The Ghoul Next Door (29 page)

Heath came back from his run at that moment and he swept me up into his arms. “You’re sweaty,” I said, and I couldn’t help the small giggle that came out when he twirled me around.

“I’m horny,” he said, dipping down to nibble at my neck.

“Oh, you’re always horny,” I said, pretending to push him away.

He then pulled his head back and in an instant his expression changed. “Hello, Mary,” he said, and I froze. Heath blinked and instantly let go of me. Backing away, he put his hands to his head and said in a strained voice, “Run!”

“Heath!” I cried out, reaching for him.

“Get out!” he yelled, backing farther away from me. “Em, just get the hell outta here right now, okay?”

“Call Whitefeather!”

Heath’s voice became even more strained.
“I am!”

I was trembling and I didn’t know what to do. Heath backed farther away from me, and I could see he was trying hard not to look at me. “Where’s the vest?”

“Bedroom,” I said, taking a step in that direction.

“No!” he said. “Just get out of here until I can get this thing out of my head!”

I fought back the tears of fear and frustration that were forming at the corners of my eyes and finally grabbed my messenger bag, my cell, and flew out of the condo.

I made it down the steps and to Gilley’s door. I knocked hard and tried the knob, but it was locked. “Gilley!” I called desperately. I didn’t know what to do to help Heath. Sy’s appearance had happened so unexpectedly, and I was terrified that Heath seemed to be struggling mightily against the evil spirit.

The door opened as I pounded on it and Gilley stood there with a wicked look on his face. He wasn’t wearing his vest, but he was holding a very sharp knife. “Hello, Mary,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d come by for our date. . . .”

As if in slow motion I saw the knife start to arc up toward me and I leaped back, taking several blind steps backward.
“Heath!”
I screamed as I tripped and went falling down the stairs. I rolled down several steps, feeling every hard bump, until I could stop myself. Twisting myself around, I saw Gilley on the landing, still holding that knife and looking like he was getting ready to come after me.

“HEATH!”

Up the stairs I heard a door open. “Em?!”

“He’s got Gilley!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet and heading down several more stairs.

“Run!” I heard Heath shout. “Em,
run
!”

I didn’t wait around for him to yell it again. I turned tail and got the hell out of there.

I didn’t stay at the condo. Instead I got in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, gripping the steering wheel and bawling my eyes out. I reached for the phone several times to call the police, but each time I stopped myself. What was I going to say? That my best friend was possessed by an evil spirit that also was making an attempt to possess my boyfriend and both of them were trying to kill me?

It was all so crazy I could hardly believe it myself. I did finally call Heath, but it went straight to voice mail, and I wondered if Sy had drained the battery again. I tried Gilley’s line next, and got the same thing. “Dammit!” I yelled, striking the steering wheel with my palm. Knowing I might be a bit of a road hazard, I pulled over and tried to collect myself. There was no one I could call and nothing I could do until either Heath or Gilley called me.

Except . . .

I wiped my eyes and wondered if I had the courage to face Lester alone. After a little debate with myself, I decided I did have the courage and drove straight to the senior center. I found Daisy again and she called down to Lester’s room. He was up and agreed to have a visitor, and then Daisy gave me directions. “He’s got one of the best rooms with a garden view,” she said. “It’s the end unit all the way down corridor B on the right-hand side. Here’s a map. It’ll help.”

I took the map and referred to it several times as I navigated the maze of hallways on the way to Lester’s room. I found him groggy but sitting up in bed, watching TV. “The lovely lass from this morning,” he said when he spotted me. “Hello, young lady. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

I closed the door and moved to his bedside. “Mr. Akers, my name is M. J. Holliday, and I’m investigating a murder. A woman named Brook Astor was viciously attacked a week ago outside her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue.”

I watched Lester’s face very closely, and as I suspected, it registered first confusion, then great shock and sadness. “Brook?” he said. “You mean, Brook Astor from the fund-raiser?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, that’s terrible.”

“Mr. Akers, I want to talk to you about your brother.”

Lester’s expression immediately darkened and became wary. “My brother?” he said. “My brother’s been dead for over forty years, M.J.”

“Yes, but Sy the Slayer has been hard at work, hasn’t he?”

Lester’s face drained of color and his mouth fell open. “How do you know about him?”

“Because he’s been taking over the minds of various men throughout the years, Mr. Akers. He’s been haunting them day and night, but mostly at night. He’s been coaxing their mean streaks, their anger, and maybe even their psychosis, and he’s been encouraging them to kill. He’s also had them all use the same weapon to carry out their evil deeds.”

“No,” Akers said, shaking his head vehemently. “No, I’ve got him under control.”

My brow shot up. “
You
have him under control?”

Akers seemed to understand he’d said something incriminating. “I . . . I . . . I mean . . .”

