by Dale Mayer
He called her right back and said, “You need to go to the hospital and get checked out.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said. “You know what that will cost me.”
“Go get it checked out,” he said. “Your nose looks like it could be broken.”
At that, she started to wail. “I figured Meghan would find me there,” she said.
“I’m sorry to tell you like this, but Meghan isn’t finding anybody ever again.”
At that, she blew her nose, then asked, “What do you mean?”
“Meghan is dead,” he said, “and it looks like she was killed by whoever killed your other two roommates.”
“Oh, God,” and then Wendy really started to cry.
He spent a few moments calming her down, and then he said, “Look. I’ll phone Gabby and get her to talk to you. You meet her at the hospital. Do you hear me?”
She nodded, swallowing her tears. “I’ll try,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll call her myself right now.”
“Okay, but make sure you do. Promise?”
“I promise,” she said.
He hung up the phone and started swearing. Jake looked at him in surprise. “So Wendy was here,” Damon said. “Night before last Meghan here beat Wendy up pretty bad. I’m trying to get her to go to the hospital now. It looks like her nose is broken, and the rest of her face was punched up pretty good too.”
He stared and said, “Meghan’s a beater?”
“It’s what broke them up once before. It’s also became the wedge between Wendy and Gabby because Gabby was pretty upset over it all. She got her friend safely away, but Wendy went back to Meghan and didn’t tell Gabby, and that all came out after the other murders. They’ve been on the outs because Meghan saw Gabby as a problem.”
“That’ll do it. How many times have we seen it happen, time and time again?”
“Exactly.” Damon watched as the coroner checked her over and asked him, “Is this identical to the previous two?”
He looked up and nodded.
“This is the third victim,” Damon said to the coroner, “and then supposedly a fourth, and then he goes silent. I don’t want to see a fourth.”
“Neither do I. Nor do I want to see him go silent and get away with this shit.”
“Nope.” Damon turned to look at Jake. “We need to check up on the other roommate. It’s after midnight already.”
“I’ll call her and get her out of bed,” he said.
“I wonder if he expected this to be Wendy.”
“That’s what I was wondering.” Jake kept dialing on the phone. “It’s not going through,” he said.
When he started to swear, the coroner looked at him. “What’s the matter?”
“Well, the other roommate was living here. We’re wondering if this is a case of mistaken identity, and we can’t reach the fourth one.”
The coroner shook his head. “You better find those women and find them fast,” he said. “I don’t know what the connection is between them, but somebody’s got it in for them. Get out of here anyway. I’ll give you a report as soon as I’ve got something.”
“Anything on time of death?”
“Somewhere in the last few hours, I’d say.”
Damon nodded, and, as they went out, Jake said, “We need to find Gabby and check up on her alibi too.”
“I’m her alibi,” he said. “I just left her in a warm bed.”
Jake looked at him and stared. “Jesus Christ!”
“I know. I should have waited until the case was over, but, well, the time frame changed.”
Jake shook his head and said, “I’m going over to the other one’s apartment.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll go grab Wendy, make sure that Gabby meets her.”
“Honestly why don’t you go home and grab Gabby, then pick up Wendy, and take them both to the hospital where they’ll be safe?”
He thought about it for a brief second and said, “You’re right. Thanks.” He raced back home. Once he got there, he opened up the door and stopped because it hadn’t been locked. He was positive he had locked it. Instantly he raced upstairs to the bedroom.
And froze.
Gabby stood against the wall, but an odd look was on her face, as if she weren’t quite here. Having seen it before, he took a long slow deep breath. “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.
She tried to open her mouth but couldn’t seem to get anything out.
“Talk to me,” he said. He looked around the room. “I don’t know what spirit you are or what problem you have with Gabby, but I’m here now. So why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”
With that came a huge blow to his gut, and he was slammed against the wall. He heard Gabby scream in his mind, and he didn’t quite understand where her voice came from. But he was still gasping with the pain from the blow he’d taken. He cried out to Stefan, “I don’t know what’s going on, but we need help.”
He didn’t know if he got through to Stefan because another blow smacked Damon’s head sideways. And then another one that went the other way. Trying to remember the little bits and pieces he had learned about fighting an invisible enemy, Damon tried to center himself, as he straightened and said, “No!” The next blow seemed to stop just inches from his face. He raced to Gabby, and he looked into her eyes and said, “You can fight this.”
She stared at him, terrified from the inside. It was like looking down a long tunnel to see her at the far end.
“Gabby, listen to me,” he said. “You know this person is all about power. You know that they’re trying to control you. You don’t need that.”
I know, she said.
But he stopped and frowned. “Did you just say that in my head?”
She could only stare at him, wide-eyed.
