My Demonic Ghost #3: Hunters and Creators

by Maree, Jacinta

  Copyright for Jacinta Maree 2014

  Cover Design by Catherine Nodet

  www.catherine-nodet.fr

  Edited by Karen Reckard and Heather Savage

  Staccato Publishing

  Maple Grove, MN

  AUSEdition:April, 2015

  ISBN-13: 978-1511567626

  ISBN-10: 1511567627

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Hunters and Creators

  By Jacinta Maree

  Book three

  Chapter One:

  The green-eyed monster is following you.

  I can feel myself running through an underground tunnel, chased by psychotic laughter.

  The green-eyed monster thinks of killing you.

  Beyond the cackling was the crunching of my shoes against rocks, hitting the tracks beneath me. Each breath was soundless yet my chest ached like my heart was breaking. I couldn’t breathe.

  The green-eyed monster wants you all to himself.

  Till eventually I fall and he pounces on me, devouring my soul, sucking it into his tainted world. He opens up his greedy arms, smiles a most wicked smile, before he snaps chains around my limbs and neck. I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m drowning. I can’t breathe…

  Then I would wake. Usually gasping, sometimes bewildered and not remembering where I was. A line of sweat hems my bangs and I wipe it away with my wrist. My dreams used to be like this all the time back when I was living with my mum and dad in the inner city. They started when I was fifteen and stopped just as I turned sixteen. Since I left to live on my own I didn’t have the nightmares so much. I hadn’t dreamt like that for a long time, so I couldn’t understand why it was resurfacing now.

  I don’t know what I expected life to be like without my parents. I guess I thought it would be the same, but without rules. Truthfully, it’s a life without prepared meals, clean laundry and prepaid electricity bills; but the worst part are those thoughts now returning. Before I was fifteen and it all started, I never had any problems like this. Now, it’s an itch I just can’t scratch, sitting in the awkward section between a memory and a dream. The same flash of mint eyes would leap at me before my body would spring awake… the green-eyed monster.

  I live out further west of the city, closer to my university, but not so much that I would call my new residence a student dormitory. It’s not the best of places, but certainty nothing to sneeze at for one hundred eighty dollars per week. I worked the weekends to help pay rent, but mum and dad often sent money over if I really needed it. We had a small patch of bark for a front yard and an old wooden fence pressed against the sides and back of the property. No back yard meant no clothesline, so we used the upstairs railing to hang our clothes. I got home late this particular afternoon to find my roommate, Kate, already snoozing on the couch, her face planted against her notebook and her laptop set up on the bench. I could tell the television was on by the flicker of colours against her skin though it was left on mute. I quickly and silently eased the door closed, juggling my backpack that had dropped to my elbow with my coffee cup in one hand. My iPod and keys in the other hand were now temporarily wedged inside the stubborn lock.

  It was just my best friend and I who rented the small two bedroom place, the lower level was more like a common area with a lounge connecting to a kitchen and laundry. The stairs greeted us as soon as we stepped into the house, leading us up to the two bedrooms and connecting bathroom. Despite being only two girls, we never felt unsafe in this neighbourhood, especially seeing that connecting our place on both sides were identical townhouses. On our left was where our friend Tom and Dylan lived. We could hear everything that happened inside their flat, from what tv channels they watched down to their pencils marking their assignment papers.

  I walked over to Kate to pick up the empty chip packet that had fallen to the floor when I caught sight of her computer monitor. She was on that website again, that one about the Apocalypse. This site had outnumbered Google by a million. Personally, I was unsure how I felt about the hot gossip of the unknown, but Kate soaked it up like a dry sponge dropped in a lake. She just couldn’t get enough.

  You see, something very strange happened five years ago. Something that spun the world backwards, making everyone dizzy with excitement, but also left a lot of people incredibly scared. A strange, supernatural phenomenon occurred within the skies right above our city. There have been so many rumours going around about it; anything was possible. New religions sprang up claiming the event as a sign from God, new threats of war were sitting on the minds of many nations, yet none knew what they were fighting over. Scientists were stumped, unable to explain the disturbance. Most tried to wave it off as some strange electrical storm caught in the updraft of a hurricane, but it didn’t even remotely look like that. It was too extra-terrestrial and it all lead to the same answer… the supernatural. It had to be something beyond our human plane.

  Like so many people I had watched the YouTube clip of the event nearly a thousand times. I’ve watched it in slow motion, I’ve watched it on a large screen, I’ve even watched dubstep versions where they cut and pasted the footage so it looked like the giant falling form was dancing. I had watched it so many times it felt like I was there, standing beneath the stretch of its hand as it plummeted to the ground, and at the same time I have no memory of it. For a small chunk of my life everything was disjointed and wrong. Almost like I dreamt it all. I was there, but I wasn’t there. I remember things, but they were fuzzy and missing important details - almost like these images were planted into my brain. I found it hard to believe… or maybe I chose to believe it wasn’t possible. I mean, if that thing was really an alien or a higher power reaching out to us, what else is out there? What’s to say this awful green monster wasn’t real either?

