Only the Good Die Young

by Chris Marie Green

  Amanda Lee just took it all in.

  “But I have to tell you,” I said, “that since I don’t have a handle on these powers yet, I also might’ve gone too far with Wendy.”

  Her smile dimmed. “How so?”

  “Like I mentioned, I wanted to experiment with the powers Randy told me about. I figured I shouldn’t start right out with them on Gavin. Besides, I realized that I don’t have to just use those powers for haunting—I can use them for good.”

  “What did you do?” Total maternal tone now.

  “I tried both on her?” It was a question, even though there was no question that I’d done it.

  Amanda Lee made a tell-me-everything gesture with her fingers.

  All right. “The empathy went fine with Wendy, and from the little I saw in her mind, she’s still carrying a lot of grief around about her adopted mom’s death years ago. And there seems to have been some sort of ugly incident when she was younger involving other people in the household. I’m not sure who, though, besides Gavin.”

  “Describe, please.”

  “In her mind, I heard him yelling down a hallway after there was a female scream.”

  “Elizabeth?” Amanda Lee’s eyes had gone wide.

  “I’m not sure. But it’s something to go on.”

  “Maybe so.” She had narrowed her eyes and was absently pacing now, circling my death spot. “Did you say that you also tested out this hallucination power?”

  “Briefly.”

  I must’ve been unsettled, because my psychic mentor stopped moving around and fixed her steady gaze on me.

  I went on. “Randy, the ghost I met, told me that I had to use a more intense touch, going deeper, to cause hallucinations. So I did that with Wendy. All I wanted to do was make her feel better after a bummer day.”

  “And . . . ?”

  I thought of how I’d mind-melded with the girl, feeling the sun and sand on my skin just as much as she must’ve while witnessing the hallucination I’d brought her.

  “See, I knew what I wanted to do when I went into her—make her feel better, right?” I said. “But I hadn’t planned what to specifically show her. I just thought, Beach, and the details just came all on their own, without any effort from me. I experienced them just like I was her, Amanda Lee. I was there in the room, looking at the beach as Wendy, hallucinating, too.”

  “Beaches aren’t hard to imagine, but I wonder if the details are coming from your own subconscious, which is still intact even as a ghost.” Amanda Lee processed all of it, just as she did with everything else, and it didn’t take her long to add, “You’re going to have to be careful going forward. When you haunt our killer, you could end up scaring yourself if you have no idea what’s coming. Mind that, Jensen.”

  The good news just kept on trucking, didn’t it?

  Even so, I said, “If you’re afraid that a hallucination could spook me just as much as it could Gavin, don’t worry. If I find proof that he’s our man, I won’t hold back on wielding the full force of any images.”

  Wasn’t I sounding bold? I’d had no control over those beach images with Wendy, only the good intentions. This haunting deal was packaged with more strings attached than I’d anticipated. But I’d known it wouldn’t be easy.

  And I still wasn’t scared.

  Seriously—how bad could I freak myself out? Sailor Randy hadn’t said anything about ghosts booing themselves back into a time loop. Or maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to it.

  I’d have to hunt him down again soon to get more info.

  “Don’t worry, Amanda Lee,” I said. “I’m not going to quit on this.”

  “Especially because we’ll find your killer, too?”

  I tried to smile, but I have to say—the longer I stayed here, near my death spot, the more surreal everything was starting to seem. It was still comfortable, but in the same way it’s comfortable to huddle under a thick blanket in the dark of night when you think there’s something in the closet.

  And there were more somethings in closets than I had ever suspected while I was living.

  How had Elizabeth Dalton reacted when her own personal bogeyman came calling? Had she been afraid at first to see Gavin? Had he been phoning and harassing her after they’d broken up and she’d tried to run away from him when he’d confronted her in person instead?

  What had been going through her mind?

  “I just wish,” I said, “you could’ve gotten in contact with Elizabeth on the other side. It’d be helpful.”

  She looked away from me, then at the ground. Had I said something wrong?

  “I know,” I said. “You’ve been trying to contact her. I don’t mean to make you feel bad about being unsuccessful.”

  “No, I don’t feel bad. I told you that this case does things to me.” After a second, she added, “It’s so hard to wallow in lost chances. You and Elizabeth make me think of Michael and how life can end in the blink of an eye. One moment, everything is beautiful. The next, the phone rings and . . .”

  Something psychic must’ve struck her right then, because she got really thoughtful, resuming her pacing around my death spot.

  She came to a hard stop at the nearest tree, laying her hand against the trunk.

  “So many times,” she said, softer now, “I would come here, trying to find you. But there’s something different today. New sensations. Maybe it’s because you’re here with me with far more power in you than the night you emerged from the residual haunting imprint.”

  Was she saying she had something now? Information about my death? I started to tremble in my core. I wanted to know.

  Didn’t I?

  “Come here, Jensen,” she whispered with such urgency in her voice that I zipped over to her.

  Then she made another request. “Lie down. I think there’s a lot of psychic energy that’s been gathering with you nearby, and it suddenly flared.”

