Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (20 page)

Read Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction Online

Authors: Dominic K. Alexander,Kahlen Aymes,Daryl Banner,C.C. Brown,Chelsea Camaron,Karina Halle,Lisa M. Harley,Nicole Jacquelyn,Sophie Monroe,Amber Lynn Natusch

“Umm,” is all I can say to that. I slowly raise the infrared camera and aim it at her.

“You’re filming me now?”

Yes, I sure am
, I think, and look at the screen. My breath freezes in my throat. Through the infrared, I can see my own hand in front of me burning a deep red. The shape of the maid, though, is coming out a steely blue, like the blue I saw in the hotel room.

I look back at her. And I realize I’m talking to a ghost.

“I said, are you filming me? Answer me, child,” she says, her voice angry. She wipes away a tear with a rough swipe of her hand.

“No,” I say quickly and lower the camera. “Sorry, I .
. . what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s May,” she answers. “I’d say I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Perry Palomino, but I’m afraid I’m a victim of some terrible joke.”

There’s one thing I’ve learned about the dead: they don’t like to learn they are dead. Things kind of go crazy when they do, like their entire existence is shattered and they go along with it. I mean, imagine you think you’re alive and someone tells you you’re dead. Then you start putting together all the pieces and BLAM! Your entire world is ripped apart. The very realization can make most ghosts simply disappear. The acceptance pushes them on into the afterlife, or whatever the next step is.

But for selfish reasons, I don’t want to lose May. I don’t want her to realize she’s dead. Because while I’ve got her here, in this room, I can use her. I can use her to get to Parker.

“When was the last time you saw Parker?” I ask her innocently enough. I still keep the camera aimed at the floor.

“Five days ago,” she says. “He said he’d come by the next day. I was here waiting. He never did. I reckoned .
. . I don’t know. I feared the worst. The very worst.”

“Which was?”

“That he was dead, Miss Palomino. But not by his own hand. No, he that was murdered.”

“By who?”

“The sharks. Who else?”

My face must have contorted into a look of pure confusion because she continues, her voice and demeanor more impassioned by the second.

“The sharks are the fellas who he owed money to. You just don’t lose a boat without losing a few friends. These fellas meant business, and I seen them threaten him more than a few times. Parker went and told the police, but they do nothing. They don’t have no control. Parker would tell me he was scared. So scared. He’s a man who don’t get scared, you hear that. So if he’s scared, I reckon there’s a reason for it. They are after his life.”

The idea of Parker being murdered by men he owed money to is just as believable as suicide. I don’t know what to believe, but I choose to give the ghost the benefit of the doubt.

“Did Parker leave any proof, any records, that these men were after him?”

She closes her eyes for a second and it’s then that I notice a strange transparency about her.

“There was his diary,” she tells me. Her eyes open slowly. “It’s his checkbook. But he would keep a log on the back of the checks he couldn’t write anymore. Most of it doesn’t make much sense to me . . . If I could talk to him, hear from him, he could tell you himself. I just need to talk to him. Can you find him for me? You said you knew the manager?”

“Yes .
. . but I don’t think it will make much difference.”

“Why is that?”

“Do you know where he would have kept the checkbook?”

“On his person. Where else? What aren’t you telling me? What are you really doing here?”

I look down at the screen and aim it at her. She glows a translucent blue. It’s beautiful, for once, and not scary.

“What happened to Parker?” she goes on, her voice cracking over his name. I don’t say anything but I meet her eye and I know, in one look, that she knows the truth. Maybe not that she’s dead. But that he is.

Her face crumples. She puts her hand to her head and stumbles backward.

Out of instinct, I go after her, my arms outstretched, hoping to reach her in time before she goes over.

I almost reach her when she smashes against the floor with a sickening thud. The world goes black. The lights go off and I find myself on my knees, my leggings ripping open on the cold hard floor.

“May?” I cry out and raise the camera, hoping to see her blue form through the darkness. I only read my own heat and no one else’s.

I slowly get to my feet and try to flick on the flashlight with my own hand.

Cold fingers reach over my elbow in a stealthy grasp. I can feel the ice through my jacket.

I’m yanked harshly to the side until I crash into a wheeled laundry bin, and another hand grabs me by the face and pulls me over the side and into it.

All I can think about is the painful cold that comes from the grasp, as if permafrost is entering my veins and creating a sheet of ice on my face. And then I find myself face-first in a laundry bin, smothered by a million towels, and pulled deeper and deeper into them until I can’t breathe and I can’t scream and I can’t move. I can only drown here.

The blackness behind my eyes grows darker somehow, as if the dark has a million different shades and nuances and I was only scratching the surface. It’s a different kind of obsidian, one that signals the end, finality. I don’t want to succumb to it, but all I can see is this blackness, and all I can feel are these hands that won’t stop pulling me deeper, that won’t let go, and my thoughts become less . . . and less . . . and less . . .

“Perry!”

I think I hear my name, but it sounds too far away to be real. I think of May and wonder where she came from.

“Perry!”

My name again. It sounds familiar.

There is a rush of noise and light and commotion, and I feel more hands grabbing me. Only these are warm, and though they are strong, I can feel the care seeping through them.

I think of Dex. And remember where I am.

