A criminal his father had prosecuted, and two accomplices, had been responsible for the murder. His dad’s name had been cleared. Some comfort for an orphaned twelve-year old, he supposed.
“Is there anywhere you can go in the city?”
“I know which streets are safe to walk on.” And which weren’t. “I avoid the intersection at Skidaway Road and Victory Drive—lots of car accidents there.” Bodies flung through windshields, pedestrians hit by buses. “There’s a block on Bryant Street I steer clear of, too. A banker took a high-dive from a ninth floor roof. He almost landed on my head the first time.”
He tried to shrug, as if it were routine. In truth, though, he never got completely accustomed to it, especially when he saw something new, though there wasn’t much he hadn’t experienced by now. Well, maybe an official prison execution, though he’d certainly seen his fair share of hangings, almost always self-inflicted.
A painful visual immediately surfaced. He shoved it away, back into the deepest recesses of his mind where the grief over his parents still lingered.
She gasped, suddenly realized something he’d hoped she wouldn’t grasp for a while. “Oh my God, this place is going to be very bad for you, isn’t it?” she asked as they reached the center of the woods, where the ground was marshiest and little light shone through.
“Probably.”
“I wasn’t thinking so far ahead. I thought you saw the occasional ghost. But you will see every horrible death that ever happened here!”
He didn’t reply, silently acknowledging that fact.
“For you to come to a former asylum…from the days when the treatments were barbaric and dangerous,” she said in a broken whisper. “Why did you agree?”
“It’s my job.”
True, but there was a lot more to it, including his own need to pay debts owed to the dead, as he’d once paid his parents’. “Plus, I’ve worked in hospitals before.”
“But here! This is different. There was no care or therapy in those days. This was simply a place for people to dump their unstable relatives and forget about them.”
“Don’t forget the unwanted wives,” he growled, remembering some of what he’d uncovered doing more research last night. There’d been a famous case some decades ago when a millionaire had accused his wife of “hysteria” and had her committed here. She’d died a suspicious death not long afterward, and he’d married his mistress a month later.
He wondered briefly if the wife had been the blonde, but quickly realized she hadn’t been. He’d seen grainy old newspaper pictures of her. She was dark-haired, with sad, dark eyes. Still, her fate could certainly have been the same as the woman he’d just watch die.
“Oh, God, and tuberculosis!” she exclaimed, her hand on her mouth. “It’s so ugly.”
Yeah. He’d researched that disease, too. Natural deaths were one thing. Choking because your own lungs are useless and fluid-filled? Well, it wasn’t exactly a peaceful way to go.
“Oh, Jesus, somebody else should do this, not you.”
She sounded so horrified, so remorseful for not having known the possible ramifications, he had to put a hand on her chin and lift her face. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
“No, you won’t. I know how brains work, I know about repressed memories, how witnessing shock and trauma damage a person. You are not okay, and this place will make you less okay.”
What luck to land with a clinical psychiatrist who could so easily analyze him and put her finger right on the truth of what he did and what it did to him. He so didn’t need to have this conversation right now.
“Look, you were right there while I watched a woman being strangled to death, and I got through it.”
Grimacing as he revealed another detail of the brutal attack he’d witnessed, she twisted her long, elegant fingers into knots. “I am so sorry I dragged you into this.”
He eyed her, knowing she meant it…but not entirely. “If it means you finally get answers about your brother, it’ll be worth it though, right?”
Her teeth caught her bottom lip. Finally, she nodded. “Worth it for me, yes. I don’t suppose it’s ever worth it for you.”
“Sure it is.” He thrust off the thoughts of all he’d seen, all the murders from so long ago there was no way he could help resolve them. But he’d seen the most important one, the one that had put him on this deadly path.
His parents murders had been solved, the killers incarcerated. So yeah. It was worth it.
“And you pray for them?” she whispered.
