Ghoul Friend Page 3

  Julian made a noncommittal noise and started wiggling wires and frowning at something that looked like an oil-stained accordion. Ezra crowded close beside me. “Maybe we should get a professional ghost. I mean, if we all survive this remake of The Hills Have Eyes.”

  “More like Jeepers Creepers,” Julian muttered, waving one hand vaguely toward a dark shape far across the field next to us. “That farmhouse looks almost just like the one from the movie.”

  I stared hard at the vaguely house-shaped mass, a black hulk against the deepening purple of the sky. I thought I saw something move between us and the old house, but I didn’t feel anything. No spirits were whispering to me, no curious specters drifting about, hoping to get my attention.

  Fuck. I’d been hoping for something, like maybe it was just an aberration back in Houston. Some sort of blockage because of my inner twisty feelings over Julian.

  It felt wrong. There was usually at least a little something in most places, even areas you’d think had never had a death or even human habitation. Humans have been mucking about far longer than most of us consciously realize, and even the most ‘untouched’ places have been, frankly, touched by our grubby little hands over the centuries. An old growth forest with no signs of trails was once a thoroughfare for Paleolithic ancestors. A swath of scorching desert with only cacti and lizards for company once had a thriving community tucked away, well aware how to survive in the potentially lethal environment.

  I’d once encountered a very startled, very confused woman from some time before the Romans visited Britain whilst on a walk in Hatfield Forest—the oldest forest in England—with Grandmere when I was a pre-teen. The poor old dear (er, the ancient lady, not Granmere) had stared at me with no small amount of fear and horror. I could only imagine how odd I looked to her, and what she had been thinking she was doing with her day. It was the first time I’d really thought about sentient haunts, and what it must be like to just exist for so long without acknowledgment, without being in the world they’d known.

  It was one of the first things to make me think of helping the dead rather than simply communicating with them.

  And it was when I first realized everywhere—everywhere—had spirits. Well, almost everywhere, I thought as I stared out across the field, towards the farmhouse. I wasn’t even getting a whisper of a disgruntled cow long turned into dinner.

  “Alright?” Ezra muttered. “You look concerned. Something I need to worry about?”

  “No,” I said. “Just feeling a bit off. Must be the long drive.”

  Julian made a noise close to a growl, still fiddling with wires and belts in the engine compartment. “You know what’s faster than driving?”

  “If you mean driving in this car specifically, I’d have to say pretty much anything is faster,” I sighed. “Find the problem yet?”

  Julian nodded, stepping back to shut the bonnet once he was sure our hands were clear. “The problem is, I know absolute dick about cars,” he informed us. “So, hopefully some of the wire-wiggling did something. Otherwise, we’re going to wear out our shoe leather walking back towards the interstate.” He offered me a wry, apologetic smile. “My skill set is distinctly non-mechanical unless it is specific pieces of lab equipment or my old Nintendo. And to be completely honest, most of that involved just blowing into the cartridges and smacking the side of the damn thing whenever Mario froze mid-jump. So, hopefully some of the attempted car repair did something. Otherwise, we’re going to end up taking the walking tour of the Texas hill country.” He glared down at the bonnet as if the car had singled him out for this egregious offense.

  “Shit, I lost the light,” Ezra muttered. “What?” he asked as Julian shifted his death ray glare on to the camera in Ezra’s hand. “CeCe wanted some footage for the B-roll.”

  “You never used to say things like B-roll,” I teased, heading back to the passenger side door. “You’ve gone all Hollywood on me, Ez.”

  “I’m getting paid ridiculous money to say things like B-roll now,” he shot back primly. “We’re recording our road trip for the show, and this is part of it.” He turned the camera back to Julian. “Jules darling, tell us what’s going on.”

  “Something physically inadvisable yet entirely possible is about to go on with that phone and one of your orifices if you don’t stop filming me.”

  Ezra snorted. “Sure, Jan.” He panned the camera across the empty field, pausing when he reached me. “Oscar, anything to report?”

