Chapter Seven
It took me less than an hour to gather my things from the camper and move myself to Kathy's house. She lived on the edge of town near the beach. A street over actually. Her back yard was mostly beach sand with some scraggly grass popping up occasionally. It was a small house that told a story of a young woman who liked her privacy and pretty things around herself. There was the usual beach paraphernalia and patio furniture that told everyone this was a beach house.
She acted glad to have me come stay with her until I could get back into my property but there was also the reticence of unfamiliarity with having a stranger invading her space. I was no longer the boyfriend that lit up her eyes when I was around. I was now the house guest that interrupted her time alone and shared her every waking moment.
It was late by the time we talked out our immediate relationship and settled in for the night. She had a spare room and I chose to stay in there. She wanted her bed to herself so we designated the couch as the place for sex. We laughed about our arrangement and got comfortable with each other in a totally new setting. It was familiar to her but made strange by my presence. A new place for both of us. Together.
Before we went to our separate rooms to sleep, Kathy had one last thing to say.
“Watch out for my ghost.”
“What ghost? I've had quite enough of all ghosts lately.” I reminded her.
“Well, I have one that pops up from time to time around here. Been here since I moved in. sometimes moves things around and appears and disappears in the dark spots of the hallway.”
“I wish you'd have mentioned this before when I was making a fool of myself telling you about my stranger on the property,” I said.
She shrugged.
“Was hoping I'd never have to tell anyone. Just didn't think it would be right after all you've been through to have you get up in the middle of the night to go pee and be scared by my ghost wandering the hallway or something.”
“I appreciate your candor, but didn't you think I would rather know you believed me than to save your own reputation for later?”
She smiled and blew me a kiss. The twinkle in her eye said, get used to it. I'm mysterious.
“I liked knowing something about you without having to tell it about me.” She giggled like a school girl. I had trouble imagining her being abducted and mistreated and left abandoned on a road.
“Well, just so you know how I feel,” I tried to sound irritated.
“I know,” she laughed. “And I like the way you feel,” she added and left me standing there watching and thinking about her retreating backside. A very nice backside, indeed.
Around three a.m., according to the lighted digital clock on the bedside table, I got up to go pee. A lot of coffee while we talked. I could not help but look around as I walked down the hallway to the small bathroom. I half expected her ghost to jump out at me and shake hands. I turned the light on in the bathroom and relieved myself noting that her small bathroom was still three times the size of my camper bathroom.
Done, I turned off the light and opened the door, stepping back into the dimly lit hallway. There was a night light or something on in the living room which shone a trickle of light part way down the hall. I had taken two steps when I felt the presence. It was just like in the roadway. I knew that presence. It was not her ghost. It was mine. I smelled the wet leaves again and felt hot breath in my face even before I recognized the shape looming menacingly before me.
The black shadow was familiar and the smell was the same. I could hear that same fast, deep breathing like someone had been running. This time there was a prickling of my senses. Little pin pricks dotted my skin up and down my arms and back and chest and spine. It was not a cold chill I felt but a menacing, hot, painful touch that covered me with a small burning sensation.
I had no doubt where the sensation covering my body was coming from. The breathing was close. In my face close. The darkness kept me from seeing anything except a deeper shadow in the shadow of the hallway. I felt my legs filling with adrenaline again. I wanted to run but nothing was moving. I was immobile with fear. I could not explain it. I just didn't have it in me to run away. But I also had no real desire to stay and fight.
Then I heard it. In the darkness of that hallway I heard a low, rumbling growl. It started softly and built into a raging howl that shrieked through my ears and filled every cell of my body with a fear of death like I had never known before. I was never a brave man, not for the sake of being brave. But right then, faced with what I was sure was imminent death, I knew I wanted to live. I did not want to die. I felt like I was suffocating. The air was suddenly hot and scarce. I was clawing at my throat to bring more air in. The fiery darts of burning pain all over my body erupted into flaming shots of heat that threatened to consume me even before I ran out of air. I felt a tightness around my ankles as though someone was holding them and my wrists ached as though they were tied. Fear was my life at the moment. Darkness and fear.
The the growl became a voice. Guttural and close. Almost a snarl in my left ear. I tried to cringe and escape the voice but it held me captive as surely as if I was tied to it.
