“Been sent to fetch you, Ransom, old buddy.” The words seemed to come from every corner of the room, rattling a few crisp leaves that had blown in during winters past. A chill ran up Mason’s spine, his scalp tingled, he felt as if he was going to pass out.
Because this was no dream image.
He couldn’t blame his imagination for this.
“Get on back, damn you,” Ransom said, his voice shaky. He kept his eyes fixed on the George-thing and didn’t notice Mason. George took a step forward.
Except that wasn’t a STEP, was it, Mason? Because George didn’t move a muscle, just floated forward like a windy scarecrow on a wire.
Cold air radiated off the George-thing, chilling the cramped space of the barn. Mason wasn’t ready to call it a ghost. Because when he told Anna he’d believe it when he saw it, it turned out that he had lied. He still didn’t believe it.
And he didn’t believe what was dangling from the George-thing’s lone hand. The missing hand, its milky fingers flexing as if eager to get a good grip around somebody’s throat.
“Come on, Ransom,” the cemetery voice said. “It only hurts for a second. And it’s not so bad inside, once you get used to the snakes.”
“Why, George? I ain’t never done a thing to you.” Ransom’s eyes were wide with terror. “You was a good, God-fearing man. What you gone and got yourself into?”
Laughter shook the tin roofing. Mason’s heart did a somersault.
“Got myself into the tunnel, old buddy. ‘Cause I just had to know. Now let me fetch you on inside. Korban don’t like to be kept waiting.”
There was a rusty creak, and the hay rake rolled forward. Ransom’s eyes shifted from side to side, looking for an escape. He saw Mason.
“The charm ain’t working, Mason. How come the charm ain’t working?”
George turned in Mason’s direction, again without moving any of its withered, fibrous extremities. “Plenty of room inside, young fellow. The tunnel ain’t got no end.”
Ransom ducked between the wagon and the surrey, and Mason turned to run. Too late. The barn door screed across its track and slammed shut.
Mason fled along the inside of the wall, making sure he kept plenty of distance between him and the ghost—you just called it a GHOST, Mason. And that’s not a good sign—until he got beside the surrey. He dropped to his knees, his bones clattering against the floorboards. He crawled to Ransom’s side. “What the hell is that thing, Ransom?”
Ransom peered between the spokes of the wagon wheel. Mason could smell the man’s fear, salt and copper and greenbrier.
“What I been warning you about, son. He’s one of them now. Korban’s bunch.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Ransom’s rag-ball charm was clenched inside his fist. “That don’t matter none, when the ghosts believe in you.”
The shape floated forward, arms raised, the ragged end of its amputation fluttering with the motion. Mason found himself staring at the stump, wondering why a ghost shouldn’t be all in one piece.
Ghost—you called it a ghost again, Mason.
The hay rake creaked, rolling out of its corner toward the pair.
“Go away,” the old man said in a high, broken voice. “I got warding powers.”
“Come out and play, Ransom,” said the George-thing. “Gets lonely inside, with just the snakes for company. We can set a spell and talk over old times. And Korban’s got chores for us all.”
Ransom held up the charm bag. “See here? Got my lizard powder, yarrow, snakeroot, Saint John’s wort. You’re supposed to go away.”
George laughed again, and thunder rattled in the eaves of the barn. Horses whinnied in the neighboring stalls.
“Don’t believe ever little thing they tell you,” George said. “Them’s just a bunch of old widows’ tales. ‘Cause it ain’t what you believe, is it, Ransom?”
“It’s how much,” Ransom said, defeated, looking down at the little scrap of cotton that held the herbs and powder. The cloth was tied with a piece of frayed blue ribbon. White dust trickled from the opening.
Suddenly Ransom stood and threw the bag at George. “Ashes of a prayer, George!”
Mason was frozen by his own fear and a strange fascination as the bag came untied and the contents spread out in a cloud of green and gray dust. The material wafted over the ghost, mingled in its vapor, caught a stir of wind from the crack beneath the door, and swirled around the shape.
