Making peace with a supposedly benevolent God would have to wait for later. Today was reserved for the only one left in the world who mattered to him, and she was leaving for college, leaving him alone in that house in Pine Run, leaving him to his ghosts.
But I have to let her go.
With one last goodbye to his beloved wife, Hank turned away from the tombstone and joined his daughter.
I have to let her go free.
One day later…
Amy dropped the last box of her belongings on the floor and smiled at her father. “I believe we’re finished.”
Hank looked around the small dorm room with a disapproving frown.
The white cinderblock walls were grim and bare, the gray tile floor was dirty, the bed was nothing more than a Naugahyde cot. A bookcase crouched beneath the only window in the room.
“You sure this is what you want?” He peered into the tiny bathroom. “Place is a prison cell. Wouldn’t you be happier at home? It’s only a forty-minute drive.”
“It’s fine,” Amy said, wiping the sweat from her brow after thirty minutes of unloading the pickup truck in the August heat. “I’ll have plenty of time to fix it up. No worries.”
With a heavy sigh of resignation, Hank dropped a hand on Amy’s head and raked his fingers through her hair. “All right, peanut,” he said. “House is gonna be pretty lonesome with you away.”
“That’s why you have the dog,” Amy said, hugging her father tight. “Pistol Pete will keep you company.”
“What kind of name is Pistol Pete for a bulldog?”
“The kind I gave him.”
Hank hugged Amy just as tight and released her. “Well, I’ll let you get settled in. I’m gonna head off for a bit.”
Narrowing her eyes suspiciously, Amy asked, “For what?”
Taking hold of her chin, Hank tilted her head up, leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “Just have to run a few errands, and get you a few things for this place. That’s all.”
“You’re about six months sober, Daddy,” Amy reminded him. “I’m proud of you. Don’t go slipping on me.”
“You ain’t got to worry about that,” he assured her. “A promise is a promise. Be back later to take you to dinner. A’ight? Love ya.”
~
Watching him depart, Amy felt skepticism tugging at her brain. What errands did he have to run in Mobile? Indeed he promised her that he’d lay off the booze, but—
He wouldn’t. Not after everything that had happened. He swore he wouldn’t go back to that life. He promised me.
But could she trust him? Could she ever again believe a word he said? He’d lied to her plenty in the past.
I’ll have to learn to trust again. God give me strength.
After he left, Amy unpacked the things she took from home and gradually she made the room look less like a prison cell. Once she got that portable fridge, everything would be perfect.
It was going to be interesting, living on her own. She had the option of a roommate, but opted out. For the last year, she had grown accustomed to being by herself, and she enjoyed it.
The solitude was comforting.
After organizing her clothes in the dresser and closet, she found a corner to set up her keyboard. She opened more boxes filled with books, picture frames, and other personal things.
The first frame held the picture of her and her mother that she had always kept on her bedside table at home. She put it on the corner of the bookcase nearest to her bed, and touched the heart-shaped locket that rested against her chest.
She was thankful Patrick Keene, the sheriff investigator who saved her life, found it at the crime scene. She wanted to forever keep her mother’s memory something Ned Busby could never sully or take away, close to her heart.
The second picture was of her, her mother, and her father. She was eleven and had braces, which was why she wasn’t smiling as bright as she would’ve had her teeth had been shackle free. It went on the other side of the bookcase.
The third picture frame she took from the box drove a spear of melancholy straight through her heart.
It was a picture of her, Catherine, and Layne.
They were sitting at a table outside a Sonic. Layne’s arm was around Cat’s shoulders, his head against her head. They both wore carefree smiles.
Amy set the frame in the center of the little arrangement and forced herself to look away from it as a tear came to her eye.
Forget… just forget.
As Dr. Massie said, victims of trauma tended to force themselves to forget in order to escape the pain. But Amy couldn’t. She remembered everything and always would.
Her ghosts would haunt her to the grave.
She pulled her stuffed rabbit, Romeo, from the box and lay down on the creaky bed of springs that dug into her bones, like a splinter of memory into her brain.
“Please forgive me,” Layne had said as he stood by her hospital bed. “I tried to stop it.”
She knew he wasn’t really there, and had she reached out to touch him he would have dissipated like smoke, a phantom of her imagination. But she wanted to believe he was there, in the flesh and alive. Not dead in the county morgue as she was told.
“I know,” she told the phantom. “I forgive you, Layne… and I love you. I’m sorry I hurt you like I did. I didn’t mean to—”
Before he could respond, a nurse barged into the room with her tasteless dinner. The ghost that was Layne vanished.
He returned briefly, however, on the day of his funeral. She saw him beyond the sun-kissed tombstones in the shade of a magnolia tree. The November wind brushed back his hair as he smiled and winked his eye goodbye.
“I love you, too,” she heard him whisper.
And now she had to move on, just as he moved on, just as everyone else moved on.
Well, almost everyone.
A month after that nightmare evening in October, Michael Knight committed suicide. Amy never found out why and didn’t much care to either.
She didn’t care about a lot of things after what happened. By December, she completely withdrew preferring the comforting cocoon of solitude, the company of books and music to that of social gatherings and friends. She didn’t want anything to do with the outside world. She ccouldn’t trust it. She preferred the purple sanctuary of her bedroom, where no one could do her harm.
Squeezing Romeo to her chest, Amy sniffed and curled into herself on the bare mattress.
She promised Layne she would move on from that night and not let it keep her down.
I will rise above it. Layne. I will find the strength to carry on.
Amy wiped away a tear and slid off the bed. She had a lot of unpacking to do before settling into her life as a college student.
But first she put one of the CDs Layne made for her into her stereo. She rummaged in a box for her old journal— the resting place of yesterday’s skeletons— and found a pen.
As Dr. Massie suggest she always do, she wrote down her feelings, thoughts and memories.
Never bury them. Never forget.
It was the only way to keep those unquiet bones at rest.
About the Author
Dean Harrison is a longtime fan of horror fiction. Though he’s spent time in the “real world” working as a shoe salesman, a security guard, an investigator, a loss prevention detective and a journalist, he’s consistently returned to what he loves doing most— writing horror stories. His published work can be found in the anthologies FEM-FANGS, FELL BEASTS and TWISTED TALES FROM THE TORCHLIGHT INN. More is to come. He lives with his family in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, a city rich in ghost stories.
Table of Contents
The Nightmare Man
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Family Matters
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Kissing Cousins
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76