Ghosts of Rosewood Asylum (40 page)

Zach sensed Evelyn and Dr. Johansson now
flanking him on each side. Between their strength as spirits and Zach’s
physical body infused with holy water, Paramour didn’t stand a chance.

Zach took a few quick steps and dove
headlong onto him. There was a deafening squeal. High pitched and rancid to the
ears, it masked the sizzle of flesh. Zach hoped it was not his flesh; he felt
warmth—not a burning sensation, but it seemed all the moisture was being
drained from his body. He thought of his dying mother, he recalled her sadness
and pain. He remembered her confusion and anguish as her illness insidiously
stripped away all remnants of the person she had been. Her good part. Tears
poured from his eyes. Holy water tears.

The Paramour thing dropped to his knees.

“This water is holy water,” Zach said,
although he couldn’t hear his own voice. “Now go to hell.”

From seemingly far away, voices cried out,
“By the Divine Power of God—cast into hell, Satan and all the evil spirits, who
roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

Despite his emotional and physical pain,
with all his might, Zach screamed, “Amen!”

A tormented cry, presumably from the souls
that Paramour had collected, arose around them—woeful resignation and wasted
rage tainted the voices as they faced damnation.

Sounding far away, Hunter and Rebecca
yelled, “Be gone!”

Chapter Forty-Two

It was over.

The lobby of Rosewood was dark and silent.
It vaguely smelled of sulfur. The candles had all been extinguished, and Zach’s
face felt sunburned. Hair had been singed from his arms, and he could tell that
he was dangerously dehydrated. There were vague worries that he might be badly
burned, but he felt his face and arms. No charred flesh. Everything else seemed
intact.

The first face Zach saw was Dr. Johansson.
His thin countenance bore an approving smile. Then, his blond white hair took
on the hues from a radiant glow from where Rosewood’s ceiling should be. Bright
and yellow, it felt warm as the late-morning sun. Slowly, Dr. Johansson melded
with the light beams. Evelyn stood just a few feet away gazing while the
apparition evaporated upward. When he was gone, and as the light receded, she
turned to Zach.

She smiled too, but it was an odd, sad
smile. When she began slipping through the floorboards into the basement, Zach
waved at her to wait. “Evelyn, you don’t need to stay at Rosewood now. You can
leave, depart.”

Evelyn grimaced. “Oh, no. I’m glad to have
helped make things right for Dr. Johansson, but I’m not going just yet,” she
said. “Thomas will come back for me one day.”

She vanished downward.

Ray knelt beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

Who were you talking to?” he asked.

“Evelyn, the ghost who’s been protecting
this place.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“I did. A woman.” It was Hunter. He and
Rebecca were making their way down in darkness. “I saw the doctor depart into
the light after that...that thing was abolished. The woman though, she went
downward. She’s waiting for a lover who is never coming back.”

Zach pulled out his cell phone and opened it
up. It lit up more of the lobby than he expected. Fortunately, spirits rarely
drained lithium ion batteries. He crawled toward the stairs and moved up a
couple of steps providing light for their descent.

They met at the spot where Winkler lay.

“He’s dead isn’t he?” Rebecca asked.

He swore there was a trace of
Sailor
Black
in the air as he somberly inspected Winkler’s body. While probably
pointless, Zach checked for a pulse. There was none.

Next time, it will be one of your own.

Zach was far too drained to deal with
premonitions of that sort. Later, he’d question if it had even been his
godfather’s voice at all. He just wanted to get out of Rosewood and help his
friends out safely as well.

Rebecca noticed him using his cell phone as
a miniature lantern and she started doing the same. Ray’s good hand fumbled for
his cell with Joey wrapped awkwardly in his other arm.

Zach approached and reached for Joey, who at
first resisted. Once he saw who it was however, he stretched his arms out and
clung to Zach’s neck.

“C’mon little man. Let’s go find your mom.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Without Mother’s rose trellises, the Kalusky
backyard looked barren, stripped naked of character. Once they cleared away the
remains of the deck, the yard would be almost empty. Dad planned on building a
wide and sweeping back porch in the spring. The way his father procrastinated
and worked in bits and spurts, Zach doubted it would be constructed before July
4th, maybe not until Labor Day weekend.

“I’ll be able to sit out here and read,” Dad
said, describing the imaginary porch. Short but stocky, Gary Kalusky had big
ears and a round face. “I might even take up smoking a pipe.”

“Why would you do that?” Zach asked.

“Why not? Your uncle used to smoke one. I
kind of liked the smell.”

“Why didn’t you ever start?” Ray asked.

“Okay there, funny guy. If you think the
wife got hysterical when I drank, you should have seen her the time she caught
me smoking.”

Ray assisted Zach in lifting long white wood
planks that had once been rose trellises and laying them onto the bed of his
pickup truck. The other stuff could be thrown in on top.

“I
hate
the smell of pipe smoke,”
Zach said flatly.

“Another country heard from,” Dad said. “It
must run in the family.”

The three men worked in silence for a long
time. Although that reference to Zach’s mother had been the first, it would
also turn out to be the last. Regardless, the deck destruction project had a
somber undercurrent. It felt like somehow a level of closure was slowly being
achieved.

Zach hadn’t needed the reference to his
godfather to awaken thoughts of him. He’d been ruminating over little else
since Evelyn’s words: 
“He said we needed to wait and let you figure
most of it out on your own.”

When he was a youth, his godfather’s voice
brought comfort to him and helped him deal with his stigmata, that thing Zach
sometimes referred to as a curse. Over the years, Uncle Henry had provided Zach
so much support that the two things, the religious miracle and the spirit
possession,
felt
indelibly linked—but they weren’t.

They couldn’t be.

