Bone Island 03 - Ghost Moon (3 page)

Later, when the formal services had ended, they had come here.

Friends and neighbors had helped; food had been set on the buffets, and on the dining-room table, and people had talked. And one by one, their other friends had gone, and finally he had been alone with Kelsey, and they hadn’t said much; he had just held her while she sobbed, until she was so tired that she needed to be brought up to bed.

He had carried her. With her father’s permission. Cutter had suggested that they just wake her; he had been loath to do so. “She’s not heavy, sir,” he had assured Cutter. But when he had brought her up the stairs and laid her down, she had clung to him, and he had stayed beside her in the darkness and the shadows until the exhaustion of her grief had brought sleep mercifully to her once again, and only then had he tiptoed away.

It had been the last time he had seen her.

He couldn’t think about Kelsey or the past now. He wasn’t the same; he was sure Kelsey wasn’t the same. And the house certainly wasn’t the same. It seemed like
a shell, the bones of a family and happiness that had once existed.

He owed it to Kelsey, though, to keep the miscreants and thieves away until she decided what she wanted.

Two archways sat on either side of the stairway, one leading to the dining room, the other leading to an area that was a family room—in Victorian days, the family had seldom used the proper living room or parlor. The fireplace was dual; a mantel sat on the other side in Cutter’s office. Though it was seldom that the temperature went below forty even in the dead of winter, it could be cold in the dampness of the semitropics. He had found Cutter in the rocker by the fireplace.

He cast the light over the parlor. It sat in still and brooding silence, boxes everywhere, the heads of long-dead animals staring down at him, spiderwebs reigning supreme along with the dust.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!”

The sound was coming from the kitchen. Frowning, Liam walked through the parlor and quietly continued, skirting boxes and crates and statues, until he reached the kitchen.

He cast the flare of his flashlight toward the far wall even as a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the air.

It startled and unnerved him; even Bartholomew gasped.

“What the hell…?”

“Oh, my God! You’re alive, you’re real!”

The light illuminated three people—three young people.

Teenagers, as he had suspected.

They looked like little Key deer caught in the headlights, staring back at him with white faces and terrified stares.

“Yes, I’m alive,” Liam said irritably. “Who are you, and what are you doing here? You’re trespassing.”

There were two boys and one girl. It was the girl who worked her jaw and gasped out, “There are things in here! Things! Horrible things, shadow ghosts, they touch you…they try to kill you!”

She had been hunched in terror against the wall. She had a frying pan clutched in her hands. She was dressed in capri pants and a tank top that left her stomach, and her cute little belly-button ring, visible. She was as skinny as a twig, maybe fourteen.

The boys seemed to gain courage from her. They both stood as well, and were each about an inch shorter than she was. One of them held a copper dough roller. The other was clutching a deep dish pan. Strange weapons—gained from the racks that stretched out over the brick island in the center of the room. Liam was surprised that none of them had grabbed the fire poker.

“Sir! There’s something awful in here!” one of the boys said.

“Awful!” the other repeated.

“How did you get in here?” Liam asked.

“The door was open,” the girl said. She was shaking. “Please…please get us out of here. We’ll never come back, never!”

“You can take us to jail—it will be okay!” the boy with the roller clutched in his hands told him, his eyes still huge and panicked.

“Look, just stay here, and I’ll check out the place and—”

“No!” The wail came out of the three of them in a chorus.

Liam sighed. “Look, if the door was open, someone was in here ahead of you. I’ve got to find whoever it is and—”

“No, oh, God, oh, no! You can’t leave us here! Please?” the girl begged.

Liam pulled out his phone and called the station. Jack, on the desk, answered the phone.

“Get a car out to the Merlin place for me, will you, Jack? I’ve got some teenagers.”

“Sure. Are you arresting them?” Jack asked.

“No, I just want them taken home. But I think there’s still someone in the house. The lights are down. I need some backup.”

The three teens were still huddled in front of him. He hung up and asked their names. The girl was Jane Tracy, the boy with the roller was Hank Carlin and the last was Joshua Bell. They had just come in as a prank.

