As Carter slowly moved his body forward so that his head was protruding into the closet, Brenda could see that shadowy figure crossing the room and hovering just behind him. Brenda put her hand over her mouth and watched, wondering if Carter could sense something or if he even knew anything was going on out of the ordinary.
She quickly hit the speaker button to warn him about the paranormal activity going on behind him, but the speaker button did not light up. She remembered that it lit up when she used it before, so she began to panic as she tried to get it up and running again. She hit the button repeatedly to no avail. There was no solution readily available, so she put the laptop down and raced over to Adam’s bedroom.
“Carter, get out of the bedroom now!” she screamed, banging on the door.
Carter shot out of the room before asking any questions. He figured that Brenda was checking on the monitor, so if she was telling him to get out of the room immediately, she must have seen something pretty bad. After so many years together, Carter could read Brenda pretty well.
As soon as Carter passed through the doors, they both went straight to the living room where the kids were watching TV, but the kids were gone. They instantly panicked, and called out to the house to see if they could get a quick resolution.
Carter glanced at the laptop on the coffee table and saw some movement on the screen. He wanted to see the shadowy figure Brenda claimed to have seen because he hadn’t seen a thing when he was in the room. While looking at the computer screen, he saw Adam and Bradley slowly making their way into Adam’s bedroom.
Carter turned and raced down the hallway. “Check the monitor!” he yelled out to Brenda.
Brenda went to the laptop to see that the boys were in Adam’s bedroom, and they had shut the door behind them. She then saw Adam turn the lock on the door handle and then heard the sound of Carter pounding hard on the door as the echoes of this sound came from the computer and real time.
She continued to monitor the room while shouting out to inform Carter that she caught them on video locking the door. Carter continued to pound, demanding they open the door immediately, but they were not obeying. He began to feel powerless and betrayed. Brenda felt useless as well, but at least she had a window to their world.
Brenda continued to view the action while shouting out updates to Carter. She began narrating out loud in her attempt to keep Carter up on every movement inside the room, and it was also her way of alleviating the insurmountable amount of stress. She shifted closer to the laptop for a better view, realizing that she would be of no use standing in back of Carter.
As she looked at the monitor, she closed in on that world with the use of the zoom feature. Adam and Bradley were discussing something in the room and it looked like Bradley wanted out, while Adam was trying to convince him to stay as he stood in front of the bedroom door.
Brenda zoomed in closer to examine their conversation.
“Let me out,” said Bradley. “I want to go home.”
“Stay Bradley,” said Adam. “I need help from you.”
“But I need help from you, and if you can’t help me, then let me go.”
“I need you to stay,” said Adam. “Otherwise, he will get real angry, and you don’t want him to do that.”
The curtains in the room swirled around, there was a shuffling sound in the closet, and a dark shadowy presence made a similar flight path to the one it had made earlier. Adam and Bradley both looked at the shadow as it passed by, and they noticed that it stopped by the closet. Adam gravitated towards the shadow as if it was his leader, and began whispering to it. Brenda could not hear what was being said, so she scrambled to hit the zoom button for a closer look. She soon had it lined up with Adam’s mouth.
“I’ll do it,” said Adam.
“Do what?” Brenda asked aloud. “I joined late. Do what?”
There were not a lot of details for Brenda to capture. All that she knew was that Adam and Bradley had trapped themselves in the room where Carter had just escaped. Bradley didn’t want to be there because he had his own spiritual needs to meet, and Martin was essentially holding them both hostage. He was not going to release his hold on the boys. He had both of them caught in his web. Bradley was the outsider, though, and he was beginning to get disturbed, according to the terrified look on his face.
Brenda could not deliver any more messages. Her intercom was no longer functioning. It was a brand new system, and it had been working fifteen minutes earlier, but now it had a faulty intercom system. There was a hex over everything and everyone in that room.
CHAPTER 24
Carter and Brenda could only watch in horror as Adam and Bradley had barricaded themselves in the bedroom. The monitor showed their tactics, but there was no defense against it. The boys timing worked to perfection and their action was not six-year-old mentality. There was a higher power at work here, and Carter and Brenda knew that the higher power was Martin.
It was not reasonable to believe that these kids could have barricaded themselves in their bedroom and account for every loophole. They not only locked the door, but they rolled the heavy bureau against it and pushed the bed in back of the bureau. After Brenda made Carter aware that they had locked the door, he needed to check the monitor for inside information, but could only watch as they built this impenetrable fortress.
Brenda was visibly disturbed on many levels. Her son was in trouble and they could only watch. Martin had him in his grip and was controlling his every move. At this point, the only sign of Martin was through the action of the boys. That’s the way Martin liked to work. He liked to work through children since his success rate and longevity was increased dramatically. It was obvious to Carter and Brenda that there were two worker bees building this fortress under Martin’s direction.
