Ghost Trackers (20 page)

Drew wasn’t comfortable with consulting Trevor’s “experts,” but at this point, he was willing to explore any option. The more knowledge they had to draw on, the better, he supposed. The trick would be separating the wheat from the chaff.

“And at the banquet, we’ll talk to Greg and see if we can’t get him to tell us what he remembers,” Amber said.

Drew nodded. “And afterward, I think a nighttime visit to the rec center might be in order. Since that’s where everything started, it makes sense that that’s where it has to end.”

“I wish you’d phrased that differently,” Trevor said. “There are lots of ways things can end, and not all of them are good.”

“Always the optimist.” But he didn’t smile, for he shared his friend’s misgivings. What could the three of them hope to do against the force that had killed Sean Houser and Jerry Cottrill? But they had to try. After all, who else was there?

“Keep the flashlight
steady.”

Amber felt Drew’s hand wrap around hers to keep it from shaking. She wasn’t scared so much
as cold, but the moment his flesh came in contact with hers, a warm flush suffused her body, and she forgot all about the temperature.

She looked at Drew’s face, illuminated by the side glow from the flashlight’s beam, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the gravestone in front of them: “Lucille Dessick, 1898–1966. Beloved wife, mother, and grandmother. Well may she rest.”

“I think this is it,” he said.

It was early May, and although it had been warm during the daytime, it had gotten cooler after the sun had gone down. It was closing in on midnight now, and the breeze blowing through the cemetery made her wish she’d brought a heavier jacket. The sky was clear, the moon half full, stars glittering like scattered diamonds. It might have been romantic—if they hadn’t been standing in the middle of a graveyard checking out a dead woman’s headstone.

She looked at Drew again. She liked the way the stars in the sky framed his head, liked the way the breeze ruffled his hair, liked the intensity in his gaze. And she especially liked the feel of his hand on hers.

She couldn’t help smiling to herself. Maybe this
was
kind of romantic, in a weird way.

“I need to take a picture.” Drew let go of her hand—which she did
not
like—and removed a camera from the pocket of his jacket. She made
sure to hold the flashlight steady as he took a couple of pictures of Lucille Dessick’s headstone. When he was finished, he tucked the camera back into his pocket, then turned to her and smiled. “That proves one part of the story, at least. There really was a Lucille Dessick.”

For decades, people in Ash Creek had reported sightings of a “White Lady,” an example of a supernatural apparition common around the world. A White Lady showed herself to only one person at a time, and her appearance was supposed to herald the death of someone close to those who saw her. White Ladies wore all white, and their hair and even their skin were white, so much so that both were indistinguishable from their clothing. White Ladies tended to manifest in rural areas, and Ash Creek’s was no exception. She was always spotted along a stretch of Route Four that bordered the Dessick family farm. According to town legend, the White Lady began appearing only after Lucille Dessick, whose family had lived in Ash Creek since the town’s founding, had died under mysterious circumstances; of course, legend was vague about
why
her death had been so mysterious.

Amber, Drew, and Trevor had begun investigating the White Lady after Amber’s cousin Josh had seen her late one night while driving home from his job at the cinema over in Zephyr, and . . .

She broke off the thought and frowned. Where
was
Trevor? And for that matter, what were they doing here so late? There was no reason for them to be skulking around like this. All they’d come to do was find Lucille’s grave and take a picture. The cemetery was open to the public during daylight hours, so there was no need for them to sneak in. And while there was more than a little theatricality in creeping through a graveyard in the dead of night, Drew was a practical person. He wouldn’t have come here this late just for the thrill of it. It didn’t make any sense.

She turned to him to voice her concerns, panning the flashlight beam around as she did so, in the process illuminating the figure of an elderly woman standing next to the grave site.

