by Ron Ripley
“We need to go,” Frank said. “I’ll fill you in outside. I promise. You just got to trust me on this one.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Shane saw Gordon nod, and the two men left.
The footsteps came to a stop on the other side of the doors.
Quincy took a nervous step back.
“Do me a favor, kid,” Shane said in a low voice.
Quincy looked at him.
“Grab me some of that chain from the first set of doors, will you?” Shane asked. Quincy nodded and hurried out of the room. Shane was alone with Pete. The other man was wrestling with the bolt-cutters, trying to get them to work.
“Leave it,” Shane said, putting all of the authority he could muster into the words.
Pete straightened up in surprise, and he looked over at Shane. “Why? That guy’s right on the other side. I swear I can hear him breathing.”
Not likely, Shane thought. Quincy came back in, a length of the chain rattling in his hands. Shane nodded his thanks, accepted the metal and said, “Go outside with Frank.”
“Aha!” Pete shouted, and the bolt-cutters snapped through a link. In a matter of seconds, he had severed a second. “Nothing to it!”
Shane watched as Pete dropped the bolt-cutters and unthreaded the chain from the handles.
Part of Shane wanted to back out of the room and leave Pete to his fate.
But he couldn’t.
I don’t hate him that much, Shane thought. At least not yet.
Pete dropped the chain to the floor, slapped his hands together in satisfaction, and jerked the right-hand door open.
In the dim light of the hall beyond, the walker was revealed.
He was huge. Easily six foot six, if not taller. He wore a dark blue uniform, the pants bloused at the tops of his boots. His skin was a putrid green, his eyes bulging from their sockets. The man’s tongue was swollen, the tip of it protruding from between black lips. And he was bald in random patches across his head.
Pete’s horrified scream told Shane that he could see through the man as well.
Shane moved forward even as Pete tripped over his own feet and fell hard onto the floor. Without hesitation, Shane stepped over Pete’s prostrate form. When he was between Pete and the ghost, Shane began to swing the chain in a slow circle.
The links cut through the air with a soft hiss, and the dead prison guard smiled at him, a gruesome action which revealed gray teeth.
“You need to stay where you are,” Shane said. “We’re leaving.”
The guard shook his head and spoke, his words surprisingly clear.
“No, you’re not,” he said. His voice was harsh and brutal. “You’re going down into the hole. You shouldn’t be up here. Only the warden and the screws are allowed up here.”
“Pete,” Shane said, “get out.”
Pete didn’t reply, but Shane heard him scramble out of the building.
“All alone, punk,” the guard said.
“I’m leaving,” Shane said, taking a cautious step back.
The guard stepped towards him. He flexed his hands and shook them out with all of the ease and confidence of a professional boxer.
This one likes to hurt people, Shane thought. He must have been real popular with the prisoners.
Shane took another step back, and the guard lunged at him.
Rocking forward, Shane gave the chain some slack, and it lashed out, smashing into what would have been the guard’s chin. As the iron penetrated the ghost’s form, the guard shuddered, screamed, and vanished.
Shane’s heart beat against his ribs with enough force to be painful. The chain was heavy in his hands, and he took a deep breath to calm himself.
Farther down the hallway, he heard the sound of footsteps racing towards the foyer.
Shane turned and sprinted for the exit.
Chapter 7: Giving a Little Lesson
They were in a diner five miles down the road from Kurkow Prison.
Shane finished up his eggs while Frank doodled on a napkin. The other three men watched both of them with dazed expressions.
Putting his fork down, Shane looked at Frank. He shrugged and continued to work on a stick figure. The little man was running out of a building, his hands in the air and a thought bubble which read ‘Ghost!’
“Am I really that pretty?” Shane asked.
Pete blinked first. “What?”
“Just wondering why you’re all staring at me. Well,” Shane said, leaning back. “Not really. I know why. What do you want to know?”
“How did you stop it?” Gordon asked.
“Iron,” Shane said. “It’s one of the few things I know of that can get the job done. Requires you to be up close and personal though, which I am not a fan of.”
“Does it destroy them?” Quincy asked.
Shane shook his head. “No. It sends them back to either their bones or whatever they’ve attached themselves to. In this case, it was pretty damned close by.”
“So that was him you heard running towards you?” Gordon asked.
Shane nodded.
“Why?” Pete asked, his voice raw. “Why are there ghosts there?”
“Maybe because of the accident,” Gordon suggested.
“Yeah,” Shane agreed. “Care to enlighten me? I don’t know any details.”
Gordon nodded, and he began the story.
"I can give you the basics, but not a whole lot more. If you want the finer points, well, you'll have to reach out to some of the survivors," Gordon said.
Shane took a cigarette out and placed it unlit between his lips.
"In nineteen seventy-four, there was an accident at the prison," Gordon continued. "No one was ever told exactly what happened. Or how it happened. But it boiled down to this. The day had begun as usual with the night shift guards preparing to leave while the day shift guards were getting ready to trade out the posts. The police who did the investigation believed that's why so many of the prisoners were actually saved. Double the amount of guards."
“What was the accident?” Shane asked.