  “I think I’ve got a bug bite on my bum,” I offered cheerfully. “Most likely a mosquito.”

  He turned the camera to face himself. “There we have it. One day into our road trip westward and we have a car on life support, a crotchety professor, and one Englishman with a sore bum, though not for reasons he’d prefer. Oh, and we’re going to be eaten by a cannibal family and our skin turned into masks, so we’ve got that going for us.”

  Julian muttered something under his breath that I’m sure had to do with the legitimacy of Ezra’s birth before striding to the driver’s side door. “Cross your fingers and pray to whoever you pray to that the car starts. There’s a Walmart up the road a ways, if I remember the map correctly. If we can make it that far we’ll likely be able to at least get a tow somewhere or, more likely, be able to leave the car in a well-lit lot overnight while we…” he trailed off, looking around the empty road and wide, shadowy fields despondently. “Sleep in the home furnishings, I guess.”

  “I can see why you like him so much,” Ezra muttered. “Regular ray of sunshine.”

  I knocked on the roof of the car to get Julian’s attention as Ezra ducked into the back seat, turning the camera so he could do one of his vlog entries.

  Julian glanced up at me and I could tell, without him even saying a word, that he wanted to take the camera from Ezra and accidentally-on-purpose lose it somehow. Maybe a tragic soybean field accident. Instead, he took a deep breath and pointedly turned his face away from the camera’s field of view, shifting as Ezra did.

  He still hadn’t made peace with this fresh path in his life—I didn’t have to ask to know. He’d been more amenable with CeCe than he had been with Jacob, and we’d so far managed to avoid a lot of the media inquiries about our part in what happened in Bettina a few months before. But it wouldn’t be long, and we all knew it. Soon we’d have to answer questions for some website or an entertainment show. The show was scheduled to air in a few weeks and was already being hyped on UnReality’s social media. The only thing that had stopped them from using the entire horrible incident in New York was a few sheets of paper from the New York state attorney’s office and some stern words from Harrison. There were all sorts of ways around them and the media sorts would be working on them diligently.

  Julian, though… I worried. I worried a lot. Ezra and I had stayed at his tiny apartment outside of Baton Rouge for a few weeks after Bettina, while we got sorted out. CeCe and Harrison worked on the visa situation for Ezra and me. In the meantime, we’d been tentatively poking at whatever this relationship between us was trying to become. The sex had been amazing—limited, thanks to a lack of privacy, but amazing nonetheless. But outside of that? We’d been cautious. Julian had lost his previous job due to a fling and didn’t want to become known as the guy who shagged his coworkers, and both of us were hesitant to rush into something without knowing one another first. I mean, we knew one another but we didn’t know one another. It was like we were both too afraid to push, too worried that we were chalk and cheese to make inroads into finding out if what we both felt was something sustainable.

  I’d hoped maybe the road trip would be a bit of a chance to spend time together without being ‘on’ for work, maybe a bit of forced proximity to make us take off the kid gloves.

  So far though, it’d been seven hours of traffic, awkward rest stops, and arguing over music with Ezra or podcasts with Julian. The car trouble had been the cherry on top of a stressful day. Ezra wandered off a few feet, aiming the camera towards the
dark lump of the apparently abandoned house across the field, talking about the scenery and how different it was from where we lived in England, really layering on the accent because it was, in his words, what the fans wanted. I seized the moment to talk to Julian.

  “I know it’s ridiculous to ask if you’re okay, but… you okay?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, a tiny smile tugging at one corner of his lips. “Is yes, but no, but yes an answer?”

  I nodded. “Not a coherent one, but it is a response to a question, therefore it is an answer.”

  His smile grew just a bit, still small but definitely there. “It’s been a very strange year for me so far,” he admitted. “And I’m not entirely sure how to feel about anything.”

  “Well,” I leaned against the side of the car, hesitant to rest my arms on the roof because I was pretty sure birds had been using it for target practice. “How do you feel about the next episode we’re supposed to film?”

