Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2)

by Richard Estep

  That defused some of Becky’s anger. She and Mom got on like a house on fire (as opposed to me and Becky, who seemed to be getting on as though we were actually on fire ourselves these days) and they exchanged a glad to see you smile. Yet another reason I was really glad that Mom had been my chauffeur for the trip.

  “Hi Rachel!” Becky rushed over to her and gave her a huge hug. “Danny really dragged you all the way out here?”

  “It was no trouble, Becky,” Mom lied, bless her soul, and then leaned in to whisper something in Becky’s ear. Whatever it was couldn’t have been longer than a single sentence, judging from the time it took before they broke out of the hug, but Mom’s eyes had been on me throughout it all and she now had a mischievous smile on her lips that hadn’t been there before. So did Becky, I saw when she turned around; it was as though they had a shared secret, and though I’d probably never find out exactly what had passed between them, I had a pretty shrewd idea that Mom was telling her to go easy on me for this one.

  Mom really was the best of the best.

  “Why don’t I give you two a little space?” she said, shooting me an unmistakable don’t screw this up look. “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about. Danny, I’ll head back to the hotel. Don’t stay out too late, OK?”

  “Mom, hold on. I can walk you back…” I didn’t want her out and about on her own after dark in a strange town.

  “Oh, please,” she rolled her eyes theatrically. “It’s only a few blocks,” Mom went on, “and besides, not only am I a grown woman, I’m a grown woman with a concealed carry permit. I pity the fool who tries to get the drop on me!”

  Becky and I looked at each other and smiled. Mr. T quotes. She really was one of a kind…and true to her word, she was one of a kind that was packing a Glock somewhere about her person at all times. Dad was a United States Marine, and Mom had still given him a run for his money when they were shooting together on their range “date days.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure,” I said doubtfully. Mom waved, and began to walk toward the street. She stepped aside to get out of the way of a car heading into the lot, and as she did so she turned and made the universal call me gesture with one hand. I nodded, getting the message. I’d keep her informed, it was the least I could do for her trouble. In the meantime I hoped she would take the opportunity to treat herself to a hot bath and some much-needed quiet time.

  Mom turned the corner, following the cemetery fence, and disappeared into the early evening shadows.

  I shivered. The air was getting cold. The parking lot was getting busier, as parents dropped off their kids and some of the older teens who had their drivers licenses parked their own cars there. More came in on foot, laughing and joking. Every few minutes, one of them would exchange a smile and a nod with Becky. I was glad to see how genuinely happy they all seemed to be. It was a far cry from Falconer’s fake smiling and smirking.

  “So why did you come all the way out here, Danny — really?”

  My thoughts snapped back to Becky and the here-and-now. “Because there are some things I have to tell you.”

  “Okay…” She wasn’t tearing my head off. That was progress. There was a doubtful pause. “Let’s go inside,” she said at last. “We can go to the Green Room.”

  “The Green Room?”

  “Yeah. It’s a movie business term. It’s where performers go when they’re done being made up and are waiting to go on stage. Most of us hang out there before the night starts.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. There would be other kids around, and I really didn’t want to talk about the Dark Man in front of them…or inside the Snare. I hadn’t seen him in there at all, but I knew that he was real, because I’d seem him on the sidewalk in Boulder that night, and I was willing to best every last piece of Star Wars merchandise I owned that he was tied in with Falconer somehow.

  “Uh, could we go somewhere else?” I pleaded. She frowned, so I quickly added, “There’s a lot more to this than the apology, Becky. I really think you’re in some kind of danger.”

  She looked around. We’d chosen a bad spot to stand, right outside the entrance doors that most of the volunteers were using. “There’s always the cemetery, I guess,” she said doubtfully. I blinked, but couldn’t really come up with a better idea. The old hospital had been built right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, so that would be just about the only place we wouldn’t run into people going about their everyday business. Besides, the trick or treaters will probably be making their rounds soon.

  “Sure, why not?” For a second I thought about offering her my arm, but pretty quickly thought better of it. I led the way out onto the sidewalk, following in Mom’s footsteps, and hung a left. It was just a short walk uphill before we came to the main entrance. The gateway was wide enough to drive two cars through side-by-side, and had a rusting iron archway that identified it as the Tyrant’s Grove Cemetery. Becky followed me inside.

  “Do you want to have a seat?” I asked, pointing at one of the smooth stone memorial benches that were scattered throughout the graveyard.

  Becky bent and touched the marble. She shook her head. “Way too cold. Why don’t we just walk? I only have a little while before I need to get into makeup.”

  We walked slowly among the tombstones, keeping close to one another but without actually touching. My head was on a constant swivel. I didn’t see any evidence of spirit activity in the cemetery; the closest thing was a group of kids out on the sidewalk, with what looked to be one of their dads in tow, dressed as zombies and demons. They were stopping at each house they came to, and looked like they were making quite the candy haul from where I was standing.

  “So what’s this all about?” Becky nudged me back to the present.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, first things first…I owe you an apology.”

  “Yeah, you really do.”

