Ghoul Friend Page 15

  My stomach lurched. “I, um, I understood that he was a fan of the show and—”

  Yancy shook his head sharply again. “Look, I gotta find him. And he thinks he’s some sort of fucking psychic protege and I need you gone faster than fast. If you’re still around when I roust him out of wherever he’s gone to ground, he’s gonna take that as another goddamn sign about Mom or…” he trailed off, shaking his head again. He didn’t speak for the last few minutes of the drive. When we reached the ranch, he didn’t bother parking neatly on the front drive or under the carport, just put on the brakes and motioned for me to go. “I’m gonna find my brother. You get your… your boyfriend and head on out before I get back. Got me?”

  I nodded. “Got you.”

  Yancy stared at me for another moment before sliding out of the truck and striding towards the house. I stopped to fumble for my phone and dial CeCe. It went straight to her voicemail and, as loathe as I was to do it, gave her a precis of the day. I hesitated before deciding to leave out the part about Julian being out of contact and instead just said I was going to get him and to come meet us at the ranch ASAP. Shoving my phone back in my pocket, I looked up at the house one more time and felt a distinct frisson of watched move through me.

  For the first time in my life, I wanted to be as far from ghosts as possible.

  The bunkhouse was empty, which was at once expected and disappointing. Part of me—a very large part of me—had hoped Julian returned while I was with Ezra at the hospital and was waiting, packed and ready to go. But I’d known in my heart that he wasn’t, despite my fervent wishes otherwise. If he’d been there, he’d have called or texted. Or found a way to get to us.

  To me.

  But it took barely a moment of looking at the bunkhouse to know he had left and was either in a hurry or under duress: our bags were half-packed, some of them turned over and the items scattered across the floor and beds. The smell of something rotten (death, dead, moldering) hung in the air. Julian was gone and I don’t know which I was more afraid was the truth: a human had hurt him, or a ghost.

  Speaking of ghosts…

  “If you’re listening, my friend, now would be a fantastic time to talk to me,” I muttered. The pressure spiked again, a gasping hot sensation that made me double over, vision blurring from the pain for a moment before I could gather myself and push back. The pressure lessened a bit but left me breathless. I fell back on my arse, sprawling on some of our scattered things, and closed my eyes. My brain felt like it was short-circuiting, a strange mix of pain and exhaustion that felt electrical.

  I thought of the dream-memory I’d had in the hospital room earlier. I never dream of Grandmere. Not like that. In all the years she’d been gone, she’d deigned to visit me exactly twice. Once, shortly after her passing, to inform me I was not to hold a séance to summon her, ever (which was really unnecessary as she’d also included that in her final directive and it was a topic we’d discussed many times over the years—how we wanted our physical deaths to be handled). The second time had been around the time Ezra and I were planning our trip to the States. She’d come to me in the pokey, little flat I shared with Ez in Sussex, while he and I were packing things up for storage. She hadn’t said a word aloud, but I knew her disapproval when I saw it. She hated that I chose not to live in her home—the home where I’d grown up—and left it to be cared for by her staff. She hated that I wasn’t living as she deemed proper. But she didn’t say a word. Just stared around at the mess of boxes, at Ezra’s pile of dirty clothes he’d left on the floor by the tumble dryer, then at me. I’d started to ask her a question, to demand to know why she was there now and not when I was in a panic after she died, but a raised brow from her worked as well in death as it had in life, and she’d faded out as I just nodded and sighed. Not important in that moment, anyway, but definitely for me in the long run. Had she stunted me, made sure I was a little cookie cutter of her? She had done that to herself, I was sure of it. The spirit she’d seen when she was a girl, the one who’d scared her so badly, the one who actually killed someone, had made her afraid of her abilities. I was sure of it. She’d said as much on one of her last days. And I was mad at her, mad at myself, for not pushing harder. For letting myself be stunted like that. Rootbound. The further I pushed outside of my safe bubble of séances and the tame ghost hunts Ezra and I had done for our original show, the more I was feeling like I wasn’t as in control as I believed for so long.