“You mean you
know
your brother’s ghost is around?”

Lester shut his mouth and stared at me for a long moment, defiant. I met his gaze and mine didn’t waver. At last I saw the defiance fade, quickly replaced by guilt. “Sy showed up in my dreams after his death,” he admitted at last.

I narrowed my eyes at him. Time to drop another bomb. “You mean, he showed up in your dreams after
you
took care of him out in the woods, right?”

Lester’s eyes widened and his mouth pressed into a thin line. I could see I’d hit on the truth. “Sy was never quite right in the head,” he began softly. “My earliest memories are full of his cruelty to me, to our pets, to other childhood friends. He had a fascination with blood. He liked the smell of it, the taste of it. It was like an addiction to him. He seemed to thirst for it, and it scared our parents to the point that they wouldn’t let Sy out of their sight. My dad would take him hunting, hoping to satisfy Sy’s sick need, but it only seemed to excite my brother even more, and eventually Dad stopped taking him. Then he nearly killed me in a fight we had when I was seventeen and my parents told me it was best if I moved out. So I did, and they were stuck with him.

“The stress of dealing with Sy’s psychosis took its toll on my parents. My dad had a heart attack when he was only forty-five, and Mom got cancer only five years later. During the last year of her life, girls in our neighborhood started dying. Mom and I both suspected Sy, and when he was brought in by police for questioning, he named me as his alibi. Mom was in the hospital, on her deathbed, and she begged me to cover for him, so like a fool I did.

“After we buried her, I told Sy that I would never cover for him again, and if he tried to hurt another girl, I’d personally turn him in.”

Lester’s voice broke at that moment and he had to look away. I gave him a little time, then said, “What happened when you threatened to do that, Mr. Akers?”

Lester cleared his throat and turned back to me. “He tried to kill my fiancée, Rosie,” he whispered, and he looked so pained that my heart went out to him. “She knew all about Sy, and what my mother had asked me to do for him. I tried to keep her a secret from him, but he learned about her soon enough. She would go to the hospital to look in on Mom, and she told me that she and Sy met one afternoon. Sy had been so charming, and I knew she wondered if all my stories about him were true, but she trusted me, and the next time she saw him at my mother’s bedside, she avoided him. Then, as if he knew she was trying to avoid him, he started showing up at the flower shop where she worked, and once or twice he tried to pretend he was me, but Rosie knew better. She told me it was in his eyes and the fact that he always called her Mary instead of Rosie or Rosemary. Then he started bumping into her at the market, or at the library, and I began to really worry about his interest in her. I worked long hours—I was a train conductor back then—and I couldn’t always be around to protect Rosie, so, before I even had the money for a decent ring, I popped the question and told her I wanted to get married right away.

“Back then you couldn’t live together unless you were married, and moving her into my new house was the only way I knew to protect her. Then, one night a week before our wedding, Rosie was on her way over to my place to drop off a dinner she’d made special for me when Sy came up behind her and slit her throat. A man walking his dog saw the attack, but not the face of the man who tried to murder Rose. He got to her and helped keep her alive until an ambulance came, and I’ve thanked God every day since for that man—otherwise I know Sy would’ve made sure to finish the deed.

“Still, after I got to the hospital, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was Sy, and Rosie mouthed ‘No’ when the police asked her if she’d seen who attacked her, but the minute they left, she reached for a pen and paper and wrote down Sy’s name to show me. Then she tore it up into tiny pieces. She knew it’d be awful for me if there was a trial. I’d have to admit that I’d lied about Sy’s alibi, and I bore the exact face of a killer, which would’ve been plastered across every newspaper in Boston. Rosie trusted me to protect her from any further harm. She knew I’d take care of it.”

I nodded. “And
you
knew that he’d attack her again, or someone else, unless something was done.”

Lester seemed to hesitate and I could feel him begin to retreat away from me, as if he was realizing he’d already said too much. I had to hear more, so I decided to use everything in my arsenal to coax the truth out of him. “Mr. Akers,” I said, “I think you should know that I’m a spirit medium. I can connect with souls that have moved across to the other side.”

Lester’s eyes shone with interest. “You are?” he asked. “I believe in stuff like that, M.J.”

“Good. Because next to me is your wife, Rosemary.” I opened up my energy fully to Lester’s deceased wife and she filled my mind with something that looked like a gesture. I felt compelled to take my right hand and tap my chest, then cross both my arms and point to Lester. And then I repeated the first part of the gesture, tapped my chin, and pointed again to him.

Lester’s eyes misted. “You know sign?”

“No,” I said. “That was from Rose. What does it mean?”

Lester mimicked my gesture, but his was more pronounced. “I love you,” he said as he made the first movements. “I miss you,” he said for the second set.

“She’s here,” I told him. “She says to thank you for burying her in that blue dress. It wasn’t her favorite, but she knew it was yours, and it was important to you to see her one last time in it.”

