by Myers, AJ
“Got it,” I whispered, rolling my eyes. “Now can we get on with it?”
“Your wish, my command,” he muttered. “Did you at least bring a flashlight?”
“Nope, I brought something better,” I told him, smiling and waving my phone at him.
“Great, at least we’ll be able to call a lawyer,” he grumbled.
Shaking his head at me again, he turned around and grabbed hold of the industrial-looking doorknob and wrenched it around, breaking the lock and pretty much crushing the thing in the process. Holding the door open, he waved me in with a sarcastic little bow. Unwilling to let him know just how scared I was of walking into the darkness beyond, I lifted my chin and hurried inside. My fear more than doubled, though, when he slipped in and closed the door behind us, plunging us into complete darkness save for the red glow of the exit sign over the door.
My hands were shaking so bad that I nearly dropped my phone before I could get it out of sleep mode. The electronic glow of my home screen was the most beautiful sight in the world to me as it came to life, and I quickly scrolled through until I found the flashlight app I’d downloaded for the occasion—cursing myself for being an idiot and not putting a shortcut on my home screen the whole time. I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally found it. I hit the little flashlight icon with my thumb and the screen lit up bright enough to illuminate the darkness around us. Holding up my phone, I shone it down the hallway to get my bearings. The walls on either side of us were lined with doors, and I waited with bated breath for them to all open at once to release some kind of genetically engineered monsters—who, of course, would be starving for a little human flesh.
Yeah, way too many horror movies for me.
“The morgue is at the end of the hall,” Nathan breathed in my ear, nearly giving me a heart attack. “We need to hurry. One of our five minutes is already gone.”
Nodding stiffly, I let him pull me down the hall, shining my phone back and forth to make sure we weren’t taken by surprise. Nathan only paused for a second to look at me over his shoulder when we reached the double doors leading to the morgue. As much as I wanted to run screaming from the building, I nodded to let him know I was ready. That seemed to be the only permission he needed. He threw the door open and pulled me inside after him. My heart thudded an uneven tune as the door closed behind us. It nearly stopped altogether, though, when Nathan let go of my hand. A second later, a bright fluorescent glow suddenly blinded me as the overhead lights flickered to life.
You know those morgues you see on TV? Well, this one looked just like that. It was a long, narrow room. The walls were painted a soothing blue that wasn’t doing a lot for me personally. There was a long counter running an entire length of the room on one side with a stainless steel sink at one end. Shelves of neatly folded sheets lined the far wall, capped off at both ends with big red biohazard trash cans. It was ice cold in the room, but the shivers racing down my spine had more to do with the fact that I was in the morgue than the temperature.
“There’re no windows in here,” Nathan said in response to my ‘Are you crazy?’ look. Turning around, he studied the oversized drawers across from us and then turned back to look at me with a frown. “She’s not here.”
“Yes she is,” I whispered, staring past him at the long stainless steel autopsy table in the center of the room. Well, more specifically at the sheet-draped body on that table. A body with bright red curls.
Though I knew I didn’t have a lot of time, I moved toward that table like I was in a film permanently stuck in slow motion. For a long moment, I just stood there looking down at the girl who’d taken my place. Casey Carson. She’d only been seventeen, a junior at Moonlight High. The kids from OA and MHS attended all the same parties and bonfires, so I’d seen her around. She’d always seemed nice. Then, so had the two girls who’d died before her.
“What now, baby?” Nathan asked quietly, cupping my face in his hands when he saw the tears in my eyes. “We can mourn for her later, Em. Right now, we have to hurry okay?”
“I-I don’t know what to do,” I admitted, looking away from the sympathy in his eyes.
“Touch her, ma petit.”
I whirled around with a gasp of surprise to find a ghost I’d never seen before standing across the table from me. She was stunning. She was wearing a gown with a long-waisted bodice that showed more than a hint of cleavage. The bodice flowed into a narrow skirt that was draped and pinned up artfully in the back in contrasting shades of lavender. Kim and I had seen something very like it at a fashion museum she had dragged me to a couple of years back. Her dark hair was swept up on the sides and cascaded down her back in a waterfall of curls.
