The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed)
Read The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) Online
Authors: Evan Ronan
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Eddie McCloskey is a survivor. But the scars from his last big case run deep, slowly driving him mad.
Detective Sumiko Christie has her work cut out for her. Before the two victims died, they both reported seeing a ghost. And it gets stranger.
Both victims died from
fear.
Christie is no expert in the paranormal. Eddie isn’t ready for a case this dangerous.
But they have no choice. The ghost they’re trying to find is the rarest of the rare.
It’s a traveler.
And it’s going to kill more people. Unless Eddie and Christie can stop it.
The Traveler
is the fifth entry in Evan Ronan’s
The Unearthed
paranormal thriller series. It is approximately 85,000 words long.
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…the traveler
evan ronan
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Ghosts aren’t real, but they’re everywhere.”
-unknown
The man had argued with the ghost about when to strike. He urged the ghost to wait until 3:00AM, but the ghost insisted on 1:00AM. Eventually the man relented, because what choice did he have?
None.
He parked elsewhere in the development in a general lot close but not next to a couple other vehicles. He shut the door quietly and didn’t bother locking the car. There was nothing of value in it and in the event he needed to flee quickly, he didn’t want a lock standing between him and escape. Out of his bag he took the fake license plate. It was a bad fake but it would hold up to a cursory glance. Somebody walking a dog or out late for whatever reason would see it from afar and not think twice.
The man was already taking enough chances in this insane plan. The license plate made things marginally safer.
Kneeling like he was tying his shoes, the man put duct tape on the back of the fake and secured it on top of the real plate.
When he stood again, the ghost was there.
They were completely exposed in the lot. Townhouses sat across the street. Anyone casually glancing out a window would see him and the ghost. At first their brain would not register what they were seeing. But they would keep looking. And soon they would realize. Their lizard brain would translate the creepy-crawly feeling on their skin into rational thought.
That is a ghost.
They would scream. Call for their significant other. Reach for the phone to call someone or take a picture. To capture this
whatever it was.
They would see
him
too
.
The police would get involved. There was no one else to get involved, really. Then he would be forced to answer questions, about what he was doing in this parking lot, in this development that was nowhere near home, at one o’clock in the morning. They would ask him what he had in his bag. They would…
He wanted to whisper, but instead raised his voice. “NOT YET!”
The ghost’s face twisted into something unimaginably horrifying. Over time its power had grown. At first, it had only been able to appear fleetingly. He could barely feel its presence. As the days turned into weeks though it visited with more frequency, its stays growing longer in duration.
And intensity.
It was the dark energy. Some quack online had described what he was feeling and used the term and it had seemed appropriate to him. Had stuck in his mind.
Dark energy.
It was a darkness that reminded him of a black hole: it only took and never gave. The ghost haunted him in his waking hours, literally and figuratively. He began taking sleeping pills to escape the tortures of his waking hours.
Then the nightmares started.
Sleep was no longer an escape. The nightmares came when he was asleep and then they came to him during the day.
He didn’t know how it happened but he knew one thing with absolute certainty. The ghost sent these terrible thoughts to his mind, forcing him to mentally live out his greatest fears. Over and over.
He’d come close to dying from the last one. Nightmares ended because you could wake up from them. But what happened when you couldn’t?
“Not yet!” he snapped again.
He felt a lurch. It reminded him of a car running out of gasoline. How it sputtered along till it finally died. Energy seeping out of him.
The ghost was drawing it from him.
He knew what was going to happen next and shut his eyes, hoping to keep the bad thoughts out of his head.
But the visions came.
“No, please…no…”
The ghost hissed in that soundless way. It opened its mouth, but he knew what he heard was only in his mind.
“If someone sees us…”
The ghost hissed again. But only in his mind.
“Okay, please stop, let’s go…”
The sharp pain in his chest dulled as the ghost loosened its grip on him. He felt his legs getting stronger, his energy coming back to him.
“Thank you,” he said.
***
Louis Stahl was still awake. He’d gone out to chase tail tonight at a pub across town. It was an old bar but new to him as he’d never been, so it provided opportunities.
