw was padlocked from the inside. He was grotesquely obese, so much so that it was difficult for Trevor to guess the man’s age by looking at him. He could have been anywhere from twenty to sixty, but thanks to the diligent reporters of the Hue and Cry, Trevor knew he was forty-six and that he wouldn’t live to see forty-seven. He wore a brown jacket, jeans, and brown boots, and with the exception of the latter, his clothes didn’t even come close to fitting. They were so tight on the man’s fat form that Trevor thought they might split at the seams any second. The man wore his black hair cut short, not quite a buzz cut but close, and he had a mustache so pencil-thin it looked as if it might have been drawn on with ink. He had a shotgun, but as he didn’t have a lap for it to rest across, he held it in his right hand, butt end against the ground, barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

  Although the man had spoken to him in a low and resonant voice more appropriate for a radio announcer than a car mechanic/bootlegger/serial killer, he hadn’t turned to look at him. Rather, he continued facing the barn door, his gaze fixed on the old gray wood as if he could see through it to what lay outside.

  “You know what was stupid? Me coming in here and locking myself in when the cops showed up. Guess I panicked, you know? But there was no reason for me to. Sure, some young cooz ran to the cops and told them I tried to rape her, but that was it. She had no idea about the others, didn’t have a fucking clue that there were any bodies buried out here. The cops came to check out her story, but not because they gave a damn about her. They wanted an excuse to shake me down for some money. All I would’ve had to do was keep calm and pay them off, give them a few bottles of shine for the road, and they’d have gone on their merry fucking way. Instead, I tell them that we should have a little something to drink while we talk, and I come out here to get some of my ’shine, and what do I do? I get scared, shut the door, lock it from the inside, and grab hold of my shotgun. Now they know something else is going on besides a little slap-and-tickle that got out of hand. That means they aren’t going to leave without wanting to come in here and have a look around, and once that happens . . .” He trailed off. There was no real need for him to finish.

  “You’re Russell Stockslager,” Trevor said. “And this is 1923. January 17, to be precise.”

  Stockslager didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t have to.

  Trevor looked around. The level of detail was amazing. Not just sights and sounds but smells, too, and temperature. The inside of the barn was cold, and his breath fogged the air.

  “What is this?” he said, feeling equal parts fear and excitement. “A hallucination? A psychic replay of past events? Maybe telepathic contact across time?”

  “It’s the last night of my life,” Stockslager said, still not looking away from the door. “That’s all you need to know.”

  Although he stood a good thirty feet away from Stockslager, he made no move to go closer. He was afraid that whatever this ex
perience was—real, imaginary, or something in between—it was unstable, and like a soap bubble, it would pop out of existence if he disturbed it in the slightest way. And there was the minor fact that he was locked in a barn with a gun-toting serial killer. Stockslager might not be real, at least in a physical sense, but Trevor wasn’t about to assume that the man couldn’t do him any harm. According to common folk wisdom, if you died in a dream, you died in real life, too. This might not be a dream, but whatever it was, he didn’t plan to put that particular bit of folklore to the test.

  “This is going to sound a little weird,” he began. “OK, more than a little, but this is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me. I’ve spent my entire adult life investigating and writing about other people’s paranormal experiences, but this is the first time I’ve actually had one.”

  Now Stockslager turned to look at him, and Trevor was taken aback by how dead his eyes were. They were cold, hard, and lifeless, without any hint of human feeling. Doll’s eyes.

  “The first time you remember,” Stockslager said. “You may think this is something special, but it’s nothing compared with the little party you and your friends had the last time you were here.”

  Trevor felt a pressure inside his head, as if Stockslager’s radio-announcer voice was calling to his memories, urging them to rise out of the subconscious muck where they’d been buried for so long and come shambling forth. He wanted to know the truth about what had happened that night in the Lowry House, but he sensed that now was not the best time for his memories to surface. He knew somehow that if they did, he would be overwhelmed, his mental defenses shattered, and if that happened, he would be lost. He fought to keep the memories at bay, and although he could feel them crowding the threshold of his awareness and screaming to be let free, they stayed where they were—for the moment, at least.