He was smiling sadly. It was Coleman Hollis, of course. In the back of my mind, somehow I had known he’d make an appearance. It was, after all, my last night at the Raven’s Rest. How could he not say good-bye?
“You can see him, can’t you?” I asked Trey.
“Yeah,” Trey whispered. “I’d run and scream, but my legs are shaking too badly.”
The spirit became more solid, although he retained his blue tinge. Slowly he moved—glided would be the more appropriate term, as his legs barely moved—toward me.
Trey was muttering under his breath, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit….”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”
“He knows that too. Right?” Trey couldn’t take his eyes off the specter.
Neither could I, although I felt no fear. Adrenaline was pumping through me, sure, but I wasn’t afraid. My body seemed electrically charged, and the tingling feeling increased the closer Coleman came. When he reached out a hand to touch me, I thought I must be bristling with energy. I wondered if my hair was sticking up from static electricity. Hard to tell, as my scalp felt numb.
I put my hand out, and my fingers brushed gently against Coleman’s. Instantly he vanished.
Vanished, but he wasn’t gone. He was back within me.
I closed my eyes. I could feel him in my mind, stronger than ever. Breathing heavily, I had to hold on to the back of the chair near me to keep from collapsing to the floor. I had to fight the urge to cry out as panic rose within me. The sensation of another consciousness entering my brain, so much stronger than before, was overwhelming.
Just as I began to calm myself, adjusting to the sudden invasion, I heard Trey ask, “What just happened?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Then why do you sound so strange?”
“Because I’m here,” I said. It wasn’t me, though. My throat, but someone else was saying the words. I was, in essence, now a ventriloquist’s doll. It was odd. I was awake, conscious, but yet I wasn’t. It was like I was in my mind, but I was taking a backseat to another persona.
Trey stared at me. “Michael?”
I shook my head. “I’m Cole.”
He brought his hand up to his mouth and chewed on a knuckle. “Holy fucking shit,” he whispered.
“It’s okay. Michael is fine. No harm will come to him.”
I was drifting. I could still feel my body somewhat, but it was like I was daydreaming. I could see Trey before me, wide-eyed and looking terrified, but he seemed distant as well. I was reminded of the time I had oral surgery and they put me under. Just before I was unconscious, everything looked hazy, and my groggy eyes saw, but only just. And speech was just too difficult to even contemplate.
Yet I felt warm. Safe. Coleman was speaking the truth. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me.
“Michael?” Trey asked desperately. “Don’t kid around now. You’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“Michael’s in here,” Coleman said. It wasn’t me any longer, so I might as well identify who actually was speaking. “He’s fine, I promise you.”
Trey rushed up to me to grasp me by the arms. “Michael,” he said, peering deep into my eyes, “snap out of it!”
“He’s okay,” Coleman repeated. “Once he regains his strength, he’ll be able to talk to you again. But for now, we’ve got something to do.”
“You don’t even sound like you!” Trey was shaking. “Come on, Michael! Come back to me!”
“He will. Don’t worry. We have much to do, though. I don’t know how long I can keep this up. It’s taking a lot of energy to do this. Already I’m growing tired.”
Trey tugged at my sleeves. I felt sorry for him, but I could tell Coleman was slightly annoyed.
“Shit, Michael! I don’t know what to do!”
“There’s nothing to do,” Coleman said, “except….” He stopped. I think he was still adjusting to talking through me, and he had to pause to reassert himself.
“Except what?” Trey’s face was even paler than normal.
“We have to get some shovels,” Coleman said slowly.
WE WERE
walking down the stairs to the lobby. Oddly, I felt like there were three of us going down the steps, even if there were only two sets of legs. By now I was feeling more aware, although it was a bit like watching a TV show. I had no control over the action. I was but a bystander, impotent and powerless.
“Let me talk to him,” Trey said, glancing sideways at me. “You’ll just creep him out.”
“What?” Coleman asked. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Your hair. It looks straighter somehow. Less curly.”
“It’s just your imagination,” Coleman said, although I could sense that he wasn’t entirely sure Trey wasn’t right. Was Coleman’s essence being within me causing physical changes as well? Was my hair becoming more like Coleman’s? If he remained in my mind, would my eyes change color again? Had they already?