Not wasting any time, he picked her up and dropped her gently on the bed. But immediately she bounced out and slammed up against the wall again, and Damon frowned.
“Leave her alone!” he roared.
A burst of weird laughter filled the room.
“I don’t know what you want with her,” Damon said. “She didn’t do anything to you.”
“She’s mine,” came this terrifying cry from inside Gabby’s throat.
He looked at her. “Is that the voice you recognized?”
She nodded slowly, as if fighting against hands trying to stop her.
“Is that the man who pushed you down the cliff?”
She nodded again.
Damon could see the terror in her eyes. “What do you want with her?”
“She’s mine,” the voice said, “now and forever.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I can, because it was done to me,” he snapped. “And it’s not fair.”
“I don’t understand,” Damon said. “Why are you doing this?”
A weird ghostly overlay of a male face appeared on top of Gabby’s face.
“Separate from her,” Damon said. “Show me who you really are. Only a coward uses a woman like this.”
“I’m no coward,” he said.
And Damon watched as this huge form pulled up and out of Gabby, as Damon stood in stunned amazement. She collapsed on the bed, moaning, curling up in a small ball, as if finally freed from something. He turned to look at this massive specter in front of him, but, in the background, he heard Stefan’s voice.
“He’s just enlarging his energy to scare you, Damon.”
“It’s fucking working,” he muttered.
“Don’t let him see your fear,” Stefan said.
Immediately Damon lifted his chin. “You’re just a piece of marshmallow,” he said. “You don’t even have a fucking body. You had your chance at life, and you lost it.”
At that, the ghost slammed against Damon, throwing him up against the wall again. Now he realized that the ghost could literally use Damon’s physical body against him. He shook his head. “Not good enough, asshole.” And he tried hard to push him back again
. “Stefan, I can’t even grab him.”
“You can’t grab him physically,” Stefan said, “but use your mind.”
He didn’t even get a chance to understand what that meant, before his mind was pushing back.
“Think of a steel wall between you and him,” Stefan said, “and use that, use the visual imagery to get him thrown off you.”
Damon immediately saw a great big sheet of steel come down between the two of them, and a giant piece of machinery slammed the steel sheet back against the wall, pinning the evil spirit against it. At the edge of Damon’s hearing was almost a roar. He shook his head. “Did you hear that, asshole? That’s what happens to guys who abuse women.”
“I never abused any women,” he said.
“Never?”
“Never,” he said bitterly. “But they thought I did, so I killed them.”
“So now you’re back here to get even with everybody else because of that?”
“If that’s what they think I did, you can bet it’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ve already been punished an entire lifetime for it.”
“Sounds like you’ve been punished for several lifetimes,” he said quietly. “Isn’t it time to stop the torture?”
“No, not as long as any of them live,” he said.
“Who?”
But there was no talking to whoever it was on the other end of this spirit.
“What did these women ever do to you?”
“They laughed when I found them in bed together. They laughed!”
“Maybe your wife and her lovers did that, but these women weren’t alive back then.”
“Others are just like them,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now which females I choose. They’re all to blame.”
“Okay,” he said, “but you chose these women this time. Why?”
“Because they were surrounding her,” he said.
“Gabby?” Damon asked. “The woman you possessed here?”
“Yes. That made it easy to get to them.”
“And you pushed Gabby on the mountain?”
“Yes,” he said. “It had to be the perfect opportunity.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“The tarot cards opened the door last time,” he said. “It opened the door this time too. She pulled the Death card, which was me. Once I saw her coming, I knew I had the one opportunity to regain that same power I had when I was alive.”
“When you killed the first three women, some sixty years ago?”
“They deserved it.”
“You said you never abused them?”
“I didn’t. I taught them a lesson,” he said. “It’s not my fault if you don’t understand. Nobody understands.”
“It’s a little hard, when the end result is dead women.”
“The women are nothing,” he said. “They’re useless.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I killed the first ones when I was alive, but then, when the police caught me, I knew they would kill me in jail. So I took matters into my own hands.”
“What?”
“Yes, I committed suicide. And now I must wait. Wait for the timing to get somebody back again.”
“So, were you physically the one who killed these women thirty years ago?”
“Well, I did it, but using somebody to do it for me,” he said. “There’s no end to the amount of power that you can get on this side,” he said. “At least for a little while. Then I burn out, and I can’t do it anymore. It takes me a long time to build back up again.”
“As in thirty years?”
“Yes.”
“But you killed the first three on your own? The ones from sixty years ago?”
“And got caught for it, yes.”
“Why did you kill them?”
“Because they were lovers and one was my wife,” he said. “They laughed at me. Others knew about their affair too. I couldn’t stand that humiliation, so I took care of the trio first, would take care of the other four women in their group, two at a time, soon afterward, like in a week.”
“Then you were caught, and you committed suicide, and then what?”