“You're going to die, young one,” it said. “I have you now. You are mine. Do not try and escape. There really is no escape. I have watched you. I have thought about you. I own you. I am going to kill you to make you mine forever. Stay afraid. I love seeing you shake and tremble. You have invaded my space and now I have drawn you to a place of no going back. You must die for me. Eventually you must die. I love watching all of you die. Please, die for me.”
The pain around my throat increased and I felt a heat like a searing flesh burn. I screamed out in the darkness and thrashed around trying to escape the heat. The pain was excruciating. The burning sensation was drawing every last bit of my strength to endure. Again and again I screamed out the agony I was feeling in my flesh. I was unable to move as though I had been tied in place. I did not know if I was still in the hallway or someplace else. I kept screaming. It was the only thing I had that worked. My legs would not move. My hands seemed like they were weighted down. I tried wrestling my body out of whatever hold was containing me. A great weight pushed in on my chest and held me motionless. I thought I was standing but I felt like I was lying down the way everything was holding me. I was so confused that all I could do was scream some more.
Suddenly the lights came on. Brightness replaced the darkness and the shadows withdrew immediately. I felt the pressures exerted on my body release. The heat left. The pain subsided. The searing burn at my neck continued but it was no longer increasing in scope of the depth to which it was reaching. I could no longer sense the presence that moments before held me captive and desired my death. The light had freed me.
I turned and saw Kathy standing in the hallway. She was at the end of the hallway with her hand on the light switch. She wore nothing but a worried look on her face. She had heard me screaming and come running without a thought of her nakedness. There was a definite dose of stress lining her face. She just stared at me as I tried to bring my breathing under control. I stood there, in her hallway, rubbing my throat and looking at the woman who had chased away my attacker. Grateful was too small a word for what I felt.
“What happened?” She asked in a voice that told me she had been dead asleep and was still not quite awake.
“The strange figure was here.” I gasped while rubbing my stinging throat.
She saw my hand at my throat and she moved towards me with a fear in her eyes I had not seen before.
“What happened to your throat?” She was twisting her head at odd angles trying to get a better look at my throat.
The stinging sensation at my throat hurt like hell. I moved back into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. There was a bright red ring across the front of my throat. It looked like a chemical burn. It hurt to touch it, like the salt or oils from my hand were irritating it. I stopped touching it.
Behind me, in the mirror, I saw Kathy holding
her hand to her neck also.
“What?” I turned to her.
She fled from the bathroom and I followed her to the living room where we sat on the couch like we had before. There was a new look on her face. Something was wrong and I waited for her to tell me what it was.
“That burn on you neck,” she began. “How'd you get it?”
“I don't know. I felt a burning pain and now it is there.”
She nodded like she understood. I sure didn't. How the hell did I get this mark on my neck?
“Was there a voice?” she asked in a low almost fading voice.
“Yes. He threatened me...” I started.
“Told you that you could not escape,” she finished for me.
“Yes,” I answered. “How did you know?”
“I thought my ghost was my imagination from my ordeal. My personal aberration.”
“Your ordeal?”
“When I was a little girl I was abducted and then abandoned,” she explained. “The authorities believed it was some serial killer but I could not tell them anything about him. All I can ever remember is a shadowy form standing over me, threatening me. They said the trauma of the incident had blanked the experience out of my mind and protected me from it. I always assumed my ghost was my mind trying to let the memory back in.”
She rubbed her neck like she had the burn instead of me. Her eyes were tearing up and she was trembling. I moved closer and pulled her into my arms. We laid quietly for several minutes as she cried softly into my chest, letting out whatever it was that she was still holding after all these years. I held her tightly so she would know I was there and protecting her.
“He's real, you know?” her voice startled me. It was strained and hard. Nothing like the sweet Kathy I knew and loved. Still, she was the Kathy I knew and loved.
“He will never go away.”
“Who?” I asked. “Do you know who this ghost is?”
“Yes,” It was a low, menacing voice that slipped up from her throat and spoke. Bad memory.
“When I was taken as a little girl, I was visiting my uncle. My mom and my aunt were out shopping and my dad and uncle were watching some game on TV. I remember that because I asked about it and they tried to explain it to me but it made no sense to me. It didn't sound like fun so I went outside to play. Outside I met a man who lived in the woods. He told me he lived in the woods. He said he was my guardian angel and that other people were trying to hurt me. He asked me if I wanted to come with him and be safe forever. I followed him into the woods and we walked for a long time. That night we stayed in a cabin and ate hotdogs and danced in a circle. It was fun. He was the first big person to have fun with me.