She was very different from the ghosts I’d known before. There was no blast of cold air, no creepy-crawly feeling. In fact, I felt almost…peaceful in her presence. To my surprise, I actually found myself smiling at her.
“She has gone on, but there is still much to be learned from her. You must look with more than just your eyes to see the message she has left for us,” she continued her instruction, giving me a gentle smile in return. “Come, ma petite. I will show you the way. Lay your hands just so.”
She placed her transparent hands on the dead girl between us, one over her forehead and one over her heart. Without thinking, I copied her actions. Our fingers brushed as she pulled her hands back, and I felt like I’d just stuck my finger in a light socket. I nearly jumped backwards as a jolt of electricity shot all the way up my arm to my shoulder. I swear I felt my hair stand on end at the contact.
“Em, what are you staring at?” Nathan asked, sounding even more uneasy than when he was telling me about being locked in a coffin as a prank.
“Hush,” I whispered, still staring at my ghostly tutor. “I’ll explain later.”
“Close your eyes,” my ghost said softly, smiling over at Nathan. When I balked, she turned that gentle smile back toward me. “It will be all right, Ember. Close your eyes and focus on nothing but the child whom you touch. I will see that no harm comes to you; have no fear.”
Without so much as blinking an eye, I did as I was instructed, trusting her to keep both Nathan and I safe. Given my inability to trust even the love of my life, that instant faith in her should have worried me, but it didn’t. I simply felt safe, the way I did with my friend Tyler. It wasn’t something I could explain; it was simply there.
“Center yourself, ma petit,” the ghost across from me said softly, her voice so mesmerizing that I immediately felt myself sinking into a more tranquil state. “Now see what she has seen.”
I jerked like I was having a convulsion when the world seemed to disappear around me, leaving me in a terrifying kind of darkness, but I didn’t pull away. I instinctively knew that darkness, the way we all know it on some level. It was the darkness of death, the pitch black of the void between this life and the next. The experience of seeing it through Casey’s eyes left me feeling cold and sick. Knowing that darkness was the last thing she’d experienced in this life made the guilt in my stomach boil up like acid. It poured through my veins and I felt tears filling my eyes behind my closed lids.
Just when I started to fear that the darkness was the only memory left for me to see, I saw a brilliant pinpoint of light flicker to life. I walked toward it, watching it grow larger as I approached until it was the size of a doorway.
I had to force myself to take the last step I would have to take, knowing I wasn’t going to enjoy what I found. Finally, though, I stepped out of the darkness and into the light and found myself standing in a cell of some sort. The walls were made of stone. They were slick with moisture and the whole place smelled like a septic system gone bad. The only light came from a battery-operated lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. It looked almost like a dungeon, complete with steel bars and locked doors.
And on the other side of those bars stood Jack, his lips turned up in a twisted smile so sinister I had to really fight the urge to run back into the darkness that, comp
ared with the demon facing me, suddenly didn’t look so bad.
“You’ve made it longer than your friends,” Jack said in a low, menacing voice. “The others barely made it three days. You are a strong one, aren’t you?”
“Please,” a weak voice whispered behind me. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. Just stop playing with me.”
With a feeling of dread, I turned to see Casey slumped against the wall in the corner, her face ghostly pale in stark contrast to her freshly-dyed red curls. She was covered in blood and there were bruises and cuts on every inch of visible skin. My heart ached like someone had punched me in the chest when I saw the defeated look in her dead blue eyes. She knew she was going to die. She knew it and had accepted it. She just wanted it to be over.
“Yes, it is almost time,” Jack said, still smiling, as he pulled something small out of his back pocket. I felt physically ill when he held it up for Casey’s perusal and I saw it was a scalpel. The razor-sharp blade gleamed in the low light of the cell and I heard Casey whimper in fear. “Though your suffering has been entertaining, you have begun to bore me. We shall have one more session together, you and I, before I give you the release you long for. You will be my final message to an old friend.”
