Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (24 page)

“
That woman
scared me away,” she noted. Her fine eyebrow rose. “Who was
she?”

“
No one,” I
said quickly, even though I could tell Dex was looking at me for an
explanation. ”She was just part of my dream.”

“
I don’t
reckon I liked the way she talked to me,” she said, her voice
rising. “She reminds me of the nurses. You do know what they did,
don’t you?”

Dex and I both shook our heads.
I felt feeble and stupid.

“
I think they
tried to remove my soul,” Shawna said, her voice becoming deeper,
wetter, more guttural. More inhuman. She looked down at her chest
where a red stain suddenly appeared on one side and started
spreading outward. “I think they succeeded.”

Oh shit. All Dex and I could do
was stare at her, at the gaping hole that began to form in her
chest, until the fabric of her dress burned away and we were left
with a bloody view of her open chest cavity. Her lungs shrank and
expanded as if she were breathing.

“
Jesus H.
Macy,” Dex gasped.

“
Look what my
father did to me,” she said, her voice back to being breathy and
sweet. “He tried to give me new lungs. But it didn’t work.” Her
black eyes narrowed into slits. “Perhaps if I had
yours.”

She took a step forward
with an outstretched hand, her nails looking like claws, and Dex
and I stepped back, holding onto each other. She paused then smiled
wickedly. “I can always get my creature to get them for me. He
would be better at it than I. He owes me for letting him
loose
.”

She glanced over her
shoulder at the building, where the fog was starting to lift.
The
bad thing
was crawling out of an open window and for once
we could see it all in its entirety.

I wished I could bleach my eyes
out.

The bad thing was just as
disturbing as I thought it was when it wasn’t hidden by the
shadows. It looked human, except for its black skin that had a
sickly sheen to it and its watermelon shaped head. It had no nose,
no features, except a razor-toothed slit and ghostly white eyes
that protruded from the face. It crawled down the side of the
building, moving like a giant spider, reaching forward with
stick-thin limbs and extra-long fingers, making a skittering,
snapping sound as it moved like a cockroach.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t do
anything but stare at the bad thing until it disappeared into the
bushes that lined the bottom of the building. I slowly brought my
eyes over to Shawna, who was smiling again so broadly I could see
her canines.

“
What is that
thing?” I found myself whispering.

“
It eats
hate,” she said. “It devours fear. It has promised me
things.”

The bushes at the base of the
building rustled and a long, spindly arm came out, digging needle
fingers into the grass.

A second arm followed.

“
Guys!”
Rebecca’s voice suddenly rang out across the field.

We both looked over Shawna to
see Rebecca back at the door, removing a rock she had placed to
keep it propped open. “Can we go? I don’t feel so well.”

She obviously didn’t see Shawna
standing in front of us. If I wasn’t so terrified out of my mind, I
would have found it fucking frustrating.

Shawna didn’t seem to notice or
care. But her smile dropped from her small, white face and she
skipped off toward the bushes, the blood from her open chest
trickling on the grass. We watched as she went into the bush. The
bad thing’s arms retracted and they were both gone from sight.

“
Did you get
any of that?” I whispered to Dex, almost afraid to raise my
voice.

“
No,” he said
slowly. “I forgot to film everything except that last part. Rebecca
snapped me out of it.”

We looked over to her where she
was now waving at us. “If you don’t hurry up,” she shouted, “I’m
going back inside and locking you out here.”

No thank you. We scurried
across the field over to her. Close up, she looked paler than
normal and her lipstick was rubbed off.

“
Are you
okay?” I asked.

She shook her head and
grimaced. “I was sick around the corner. Maybe it was something I
ate. What were you guys doing?”

“
You didn’t
see the little girl or the creature on the walls? The demon?” Dex
asked.

“
You saw the
demon? The one that the historian was talking about?”

We nodded. She exhaled sharply
through her nose. “Bloody hell. What happened?”