Ice water rushed through Amber’s veins at the sight of the woman dressed in white strips of sheer cloth, like a nightgown that had been shredded—or an old-fashioned burial shroud. She was bird-thin, emaciated, her ivory-colored flesh stretched so tight across her bones that the skeleton beneath was visible. Her white hair stood out from her head like a thick growth of dandelion fluff, and it swayed in the breeze like grass that had been bleached of all color. Her lips were thin and bloodless, and while her skin was so taut it was impossible to determine how old she was, she projected a palpable sense of age. Amber’s parents had taken her to a museum in
Columbus a couple of years ago to see a traveling exhibit of Egyptian artifacts. Amber had been fascinated by a mummy lying in an open sarcophagus sealed in a glass display case. The mummy itself wasn’t much to look at—smaller than she would have guessed, its wrappings a dingy gray—all in all, not that frightening. But what had impressed her the most was the feeling that she was standing in the presence of time itself. The White Lady made her feel like that: young, small, and insignificant.

Worst of all were the woman’s eyes. Given her extreme pallor, Amber expected her eyes to be cold, smooth, featureless orbs like a marble statue’s. But the White Lady’s eyes were nothing like that. Her sockets were filled with a living, roiling darkness from which small tendrils emerged and undulated in the air, as if a pair of strange black sea creatures had taken up residence in the woman’s skull and were reaching out to sense the world beyond. For some reason, those tendrils seemed familiar to her, but that was crazy. She’d never seen anything like this before . . . had she?

Amber’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart pounded so hard she could feel the veins in her neck throb. She wanted nothing more than to turn and run, but she remained rooted to the spot, unable to make herself move. She could sense Drew still standing beside her, and she wanted to turn her head and glance in his
direction, if for no other reason than the reassurance the sight of him would offer, but she could no more turn to look at him than she could pick up her feet to run.

The White Lady raised her right arm in a smooth, graceful motion that was at odds with the aura of age she projected and stretched out her index finger to point at Amber. The finger was long and bony, and the nail was black, hooked, and sharp like a raven’s claw. The woman opened her mouth to reveal teeth of polished obsidian, and a thick tongue rolled forth, also black, the tip ending in a cluster of thin, wavering tendrils. A low, keening sound emerged from deep within the White Lady’s chest, rising in both volume and pitch as it went on. The sound continued without interruption, as if the woman’s lungs contained an inexhaustible supply of air and she had no need to pause for breath.

What
was
this creature? Were they looking at the ghost of Lucille Dessick? But this . . . this
thing
didn’t look as if it had ever been human. Amber became aware of another sound then, fainter than the woman’s keening, a soft
huh-huh-huh
that sounded almost, but not quite, like sobbing. She wasn’t surprised when she realized that the sound was coming from herself.

The ebon tendrils protruding from the woman’s eyes and mouth shot forward, extending a trio of writhing, tangled masses toward Amber. The sight
shocked her out of her paralysis, and she gave voice to a full-throated scream that split the night like a razor.

She felt Drew’s hand grab hold of hers then, felt him pull her away from the White Lady. She spun around, dropping the flashlight as she did, and she and Drew ran like hell, the keening of the White Lady following them as they fled.

She let terror take her then, and she ran without thought or reason, barely aware of the ground she and Drew covered. The cemetery flew by in a jumble of images—the silhouettes of headstones, trees, and mausoleums—and then they were out on the street and still running, past houses, parked cars, and streetlights whose cold illumination provided no comfort. They ran until her lungs burned and her leg muscles felt so weary they might slide off the bone like meat from an overcooked chicken. And then they were on her porch, sitting on the concrete, leaning against each other as they gasped for air, sweat drying in the night breeze.

Amber looked out into the street, half expecting the White Lady to be there, having followed them from the cemetery on foot or, as seemed more likely, simply materializing out of thin air. But the empty street was a most welcome sight.

Amber had no idea how long they sat like that, but the burning in her lungs subsided, and her breathing eased. And then she began to laugh. It
started out as a soft chuckle at first, but it grew into full-fledged, hurt-your-belly, unable-to-stop laughter. Drew tried to shush her at first, but his efforts only made her laugh harder, until he gave up and joined her. Though part of her worried that they’d wake her parents—hell, the whole neighborhood—she needed to release the tension that had built up inside her, and she didn’t care. But the porch light didn’t come on, and the front door didn’t open. No neighbors stepped out of their houses to see what all the commotion was about. It was as if she and Drew were the only two people in the world, and it was wonderful.