I forced myself to watch as he unlocked the door of the cell and stalked toward the cowering creature in the corner of the cell. I wouldn’t allow myself to look away even when he reached down and grabbed a handful of her curls to haul her to her feet. I kept my eyes on Casey’s face when he threw her onto the filthy cot next to me, ignoring the tears I could feel streaming down my cheeks.
Then, to my horror, as Jack slit her shirt open down the front, she turned and looked right at me. And for that one second as our eyes met, I knew she saw me.
“Run,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Just run.”
I didn’t look away from that suddenly peaceful face until Jack, with a vicious laugh, started to carve something into her skin. Only then did I close my eyes and turn away. The second I did, I felt the world shift again and I was back in the morgue. Opening my eyes, I looked down at the peaceful face of the girl lying on the table, knowing I had just watched her die.
“Ember!” I turned my tear-streaked face toward Nathan and was surprised by the terror I saw on his face. Before I could say a word, he grabbed me up in crushing hold and buried his face in my hair. “God! You scared the hell out of me! What happened to you? I couldn’t get you to answer me! I tried everything, but it was like you were gone!”
“I was,” I choked out, turning my head to look at Casey again. It was only then that I realized the ghost who’d led me into my trance was still there, watching me with a gleam of pride in her eyes.
“We need to get out of here,” Nathan said tensely, looking toward the door. “Someone’s coming. I can hear their radios from here.”
“Hold on, I need to see something,” I told him, wiggling out of his grasp. Stepping toward the corpse on the table, I reached for the edge of the sheet before hesitating. Looking over my shoulder at Nathan, I whispered, “Could you turn around for just a second?”
“She gone, Em,” Nathan said, giving me a perplexed look. “I honestly don’t think she’ll mind.”
“I do,” I told him, looking at Casey again. “I mind.”
I waited until Nathan, grumbling about prison sentences, turned around. Only then did I pull the sheet back to reveal Jack’s last act of brutality. I frowned at what was revealed, not understanding what I was seeing. Directly over Casey’s heart were carved three arrows, one straight up and the other two crossing each other over the first one’s shaft. The question was, what did it mean?
“Em, you might want to hurry,” Nathan said, suddenly blurring toward the door, “Our company just arrived.”
“Forgive me,” I whispered to Casey as I pulled my phone out again. Feeling like the worst kind of sicko, I snapped a picture of the macabre carvings and then shoved my phone back in the pocket in the front of my shirt and pulled the sheet back over Casey’s body.
“Hurry, ma cher,” the ghost across from me said. “I fear Nathaniel is correct. Your time has run out.”
With one last glance at Casey, I turned and ran toward Nathan who was holding the door open for me. I had just cleared the threshold with Nathan hot on my heels when all the lights in the funeral home snapped on at once and we heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall to our right.
“This way,” Nathan said, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward one of the doors down the hall. We slipped inside and closed the door behind us just as a voice I couldn’t stand drifted down the hall toward us.
“Who the hell breaks into a funeral home?” Sheriff Martin’s voice was tight and angry and I had to bite back a moan. I mean, he was the Sheriff! Shouldn’t he have been home spoiling his overindulged skank of a daughter or something? “All right, boys. Fan out and check these rooms just in case. It was probably just kids, but given that we have a serial killer on the loose, we can’t be too careful.”
“Oh shit!” I whispered, looking up at Nathan.
“We’re screwed,” he whispered back.
“I am not going to jail,” I hissed back, turning around in circles as I looked for a place to hide. I gulped loudly when I saw which room we’d run into.
“What a surprise,” I muttered, staring at the showroom full of coffins. Looking up at Nathan, I tried for a smile. “Baby, you know that promise I made you?”