“You know, it’s like…it’s like a haunted house. Like at Disney World,” Hank said. “We just wanted to have some fun. We weren’t going to steal anything. Please, can we get out? It can kill you, too, Officer, you don’t know…it’s terrible!”

“The Addams family…the Munsters…,” Jane said. “We just wanted to see. They said he had all kinds of treasures…. Can we just get out?” she begged again.

He didn’t blame them. There was something creepy about the house. The hanging utensils cast strange
shadows in the glare of his flashlight, while a rocker by the fire seemed to move. Dust motes seemed like misted forms in the artificial light, as well.

“All right, come on.”

He turned, and the three came running up behind him like metal drawn to a magnet; he thought he’d trip, they were so tight against him.

Scared. They had scared themselves in the place. They’d wanted a spooky challenge; they had found one in the Merlin house.

They went out to the porch. Liam hoped the patrol car would hurry. If the door had been unlocked, someone else had gotten in. That someone might have provided the shadows and touches that had scared them so badly.

He wanted to find the trespasser before it was too late.

The three remained stuck to him like glue while they stood on the porch. “Hey!” he said. “You’ll be home in a few minutes. Look, there’s someone still in there. That person was trying to scare you out. But it’s a good lesson. No trespassing. It can be dangerous.”

“They weren’t just trying to scare us, and it wasn’t any person,” Jane said. “They wanted to kill us—they would have killed us. They were ghosts, evil spirits!”

“Jane, it’s just a house,” Liam said.

“Then the house wanted to kill us.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

“Because we heard it!” she whispered. “We all heard it! It was horrible, a horrible whisper in the darkness saying, ‘You’re going to die. I’m going to kill you.’”

“And he was there,” Joshua said gravely. “I saw him. I saw old man Merlin. His eyes were burning in the darkness. I felt him, felt him put his hands around my throat.”

“He shoved me,” Jane said.

Just then the patrol car arrived and Art Saunders and Ricky Long emerged. “Art, get these three home,” Liam instructed. “Ricky, come with me. Lights are out, and I want to search the place.”

“Yessir,” Art called. “You three, get your little juvenile-delinquent butts into the car,” he said to the kids.

Ricky Long had been with the department about three years. He was a good cop. He’d seen some bad things in his brief stint.

He looked sick as he walked toward the house.

“You want me to search it with you, sir?” he asked.

“Ricky, it’s a house. If there’s something in it, it’s flesh and blood. Yes, we’re supposed to guard lives and personal property. I’ll take the upstairs, you take the downstairs.”

Ricky nodded slowly.

Liam left him to search through the ground floor. Upstairs, he went methodically from room to room, aware that Bartholomew was at his back.

“I don’t like this place,” Bartholomew whispered.

Liam stopped. “Bartholomew, you are a ghost.”

“I still don’t like this place. There is something here. Remnants of evil and pain. Maybe it’s in all this creepy stuff. Mummies, coffins, shrunken skulls. Evil spirits, the memories of pain and sacrifice and human suffering. Miasma on the air. Let’s get this done and get out.”

“Bartholomew, someone human was in here. Doors don’t unlock themselves.”

“What if evil spirits unlock them to lure in the innocent?” Bartholomew asked. “I may be a ghost, but we both know that evil isn’t something that dies easily.”

Liam wondered if Kelsey Donovan was going to have Joe Richter sell the place for her, or if she’d come to Key West herself. He’d have to ask Richter. If Kelsey was going to come down and move back into the house, he had to stop whatever the hell was going on.

“Cutter Merlin wasn’t an evil man,” he said.

Bartholomew sniffed, sidestepping a huge stone gargoyle probably procured from a medieval church somewhere in Europe.

The gargoyle’s huge shoulders hunched and the eyes seemed to stare at them with malice.

“They say he practiced black magic!” Bartholomew told him.

“People make up whatever they wish regarding an old hermit,” Liam said sadly.

“He was some kind of a wizard. Or a witch, maybe. Men can be witches, right? Yeah, that’s right. They hanged men as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. And in Europe, too,” Bartholomew said.

