Ghost Trackers (16 page)

“You doing OK?”

She looked up, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not every day you find a dead body, let alone two. How are you holding up?”

She looked at him for a long moment before answering. “All right, I guess, all things considered. It’s funny the different ways people respond to a tragic event, though. Drew becomes a practical problem solver, while you get excited—not because you’re happy those men died,” she hurried
to add, “but because you view their deaths as possible proof of paranormal activity.”

Despite her attempt to soften her words, they still stung.

“You’re right. I didn’t really know Sean or Jerry, and I
do
believe their deaths were too coincidental and bizarre to explain logically. And yes, I’m thrilled by the prospect of being part of a true paranormal experience. But if what you said earlier was right, and we
have
woken up some force that’s responsible for Sean’s and Jerry’s deaths, then it’s our responsibility to learn as much about it as we can. Only then will we have a hope of stopping it and preventing more deaths.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

He forced a smile. “I guess what you said cut a little too close to the bone, you know?”

“You’re a good guy, Trevor Ward. Don’t you ever forget that.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze, and then, without either of them saying anything else, they returned to reading.

Trevor soon found himself getting caught up in the story of Russell Stockslager. In the 1920s, Stockslager, who worked by day as a car mechanic in town, was one of the prime producers of moonshine for those citizens of Ash Creek, and there were many, who viewed Prohibition as an annoying inconvenience. Although there was nothing
in the articles he read to suggest it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the town’s police had been aware of Stockslager’s profitable avocation and turned a blind eye to it. After all, the cops had to get
their
booze somewhere, too, right? But what the police hadn’t known was that Stockslager was able to use his ‘shine for more than making money. It made effective bait for luring women to his home, which in those days was outside city limits.

The newspaper hinted that he accepted—or, more likely, demanded—sex as payment for booze, and when that thrill no longer satisfied, he’d turned to torturing and murdering his female visitors. He’d slain seven women and buried them in the barn where he kept his still. On January 17, 1923, an eighth woman—a girl, really, as she’d been only seventeen—managed to knock him out while he was raping her and escaped. She informed the police, and they headed out to the property in force. Stockslager tried to fight them off with a shotgun, but there were too many cops, and they were too well armed. And while he managed to hold them off for the better part of an hour, in the end, they stormed the barn where he’d been holed up and shot him dead. Afterward, the police discovered the graves of his victims, and overnight, he stopped being a simple bootlegger and became a town legend.

Seven women died on Stockslager’s property in
horrible circumstances, and while there was nothing in the news articles written in the days following his death to indicate precisely where the murders had been committed, Trevor suspected that they’d happened inside the house and he’d taken the bodies outside afterward for disposal. His closest neighbor lived a quarter of a mile away, but even so, that was close enough for someone to hear screams coming from the barn. No, he would have done his dirty work inside, most likely in the basement, choosing to bury the dead women in the barn, not only so the smell of their decaying bodies wouldn’t permeate his house but also because the odors produced by his still would mask the stink. And who knows? Maybe he liked having his victims near him while he worked.

Those poor women had experienced unimaginable fear and pain before they died, and all of that negative psychic energy could have remained trapped in the house. Trevor knew from previous research he’d done that the Native American massacre had happened in the general vicinity of the Lowry House. What if it had happened on the
exact spot
?

The negative psychic energy released during the massacre could have soaked into the land, remaining dormant until someone built a house there. Maybe Stockslager had been a bad man to begin with, or at least someone with the potential to be bad, and he’d awakened the negative energy on
his land and been influenced by it. Transformed from a small-time criminal into someone truly evil. And when his victims died, the negative psychic energy
they’d
left behind could have merged with the energy already there, making what was already a Bad Place even worse.

He tried to imagine what it had been like the night Stockslager’s bloody career had ended. It had been January, so it had to have been biting cold, but had there been snow on the ground? Hard to say. Snowfall in southwestern Ohio, like all the weather, was unpredictable. The paper said the police arrived at the house sometime after two
A.M.
Had it been a clear night, the stars spread across the blue-black sky like glittering chips of ice? Or had it been overcast, the clouds blocking the stars and making a dark night even darker?

