“Well, the sobbing comes to a screeching halt and Sean hears whispers, like a group of people, waiting there in the dark, like somebody might turn on the light and yell, ‘surprise!’
“Now, he’s getting pissed, okay. It’s late, and he’s tired, and he should’ve been halfway home. But no, he’s there in the theater, chasing after a girl, and now maybe a couple of her friends, who didn’t even buy a fucking ticket. So he tells them, ‘Look, I’m gonna get my boss out here in a second,’ and ... then ...
“WHAM!”
Robby’s hand lashed out across the table, his fingers hooked into claws.
Tyler jumped and nearly spilt what was left of his drink.
“Something scratches him.”
“You mean somebody scratched him,” Tyler corrected.
“That’s what I thought at first. Sean said he looked everywhere for the girl, but he never saw her again, and he never found anybody else either.
“The next morning, he showed me his forearm.
“I was used to it. Everyone knew I was volunteering at the fire department, training to become an EMT, and they thought I was just one step removed from their family doctor. They’d come to me and show me stuff they were worried about, or stuff they didn’t want their parents to find out about, cuts, bruises, and rashes, wanting me to tell them what they were and what they should do about them.” He looked at Tyler. “You probably get the same thing.”
Tyler nodded.
“Anyway,” Robby said, “Sean had three long welts that stretched from his wrist to his elbow, these ridges topped with dotted red lines where the nails or whatever had broken the skin. Sean had always been allergic to cats, and if he hadn’t told me this story, I’d have sworn he’d been clawed by a tiger. I just told him to spread some Neosporin on the marks and watch to make sure they didn’t get infected.”
Tyler nodded again.
“After a few days, the swelling went down and the cuts healed over,” Robby told him. He took another drink, licked his lips, then said, “A few weeks later, I was doing research on town history. Every small town has its share of weirdness, I guess, and Harmony probably has more than most. Anyway, I came across some stories on the Woodfield. Of course, there were a bunch of articles on the fire, but there was also a front-page story about a teenaged girl who was killed by her boyfriend up in the balcony. It even had a picture of her. Probably her high school yearbook photo.
“I showed it to Sean.”
“Let me guess,” Tyler said, “It was the same girl he’d seen.”
“One and the same,” Robby confirmed. “She’d been dead thirty-two years.”
Tyler said nothing. He quietly finished his beer. Kim’s story the other night and now this.
Robby frowned. “You’re staring at me like you’re trying to figure out the range of my ankle bracelet.”
“Sorry. You’re saying this theater is haunted and that Martinez was killed ... by a ghost?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘possessed by evil spirits,’ but haunted is good. We can go with haunted. You heard what the detective said. You translated the words yourself, ‘The theater is cursed. Free us from the demon.’ Did you get it right or not?”
“He could’ve said, ‘Help, I’m being chased by a rabid Easter Bunny’ instead. Just because it’s on tape doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“You don’t think it’s just a little bit odd that my friend got scratched the same way your patient did?”
Tyler shrugged. “They were in the same building. They might have walked down the same hall, got caught on some screws in the wall, or a jagged piece of metal, or ... anything.”
Even as he spoke, his own mind was not convinced. What about the cold? it reminded. Explain that one.
He couldn’t.
“I told you how it would sound, Doc. And if I expected a rational guy like you to just believe me and go with it without question, well, then I really would be crazy. I’ve been where you are now, somebody telling me some supernatural force was out there, up to no good, and me just knowing it had to be bullshit. I used to think I had this whole town wired. I was one cocky son of a bitch.”
“Obviously something changed your mind.”
Robby smiled bitterly and downed the last drop of his scotch. “That’s a story for another night, Doc, sometime when I’ve had a lot more to drink.”
“Just for the sake of conversation, let’s pretend there’s a ghost in this theater, a real nasty one.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the M.E. got to do with it? Why would anybody want to kill Billy? I mean, whoever did it didn’t even take the body. Wouldn’t you think that, if they were worried he might’ve found something that would implicate them in the death, they would’ve stolen it so that another M.E. wouldn’t be able to examine it either?”
Robby’s eyes were focused on something behind Tyler. “I never said I had all the answers, Doc.”
Tyler turned around to see what he was looking at.
A tall, bearded man with long, stringy hair stood off to the side of the stage, his hands in the pockets of his faded denim jacket. He swayed slightly back and forth, as if he were so drunk that he had to fight to stand upright. Like most of the men and some of the women in the club, his eyes were firmly planted on the dancer.
“You know him?” Tyler asked.
Robby shook his head. “Never seen him before.”
“Then why are you staring at him?”
“He’s got my Spidey Sense tingling.”
“Your what?”
“You know how Spider-Man can sense when something bad’s about to happen?” Robby nodded at the man in the jacket. “Well something’s not right with that guy.”
Tyler turned around for another look.
The stranger made a sudden leap onto the stage and bolted for the stripper. His hands were out of his pockets now, and one of them held a long, serrated hunting knife. He grabbed the girl by the hair, yanked her head back and placed the blade against her neck.
In that instant, the look in the stripper’s eyes changed. It wasn’t sadness or boredom now. Now it was absolute panic.