“When I said I wanted to go back home, he said I could never leave. He held me down and put his knee on my chest and tied my hands and feet and then spent hours telling me how he had helped other kids escape from their mean old parents. I was scared the whole time. I knew he was going to kill me. He kept squeezing my throat until I passed out. I woke up several times and he started scaring me all over again. Sometimes he held a knife and waved it like he was going to cut me. I think he liked scaring me more than anything else.
“One time when I woke up after he had choked me, he was gone. For a long time I laid there and waited for him to come back and kill me. I cried and whimpered a lot. I knew I was going to die. He had told me I had to die for him.”
I remembered the voice talking to me in the dark hallway. It could not be a coincidence that my ghostly form and her experience were so similar.
“Somehow, after a really long time, I got my hands loose and untied my feet. When I looked outside the cabin, I could only see the dark. I was scared of the dark but I was more scared of the man coming back. I guess I wandered all the rest of the night until I somehow ended up on a road and a car came by. They took me to the police station. The police called my parents and I was taken home.
“That's when the police came to question me. Lots of different ones. They asked lots of questions but I could remember nothing of what I just told you.”
“Nothing?” I asked quietly.
“Nothing. Doctors said I had blocked it out of my memory. I tried to remember but it was just not there. About four years ago, I started remembering little bits and pieces of it. The memories coincided with my buying this house. The night I first noticed the ghostly shape in the hallway I had my first dream of that terrible night so long ago. Since then I have remembered most of what happened while I was sleeping or dozing. Little bits come back to me and eventually they created a bigger picture helping me to remember it all. Somehow the ghost is connected to the memory I had. Still, all I can remember of the man is his shadowy form leaning down over me,”
“Worse,” I added. “Your ghost and my ghost are the same one.”
“How can that be?” Her voice said that she believed me but was confused by the connection.
“The police told me that a man they believed was a serial killer was found living on my property in a cabin. He owned it before I did.”
“Mr. Berger,” she said. “He was suspected of killing a young boy. My mom told me about it once when the subject came up. I had no idea he was the previous owner to your property, though. But what does he have to do...with...” a light went on.
“The cabin?” she asked and answered her own question. “You think maybe the guy who walked me through the woods was Mr. Berger?”
I nodded and tried to smile reassuringly.
“Maybe. Seems logical.” I calmed her with a stroke of my hand gently down her arm.
“But that was years ago. No one has ever seen or heard of him again. And my experience was years after the police scared him out of town.”
“Apparently he had a way in and out or something. Or maybe a hiding place that they never found.”
“I suppose.” She didn't sound convinced.
“What if, and I'm really stretching here, he didn't leave like they thought. What if he had a hiding place out there in the woods somewhere and just came out to do his killing when he took a notion? That would explain why the police never found him or anyone else ever saw him.”
“That's an awful long time to hide from people,” Kathy saw a hole in my theory.
“But suppose he came out at night, did all his abducting elsewhere and even stole or bought his supplies somewhere else? Some place where they were not looking so hard for him.” I postulated.
“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to.”
“Better than going to jail.” I reminded her.
“I suppose.” She was still thinking it over.
“How did he get around. He would need a car.” She threw another wrench into the wheels of my theory.
We sat silently thinking and dealing with our share experiences.
“What if he had a motorcycle instead of a car?” I asked.
“Makes it easier to get in and out of the woods.” She admitted. “Harder to abduct children, though.”
“Why? Kids love to get a ride on a motorcycle. It would be a great way to draw out the kid that took risks and was maybe alone to begin with.”
She nodded her head slowly as she thought over my answers to her questions. We sat again for some time before either of us stirred again. I just held her and felt her warmth against me. It had not occurred to me that she was still naked. Suddenly I was reminded how vulnerable she was by how naked she was. She didn't seem to notice her nakedness so, I was comfortable with it, too. Still, I pulled a blanket she kept on the back of the couch around her. She gladly pulled it closer around her to ward off the coolness in the room.
“We have to go out there,” she finally spoke up.
“Out where?” I asked.
“Your property.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked. Her look told me I had better take that one back.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm not saying you're crazy but don't you think that going looking for trouble is a little crazy?”
“T
hat's the source of all this trouble. Your property,” she explained. “We have got to get to the bottom of this and end it once and for all.”
I thought of the ghostly form menacing me in the hallway a few moments ago.
“How do we end this?” I asked “What is it we're ending?”
“The ghost.” She sounded sure of herself.
“How do we end a ghost?” I asked.