  That maybe I wasn’t what I’d believed. I was a medium, yes, but I didn’t know nearly as much as I should. I had no idea what a ghost like Mason Albright was capable of, if what he was doing was even uncommon. For all I knew, it happened all the time and I just never knew it because Grandmere made sure I wouldn’t.

  Had my entire life been shaped around her fears, her self-doubt?

  The pressure came back, and I screamed, the sound torn from my throat and lungs and leaving me panting from breath as I shoved myself onto my hands and knees, then rocked onto my feet. “Stop it,” I snarled, pushing back.

  Again, Oscar.

  Grandmere’s voice. Memory or real?

  Again.

  I cried out, a sobbing and broken sound I hadn’t made since my parents died, since the night they didn’t come to me to say goodbye.

  Since the night I went to live with Grandmere.

  “This is you, isn’t it? Trying to mold me still?”

  The pressure dialed back.

  “No.” I raked the back of my hand over my hot, wet face and grimaced at the gross feeling of snot and tears. “No,” I repeated. “I refuse to let you do this anymore!”

  A faint whiff of Cornubia and orange blossom, linen water startled me before it faded out just as fast as it’d come. “You cannot do this,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to unscramble everything in my head and feeling like I was trying to grab onto a slippery rope with wet fingers. Each time I seized on something, it tugged away. “You might have caused people to get hurt,” I said, aiming for stern but sounding, even to my own ears, tired. “Enoch, Julian, Ezra… I’m not good for much, Lord knows, thanks to the fact you kept me from even trying to stretch beyond this, but the one damn thing I can do, you managed to keep me from doing it, didn’t you? Why? For once in your existence, give me an honest answer!” I was shouting, I realized, shouting at the top of my lungs. And on my last word, I felt as if I were burning from the inside out. A hot wash of something raced through me and an orange flash, like what I’d seen with Ezra in the town square, blinded me for several seconds, and the soft sensation of something snapping, hands clapping, pressure releasing, popped somewhere behind my eyes. With the absence of the pressure, which had been a near-constant since soon after leaving Bettina, came a shock of pain, of loss. The lack of it made every other sensation tenfold more intense. Quiet. Absolute quiet flooded my head. My entire body tingled from the inside out.

  Then it was done. I was alone. The chaotic quiet in my head had shaken itself out and a susurrus of voices was ramping up, bare whispers turning into urgent pleading and relieved voices. See me, hear me, help me…

  But one stood out. Stronger, not the strange and staticky sensation of the dead but a whisper in my thoughts. Mr. Fellowes. Oscar.

  The whisper-rasp of my undead friend was barely audible, but it shivered along my awareness and settle in the base of my skull. “I’m here.” The pressure tried to push again but I flung up a hand. “No,” I spat. “No! Not now, not anymore! If you have something to say to me, face me! I know you can do that! I’ve seen you twice before!”

  Are you there? I… something’s the matter.

  Turning mentally to the voice, reaching out and making that link click, should have been as natural as breathing. I’d been doing it since I was a toddler, if not before. But reaching for my friend, it was a struggle. They slipped and slid out of my grasp, at once too hard and too ephemeral to hold on to. “I can hear you,” I said through my teeth. “I can
hear you, but I can’t focus. Talk to me.”

  Doctor Weems is hurt. He’s in trouble and it’s my fault. He’s coming!

  Shit, shit, shit! I spun, as if I could see the voice if I snuck up on it, surprised it. The room was empty still, in disarray and smelling of faint rot and wet earth and old blood, and now my panic-sweat and a trace of Grandmere’s perfume. “Where is he? Where are you?”

  He’s—

  A rustle of voices bloomed around me a moment before shades shimmered into sight. Two thin and worn-out looking specters, dressed in clothes of a century or two ago, a more recent young man with wild and curling hair and dark, angry eyes,

  “Oh, fanfuckingtastic. Now I get reception,” I muttered, feeling at once frustrated and guilty. “I don’t suppose I can convince you all to form an orderly queue and take a number? I’m a bit in the middle of something right now.”

  One of the pale spirits, barely visible, moved forward. “Mason Albright.”