He nodded. He’d never really talked about that before; honestly, he wasn’t sure he’d done it aloud in front of anyone before, his final condolences often a whisper in his mind. She just made him feel at ease enough to pray for the poor, lost woman aloud.
“Next time,” she whispered, her eyes gleaming with emotion, “I’ll pray with you.”
It’s so dark. Not lights-out dark, but can’t-even-see-my-fingers-in-front-of-my-face black. This isn’t Building 13. In Building 13 there’s a skylight on the roof so it’s light enough to see the stuff. The bloody stuff. The scary stuff. The ugly pictures and the rusty springs on the bedframe and the dirty, sharp medical instruments. This is worse. Oh, God, it’s so much worse!
Right now, Charlie McMasters almost wished he were in Building 13. Feeling the terror of the scariest place at Fenton was always followed by release into the sunlight the next morning, once his punishment was through. Here, though…he hadn’t seen the sunlight in at least two days. Just the dark-dark-dark, and the black-black-black, and the bad monster that would be coming back-back-back.
He giggled. He whimpered.
He was going crazy.
“Stop it. Be brave,” he told himself. His own voice shook and sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of a kindergarten kid. He swallowed and tried again, needing to hear something. “There’s no monsters.”
Monsters were made up things to scare babies and people at the movies. People might think he was a dummy, but he wasn’t a complete idiot and he wasn’t a baby. Since he’d had to come to Fenton, he’d realized there were things a lot worse than vampires or mummies, or any made-up monster. Other kids, for one thing. Teachers.
And ghosts.
Ghosts. Now, they were something he knew existed. Because if any place was haunted, it was this one.
Everybody knew boys had been disappearing, their balls cut off, and their guts spilling out so the alligators would eat them faster once they were dumped into the swamp. He and his friends sometimes whispered in the dorm about it after lights out. They were all convinced those boys’ ghosts were still around. Only Eli didn’t think it was so. And while Charlie usually believed whatever Eli said, he also believed if an alligator ate his nuts, he would be mad at whoever had cut them off and try to get his revenge.
If he ever saw Eli again, he would tell his friend the stories were true, that boys had been killed, and the ghosts were real. He knew it, because he heard them sometimes, singing strange, creepy songs. They sounded like the souls of kids who’d gone crazy, as he probably would. Or already had. Considering he’d started singing along—Ring around the Rosie, pocket full of posies—it was probably too late.
Did crying, begging, pleading, singing and praying mean you had already lost it?
“No. I’m not crazy.”
Not yet.
“Charlie’s not crazy. Charlie just wants to get out of here. Charlie wants to go h-home.” His breath hitched. His body quaked. “Please let me go home.”
His words ended in a high wail that was almost a scream.
And something moved in the corner.
“No. Not you—you can’t be real.”
Some boys might be brave and try to escape from this hellhole he was in. Charlie thought about trying to get out; he really did. But he couldn’t make himself do it, having no idea where he was, or what would happen if he got away—there’s ghosts outside looking for their balls.
But sooner or late
r, he was gonna have to try. Because Charlie was starting to think there were worse things than being with ghosts out there. Sometimes there was something in here.
He’d begun to suspect the thing that was blacker-than-the-blackness, that came into this place through an opening he couldn’t see, that watched him in silence for hours at a time, wasn’t a ghost at all. It was a demon.
It’s here. Right now. It’s in the corner, watching me, with its sharp knives and its bloody claws. He gulped down a scream of panic. “Not here, not here, not here.”
There’s no demon in the corner. Somebody’s playing a joke, that’s all. It’s a prank, soon they’ll come back and let me out.
It didn’t help. The demon remained.
He’d always thought demons would be hot, coming from a place that burned, like he’d always been told hell did. But this one was cold. So, so cold. Every time he heard the tiniest whisper of a sound from somewhere in this room where he’d been chained, and knew he was no longer alone in this gross-smelling, musty, dirt-floored place, the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. Charlie’s teeth would chatter, and his body would shake. He would try to be brave, but sooner or later, as the silence stretched on, he would start to cry, and then to beg, even though he knew it wouldn’t help. The demon never reacted at all.