“They hanged a bunch of innocent people caught up in hysteria or a land grab,” Liam said firmly.

As he did so, he heard a scream again. Male this time, hoarse and curt…and somehow just as bloodcurdling as the first he had heard that evening.

The sound came again, a scream of abject terror.

Then, it was broken off. Midstream, as if the screamer had…

As if the screamer’s throat had been slit.

Ricky. Ricky Long, screaming from the ground floor….

And then—not.

Liam forgot Bartholomew and the idiotic imaginations of the masses and went tearing down the stairs.

L
iam’s call had opened the door to the past.

Odd—that was actually what she had done in her mind, she realized. Closed a door. And as if that door had been real and tangible, she had set her hand on the knob and turned it.

Cutter Merlin, her mother’s father, had been so many things. He had doctorates in history and archaeology, and he had been the best storyteller she had ever known. His beautiful old house in Key West had been like a treasure trove, filled with
things,
and each thing had offered a story. She had loved growing up with the exotic. While her friends could be easily scared, she loved the idea that she lived with a real Egyptian mummy. At campfires she had told great tales herself, describing how she had awakened once to find the mummy standing over her…reaching out for her.

It had been great. The others had squealed with fear and delight.

Except for Liam, of course. She could remember the way he would scoff at her stories. He was two years older than she was, but in their small community they often
wound up at the same extracurricular events, and even when they were in grade school, they had battled.

“Yeah, sure!” Liam said, mocking her story. “Like the mummy really got up. The mummy is old and dead and rotten, and if you let me in the house, I’ll prove it!” he would say.

“Ask my grandfather!” she’d dared him.

“I’ll be happy to,” he’d assured her. But he never did. He didn’t want to prove his words, because her stories made her popular.

And they were good stories, of course.

He’d been so elusive; that little bit older, somehow, even for a boy, more mature.

And sometimes, when they were grouped together out on the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor, she told stories that were true about the aboriginal tribes her grand father had known, getting a little bit dramatic by adding the fact that Cutter had barely escaped with his life—and his own head.

Liam listened, rolling his eyes at her embellishments.

She had been tall, since girls did tend to grow faster than boys. But Liam had grown quickly, too, and by the time they had reached their early teens, he had stood at least an inch over her, and when she would talk, he would lean against a doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, that amused and disbelieving look on his face.

But when her mother had died, he had been like the Rock of Gibraltar, telling her to go ahead and break down when she had tried so hard not to cry in public, and he had held her while she had sobbed for an hour.
He had been her strength that night, smoothing her hair back, just being there, never saying that it was all right that her mother was dead, just saying that it was all right to cry.

And then…

Then she hadn’t seen him again. Her father took her away from Key West, hurriedly, one night. She had left most of her belongings, taking only one suitcase, because her father had been in such a rush.

She’d told no one goodbye.

And no matter how real her life in Key West had been, everything about it had faded away. She had enrolled in a California school. She had acquired new friends. She had played volleyball in the sand, and she had finally learned to surf in cold water. Everything in their apartment was brand-new, and her father never even watched old movies.

There had only been one time when she had asked him about Cutter. She had never called him grandfather, grandpa, or even gramps—he had always been Cutter to everyone. And so she had asked her father, “Do you hate Cutter, Dad? Do you think that he hurt Mom somehow?”

He had hesitated, but then shook his head strenuously. “No, no. Cutter is a good man. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different, ever.”

“Then why did we run away from him?” she’d asked.

“Because bad things can follow a good man, and that’s that, and please, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

And that had been it.

Key West had faded away, like a scene out of a movie, one she had seen long ago. Until her father was dying, and he had talked about Cutter again.

Cutter wasn’t
safe.

She’d loved him. She thought about it now, and she knew that she had really loved him. He’d had such a wonderful sense of adventure. His eyes had been brilliant while he’d described the pyramids in Egypt and the temples in ancient Greece. He talked about places like the Vatican, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame with great awe. He’d talked about the catacombs in Paris, and about marvelous, creepy grottos in Sicily.