Lester made a noise that was a half-sob, half-choking sound and he pushed his fist up to his mouth. He then started to sign in earnest, but there were no words to accompany the gestures. “I don’t understand sign,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you said.”

“Can Rosie see me?” he asked.

“She can.”

“Then she knows what I said,” he told me, wiping his eyes.

“Do you trust me enough now to tell me what happened to your brother?”

Lester took several deep breaths and stared at his lap for a long time. At last he said, “He liked to hunt on weekends. I knew his habits. I also knew what I had to do.”

“Where’s the knife?” I asked. I suspected he had it.

“The one he used against her? I don’t know. I searched his hunting shack and never found it. I looked all over the house for it too, but I couldn’t find it there either. It was his favorite hunting knife. Dad gave it to him when Sy turned sixteen. It was the same knife he used on me when we got into it that time before my folks told me I had to leave. I know Dad tried to take it away from Sy, but he told me he couldn’t find it. The bastard had hidden it good. I know it’s the one he used on Rosie and the other girls. There was something evil in Sy. Something demonic.”

“I believe it,” I told him. “Tell me when his ghost started showing up.”

Lester shook his head and stared at the blanket across his legs. He looked so much frailer than when I’d met him that morning. “It was a few years after Rosie and me got married,” he said. “She spent weeks in the hospital after the attack recovering, and she and I had to learn how to sign, but we never brought up the subject of my brother again after I showed her the article in the paper about Sy’s hunting accident. Rosie had simply nodded and squeezed my hand, and I admit I never loved her more than in that moment. We married a few days before she was released—the hospital pastor did the honors. Rosie came home to my house and we adjusted to our new life together and it was wonderful for several years. We tried to have kids, but it never worked out for us, which was okay because we still had each other.”

Lester’s eyes misted and he wiped them with his sleeve. I was moved by the love he carried for his deceased wife and subtly I felt her energy come stand next to me again, but I didn’t want to distract Lester, so I waited for him to continue. “Anyway, I thought our life together was perfect until one night I woke up and I couldn’t move. What was even stranger was that I was lying in the middle of the living room of my parents’ house. And then out of the kitchen walked Sy with that hunting knife in his hand and a terrible look in his eye.

“I couldn’t make any sense of it, because everything about the dream felt so real, except I was totally paralyzed and my dead brother was about to stab me. And then Sy put his foot on my chest, just to show me that I was no match for him, and then he stabbed me, right in the abdomen. I felt the knife. I felt the searing pain of it and I felt myself bleeding to death, and then I blacked out.”

I was a little stunned by Lester’s story. It was very similar to the OBE I’d had, and with a shudder I wondered, if Heath hadn’t shown up and rescued me, would I have been stabbed too?

“When I came to, I was back in my bed, but in agony. Rosie got me to the doctor, and I had a severe kidney infection that no one could figure out the source of. And for years I was plagued by them, and then, about six years ago, they found cancer in my left kidney, which then spread to my bones. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m convinced Sy was the cause of it.”

I nodded to let Les know that I thought so too. His brother was a powerfully evil force, capable of causing great harm, so it seemed plausible to me that he’d been responsible for the poison that put a tumor into Lester’s kidney.

“Anyway, Sy kept coming into my dreams, not every night, but often enough that I’d lose sleep. I told Rosie what was happening and she got me sleeping pills, but they didn’t work and then the dreams got worse. Soon Sy was coming into the room with a poor girl in his grip and he’d stab her right in front of me, then slit her throat. It was terrible, and I started avoiding going to bed. I’d get up and pace the room, trying to stay awake until I was so tired that I’d fall asleep and not dream, but I was also so sleep deprived that I started making mistakes at work.

“One day when I almost took my train down the wrong set of tracks, which would’ve been a disaster, Rosie put her foot down and told me we had to do something. She said she’d been doing some research and she found this spiritualist—he was an Indian medicine man or something—and he said he could help me. With no other option I gave in and decided to go see him. At his house he brought me to this tepee-looking thing and sat me down in the middle of it. Then he gave me some sort of potion and he told me he’d sit with me while the potion took effect. Then, the craziest thing happened: I was back inside my parents’ house, and Sy was there too, but this time I wasn’t paralyzed. Sy came at both of us, and me and the medicine man fought Sy to the ground. Then the medicine man told Sy that he’d given me a powerful potion, and that I was now Sy’s master. He’d never again bring me to that place and paralyze me. I was free to fight him, and the medicine man made sure to let Sy know I was stronger because I was connected to the world of the living. He also told Sy that he would join me whenever I came to that place and help keep Sy in check.”

“And what happened?” I asked, because I knew that Lester hadn’t been able to stop his evil brother from haunting others and influencing their thoughts.