“Calm down,” he mumbled, needing to hear his own voice, to keep from screaming at the black hole of ice to say something. Anything. Just let him know he was still alive, still someplace on earth, and not locked in a hole in another dimension or in hell itself. “What would Eli do? He’d stay calm, that’s what he’d do.”
He took some deep breaths and wiped the tears off his cheeks. He bit on his bottom lip to stop the shaking. Although chained at the hands, lying on the dirt, he was able to move enough to curl up in a ball on his side for warmth.
“What would Eli do?” he whispered again, wondering why he hadn’t thought of that before. Eli was the nicest boy he knew. Nicer even than the older kid who’d stood up for him at the beginning of the year when Charlie was getting called a dumb lardass.
The older kid who was now probably one of those ghosts singing in the swamp, considering he’d also disappeared from school.
“Sorry older kid,” he muttered, feeling calmer now. It was cold because it was nighttime. He couldn’t see anything at all, but he knew it was true. The sun went down and cold air came in, no demon riding on its back. It was just night. Cold, dark night.
He almost convinced himself of that. Almost believed it.
And then there was a noise. A scritchy-scratch.
The terror Charlie had been keeping deep inside his chest and his throat came out. He yipped. He sobbed. He begged.
A low, deep, throaty chuckle. It came from the corner where the cold hole of evil lurked.
Charlie heard it moving. Coming closer.
He opened his mouth to scream. Couldn’t catch his breath. Couldn’t move.
He was a mouse sensing the approach of a snake.
The snake bit.
CHAPTER 5
They searched for two hours, until the moon had moved across the sky, and the night air was actually getting cold, rather than merely chilly—a rarity for Georgia this late in the spring. But it was still humid, and a soupy fog rose from the ground, reducing visibility.
In that time, they’d explored several rotting shacks, an old junked train car filled with must and mice, two locked storage buildings, a dilapidated dock extending into dry reeds, and what appeared to have once been a padded-walled room in a squat, standalone building made of concrete block. The padding had oozed filthy stuffing, the floors were slick with slimy mold, the walls coated in mildew. Worst of all, there was recent-looking graffiti. Boys who’d been imprisoned in here had left words of support to the next coming down the torture line, a long chain of victims, judging by the amount of writing.
They hadn’t, however, found the overnight punishment building Isaac had mentioned. Building 13, the deepest pit in this flaming hellhole, proved elusive. He’d said it was in a swampy area, with an overgrown trail. There were so many of those, it was hard to spot them all, especially at night. Considering they’d barely made a dent in searching the entire huge parcel of land, it probably wasn’t much wonder they’d missed it.
Derek hadn’t appeared too worried. Tomorrow, he would be a staff member. He might hear about the place. In fact, the administrators might brag about it. Maybe he’d even be offered a sick, twisted tour.
“It’s two a.m. What time do you have to be back here in the morning?” she asked, brushing a slick strand of gunk out of her hair.
“Nine.” He leaned against a tree. Brave man, considering the spiders and bugs that probably infested its mossy bark. “I guess we should head back to the car.”
Considering it would require an hour of picking their way back through the soggy ground, she agreed. She was wet, cold, filthy, and exhausted. “I’m sorry we didn’t find more.”
“We found enough for the first night out. More than enough.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. Although he hadn’t described each experience, she noted the times when he stumbled across another awful scene of death. She mentally ticked off the list of sacrifices he was making by being here. As if compelled by duty—not fascination—he’d stood rigidly, at almost military attention, staring at the empty air six times. As promised, she’d said a quiet prayer with him each time he was finished.
Three of those times, he’d stared deep into the swamp.
The idea that her brother’s body had been tossed here to rot—to disappear into muck—hadn’t left her mind. Realizing they might never find his actual human remains, she’d focused on the thought that Derek might see it happening and at least find answers. She might not be able to bury Isaac—she accepted that. But she still had to try to see justice done for him.