  “Ah, no, I’m Oscar Fellowes.”

  The second pale one, even harder to see than the first, joined her in staring at me from close range. “He’s not going to stop. He’s taken so many of us.”

  The young man’s ghost, a slight foxing around the edges the only sign he wasn’t corporeal, bared his teeth in a grimace. “He’s not like us. He’s… he’s fucked up, man. Just absolutely fucked up.”

  Mr. Fellowes! He’s coming!

  “Bollocking bollocks,” I groaned. “Mason Albright seems to be a busy bastard. Ah, pardon me, ladies.”

  One of the women, the one who seemed so ephemeral that a blink might wash her out of sight entirely, snorted. “I lived with ranch hands and hard men for my entire life. You think I ain’t heard worse?”

  “Are you Carstairs’ ancestors?”

  The man rolled his eyes. “Denning Hudson. My people owned one ranch over, to the east. I was the last of ‘em, though. We clung hard to that tiny piece we were able to keep after Carstairs bought it out from my grandparents but when the war came…” He shrugged, bitter and cold. “Well, Albright’s shade took care of me before any enemy soldiers could. That’s Sarah Carstairs,” he pointed to the palest woman, “and Reba O’Halloran.”

  “We’re the only ones left,” Ms. O’Halloran said quietly, though I couldn’t tell if it was from sorrow or a sheer lack of energy that she was so soft-spoken. “He took the others.” Her eyes were barely there, slightly darker hollows in her blue-white-translucent face, but I felt them boring into me. “He’s strong because he takes us, drains us down to nothin’.”

  For a moment, I thought maybe Texas was having an earthquake because the floor definitely seemed to shift beneath me, the entire bunkhouse tilting. I realized no; I was dizzy, off kilter at her implications even as I dug into my training, my knowledge (my apparently limited, maybe even very wrong, knowledge). “I don’t… That’s impossible,” I protested weakly. “Ghosts can’t do that.”

  Hudson was suddenly in my face, anger pulsing off him in heavy waves. “You don’t know jack about ghosts, Mister Fellowes,” he sneered. “I’ve seen you, seen you when I tried to get that boy to hear me. Him watching those… those videos you make. Talking to the dead like that with your little friend.” He spat, or he would have had he had saliva. He seemed momentarily startled that his gesture had no effect before looming over me once more. “You don’t know jack shit, Mister Fellowes. And we wish to God we didn’t.”

  Help!

  I jerked at the rasp-scream of my friend’s voice. “I need to go,” I breathed. “Someone…”

  The bunkhouse door swung open and, for one long moment, Grandmere stood there, shadowed by the setting sun behind her. “You’ll learn the hard way, Oscar. Don’t beg for my help when this falls apart.” And she faded, leaving me alone with three ghosts who had gone quiet.

  “He’s here,” Ms. O’Halloran murmured. “He’s here…”

  Chapter 13

  Julian

  Watching Enoch pace the dilapidated kitchen was dizzying. I could barely track him, my eyes wanting to roll and close rather than focus. Behind me, the woman was restless, weakly kicking her legs back and forth on the mildewed sleeping bag, clawing at the fabric with her fingers, and making tiny noises with a broken cadence. “Enoch, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I tried again. I’d told him, maybe too bluntly, that his great-grandmother had taken a fall at the house. That I’d only been there for Deborah (he seemed so sure it was her) to find because I couldn’t go in the ambulance with Ezra, who’d been having some sort of seizure issues. Enoch had laughed darkly at that, told me that wasn’t what was wrong, but his grim mood had swung to panic when I mentioned his great-grandmother.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” His voice was shrill, and he was tugging at his hair in what was surely a painful way, fistfuls of it just yanked with each word. “He did it! He did it to her! Shit! I should’ve been there! But then he’d have come for Mom! Shit!”

  “Enoch, please,” I tried again. “Panicking isn’t going to help you, right? Let’s take a breath.”

