Texas Gothic (25 page)

“What are you talking about, Mom? I didn’t volunteer for this.”

Her voice cut in and out, and when she came through clearly again, she was speaking as if she hadn’t heard me.

“Funny, I suspected your talent might be spirit related, because of—”

She cut out again.

“Because of what, Mom?” I yelled at the phone on the console, as if that would make a difference in reception. “If I’d volunteered for this, I could get rid of this ghost, right? Mom?”

“Yes, dear?” And she was back.

“Did you hear what I said? I’m losing the connection in the hills.”

“Are you on the road?”

“Yes. I must be going through a dead spot.” Wow. There was a poor choice of words. “I’d better go.”

“Amaryllis Goodnight! You’re not talking while you’re driving, are you?”

“I’m on speaker—” A hiss of static cut off the conversation. I glanced at the phone, saw the call had dropped, and when I looked up, there was a man in the middle of the road.

I slammed on the brakes. Stella struggled to grip the pavement and I clutched the wheel, bracing myself for something horrible, every muscle tensed as if I could
will
the car to stop in time.

Please, God, stop in time
.

A squeal of tires and an explosion of static from the radio. Then everything went quiet, and dark, and I was stopped in the middle of the two-lane highway, surrounded by mountains and fences, with nothing ahead of me but more road, a long strip of winding yellow line, and no one in sight.

“What. The. Hell.”

I stared at the spot where I would swear—where I would bet my
life
if I hadn’t managed to control Stella’s swerve—someone had been standing just an instant before.

Nothing.

Fear crept up my spine with sharp, cold feet. When I say nothing, I mean
nothing
. There was no man, there were no other cars, not even a distant house or barn light. I was completely alone.

What, exactly,
had
I seen? A flash. A figure in the headlights,
man-shaped, standing straight, arms to his sides. I had no memory of what he looked like. It was just an impression, a pillar of a person. A shade.

I pried my fingers from the wheel and flicked on the hazard lights. The thought of leaving my car, my bubble of safety, even if it was just an illusion, spurred my racing heart. It hammered in my ears as I climbed out and searched either side of the highway. The contrast from the headlights to the dark was too great for me to see much, but if someone had run off to one of the shoulders, I would know it.

Nothing.

Sagging, weak-kneed, against Stella’s hood, I rubbed my trembling hands on my pants to get the feeling back into them. I was being foolish to react now to something that hadn’t happened. But I had a good imagination and could hear the thud in my head, of a body hitting the hood, the crack of bone against windshield.

I felt like I’d been pranked. This ghost was starting to really piss me off.

With a surge of anger, I jumped to my feet and I shouted at the empty road, “What do you want?” Then I spun and called to the limestone hills, “I’m
busca
-ing for you, you stupid ghost. What more do you want?”

Only silence answered.

The ghost wanted me to stop. I was stopped. I remembered the EVP, and though I’m sure Phin would be ready with a digital voice recorder, all I had was my phone. Maybe the voice-note app would work.

Before I could get it from the car, I heard a strange, deep
whump
.

I knew that subwoofer sound. It was soft and distant, but not as distant as when I heard it at the farm, or at the dig site.

I caught a flicker of light in the darkness past the fence that ran along the highway. There was a gate about a hundred feet from me, and the sign told me I was in the middle of McCulloch land, but the twists of the road made it hard to know
exactly
where. Which probably made what I was about to do even more stupid.

There was something out in that pasture, and I was going to follow it, and I was going to
find
it. Ghost, mystery, Mad Monk … I was hell-bent on putting them all to rest.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I got in the car and drove closer to the gate, pulling off the road and into the weeds on the shoulder. Then I grabbed my phone and my flashlight and clambered over the gate.

I was doing exactly what I’d sworn never to do again. I was chasing ghosts into the darkness. But my determination was stronger than my fear.

The deep sound didn’t repeat, but I could hear a throaty rumbling. The hills made it impossible to localize. I left my flashlight off and picked my way down the white caliche road until my eyes adjusted to the moonlight. Something
big
moved in the shadows to my right, scaring my heart into my throat—until I heard rhythmic chewing. A cow.

