Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  Crowley came into focus, slightly distorted, half lost in the murk that seemed glued to Roger’s perceptions. Sitting just to his left was Robin Carlysle, a woman who’d killed her own children according to the courts, and who insisted that she had never harmed her toddlers, that it was her father and his friends who had done the crime. Of course that was nonsense, because her father was dead and had been since before the children were born.

  Arthur Carlysle had been a very bad man in life. According to what Robin had explained over the last three years of therapy, he’d assaulted his daughter sexually on several occasions and used her as a bargaining chip when he was low on funds and playing poker with his friends. To make matters worse, he’d been a police officer in the town where she was born. Seven years after his death, in one of her first sessions with Roger, she confessed to him that the day her father died trying to prevent a bank robbery had been the first time in her life she’d ever felt free.

  Years of therapy later, she’d finally moved on with her life and gotten married to a man who was almost the spitting image of her father. He was abusive, too. The biggest difference was that he left her when she got pregnant instead of hanging around to heap more abuse on her.

  Robin had actually been moved from the fourth floor because of her firm belief that staying there endangered the rest of the female patients. She claimed that her father would hurt them. After frequent requests and threats to hurt herself if she was not relocated, he’d given in to her strange demands. They were harmless enough and it seemed to help with her progress.

  Robin sat perfectly still, her eyes looking down at the table, but around her the darkness in the air seemed to congeal. Roger could make out six indistinct figures, none of which had been in the room a moment before.

  He looked away from them for a moment, distracted by Carl Branaugh’s panicked scream. The detective was on the ground and another dark shape crouched over him, thin arms outstretched. Roger’s heartbeat was loud in his ears and his skin felt cold. He looked away from the detective and back toward the shapes near his patient.

  Though they were slow to come into focus, he saw them. Their skin looked like rotten fruit, covered with tiny spots of darkness that appeared bruised, and their complexions in general were sallow. Their clothing was little better, often torn or pulled out of shape. Each and every one of the figures kept a hand on Robin at all times, touching her hair, her face, her shoulders, even as they screamed at her. Worse for him was the fact that they were yelling, that he could see the strain on their faces and in the muscles of their necks, but not a one of them made a sound.

  Roger moved closer to her, trying to make out all of the details of the six men. They appeared to be in their early to mid forties, but it was hard to tell through the decay that rotted away their flesh. One man in particular stood out; a fellow in a policeman’s uniform, whose skin was riddled with bullet holes.

  “Dear God, Robin…” His voice broke as he kept looking. Even death didn’t hide the obvious resemblance of the cop. The barrel-chested man standing directly behind Robin was familiar enough from the photos in her file, but he would have known Robin’s father without the benefit of a picture or two.

  He stared, horrified. Were ghosts real? Well, yes, he supposed they were, but that wasn’t what hit him hard enough to paralyze his mind: it was that he’d never once considered that the woman he’d been treating might have been telling the truth all along that did him in.

  Crowley moved closer, physically stepping through the form of a heavyset man screaming into Robin’s face.

  “Robin? Do you want me to get rid of them now?” Crowley’s voice was surprisingly soft, gentle.

  Robin nodded her head and collapsed into tears, her entire body shaking as she started to wail out her fear and grief.

  Jonathan Crowley spoke softly, too low for Roger to hear the words clearly, and reached for the first of the ghosts, the one he was transposed with. The figure struggled to get away from the hands that grabbed it, shadowy features suddenly panicked and in pain before it collapsed in on itself.

  The others reacted, backing away in fear as Crowley gave them chase, moving after each of them and simply touching them, drawing them into his hand as they shrank in size. The last remaining figure was Arthur Carlysle, who silently begged for mercy and was granted none.

  The daughter of the last dead man continued to cry, her face pressed against the table where she sat. Crowley walked away from her and straight toward Roger, holding his hand open to make sure Finney saw exactly what he held there.

  “Six ghosts, Doc.” Crowley’s voice was strained, bordering on agonized. “I don’t know how long they’ve been attached to Robin, but you can believe she noticed them. I don’t know why, but some people are sensitive to the dead. Some people can’t get away from them to save their lives.”

  “How did you catch them? What will you do with them?” His voice shook as he talked, his eyes looking at the six shapeless things that writhed and festered in Crowley’s hand, as stuck to his flesh as a fly to a spider’s web.

  “I caught them because I know how. As to what I’ll do with them, I was thinking maybe you’d like to have them for a while. You could study them and listen to them every night while you try to sleep. I could make that happen, too. Do you like the idea?”

  “NO!” Even without touching them he could feel their presence like radiation spilling from Crowley’s hand. They felt cold and angry and worst of all…they felt hungry.

  Crowley closed his hand into a fist and moved it down to his side. He was smiling already, but when he caught Roger’s eyes he winked. “Just kidding, Doc. I wouldn’t do that to you. I like you.” He leaned in closer, until they were only inches apart. “Now just imagine spending the last few years of your life with them touching you all the time, screaming at you endlessly. That’s what Robin has been going through. In the old days they used to say a person was ‘Hag-ridden,’ meaning that the person was cursed by a witch that sent spirits to torment them. I understand a lot of doctors think the people who suffered from being hag-ridden were really just crazy. What do you think?”