Best not to think about such things. A panic attack wouldn’t help me, and probably not Coleman.
Luckily, Lonnie Schultz was still manning the front desk. He looked half-asleep, perched on a stool, a book lying open on the desk before him. He nodded at me and Trey when we approached. “Hey. What’s up, guys?”
Trey motioned for me to stay a few feet back while he went up to talk to Lonnie. He leaned against the counter and spoke in a low voice. “We need a favor,” he said.
“Yeah? Anything I can do. You know that.”
Trey gave him his most ingratiating grin. “You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of shovels we could borrow, would you?”
BY THE
time I was sitting in the passenger seat of Trey’s car, I was almost entirely myself again. Coleman was still in there, but he had used up too much energy. Now I was just getting vague impressions from him, words and thoughts here and there, like a radio not quite tuned in to a station properly.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
Trey slammed his door shut and glared at me. “I told him we had a burst pipe at my mom’s house and there was some garden damage. Don’t ask me why we had to replant the posies in the middle of the night, or how the pipe burst in the first place. It was a lame excuse, and Lonnie didn’t buy it, but we got the shovels. I could hardly tell him that we were going to go dig up a body that’s been buried for over thirty years.” Trey’s eyes narrowed. “I’m assuming that’s what we’re doing, right?”
“It is. Pretty sure, anyway.”
As he turned the key in the ignition, he kept his eyes on me. “Who am I talking to right now?”
“It’s me, Michael. Honestly.”
“And Coleman?”
“He’s… resting.”
Trey’s nerve seemed to leave him, and he threw his head back, banging it against the headrest. “This is too freaky for words.”
I touched his arm. “It’s going to be okay.”
“He’s in you still, though?” Trey was almost whispering. “What does it feel like?”
I thought about it. “I’ve got a bit of a headache, and I feel a little sluggish. Like just then, when I reached out and touched you. Normally you just reach out and do it, but I had to stop and think about it, if that makes any sense. Like when you’re really drunk and have to concentrate to do simple things. It’s really hard to explain.”
“Yeah, I bet. He knows he can’t stay there, right?”
“He knows.”
Trey put the car into gear with a sigh. “Might as well get this over with. I’m assuming we’re going to the vacant lot.”
“No.”
“No? But I figured—”
“Just drive, Trey.”
“It would be nice,” Trey said as he pulled away from the curb, “if I knew where I was going.”
There was no traffic. No one was out taking their dogs for a late-night walk. The town seemed deserted. The night was cloudy, and the wind had picked up. A couple of drops of rain spattered against the windshield. I stared ahead, although I was also seeing brief images flashing in my mind, which I assumed was Coleman, trying to tell me where to go. “You know that road by the old Baptist Church?”
Trey frowned. “Cedar Road? That doesn’t go anywhere! When they put in the new bridge, they closed that road. It’s a dead end!”
“I think that’s where he wants us to go.”
“You’re freaking me out. You know that, right?”
“This is the end of it,” I said. “It’s hard to explain, because I only get flashes of Cole’s thoughts and memories, but I can tell he’s been working up to this. It’s taken him a while to figure out just how to communicate with me, how to use his energy correctly. At first he was very confused and frustrated, but now he knows how to get me to see what he wants me to see.”
“Which is?”
My smile was thin. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
We were now going down Lincoln Boulevard, which is one of Banning’s main drags, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary that there was a car following us, but my heart seemed to beat faster when I noticed the headlights in the side-view mirror. Two o’clock in the morning. It could just be someone coming home from one of the bars. Banning certainly had a lot of them for a small town. It worried me just the same.
“Do you think that guy is following us?”
Trey hadn’t noticed the car, but he squinted now into the rearview mirror. “Could be. Want me to do a James Bond and shake him?”
“Just don’t get us arrested.”
We were approaching one of the few traffic signals in town, so Trey timed his speed so that he barely squeaked through the yellow. I twisted around to see the other car run the red light to keep up with us.
