Nightmare (22 page)

"A specific thing or place-like the earth," I said, my voice
barely above a whisper.

"The third part of the symbol?" asked Derek.

My thoughts were spinning fast now, my heart pounding
like mad, and my mouth barely able to keep up with what I was
thinking. I faced Derek and tried to pretend Dr. Eccleston wasn't
there. "All right, okay-what if ... listen, I know how this sounds,
but just think about it ... let's say for a second that somebody,
through, I don't know, some kind of advanced technology or something, found a way to extract a soul from a human being?
The third symbol stands for distillation or separation, right?
What if the combined symbol stands for a process of physically
separating a soul from its body? And then binding that soul to
the earth."

Derek stood silent, dread filling his eyes.

I nodded slowly, my eyes big and fearful. "A disembodied
soul."

Derek shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs. "You're
saying that someone out there did this on purpose. To Jordin
and maybe Carrie? And they could be doing it to more people
right now?"

I wasn't sure I was ready to commit to endorsing this altogether, because it sounded ludicrous. But it fit the facts. So I
took a deep breath and said it out loud.

"What if somebody's found a way to create a ghost?"

It was getting late, and our heads were dizzy with many
thoughts of what all of this could mean. More than likely, it was
just nonsense, so we agreed to turn in for the night and consider
it all again with fresh perspectives. But before parting ways, we
decided that our next avenue of investigation had to be finding
Jordin's journal.

"I've looked everywhere," Derek told me. "Her dorm room, her
condo downtown. Everywhere she normally hangs out. No one's
seen it. You suppose it could still be somewhere up in Martha's
Vineyard, since that's where she disappeared from?"

I nodded, thinking. "Maybe we should take a ride up there.
Do you know where Jordin and her friends were staying?"

"Jordin owns a vacation home up there," said Derek.

"Of course she does," I said wistfully.

Going there ourselves might be the only way we would ever
discover what path had led her to wherever she now was-or
whatever she had now become.

I still don't think Derek believed me about that, even after
all that'd happened. I decided to put it aside until tomorrow as
I crashed in a sleeping bag in my old roommate Jill's room for
the night.

I wasn't asleep yet when my phone vibrated, thanks to a very
unexpected caller.

"You said in your email that you have a friend among the
missing students," said Boston Herald reporter Pierre Ravenwood,
playing it cool and turning his paper coffee cup slowly in his
hands as he talked.

In the rush of hearing from Jordin, I'd forgotten to expect
his call. He'd made his way down from Boston and we arranged
to meet in a popular coffeehouse just off campus. It was almost
midnight, so the place was packed with students in need of a
caffeine fix for study purposes, but we located a tiny table off to
one side in the crowded room and spoke in hushed voices.

I had arrived first, but Pierre followed in less than five minutes. He was on the short side, with dark, straight hair that he
wore a little longer on top than was currently in style. But he had
on designer jeans, a crisp button-up shirt, and black sunglasses
with lenses that were nearly clear inside the building.

I could see from the way he carried himself that Pierre was
going to keep his cards close.

"At the time, I did," I replied. "Now I know two."

"Two," he repeated.

I nodded. "And I know for a fact that both of them experienced something very, very odd shortly before they vanished."

Pierre shifted forward in his seat a hair. "How odd?"

"Odd enough to defy conventional explanation," I told him.
"I even have photographic evidence."

He took a moment to absorb this, and I saw a multitude of
thoughts whiz through his brain. He pierced me with his dark
eyes and said, "I'd like to see this evidence."

I interlaced my fingers and placed them on the table. "Tell
me what you know. About the disappearances. And about Durham Holdings. And I'll give you the exclusive-including my
photo."

I expected an argument, but he merely leaned back in his
seat and considered my terms, not changing his facial expression a single tic.

There was something about watching him think that I found
captivating. Everything about him seemed so even-keeled, confident, thoughtful. I wondered if he ever played poker.

He displayed several qualities I admired, and ...

Well...

He was kinda cute.

"How old are you?" I asked, not caring about how brazen the
question might come across.

"How old are you?" he fired back without missing a beat.

"Twenty-one," I replied.

"You look older," he noted, and I couldn't tell whether he
was intentionally trying to provoke me or if he was just socially
inept. "I'm twenty-six."

"Hmm, an older man," I remarked before I could stop
myself.