  Crowley turned away from him abruptly and looked at Branaugh. The police detective was on the ground, shivering violently. A single form was curled along him, a shadow that clung to him and spoke into his ear, her decaying face distorted with anger.

  Crowley squatted next to the man and looked him over carefully. “I can put her to rest if you want me to, Detective. But you have to ask me to do it for you.”

  Roger looked around the room, taking in everything for the first time since the cloudy atmosphere had manifested. Phil Harrington sat against the far wall, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms locked around his legs. The man trembled, eyes wide, and stared at the something only he could see.

  Robin still sat at the table, crying, and he moved to her side. “Robin, can you hear me?”

  She nodded her head, still not looking up. Despite his personal convictions that physical contact should stay on a professional level between doctors and patients, he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her closer. “I’m so sorry, Robin. I can’t apologize enough.”

  ***

  Carl could barely hear Crowley over the sound of his sister’s voice. She spoke to him, but he couldn’t understand most of the words. He could only sense the regret, the pain she endured and that was enough to drop him to his knees.

  Beth was dead, but she still talked, whispering words of sorrow that echoed through his skull.

  Crowley spoke louder. “I can put her to rest if you want me to, Detective. But you have to ask me to do it for you.”

  “Will it hurt her?” He could barely draw in the breath to speak, his body felt cold wherever she touched, cold enough to burn.

  “I can give her peace, but yes, there will be pain first.”

  Beth screamed, crying out for a life lost, and it seemed, for just a brief second, that there was something else in that sound as well. “
Beth? What should I do?”

  Two voices spoke as one, their sounds echoing through each other. The one voice, definitely his sister’s, said, “Free me.” The other voice, a tone that was cold and remorseless but no less that of his sibling said, “Join me, Carl. Come be with me and take the loneliness away.”

  Her hands seemed to stroke his skin and clutch to him at the same time. He felt pain with every digging caress.

  Crowley leaned in closer and spoke clearly now. “The mind of a ghost is as complex as the mind of a living person, Detective. She wants peace, and she wants you with her at the same time. She is giving and greedy. The longer she stays this way, the more her mind will hunger. She wants to live, Carl. She wants to live and breathe and she can’t. She’s dead, but she doesn’t want to die alone. Hungry ghosts never want to die alone.”

  Carl cried, torn by the echoes of his sister’s feelings, the desire to be alive, the need to have company, the need for simple contact with another being. How was it that she could be here, touching him and not see the other ghosts? How long had she been here without him even knowing?

  He shook his head. “Free her, please!” He said the words before he could change his mind, because as much as he wanted to live, a part of him wanted to be with his sister, regardless of the cost. If he heard her for too much longer he might give in, and there was so much life that he still wanted to experience.

  Without another word, Jonathan Crowley reached out and grabbed Beth’s wrists, pulling her away from him.

  Beth shrieked, a sound that ripped through his heart and mind and chilled him even more. Her body kicked and struggled, but Crowley held her, backing away from Carl, and he let the man go despite the temptation to move after him and fight to keep his sister safe. It was too late to protect her now, just as it had been too late when she killed herself.

  Beth screamed again and this time Carl’s voice met hers and added to the sound. Carl Branaugh wept as he crawled on his hands and knees, his eyes locked in the darkness that was all he had left of his sister. He cried louder still when she disappeared from Crowley’s grasp, vanishing as if she’d never been there.

  In the room that was darker than it should have been, three men who had never seen a ghost before did the best they could with the news that they had been wrong. Ghosts were real, or at least real enough to wound them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Amelia moved closer to Crowley and stopped just short of touching him. “That was a little harsh, wasn’t it?”

  “Not really. They wanted answers. Now they have them.” He didn’t look at her, focusing instead on Harrington over against the far wall, damned near hiding himself under the tables where food was slowly going to waste. The sight of her was still enough to infuriate him. “Besides, you’re hardly in the right position to be talking to me about cruelty.”

  “Jonathan, I already apologized, what more do you want from me?”

  “Right now, I want a sandwich. If you feel like slapping one together, that would be dandy. If not, I’ll do it myself.”

  She shook her head and moved toward the cold cuts and bread. He wasn’t fooling her and they both knew that before it was all over, he’d be acting as if nothing had ever happened and helping her with her problem. If he’d been doing his job right in the first place she would already be dead, but he hadn’t fixed things back then and he wouldn’t now.

  He watched Harrington relax and knew that the spell was wearing off. While plenty of people had accused Jonathan Crowley of cruelty in the past—and not without their reasons—he wanted to teach the men in the room a lesson, not drive them out of their minds.

  Carl Branaugh was slowly climbing to his feet, looking at Crowley almost constantly, uncertainty clear in his expression.