“It’s a beautiful night. A day after the new moon, but the sky’s clear and the stars are out. There’s a couple inches of snow on the ground, but it’s not all that cold, really. Around thirty degrees, I’d guess, though I haven’t checked.”

Trevor blinked. A moment ago, he’d been sitting across the table from Amber in the Ash Creek Historical Society’s reference room. Now he stood inside a small barn lit by several uncovered light-bulbs hanging down from the ceiling on black wires like glowing spiders dangling from ebon threads. The barn had a dirt floor, and on one side of it sat
a still, a simpler-looking device than he expected: a couple of barrels connected by metal tubing to a large metal canister erected above a small fire pit. No fire was burning now, though. The acrid tang of raw alcohol hung heavy in the air, along with another odor, cloying and rank, and in a sickening way almost sweet. The other side of the barn was empty, save for seven raised mounds of earth, marked with simple crosses made of small twigs bound with twine.

“What can I say? I always was a sentimental son of a bitch.”

The man sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the closed barn door, which Trevor saw was padlocked from the inside. He was grotesquely obese, so much so that it was difficult for Trevor to guess the man’s age by looking at him. He could have been anywhere from twenty to sixty, but thanks to the diligent reporters of the
Hue and Cry
, Trevor knew he was forty-six and that he wouldn’t live to see forty-seven. He wore a brown jacket, jeans, and brown boots, and with the exception of the latter, his clothes didn’t even come close to fitting. They were so tight on the man’s fat form that Trevor thought they might split at the seams any second. The man wore his black hair cut short, not quite a buzz cut but close, and he had a mustache so pencil-thin it looked as if it might have been drawn on with ink. He had a shotgun, but as he didn’t have a lap for it to rest across, he held it in
his right hand, butt end against the ground, barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

Although the man had spoken to him in a low and resonant voice more appropriate for a radio announcer than a car mechanic/bootlegger/serial killer, he hadn’t turned to look at him. Rather, he continued facing the barn door, his gaze fixed on the old gray wood as if he could see through it to what lay outside.

“You know what was stupid? Me coming in here and locking myself in when the cops showed up. Guess I panicked, you know? But there was no reason for me to. Sure, some young cooz ran to the cops and told them I tried to rape her, but that was it. She had no idea about the others, didn’t have a fucking clue that there were any bodies buried out here. The cops came to check out her story, but not because they gave a damn about her. They wanted an excuse to shake me down for some money. All I would’ve had to do was keep calm and pay them off, give them a few bottles of shine for the road, and they’d have gone on their merry fucking way. Instead, I tell them that we should have a little something to drink while we talk, and I come out here to get some of my ’shine, and what do I do? I get scared, shut the door, lock it from the inside, and grab hold of my shotgun. Now they know something else is going on besides a little slap-and-tickle that got out of hand. That means they aren’t going to leave without wanting to come
in here and have a look around, and once that happens . . .” He trailed off. There was no real need for him to finish.

“You’re Russell Stockslager,” Trevor said. “And this is 1923. January 17, to be precise.”

Stockslager didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t have to.

Trevor looked around. The level of detail was amazing. Not just sights and sounds but smells, too, and temperature. The inside of the barn was cold, and his breath fogged the air.

“What is this?” he said, feeling equal parts fear and excitement. “A hallucination? A psychic replay of past events? Maybe telepathic contact across time?”

“It’s the last night of my life,” Stockslager said, still not looking away from the door. “That’s all you need to know.”