  My hackles went up a little at that. After all, nobody likes to be agreed with when they admit to being at fault, do they? What we really want to hear is: oh, no way. Not at all. I was just overreacting. Or perhaps even hey, I wasn’t exactly perfect either. I could feel annoyance turning to anger. Then I looked around me, getting a reminder that I was standing in a graveyard over a hundred miles from home in a place that I didn’t know, and all because of the way I’d been treating Becky lately.

  Taking a calming deep breath, I shoved the lid down on my temper as hard as I possibly could, hoping that the effort didn’t show on my face.

  “I’m sorry,” I began again. She looked at me expectantly. “For…well, for everything, really.”

  “For everything?”

  “Yeah. For pushing you away when I should have been…nicer. And for giving you a hard time about Long Brook.” From the look on her face, this was exactly what she had wanted to be told. Then she cracked a little smile.

  “Are you just blowing smoke, Danny, or do you really mean that?” she asked softly, searching my face with her eyes. I smiled back.

  “I mean it,” I told her, and I did. “There’s more to talk about, but I mostly wanted to tell you that up front…tell you just how sorry I am.”

  “I believe you,” she said, and surprised me with a hug. This one wasn’t awkward. I hugged her back, and pretty soon we were a boy and a girl bear-hugging one another and giggling in the middle of a graveyard at sundown. Some people might have thought we were being disrespectful, but we really weren’t. Besides, the people who really mattered – the spirits whose graves these were, all around us – were nowhere to be found.

  Side note: it might come as a surprise to hear it, but most cemeteries aren’t actually haunted. I know, I know – how many horror movies have you seen where the haunted house is built on an old Native American burial ground? Thank you for that, Mr. Spielberg. A graveyard at night might be creepy as hell to most people, but any Seer knows better. To us, they’re just peaceful and calm places, a good place to go if you want to be alone with your thoughts for some quality quiet time
.

  Practically nobody ever dies in a cemetery, and when we do pass on, the spirit loses all interest in the physical shell it once inhabited. They’ve pretty much outgrown the body and are ready to move on to bigger and better things. Think about it for a second. Think back to the coat or jacket you wore when you were…let’s go with ten years old. Before too long, you outgrew it and replaced it with a newer one, right? One that fit you better. That’s how it is with moving from the material body to the spirit body. Once the funeral is over (admittedly, a lot of people like to drop in and watch their own funeral – call it morbid fascination) and the body is buried six feet deep in the ground or has gone up the chimney, the previous owner has no more interest in what happens to it than you did with your old coat.

  On the rare occasions that I’ve actually seen spirits of the dead in a graveyard, they were following one of their loved ones on a visit to their gravesite. Usually, the spirit was trying to bring some comfort to the grieving mourner, who sadly enough couldn’t see them. I like to think that some of the more psychically-attuned ones would somehow sense the supportive hand on their shoulder, or feel the presence of their loved one’s spirit at their side. I’ve never really made any effort to dig into it and find out more. Note to self: ask my spirit guide Lamiyah about it, next time I see her.

  I really didn’t want to let Becky go when she broke the hug first. It had felt so good being close to her…not in a sexual way or anything like that, but just that feeling of warmth and closeness you get when you mend fences with somebody you care about. Maybe it’s the security and comfort of knowing that a relationship you valued isn’t lost forever.

  We were both laughing now. Becky wiped a tear from her eye with the back of a sleeve.

  “So,” she asked me, “are we good?”

  “Yeah, we’re good.”

  “Thank goodness for that!” We both laughed again. I couldn’t speak for her, but I already felt better, as though something wrong had been put right. “So what’s the other thing you needed to tell me about?”

  And just like that, all the air went out of the balloon again.

  “Oh yeah,” I muttered darkly. “That.”

  I proceeded to fill her in on the whole Dark Man situation. Her expression became more and more concerned as the story went on. I left aside a couple of key parts – mostly things that the Dark Man had said, and how Becky had suffered at the hands of the spirits in the maze – but I did tell her that I felt she had been hunted, stalked somehow, in amongst those glass corridors and dead ends.

  “I know it was just a dream,” I concluded lamely, “but I had a dream like this before…before…”

  “Before Long Brook,” she finished for me. I nodded miserably.

  She was referring to a dream I’d had the night before we had visited that abandoned old sanatorium up on the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Well, I say ‘dream,’ but nightmare might be a better way to put it. I was walking through the corridors and rooms late at night, wandering aimlessly until I found a restroom. When I looked in the mirror on the wall in there, I couldn’t believe my eyes: I was wearing somebody else’s body, the reflection of a kid much younger than me staring right back out of the cracked glass.

  It wasn’t long before I was captured by this hag of a nurse and dragged up to the ruin of what had once been the surgical suite, where von Spiessbach’s ghost had tried to carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey…all ‘for my own good,’ as he had made a point of telling me.

  Now imagine how I felt the next day when the three of us rocked up there in Brandon’s car and I walked along those same corridors for real. The term déjà vu doesn’t even begin to cover how weird that felt. Things got worse when it turned out that the mad doctor and his demented sidekicks were real too. I’d told Becky about the dream, but we hadn’t talked about it too much afterward. I wasn’t sure if I had traveled in spirit to the sanatorium in my sleep that night, or whether it had just been a really, really lucid precog dream (a term I totally stole from the movie Minority Report) that should have warned me against ever actually setting foot there.