Eventually, their laughter ended, and she began to shiver, partly from the night chill but more, she suspected, as an aftereffect of all of the intense emotions she had experienced that night. She tried to make herself stop shaking through sheer willpower, but her efforts had the opposite effect: the harder she fought to control her trembling, the worse it became. It became so bad it felt almost as if she were having a seizure.

She tried to say something to Drew, but she was shaking too hard to speak. He seemed to understand anyway. He took her in his arms, held her close and tight, and she gave herself over to the trembling and let it run its course. It seemed to take forever, but he continued holding her, and his reassuring strength and warmth comforted her until the shaking diminished and her body
grew still. He didn’t let go of her then, and she made no move to draw away from him. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him and held him as tightly as he held her.

After a time, he reached up, took hold of her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and tilted her head up so she was looking at him. He gazed at her a moment, his eyes seeming to glitter with the same cool light as the stars above, and then he leaned down and pressed his lips against hers.

Amber was taken by surprise, and at first she stiffened as Drew kissed her, but she soon relaxed and found herself kissing him back. The two of them had been friends since grade school, and she’d never considered him anything more than that. She’d never imagined that she would be sitting there with him, kissing him after fleeing from some horrible spectral apparition that had manifested in front of them in a graveyard in the middle of the night. No, if she were to be honest with herself, that wasn’t true. Well, the part about the ghost was, of course. She hadn’t imagined something like
that
factoring into any romantic scenarios she might have conjured between herself and Drew. But from time to time, she had wondered what it might be like if the two of them were more than friends.

And she
had
imagined kissing him, although she hadn’t gone so far as to practice on her pillow, as one of the teen magazines she read had
advised. She was pleased to discover that the reality was turning out to be much nicer than the fantasy, and she wondered why it had taken the two of them so long to admit their feelings for each other.

I wonder if we’ll stay together
, she thought, knowing it was premature to go down that road but unable to help herself.
What if we got married and had kids? Wouldn’t it be funny to tell them their mom and dad got together because they were scared by a ghost in a graveyard?

Their kiss continued and deepened, and Amber felt Drew’s moist tongue tease against her lips. She hesitated. This wasn’t the first time she’d kissed a boy. That was Bobbie Ehrnhardt at summer camp last year. But she hadn’t let Bobbie put his tongue in her mouth, for it had seemed less romantic than, well, icky, to be frank. But the thought of doing it with Drew didn’t seem so bad. In fact, it felt natural.

Up to this point, she’d been kissing him with her eyes closed, but she opened them now because she wanted to see the expression on his face when she opened her mouth and extended her tongue to meet his. His eyes were already open, and they were gazing at her. Not with love, not with anything even approximating warmth. They were cold, those eyes. Cold and hungry. Cold and hungry and
blue
.

Drew’s eyes were brown.

She let go of him, put her hands on his shoulders, and shoved. He released his grip on her, and she scooted away. He didn’t seem upset, though. Rather, he appeared amused.

His blue eyes glittered with an internal light, and the voice that came out of his mouth next wasn’t Drew’s, though the face still was.

“Surprise, surprise,” Greg said.

Amber woke with
a start, sat up, and looked around. She was in her hotel room, on her bed. Drew and Trevor were over at the desk in the corner, Trevor sitting in front of his open laptop, Drew sitting on the edge of the second bed, close enough to see the screen over Trevor’s shoulder. As far as she knew, she hadn’t made any sound upon awakening, but both men turned to look at her.

“Are you all right?” Drew asked.

His eyes were brown, just as they should be, but even though Amber knew that what she’d experienced hadn’t been real, she couldn’t help suppressing a shudder at the sight of him.