  “You want to know if it was real?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded his head.

  Crowley grinned. “Want to do it again, just to make sure?”

  “No, no that’s all right.” He looked away for a moment and placed a trembling hand over his eyes. “Is she at peace?”

  “Probably. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “How do you get rid of the ghosts?”

  “There are a lot of different ways. With your sister, I just severed the bonds she had to you and let her go free. I guess you could say I gave her a map of where to go, but I can’t make her follow it.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “You mean why was she different than you remembered?”

  “Yes. She changed.”

  “She’s been changing since she was born. Why would dying stop that?” He waved a dismissive hand. “You wanted to know about ghosts, and now you know.”

  “I don’t know a damned thing, just that they’re out there.”

  “That’s more than you knew before. You want to know something else, ask me.” Amelia handed him a plate with two thick sandwiches, one with ham and one with bologna. He nodded his thanks and sat down at a free table, digging in with a passion. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hungry enough to feel sick from it, but happily, he knew the cure.

  Roger stood up and started leading Robin from the room. Crowley shot him a warning look to be gentle, knowing it was unnecessary, and the man nodded his understanding.

  “I feel different now.” Branaugh had a dazed look on his face.

  “Yeah, well, you should. Your sister isn’t feeding off of you anymore.”

  “Feeding off me?” He stared at Crowley. “What do you mean?”

  “It takes energy to affect the world. Most of the time that lack of energy is felt as a cold spot, but now and then you get a ghost who sort of siphons off life force in order to keep going. Your sister was draining life from you so she could stay around.”

  Branaugh looked sick and shook his head.

  “Oh, relax. The worst you probably got out of it was feeling tired now and then. She wasn’t a psychic vampire; it wasn’t like she was trying to eat your soul, just taking what she needed.”

  “But that’s sick!”

  He answered around a mouthful of ham and cheese on rye. “No, it’s survival. Listen, count your blessings, I’ve run across a few hungry ghosts who were trying to eat entire towns and doing a damned fine job of it.”

  “How could they get that strong?”

  “The rules aren’t the same for ghosts, Detective. They can even make up their own rules now and then.” He shrugged. “Lucky bastards,” he kept his voice low, but not so low the people around him couldn’t hear it.

  Amelia moved over to where Harrington was still sitting on his ass and staring at nothing. “Doctor?” She touched his arm and got no response, and Crowley frowned. Apparently the man hadn’t wanted to accept the possibility of ghosts and now he was paying for it.

  Or maybe he’d seen something worse.

  “Jonathan, I think he may be hurt.”

  “Noticed that, did you?” Crowley dropped the remains of his sandwich and kept chewing.

  “Are you going to help him?”

  “Why? You’re right there.”

  “He’s not responding to me.”

  “So what makes you think he’ll respond to me any better? Give him some room and let him decide which version of reality he wants to deal with.”

  “Which version?”

  “Yeah, you know the one with ghosts and other scary things or the one he’s dealt with his entire life. It’s not always easy accepting the truth. Why do you think Robin over there was having such a good time?”

  Crowley stood up and stretched, still feeling a sense of wonder at having sensation where his left foot touched the ground. That would take getting used to.

  “Okay, I’m going to do something with these little buggers in my hand. I need to find a place for them that’s less near me.”

  “What things?” Branaugh looked at his hands and saw nothing.

  “Ghosts. You want them?�
� He knew the detective saw nothing now, which was exactly the way he’d expected things to go. Harrington, on the other hand, flinched.

  “Ah. You still seeing them, Doc?”

  The man nodded. “Want me to get rid of that? Think about how much you could help your patients if you knew whether or not the ghosts they saw were really there?”

  Harrington looked at him and shook his head slowly back and forth. “I’ll take my chances the old fashioned way if that’s all right.”

  “Fair enough.” Crowley walked over and put his hand on the doctor’s head. The skin he touched was clammy with shock. He spoke under his breath and felt the sudden heat from his left hand spread into the man who’d been trying to cure his ills.

  Harrington relaxed immediately and fell into a deep sleep. Crowley nodded his head, satisfied and then moved toward the door.

  “What will you do with them?” He was rather surprised to see Branaugh at his side.

  “Dispose of them.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “Well, let me tell you a little story, Detective. Your sister wanted to live and so she stuck to you. These fellas, they wanted to make Robin suffer. They didn’t care that they were dead; they just didn’t want her to know happiness of any kind. Did a pretty good job of it, too. I don’t know why she pissed them off or how, but I do know that if I let them go, they’ll head back for her as soon as they can.”

  “So, how are you going to get rid of them?”

  Crowley looked into his face and studied his expression; Branaugh had a desire to know more than would be safe. He wanted to understand things that would make him a target for a lot of the nightmares that lurked just out of view.

  “I’m going to send them where they belong, Branaugh. I’m sending them to Hell.”

  “How?”

  “Using techniques you’d be better off not knowing. Leave it at that.”