George shimmered, faded briefly, fizzled like a candle about to burn the last of its wax—
Jiminy H. Christ, it’s working. IT’S WORK—
The cloud of herbs settled to the floor, and George wiped at its eyes.
“Now you boys have gone and made me mad,” the ghost said, its voice flat and cold, seeping from the corners of the room like a fog. “I tried to do it nice, Ransom. Just you and me, taking us a nice long walk into the tunnel like old friends. But you tried to spell me.”
George shook its see-through head. The motion made a breeze that chilled Mason to the bone. Ransom ducked behind the wagon wheel and tensed beside him. The ghost fluttered forward, steadily, now only twenty feet away, twelve, ten. A rusty metallic rattle filled the barn.
George held up the amputated hand. “They took my hammering hand, Ransom. He took it.”
The ghost sounded almost wistful, as if debating whether to follow the orders of an absent overseer. But then the deep caves of the eyes grew bright, flickered in bronze and gold and blazing orange, and the face twisted into something that was barely recognizable as having once been human. It was shrunken, wizened, a shriveled rind with pockmarks for eyes. The voice came again, but it wasn’t just George’s voice, it was the combined voice of dozens, a congregation, a chorus of lost souls. Come inside, Ransom. We’re waiting for you.
The horses kicked their stall doors. A calf bawled from the meadow outside. The surrey and the wagons rocked back and forth. The lantern quivered on the floor, and shadows climbed the walls like giant insects.
The calf bawled again, then once more, the sound somehow standing out in the cacophony.
“Calf bawled three times,” Ransom whispered. “Sure sign of death.”
Mason crouched beside him, wanting to ask Ransom what in the hell was happening. But his tongue felt like a piece of harness against the roof of his mouth. He didn’t think he could work it to form words. Ransom looked at George, then at the closed door. The door was much farther.
Mason reached out to touch Ransom’s sleeve, but came up with nothing. Ransom made a run for it. The ghost didn’t move as Ransom’s boots drummed across the plank floor. Mason wondered if he should make a run for it, too. Ransom moved fast, arms waving wildly.
He’s going to make it!
Ransom was about six feet from the door when the hay rake pounced—POUNCED, Mason thought, like a cat—with a groan of stressed steel and wood, the rusty tines of the windrower sweeping down and forward. Ransom turned and faced the old farm machine as if to beg for mercy.
His eyes met Mason’s, and Mason knew he would never forget that look, even if he got lucky and escaped George and managed to live to be a hundred and one. Ransom’s face blanched, blood rushed from his skin as if trying to hide deep in his organs where the hay rake couldn’t reach. Ransom’s eyes were wet marbles of fear. The leathery skin of his jaws stretched tight as he opened his mouth to scream or pray or mutter an ancient mountain spell.
Then the windrower swept forward, skewering Ransom and pushing him backward. His body slammed against the door, two dozen giant nails being hammered into wood. Ransom gurgled and a red mist spewed from his mouth. And the eyes were gazing down whatever tunnel death had cast him into.
The wagon and surrey stopped shaking, the walls settled back into place, and a sudden silence jarred the air. The old man’s body sagged on the tines like a raw chuck steak at the end of a fork. Mason forced himself to look away from the viscera and carnage. The lantern threw off a burst of light, as if t
he flames were fed by Ransom’s soul-wind leaving his body.
George floated toward Mason, who took a step backward.
“You’re not here,” Mason said. He put up his hands, palms open. “I don’t believe in you, so you don’t exist.”
The ghost stopped and looked down at its own silken flesh. After a stretch of skipped heartbeats, it looked at Mason and grinned.
“I lied. It ain’t what we believe that matters,” it said softly, sifting forward another three feet. “It’s what Korban believes.”
The hand reached out, the hand in the hand, in a manly welcome. Marble cold and grave-dirt dead.
Mason turned, ran, waiting for the pounce of the hay rake or the grip of the ghost hand. He tripped over a gap in the floorboards and fell. He looked back at his feet. The root cellar.
He wriggled backward and flipped the trapdoor open, then scrambled through headfirst. He grabbed the first rung of the ladder and pulled himself into the damp darkness of the cellar. If potions and prayers didn’t work, then a trapdoor wouldn’t stop a ghost. But his muscles took over where his rational mind had shut down.