They continued to peer into the bedroom via the camera, looking for any hole that they could pierce. They needed to turn around their hopeless feeling because their son’s well-being was at stake, along with the neighbor’s son. Martin had done some bad things to them in his life, but Carter and Brenda were not going to sit around and let him do bad things to their child. Yet, here they were sitting around watching Martin do bad things to their child. They were so thankful that they had installed that camera. It would have been horrific to go through this without an eye on their condition. They were in trouble, but they were not hurt, not yet.
Bradley started crying. He had been handling everything up to this point, but he became very scared when it began to get out of hand. Adam had a possessed look on his face which indicated that he was all in. He was speaking quietly to Bradley, but it didn’t appear to be helping Bradley cope with the situation at hand. Although Bradley had a spiritual connection going on at his own house, there was not a hint of evil intent. Martin was a cancer, and he was spreading rampantly, out of control, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Bradley needed out. He wanted his involvement to end immediately, and appeared to be a man on a mission. He at first was intimidated by Martin’s orders, which came through Adam’s directions, and that was why he played along. However, when things began to spiral out of control, he wanted out at any cost. When he began pulling at the bedpost in an attempt to begin the process of dismantling the fortress, he was met with resistance.
Since the door was blocked, Carter stopped trying and joined Brenda in front of the laptop. He would no longer bother trying to penetrate an impenetrable wall. He just needed to sit tight and hope the situation would resolve itself. Adam grabbed Bradley, pulling his arms away from the bed and throwing him down to the floor. Brenda pushed the intercom button to tell him to stop, but again the light did not come on, so she didn’t even bother speaking. She ran to his bedroom door and yelled, “Adam…this is your mother. Stop that! Le
ave Bradley alone!”
Bradley returned to his feet and grabbed the bedpost again, unwilling to give in to evil. He was crying harder at this point, but he was not giving in. Adam could not get Bradley’s hands off of the bedpost, so he tried pushing the bed back to the dresser. Bradley was putting up resistance even through his tears, and Adam’s face remained stoic.
There was a tug-of-war going on. The bed would be pulled away from the bureau, which was against the locked door, then pushed back against the bureau. At first Carter and Brenda agreed that it would be too difficult and dangerous to knock down the door by force with the two kids behind it, but they needed an intervention immediately or someone was going to get severely injured.
Carter ran to the shed outside and got a sledge hammer. The plan was for Carter to knock the door down as soon as Brenda gave him the okay. It would be precisely the time Adam pulled the bed away from the bureau. That way, the boys would be the furthest away from the sledgehammer, should it come bursting through the bedroom door in Carter’s attempt to gain entry.
Carter just wanted in, and he dismissed what they had just discussed about when to hammer the door. As Brenda was following the booming sound on the door, she could see Carter’s panic had gone into overdrive. She saw the bedroom door moving inward with each pound. The boys backed up from the door because the violent boom sound that Carter was creating scared them to pieces. Brenda’s eyes were drawn to the left side of the room where the bedroom door was very nearly being pounded off of its hinges.
The door was then pounded off of its hinges. By the time Carter had blasted his way into Adam’s room, Brenda had joined him. They looked for the boys and only found Adam. Bradley was gone, and there was an opened window. It was the same window that they once thought Adam had escaped through on the night he went missing. Now it was Bradley. The drop was too far down for anybody to survive. They looked down and saw no signs of Bradley.
“Where did Bradley go?” asked Brenda.
Adam looked at her and said, “Bradley went home. Daddy scared him with the big boom.”
“How did he get out?” asked Carter. “He couldn’t have escaped through the window because he could never have made it down safely.”
“He thought so too,” said Adam.
“Then why is the window open?” asked Carter.
“He was going to go through it, and changed his mind just like me,” said Adam.
“Just like you?” asked Carter. “What do you mean by that?”
“The night Martin got me out of the house. I tried to get out the window, but it was too far down. He must’ve done what I did.”
“Which was…” Brenda said.
“Snuck out of my bedroom and went out the front door.”
Carter and Brenda could not get any more information out of him. It was the middle of the night and they were all wiped out from everything that had gone on. Whatever was going on with Bradley seemed to be over, but it was not going to go away. They were all exhausted, so they decided to resume the discussion the following day since everything had calmed down.
. . .
Brenda had the good fortune of being able to sleep a bit later due to the events of the previous evening, but Carter only had a few hours of shuteye. He had a job to go to, and he could not miss this day because he had important meetings to attend. Whatever sleep he did get would have to be enough.
It was almost noon and Adam was still asleep in his bedroom, but the mystifying part of this was the fact that he was too afraid to sleep in his room the night before and again slept with his parents. Brenda eventually had to wake him because she didn’t want him to be up all night. She had already been up for two hours and had given him the benefit of the doubt by letting him sleep. She went up to get him and he was still sleeping pretty hard. He didn’t hear the door when she came in, nor did he hear her noisy entrance, and she made a point of being loud in an attempt to rouse him a little easier.