  He opened his eyes, nose wrinkling and smile twisting into a moue of consideration. “It sounds like a classic ghost story, really. Haunted lodge in the wilderness, a gray lady on the stairs…” he shrugged. “I’ve read a hundred variations over the years. I suppose they’re classics for a reason, though.”

  I hummed under my breath, a tiny part of me excited that he’d been giving the episode’s premise so much thought. “You think it’s too basic?” Honestly, I could do with basic. The location was an old ski lodge, one of the first in the state, and before that it had been some mining baron’s stately home. It had become a sort of locally famous ‘weird old house’ situation, the bread and butter of paranormal investigators, really.

  They just hadn’t expected the former owner’s wife and a few guests to still be in residence.

  Really, it looked to be a fairly basic haunting, in as far as these things went and I was looking forward to that. Something simple and easy. Something I could hopefully stretch my abilities back into shape with. I couldn’t begin count the number of times we’d met with lady-on-the-stairs type ghosts. Ezra tried to total it up once but lost count in the mid-twenties. Apparently, back home, the ghosts of ladies hang out on stairs quite a bit. I thought of suggesting to Julian that he write a paper about it—Common Hauntings and their Cultural Significance—but I wasn’t sure if we were at that place in our relationship yet.

  “Are you concerned about that? Whether or not an alleged haunting is too basic? I thought you were supposed to help any and all spirits that came your way.”

  “That’s… a gross oversimplification of what I do.” That tiny spark of excitement was smothered efficiently and ruthlessly with his words. “I think it sounds interesting, and if there is indeed a classic repeating haunt, I’d love to find out why and if the owners of the lodge would like her disrupted. If the ghost is intelligent and aware of her passing, then…” I shrugged. “We go from there. It doesn’t matter to me if the story’s been told a million times by a million people.” It was a soft and fragile thing, this tentative peace Julian was making with what I—what we, now I suppose—did. He still didn’t believe in ghosts, but he was less abrasive about it, at least so far. We’d yet to film another episode so that might change in front of cameras, but he’d at least stopped rolling his eyes whenever I mentioned a haunting, or when I excused myself to try and make contact with a spirit I was certain was nearby.

  Julian sucked on his lower lip thoughtfully, turning the full force of his gaze on me. Ezra’s voice drifted on a light, warm breeze, nearly swallowed under the rattling noise of what sounded like a thousand angry, giant crickets. Julian and I were in our own small bubble of time as quiet settled between us, that thoughtful, intense stare pinning me in place, quieting whatever I might say for that moment. It was an odd mix of trepidation and affection, the urge to preen under his regard mingling with my knee-jerk reaction to turn into a hedgehog and go quills-out in pre-emptive self-defense. “What are your personal ethics when it comes to a ghost who doesn’t want to move on? What do you do then?”

  I blinked. That was unexpected. Hedgehog it is, then. “I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that. Most people want Granny to go to the light. And I’ve never had a spirit refuse help crossing over. The ones that crossed seemed relieved.” For the most part anyway, but I held that last bit to myself. Sometimes, I wondered, especially when it came to the less aware ghosts, if they truly wanted to move on from what they knew. I wondered, too, what they were moving on to. It always surprised people when they found out I had no idea what came next. I had a few theories but none of them were concrete and, to be honest, I was a bit of a skeptic in that arena myself. Who was to say it was some paradise over there? Or that whatever was across the veil was anything more than some sort of vast expanse of nothing where we’d all just float around in some unaware and muted bliss until… until something else. I glanced back at Julian to find he was staring off into the darkness where the dark smudge of a house was being swallowed in the dusk.

  “Hm. Do you supposedly help all of them cross over? I know what’s been on your web series, but those aren’t the only hauntings you’ve investigated before now. In all of those investigations, in all of your séances or whatever you call them, have you ever had a ghost refuse to move on, or do you help all of them along?” He finally looked back at me, a strange and almost flat expression on his face, like he was bored or disgusted and trying to hide it. “Do you force them out, in theory?”

