Ghost town, p.17
Ghost Town, page 17
She knew him.
Chapter Thirteen
Voice Memo 35
Last night Rose was telling me about raising the energy in the room to attract spirits. I tried to explain that what she was referring to was likely electromagnetic frequencies. The haunting frequency is well-known in the scientific community as around 18hz. It makes you see things. Makes it hard to trust your senses. I don’t think I got through to Rose, but it’s a work in progress.
July 18, Masonville
Blair was having trouble breathing. Trouble processing the evidence that she was seeing with her own eyes.
It was Dr. Edmond, her old professor.
His face was scratched and caked with dried blood, but it was him, without a doubt.
Dr. Edmond had been one of her favorite professors before he’d left the university one day in the middle of the semester without so much as a good-bye to any of his students. He’d been the best molecular biologist she’d ever met. And he’d been one of the reasons she’d started her paranormal investigation.
And now here he was, walking past her, away from the woman he’d been torturing. Here he was in a secret facility, in the middle of a ghost town where people were being slaughtered.
How was that possible?
“Come on,” Leif prompted her, standing up from their hiding spot as soon as he was out the door.
Blair shook her head to clear it and followed, trying to focus on something other than the shock of seeing Dr. Edmond there.
“Shh.” Leif hushed Rose as they approached. “It’s us. We’re going to get you out of here.”
Blair started by removing the electrodes that had been placed on Rose’s head. She and Leif both worked at the straps that held Rose down. Blair’s hands were shaking as she worked. What possible reason could Dr. Edmond have for doing this? He’d always been so kind. Obsessive, maybe, but never violent. Never sadistic or evil.
He’d been immersed in the study of the paranormal when she’d known him. They had spent many an office hour discussing the mysteries of the world rather than molecular biology, and she’d always looked forward to their talks.
“Blair,” he’d said, the last time she’d seen him. “I have something in the works. Something incredible. If I can, I’d like to have you help me with it.”
The next day he’d been absent from class and hadn’t lined up anyone to cover his lecture. They’d been informed that afternoon that Dr. Edmond was no longer with the university.
None of her emails to him ever went through. The university had wasted no time in taking his access away. And she’d never heard from him or seen him again. Until now.
Blair and Leif hustled Rose over to the door, supporting her between them as they followed the hallway back the way they’d come. Halfway toward the door they heard footsteps behind them.
Blair looked around frantically and spotted a room off to their left. She tugged Rose and Leif toward it, slipping inside and easing the door shut behind them.
Peering through the window, she saw Dr. Edmond reappearing down the hall, heading back toward the room they’d just left. He had a terrified-looking man in a lab coat with him. The man’s hands were zip-tied together, and he looked weak and sickly. He wasn’t fighting to escape, despite looking like he was being led to his death. He just walked silently beside Dr. Edmond, keeping his eyes trained on the floor.
“You won’t die,” Dr. Edmond was saying. “The believer dies, which is deeply unfortunate, of course, but you won’t be harmed. You’ll simply have a little bit of company in your head.”
Whether or not the man responded, Blair couldn’t be sure, as they both disappeared back into the room where he’d been keeping Rose.
A yell and a crash made Blair wince. He’d noticed that Rose was gone.
Dr. Edmond reappeared out the door, moving down the hall in the same jerky manner as before. But this time he was moving fast, which was even more off-putting.
And he was staring straight at the door to their hiding spot.
“Fuck,” Leif whispered, grabbing Blair’s arm, and backing them deeper into the room. “He knows we’re here.”
Blair followed, holding her breath. They supported Rose as they ducked back deeper into the room, hiding under one of the many counters that lined the space.
Dr. Edmond entered the room, the sound of his footsteps loud on the linoleum floor.
“I know you’re here,” Dr. Edmond said. “I can sense you. Come out. Perhaps more than one at a time will open the portal. The doctor only has equipment for one, but it may be that just your presence will be enough.”
The doctor? Who else was involved in this? The lab was empty besides Dr. Edmond as far as Blair could tell. Which was strange in and of itself. With a facility like this she had expected to find a few people working, not just one crazed man. The man he’d led had been zip-tied. That didn’t spell good news. Whatever had happened to the rest of the staff must have been bad.
Unless of course they were all somewhere else in the lab. It was big enough that they’d never be able to explore the whole thing, even if Dr. Edmond hadn’t found them. Did he have the other workers locked up somewhere? How could he have overpowered a whole lab on his own?
He had to be working with other people.
But Blair couldn’t ponder for long, because suddenly the lights in the room began to flicker. Blair looked up at them nervously. Electronic interference. That was a sign of the paranormal, she thought almost nonsensically. Why in the world her brain had provided that bit of information was a mystery. She couldn’t focus on that right now. Not when they were facing a very human threat.
Blair scanned the shelf in front of them, desperately trying to find something they could use as a weapon. It was all just chemicals. Nothing sharp or blunt.
Blair reached out with trembling hands and grabbed the peroxide from the shelf. Now if she could just find acetone. She wasn’t a chemist, but desperate times called for desperate measures. And if she messed up? Well, Dr. Edmond was trying to kill them anyways.