“Yeah,” he said, drawing the word out like he was dreading what I was about to say.
“It looks like I’m gonna have to break it after all.”
“Nathan, I said I was—”
“Sorry,” he finished for me in a growl. “I heard you. All twenty times.”
“But, you’re still—”
“I’m not mad,” he bit out, interrupting me again.
“Then why are you talking to me like—?” He hadn’t let me finish an entire sentence since we’d escaped the funeral home, but, for some stupid reason, I couldn’t seem to stop trying. As expected, he cut me off again.
“Because I just spent two hours in a coffin, that’s why!” he roared. Guess he was mad after all.
“So did I!” I yelled back, snapping under the pressure at long last. “Do you really think that experience was any better for me than it was for you?! Think again, buddy! I’ll have nightmares about that coffin until I end up in one for real!”
He so needed to get over himself! Okay, so it hadn’t been ideal, I’d be the first to admit it, but at least we weren’t in jail. Nathan was obviously having a hard time seeing it that way, though. He was acting like I’d planned the whole fiasco. Yeah, because I had just known The Donut and his bungling band of idiots were going to hang out for two hours.
“Just tell me I didn’t go through that for nothing,” Nathan grumbled finally, giving me a look that said I’d damn well better tell him that. “Did you find out where he is?”
“Yes. No. Kind of. God, I don’t know,” I told him softly, blinking back tears again as I looked away.
I suddenly wished we’d never gone to the funeral home at all—and not because I’d just spent more time than I ever wanted to in a coffin. Seriously, after that, I intended to let everyone I knew know that I wanted to be cremated. I never wanted to be put in another box. Like, ever.
Even my coffin experience didn’t compare with the horrible scene I’d had to witness when I’d spent Casey’s last few minutes on earth with her though. I had been planning to summon Casey’s ghost. I’d thought I could just call her up and get her to tell me where Jack was so I could end the whole thing. I hadn’t figured actually seeing what had happened to her into my brilliant scheme.
I had about as much of a chance of erasing the last few minutes of that girl’s life from my memory as I had of forgetting what it had been like to be shut in that coffin. It was something I would never be able to forget.
Nathan was quiet for the rest of the ride home, his expression tens
e and unhappy. As we pulled into the driveway, he took a deep breath and I saw him shudder. When the garage door closed behind us, he cut the engine and finally turned to look at me again. When he saw the tears standing in my eyes, his expression finally softened.
“Baby, are you okay?” When I tried to look away, he grasped my chin and gently turned my head so I was facing him.
“I just want to go to bed,” I told him, pulling my chin free. “I need…”
I shook my head and reached for the door without finishing that sentence. I didn’t know what I needed. I needed somewhere quiet to be alone. I needed to cry and scream and rage at the twisted Fate that kept messing with me. I needed someone to tell me it was all right so I could tell them they were wrong.
What I didn’t need was what was waiting for me.
Grams was standing framed in the doorway to the kitchen looking like someone had just pissed in her anti-wrinkle potion.
For a long, tense, silent moment we just looked at each other. Her graying red curls were coming loose from the twist she usually wore them in. The shoulders of her long wool overcoat were dusted with snow and her leaf-green eyes were practically shooting sparks. She looked tired and almost weak.
She also looked like she was ready to decapitate someone. Considering she was staring at me instead of Nathan, I had a pretty good idea who was about to get the axe.
“Uh…hi, Grams,” I finally squeaked, going for a smile—that immediately slipped off my face when her glare got a little darker. By the time Nathan got out of the car and joined me, I was ready to bolt.
“Shea,” Nathan said by way of a greeting, arching an eyebrow when she turned her glare on him instead of me. “I thought you said they’d cancelled your flight again.”
“They did,” Grams bit out through clenched teeth. “I decided not to wait.”
“Then how’d you get here?” I asked before I thought about it. I instantly wished I’d just kept my mouth shut. The look on Grams’ face guaranteed a nuclear detonation in ten…nine…eight…