Audience members yelled and screamed, but the madman screamed louder, “Why?” Spittle flew off his lips, spraying the side of the sad girl’s face. “Why won’t you talk to me?!”
Before she could answer, he slid his blade across her throat like a zipper, opening her flesh. Tyler watched helplessly as her hand shot up, watched arcing arterial spray paint her fingers red.
The madman released his grip on her hair, let her fall, and a bouncer rushed him, pushed his face down hard onto the stage. All the while he kept yelling, kept screaming, “Why?”
Tyler ran for the stage. His only thought was his responsibility to the girl.
“Get back!” the bouncer warned, his knee stabbing the madman’s spine, his thick hands prying the blade free.
“I’m a doctor,” Tyler said as he climbed up.
The girl had lost consciousness. Blood gurgled up from her split neck, formed a pool on the shiny, lacquered stage beneath her. Tyler unbuttoned his shirt, planning to wad it and apply pressure, but a hand thrust a white bar towel into his face.
It was Robby.
In his other hand, the EMT held a cell phone to his ear. “That’s right,” he told the person on the other end, “The Pole Position Show Club ... Yes ... Hurry.”
Tyler took the towel from him and pressed it against the wound, feeling warmth as white cloth rapidly turned scarlet. He then lifted the stripper’s head and pushed it forward to try and pinch the gash closed.
“They’re on their way,” Robby told him.
But not fast enough. She’s bleeding out.
Tyler had the sensation of something brushing against his shoulder. He felt hot gusts of breath on his arm, like the respiration of a large animal, and his head jerked to the side to see who or what was standing next to him.
There was nothing there.
T
he stripper suddenly opened her eyes. Her gaze was aimless at first, but it soon found Tyler’s face and focused intently upon him. It almost looked as if she were glaring at him. Her lips moved, attempted words, and after a few mute tries, she found a voice.
“She ...”
The tone was deep, low.
“She can’t help them.”
It didn’t sound like a woman’s voice at all.
“They’re mine! They belong to me!”
Tyler glanced up to see if Robby heard it as well, to make certain he hadn’t imagined it, and the look of wide-eyed shock on the EMT’s face confirmed it.
The girl actually moved. Her hand reached up, grabbed Tyler’s half-unbuttoned shirt and pulled. She should have been weak from blood loss, but her grip was strong. “Keep the bitch away from my theater or it will be a coffin birth.”
And then she fell silent. Her grip loosened, her limp arm dropped, smacked the stage. The light faded from her eyes as if someone had just flipped off a switch. They were now vacant, glazed ... dead.
Tyler sat there, trembling. He stared at the body in stunned silence until the ambulance arrived.
21
Geoffrey Burke drew his legs up and rested his chin on his knees. It was in here. He could feel it. Its foul presence lurked among the shadows, watching, its malevolent stare focused on him like the sun’s rays through a magnifying lens, burning.
“What do you want?” he asked, his hands wringing sheets and blankets.
A growl from the darkness. Rumbling. Predatory.
Geoffrey pressed his back against the headboard, then asked again, desperation making his voice shrill, “What do you want?”
The floor creaked. It stalked closer.
He felt sweat trickle down his temples. “Go away,” he whispered.
But it didn’t go away, this rancid thing. It moved closer still, so close in fact that he thought he might catch a glimpse of it in the moonlight that pooled at the foot of his bed.
Tears threatened Geoffrey’s eyes now. His lower lip trembled. “Please,” he begged, “no more.”
And then it sprang forward from the darkness — something huge, something with claws and fangs, a shadow with substance, with weight. It held him down, pinned him to the mattress, a thing so grotesque that his mind refused to recall its face even in slumber.
Burke surfaced quickly from the depths of the horrible dream, breathing heavily, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his chest and arms still ringing with the echoes of past violation.
Awake, it was easy to bury his fears, to smother them beneath his day-to-day affairs, but when his subconscious was given free reign, it was quick to dig it all back up. In his lectures, he’d spoken at length on the phenomenon of residual haunting, on acts of violence so intense, so heinous that they generate a psychic reverberation, replaying actions over and over for all eternity like a compact disc with a deep, unforgiving gouge. His nightmares were like that, the same again, and then again, and then again ... the fear, the pleas, the agony.
Burke sat up in his chair; looked around the confines of the room, his mind still partially adrift in a sea of terror. This was not his parents’ flat, not the chamber of horrors his bedroom had become. No, this was his office, his sanctuary. The tide of confusion began to subside and he glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was just after midnight, five in the morning London time.
Still a bit dazed, he rubbed his breast, happy to find his shirt intact. He then took his hand away and examined it to be sure. Not a drop of blood on his fingertips. He wiped drool from the corner of his mouth, glazing his chin, then swallowed; tried to calm himself.
He was alone.
He was safe.
Safe.
That was a fairy story. Whatever bit of safety he’d known had been ripped away and left to bleed long ago. There were no safe places when he was twelve, and there were certainly none now in his fifties.