“Good morning, Adam,” said Brenda. “It’s rise and shine. It’s uppy-uppy time!”
When that didn’t work, she shook him until he opened his eyes. When she looked closely at his face, she could see streaks of dirt. Her mind instantly shot back to the time Bradley came to get him in the middle of the night to work on Mr. Jenkins’ yard and he got muddy. He had crawled back into bed without doing more than taking off his muddy sneakers. He was still wearing his dirty clothes, and that was what Brenda expected to find when she lifted up his covers.
Her suspicions proved to be correct, but she wasn’t sure how this could be possible given the events of the previous evening and everything else that occurred. All of the players involved must have been exhausted. It was a late night, there was a whirlwind of commotion with a lot of damage both mentally and physically, and they’re kids.
Brenda looked at Adam’s dirty clothes as she peeled back the covers. He was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open and could only blink intermittently. Brenda continued to shake him, but then decided to let him rest a while longer and deal with the after-effects in another hour or so. She wanted to pull her hair out, but instead pulled the blankets back over him and left the room.
There was a lot on the table that had to be considered. Martin was back in town, and he was wreaking havoc on their son. Mr. Jenkins was back, and he was less intrusive, but he was still taking six year olds out of their homes at ungodly hours and without their parent’s knowledge.
When Carter finally returned home, Brenda reminded him of everything that needed to be considered before making a plan to move forward. They needed to consider everything and everyone. Evan needed to be considered, as did Evelyn, Adam, Bradley, and Skippy. They couldn’t forget Skippy as this dog obtained a lot of pertinent information for them.
“Let’s think about these two spirits in our lives,” said Carter. “There’s Martin, of course, and Mr. Jenkins.”
“Yes,” said Brenda. “One is an evil pain in the ass and the other one is just an old man taking kids out of their homes in the middle of the night to carry on the work he can no longer do.”
“Right,” said Carter. “I’m certainly more concerned with Martin, but maybe there’s a way for Mr. Jenkins to help out.”
“What do you mean?” asked Brenda.
“His spirit. Mr. Jenkins’ spirit. Maybe we can use him the way he’s using the kids in order get what we want. Do you think we can get any more out of Evan?”
“I think we’re all set with Evan,” said Brenda. “He did what he could do, but now what we need to do is not covered under his specialty. He handed that one off to Evelyn.”
“Yeah he did,” said Carter, “and that was some hand-off. It came complete with a horrifying story.”
Brenda shook her head in agreement. “I can’t believe he even brought the name up. If I was in his shoes, Evelyn would not be a name I would ever mention. Maybe he thought that we wouldn’t pursue it? I mean, could we have a more vested interest in pursuing everything, big or small?”
Carter and Brenda laid out every detail of what they had learned in their quest to get Martin out of their son’s life, but they needed to take it to the next level. They needed to get him to where he belonged. He belonged in the afterlife, but somewhere along the line he took a wrong turn, or missed the boat. Now this pain in the ass wouldn’t leave them alone. If he couldn’t get to them, then he would get to what they care most about. In this case, it was their precious son, Adam. Martin did not care who he took down in the process.
The problem with Adam and Bradley was essentially the same. They were being haunted by a spirit, and the reach was doubled because each spirit was now affecting both boys. They needed to let the Oldman’s next door in on the secret about their son, and how he had aga
in pulled Adam in to his world. This time it backfired, though, because Adam was already pulled in to Martin’s world.
Carter and Brenda were going to do this together while Adam was asleep and Dan Oldman was at work. That was the best time to approach the Oldman’s about their son. This was not the perfect couple with which to deal, but Carter and Brenda had quickly learned how the Oldman’s operate.
Since they had heard Dan’s car backing out of the garage and pulling away from the house very early in the morning, they knew he was at work and that they could just go next door around midmorning, unannounced. It would have to be unannounced as they were very much still new neighbors, so they hadn’t swapped phone numbers yet.
“Morning,” said Brenda curtly after Victoria Oldman answered the door. Carter smiled behind her, having noticed Victoria’s bikini. This suit contained even less material than the first bikini she once paraded around in for Carter. Brenda’s smile was a little phonier, but she wore it and sold it as real, just to get in the door.
“So how are things?” Brenda asked as they sat in the living room.
“Oh great,” said Victoria. Then her face changed over to stone. “Actually, that’s not true. Dan and I have not been getting along, and Bradley is driving me off a cliff. I could sit here and pretend that everything is fine, but why should I? Maybe I need help. Maybe I’m crying out for help. I am! I am crying out for help! Please help me, you guys. Please help!” She then burst out in tears, trying to speak through them, but there might as well have been no words coming out. Of course, Brenda was the one who had to console her. If Carter suddenly became the consoling one, then he’d be sleeping on the couch.
Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3) Page 67