by Greg Herren
“Did you sacrifice your chance of getting into her pants?” Rachel spun around in the chair.
Logan made a face at her, and it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t the only person in our group that found him attractive.
Before he could say anything to her, Carson said, “It is curious, isn’t it?” He turned to me and smiled. “It’s like your presence here is what triggered it all, Scotty.”
“And the trip to the cemetery,” Rachel added. “If we hadn’t gone to the cemetery, maybe none of this would have happened.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Carson ignored the snarkiness in her voice and treated her question seriously. “I guess we’ll never know—but I do think the restless spirit would have connected with Scotty anyway. Going to the cemetery just made it easier.” He cleared his throat. “I’m thinking we might need to try to communicate directly with Albert’s spirit.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” This from Teresa, looking up from the papers she was reading.
“A séance.”
“Don’t we need a medium for that?” Rachel replied. She smirked at him. “I may not have interned at the show, but I do watch it.”
“No,” I said slowly. “We don’t need one. We can do it ourselves.” I took a deep breath. “I vote we do it tonight.”
Chapter Twelve
For the rest of the day, tension seemed to just build with every passing hour.
I didn’t think the day would ever end.
Minutes crept by, and constantly checking my watch or any clock in the nearby vicinity didn’t help matters. I’d never known time to move so slowly, and with each tick of a passing second my nerves got worse. I kept swinging emotionally from wanting to get it all over with and being afraid we were messing with things we shouldn’t be messing with.
It’s not like Carson was an expert on the supernatural by any means. Who knew what could happen? So many things could go wrong…and I had a strong sense that something bad was going to happen.
It was like sitting in the dentist’s outer office and hearing the drill making that horrible buzzing sound, and knowing soon enough I’d be the one in the chair with my head tilted back and the drill in my mouth, the smell of burning teeth nauseating me as the drill dug rot out.
My mom always said that worrying was like borrowing trouble.
But I could talk myself down from the panic. The anticipation of the drill was, after all, much worse than the actual experience. And even though I knew there was something that wanted to harm me, I somehow knew that it wasn’t Robert or Albert or whichever one of them it was who’d been invading my mind. They were benign, they wanted to help save me from whatever dark force it was out there in the woods.
The dark force was what was to be feared. And I had to believe it couldn’t really hurt me, despite the evil intent I’d felt from it in the woods.
It has to be the killer, the one who really killed Albert¸ I reassured myself. That’s why Albert can’t rest—he knows Robert was innocent.
These thoughts slowed my heart rate down and helped the fear to pass, which was better, but the calm soon turned again to impatience.
Going to the garnet mine now seemed like a good idea—I figured it was a distraction, and I certainly could use something to take my mind off what was going to happen that night. The other option was to hang around the lodge by myself—which certainly would have been much, much worse.
The garnet mine probably would have been interesting on any other day or any other vacation, but as we walked through and the guide lectured us on the finer points of garnet mining and its history in the region, my mind just kept wandering. I tried to get interested in what she was telling us—we were the only people in the group—but she just didn’t hold my attention. I kept thinking about Marc. Once we’d been led into the mine I wanted to distract myself from my fears and worries, and what better way to do that than thinking about my boyfriend? But it actually had the opposite effect—my mind seemed to transfer my worries about tonight into worries about Marc.
And it didn’t take long for the worry to turn into fear.
His dad is so crazy, maybe there’s another level of meaning to his texts and maybe—maybe there’s a reason why his dad took their phones. Maybe he’s finally completely lost it. Maybe they’re in danger. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is about—maybe Albert is trying to warn me that Marc’s in danger, that he’s going to be killed…
“Stop that, stop freaking yourself out,” I told myself sternly.
I gave my attention back to the tour guide. I suppose it was interesting—Teresa and Rachel certainly looked fascinated, like they were hanging on the guide’s every word—but I just couldn’t make myself care. I hadn’t dressed warmly enough, either. It was chilly inside the mine, and I couldn’t wait for us to get out of there. But of course, after the tour was finished, we had to go to the gift shop, where the girls picked out garnet jewelry for themselves, even though they could never seem to make up their minds on any particular piece. Our mothers were no better, and finally, in disgust, I went back outside.
The gift shop was on another plateau of the mountain, with a huge lawn of perfectly trimmed and edged grass and flowerbeds. At the far end of the lawn, the forest began again, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. After the cool of the inside of the mine and the air conditioning in the gift shop, it felt warm outside, so I sat down in the grass next to the driveway where the cars were parked and pulled out my phone—there was signal here, hooray—and scrolled through my e-mails. I started writing out texts to Marc maybe three or four times, but every time deleted them without hitting send. Carson and Logan wandered across the lawn to the fence. I saw them talking animatedly, but when they wandered back and I asked them about it they both claimed it was nothing.
I didn’t believe them, and that just made me even more uneasy than I already was.