“Some sort of gas,” Gordon said. “Word has it that the gas slipped out from the basement. An accident, a mixture from some of the chemicals stored down there. Prisoners and guards suffocated, poisoned by the gas. When they retrieved the bodies, they were so contaminated that people got sick from being around them. In the end, the authorities decided it would be best to burn the corpses. But all in all, they don’t know how the whole thing started.”
"How many died?" Frank asked.
"That's the other thing," Gordon said, leaning back in the booth. "They think most of the prisoners were saved."
"Think?" Shane asked. "Didn't they do a head count?"
"They said they did, but a couple of hundred got out. Mostly the hard cases, so they said, the ones down in solitary and the others on death row." Gordon shook his head. "Other than that, they didn't say."
"How did they die?" Shane asked. "Do they even know what the chemical agent was?"
"No," Gordon said. "And they blocked any release of information about the investigation."
"How?" Quincy asked, looking around, confused. "I mean, I thought in America they can't do this sort of thing, yes?"
Shane snorted.
"What?" Pete asked. "What's funny?"
"Nothing's funny," Shane said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. "The problem is that if you're going to really work on the place, you're going to have to do some digging."
"If I work on the place," Pete murmured. A forlorn expression settled on his face. "I can't get the money back that I deposited. I have to make it work."
"I can't work with ghosts around," Quincy said. There was fear in his eyes, and Shane didn't think any less of the young man for it. "No. No, I can't."
"What?" Pete started, but Shane interrupted him.
"No worries about that, Quincy," Shane said, smiling. "No worries. No shame in it, alright?"
Quincy nodded. He pulled his walle
t from a back pocket, took out a ten dollar bill and put it down on the table. When he stood up, Quincy looked at Pete.
"If you get a place without ghosts, Pete," Quincy said. "Then I'll come."
"And I won't call you for the work," Pete snapped.
Quincy shrugged, waved to the others, and left.
Silence fell over the remaining men for almost a minute, before Peter broke it, asking, "How do I get rid of ghosts?"
"There are professionals out there," Shane said.
Frank looked at him.
"What about you?" Pete asked, his face brightening. "You seem to know what you're doing. Hell, you got rid of that one quick enough."
"And it came back," Shane replied. "Listen, getting rid of them isn't easy. It's not like those shows where you can just wave some burning sage around, and the damned things leave."
"You said you killed ghosts," Gordon said.
Shane sighed. "I do."
"And he's good at it," Frank said. "Extremely good at it."
"Will you?" Pete asked. "Please? I don't know how much it would cost, but would you?"
Shane hesitated, and then he said, "Tell you what, let me dig into the history of the prison for a few days, and I'll let you know. If I think it's too much, then no, I won't. If it's something I think can be done, then we'll work out a price."
"Thank you!" Pete said, extending his hand.
Shane shook it and felt as if he had just made the worst decision in his life.
Chapter 8: Mulberry Street, The Adams House
Dorothy Adams had been retired for exactly three days, fourteen hours, and seventeen minutes.
And she was going stir-crazy.
She had never been a knitter or someone who enjoyed crocheting. Reading was enjoyable, but Dorothy had exhausted the local library's supply of new books. And while her pension would allow her to live comfortably, there wasn't a great deal of what she saw as 'financial wiggle-room.'
Dorothy left the kitchen, walked into her small family room and sat down on the couch. Taz, her black and white cat, looked up at her with tired eyes.
"What's wrong, handsome?" she asked.
Taz got up, stretched, and walked over to her. He smelled her blouse, sneezed, and then climbed onto her lap, dropping down. He was heavier than she remembered, and she considered whether it might be better to limit his food.
No, she decided. He's seventeen years old. He can eat whatever he wants.
She scratched between his ears and the cat purred. Dorothy smiled and looked out the bay window onto Mulberry Street. She knew she was alone on the street. Over the years, the other families whom she and Jonathan had known so well had either broken up, moved away, or passed on.
The new residents were strangers to her. Men and women who worked full-time jobs far from their small town. Their children were in daycares or at school. The only people Dorothy could expect to see over the next few hours were either delivery drivers or the mailman.
And Dorothy was alone.
Jonathan had died years before, working as a guard at Kurkow Prison.
She closed her eyes against the memory of it. Each fall and winter, and into every spring she was reminded of the horror. Through the trees lining her backyard the prison could be seen. A huge, abandoned structure.
They didn't even let me bury him, she thought. Dorothy sighed and closed her eyes.
All of the bodies had been burned. Contaminated by whatever had killed them. And she had been left alone to raise their son.
A bitter taste rose up in her throat at the thought of Jon Junior. He had been so unlike his father. A calm and peaceful boy, a place of refuge when his father stormed against them both. He had even stood between Jonathan and Dorothy on those nights when his father had had too much to drink.
Those nights when the belt would come out, Dorothy remembered. When he would beat me.
But Jon Junior would stop the beatings, the abuse.
Then the world had changed with Jonathan's death. Dorothy had to go to work and her time with Jon Junior had become less and less.
It was because of that, she thought, anger rising to the surface. If I had been home more, then he never would have joined the Marines. And if he hadn't joined the Marines, he wouldn't have been in Beirut. He wouldn't have died in the bombing.