I gestured to the open door.
“I’d feel a whole lot better if we could discuss this inside.”

“
Right,
right,” she said. We went back into the body chute, and for the
first time, the tunnel of death almost felt safe. At least compared
to the outside, where Shawna and the bad thing might still be.
Sooner or later, it seemed, there would be no safe places
left.

Maybe there never were.

CHAPTER TWELVE

After we filmed outside, we
went back into the break room to review the footage while giving
Rebecca the rundown on what we saw. It was true that once Shawna
appeared, Dex dropped the ball on the filming. I couldn’t blame
him—the show was the last thing on my mind too. I was more
concerned about, oh, I don’t know, not dying or having my lungs
ripped out of me.

But as soon as Rebecca called
out to us, snapping us back to reality, Dex did start to film. He
caught a few seconds of me asking, “What is that thing?” and though
you couldn’t see Shawna, per se, you could see an orb of light
flickering past the camera and hear a garbled voice whisper, “It
eats hate.” Even though I was there when Shawna said it, the
playback cut me to the core.

Even Rebecca looked impressed.
Well, at least she momentarily stopped looking like she was going
to puke. And then at the very end of the tape, you could actually
make out the droplets of blood as they appeared on the grass as
Shawna skipped away. Again, it wasn’t everything that we saw, but
for a ghost hunting series, that was some pretty good evidence. The
three of us were practically giddy as we realized that the show
itself was shaping up to be something pretty special.

And then of course, I think it
made us all a bit sad. So Dex brought out the rest of the whiskey
and we had a merry little time at that table, enjoying each other’s
company and not thinking about the horrors that were waiting for us
on the floors above us.

When it was time for bed, I
wanted a good night’s sleep instead of cliffhanging off the side of
the bed with Dex’s body taking up most of it, so I went for the
middle bed. Even though the immovable plastic partition between the
beds meant that I couldn’t see them properly except for their
outlines and couldn’t be close to them, being in the middle made me
feel safer. Dex was closest to the door as well, plus I’d propped
the chair under the handle again, just in case.

I actually fell asleep for what
must have been a couple of hours, something I never thought
possible in this terrible place. When I woke up from my dreamless
sleep, the first thing I heard was Dex snoring lightly from his
bed.

He must be on his back, I
thought. Normally I poked him in the side when he did that in order
to get him to roll over and shut up.

I lay there, my eyes adjusting
to the light, and pulled my covers up to my chin, feeling a chill
set in. I turned my head on the pillow to look over in Rebecca’s
direction.

She was sitting up in bed. I
could see her silhouette through the curtain.

“
Can’t sleep?”
I whispered.

The outline of Rebecca’s head
moved, as if to face me. She didn’t say anything.

“
Are you
awake?” I whispered again. Maybe she was dreaming or sleepwalking
or something. “Rebecca?”

I could feel her staring at me
through the curtain, still remaining silent.

Honestly, she was starting to
freak me out.

I slowly got out of bed and
walked toward her, trying to keep as silent as possible and not
really knowing why. I put my hand on the edge of the curtain and
pulled it back as far as it would go.

Her bed was empty.

No one was there.

I swallowed hard, my scalp
prickling.

Just then I heard a muffled sob
and the sound of crying. Now that sounded like Rebecca. She rarely
cried, but the few times I’d heard her, all of it post-Emily, she
sounded elegant even when she was breaking down.

I padded down the room,
glancing over at Dex as I went. He was still snoring, eyes closed,
deep in sleep. I decided to leave him be for now. The chair had
been removed from under the door so I opened it and stepped out
into the hall. The crying continued, coming from the bathrooms.

Not that I wanted Rebecca to be
crying, but I really, really hoped it was her and not Shawna luring
me to my own doom. I tried to keep my heart from pounding out of my
chest as I carefully crept down the hallway, the lights above me
flickering.