By the time the women were through in the gift shop, it was past six. Rather than going back to the lodge for dinner we went to a restaurant on the state highway. With all eleven of us clustered around an enormous table, talking and joking and laughing, my unease continued to grow—especially as the light began to fade from the sky outside the restaurant’s windows.
It’s not too late to change your mind you don’t have to do this.
But I didn’t really believe that was true.
There was a certain inevitability about the séance, about trying to reach Albert, I couldn’t deny—whether I wanted to or not.
Just because you don’t want to try to reach Albert doesn’t mean he won’t try to reach you. And you can’t control that. You’ve never had any control. The séance, at least, is trying to take some control over these happenings.
I got a text from Marc right after the entrées arrived. I excused myself from the table—getting an odd look from Carson when I did—and slipped away to answer it while everyone dug into their dinner. I didn’t want my lobster mac-and-cheese to get cold, and I could have answered the text at the table, but I just wanted some privacy with Marc—even if it was really just a stupid text message.
His text simply said, Miss you and wish you were back already. Will Sunday ever come?
Tears filled my eyes as I read it again. I walked around to the back of the restaurant and sat down, and let the tears come. I allowed myself to just sob—and as I cried the tension and stress of the day seemed to ease up a bit. I wiped at my eyes and got control of myself. I’d needed to release some of the pressure, and now I felt a lot better, more in control of myself.
The sun was getting low in the west—it was now after eight—and I typed out quickly, Is everything okay with you? Within a minute I got a response, Dad’s been rough but other than that okay. Just wish you were here.
I couldn’t shake the sense that something was terribly wrong back home, but I wrote it off as nerves. I was all keyed up and needed to get a grip.
But as it drew closer, I was becoming more and more worried
about the séance.
I’d agreed to do it because I wanted the whole thing to be over and hoped that communicating directly with whatever spirit was haunting me might finally do the trick. Maybe things had been hard because I’d blocked myself, resisted out of fear, I don’t know. At the time, it seemed like the right way to go to get it over and done with, so maybe I could enjoy the rest of my vacation—so we all could, really. And the parents were starting to suspect something was going on with us. My mother had cornered me outside the garnet mine gift shop and quizzed me thoroughly, but I’d managed to fend off most of her questions and satisfy her. I’d noticed Nancy Stark cornered Logan in the mine, and they’d had a quickly whispered conversation—likewise Lynda Wolfe with Rachel.
But we hadn’t had a chance to compare notes with each other.
I went back inside and slid back into my seat, giving everyone a brittle smile. My lobster mac-and-cheese was still steaming.
“Everything okay?” Logan asked as I picked up my spoon.
I smiled and nodded. The table had fallen silent when I came back, but as soon as I sat down everyone started talking again. As I ate, I couldn’t help watching as the night sky grew darker and darker outside the windows. “Got somewhere to be, son?” my dad asked with a big grin on his face as I checked my watch again.
I smiled back at him. “No, Dad, I—”
Carson cut me off quickly. “Uncle Hank, we were thinking about going for a walk later, down by the lake.” He gave me a weird look that was clearly meant as a warning for me to keep my mouth shut.
Because of course I was going to tell my father and all the other adults in our group that we were planning on having a séance and contacting a spirit.
I just shook my head at him.
But finally, dinner was over and the check paid and we were all heading back up the mountain road in our respective cars. I didn’t hear from Marc again—I didn’t expect to, frankly—and it seemed to take another eternity before the parents were back in the lodge’s bar area with a couple of bottles of wine and the Trivial Pursuit game.
“You kids be careful,” Jerry Stark yelled after us as we walked out of the lodge. “No going in the water.”
“Like we would,” Rachel muttered.
“So, where are we going to do this?” I asked. My nerves were jittery, and I could hear my voice shaking just a little bit. “I thought we were going to do it in the game room.”
Carson shook his head and pulled a flashlight out of the backpack he’d been carrying around all day. He turned it on and pointed it at the woods. “I think it would work better down at the ruins,” he said, not looking at me.
The ruins?
My heart sank and my stomach knotted. “I don’t know—”
“It makes sense,” Rachel interrupted me softly. She took my hand. “We talked about it this afternoon—we’re all scared, too, Scotty, but it makes the most sense. The ruins—that seems to be the heart of where this is all coming from. And if we’re all together, we should be safe, right?”
“You don’t know that,” I replied, but somehow, I sensed she was right. I’d known, somehow, all along, that the cabin was the key.
Carson led us into the forest single file. The wind was moving through the trees above our heads, branches swaying gently as we walked down the path. I felt oddly calm. The night was silent other than the whispering breeze. I allowed my mind to wander, not wanting to think about what might lie ahead for me and the others. There was a little part of me that kept thinking we were making a huge mistake, we were playing with powers far beyond our comprehension. I almost felt like I was making my last walk, that the path was actually leading me to a public execution.
Grim thoughts.
When we reached the cabin, Carson handed the flashlight over to Logan and pulled a big woolen blanket out of his backpack, which he spread on the ground. We all took seats in a circle, and he then lit an enormous candle, which he set in the middle. We joined hands.