The cows had been cleared from around the dig site, so I was in a different section of the ranch. I thought the looming bluff in front of me might be the big granite outcropping that Mrs. McCulloch had pointed to at lunch, which helped me get my bearings.

The light I’d seen from the road winked out. I fixed the
point where it had disappeared in my mind and, trusting my night vision, set off at a slow jog across the pasture. At first I kept to the packed-down cattle trails, but when it became too difficult to keep on target, I abandoned the path for the more uneven ground.

The hill was a black shadow against the charcoal of the sky, and as I neared it, I heard an intermittent rumble. It took me a moment to identify the sound as a diesel truck engine, coming toward me.

Coming
right
toward me, I realized with a start. The bounce of its shocks, the crunch of rock and dirt under big tires, but no headlights. Who drove over this terrain in the dark with no headlights? There were ravines and ditches and cows and girls with more determination than sense out in these hills.

In those heartbeats of frozen confusion, I couldn’t think of a single person who wouldn’t be extremely annoyed to see me. But I also couldn’t think of any good reason for someone to be driving without lights. I mean, no reason that wasn’t sneaky and dangerous. I didn’t want to be caught there by anyone, but especially someone who didn’t want to be caught there, either.

For another second I danced indecisively from foot to foot, then spotted a rocky outcropping like a gift from heaven. I ran for it and rolled into the concealment of shadow beneath it.

Only it wasn’t a shadow. It was a hole.

And I was falling.

I slid down an almost vertical slope, sharp rocks tearing my shirt and scraping my back, but slowing my descent.
Before I had time to let out more than a startled screech and pained yelp, I landed on something soft and yielding and
really
foul.

My flashlight clattered down beside me and hit with a squish.

The blackness was so profound it hurt my eyes. From overhead I heard the faint rustle of leathery wings in the keen, cutting silence that followed my landing.

I took stock of the mess I’d gotten myself into. On one hand, I was bumped and bruised and scraped, but when I tested arms and elbows and knees, they all still worked.

On the other, I was trapped at the bottom of a sinkhole, and my neck had just been saved by a ginormous pile of bat guano.

I was well and truly in the shit.

i
felt around for my flashlight, promising myself that when I got out of this—
however
I got out of this—I would indulge in an almighty freak-out about the fact that I was covered in bat crap. But for now I’d be thankful it had broken my fall.

Turning on the light helped. Knowing your situation, even when it sucked, was better than not. I was in a cave of reasonable size. One section seemed to go deeper into the ground, though I couldn’t tell how far because stalactites—or stalagmites, I could never remember which—blocked my view. I was not at all inclined to investigate, because that
would mean crawling on my belly into places where neurotic control freaks were never meant to go.

In central Texas, school field trips to the big tourist caves are a requisite. Inner Space, Natural Bridge, Longhorn Caverns … limestone caves riddle the hills—big, little; dry, active; open, closed—and I knew from helpful docents—not just from Ben McCulloch—that sinkholes
do
open up now and then.

This one, judging by the pile of guano, had been there for a while. It only
felt
as though I’d been swallowed by the earth. Really I had just, literally, leapt before I looked.

The slope I’d slid down was way too steep to climb. The mouth of the cave was a flat oval with an overhang, ten feet or so above my reaching fingers. A few fluttering black shapes clung to it; it was probably solid with bats during the daytime.

I had nothing against bats. They ate bugs and were good for the ecology. I just didn’t want to be there when they got back.

Get a grip, Amy. You’re going to get out of here. It’s a bat cave, not the Grand Canyon
.

And this wasn’t the Dark Ages, either. The solution, once I’d calmed down, was simple. I wiped my hands on a tiny clean spot on my shirt and fished my phone from my pocket with two fingers. There was not enough Purell in the world to make me happy just then.

Phin did not answer her phone.

“Dammit, Phin!” My shout scared the last of the bats away.