  I stiffened. “Julian, what are you trying to get at here? Are you asking if I’m… what? Abusing ghosts or something?”

  He stared at me a long moment and slowly seemed to relax. It wasn’t anything as overt as a change of posture or even a smile. He just… became more like himself. “Sorry, my mind was wandering,” he muttered, looking away again, turning his attention back to the open bonnet. “I… It’s been a long, weird day.” He glanced back over his shoulder at Ezra, still rambling for the vlog or B-roll or whatever he was doing and sighed. “I’m gonna walk down the road a bit, see if I can get a signal or something, call CeCe and see if she can get AAA out here.” He turned and called out to Ezra, and I felt summarily dismissed. A cold, greasy feeling shivered its way down my spine and settled in my belly. What the fuck was that?

  “You okay?” Ezra hefted himself up onto the boot beside me, nudging me a bit too hard with his elbow and sending me tipping sideways.

  “I was until you tried to break my ribs,” I muttered, rubbing at my side. “Ow.”

  Ezra rolled his eyes. “Ah, yes, feel the wrath of my boney elbow. Fear me. Fear me,” he deadpanned.

  I elbowed him back, and we both pulled mean faces at one another before he slung his arm over my shoulder and pulled me closer. “I’m fine,” I protested.

  “Bullshit.”

  “It kind of is, yeah,” I sighed, resting my head on his shoulder. “It’s just been a lot lately.”

  “I feel like that’s partially my fault,” he admitted. “If I hadn’t pushed about the show, we never would’ve been involved with that mess in New York and—”

  “And maybe those spirits would still be waiting to be heard. Or, worse, they’d be heard by fucking Mark Thomas.”

  Ezra made a cat-hiss sound and I giggled, unable to stop myself. “I’m just being maudlin,” I sighed. Glancing behind us, I saw Julian a ways down the road, staring off towards that hulk of a dilapidated house. I couldn’t tell if he was on the phone or not, but he was standing very still so he was either mesmerized or, hopefully, had gotten in touch with CeCe. “Come on, let’s do some of this B-roll stuff while we wait,” I said. “It’ll keep our minds off the cannibal farmers.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ezra muttered, following the direction of my gaze. “You guys okay? You’ve been kind of,” he made a side-to-side motion with one hand, “for the past few weeks.”

  “We’re fine,” I said, smiling thinly. “Just finding our footing.”

  Ezra gave me a considering look before sliding off the boot and fi
shing his phone from his pocket. “Just mind you don’t slip.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” I asked, following him as he trudged towards the edge of the brittle-brown field. “Are you trying to be philosophical?”

  He sniffed, turning to face me with the camera at the ready. “‘Now my charms are all o’er thrown,’” he quoted loftily, throwing Shakespeare at me in the middle of simmering to death in our own juices. “Now, tell me, Oscar Fellowes, what’s your favorite kind of ghost?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  Chapter 3

  Julian

  The thing people forget about Texas, it kind of sucks.

  It’s okay—I’m from Texas, so I’m allowed to say that.

  And I’m not just talking about politics. I mean, specifically, the weather. There is lots to love about my home state, but it was hard to remember as I experienced some sort of radiation criticality event on my walk to find some cell signal. Barely a hundred feet from the car and I already wanted to die a little. Late afternoon sun baked me in my skin, the day’s heat rising from the sharp-smelling asphalt road doing a damn fine job of making sure I got blisters even through the soles of my shoes. Oscar and Ezra, when I glanced back, were filming something for CeCe’s vlog, gesturing expansively at the farmland behind them. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought Ezra might have been mooing. I tromped another several yards, checking the bars on my phone and finding a flicker of one more bar just at the edge of a drainage ditch. I stood still, looking like an absolute jackass as I lifted my phone and lowered it, held it far out to one side, then up close to my face, chasing the elusive signal.