  I wasn’t scared.

  Numbing myself, I lay down, realizing intuitively that I’d assumed the exact pose of my death. I shuddered.

  Amanda Lee reared back her head, her mouth agape.

  At first, I thought she might be having a heart attack, and I surged upward, wanting to help her with one of my ghost powers. What kind of power, though?

  Who the hell knew?

  She fell backward, away from my death spot, before I could even reach out to her, then stumbled and regained her balance. Her eyes were open, one hand clutching the silken front of her blouse.

  Then she slowly walked toward me, raising her other hand.

  Night of the Living Dead, I thought, just standing there and waiting for her to get to me.

  She arrived, and before I knew what she was doing, she took that hand and swiped it through the air, passing it through me.

  Making contact and delivering an image that rocked me.

  Running, fast, faster. Gotta get away. . . .

  Was it here? Near?

  Silence.

  Maybe it was gone.

  Maybe I’d lost it a few minutes back. Maybe if I didn’t breathe, it wouldn’t find me again—

  Stop! Please! Why’re you doing this?

  My voice, pleading. Then my scream, because out of nowhere came that mask, that hideous, gaped mouth of a hag, leering, laughing, only inches away.

  Then the ax, raised over its head . . .

  Speeding down toward me—

  Banging my vision to black.

  9

  It took me a few hours to recover.

  I mean, damn, how do you ever come to terms with the fact that you’d once starred in your own horror movie? That there’d been an ax-wielding maniac in the woods and you’d been one of the stupid dime-a-dozen, dead-meat kids who usually get picked off one by one with low-budget special effects?

  I didn’t know what I’d expected my killer to be like. Just a regular old Joe wandering through Elfin Forest with an itch to murder? Just a jealous ex-boyfriend who’d seized the chance to get me alone and tak
e some blood-ridden revenge, à la Gavin Edgett and Elizabeth Dalton?

  I also wondered why my own personal Jason Voorhees hadn’t gone after the kids I’d been with, too. Had something scared the killer away and saved them? Or had he been stalking me and me alone, and once his mission was accomplished, he was done? Also, if my killer had gotten me with an ax, why wasn’t there any blood at my death spot?

  After I traveled from the forest and back to the casita, I soothed myself with the computer, doing a search for everything I could find out about serial killers, especially when it came to psychology. But there was so much to cover. Too much.

  And the distraction wasn’t keeping away the willies.

  I just kept hearing Amanda Lee’s frantic voice when she’d pulled me out of the vision.

  “Jensen, you come back to me! Don’t leave me!”

  Her pleas had worked because, with that familiar backward sucking sensation, I was yanked out of the vision, returned to the world, Amanda Lee coming into focus second by confusing second.

  “Jensen?” she asked, still panicked while reaching out to me.

  I dodged her hand. She didn’t like to get cold, and that’s what she would be if she made contact with me. For some demented reason, that fact was first and foremost in my mind during the fuzzy aftermath.

  As if remembering my coldness, she backed off. But her voice didn’t calm down.

  “You’re so gray right now,” she said. “Just like you were when I first met you.”

  As I checked out my essence—definitely no color here—she’d gone on to tell me that my pallor had been going grayer and grayer while we were sharing her vision, and she’d been afraid that I was about to return to my residual haunting phase.

  So what was the lesson here? That I shouldn’t be partaking in any more of Amanda Lee’s murder visions. But the ramifications of what’d happened today in Elfin Forest extended even beyond that.

  Was this what would happen to me if I scared myself to death with a hallucination during a haunting? Should I be taking Amanda Lee’s psychic vision as a warning for how much terror I could tolerate?

  Those were the questions dogging me during my serial killer research, so I finally broke it off and did the next best thing.

  I went outside and restlessly hopped into a travel tunnel, already leaving my killer in a “to be continued” mental file. Seriously, since the ax and the old granny mask had added about five hundred notches of creep to my story, the only thing that made me feel better about it was putting it at a distance for the rest of the day.

  I told myself it’d been another girl in that vision today, a different Jensen Murphy.

  It hadn’t been me. Couldn’t have been.

  And I kept telling myself that as I surged to my next destination on the Jensen Justice Tour, popping into the atmosphere right across the street from the shorefront building that housed Gavin Edgett’s gaming company.

  I was invisible to the tourists who trooped by on the village sidewalk, some looking for the Hard Rock Café, which I guess used to be in the building I was pseudo-leaning against. They were only background noise, though, because I had to decide, here and now, if scaring myself back into a time loop was going to be worth catching killers.

  But would I even know that I’d returned to that numb state? Would I even care, just as long as people like Gavin Edgett made a confession that led to punishment?

  My killer’s granny mask flashed before me again. So did the glint of that ax blade.

  And it was there, on the sidewalk, facing the windows of Gavin’s building as the sun threatened to dip below the ocean, that I decided that no amount of danger was going to stop me, ever.

  In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh.

  As I surveyed the two-story structure, I knew what I had to do now—restrict myself to only playing full-on detective with Gavin today, using my empathy to get into his head so I could be sure of his guilt and then get to the real haunting stuff.