My little boy wouldn't be dead.
Dorothy let out a long, shuddering breath, opened her eyes and focused on the world beyond her bay window. The sky had been darkening since a little after dawn, storm clouds moving in with a promise of snow. Dorothy had tried to watch the news, but none of the weathermen on the various channels seemed to have any idea how much snow they might be in for.
A honeymoon snowstorm, she thought with a wry smile, remembering the old joke with a smile. You know it's coming, but you don't know when, how much, or how long it’ll stay.
She chuckled to herself and watched a car pass by the house, the driver holding a cell phone up to their head.
Foolish, Dorothy told the driver. That's a good way to cause an accident. Or get a ticket.
But as soon as she finished the thought, the vehicle was gone, leaving her alone with Taz on Mulberry Street. She smiled at the cat, scratching his back.
Taz went quiet, his body stiffening. He got to his feet, all of his hair standing on end. His eyes narrowed to slits, and his ears laid back against his skull. The purr was replaced by a low, angry growl.
"What's wrong?" Dorothy asked him.
The cat jumped from her lap, landing with a thud on the floor. He sank down low, his tail snapping back and forth.
"Taz," Dorothy said. "What's going on?"
He fixed his eyes on the doorway that linked the kitchen and the family room, the growl growing louder.
Dorothy got to her feet and looked at the cat. "What's gotten into you?"
Taz scooted backward, never taking his eyes off the doorway.
Dorothy shook her head and went into the kitchen. The air was colder than the rest of the house, and she checked the window over the sink. It was closed, and the storm glass was down over the screen. She stepped over to the back door and saw that it was locked. Frowning, Dorothy pulled the curtain aside to make certain the screen door was still closed, and when she did, she gasped.
Jonathan stood on the back porch. He was a few feet away from the door, his shoulders slumped beneath his uniform shirt.
The shirt she had ironed the morning of the accident.
His skin was green, his lips swollen. From between them, his tongue protruded, looking like a dead snail half out of a broken shell. His yellow eyes widened in surprise when he saw her. Then he grinned, revealing crooked teeth, the enamel no longer white, but gray.
Dorothy backed away from the door, terrified, the curtain dropping back into place.
The grin on Jonathan's face was the same he had worn whenever he was drunk.
Whenever he would take his belt off and loop it around his hand, the buckle swinging free. The grin which proceeded the abuse.
He's not real, Dorothy told herself. Jonathan's dead. His body cremated. His remains somewhere unknown. He isn't a ghost. Ghosts aren't real. You know that. If the dead could come back, my little boy would have returned to me.
She clasped her hands together to try and force herself to calm down.
And Jonathan came through the door.
He didn't open it. He didn't break it down.
Just passed through it, gliding into the kitchen.
"Hello, Darling," he said, his swollen tongue and discolored lips somehow forming the words.
Dorothy backed into the table, grabbed the edge with her hands and eased herself into a chair. The room had grown cold enough for her to see her own breath.
"You're dead," she whispered.
"Yes," Jonathan said, stopping a few feet away. "Very dead."
"How are you here?" she asked, still whispering.
"I don't know," he replied. "I've been at work for a long time. There was an accident
, and we died. So many of us. And so many of us have been there, at Kurkow. Waiting, wondering when our shifts would end. When the sentence would end. And they ended today."
"Oh," she said in a small voice.
"I've come home," Jonathan said, and there was no affection in his voice. His grin widened, a horrific rather than an endearing expression.
"What can I do for you, Jonathan?" she asked, her legs shaking as she got to her feet.
“You’re going to help me, Dorothy,” he said, an old and terrifying humor filling his voice.
“How?” she whispered.
“Do you remember how gentle I was?” he asked, his words coming out in a rush. “Do you remember how I worked off that head of steam I’d build up at Kurkow?”
Dorothy nodded, petrified.
“Do you remember how much it would please me?” he hissed. “Do you recall how you would entertain me?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
"Then entertain me," he said, stepping forward. Before she could react, his hand lashed out and wrapped around her throat, the touch cold and brutal. Pain exploded in her flesh, his fingertips like needles as they drove into her muscles. Her windpipe was closed off, and she gasped, desperate for breath.
Jonathan lifted her with one hand and threw her against the wall. Her head put a dent in the drywall, the paint cracking and falling to the floor as she slid down. The phone was jarred from its cradle, slapping the tile with a loud crack.
Jonathan chuckled, took the receiver and ripped the cord out of the base.
Dorothy's head spun, and she had a difficult time focusing. When she could see straight, she found Jonathan standing over her, smiling. He waggled the phone's receiver at her, the yellow plastic seemed dull in the pale light of the kitchen.
"I know it's not my belt, darling," Jonathan said, "but I think it will suffice."
Dorothy screamed as he brought the handset crashing down onto her shoulder, the clavicle snapping.
Over her own shrieks, Dorothy could hear him whistling as he struck her again, and again, and again.
Chapter 9: Getting Help
"Where are you going?" Frank asked.
"Mont Vernon," Shane answered.