Carson began talking in a low voice. “Tonight, we come seeking the spirit who has haunted these woods, with light from the world of the living to the world of the spirit. We mean you no harm—we merely want to get some answers from you…”
He kept talking, and even with my eyes closed, I could tell things were changing. The wind was picking up, and I could feel it blowing my hair around. Yet the candle continued to burn as Carson’s voice got louder.
And I felt it coming, whatever it was, I knew it—I could feel it as the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck stood up. I wanted to scream, to get up and run as far as I could, not stop running until I got to the airport in Albany, get on a plane and just keep moving because anything would be better than this, this horrible sense of something awful about to happen, but I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t control it, I was completely helpless…
And it started.
Whatever or whomever it was, it started with a prickling feeling at the back of my head, like it was probing my brain, trying to find a way inside. I was terrified, positively terrified, but there was nothing I could do, I’d agreed to this and had to see it through. So I took a deep breath and let go of myself.
And it was like it poured into me, and I could sense its joy, its relief, at finally finding a vessel. Rachel’s hand on my right tightened, squeezing really hard, and I heard someone gasp, but it wasn’t something I felt like I needed to focus on as I was being filled up with whatever—
—Albert, it is I, Albert—
—and I opened my eyes.
I heard Carson asking something but his voice sounded so far away, like we were on a phone call with a really bad connection. I could see him, too, his face shadowed in the flickering candlelight, and I heard myself answering but it wasn’t my voice. But I didn’t feel afraid because somehow, somehow I felt reassured because I knew Albert didn’t want to hurt me, he wanted to help me and he wanted us to help him somehow but I didn’t know how—
—and the dark began to fade as the clearing began to fill with light again, and I could see the trees again, and it was the same as it was all those years ago.
When the tragedy happened.
Shhhh, Albert whispered inside of my brain, watch and listen. You know it’s important. You understand, don’t you?
And I saw it all, like I was there.
But I was there, in a way. It was warm, spring, with just a slight hint of chill in the air. I could hear the sound of trickling water. The rose blooms were ready to open on the bushes planted just the year before, when the cabin had been finished and Robert, sweet Robert, had moved in.
And Robert was there, lowering the bucket into the well. His hair—so much like mine, thick and curly and black, hanging down to his shoulders but pulled back and tied with a piece of fabric to keep it out of his face. His broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his shirt, which was damp with sweat under the arms and in the center of the back. He was also barefoot, and he took a drink of the cool, clean water and sighed in pleasure.
“Robert!”
I turned and could see him, Albert, coming down the path, the look of concern on his face, as he brushed his reddish-gold hair out of his own eyes. He was hurrying, almost running, and he was slightly out of breath.
“Go away, Albert, go back to your girl,” Robert said, letting go of the bucket and turning away from the well. His voice sounded tired rather than angry, resigned. “I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.”
“Robert!” His voice cracked in despair and sadness, and Robert stopped walking. “I love you, you know that. I want us to be together when we go to the city—”
“What would be the point?” Robert’s voice sounded weary, and I could sense how tired and broken he was. He’d been run out of Boston for loving another boy, accused of all kinds of things, and he’d come here to collect himself and put his life back together, to deny the urges that got him into trouble out in Boston and find a woman, live a decent life.
He hadn’t counted on findin
g Albert, his Bertie, and falling in love all over again.
He loves me, he does, Bertie whispered to me inside my head, and I love him.
“I’m sorry,” Albert whispered. “But I kissed her—I kissed her for us.”
Robert turned and looked back, his pain written all over his face. “For us?” He half smiled. “And how do you figure that, my Bertie?”
And when I heard him say the word Bertie, I knew. I recognized the voice I’d heard, even though it had sounded empty and hollow as the word had swirled through the woods at night. I’d been wrong, so wrong, Bertie was Albert and Robert was calling him, still calling for him, all these years later.
“He knows, Robbie.” Bertie’s voice cracked. “He suspects. I know he’s written to Boston about you—about why you left, he saw something—”
The words affected Robert, the color draining out of his face, and he swayed on his feet, reaching out and touching the brick base of the well so he didn’t fall.
“No,” he whispered. “How—how can it be?”
“Molly told him,” Albert’s face twisted in a sneer. “She suspects—and she’s jealous and angry. That was why I kissed her, Robbie. I need to convince her she’s wrong, that there’s nothing between you and me.” His voice broke again. “If I have to spend the summer making love to her to protect you, so be it, Robert, I will do it. I will do whatever I have to do to make sure that nothing ever happens to you. I love you.”
Robert held out his hand, and Albert took it, pressing it to his lips.
Then I felt it.
The darkness, the evil, was coming like a shadow over the sun.
And it was dangerous, consumed with fury and anger, so consumed with the rage it was close to crossing the line into madness.
It was terrifying.
I wanted to scream at them to run, but there was nothing I could do. Watch, the voice said inside my head again, watch so you will understand and you will know what you have to do.