He was halfway inside when the trapdoor slammed down on his back. Stripes of silver pain streaked up his spinal column. Then he felt something on the cloth of his pants. A light tapping, walking.
Fingers.
He kicked and flailed his legs, grabbed the second rung, and heaved himself into the darkness. He was weightless for a moment, his stomach lurching from vertigo. Then he was falling, a drop into forever that was too fast for screaming. The door slammed into place overhead as he landed in the root cellar. The air was knocked from his lungs, but that didn’t matter because he wasn’t sure he’d breathed since he’d entered the barn.
The cellar was completely dark except for a few splinters of light that leaked through gaps in the flooring above. He experimentally moved his arms and something tumbled to the ground. He reached out and squeezed the thing under his hand, then felt it. He had landed in a sweet potato bin.
Mason rolled to his feet, then ducked behind the bin. He tried to remember what Ransom had said about another door at one end of the cellar, and a tunnel leading back to the house. George might already be down here. How well could ghosts see in the dark?
Boots, marching feet, fell loud and heavy above him, and he realized it was his pulse pounding in his ears. He opened his mouth so he could listen better. The upstairs was quiet. Mason smelled the earth and the sweet apples. He tried to get a sense of the cellar’s layout, to figure out where the exit was, but he’d lost his sense of direction in the dark.
He could find the ladder again, but a trapdoor worked both ways. What would be waiting for him if he went back up? The hay rake, its tines dripping red? George, ready to give him a hand up? How about Ransom, full of holes, now one of them, whatever they were supposed to be?
He thought of Anna, her quiet self-confidence, her hidden inner strength disguised as aloofness. She claimed to understand ghosts, and hadn’t ridiculed Ransom’s folk beliefs. She wouldn’t freak if she saw a ghost. She would know what to do, if only he could reach her. But what can anybody who’s alive really know about ghosts?
His racing thoughts were broken by a soft noise. At first he thought it was the creaking of the hay rake flexing its metal claw up in the barn. But the noise wasn’t grating and metallic.
It was a rustle of fingers on cloth.
The hand.
He kicked and flailed, and more sweet potatoes tumbled to the cool dirt.
The noises came again, from all sides, from too many sources to be five ghostly digits.
Then he recognized the sound, one he’d grown familiar with while living by the Sawyer Creek landfill.
It wasn’t a creaking, it was a squeaking.
Rats.
CHAPTER 53
“Go away,” Anna said to the ghost that had stepped from the wall, that now stood before her in evanescent splendor.
Rachel drifted closer, the forlorn bouquet held out in apology or sorrow. “I never wanted to hurt you, Anna.”
“Then why did you summon me back here? Why didn’t you just let me die dumb and happy, with nobody to hate?”
“We need you, Anna. I need you.”
“Need, need, need. Do you ever think I might have needed somebody, all those nights when I cried myself to sleep? And now you expect me to feel sorry for you just because you’re dead?”
“It’s not just me, Anna. He’s trapped all of us here.”
Did the dead have a choice about where their souls were bound to the real world? Did the doorway open on a particular place for each person, or did ghosts wander their favorite haunting grounds because they wished themselves into existence? Those were the kinds of questions the hard-line parapsychologists never asked. They were too busy trying to validate their own existence to feel any empathy for those spirits condemned to an eternity of wandering.
But Anna wasn’t strong on empathy herself at the moment. “And if you were free, where would you go?”
Rachel looked out the window, at the mountains that stretched to the horizon. “Away,” she said.
“And Korban has bound your soul here? Why would he do that?”
“He wants everything he ever had, and more. He wants to be served and worshipped. He has unfulfilled dreams. But I think it’s love that keeps him here. Maybe, behind it all, he’s afraid of being alone.”
“Something else that runs in the family,” Anna said. “Well, I don’t mind being alone, not anymore. Because I found what I thought I’d always wanted, and now I see I never wanted it at all.”