His talent as a storyteller had been amazing. And, of course, he’d turned her into one, she thought. No one had ever really known when Cutter was telling the truth—and when he was spinning a very tall tale.

She called Joe Richter, the attorney, to let him know that she would come in person, and then she called Avery Slater, her creative partner, to let him know that she was leaving and why. And naturally, Avery appeared at her door within twenty minutes.

He was seriously one of the most beautiful people she had ever seen, and she used his image for one of her characters, Talon, an angel who had come to live among men. Avery was tall, and he spent his free time at the gym, so he was lean and muscled, as well. He had luxurious, thick, almost black hair, his eyes were chestnut and his features might have adorned a Greek statue. He was a skilled animator, her partner and one of her best friends. She knew that people often thought they were a
romantic pair, but Avery was gay, not in the closet in the least, but someone who was very private as well, unless he was among close friends.

He burst into her home with the ease of a best friend, heading straight into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and finding the chardonnay. He poured himself a glass, didn’t offer her one and swallowed it down as if it were water, staring at her all the while.

“You can’t just up and go to Key West,” he told her, setting his glass down firmly on the counter.

“I’m not moving to Key West, I’m just going down for a few weeks. My grandfather died,” she said.

“Yes, yes, you told me that. But you weren’t close—you hadn’t seen him in years,” Avery reminded her.

“I owe him a decent burial,” she said.

“Send money,” he said. He frowned. “Oh, wait—will you inherit money? A lot of it?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe. He had a number of artifacts, but I knew, even as a kid, that he’d willed a lot of his things to various museums.”

Thoughtfully, Avery nodded. “Yes, yes, a will. Of course. There you go. There’s no need for you to go to Key West.”

“Yes, there is.”

“An attorney can arrange for a funeral.”

“Avery, he was my grandfather.”

“But we have work to do!” he said.

“Avery, I will bring my computer. And my scanner. And I will send you the strips, and you will set them up for animation. It will all be fine. Seriously. We’re ahead.”

“You can never be ahead in this business. We have to keep the Web stuff going daily—that’s the only way to really acquire an audience. The bigger we get on the Web, the more the advertisers will pay,” he reminded her.

“I have to go.”

He frowned. “I don’t think you should go.”

“Why?”

“I’m seeing a guy who reads tarot cards,” he told her.

“Okay…?”

“He warned me that a friend would want to go on a dangerous journey,” Avery said, his expression somber and grave. “It’s dangerous.”

“The danger is in getting a serious sunburn,” she said. “Avery, I lived there, remember?”

“And your mother died there, remember?”

She felt a chill, and it was almost as if she knew the words would haunt her later.

“You can take me to the airport, if you want,” she told him.

He sighed deeply. “You’re going to go no matter what I say, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

He came over to her and drew her into his arms, hugging her tightly. She was touched by the gesture; she had thought that he didn’t want her going because he was so ambitious, and he liked to work together, with her at his beck and call whenever he had an idea.

But he seemed genuinely concerned.

She drew away from him. He was so gorgeous.

“It’s okay. I’ll see to the house and his things. I owe Cutter that much. And I want to have a funeral for him. Then I’ll be back. It will all be fine. Really,” she assured him.

“No. That’s not what will happen. You’ll go home, you’ll see old friends. You won’t want to come back here.”

“I left as a teenager. My life is here,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

He wagged a finger at her. “If you’re not back immediately, I’ll be down there to get you. I’ll take care of you. And if there’s anything bad, well…I’m psychic, you know.”

She laughed. “No, I didn’t know. But by all means. Key West is beautiful. Come on down.”

He sniffed.

At last he left, still offering dire warnings to her.

She needed to pack, but she wandered out to the porch and gazed at the pool she shared with the others who lived in the group of old bungalows. She stared at the water.

Cold water. Even heated, it was still cold, in her mind.

Key West had warm water. Beautiful, warm water.

A sudden scream startled her and brought her back inside. She had a habit of keeping the television on for company. One of the movie channels was running an all-day marathon of classic horror movies.