“We have to put it to rest.”
“Huh?”
“You know, settle the bones. Bury the dead guy who started all this?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. My look must have conveyed my ignorance when she tilted her head up to me. She twisted in my arms and dropped the blanket part way exposing her breasts and giving me more to concentrate on than her suggestion.
“Listen,” she explained. “We have got to find the hiding place where all this evil took place from. Then we have to find the body or bones or whatever of the guy who lives in the woods, the abductor and killer of the kids.”
She was talking slow like I was having trouble understanding her. I tried to focus on her words but her body was tempting me with other thoughts.
“Ghosts are products of dead people who have unsettled lives and unfinished business.” She said it as though it was a known fact the world over.
“Who says?” I asked.
“I don't know who said it,” she admitted. “What does it matter? The thing is, we've got to do something to get rid of this thing in our lives.”
I could not argue with that. I was not sure I wanted to go through another episode like I had just experienced in the hallway. I was not so sure that I would live through it the next time. What would have happened if Kathy had not turned on the light? Would I have died right there? Did this thing have that kind of power? What kind of malevolent evil were we dealing with? It was a good question but not one I was sure I wanted an answer to.
And she had said, Our lives. Ours. I liked hearing her say that.
We stayed silent for a good while after running out of things to say to each other. With all the lights still on, we drifted back into our independent versions of somewhat peaceful sleep.
The sunlight was streaming through a part in the heavy curtains which covered the sliding doors at the rear of her house. Enough light filtered in around the curtains and through other windows in the kitchen that the place was washed in a cheery bath of warming sunshine. The real value of the sunlight had nothing to do with the warmth it conveyed beyond just making the darkness of the night and our fearful thoughts go away.
As soon as I was awake I realized something was wrong. I could feel it. I sensed it. And immediately I smiled to discover what it was. Kathy had been in my arms when we went to sleep. She was not there when I awoke. I experienced a brief moment of liking the feeling of missing her and then fear washed in like a wave climbing up on a beach.
I sat up quickly and looked around, ready to call out her name. Then I saw her. She was sitting sideways on a chair at the side of the curtains over the sliding door. She had positioned it to look through a sliver of daylight outside. Her head was cocked to one side in thoughtful repose and she seemed to be almost in a dreamlike state. I noticed she was also blanketless and quite naked. Framed in the small splash of sunlight like that, she looked gorgeous and completely edible. The shadows on her body were accented by the brightness of the sunlight building a framework around her, almost as though she were engulfed in a full body halo effect. Glowing. I wished at the moment that I could have gotten a picture of the scene, but I am pretty sure no camera can capture exactly what I was seeing. Not all of it.
I lifted the blanket and carried it to her chair and draped it over her shoulders and down across her lap. She smiled up at me and tilted her head back allowing me to bend down and kiss her. It was a good morning kiss like no other. In it I felt the thankfulness of being together, sharing an evening, knowing one another well enough to bare our souls as well as our bodies, and a full measure of appreciation for whatever providence had brought us together. As our lips met and joined, she moaned a soft hum of pleasure at the contact, making her own small gesture of thankfulness for the moment.
“M-m-m-m.”
“Good morning, beautiful.” I whispered it so as not to shatter the silence of the moment.
“Good morning.” She replied and moved her face back down to the part in the curtain through which she had been staring when I awoke.
I took up a more comfortable chair a few feet away and watched her. I was still amazed at how much I just enjoyed looking at her. Not her body. Her. Just her. Just seeing her close by me. There. Not somewhere else. Kathy was a beautiful woman. She could go anywhere and be with any man she chose. I guess what I was looking at most was the woman who chose me.
“I always hoped my ghost was my dad.”
She spoke into the sunlight splashing through the slit in the curtain. She did not turn towards me. It was like she was speaking out her thoughts. I felt honored that she would say them out loud, including me in her thinking. It made her and I into an us. If she was not the perfect woman, then I was sure that meeting the perfect woman would be too much of a sensory overload for me. My entire being was in a whirl just thinking about the moment we were sharing right then. Us and a small beam of sunlight that seemed to announce to the whole world there is greater light coming.
“The first time I saw the ghost was a month after my dad's funeral. There were times when I saw the figure in my hallway and thought it was watching me. Watching over me. Sometimes I felt him watching in my room at night. I thought maybe my dad had come back to watch over me since he was dead. It kind of comforted me to know he felt that way. Sometimes I was not so sure when he was alive.”