“We have tunnels of the soul, Anna. Where we face the things that haunted our lives and dreams. In my tunnel, I’m unable to save you, and I watch as Ephram twists your power until it serves him. Our family had the Sight, Sylva and me, but it’s stronger in you. Because you can see the ghosts even without using charms and spells.”
“Maybe the spells will help me,” Anna said. “Isn’t there one that makes the dead stay dead? ‘Go out frost,’ is that it?”
“Don’t say it, Anna. Because soon you’ll get fetched over, too, and Ephram will be too strong for any of us to stop.”
Anna rose from the bed. “Go out frost.”
Rachel dissolved a little, the bouquet wilting to transparent threads in her hand, her eyes full of ghostly sadness. “You’re our only hope. It’s Sylva.”
“Go out frost.”
Rachel faded against the door. “Sylva,” she whispered.
“Go out frost. Third time’s a charm.”
Rachel disappeared. Anna looked up at Ephram Korban’s portrait. “You can have her, for all I care.”
Anna put on her jacket, collected her flashlight, and went for a walk, wanting to be as far away from Rachel as possible. If Rachel was going to hang out at Korban Manor, then Anna would take a stroll to Beechy Gap.
Rachel had said Sylva knew some sort of secret. Maybe Sylva knew a spell that would keep all ghosts away. Anna had dedicated a big part of her life to chasing ghosts. Now that they were everywhere, she never wanted to see another as long as she lived. Or even after that.
CHAPTER 54
Mason kicked himself backward, pressing against the moist clay bank. Another sweet potato tumbled to the ground. At least he hoped it was a sweet potato. More squeaks pierced the darkness, a sour chorus rising around him.
He would rather face the ghost of George Lawson, stray hand and bloody hay rake and all, than what was down here in the dark. He thought about making a dash for the ladder, but he was disoriented. He was just as likely to run into the apple barrels or trip over one of the pallets that were scattered across the dirt floor. And falling would bring his face down to their level.
To his left came a clicking, a gnawing, a noise like teeth against tinfoil. Maybe five feet away, it was hard to tell in the blackness. The room was like a coffin, with no stir of air, no edge or end that made any difference to the one trapped inside. He huddled in a ball, l
ooking up at the cracks in the boards, at the yellow lines of light that were his only comfort. He smelled his own sweat and fear and wondered if the salt would bring the rats closer.
Leaves whisked across the floor upstairs, then the barn door slid open with a rusty groan. That was followed by a dull thump, and Mason pictured Ransom’s body hitting the planks, limbs lolling uselessly. Then the lantern went out above, and Mason closed his eyes against a black as deep as any he had ever seen.
No. There had been a worse darkness.
Funny how things come back to you. Maybe this was one of those tunnels of the soul. A memory so long buried that the meat had rotted off its bones, that the skeleton had started its slow turn to dust, that the existence of it could no longer be proven. But always that spark remained, that hidden ember, just waiting for a breath of wind to bring the corpse back to full life, to resurrect the memory in all its awful glory.
Funny how that happened.
This was it, the memory. Only this couldn’t be real. Or was the first time the one that was shadowy? It didn’t matter. Because they were the same, past and present entwined in the same heart-stopping fear.
The squeaking.
The rats, tumbling in the dark like sweet potatoes or a child’s toys. How many?
One was too many. How many squeaks? Mason held his breath so he could listen. Ten. Fifteen. Forty.
Mama was out of town. Somebody had died, that’s all Mason knew, because he’d never seen Mama cry so much. And Mason sensed a change in her when Mama gave him all those extra hugs and kisses, held him in her lap for hours. Then she was gone.
And Daddy, Daddy with his bottles, was all Mason knew after that. He lay in the crib, his blankets wet, too scared to wail. If he cried out, maybe Momma would come. But if she didn’t, Daddy might. Daddy would only get mad, yell, and break something.
So Mason didn’t say anything. Time passed or else it didn’t. There was no sun in the window, only the light that Daddy turned on and off. Daddy slept on the floor one time, and Mason looked through the wooden bars of his crib, saw him with his bottle tipped over, the brown liquid pouring out across the floor.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 120