Although he stood a good thirty feet away from Stockslager, he made no move to go closer. He was afraid that whatever this experience was—real, imaginary, or something in between—it was unstable, and like a soap bubble, it would pop out of existence if he disturbed it in the slightest way. And there was the minor fact that he was locked in a barn with a gun-toting serial killer. Stockslager might not be real, at least in a physical sense, but Trevor wasn’t about to assume that the man couldn’t do him any harm. According to common folk wisdom, if you died in a dream, you died in
real life, too. This might not be a dream, but whatever it was, he didn’t plan to put that particular bit of folklore to the test.

“This is going to sound a little weird,” he began. “OK, more than a little, but this is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me. I’ve spent my entire adult life investigating and writing about other people’s paranormal experiences, but this is the first time I’ve actually had one.”

Now Stockslager turned to look at him, and Trevor was taken aback by how dead his eyes were. They were cold, hard, and lifeless, without any hint of human feeling. Doll’s eyes.

“The first time you remember,” Stockslager said. “You may think this is something special, but it’s nothing compared with the little party you and your friends had the last time you were here.”

Trevor felt a pressure inside his head, as if Stockslager’s radio-announcer voice was calling to his memories, urging them to rise out of the subconscious muck where they’d been buried for so long and come shambling forth. He wanted to know the truth about what had happened that night in the Lowry House, but he sensed that now was not the best time for his memories to surface. He knew somehow that if they did, he would be overwhelmed, his mental defenses shattered, and if that happened, he would be lost. He fought to keep the memories at bay, and although he could feel them crowding the
threshold of his awareness and screaming to be let free, they stayed where they were—for the moment, at least.

Stockslager’s fat earthworm lips formed a small smile. “You’re stronger than I thought you’d be. Good for you.”

Trevor’s initial excitement upon finding himself experiencing what seemed to be an honest-to-God psychic event was waning fast. Whatever sort of apparition Stockslager was, he felt real, and more, he felt
strong
. Malevolent power rolled off the man in waves, and it seemed to be increasing in strength with every passing second. As a kid, Trevor had ridden his bike past a power substation out in the country, and he’d sensed as much as heard the thrum of electricity surging through the machines, felt the air itself vibrate, making his skin tingle and itch. Being in the barn with Stockslager was like that, only much worse.

“I, uh, I think I’d like this to be over now,” he said.

Stockslager chuckled with that smooth, deep voice of his. “You think this is like a dream, where you can will yourself to wake up when things get too scary for you? It doesn’t work like that, Trevor. Not even close.”

Fire whooshed to life beneath the still, startling him. The flames rose high and hot, curling up the sides of the metal canister, which began to ping and rattle as its contents came to a rapid boil. The
interior of the barn, so frigid a second ago, became hot, and he felt beads of sweat begin to form on his skin.

“Alcohol’s good for a lot of things,” Stockslager said, still sitting, still holding his shotgun butt-first against the ground. “It helps loosen people’s tongues. Helps lower their inhibitions so they can find the courage to do things they might not otherwise do. Helps them laugh and cry, helps them relax . . .” His lips stretched into a grin. “Helps them get laid. But you know what the best thing about alcohol is, Trevor?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on the Historical Society’s reference room, its sights and smells. He thought about Amber sitting across the table from him. Presumably, his body was still there, still seated, his face still pointed at an old yellowed newspaper article detailing Stockslager’s death at the hands of the police. Whatever was happening here—wherever
here
was—it wasn’t real. At least, not as real as the reference room. If he could concentrate hard enough, shut out what was happening here, maybe he could reconnect to his body and shift his consciousness back to where it belonged.

Stockslager went on. “The best thing about alcohol is that it can be used as a preservative.”

He heard a new sound over the crackling of flames, the metallic pinging of the still, and the hiss of escaping steam. A soft rustling, followed
by a scratching. Despite his attempt to shut them out, the sounds conjured images in his mind: earth being pushed aside, fingernails clawing on the ground . . . He didn’t want to open his eyes, was too afraid to look, but that wasn’t the only emotion he felt. He was also curious, and in the end, his curiosity won out. He opened his eyes, but he already knew what sight would greet him when he did.