  “Shut up,” he snapped. “Just shut up a minute!” He threw his head back and took several gulping breaths. “Shut up,” he repeated, but it seemed more to himself than to me or Deborah. “Help,” he whispered. “He’s coming…” He squeezed his eyes shut tight and rocked back onto his heels before coming down hard on the flat of his feet. He was chanting help and he’s coming and hurry over and over until the words blurred together and, finally, he stopped on a deep, sucking gasp. “He can’t hear me!”

  “Um, try someone else?” I got to my hands and knees and hung there a moment, my stomach heaving. Only thin bile came up, splattering on the dirty floor and leaving it none the worse for wear.

  “Like it’s a freakin’ chat room,” he muttered.

  “You said your mom was strong in it, right? And you were too, before she, um, got hurt? So why don’t you try again? Reach down to whatever it is that makes you able to do it and grab on, give it a try.” A few months ago, I’d have told him to stop it, to get himself together but… Who was it hurting? It was even possibly helping because it distracted him from me, and I was able to push onto my knees then, letting dizziness wash over me for a minute as he tried to talk to Yancy, from the sound of things.

  “Like a brick wall,” he muttered. “Too much like Pops.” He shook his head and his tone changed to sweet and caring. “MeMaw, MeMaw, MeMaw,” he whispered over and over. “MeMaw, can you hear me? Hey, MeMaw!” Enoch froze, his eyes flying open and head snapping up. “She’s not there.” He jerked his head to face me. “She’s not there! It’s not even like Yancy is a brick wall! She’s a blank spot! Fuck!” He kicked at the wall, the boards splintered with rot and wet drywall mushing under his heel.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” I was terrible at soothing. CeCe would attest to that. When we were kids and one of us got hurt, I was the tough-love twin. You won’t bleed to death from a scraped knee. A plain bandage works just as good as a cute one. Stop getting snot on me, it’s just a splinter, geez… But now, I figured, was as good a time as any to dredge up my dormant empathy gene and turn it on for Enoch. “You’re pretty stressed out right now, Enoch. Studies have shown stress has a negative impact on ability.” I was generalizing like a champ, but he was paying attention. At least a little. “Oscar even has problems when he’s stressed, you know?”

  “He’s the best freaking medium ever,” Enoch protested, sounding scandalized. “How can he have problems from something stupid like being stressed out?”

  I struggled to my feet, clutching the pantry door frame for support as I tried to stay upright. “I don’t know how y’all’s abilities are supposed to work, but if you’re feeling frantic and frustrated, I know that can definitely affect how things like thinking and even physical performance work. When Oscar isn’t able to focus, sometimes it’s hard for him to talk to ghosts. He has to take a minute and recenter himself.” That wasn’t a lie. I’d seen him do these resets after a particularly intense
reading, before moving on to the next person. We’d had to do some promo for UnReality and Oscar filmed a few ‘casual’ séances with carefully vetted-by-the-channel questioners. One or two had been unhappy with what Oscar said and he’d needed a few minutes of quiet to just center and, in his words, let himself feel okay with what he’d passed along. “If Oscar can be affected by stress, and he’s a full-grown man who’s been doing this for most of his life, wouldn’t you be impacted by it too?”

  “Because I’m a kid?” he sneered.

  “Because you’re tired. And yes, you’re a kid. And you shouldn’t be alone in this, Enoch. Let me help you. Let me help you find someone you can talk to about this.”

  He was quiet for a long moment, then, “Maybe Oscar?”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. At that point I’d have offered to resurrect Houdini himself if it meant Enoch would help me back to the Carstairs place and call for help.

  He was quiet again, then nodded. “Okay. Okay. But the problem is… he’s out there.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the dirty kitchen window. “He’s out there and he’s not gonna let us get far. And I can’t let him take her, Doctor Weems. I can’t let him take her from me. Not if there’s a chance I can get her okay again.”

  I looked at the woman behind me. I wasn’t a medical doctor, but I knew there’d be no helping her at this point. She was on borrowed time. Her breathing was shallow and very slow, her eyes unfocused… I nodded at him. “Okay. Can you carry her?”

  “Doctor Weems, he’s gonna try for you,” Enoch said urgently. “He’s angry, and he wants to do some really bad things. And if I’m fast enough, he’ll go for you first.”