  “There’s a mirror maze back at the Snare,” Becky admitted, repeating what she’d written in her email. “I’ve been through it a couple of times already, but it just feels…weird. Wrong, somehow, if that makes any sense?”

  I nodded. It did make sense. When we’d talked about it, Becky always claimed that she didn’t have anything in the way of psychic abilities at all, but maybe she was subconsciously picking up on there being some kind of malevolent spirit activity there in the mirror maze.

  “It’s not just me,” she went on. “A lot of the others avoid it too. We all laugh and joke about it, but you can tell that nobody really wants to end up in there during the haunted house.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, even though there was nobody around to hear us. “Everybody feels as though they’re being watched in there; some of the kids have even seen faces looking back at them out of the mirrors…”

  A shiver ran through me. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the cold night air either. This was something more primal, a fear of being trapped in that maze along with the Dark Man and his cronies…

  The Dark Man.

  “So, about this big bad,” Becky said, apparently reading my mind. “Is he…you know, like von Spiessbach?” She meant the psycho surgeon from Long Brook. He’d put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger long before Becky and I had ever met him.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t think so. I mean, he came floating at me like a spirit would, he wasn’t a living being like you or me…but I don’t think that’s he’s dead and earthbound either. He just felt different somehow – I’ve never really run into anything like it before…”

  “It?” she asked sharply.

  I thought about it for a moment. By unspoken agreement, we were strolling back toward the cemetery gates and their big iron archway.

  “Yes, it,” I settled at last. “Whoever the Dark Man is, Becky, I’m not sure that he’s human…at least, not in the same way that we are.”

  “Then what do you think he is?” she pushed.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to ask Lamiyah.” I sighed. “I know, I really should have done it already. I’ve been distracted, though. Worried.”

  “Hard to fault you for that, Danny,” she smiled.

  “I’m faulting me for that. It’s not a good excuse, but I’ve had a lot on my mind, and, well…I guess it just fell through the cracks.”

  “Hey.” She stopped me, resting a hand on my arm. I was instantly buzzed at her touch, almost as though she was shocking me through the sleeve of my hoodie. “You’re only human. Unless there’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  We both shared a laugh. It felt good that things were getting back to normal with Becky again. Maybe I wasn’t going to lose her after all. Maybe she didn’t think I was a total idiot. Maybe I was just my own worst enemy. Maybe…

  “Nothing I can think of,” I said truthfully. “But Becky, seriously…I think there’s something dangerous happening at the Snare.”

  “So you think I’m in danger?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I really do. Can you maybe quit tonight and come on home tomorrow? Mom and I can give you a ride.”

  Becky’s mouth was suddenly a thin line. I recognized that look because I’d seen it before. She was about to dig her heels in. I began to mentally rehearse my next argument, trying to make her see that for her to keep working at the Snare was going to expose her to who knew what kind of danger, but she cut me off before I had a chance to say anything.

  “There’s just one problem, Danny. I have friends there…people I care about. Hell, what about my cousin Jessica? If this ‘Dark Man’ was a danger to me, aren’t they all in danger too?”

  What could I say to that? She was right. I didn’t want her to be, but there was no avoiding it. From what I’d sensed of him during the dream, the Dark Man was pure predator,
always looking for something or someone weaker than himself to prey upon; I also suspected that he got off on the challenge of inflicting fear, which was what the whole chase thing with dream-Becky was all about. Becky was no wallflower – the girl had nerves of steel, and I’d seen them at first-hand.

  I just knew that not all of her friends would be that way.

  “Yes,” I said at last, reluctant to face up to the facts. “I think that some of them – maybe all of them – are at risk from him.”

  She looked me straight in the eyes. All of arguments I’d been concocting to get her to quite the Snare melted away with the force of that stare. I could feel my willpower turning to vapor and vanishing with every passing second.

  “So you know there’s only one thing we can do,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  “Danny.” Ouch. That was her Mom-voice. It only came out when she was really, really determined.

  “Yes,” I stalled miserably.

  “What are we going to do about the Dark Man?” It was couched as a question that she knew damned well I already knew the answer to.

  I stared right back into her gorgeous eyes and said the only thing that I possibly could.

  “We’re going to find him…Find him, and kick his ass into the next freaking dimension.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The last of the sunlight had finally faded from the sky when we left the cemetery and made the short walk back to the Snare of Souls. It didn’t give me too much time to think, but the way I looked at it, I really didn’t need much time to think. Becky was one hundred percent right. If she was in danger from the Dark Man, as I would have bet my bottom dollar that she was, then yes: it was entirely possible that he might just follow her back to Boulder if she packed up her stuff and came home with us right now, or first thing in the morning. But it was also every bit as likely that he would just switch his attentions to her friends, the kids who lived in Tyrant’s Grove; they probably had no idea that the Dark Man even existed, let alone the fact that he got his kicks toying with those who were weaker than him — which seemed to be pretty much everybody, if the sense of power he’d been putting out in my dream had been even remotely accurate.