Normally he scored everywhere. Stahl was an attractive, powerfully-built man with a good head of hair, a disarming smile, and an easy carefree manner that was the perfect cover for his obsessive nature.
He loved women. He was addicted to them. They were better than booze, better than any drug he’d ever tried or thought of trying, better than anything.
The best part?
They loved him.
At least, until they got to know him. But what did that matter? They didn’t love him at last sight, but they loved him at first sight. The combination of his characteristics conspired to make most women interested, even intrigued, by him. His body got their attention, his mind captivated them, and his public persona—the mask he wore—won them. Over the years he’d lost count but knew his tally had to be in the hundreds. And at thirty-one he showed no sign of slowing down.
But tonight had proven that rare disappointment.
He’d thrown the look at a couple of women in their mid-twenties after picking up on their vibe. Money was no object to him in general and certainly no object when it came to his greatest joy in life. Their drinks were mostly gone, so he’d made the classy move and sent a couple more their way.
They’d raised their new drinks to thank him and he took that as his opportunity to slide a few bar stools down and talk to them.
He was good at talking because he had many interests, but also because he listened. He loved the sounds women made, how careful and different they were about the words they used. These two were both smart. They’d gone to a good college and now were young professionals who spoke without guile of their careers and what they both
really
wanted to do one day.
It wasn’t until he’d bought their second round that they oh so discreetly mentioned they were both in serious, dedicated relationships.
Stahl loved women but he hated hypocritical, misleading bitches like that. They had known what he wanted and had fooled him into buying drinks. As politely as he could, he excused himself, calling the night a wash. He hated resorting to pornography to get off. To him that was a sign of weakness, an admission one wasn’t worthy to fuck a real, live woman.
But he had to feed his addiction, so he went online. It always took him at least an hour to find a suitable clip.
Stahl was in the middle of his search for the perfect video when he heard something in the backyard.
Instantly on his guard, he stood and tiptoed through his dark house. Passing through the kitchen, he grabbed the flashlight out of the junk drawer and proceeded to the living room. Stahl’s sliding glass doors opened to the backyard. He crept to them and opened the blinds a couple inches to look outside.
It was a little after one so it was the perfect time for a burglar. He thought he saw something shift in the trees and clicked on the flashlight.
Nothing.
He waited a second before flicking off the flashlight. His throat was dry. Stahl wondered if this was it. If someone had finally come to kill him. He’d done a lot of bad things in his life and had always feared they would catch up to him.
The cops had questioned him before. They’d suspected him of horrible, disgusting crimes. Stahl had done a lot of bad things in his life but wasn’t guilty of the crimes the police were investigating. Getting grilled at his home and the station had been an unpleasant experience, one he wished never to duplicate.
He’d often wondered what he’d do when he needed the police’s help. Now he knew.
He grabbed the house phone and dialed 9-1-1. “Yes, I want to report a prowler in my backyard.”
The operator kept him on the line, asking more questions. A few minutes later, there was a knock at his door and he let the police in. There was nothing incriminating in his house, so he had no worries. Besides, they were here to check out a prowler, not investigate Stahl.
The man had wisely run as soon as the flashlight had spotted the ground not more than ten feet away from him. Wisely, he’d planned his escape route in advance. In this development, there was plenty of space between houses and Stahl’s place was relatively isolated. His nearest neighbors were half a block in either direction.
The man fled.
Which was good for another reason.
The ghost couldn’t always stay with him when he ran, and never when he drove. The ghost needed him to be relatively still to locate him. The upshot was, when he fled, the ghost didn’t have an opportunity to terrorize him or be seen by others.
The man was not in good shape though, courtesy of years of sitting behind a desk for a living. He was winded in three minutes and hunkered down among some trees near his car. He had his keys ready and was about to step into the parking lot when a cop car rounded the nearest corner and headed up the street.
Shit
.
He didn’t want to stay still for too long because the ghost would come. And the ghost would be furious.
As these thoughts raced through his mind, it did appear.
“He was awake and the cops came—we have to leave—”
But the ghost wouldn’t let him leave. They had come to kill Stahl, and before the end of the night, they would.