I stopped right outside the
woman’s washroom and took in a deep breath. Then I flung the door
open and poked my head inside.

The washroom was empty and the
crying had stopped.

Oh shit.

“
H-Hello?” It
was Rebecca’s voice, coming from one of the stalls.

I let out a huge breath of
relief. “It’s me,” I said.

“
Oh.” And then
she started crying again.

I raced over to the stall she
was in and knocked on it. “Can I come in, or are you, um…” What was
the polite way to say “taking a dump?”

The stall door slowly swung
open and Rebecca was sitting in her silk pajamas on top of the
toilet, dabbing at her tear-soaked face with rolled up tissue
paper.

“
What’s
wrong?” I asked her, my voice softening.

“
Oh, it’s…I
can’t even say,” she said with a sniff. “You’ll judge
me.”

“
Me?” I
exclaimed. “Judge you? Rebecca, come on. It’s Perry. I have no
right to judge anyone and I’d never judge you. Believe me, I’ve
been there, done that.”

She gave me a sad look. “I
guess you’re right.” She sighed.

“
Well? What’s
wrong? Did something happen to you?”

“
Something did
happen. Recently. Before we got here.”

I cocked my head, having no
idea what she was going to say. “Well? You can tell me. I’m here to
listen. I’m your friend.”

“
I know you
are,” she said quietly. “I haven’t told anyone yet.”

“
Not even
Dex?” I asked, knowing she was closer to him than she was to
me.

She shook her head and a
teardrop fell on her pants. She quickly wiped it off with her hand.
“No. I can’t tell him.”

“
Well, I won’t
tell. What is it?”

She took in a long breath and
held it for a moment before she exhaled. Then she looked at me with
regretful eyes and said, “I’m pregnant.”

Whoa.

Whoa.

I was absolutely floored.
“Pregnant? How could you be pregnant?”

She stared at the tissue in her
hands. “It was almost a month ago. I went out to a club with Dean
and Seb. You know, the night you guys took that cooking class. I
got drunk…I didn’t want to be alone. One thing led to another,” she
trailed off. “I had sex with a guy.”

“
I don’t know
what to say,” I said, still flabbergasted. “I mean,
how?”

She gave me a wry look with her
red eyes. “You want a demo?”

“
But I mean,
why? You’re a lesbian. Why are you sleeping with men?” Maybe it was
a stupid question on my behalf, I don’t know.

She let out a long, tired sigh.
“It wasn’t the first time for me. It’s happened before. Similar
circumstances. Too much booze, just got out of a relationship…”

“
Wow,” I said
slowly, letting it all sink in. “I had no idea. So do you have a
type of man you sleep with? Ones that look like girls
or…?”

I half-expected her to give me
a snippy remark over that but she just stared at me, her forehead
creasing with worry. “No, not at all,” she stated gravely. “Perry,
there’s something that’s been weighing on me…promise you won’t get
mad.”

My eyes widened defensively.
“If you’re starting something off like that, I can probably promise
I will get mad.”

She nodded a few times, licking
her lips. “All right. But please don’t get mad at Dex.”

This conversation was
definitely heading in the wrong direction. A direction that was
making me feel sick to my stomach, considering what we had just
been talking about. I shook my head. “Please don’t tell me what I
think you’re going to tell me.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “I
still can’t read your mind.”

“
Then just
stop talking,” I pleaded.

“
You really
want me to?” she asked but the damage was already done. She put
forth the bait and I was biting. I couldn’t be left dangling like
that over something I wasn’t allowed to get mad at Dex over. I
couldn’t bring myself to say anything though, so I just stared at
her.

She dabbed her tissue at her
nose before taking a deep breath and looking me straight in the
eye. “Remember when we first met? When we first had lunch
together?”

I barely nodded.

“
I had told
you that when Dex first joined Wine Babes, before he was with Jenn,
that he asked me out and I turned him down?”

Oh dear lord. No. No. No.