The stigmata and the visions it gave Zach,
bettered him. He’d not only learned how to cope with the condition, but had
learned to use it in conjunction with his talents. It had been an uncomfortable
affliction at first but, like any other positive human quality, practicing it
worked to his betterment.

It was a something good.

The possession, Zach wasn’t so sure about.
Uncle Henry’s spirit had remained to help Zach cope with the stigmata—he knew
that. Before his godfather passed away, he too may have experienced the
bleeding. He too may have experienced some sort of visions attached to them.
The condition may be a sort of generational family legacy. His uncle had died
prior to bearing any children. He had no one, for lack of a better word, to
heir the stigmata to. He’d passed away before Zach was old enough to have the
condition explained to him. Zach’s mother, Uncle Henry’s sister, was too
mentally unstable to deal with the details of the gift, if she’d ever known
about it in the first place.

Regardless, Rosewood had served as ample
reminder to Zach what happens when spirits remain in this dimension instead of
passing on. Uncle Henry’s spirit, not to mention his eternal soul, was in
jeopardy. He was trapped in Zach much like Evelyn was attached to Rosewood.

“Hey, Mr. Popular TV Guy,” Zach’s dad said,
his tone lighthearted. Zach fully expected to be the butt of some joke. “All
your friends, all those fans, I ask you to bring me one person to help with
construction and you bring me a cripple?” He nodded in Ray’s direction.

“Ah, Dad, don’t worry about it. This is
quality time, right Ray?”

Ray frowned and rolled his eyes.

“Besides,” Zach continued, “look! He hammers
with his left hand.”

“Today I do,” Ray called out. He knocked a
plank of wood away from the other boards with a mallet. “And in the boxing
ring, whenever I’m able to get back.”

Ray had broken both his pinkie and ring
finger of his right hand. He didn’t need a cast but instead, wore a metal
splint that kept the fingers together and held them in place.

While Ray wasn’t looking, Dad flashed Zach a
facial expression that clearly communicated the idea Zach shared, but would
never say—
how long will he let this delay him from turning pro?

Zach discreetly shrugged and went back to
working. And thinking. The words of his uncle haunted him.
Next time it will
be one of your own.

Not “next time it might be one of your own,”
or “if you’re not careful, next time it will be one of yours. No.
Next time
it will be one of your own.

Zach stared at Ray banging away at the deck
and then tossing wood scraps into his pickup truck. He did all the work with
one hand and never complained. Zach thought of the other
Xavier Paranormal
Investigators
. They were all good people—young people trying to make a
positive difference. To lose one conducting the type of paranormal work that
they did would be a tragedy.

What did the voice of Uncle Henry mean? Next
case? Next time they encounter an evil spirit? Next time they investigate an
asylum? Next time they set foot into Rosewood? Perhaps they were just
rationalizations, but what was he to do, cancel the show? Tell
XPI
they
all had to quit because of a premonition? That wasn’t going to happen. Why
worry about things he had no control over?

Exactly. So then, why did his godfather say
it? It went back to the heart of the matter. Uncle Henry’s spirit was playing
games—causing stress. He could warn Zach when a flashlight was to be shone in
his eyes, but not which member of his team’s life was in danger?

Then again, as much as Zach knew of ghost
hunting, he knew nothing of what it was like to
be
a Spirit. It was
possible that feelings, intuitions and fleeting visions came to this godfather
and only so much of it could be communicated. Regardless, the longer Uncle
Henry’s spirit possessed Zach, the harder it would be to live without him.

But worse, the more his spirit, his soul
would deteriorate.

And then there was the matter of Evelyn.
With all the terrible visions and experiences the case of Rosewood Asylum had
left him with, two things kept him awake at night:  Uncle Henry’s warning
and Evelyn’s final words.

“I’m not leaving just yet,” she said.
“Thomas will come back for me one day.”

She wouldn’t depart. Her perception had
become so clouded over a century of deception and deceitful acts. Evelyn
Paramour—the young woman who, with high hopes had married a policeman, but had
instead gotten a monster. The lady whose lover was murdered, and who was
eventually killed by the evil husband she’d wished to escape. Well intentioned
as it may have been, her haunting of Rosewood had weakened her awareness to a
point that she likely couldn’t move on without assistance. If she didn’t move
on, if she couldn’t pass over to heaven, or the other realm, the great beyond
or whatever one wished to call it, she would unwittingly have made herself John
Paramour’s final wasted soul.

Zach couldn’t let that happen. After having
discussed options with Hunter, Zach had ruled out fire as a means of destroying
Rosewood. Not only was there the chance that fire destroyed spirits, Evelyn’s
death by fire and century-long battle against it had earned her a better fate.
Zach hoped to begin a chain of events that would slowly set things right. He
intended to enact the plan that very afternoon. In fact, he had already set the
wheels in motion.

“Hey Ray,” Dad called out. “You want
something to drink?”

“Nah, I’m okay for now, Mr. Kalusky.”

“Well keep yourself hydrated. The pace my
son is keeping, you two are going to be here until after dark.”

“Subtle hint delivered, Daddy Dearest,” Zach
called out.

As Dad and Ray continued to remove plank by
plank of the termite-infested deck, Zach set to digging up huge chunks of his
mother’s old garden and carrying them to Ray’s truck. His dad just stared.

Dad had made nearly an identical expression
when Zach had asked for the garden dirt as a return favor for helping tear down
and haul away the deck.

“What the hell do you want it for?” Dad
asked.

Zach was tempted to say, “A science
experiment of sorts,” with the “of sorts” having inserted a sliver of truth to
an otherwise white lie. Instead, he had just shrugged and said, “If it’s all
the same, I’d rather just not say.”