“Really?” My way of saying, “Go on.”
“Really.” Now she turned in her seat toward me. The blanket fell partway open around her shoulder giving me my morning breakfast treat of her beauty.
“When I was a child, I remember he always wanted to take me everywhere with him. Then...after the ...incident...that's what we called it, afterward...he kind of got cold toward me. As a child I never really noticed it. We just didn't go places a lot. I figured he was afraid to take me out because I might get kidnapped again. But as I got older I realized he had pulled away from me. I guess I thought maybe he figured I was soiled somehow. I don't know. But I tried to get closer to him every day.”
“I'm sure he still loved you.” I tried to interject a little positivity to keep her from getting depressed in her stroll down memory lane. “Sometimes parents have a hard time dealing with their own perceptions of how they have failed to protect their children. Maybe he was just feeling like a failure and being with you reminded him of it.” I wanted her to know it was not her, but him who had to deal with his own thoughts about her kidnapping.
“Maybe,” she offered and shrugged her shoulders. “But for a little girl, daddy is the whole world. Mommas are great when bad things happen or I needed to talk about boys, but daddies are the rulers of the universe. I remember thinking that if daddy was around I was safe. Even when I was wandering out of the woods, I remember thinking that I needed to find my daddy.”
A long pause stood in the room between us for several minutes. I gave her time to think about her words. I didn't want to press. I wanted her to go at her own pace. I was in no hurry. I was right where I wanted to be. With her.
“I guess I spent the rest of his life trying to find him again.”
“Huh?” I offered up my insightful inquisitor side. What did she mean trying to find him? She was the one who got lost in that kidnapping. He was only the loser, not the losee.
“I mean, it was like he had gone somewhere...in his mind...after the incident. We went places and we were around each other but we were never together again. When mom died he withdrew even further.”
“Too bad,” I smiled at her. She smiled back.
“Why, too bad?”
“He missed a great
woman to be around.” I pulled her back to the here and now. Me. Us.
“Think so?”
She was not joking. Something inside her drove her to really want to know. She had questions about herself. Not just from the incident. She was mentally healthy enough to reason out that bad people do bad things and that was none of her fault. But a father who did not respond in a right way damaged a kid who was still trying to determine her self worth. Mom's can tell a child how precious they are. But what a father does speaks volumes in seconds to their heart. Having her father pull back from her when she really needed something substantive to hold onto, was a blow to her own self picture.
“I can not imagine anyone ever being more worthy of my time and attention than you.” I offered.
Men are poor substitutions for dads but it was all I had to offer at the moment. Maybe someday, as a husband, I could offer her more, but right then I had only the perspective and position of a male friend. A good male friend, but still, only a male friend.
“I guess the ghost proved last night he was not my dad.” She changed the subject. I let her.
“Or maybe he was and he was warning me off.” I half kidded.
“But you said it was the figure from your campground?” she questioned.
“I did. And it was. I was just trying to make the case that your father still loves you, even from the grave.”
“Thanks.” She gave me her award winning smile again. “Kind of creepy now that I think of it.”
“What?”
“My dead father coming back from the grave to protect me from you.” As she said it a coldness descended upon the room. I chalked it up to that age old fear that every young man has of the girl's father. Thinking about the old man chasing me off from the grave was not at the top of my cheery subjects list.
“We still have to do it, you know?”
“Do what?”
I knew what she meant. I just hoped that making her say it would make her rethink it. It didn't.
“Go back to the campground and flush this ghost of ours out. Find a way to make it go away. Forever. We can never be happy together with some ghost tramping around on our campground now, can we?”
We. Together. Ours? She was talking and I was sure she was talking about us but the words were so unfamiliar that I was stunned. We were an us. What was mine I wanted to be hers, too. She had called it our campground. Our situation. Our ghost. Not mine. Not hers. Ours. And she said forever. She was obviously thinking long term, way down the relationship road. I was in. That was the moment I knew. She was mine and I was hers. We were an us. My head was spinning with the realization. I needed to call my mom. Well, soon anyways.
“Okay.” I agreed. Right then I would have agreed to charge the entire modern, mechanized, ninth cavalry on horseback with a pocket knife for her.
“Let's get showers and stop off at Tammy's for some breakfast.”
Tammy's had become our local favorite eating place. We'd been there once before. This whole town had just become my favorite place. For the first time in my life I understood the concept of walking on clouds. I kept looking down to see if my feet were touching the ground.