  I went back upstairs and locked myself up in my room. Unlike Kate, I wanted nothing to do with this new craze of believing in the supernatural, though unfortunately, I was connected to the ‘spiritually weird’ whether I wanted it or not. When I was fifteen just turning sixteen, strange things would happen. It only happened when boys I liked tried to get close to me; I had gotten the reputation of Virgin Mary. Things just seemed to happen, like some sort of father figure was always looming over me, preventing boys from getting too close. I already had an over protective dad. One is enough, let alone one that could attack from the darkness.

  One time, my first and last boyfriend, James, tried to kiss me in the middle of the hall. Just then, the fire alarm was pulled and we were drenched under a sheet of water. Even though that didn’t deter him, it was the slippery walkway under our feet that made it impossible to make the two-inch step for our lips to meet up. Every time we tried to get close, something else would wedge its way between us. In the movies, James was hit with an empty coke bottle even though there was no one sitting behind us. Outside the front of my house a plastic bag was blown into his face without any wind, blocking him from kissing me. He even struggled to uncover his mouth and nose to take a single breath like someone was holding the bag forcefully over him, trying to suffocate him. I think the last straw was when we were walking home from school together and a parked car somehow slipped out of its handbrake and chased him down the hill.

  To save him from being squashed or attacked again by floating garbage, James and I agreed to have a break. That and James got into a prestigious high school with a scholarship that whisked him away to another state, but I think it was mostly the abnormality thing that made him leave. Since then, whenever I approached a boy I liked, something always happened to drive
him away. I gave up eventually and took the lonelier path of singlehood. I guess it wasn’t too bad. I mean, old Ms. Patcher that lives directly next to us, but on the right, seems to be coping okay. She’d spent her whole life alone. No husband or children, and barely a visitor to her doorstep. Yet every morning, she sang as she watered the flowers outside her porch. Sometimes I waved at her but, she never looked up long enough for me to remember her face. The others told me not to bother talking to her and I eventually got used to not greeting her as I rushed out the door. This morning though, I was particularly rushed.

  My alarm clock kicked me out of my sleep and, in return, I slapped it off my bedside table. After I was dressed and showered, I clambered downstairs to find Kate still bent over the table using her arms as pillows. I picked up a loose bottle cap and flicked it at her, hitting her against her forehead. She jolted up, blinking madly.

  “What? What? What?”

  “Morning sleeping beauty,” I joked and headed straight into the connecting kitchen to brew myself a cup of coffee. Kate groaned and rubbed at her eyes, finally smoothing back her drain clog of a hairstyle from her face.

  “You got home late,” she mumbled, half concerned, before perking up when a thought struck her. “Oh! Rach you’ll never believe what I found.”

  “Uh huh. What’s that?”

  “It’s more of those supernatural occurrences.” She swept up her laptop and quickly mantled it on the kitchen bench so I could see. She had roughly fifteen internet windows open, all of which lead to different sites, all discussing the so called ‘Apocalypse’.

  “What now? Don’t tell me all the dogs have disappeared and the cats have formed a union.” I pulled the milk from the fridge before fetching two cups, smiling at Kate’s mocking laugh.

  “These are pure, actual facts, I’m not some loony chasing fairy tales. This is real. Look, there has been a 40% rise in deaths from random heart attacks. I’m talking people that were healthy one day and dead the next.” She snapped her fingers together. “Bang. Just like that. The cases of mentally unstable patients are growing too…”

  “Yeah, well that’s because everyone is scaring themselves into thinking the world is about to end. If I truly believed that, I think I would be acting a little weird too.” I set the boiling water into the cup before stirring the instant coffee brew with my teaspoon. Yawning, I shook my head, trying to rattle the drowsiness out of me. Whatever happened to the days where every video claiming the afterlife that popped up on YouTube was disregarded as a fake? Now gossip was fact and everyone was trying to make reason out of mere coincidences.

  “Then how about this.” Kate nibbled on her lower lip as she always did when she knew juicy news that I didn’t. She clicked away on the computer again, bringing up yet another window that showed a blank map of our area with strange markings jotted among the towns. I brought my coffee to my lips, not able to make sense of the connections between the marked spots. Was it a disjointed star? Someone’s face? I dunno.

  She pointed at a large red circle further away from the rest of the sightings. “It’s a new mark,” she gasped with excitement.

  “So?”

  “So, they have predicted when the next encounter with the spirits is going to be. It’s a rural area close-ish to us too. They’ve predicted it to occur in June, that’s not two months away. I tried to get us a room at a lodge but everything is booked up.”

  “Oh no, what a shame.” I puckered out my lower lip as Kate playfully whacked me.

  “It’s in a country town in the mountains. Ummm… something heaven? Or Haven? I’m pretty sure it’s a colour…”

  “Whitehaven?” I said out of reflex.

  Kate perked up onto her elbows. “Yeah. How do you know it?”

  “My distant uncle and his family had a place there. Dad looks after it now but we haven’t gone in years. It kind of just… sits there.” I should’ve known by the extension of unnatural silence that I had said something stupid. Kate’s emotions were as obvious as if she walked around flashing cue cards. Her brows had hit the roots of her hairline, eyes as wide as her gaping mouth that twitched at the corners trying to fight back her excitement.