“What about you? Do you have to be at work early in the morning?”
“I’m not on staff at the V.A. hospital, just on a contract basis. So I don’t have set hours.”
“Lucky thing after tonight.”
“Not so lucky. I have a seven-thirty a.m. appointment tomorrow”
“You might as well go straight to work after you drop me off.”
“Ha. I reek. I’ll need a two-hour shower to wash off the eau-de-rot,” she said.
Suddenly, Derek stiffened. She thought for a moment that he’d seen something again—another spirit to kick him in the ass on the way out the door. But he wasn’t looking at anything but the ground. His head was cocked. Lifting a hand, he placed an index finger across his lips.
She suddenly heard it too. A voice—faint and distant.
It was singing.
“Fly’s in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo,” came the lilting, off-key sound. “Bobby’s in the stew pot, Billy is too.”
The song came out of the swamp, eerie and strange, high-pitched and otherworldly. Notes bounced off trees, creating a stereo effect that seemed to surround them, oozing in like midnight fog.
Kate shivered, a long, rolling sensation that made her shake. A week ago, she would have laughed off the reaction, and the thought that had inspired it. A ghost. Now, though, she believed anything was possible, especially in a place like this, in the blackest of night.
Maybe Derek had been wrong. Perhaps some spirits weren’t content with leaving just a visual memory of their deaths, at least not here, on damned ground. “Do you…”
“Shhhh. Stay here, I want to go check it out.”
Derek barely made a sound as he began to move, creeping through the trees, following the sing-song voice. She did as he asked for about thirty seconds before realizing it was creepier to remain here alone than to pursue the singer. So, moving as quietly as she could, she went after him, feeling like a kid following the tune of the pied piper. Or his ghost.
She shoved that thought away. Maybe Julia Harrington saw—and heard—ghosts. But she certainly never had. Why would she start now?
&nb
sp; Far ahead, the singer was moving through the swamp. “Everybody’s gone now, soon me too? Skip to the loo my darlin’!”
She shivered again. The echoes of that high-pitched, childlike, half-crazed voice terrified her like nothing else they’d experienced tonight. The air seemed alive with it. She wanted to turn back, but Derek hadn’t.
Kate could barely make out his movements in the darkness ahead of her. He went deeper and deeper into the heart of the swamp, and she trailed after him. She didn’t try to catch up, not wanting an argument about her following, though he probably suspected she would.
It didn’t take long for her to regret the impulse. With each step, the water rose, from the soles of her boots, to her ankles, now her calves. She breathed through her mouth, trying not to gag on the stench of rot and decay.
Although they were moving toward the music, the singing didn’t grow louder, as if the singer distanced himself a step for every one they took. Sometimes the song stopped, and she’d fear they had lost him. But the silence didn’t last long, and she’d hear a whistle, or a hum, and they would pick up the trail again.
That’s what had just happened—after a minute-long pause, she caught a note off the night wind. She focused on it, certain Derek was doing the same, trying to determine the direction. Before she could figure it out, however, a deep honking croak caught her attention. She froze, recognizing the sound.
A gator. Medium sized. It was mating season and he was probably particularly aggressive right now. Derek had probably passed within a few feet of it but hadn’t even missed a step, from what she could tell.
Hell.
She quickened her pace as much as she could, her stare never leaving the animal as it slunk back in the slimy water. Its body disappeared soundlessly until nothing but its eyes remained, peering at her, reflecting a glint of moonlight.
She kept a lookout for eyes like that, knowing large bodies could be concealed beneath even shallow pools. Her feet were now sinking knee deep into the brackish water. She had to push through it rather than walk. Trying not to splash, she wondered how Derek could move so cat-quiet, glad he was focused only on the singer ahead of him and not the creeping follower behind.
Cold Image (Extrasensory Agents Book 4) Page 9