Someone was running from a werewolf.

She smiled and sat, and then stretched out on her sofa, watching the television. As she did so, her eyes
grew heavy. A nap would be great; she had tossed and turned through the night.

As she felt herself nodding off, she thought about fighting sleep.

She knew that she would dream.

It seemed that a scene from a movie was unfolding. The house was distant at first, sitting on its little spit of land. The water around it was aqua and beautiful, as it could only be around Florida and the Caribbean.

But then dark clouds covered the soft blue of the sky, and the ocean became black, as if it were a vast pit of tar.

The camera lens within her dreaming eye came closer and closer, and the old Victorian with its gingerbread façade came clearer to her view. She heard a creaking sound and saw the door was open, that the wind was playing havoc with the hinges.

She was in the house again, and she heard the screams and the wailing, and she saw her father, as she had seen him that day, holding her mother, the sound of his grief terrible. She ran toward him, screaming herself, calling for her mother.

Then Cutter himself came running down the stairs, crying out in horror. He sank down and she felt herself freeze, just standing there as she had on that day.

Then her mother and father and Cutter all faded to mist, and she stood in the empty house, alone. There were boxes and objects, spiderwebs and dust, and there was something else in the house as well, something that seemed like a small black shadow, and then seemed to
grow…dark, stygian, filling the house with some kind of evil.

The mummy rose from its sarcophagus and stared at her with rotted and empty eyes. It pointed at the black shadow, and its voice was as dry and brittle as death as it warned, “The house must have you. It’s up to you. Now you—you must come, and you must stop it from growing, from escaping. It’s loose, you see, the evil is on the loose, and it’s growing.”

The mummy wasn’t real. The mummy was dead. Liam had said so.

Terror filled her. She heard her name called. She turned. Liam was there, a tall, lanky teenager, reaching out to her. “Come here, come to me, it isn’t real, the mummy is dead, it’s in your imagination, in all the stories. Don’t believe in it, Kelsey—take my hand.”

There seemed to be a terrible roar. She turned, and the mummy was a swirling pile of darkness, a shadow, and the darkness was threatening to consume her.

Kelsey awoke with a start. She was in her charming living room, in her charming bungalow apartment, and she had fallen asleep with the television on.

And the movie channel she watched was showing Boris Karloff in
The Mummy.

She laughed aloud at herself, turned off the TV, and decided that she was going to get things done, batten down the house, pack so she could leave in the morning, and then get a good night’s sleep. She wasn’t a coward; she had spent her childhood with Cutter, and really, she had to have some kind of sense of adventure.

I owe you, Cutter! I’m so sorry. I should have
come to see you. I never should have let you die alone like that.

Please forgive me.

She wasn’t afraid.

The house was just a house.

And Cutter’s mummy was just preserved flesh that could now find a good home in a museum. Everything in perspective.

Cutter himself needed to rest at last, in peace.

She would see to it.

Liam shouted the officer’s name. “Ricky!”

There was no answer. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, however, he saw him on the floor, caught in the glow of light from his own fallen flashlight.

“Ricky!”

He rushed over to the man. Hunching down, he called for backup and an ambulance. He instantly checked for Ricky’s pulse, and was relieved to find that it was beating steadily.

Ricky groaned, and moved.

“Lie still. Where are you hurt? What happened?”

There was no sign of blood anywhere near Ricky.

As Liam spoke, Ricky opened his eyes, staring at Liam for a moment and then jerking around in panic. He stared across the room in the darkness. Liam aimed his flashlight beam in the area that seemed to be causing Ricky so much fear.

His light fell upon a suit of armor.

Ricky let out a scream, trying to choke it back.

“Ricky,” Liam said evenly, “it’s a suit of armor. Probably real, historic and worth a mint.”

“It moved!” Ricky declared.

Liam walked toward the armor. It was just that. Metal. It was buckled together by leather straps that had been made to replace the originals. They were probably period, but not historic.

The metal display stand was not on rollers. It hadn’t moved.