“I’m losing patience,” Dr. Edmond said.
There it was! Blair grabbed the acetone, her heart hammering in her chest. The bottle was half empty, so she poured the peroxide in, and was gratified to smell something almost like bleach. That was a good sign.
“Come out,” he screamed. “Now!”
With a bang the lightbulbs exploded, all at once. They rained down glass, as the room was plunged into darkness except for one sparking bulb in the far corner of the room. But somehow, Dr. Edmond was glowing. A sickly red light seemed to come from his skin, and his face began to contort. No, not his face. Something over his face, like a mask forming. A mask with teeth and tongue and eyes that burned like hot coals.
Fuck. Maybe the threat wasn’t so human after all.
Blair almost dropped her concoction. Her whole body was trembling. Leif grabbed her free hand and squeezed it tight before she let go. She was shaking too.
It was as though Blair’s brain couldn’t process what she was seeing. She believed in the paranormal, of course, but at this level? It was difficult to trust her own eyes.
Sluggishly, Blair’s brain came back online. Heat source. She needed a lighter. She could potentially throw it at the sparking light, but there was no guarantee that it’d catch.
Leif nudged her and handed her a lighter as though she had read her mind. Blair raised her eyebrows as she took it. She didn’t think Leif smoked.
“Weed,” Leif mouthed with a shrug. Blair almost laughed out loud. God, she was feeling hysterical.
She pulled some tissue from her own pocket and made a wick. That’d have to do. Dr. Edmond was searching behind every counter. He’d get too close soon. She had to throw it now.
She pulled Leif forward by her shirt collar and pressed their lips together. When she pulled back, Leif looked dazed. Good. At least if this went wrong, she’d managed to put that look on Leif’s face.
The click of the lighter was loud in her ears. The tissue caught fire and she threw her makeshift Molotov cocktail as hard as she could over into the far corner of the room. She grabbed Leif and Rose and pulled them down farther under the counter, praying it’d protect them.
The explosion was bigger than she’d anticipated. She felt the heat of it and heard the deafening boom of it.
Dr. Edmond didn’t make a sound. But when she peeked up over the counter, she saw that he’d been thrown across the room.
“C’mon,” she yelled, grabbing Rose under the arm and bolting for the door. She and Leif ran together, supporting Rose between them, as the lab began to burn behind them. Then there was a sound of a rush of wind, and Dr. Edmond roared in rage.
They ran faster, but Rose was still out of it, and dragging her along was difficult. Dr. Edmond roared again from behind them. They were going to get caught.
Blair made sure that Leif was supporting Rose’s weight, then spun around to face Dr. Edmond. He was still down the hallway, heading toward them with unwavering intensity.
“Dr. Edmond, please. This isn’t you,” she called out desperately.
Dr. Edmond paused, shivering hard as though he was freezing cold. Then his face cleared before twisting into an expression of distress. Finally, he grasped at his arm, gasping in pain.
“Blair? No. She wasn’t supposed to invite you,” he said, his voice shaking with pain.
What the hell did that mean?
Blair wanted to ask. Wanted to ask him so many questions. Wanted to scream at him. Demand to know if he’d killed Abe. Instead, she said, “Please, Richard. Just let us go.” It was more important to get Leif out of there than to endanger them both by staying there yelling.
“I can’t, Blair. Not now. I’m so close! You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve discovered. The advancement of science depends on this,” he said, taking another step forward. Blair, Leif, and Rose took a step back, and Dr. Edmond stopped, frowning.
“Science isn’t worth human lives. You killed my friends,” Blair said, tears streaming down her face.
“I’m sorry, Blair. But I needed people who believe. I need—” He shivered again hard, all recognition fading from his expression. “Enough talking,” he said.
Blair’s skin crawled at the blank look in Dr. Edmond’s eyes.
“You’re not taking us without a fight,” Leif warned him. “We’re going to do worse than that cut on your arm and a couple of burns if you don’t let us go.”
Before Dr. Edmond could reply, one of the huge glass windows at the front of the building shattered as a car drove right through it and into the lab.
“Holy shit,” Blair said, as Tammy and Shae hopped out of the car and ran toward them. Blair could barely believe her eyes. But there they were. RTS had come back.
“Go to hell,” Rhonda yelled out the driver’s side window at Edmond, as Shae and Tammy hurried to help take on some of Rose’s weight.
Edmond tried to pick up his pace, but the explosion had clearly harmed him, even if he hadn’t yelled out in pain. He was limping, and one side of his body was badly burned. Still, he followed them, despite the pain he must’ve been in.
Blair threw herself into the car, with Leif right behind her. She shuffled herself over to the far seat as Rose and Tammy followed, while Shae hopped in the front.
Rhonda put the car in reverse and peeled out of the building the way she’d come in. The crunch of glass was loud, but Dr. Edmond’s screams of rage were even louder.
“How’d you get a car through the woods?” Leif asked.
Blair’s heart was pounding, but she spoke at the same time as Rhonda. “Logging road.”