I should probably interject here that whenever I meet a guy
I like, I have a tendency to be a little too forward.

Okay, more than a little.

I was about to ask him if he was currently seeing anyone when
he reeled the conversation back in, having decided to accept my
terms.

"The disappearances have been going on for more than a
year," he said. "The rate at which it happened started very slow,
with just one or two students vanishing from a couple of colleges in a single state over three months' time. But it built and
according to my research there's over three hundred students
unaccounted for. Not very many from one place, but the total is
frightening. I don't know if I was the first to pick up on it, but I
was the first to write about it."

"Why isn't this all over the news? There should be Amber
alerts and all that."

"Well," he said, leaning forward again and growing a teensy
bit more animated, "whoever's doing this knows how to be discreet. Every person that's vanished has had a good reason for
not drawing a lot of attention to their absence. Many of them
are young people who are estranged from their parents for one
reason or another. Others have no immediate family to miss
them. Sometimes they even go to the trouble of leaving notes
behind for roommates and friends to find, claiming the `need to
get away' and `find themselves' and so on."

I let out a long breath as I considered this. I knew how the
stresses of college life could get to people; I saw it every day. It wasn't inconceivable that someone out there could be taking
advantage of that.

"So how did DHI fall onto your radar?" I asked.

He threw me a dark, threatening look, a nonverbal communique that he'd find a way to chop my head off if I repeated to
anyone what he was about to say. "I have an inside source. A few
days after I published my story, I started getting anonymous
emails from someone claiming to work at DHI's corporate offices
in Copenhagen. I doubted its veracity, of course, but over time,
this person convinced me that they were legit. But DHI's security
makes Fort Knox look like a day care-this company is not just
vigilant, they're paranoid in every sense of the word-so my source
has to be very, very careful.

"I still don't know anything about him or who he is. I don't
know if he is a he. But I know they're scared out of their minds by
something that's going on inside the company. And that something is directly related to the disappearances, or so this person's
told me. Meanwhile, DHI is impenetrable. I can't even get them
on the phone, and my editor thinks I'm getting paranoid, so
she won't pay for a flight to Denmark. I've been trying to hire
some locals in Copenhagen to do some snooping around for
me, but so far I can't find anyone willing to go anywhere near
these people.

"Now. I've been more than generous in what I've told youmostly because I'm at a dead end and in desperate need of something to justify continuing this line of pursuit to my editor. So
if you can connect these dots for me, let's hear it."

"The connection," I replied, "is Ghost Town."

"That amusement park?"

"Yes. I don't know how, but Ghost Town is at the heart of
all of this."

From there, I told him what I knew, leaving out the heaviest
paranormal bits because he didn't seem the type to swallow it. I
told him about Jordin and what we knew of the circumstances
surrounding her disappearance. And I told him about Carrie Morris, and how she'd vanished from Columbia literally overnight.

Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket, I said, "I don't know
if I can connect every one of those dots for you, but I can show
you what one of them looks like." I handed him the phone, which
had the picture of the symbol on its screen.

"What is that?" he asked, taking the phone and examining
the image up close from behind his heavy-rimmed rectangular
glasses.

"It appeared on Carrie Morris's neck the morning before she
disappeared."

He looked up at me with a strange expression, like he was
trying to figure out if I was putting him on.

"There's more," I said. "A lot more. I think I know what DHI
is up to, and I have a pretty good idea of what's become of all
those missing students."

He eyed me carefully. "And what's that information going
to cost me?"

"A willingness to believe in the impossible," I replied.

By the time our meeting ended, I couldn't tell if Pierre was
humoring me or if he was simply dazed at such an outlandish hypothesis. Either way, I knew I'd given him a lot to think
about.

As I walked through the brisk New York night, my thoughts
returned to Dr. Eccleston's discovery and our theory about what
was behind all this. Manufacturing ghosts? Were Derek and I grasping at the implausible just because we were desperate to solve
this mystery?

To my great relief, it occurred to me that Dr. Eccleston had
shown no interest in my and Derek's possibly crazed musings
on the mechanics of fashioning a ghost. He'd heard everything
we'd said, of course, but remained far more interested in the
origins of the combined symbol, and promised to let us know if
he discovered anything more about it.

I returned to Jill's room and passed out almost the second
my head hit the pillow.