Habitually not answering her phone was annoying. Ignoring
it while we were in the middle of a mystery was infuriating. Shouldn’t she be getting the heebie-jeebies about now?

I thumbed through my recent connections, hoping I’d phoned Mark or vice versa. But there was only one recent call that didn’t have a name attached to it, and I knew exactly who it was.

Would I rather die a slow, lingering death and be found by archaeologists someday, buried in petrified bat crap? Was that seriously worse than calling Ben McCulloch for help?

I swallowed my pride and hit “dial.” He answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

That pride stuck in my craw when I remembered he was on a date with Caitlin. My night just kept getting worse.

“Hello?” he repeated. “Amy, is that you?”

“Yes.” Where to begin? “I don’t suppose you have a rope in your truck.”

“A rope? What kind of rope?”

“About fifteen feet long? Strong enough to hold, um—” I rounded up generously for safety. “—a hundred and twenty-five pounds?”

Over the phone, I heard a car door opening and closing with a slam. “Stop being coy. Where are you?”

I leaned my head against the stone wall. “Other than down a very deep hole, I don’t really know.”

After a pause—I didn’t even try to interpret it, because I was miserable enough—he said, “Does that phone have GPS on it?”

“Yeah. I think so. It finds the nearest Starbucks for me, so it must, right?”

Another pause, and this one I
could
interpret. “I can’t believe your aunt said you were her smartest niece.”

“She must have been talking about Phin.”

“God help your family, then.” I heard the gruff growl of his truck starting up. “Hang up, then find your position with your phone. You should be able to send it to me in a text, and I’ll put the coordinates into the GPS in my pickup.”

“I can do that.”

“Of course you can. It’s not rocket science.”

I decided to forgive him for being a jackass, because the spark of annoyance warmed my insides, which had gone cold with worry. “I’m in town,” he said, “but I’ll be there soon. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Only my delicate sensibilities.”

I must not have sounded as resilient as I intended, because his reply was firmly reassuring. “Just sit tight, Amy. It’ll be all right.”

I accepted his word for it and tried not to think about snakes. Or rabies. Or suffocating from the methane fumes from the guano.

After sending him my location, I turned off the flashlight to save the battery. It was very, very dark, with the overhang blocking out any stars or moonlight. The damp crept into my skin and made my tired joints ache.

I closed my eyes to pretend I wasn’t down a deep, black hole. It was a horrible feeling to just … sit there. Waiting on help. Maybe this control-freak thing wasn’t working out for me as well as I thought. Especially since I had lost so much control over my life.

Time stretched interminably, then snapped back as the
sound of tires on rocky ground and the rumbling chug of a diesel pickup truck shook me out of self-pity. Ben must not have been very far away. He may not have liked me, but I never doubted he would come for me.

I opened my eyes and reached for my flashlight to signal him, but something jolted my hand. The unseen force knocked the light from my fingers, and it clanged against the rock.

Heart slamming against my ribs, I swung around, putting my back to the wall so nothing could sneak up on me in the pitch dark.

Only it wasn’t pitch dark anymore. The inky blackness lightened until I could see the shadow of my hand in front of me. Then the shape of my fingers, then the lines of my palm, bathed in a cold glow that was the color of moonlight where moonlight couldn’t reach.

A faint breeze, like a frigid breath on the back of my neck, stirred my hair. I could smell leather and metal and damp stone as the cave floor pooled with icy fog, cold creeping up from the earth.

The air, as always, stung my throat and lungs, and I took shallow breaths, even though fear said to grab deep gasps so I could fight, or run.

Where could I run? The specter gathered in front of me, mist and light pulled together. I wanted to change what happened next, but I couldn’t look away from its dark eyes and gasping mouth. He raised his arm, grasping, and the cold rooted at my heart spread through me like a vine of ice choking off my air.

One thing was different. Nonsense sounds wove through
the blood rushing in my ears. They grew louder and louder in my skull, ricocheting around like bell peals in a church tower. I stumbled, fell back against the cave wall with a grunt, pushing out the last of my breath.