  “No,” I quickly declined before she had the chance to beg.

  “Oh, please, please, please, Rach. This is perfect! That way we can go to the sighting…”

  “Kate…” I turned my back to her, glancing down into my cup. I fingered the edge of it with the tip of a nail, trying to collect the right words. There was something about that Whitehaven place that gave me the chills. Both dad and I are reluctant to even check up on the place. “Let’s not talk about this now. We’ve got Hummings for our practical work and I don’t want to be late again. He’ll set us up at the back near that disgusting smelling corner.”

  “Fine, fine but I’m not letting this go. I really don’t want to have to camp out again Rach, you know I can’t sleep well in a sleeping bag. If you were a true friend…” She dragged out her words as she picked up the cup of coffee I had poured her.

  I feigned being shocked by her accusation but couldn’t withhold my smile. “You’re such an oddball Kate, you should be lucky that I hang around you.”

  “Most people would call it charm.”

  “Yeah, well most doctors would call you clinically insane. Come on, we seriously have to go or we’ll miss our train”.

  Kate has been my best friend since the start of my university classes. After graduation, my high school friends had all enrolled for different courses at different universities scattered throughout the area. It wasn’t a surprise that I had to say goodbye to half of my school mates, but it also allowed me to meet new people such as Kate, Dylan and Tom. She had been from a neighbouring high school and we quickly hit it off at orientation week, which mostly involved overindulging in the vulgar taste of cheap wine and beer, leading us to stupidity and memories of vomit filled toilet bowls.

  I was thankful as well that my nasty reputation as the Virgin Mary may just stay stuck in the pages back in my high school years. No one breathed a word about it, until of course Janet Corporeal switched majors into Literature and Journalism, which was my course. The first nine months were blissful till the rumours started. And like with bored housewives, the gossip burned like wild fire through the ranks of freshmen to seniors. If it wasn’t for this stupid obsession with ghosts and other supernatural beings the rumour may have been brushed off, but nowadays anyone believed anything out of the ordinary. It was very easy to have people believe you were cursed without proof. Talk about going backwards. Someone screamed witch and everyone pulled out their pitchforks. That brings me back to why I am so thankful for Kate. She may have seen my nickname as a new way to connect with the ghosts and the supernatural, but she never treated me any differently.

  ***

  Through a packed train and across the streets of Decker Avenue, we finally arrived at our University of Greenmore. The excitement and thrill of being in a university was washed away when our first set of assignments rolled in like relentless waves. Even though I now sat in my literature lecture, all I could hear was the excited buzzing of my classmates discussing the recent ‘apocalypse’ update. This would be the sixth planned sighting of the ‘ghosts’, the other five were a disappointment when the predictions were wrong. Something about this particular sighting was apparently more genuine, which meant it was more likely to actually happen. Bet that’s what they said about the fourth and fifth sightings, too.

  To be polite, I joined in distantly with the chatter, trying to buy myself back into the good graces of my classmates considering Janet had so kindly shoved me out by bringing back the rumours of my ‘curse’. It was like every chance she got she would try to put a fence around me, alienating me more and more from the others. This time was no different.

  “No, I swear it’s true. You know she’s marked with bad luck. They call her the Virgin Mary because bad things happen to boys who try to get too close to her. One of my guy friends passed her in the
hallway at school and asked some question about the homework. Next thing he knew, he turned around and was mysteriously shoved down the stairs. He sprained his wrist and broke his thumb. He told me he heard a voice hissing in his ear while he was falling.”

  “What did it say?” Daniel, another boy from our class was tapping the end of his pen against his notebook, sucked in by her story. I was sitting just a few rows in front, pursing my lips and trying to conjure up some courage to turn to them and say, ‘it’s all lies’. The way I remember the incident, he merely tripped over his own clumsy feet.

  “That’s the thing, it wasn’t English at all but a horrible groaning noise, like an animal.” Janet had her hand to her lips as if she were trying to mask her voice from carrying across the classroom. They were all murmuring in an excited fear when I couldn’t handle it anymore and turned around.

  “It’s not true!” Instead of staying calm and non-fazed, my voice wavered as if I was actually guilty. “He just tripped.”

  “Of course you would say that.” Janet scoffed, “whatever thing you have following you, just make sure it doesn’t come over here.”

  I huffed in irritation. “Believe me, if I had control of any spiritual creature I surely wouldn’t want it hanging around me.”

  “I think it’s kind of cool.” Kate perked up from beside me and smiled a weak reassuring smile. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, magnifying her brown eyes behind the lenses.

  “Cool? Are you sick? Do you like being shoved down stairs by ghosts?” Janet sneered, rolling her eyes. I shook my head, trying not to let her get the better of me.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Kate patted my arm before she fetched out her notebook. I merely nodded again, swallowing down my annoyance like swallowing foul medicine. If that wasn’t bad enough, on top of three essays and a portfolio that’s due, Mr. Eagles, our philosophy professor, decided to give us some light reading. The word light must’ve been translated wrong somewhere between student to teacher. Light is not fifteen pages. I tried to stay back in the library to knock out a few chapters but it was like I was reading Chinese.