His hand skimmed across the desktop, across the photos strewn there, prints of downloaded stills, images Tashima Ishmail had captured with the camera’s digital eye. His glass had overturned, baptizing several in scotch. Burke picked a print up by its corner to let it drain, then grabbed a Kleenex. He dabbed, attempted to wipe it clean, and smeared the ink.
Damn.
He let the picture fall back onto the pile, each a variation on the same image: Kim Saunders, surrounded by bright splotches. There were so many of them, the spirit orbs, making it appear as if the young lady were caught in the midst of a blizzard.
Burke allowed his gaze to linger on Kim’s frozen face a moment, then he pivoted his chair toward the computer; tapped out a command on the keyboard. His fingers moved to his mouth, stroking his lips as the video file ran for yet another private screening. The orbs had been captured there as well. He’d spent much of the night cross-referencing notes on the auditorium, fighting for reflective glass or prisms, championing stray particles and asbestos dust, but an earthly explanation continued to elude him. He watched the lights fly about, their motions swift and unnatural. They zoomed and buzzed like a gathering swarm of fireflies, or ... moths. Yes, moths drawn to a flame.
“What do they see in you, Miss Saunders?” he whispered to the room. There was no emotion in the voice. Even here, hidden from the eyes of the world, he maintained a tight lid. He reached out and touched the screen, then directed a curious question to the faceless specters themselves, the same query he made each night to the darkness behind his eyes. “What do you want?”
When Kim ran sick from the balcony, Burke was confronted with the realization that he might at long last be close to an answer, that all his preparations and planning might finally come to some sort of fruition.
Of course, the young lady tried to play the incident off as nothing, but the professor recognized the truth.
Places where a true spiritual presence existed often brought out a physical reaction in those who were sensitive, and he’d made certain that they were all sensitive. Burke pulled Kim’s file from beneath the photos. It was filled with questionnaires, release forms for the investigations, medical information, everything he could legally access, and a few bits he’d managed to pilfer from the university computers with a stolen password. The young lady’s physicians had branded her responses the symptoms of allergy, had prescribed pills to mute their urgent calls, but they could not shield her from the loud cries of the Woodfield. No ... Burke too felt something in the old theater, a feeling missing from past sites he’d investigated — a feeling he’d been trying to find since that first attack of his childhood.
His hand made a trembling fist and he dropped the manila folder.
Mind how you go now ... mind how you go.
Yes, he needed his wits about him. He should leave now, drive home and get some rest in a proper bed.
Burke combed his hands through his graying hair, then rose and crossed the room, but his eyes were slow to leave the photos. He paused a moment; turned off the light. And before he closed the door, he glanced over his shoulder, searching the darkness.
He yawned and said, “If we have any surprises in store for one another, it will have to wait for the weekend.”
22
Tyler paced quietly in the corner of the club, his tired brain reeling, searching volumes of medical knowledge and blindly reaching for theories. Any theory would do, no matter how wild or outlandish. After all, nothing could be more outlandish than what just happened.
Robby leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets. The rest of the club had emptied except for police officers, a few other witnesses who had been detained for questioning, and of course, the man in the jacket, the one with blood on his now manacled hands.
“Gentlemen,” Detective Perry said as crossed the floor toward them, a small notebook in his palm. He wore a different shirt and tie from their earlier meeting in the morgue, and Tyler wondered if he’d gone home simply to change or if this was in fact the first hour of a new overnight shift. “You’ve had a long and
eventful day.”
“Why’d he do it?” Robby asked.
Perry glanced over at his new prisoner, watched as two uniformed officers escorted him out through the tinted doors of the strip club. “It seems he had an unhealthy obsession with the dead girl —” The detective consulted his notes. “— a Miss Lauren Jacobs. Either of you know her?”
Tyler shook his head wordlessly.
“I’ve seen her dance here a few times,” Robby confessed. “Did she date the psycho?”
“No,” Perry told them. “Per the staff, she’d received emails through the club’s inbox. They started innocently enough, ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful,’ but they quickly turned threatening. She’d block one email sender, and the man would just send them from a different account. Never had a picture, though. Well, at least not of his face. He sent her snapshots of his genitals.
“Did she say anything before she died? The bouncer thought he heard —”
“It was impossible,” Tyler broke in. “The bastard sliced through her trachea and her ... her vocal cords were severed. There was no way she could’ve said anything.”
Perry studied him a moment, as if trying to figure out if he were telling the truth. He was, and that’s what frightened him.
“I suspected as much,” the detective said at last. “I’m sure there was a lot of chaos in here when it happened. He probably heard a voice from the crowd.”
“Had to have been it,” Robby agreed, smiling.
“Well ...” Perry closed his notebook. “I guess that’s all there is for now. I won’t keep you any longer. If I need anything else, I know where to find you.”
“That you do,” Robby said, then he gave Tyler a pat on the shoulder. “Let’s get you home, Doc. You look tired.”
That’s because I am tired. Tired. Confused. Scared.
As they made their way toward the door, Tyler felt compelled to glance back at the stage, at the female form that lay there, naked but for a G-string and a few bits of electrical tape. Her head was tilted toward him. Her eyes gave him a blank stare.
When they were secure in Robby’s truck, the E.M.T. was first to speak, “You believe me now about the weird shit that goes on in this town?”