I put my hands at the bottom of the bin, and push myself off. As I do so, they come in contact with something beneath one of the towels. I’m afraid it’s the remains of whoever was pulling me down before, but I still close my fingers around it as Dex yanks me out of the bin and into the harsh fluorescent light of the room.

I cough wildly, trying to find my breath as Dex keeps his hands on either side of my shoulders, steadying me. As the air hits my lungs and my wincing subsides, I notice Pam standing beside the door, a key in hand, her face drawn in a look of absolute terror.

“Perry,” Dex says. “Perry, look at me.”

I manage to look at him. His dark eyes are searching mine relentlessly, his brow furrowed, his stance tense.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I nod, feeling relieved and embarrassed all at the same time.

“Was I sticking out of the laundry bin?” I ask with trepidation.

He nods and I see a hint of a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. It would have been a comical sight, my giant ass in the air and all.

“I leave you alone for five seconds .
. .” His tone is light, but he knows there’s more to the story. And that I’ll fill him in on it later.

“What’s in your hands?” Pam asks, looking at them with curiosity.

I glance down and see I’m holding a rectangular cover of well-worn leather. I open it carefully and see what I thought I would see. A checkbook filled with writing. The possible proof that Parker Hayden was murdered and not a victim of suicide.

I walk over to Pam and place the item in her hands. She looks up at me, surprised and confused.

“You may want to run this by a historian. Or even the police,” I say. “There’s a chance that Parker Hayden didn’t commit suicide after all. It could be a cold-case file. A very cold case.” I feel extremely cheesy as I tell Pam that.

No surprise, Dex says, “Wow, I leave you for one minute and suddenly you’re
CSI: Portland
.”

I give him a tired smile. I’m ready to go home.

• • •

A few days pass before I get a call from Dex. We’re not at the point where we call each other just to talk, but every contact I have with him is important, and I still get stupid butterflies every time I see his name pop up on the call display. This time, he’s calling to talk about our episode at the Benson.

“How’s it all looking?” I ask as I sit on my bed, listening to my younger sister, Ada, argue with my dad downstairs.

“Oh, it’s looking fucking fantastic, kiddo,” Dex says, his voice coming in low and smooth over the line. “I just want to hug you for keeping that camera rolling while May was talking. I’ll have to run it over some other footage and do that little subtitle thing underneath, but it really helps our case, especially when you get that blue shit on-screen. That really is something.”

“Best show ever?” I ask, amused at his praise.

“Well,” he says slowly, “it probably would have helped had I been around, but you did okay on your own.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“There’s something else, too, you should take as a compliment.”

My eyes perk up and I sit up a bit straighter, putting down my
Spin
magazine. “What’s that?”

“Pam just called me. She said she handed over the checkbook to the police, who are having a division look into it or something. Anyway, the point is that ever since our visit, all the haunting in the hotel has stopped.”

“What do you mean, all hauntings?”

“Well, she says she usually gets some sort of feedback each day. Since our shoot, there hasn’t been any. I don’t know what that means, but she seems to think that whatever you did down in that laundry room .
. . well, I guess you cleared the place.”

“So I’m an exorcist now?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, kiddo. You’re miles away from being Father Merrin, and for all we know the haunting could start up again. I’m just saying . . . next time you feel like being hard on yourself because we aren’t making a difference and there’s no point to any of this . . . I dunno. Don’t. Because you did good here. You did good.”

I let Dex ramble on a bit more to please my ego, and then we hang up. Like the other times before, I still don’t know what to make of my ghost hunting. I don’t know how I got roped into doing the show, how I ended up being a magnet for the supernatural, and what on earth it has in store for me. The only thing I do know is that it’s dangerous and I’m compelled to keep doing it.

But I also know that even though someone is dead, is doesn’t mean they’re beyond help. And for every ten ghosts who try to kill me, if I end up saving one of them, it might be worth it after all.

Though you may want to remind me of that, next time I’m locked in a coffin or something.

THE END

You can read more about Dex and Perry in Karina Halle’s
Experiment in Terror
Series, starting with the first book,
Darkhouse
, which is free at all e-book retailers.

About the Author

With her
USA Today
best-selling contemporary romance novel,
Love, in English
, and
The Artists Trilogy
(published by Grand Central Publishing), numerous foreign publication deals, and self-publishing success with her Experiment in Terror series, Vancouver-born Karina Halle is a true example of the term “hybrid author.” Though her books showcase her love of all things dark, sexy, and edgy, she’s a closet romantic at heart and strives to give her characters a HEA . . . whenever possible.

Karina holds a screenwriting degree from Vancouver Film School and a Bachelor of Journalism from TRU. Her travel writing, music reviews/interviews, and photography have appeared in publications such as
Consequence of Sound
,
mxdwn
, and
GoNomad Travel Guides
. She currently lives on an island on the coast of British Columbia where she’s preparing for the zombie apocalypse with her fiancé and rescue pup.

Karina may be found on social media at:

Facebook:
Karina Halle

Twitter:
@MetalBlonde

Website:
www.experimentinterror.com

Website:
www.authorkarinahalle.com

Books by Karina Halle include:

The Artists Trilogy

Sins and Needles

On Every Street

Shooting Scars

Bold Tricks

Experiment in Terror