Garvey cut him off again. “Bed.”
“Bed,” Molly agreed.
“That’s right, Molly. Say good-bye.”
The thing jolted up quickly and stretched out toward Tovin. “Feel him,” it said and then did exactly that. Ick-covered hands found their way to Tovin’s face, to his hair, then to the line of his neck. Like the dead male, her pale blue eyes were covered in cataracts. Questions sort of flew out the window the longer the thing kept stroking him. Why Garvey was there, why he had two vampires—well, one now—or what he planned to do with them. None of it seemed especially pressing anymore. All that mattered was getting out of there.
Garvey’s face matched Tovin’s in disgust. The line of his mouth was drawn and twisted so that one half went up and the other down. “Very, very weird,” he said. Then, just like that, he shrugged it off. “Oh well. Like I said…go. And, uh, keep this to yourself.”
“Go,” Molly echoed.
Tovin went.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: THE CLOSET
Gunk from the vampire’s touch puckered his skin. Where it dried, it pulled. The glue-like substance was a pungent reminder of his recent brush with death. Tovin wiped it off using his sleeve. Flakes of it lazed down to the ground, falling like snow.
Shaking, hands gripping his knees, he slouched over to regain his breath. Stopping only made the burning in his lungs worse, the pain in his side more acute.
He straightened himself up to move forward but stopped in his tracks.
Try not to die was generally good advice.
Tovin knew he wasn’t following it when he pressed the pause button on fleeing to gawk at the now open janitor’s closet. Tedious instinct asserted exploring the closet defied common sense. It tweaked his unwilling limbs toward safety, but idiocy would not be denied once the woman in blue appeared right next to it.
Tovin, she said, I opened the door for you. They don’t know you’re out yet.
“No,” he told her, “I’ve been dumb enough for one day, thanks.”
Not nearly, she responded. More than happy to haunt you until you agree.
Given one could be worse than the other, Tovin felt this was a situation where clarification necessary. “What do you mean by haunt exactly?”
Unlock your door over and over. Bet they’ll be mad when they wake up.
Well played, ghost.
Tovin staggered toward danger. Grave-like, the black rectangle of the door appeared to slouch into nothing. No light came in or went out. The only sound was his own heavy breathing, the concerning pulse of his frantic heart.
Tovin fiddled with the edges of the wall for a switch.
No lights, the ghost informed him.
“What good is it to me open it, then?”
Keep going, she ordered without further explanation. Faster.
He followed her down the stairs, pausing every so often to feel out the lay of the land with his feet, to search for the end of the wall with his hand. Eventually the ground became even. Tovin stumbled into what felt like a vast room. Stagnant air laced with the smell of mold tickled his nose. Sneezing, Tovin looked around for some sign of the ghost.
“Okay, I’m here. Why?”
She appeared in front of him. In the darkness, she was two pale eyes, the vague outline of a head—more ghostlike than she’d ever been before. Tovin gasped.
Sorry, she apologized.
“No problem,” Tovin assured her. “You can’t help that you’re dead.”
He thought she smiled as she lifted up her arm to point toward what looked like nothing but more darkness. Staggering, Tovin put his hands out in front of himself, moving forward zombielike. When his outstretched hands hit something solid, he stopped.
“Now what?”
Read.
A soft light came from the dead woman’s body.
In front of him were rows and rows of files that appeared to be death records.
“Whelp, you can’t say they’re not meticulous,” Tovin commented.
Read. Hurry.
Tovin grabbed three or four at first. And then he grabbed more and more.
Each one he pulled down had the same thing written down for cause of death. The Door. The Door. The Door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacqueline Rohrbach is a thirty-six-year-old creative writer living in windy central Washington. When she isn’t writing strange books about bloodsucking magical werewolves, she’s baking sweets, or walking her two dogs, Nibbler and Mulder. She also loves cheesy ghost shows, especially when the hosts call out the ghost out like he wants to brawl with it in a bar. You know, “Come out here, you coward! You like to haunt little kids. Haunt me!” Jackee laughs at this EVERY time.
She’s also a hopeless World of Warcraft addict. In her heyday, she was a top parsing disc priest. She became a paladin to fight Deathwing, she went back to a priest to cuddle pandas, and then she went to a shaman because I guess she thought it would be fun to spend an entire expansion underpowered and frustrated. Boomchicken for Legion!
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ImmutableMoon
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