“Well, I was caught too soon. Didn’t have time to take out the rest of the women,” he said. “I committed suicide to escape my fate. But then I came back! So I had to use somebody else to finish my plan, and that was easy for me.”
“I don’t understand,” Damon said, and honestly he didn’t. He heard Stefan in the background, trying to figure it out himself, and Damon watched Gabby on the bed, listening in, trying to figure it out too.
“It was my son,” he said. “As spirits, we always have access to our children because they have doorways they don’t know of. So, I used my son to kill again thirty years ago.”
“And that was Fendster?”
“I am Fendster,” he said.
“Oh, my God, the son and then the grandson were named after you. You’re the grandfather?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“But you were all captains,” Damon pointed out.
“I raised my sons to be good law-abiding citizens. But they used me to get into office, so I used them. By the time I could manage to get a hold of one of them, it was always my oldest son. I used him to kill the women.”
“And your younger son didn’t know?”
“Not back then, but my grandson knew. Once he started digging into the cold-case files, he knew. I don’t know what he found or how he found it, but I had to kill him,” he said. “That took a long time and all my energy. I would have been back here earlier, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get either of my sons to do the job because it meant killing one’s own son, the other’s own nephew. All my sons wanted to do was keep my grandson alive, even though he could convict us all.”
“Imagine that,” Damon said. “All he wanted was to keep his own alive. But you managed to convince him?”
“No, I managed to overpower the father. He was a drunk, and, when he drank too much, it was easy for me to take over.”
“So you had the father drive his own son into the wall, killing him?”
“We cut his brakes,” he said, “and then did a high-speed chase on a road where we were chasing him for fun. Of course it wasn’t for fun, and he didn’t know his brakes wouldn’t work. By the time he slammed into the wall like that, everybody was pretty convinced it was suicide. My son didn’t like his life after that, and he drank too much soon afterward.”
“And your other son? The captain?”
“That one is useless,” he said. “A do-gooder. Too honest to be useful.”
“Does he know what happened?”
“Nope, he has no idea.”
“But that still doesn’t make any sense,” Damon said. “You’re just a ghostly form right now. Who have you been using to kill these women this time?” he asked. “You’re obviously here with Gabby, but she didn’t kill them.”
“No,” he said, in frustration. “I’ve been using the only one I could use,” he said. “With my other son a worthless drunk and my grandson dead, that only left the one. But he isn’t controlled as easily.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “you’re using the captain now, aren’t you?”
“He’s old, and he’s worried. He doesn’t know what happened last time, but he’s afraid it’s all connected and is fighting me even harder.”
“Because you’re using him to kill, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” he said, and then he started to laugh. “It’s great, you know? The more I get control, the faster and easier I’m managing to do this. Look at how quickly I took a hold of Gabby. I don’t even have to go back into silence now,” he said. “Somebody like her, we can do all kinds of stuff in this world.”
“You mean, kill people?”
“If need be, yes. I’m sure she can drive us to California, and I can enjoy life again,” he said. “There’ll be other victims, other people. It’s not the sam
e or quite as good, but, given the alternative, this is freaking awesome.”
“And, if you can’t kill people, then what?”
“Oh, I can kill people,” he said. “I came to kill her but realized that, because I could actually possess her quite easily, it’s one of the things that I’m looking at prolonging. I’ll just take over and live her life, while I find another host. It’s a perfect solution. It took me fucking long enough to get here to do this, and I won’t let some little piece of shit, like you, take that from me.”
“What about me?” Gabby asked from the bed, sitting up and staring at the ghostly image.
“You have no say in the matter,” he said. “You’re weak. And weak means victim. That’s a lesson you should have learned a long time ago. Besides, you’re female.”
And, with that, Gabby gasped in anger. “And so, just like that, I don’t count?”
He sneered. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “Not everybody counts in this life.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but I do. I’ve spent an entire life trying to live, and you won’t take it away from me now.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re the one who got—” And then he stopped and whispered, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, that’s absolutely perfect.”
“What?” she cried out.
“That’s why I can take over your system so well. You actually have my genetics.”
She stared at him in shock and then quickly shook her head. “No, no, no, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Wow, look at that. … My do-gooder son. He went and had an affair and actually produced an offspring.” He smiled.
“Did you kill my mother?” she asked.
“Well, yes. It was something my son Fendster wanted, I thought. I didn’t really understand why, but he kept talking about how she would ruin him. He needed her to disappear, so I obliged. I don’t think he really understood what was happening, and I didn’t expect him to be so upset. But he was weak, and weak people are victims. So, he’s my victim, but that’s the only one I managed to get him to do back then. Fendster got really strong and fought me after that. I had to possess other bodies to get the rest done back then. That takes a ton of energy from me.”