“Not conclusive,” Trey noted, “but suspicious. I mean, at this time of night, I’d have done the same thing. Stop when there’s no traffic? But it could also be either Darryl Hollis or Gary Thornton, keeping tabs on us.”
Trey took a right turn, hard enough that the safety belt was the only thing that kept me from being thrown against the door. “What are you doing?” I asked, readjusting my glasses. They’d slipped down my nose from the jolt.
“Just taking a little detour to make sure. He still following us?”
“Um… no.” There were no lights in the mirror, but I turned to look back to make doubly sure. “I can’t see anything.”
“Might not have been anything, then,” Trey said, visibly relaxing. He made a few more rapid turns, basically taking us around the block to get back on track. When he turned onto Lincoln again, there was no sign of any moving vehicles.
We came to the edge of town, where there was a used car dealership, a medical clinic, an apartment house, and not much else except for the Banning Baptist Church, sitting on a hill by the woods. Here Lincoln Boulevard actually became Riverview Road, a winding path that led to the highway to Rockford. Trey, however, turned onto Cedar Road, just past the church.
The road wasn’t in the best condition, and Trey slowed considerably as he dodged potholes. “The town officials were going to put a chain across here to keep people from using the road,” he told me, “but people still come down here to fish.”
The car lurched as we hit a particularly large hole. “I’m guessing they’re not going to fix it up, then.”
Once past the church, the road actually got worse. There were some outbuildings on our left, storage spaces for, one assumes, whatever wouldn’t fit into the church basement. On the right was a dense, thick woodland. The wind had picked up, and rain now hit the windshield with more frequency, causing Trey to turn on the wipers.
“Lovely night,” he grumbled.
“This is the right place, though,” I said, looking out at the trees as they loomed, dark and ominous, seeming to close in on the slow-moving car.
“We won’t be able to drive much more. Soon we’ll come to the….”
The headlight beams lit up a barricade ahead of us, with a Bridge Out sign attached. Trey stopped the car but kept the engine running. He peered out at the spectral limbs hanging over us. The area illuminated by the lights was dismal and forbidding. Everything else was murky blackness.
“You brought flashlights, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. Like they’re going to help a lot.” He pointed at the bridge, although I could only make out its vague outlines. “The last time I was down here, and mind you, I was in high school at the time, this bridge wasn’t in the best condition. I’m sure it’s worse now. We’ll have to be careful going across. Assuming, of course, that we’re supposed to be on the other side.”
“We are. We need to head into the woods.”
Trey watched the rain fall. “I’m going to be cold. I’m going to be wet. And, unless the shovels are just for atmosphere, I’m going to be sweaty. Is there anything about this I’m going to like?”
“You’ll be with me.”
He grudgingly accepted this. Trey sighed as he shut off the motor. Opening the car door, he muttered, “Let’s get this over with.”
Trey, a gray (not black!) beanie clamped onto his head, went around to the trunk. I donned a baseball cap (Trey’s, and it had Foo Fighters World Tour on it) and joined him. As I waited for him to find the release catch, I gazed around me. Trey was right. It was chilly, rainy, and with the car lights off, dark as hell.
Trey finally found the release, but as the trunk swung open, he paused and looked behind him. “Did you hear that?”
I looked back down the road, not that I could see much. “Just the wind,” I said. The sky rumbled. “Thunder?”
“It wasn’t that. And I thought I saw a light. Way back there.”
“We might be able to still see the lights of the town from here. Maybe you caught a glimpse.” I hoped I sounded convincing, because I wasn’t sure I believed it. I shivered, yearning for a warm blanket, a safe, dry room, and a cup of hot chocolate. “Give me one of those flashlights, would you?” I couldn’t take the eerie darkness much longer.
He handed me one, as well as a shovel. We both flicked on our beams and scanned the area. Trees. The bridge loomed over us. My flashlight couldn’t break through the gloom to show me all of it, but it revealed enough that I wasn’t exactly eager to try my way across it. The girders were dark with rust, and the deck, wooden beams, had rotten sections that I could see myself falling right through.
“Shaggy and Scooby-Doo wouldn’t even head over that thing,” I said.
Trey didn’t argue the point. “Let’s go. Keep to the sides and we should be safe enough.”