  Since the clock hadn’t struck five yet, I’d been betting that he was still inside his office, so I rose above the heads of a family dressed in tropical shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, then floated over the traffic toward the building.

  It was easy enough to get inside, because I just followed a punky-looking girl with dreadlocked hair through the door, then the lobby. I took a detour up some stairs and through a quiet white hallway. When I got to a place marked ON EDGE PRODUCTIONS, I breezed inside.

  Way busier in here. I navigated what seemed like a maze of modern-art-like pale walls that slanted away from the main hall, then cubicles where workers—mostly nerdy guys—were chatting away and having a grand old time while others wore headsets and played games on their computers.

  All around, there were cardboard cutouts of characters that probably starred in the games On Edge Productions made, and the same characters were framed on the walls. Some of them even looked like the ones in Wendy’s room.

  I flattened myself against the ceiling, flowing along at a crawl as employees strolled below me. I swung down to glance in every open office door I passed.

  No Gavin anywhere.

  When I got to the only closed door, near the corner of the building—a place for a boss to have an office—I took a chance and slid underneath.

  And there he was. The boss.

  He wasn’t working behind his computer-cluttered desk, though. He wasn’t even staring out the window at the palm-studded street below and seemingly dreaming up all those blood and blades featured in his video games.

  The big guy was fast asleep on a couch, one hand hanging off it until his blunt fingers almost brushed the floor.

  Was he catching up on the sleep he’d lost last night, during the haunting?

  Electricity beat through me, and I tried not to think about how it would feel to whoosh by him, trailing my hand over his short brown hair. I tried not to look at him up close, noticing the thickness of his lashes against his otherwise hard features.

  But I did both anyway, flying over him, then hovering.

  What’s going on in your head? I wondered, face-to-face, now that I could get away with it. What was the trigger that made you kill Elizabeth, if you really did it?

  I braced myself—make it subtle, Jen—then touched his cheek, thinking what a shame it was that a killer had to be this brutally handsome.

  But maybe that had been his best weapon, just like Ted Bundy.

  Something like anger boiled in me—anger at him, at anyone who’d take a knife or an ax to another person—and before I knew it, I was pressing harder on his cheek than I intended.

  Beyond an empathetic touch and into hallucination territory.

  Without warning, I got sucked into him, turning, flailing, flying, then landing in what seemed to be a blank space.

  Why did I keep ending up in these situations?

  God.

  Then I realized that I could still feel me in this new place. This wasn’t like the hallucination I’d shared with Wendy, when the beach had come into her room, thanks to my efforts.

  I was in complete control as Jensen right now. And I was still floating in complete blackness inside Gavin’s psyche.

  If this wasn’t a hallucination, then what was it? Definitely not the more superficial thought-empathy.

  I heard a warped knocking sound to my right. Slow motion, drawn out, unclear.

  This was more like . . . a dream?

  Gavin’s dream?

  Shit. Did it make a difference if the hauntee was asleep or awake when I went into him? Drunken Sailor Randy hadn’t gotten around to that explanation, either, but it sure looked like I’d become a part of Gavin’s psyche in a different way than how hallucinations or empathy worked.

  I was deeper inside his head because he was totally unguarded in sleep.

  Well, since I was here, I had to go for it, right? Actually, this was pretty awesome, when it came right down to it. How many detectives had opportunities like this to investigate their subjects? />
  A faint outline was gradually appearing where that knocking was coming from, and the sight resembled a door with a light on behind it.

  But the light was . . . blurred. Smudgy.

  Another draggy knock sounded on it.

  In what seemed like slow motion, I went over and reached out to open the door, but as I looked down, the soft light showed me something I hadn’t expected.

  I had a hand.

  Even though fear struck me—was I actually in another part of the star place? Was fake Dean the one knocking?—I went ahead and opened that door, letting in a flood of blinding light.

  It washed over me, and girding myself, I walked through it.

  Once I was on the other side, the light drew back, revealing the most fucked-up thing I’d ever experienced, even as a ghost.

  Everything was in slow motion, from the walls that moved upward like golden waves, to the sky that rolled with contained fire. And in that sky were things that made no sense whatsoever—a Victorian-looking air machine that was being piloted by a little dark-haired girl in goggles and a leather jacket. A big black bird winging just above the machine, casting a shadow over it.

  Before I could even say, “Huh?” something more surreal reared up on my left.

  A dragon rising out of the water wall, bellowing.

  Just get out of here, I thought, but my brain and my body seemed to have been reduced to the same twisted lack of speed that was affecting this entire dream room.

  Then I saw the worst part of all—the dragon had the face of an older man but sort of crushed, unrecognizable.

  I absorbed that just before the thing plunged back into the moving ocean wall.

  If the star place was almost heaven, this was almost hell, with brimstone and a sky of fire.

  At least I had the presence of mind to glance down at myself, just to make sure I hadn’t turned into something strange, too.

  But I was me. With a body.

  Just like in the star place.