“Yeah. We saw it on the map Blair left at the manor. Rachel told us where you were. We figured you might need some help.”
“I thought the logging road was closed down?” Blair asked. She was trying desperately not to think about Dr. Edmond’s horrifying face. Trying to block out the memory of the smell of burnt flesh and the fear that bubbled up inside her when she thought about how he hadn’t even made a single pained sound.
“It just had some old barrier across it and some brush blocking the start of it. The rest of it is in suspiciously good repair,” Tammy said.
“Must be how whoever was working there got in and out,” Leif said. Blair felt weirdly like she was underwater. She checked on Rose, only to find her crying. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re out now. It’s going to be okay.” Blair reached into her pocket for the obsidian talisman Rose had given her, hoping it would give her some comfort. Instead of a stone, she felt crumbled pieces. Somehow, the talisman had shattered.
“You came back,” Leif said.
“We couldn’t just leave you all here to die,” Tammy replied.
We tried to go to the police, Shae said as she signed, but there were none in the nearest town. Or the next one. Or the one after that.
“They were tiny,” Tammy said. “And they didn’t have any cops. We only got steady service back once we’d gone pretty far back south, but then we made the call to the police. They said it’d take time for anyone to come out.”
“They also told us that no one was allowed in Masonville, and that if we had been there, we’d be in trouble,” Rhonda told them. “So we turned around. We had a bad feeling about leaving you all here. We thought we’d come back and let you know that the cops were coming.”
Blair wanted to feel touched. And deep down she did. But she was also in shock, and couldn’t feel much on the surface.
Leif reached out and touched her shoulder, and Blair let the warmth of Leif’s skin ground her.
They were okay. At least for now.
Chapter Fourteen
Voice Memo 70
If someone finds this, please tell my friend Hafsah Attwal in Mapleton that she’s amazing and I’ve missed her very much. She’s a student at Sir John Lambria University. If you can find them, tell my siblings Brandon, Lilly, and Joseph Wyndon that I still love them. I don’t know what to say to my parents. I guess that they lost their chance to see me grow up. And that I found a beautiful girl who has made me very happy, even if just for a short period of time. And…and I guess that’s all.
July 18, Masonville
They took Rose inside and upstairs the moment they arrived at the manor, letting Rhonda, Tammy, and Shae find Gen and Rachel to get them up to speed.
“Thank you, girls. Thank you so much,” Rose was saying. Had been saying the whole ride back. “I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the five of you.”
“It’s all right now,” Blair said. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I’m going to be seeing that horrible man in my dreams,” Rose said, her voice was trembling as they opened the door to her bedroom.
She had grids of crystals laid out on every surface, and most of a sweater that she’d been knitting sitting on the bed.
“You knew him,” Leif said. Blair had called him Richard. She knew him at least well enough to know his first name. “Who is he?”
“That was Dr. Edmond,” Blair said. “He was my professor. My favorite professor.”
Leif felt her brow furrow. How could that be possible? “Why would a university professor be all the way out here? Why would he be doing all of this?”
“I don’t know. He would never do something like this,” Blair said. She sounded dazed. Like this couldn’t possibly fit in with her world view. Like maybe this Dr. Edmond who was killing them all off was actually a nice person.
“It wasn’t him, dear. It was something else in his body. He had this face. This horrible face. He was a monster,” Rose said. Her voice was trembling and weak, and she looked absolutely exhausted.
“I think you need to rest,” Leif said. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Rose nodded and let Leif lead her to her bed.
“I thought I knew something about spirits, but I don’t. I don’t know anything anymore.”
Leif tucked Rose into bed, frowning when she noticed that the poor woman was shaking. She was probably in shock. They’d have to keep an eye on her. Make sure that man, Dr. Edmond, hadn’t injured her somehow.
“Rose, before I let you sleep, how did he grab you?” Leif asked.
“Oh. I went outside and I saw your friend Johnny near the trees. So I went to see if he was okay, and someone else grabbed me from behind.”
“Johnny?” Leif asked. “He’s alive? Are you sure it was him?”
“Yes,” Rose said. “I’m sure. He wasn’t acting like himself, though. He just stared at me, and then the person behind me grabbed me and put a cloth over my mouth. I woke up in that awful lab with my mouth and throat burning.”
“Someone chloroformed you?” Blair asked. “Did you see anything, like their shoes or their hands? You would have woken up as soon as the cloth was gone, but it seems like they might have choked you.”
“No,” Rose said. “I’m sorry, but all I saw was Johnny and then I smelled that almost sweet chemical smell and I don’t remember anything else. Maybe being in the back of that truck? And being in the woods for a while, I think. It’s all a blur, though.”
“That’s all right. Do you remember anything else that Dr. Edmond said?” Leif asked.
“Yes, a little. He said he needed believers,” she said.
“Yes! He kept talking about belief,” Blair said.
“He said if I believed it would open a portal,” Rose said. “He put those things on my head and—” She cut herself off, sniffling. “That’s all I can recall.”
“It’s okay,” Blair said. “You rest now. We’ll be right outside your door.”
